Categories
psychoanalysis

asking questions in session

I love to ask questions. I always have. I remember very distinctly being at an intersection with my mom and insisting that she answer a question. This was before my parents separated so I was really young. I remember my mother shouting, “Not at the intersection!”

I may remember this only because it entered the family lore, though I remember the intersection and the car. But memory works in crazy ways, so I don’t know for sure. Anyway, I soon was the kid who asked questions and demanded that they be answered at the most inopportune moments. I was described this way to myself and to others. My mom still loves to tell me, “When you were little you insisted that I answer questions at intersections.” (I have long since asked myself what’s specifically bad about intersections. I think I could attempt to summarize the main claims of The Critique of Pure Reason for someone in the middle of a six-way, crowded intersection; but hey, that’s me).

Then and now, I’m not sure I know exactly why I love to ask questions. It is certainly the case that there isn’t a single reason and I think I know at least some of the reasons. I know why I ask questions in some contexts. When I am in social situations, for instance, asking questions allows me to shape interactions in a way that suits me and typically pleases my interlocutors too, so, my reasoning goes, everyone wins.

Today I had a little insight into why I so love asking a certain kind of question in therapy. Again, there is most certainly not a single (or simple) reason, and the issue of when and how to answer these questions is one my analyst and I have discussed a lot and keep discussing. I love, though, that she is incredibly flexible about these things. I would hate working with an analyst who takes the not answering of questions as an immutable law of the universe.

In therapy, there is a specific kind of question I really, really love to ask and have answered. Those are questions that concern my analyst’s work and the discipline in general, specifically how she sees it and understands it and practices it. I get tremendous pleasure from these conversations. It is not a kind of excited pleasure. It’s a soothing, fulfilling, filling pleasure that leaves me satiated and calm.

The insight I had today is that this pleasure has to do with being taught. See, I have trouble being taught. When I was little I was insatiably curious and probably very precocious too. I had a million questions in my head. They sprouted like mushrooms and demanded to be answered because so much depended on the answer. Here is an example. I would be reading a book (I read books all the time) and encounter a word I didn’t know. Not wanting to bother anyone, and also wanting to be autonomous, I would pick up the dictionary and look the word up. But the definition always contained words I didn’t know! I would look those up. Their definitions also had words I didn’t know. I would look those up. Ad infinitum.

It was very frustrating to me. I simply couldn’t understand why the people who wrote dictionaries didn’t write them in such a way that you understood your definitions the first time around.

The endless delay of the moment in which I would nail the answer to my problem (in this case, what does the word in my book mean?) was a curse that followed me everywhere. I would ask my mom, “What are people made of?” My mom might say, “People are made of cells.” “What are cells?” “Cells are little bits of biological stuff.” “What do you mean? What are they made of?” “I don’t know exactly.” “Where can we find out?” “In a biology book.” “Do we have a biology book at home?” “No.” “So how are we going to find out?” “We can ask someone who knows.” “Who do we know who knows this?” “Your uncle will know.” “Can we ask him?” “You can ask him next time you see him.” “But I need to know now; can you call him when we get home?” “No.” “Why not?” “Because I can’t.” “But how am I going to find out what cells are?”

This would be about when my mom would start screaming.

This is the kid I was. The answer to my questions always eluded me. Getting answers became more and more urgent to me. I would go crazy hunting down answers. I would go crazy going from one incomprehensible dictionary definition to another. I needed so many answers yet so few were forthcoming.

My mom was not the best mentor or teacher in the world. She was impatient, she had a whole lot on her plate, and, quite honestly, I don’t think she was exactly consumed with the desire to satisfy my need for knowledge. She probably figured it was something I’d get satisfied later in life, like everyone else, by getting a formal education. I am pretty sure that for her my desire to know and understand things was mostly a source of great annoyance, and probably more. She might have found it angst producing. She might have been resentful of me for it. I am suggesting this because I remember becoming really stubborn and insistent, screaming, stamping my feet, getting frantic. I would not have gotten this disorganized if I had perceived calm and self-possession in my mom.

