Category: love

1. I think it’s been 2 years with this analyst: more? Some of us have trouble finding a good fit. Psychoanalysis, the discipline, is in love with making us feel — those of us who have trouble finding a good fit — that it is our fault. Or that we should turn somewhere else. Or that we should stay untreated.

2. Of course we don’t have the luxury of staying untreated, and, really, there is no one else.

3. Whose problem are we? What if psychoanalysis* really is not for those of us whose hurt is deep and massive and goes way back — and what if really there isn’t anywhere else? Maybe we are no one’s problem except our own and, if someone loves us, theirs too.

4. Does this mean that psychoanalysis fails? Maybe not. Maybe psychoanalysis is fine with being only for some people. It already is for some people — White (very few psychoanalysts of color), affluent enough, articulate enough to talk their pain through, resilient enough to stick it out for years.

5. Maybe no one, really, owes me anything, not even my analyst, who fails me repeatedly at something very, very important to me, which she regrets, and tries very much to give me, again and again, in a feedback loop of good will, love, and hurt.

6. And why should anyone owe me anything? Why should anyone owe anyone anything?

7. But this is know: I owe it to myself, and those I love, to keep trying, with the assistance of professional healers or alone, to keep trying to salve my wounds, find a way through the madness, and maybe hope the wounds won’t hurt so much, one day.

8. Here’s a confession though. I believe in a world in which we all owe each other however much love we have to give. And this love is not a smile or courtesy. This love is easing up other people’s pain, seeing them, sharing a bit of the road with them, giving whatever respite and joy they need.

9. But the trick is, we are all responsible only for our part in this. We are not entitled to others’ love. And if we die alone, unloved by other humans, we still will be able to say, I have loved.

* This blog uses “psychoanalysis” as meaning psychodynamic psychotherapy, either applied intensely as psychoanalysis proper (however you understand it) or applied intensely or less intensively as therapy.

I am suddenly very tired of some people. Please don’t judge me poorly. I think I have exhausted myself chasing them. I feel tired.

I realize there are people in my life who can give me x, where x is way not enough and way not what I want, yet I have spent years investing a tremendous amount of energy in the pursuit of more-than-x, an intimacy, a closeness, a mutual lovingness I should have known was never going to happen.

I have done this all of my life. My husband said to me once (a long, long time ago): “When people tell you something about themselves, you should believe them.” People have told me repeatedly, often in so many words, that they can only give so much, that they don’t like too much closeness, that they need time, that…

It’s not that I don’t understand what they are saying. I simply don’t believe them.

Now I see that I could not, simply could not, follow my husband’s advice. My mind was structured in such a way that the possibility of not pursuing, at all costs, intimacy with people I like and love was simply not there. I am learning so much about psychic structures. I am learning that people can’t help themselves. I couldn’t help myself.

I think I am learning for the first time in my life not to pursue people who don’t want to be pursued. What a concept. And here’s another concept I have learned but I am having a hard time, still, putting into practice: it is of no use whatsoever to tell people that some of their behaviors are damaging to them. It is infinitely more helpful to give them as much acceptance as we have to give and hold our peace.

But sometimes this need to tell and tell again comes from that other need, the need to get close to them. You need a solid measure of self-love to hold your peace. There is no peace at all to be held without self-love.

I have despaired for years (I say years but I should say decades) over the loss of friends I never had in the first place, some of them people who had no idea I longed so much for them, and would have been astonished to learn it. Now I’m sitting quietly, finally mourning their never-to-be-changed distance from me, their being not-what-I-want. I mourn my relinquishing of them and my relinquishing of a whole way of wanting, desiring, and having people. It’s being a long and painful mourning.

Once I had a therapist who was a kindly woman but didn’t know enough about the soul and the mind of people; I saw her for many years to little gain. One day, in a moment of what felt to me great openness and vulnerability, I told her about my anguish at the prospect of losing someone. There was huge anxiety and loss in that statement. I was in great pain. My therapist memorably and lapidarily said: “We can’t lose people because we don’t own them.” I count this as one of the two or three most useless/hurtful things she ever said to me.