There have been maybe two people who have been really good to me, answer-wise. They have known things and been willing to take me from link to link till I got my answer. But there haven’t been many. Two is not a lot. Formal education has created more questions than it has given answers. I feel I lack so many pieces of the puzzle. Now, I realize we all do, that it is the very nature of knowledge. But I feel the empty spaces in the puzzle very keenly. They torture me. I want to know so, so badly.

In therapy, when I get to ask my therapist about her work and she explains everything to me like we have all the time in the world,  the torture of the missing pieces is soothed as if someone lay some fantastic balm on a bad burn injury. My therapist answers thoughtfully and deliberately; she answers with great complexity and sense of nuance; she answers like she owns the material; she answers with incredible competence and assurance. I cannot even express how tremendously gratifying this is for me. It more than makes up for all that screaming between my mom and me when I was little. I am almost happy my mom led me to frustration over and over, because without this terrible frustration I wouldn’t be able to experience such pleasure, solace, and joy now. It’s that good.

Categories
queerness

the role of the analyst

Regarding the post I wrote yesterday, about my mother, I have to wonder. People keep other people emotionally captive, but it often works both ways — people keep themselves captive to others, as well.

A couple of days ago I dreamed of someone who was my girlfriend for a few years many years ago. I dream about her all the time, so she clearly absolves a rather critical symbolic function in my mind. I have dreamed about her for decades. I haven’t seen her in decades. There have been stretches of months in which I dreamed about her every night. All these dreams are consistently torturous and nightmarish.

But this is besides the point. The point here is that, later that day, I found myself making a thought experiment I make all the time these days. What if I felt so at peace with my sexuality that I decided to live with a woman instead of with my husband?

This prospect is terrifying to me on about sixty-seven fronts, but the one front I had in mind in that moment was, “How can I do this to him?”

But this is besides the point. The point here is that, on that day, I also thought of that long-ago yet so present girlfriend and thought, “How can I do this to her?”

Once I realized that this is what I was thinking I had to be blown out of the water. And I was. This is a person I haven’t seen in decades! She is married! I don’t owe her anything.

And yet, I feel I owe her the world.

Which brings me to my mom. Is she holding me hostage or am I holding myself hostage to her? Does she consider me her savior or do I consider myself her savior? Of course these two options are not mutually exclusive, nor are they exclusive of a number of other options. But this is a thing I learned in the process of doing psychoanalysis. You can’t fix these dynamics through sheer self-understanding, or sheer willpower, or sheer anything. You have to let the structures that keep you captive be dug out of the foundations that hold you up and gently, be lovingly dusted up, looked at, readjusted, maybe reassembled. And you can’t do it on your own. All this dusting up and readjusting must be done with another.

This is the myth that is holding so many of us truly hostage: that we are supposed to fix ourselves, become better persons, on our own, through sheer determination. Why have we created this poisonous fiction? Why are we all so terribly wedded to it?

Art by Mark Spain

Categories
psychoanalysis

being my mother’s savior

My mother is bubbly because she has something to say to me. She is chomping at the bit. I have something to say to her, too, but I have a strange side to me that prevents me from saying anything about me to someone who looks and feels like they are just waiting for me to be done so they can start their story. Words simply dry out and die.

…

My mom is all excited because she has been helping her grandchildren (respectively 16 and 18) with their school work. She is full of details about it. Mostly, her part in it. What she did, what she told them when they came home with a low or high grade, what she fed them, how long they stayed at her place, how exhausted she was at the end. “Do you have a sense of what 3 to 9 pm means?” “Yes, mom, I think I do.”

My heart sinks and I am filled with speechless sadness. Mind you, I was already pretty speechless, but this gives my speechlessness the final blow. It seems like I can barely take it.

Last summer my mom and I had this long talk. It went on weeks, really. My mom was pretty down about things, and I was down about things too, things I couldn’t or wouldn’t talk to her about because she seemed to her have plate full and, well, I can’t really say anything to anyone who is chomping at the bit etc.

I did have a full plate myself. I was busy and I was full of some sorrow I was trying to process. So I told my mom that all the grief she was pouring into the telephone was too much for me. I told her that she needed help, a listening ear, and under other circumstances I would have been happy to be that listening ear, but right then I couldn’t, I simply couldn’t.

One of the reasons for her bitterness and sorrow was her lousy rapport with my sisters. I told my mom that finding help in sorting out why she was so bitter toward and disappointed in her children (her disappointment in me took the form of being worried about me, a worry she constantly asked me to soothe, much to my rage and overwhelm) might help her improve her rapport with them. I told her that this was a pivotal time: find a way to like your kids or lose them.

Bravely, she listened. She went as far as to a therapist, a lone visit that nonetheless  made her feel better. She arranged to see him again after the summer holidays.

But she didn’t go back. When I brought up the issue  she got testy and stubborn and told me not to make her do things she didn’t want to do. That was hard for me, this sudden retreat into misery and away from the possibility of changing and healing. But I didn’t complain. I only told her please not to treat me as the therapist she was refusing to see.

Normally, I really believe in listening to others; I believe that we, all of us, are each other’s saviors, and listening is one of the most powerful ways we have to hold each other and soothe each other and help each other. but it’s terribly hard for me at this time to be this person for my mom. And I fail to see how I should be doing this when she can afford someone who is probably going to be much more helpful to her than tortured, wounded me.

Since that time she has been keeping our conversations at a maddening even keel. I shouldn’t be annoyed because that’s what I asked, but it seems as if, without painful things to talk about, we can achieve no intimacy whatsoever. And without intimacy my bi-weekly conversations with my mother are nothing short of torture.

Yesterday, though, she was happy. The grandchildren, who stopped needing her around when they stopped needing to be baby-sat, need her again. She is useful. They seek her out. And I want to scream: GET YOUR OWN LIFE. GET IT NOW. STOP WAITING.

I want to scream this because, the moment the grandchildren pass their tests, my mom will go back to being a sad person and I will be all the life she has, and I don’t want to be that for her. I don’t want to absolve that function any more. How much farther away do I have to get to stop being her salvation? Is a full ocean not enough?

Art by Mark Spain

Categories
psychoanalysis queerness

the writing cure

Yesterday, Thanksgiving day in the United States, I woke up feeling terribly depressed. When I say “I woke up” I mean that I felt terribly depressed the second I went from unconsciousness to consciousness. When I say “terribly depressed” I mean overwhelmed by a despair so deep, it seemed intolerable.

Later on, after breakfast, I sat down and poured out this despair into written words. The whole writing experience, which I vaguely meant as a cris the coeur addressed to no one in particular and therefore, most likely, for no eyes other than mine, turned out to be an amazing exercise in self-analysis and, ultimately, liberation and recovery. I felt light and happy all day.

This is the first time in my life (I think) that I see with my own eyes, concretely, black on white, how depression (may) = self-hatred (may) = rage. It was incredibly powerful for me to find, at the root of my despair and self-loathing, a childhood memory of sexual trauma I didn’t even remember had occurred. This memory, in turn, gave rise to the realization that a profound discomfort with myself that has dogged me all my life is rooted (at least partly) in a discomfort with me others have communicated to me very early on for being a queer kid, and that has caused me to feel immensely and devastatingly threatened in my very existence.

This whole process was ignited by a conversation I had with my best friend, who is now so in the dog house, I hesitate to call her my best friend (I’m furious at her). For reasons having to do with a tremendous amount of pain in her own life, past and present, she is doing wrong by her teenage daughter. She is ignoring what is clearly an eating disorder and following a clueless doctor’s advice that this young girl be examined by a gynecologist for no longer getting her period. The kid, in the meantime, is not eating. Since mother and child live a long way from me, I know this only because my friend told me. When I however suggested that instead of taking her to a gynecologist she take her to a nutritionist or an eating disorder specialist, my friend’s defenses went all the way up and she strenuously denied that the child wasn’t eating.