One learns to live with pain and sadness. I ran across someone on campus the other day; his wife has seriously advanced dementia. They married relatively recently, when she was already sick. They had been an item on and off for years (decades?), but when she got sick he did the “honorable thing” (his words) and married her. They had a few good years. Now she’s a ghost of her former self. My friend’s wife used to be an extremely prominent and fabulously brilliant scholar. I used her work in my dissertation. I was thrilled she taught at the university to which I was moving. She retired soon after I arrived. I never got to meet her pre-dementia, except in her books.

My friend, who is still a young man of 50 or so, is living this experience with the sadness and bereavement it deserves. He is also a buoyant guy, and he’s hanging in tough. I wish I could be closer to them but I don’t have the emotional and physical resources to do more than the occasional email and a good listen on the rare occasions when we run into each other. Some time ago I would have tortured myself over this inability. I’m slowly making peace with the fact that I am far from omnipotent.

In my condo association a woman has been made the official community scapegoat. This woman is someone who seems to have been born to be the designated punching bag of any community in which someone has to be sacrificed to the gods of collective rage. I like her. She’s exceptionally kind. Yet, we had some seriously difficult times in the past because she has a very loose sense of personal space and for a while would invade my life in all sorts of ways that were very painful to me. There was no malice. Need, if anything; and I have nothing, not an iota of judgment against need. But I was in a precarious space too, beset by my own needs, and it was way too much for me (it still is). It took us a few years (years!) to negotiate safe zones. We have it down now. We can be on each other’s side and know it, while respecting each other’s need for quiet and space. Honestly, it’s taken tears to get here. For months, maybe more, her constant turning up at the door drove me to despair. I’m glad, though, that I hung in there, held on to her and to me, found a way to be her friend without sacrificing my health. I feel elation at this victory. Yeah, I feel elation.

She told me the other day that she gets incessant hate mail. She told me that people turn off the garden hose while she’s using it, just for the hell of it. She told me (I was shocked) that she washed three new pairs of canvas sneakers in the common laundry room and someone threw away all the left shoes. I couldn’t believe people in this seemingly “decent” place would do such a thing. (My husband always says: when I am tempted to do something less than kind, I think of how I would behave on the last train out of Prague). I wonder if this blood-lust is simply the result of insecure domineering people’s smelling weakness. But I can be angry at these people only so much. Hatred is its own form of torture. As in the other case, the case of my very alone friend and his dying wife, I relinquish my omnipotence. I am learning.

Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals, which I am teaching now, is a declaration of war. It is, in fact, a tremendously strong and vulnerable book about what it means for a radical lesbian feminist activist to get a mastectomy. The way in which she examines herself and considers the implications of illness, amputation and mortality from the point of view of someone whose ideology is an integral part of her life (Audre Lorde was an activist before she was anything else) is admirable and powerful and inspiring. Occasionally, though, there are passages that give me pause. I can’t find any of them now, so I’ll quote from memory (I may fix this some time later): If I can stare this much fear/pain in the face, there is nothing they will ever be able to do to me.

Audre Lorde is a great poet and she doesn’t take pain and terror lightly. In fact, in The Cancer Journals she exposes her pain and terror with merciless vulnerability and courage. But the fact is, there is no pain or terror the suffering of which makes us invulnerable to future injury. Or, maybe, there is no pain or terror the overcoming of which makes future pain and terror less painful and terrifying. Or, maybe, it is possible that the overcoming of some ordeals may make people very strong in the face of future ordeals, but this is true of so few people, they are statistically insignificant.

I’m sticking out for pain and terror here, because they are the substance of my life and the lives of so many. As a culture, we cultivate relentlessly the fiction of invulnerability. Even a radical Black feminist lesbian can indulge a little in this fantasy. I don’t begrudge it to her. God knows her heart and mind are big enough to contain the fantasy and still be full of depth, light, and wisdom. But me, I don’t want to. I want to leave room, in the world, for those whom pain and terror do not make stronger. They are many. We are many. Pain and terror carve the flesh of the soul and sometimes reduce people to shells and husks. These people are not losers. They are our wonderful wounded brothers. They are champions.

There is no right way to confront tragedy. There is only compassion, mutual support, interdipendence, humility. Let us never be our brothers’ and sisters’ judges. Let us never be our own judges. I am learning to relinquish omnipotence. It’s a really good thing.