This is someone with whom I have had a long and lovely friendship. I have known her since I was 15. We have shared our lives for decades. Yet, now, she is a stranger to me. She has been for about two years, since, faced by a horrible personal crisis that rendered her entirely incapacitated, she sort of rejected me and the bond that had sustained both of us for years and shifted her allegiances to men and their cures. Men as in psychiatrists. Guys in coats. Guys who don’t want to know anything about what’s going on with you because they have the latest, most wonderful pills which, taken in wondrous combination, will make everything all right.

I have been thinking about this for two years and I still don’t see the bottom of it. I strongly believe that people have a right to their own choices. Yet her choice, the choice made by this person who was the heart of my heart, wounds me and enrages me beyond any rational explanation.

Yet I have stuck by her. Uneasily. Till the other day. Because, when she told me about taking her daughter to a gynecologist, I saw myself again as the child of a helpless, beholden-to-others mother who would not and could not listen to me and consequently caused me some heavy-duty trauma. I could not stand by the sidelines while this story reproduced itself in my friend’s and her child’s lives. As an aside, I wonder how many parents are equipped to deal with traumatized, pained, desperate children who act out because they have no other ways to get through to them. Our culture does next to nothing to train parents on how to deal with these moments. Our culture, as a matter of fact, gives us all the wrong cues.

On Wednesday, as I was relating this story to my therapist, the connection between my friend, her child, and the time my mom took me to the doctor emerged all by itself through free association. I had said this story to my therapist before, but it had been in terms of my being too skinny. On Wednesday, I couched it in terms of having my sexuality checked. I was so taken by this new interpretation that I couldn’t remember what the previous version had been. In the previous version I could not make sense of the doctor’s touching my genitals. I remember asking my therapist why he did that. She didn’t know either.

Now I know.

I have read (in this truly excellent and striking book) about women’s putting their stories into writing and finding in this act of writing and publication (someone, at least an imaginary someone, has to read what you wrote otherwise it doesn’t count) a powerful survival tool. I wish all women, all people in pain, the love of another who is willing to do with them the journey to understanding and recovery.

Categories
psychoanalysis

thanksgiving lament

I suck with absolute and tragic finality.

I suck on Thanksgiving, in particularly.

I suck because the streets are empty and it’s a beautiful day.

I suck because I can’t see my therapist.

I suck because she can’t see me.

I suck because I’m not hungry yet I desperately want Swiss cheese, which I won’t allow myself to have.

I suck because the world sucks.

I suck because I am tired of my friends.

I suck because I can’t speak to my mother.

I suck because I’m deathly tired.

I suck because I hang on to life even though there’s nothing to hang on to.

I suck because I make plans for the future.

I suck because I act as if there is a future.

I suck because there is a present and I don’t want to be in it.

I suck with heartbreaking finality.

I suck because the American people are doing all sorts of horrible things to themselves and others.

I suck because we are all too tired to do anything that will stop this descent into madness.

I suck because churches, including mine, hate gay people.

I suck because I can’t take one more day.

I suck because I make plans for the future.

I suck because I spend more money than I take home and if I live past retirement age I’ll have to live at the
poor people’s home.

I suck because there is nothing I can do.

I suck because I have accomplished exactly nothing in the grand total of my life.

I suck because I’ll never accomplish anything.

I suck because I feel alone in the world when I clearly am not.

I suck because I hate other people.

I suck because my house sucks.

I suck because the world oppresses the weak.

I suck because there are bone fide epidemics of rape all over the world, including Belgium (Belgium, for God’s sakes, where the raped people of choice are younger-than-17 girls!).

I suck because my country is being taken over by hate-mongering right wingers.

I suck because the world is trying to patch a tremendous economic collapse without doing anything to cut it at its root, i.e. the unconscionable and unregulated enrichment of few on the shoulders of the rest.

I suck because Haiti, which is just a few miles from me, is the third most neglected place on the planet, and its people count for nothing to anyone.

I suck because my mom took me to a doctor when I was young because she was worried I wasn’t girl enough, and the doctor touched my genitals, and no one told me what it was about, and until yesterday I believed it was about me being too skinny for my height because that was what I was told, and I couldn’t make sense of the sexual molestation because it didn’t fit with the too-skinny narrative, but yesterday, for the first time, I realized that the doctor was checking whether I was a real girl, and now I’m so angry I couldn’t be more angry.

I’m angry because it sort of went okay but it could have gone terribly wrong.

I am angry because no man had touched my genitals since the boys in the basement.

I am angry because, probably, I myself didn’t know whether I was normal, and I was terrified there’d be something wrong with me and I’d be made to change.

I’m angry because boys molested me in the basement, and then a doctor molested me too.

I am angry because no one should lie to children.

I am angry because the world had no place for me the way I was.

I am angry because by the time my mom brought me to this doctor, I had already amply internalized that feeling.

I am angry because I was hugely relieved when the doctor said to my mom in front of me that I was perfectly fine, like I has just escaped an execution.

I am angry because I have lived all my life dodging executions, fighting for my life.

I am angry because I have lived thinking “I need to change” every minute of every hour of my life, and fighting this voice inside me.

I am angry because lots of people have told me I need to change.

I am angry because H., who now doesn’t speak to me any more, went on an all-out campaign to feminize me.

I am angry at all the people who tried to feminize me.

I am so angry I have no room inside me for all the anger and I want to kill everyone.

Categories
psychoanalysis

heightened meaning

Sessions are spatio-temporal sites of heightened signification. In session, things mean a lot. I know that a lot of it stems, for me, from the urgency I feel to air the pain. I walked into analysis with a mountain-load of pain on my shoulders. I had, still have, no time to waste. I was dying to get the mountain-load off my shoulders. Maybe I was just plain dying. So it was essential to me that my analyst understood that I meant business, and that we consider no moment a throwaway moment. From the moment I say hi to the moment I say bye, everything has a density of meaning I experience nowhere else (not true: intensely scary/painful/traumatic situations have their own kind of greatly heightened meaningfulness, but one can’t take too many of those).

I also want to mention that, in session, my conscious mind works differently from the way it typically works outside of session. Things I normally know, I don’t know. Things I would easily grasp, I don’t grasp. Probably the converse is true, but I am more aware of the moments in which I don’t know things I should know. They are quite striking.

Last Friday (the same Friday I talk about in my previous post) this small exchange happened. After sitting in my analyst’s office for a short time, I pointed out that it seemed warm in the room. My analyst agreed and asked if I would like her to turn down the A/C. I said I would. The thermostat is in the hallway and two more therapists’ offices open onto it. It’s a nice, light, spacious hallway, square rather than rectangular, nicely decorated, and it’s a space I enjoy seeing when I walk through it. I asked if I could go change the A/C settings too and my therapist said, “Sure.”

These little communal expeditions, which have happened only once or twice before, have been really meaningful to me lately. I think both my analyst and I are pretty clear about their meaning and I think both of us find them productive.

Only one of the other offices was closed. I asked whether there was a session in course and my analyst that yes, there was. That reassured me. I would not have liked for that therapist to come out of her office and find us both there playing house, something that felt to me intimate, intense, meaningful, and private. I figured that if she was with a patient she was not likely to come out.

Then I noticed that my analyst was a bit apprehensive about this, too. In the meantime we were back in our (our!) office and talking about this. My apprehension vis a vis the other therapist, I said, was that she would see us there together and disapprove of this departure from the words-only psychoanalytic mantra. My fantasy about her disapproval was that she would scold my therapist (who, by the way, is senior to her professionally) when she next saw her alone. And then my therapist would have either to defend me/us or cave in the face of her colleague’s disapproval, and that would result in the withdrawal of (what to me felt like) the delicious privilege of going into the hallway together.

At the beginning of this post I spoke about heightened signification and, also, about some specific limitations in my knowledge and understanding while in session. This event with the thermostat and our joint expedition was clearly intensely meaningful to me, but also, I realize retroactively, and strikingly, I could think of no other explanation for why my therapist was a little apprehensive about the whole thing than that she feared her colleague’s disapproval. Surely she, too, must feel that her colleague would disapprove of my being there because it was behavior rather than language, and, surely, she was also anxious about being scolded, and, surely, she was also unsure about whether she was doing the right thing, and, surely, she anticipated the anxiety of having to defend her choice or change it. In my mind there was absolutely no other possibility, no other interpretation.

I am emphasizing this because clearly in that moment my anxious transference was trumping my capacity to envision alternative explanations that were in reality quite obvious. (My analyst, it turned out, was concerned about her colleague’s patient’s privacy, in case he or she came out of session).

But then what happened was that this small event, which for some reason it took us some time to clear up, occasioned a really profound realization later on, and for the life of me I would not have noticed the connection if my therapist had not very smartly picked up on it and showed it to me, and all in all it was a really great session.

I am not sure why I’m telling this story. Maybe because it led to some really startling realizations on my part (I discuss them in my previous post). Or maybe because what could have been a misunderstanding turned out to be so useful. Or maybe to underline the power and intensity of transference. Or maybe just to praise my analyst, for being so open to experimentation, joy and creativity.

Artwork by Trash60.

Categories
psychoanalysis

the courage to tell the story

I am entirely impressed — blown away, really — by the mind’s willfulness, determination, doggedness at making itself heard. It will pound on the door patiently, or not patiently, for years and decades if it needs to. It won’t ever stop. It will beg and plead for attention and when attention is not given it will cry and scream and kick the door down. The injuries of the past, the wounds that shaped us by carving into live flesh, seek redress. Sometime the only possible redress is a long, slow process of metamorphosing the past into present, so that it can be acknowledged, processed, comforted, and forever put to rest. There are memories that integrate into the fabric of one’s personal history and memories that refuse to do that. The latter speak to us every day. Often, they shout. It is maddening to be the only person who hears the shouting.

Traumatic events have a way of stopping the accumulation of one’s history (this happens at the collective level too). A traumatic event is like a partial blockage in an artery. What would otherwise keep flowing gets stuck to it. Soon the screaming memories accumulate. The artery explodes. The body rearranges itself around the injury.

At the beginning of my analysis, in talking about my friendships, I would discuss a lot, and with great frustration, how little I felt reciprocated by my friends. This had been a theme in my life for a long while. I felt that often people just didn’t give back. The amount of pain this caused me was tremendous, for all sorts of really complicated reasons. I am aware of the fact that people, myself included, are limited. I am aware that we have only so much to give, or maybe we have a lot to give, but that specific lot is not something another might want or even need. Yet, even as I felt tremendously frustrated at not getting back goods that I could use and enjoy (I’m not talking about material goods, though those count too, and their symbolic value is huge), I was unable to withdraw my givingness from my friends. I simply had to keep on giving. This double bind drove me crazy with anguish.

Having lived with all this for years, I came to narrow down the scope of my expectations, and feel that one way in which people could always return my givingness, a currency that was always viable and acceptable to me, something I could reasonably expect them always to give me, was money. Of course, this was a fantasy: you can’t ask your friends to pay you for your friendship. But maybe you can expect them to spring for coffee, or buy you lunch once in a while… that kind of stuff.

Since, however, people are just as generous and tuned in with when it comes to money as with everything else they have to offer, this presumptive lowering of the bar of reciprocation only managed to focus my anger. Focused fury is not less furious. Focused fury is like sunlight through a magnifying glass: it burns.

I think I railed about this in therapy for months, then, for some reason, maybe simply external reasons (friends moved, I become more solitary, etc.), this topic petered out. During my railings, my therapist mostly listened. She knew, I think, that these things are symbolic of other, deeper things, and that it takes time for the deeper things to surface. My fury at my friends’ lack of reciprocation was my psyche knocking at the door.

On Friday I found myself talking about my childhood in terms in which I had never heard myself discuss it before. I talked about how my parents demanded certain things from me, things that should not be asked, much less demanded, of a child, and if they thought I was stupid kid who did not notice they were clueless. I was keeping tabs. I was keeping tabs big time. I had it all recorded in the ledger of my little mind: every thing I had ever done for which I had gone uncompensated by gratitude, acknowledgment, or even just a fucking present. The list of the things I took upon myself on behalf of my parents for which I got nothing back grew so long, I felt I was owed more than they could ever give me. And this feeling dragged into adulthood. In adult conversations with my mom, my feeling that some things were simply owed me came out over and over. I was owed a good listening, for instance, even if it hurt my mom to hear, because I had carried this pain all this time for her and she owed it to me to share it with me. It was pain she had occasioned. She was my only witness. I didn’t care if it hurt to hear. I had been carrying the pain every day of my life and I was carrying it still. She owed me to hear me out, fully and truly.

While I was telling my therapist this story (I got quite worked up, because the sense of injustice of the little kid who was me was just as alive and burning hot at the time of the retelling as it had been at the time when these events first occurred) I realized, in a corner of my mind, that my obsession with exact reciprocation in friendship had its roots in these childhood injustices. It took three years for my mind to go from knocking on the door to speaking.

This feels tremendous to me. I have really been tortured by the symptom: the feeling of being constantly shortchanged by my friends. It’s been one of the banes of my adult life. The realization of its roots feels incredibly liberating to me.

And there was, of course, tremendous shame to overcome in telling my therapist about the kid who had given and given and not been paid back, because, you see, that kid had let it happen. You try telling the kid, “But you were just a kid.” The kid will scoff at you. She feels she should not have bent. She feels she should have died rather than give in. So it was brave, my telling. Not the conscious act of telling — the telling wasn’t that deliberately done — but the conscious decision to let go, to let the story pour out of me, to not hold back. That was courageous.

Artwork by Trash60.

Categories
love psychoanalysis

pain and terror

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.

Categories
psychoanalysis

touch the pain

My body has been very angry with me. It’s given me an itchy and burning fungal infection and today, Sunday, the hardest day of the week, has kept me sneezing all day long. Allergies. To everything.

This afternoon, after managing to calm down enough to sleep, I dreamed of an ancient grief so deep, my dream forced me awake like forceps clamped tight on the sides of my skull. I don’t remember, now, the single neon-bright image/thought that commanded that I regain consciousness (I remembered it for several minutes but now I only remember its lurid brightness), but I know the dream was about my mother, my sister, exclusion, infinite exclusion, being cast away, being unwanted, being forever, unappealably banished from the village yet having to live in the village, invisible, unwanted, raging, dying, going crazy, trying to keep sane, every day, every night. Years.

I felt very little.

The feeling of grief was so pure, so tremendous I didn’t know how to endure it. And then it occurred to me that, in the past two-three years, I have dealt with it by transforming it into terror, and felt happy that this was not happening now. Nothing is worse than the terror. I held on to the grief because the grief is less unendurable than the terror, and because I could.

And now I have to say that, in this last difficult week, I have lost my dog. On Tuesday she was very unruly and I could not help taking it personally, as in: the dog is revolting against me. (This has been a week in which everyone revolted against me). But today, after my nap, flooded by grief, I moved toward the dog who lay next to me and started whimpering and sobbing. It was such a naked act. I felt so ashamed and vulnerable while asking my dog for love. It’s hard to explain if you are not me. I was the child cast out of the village asking a villager to take her back. The child knows only rejection. Asking the dog for acceptance was very, very brave of the child.

The dog, who was facing away from me, turned around, stared into my eyes with her big gentle brown eyes, and started licking my face. The dog and I don’t have much of a licking relationship so it was nice. I whimpered and cried and the dog kept her eyes on my eyes and licked my face. I thought, “She’s licking the salt.” Then I thought, “She’s kissing me.” The dog and I lay face to face for a long time, and when the whimpering surged the dog would lick my face. She licked my nose, my mouth, my cheeks, and my eyes. Her tongue was dry and there was no sliminess. There was no smell. It was warm and nice. She looked into my eyes the whole time. This is my dog.

I thought, could anyone else, right now, bring me the consolation this dog is bringing? I ran through people in my mind — this person, that person — and the answer was, “No, not really.” And I don’t know why.

But I feel tremendously, tremendously grateful to and for the dog.

(Artwork by Derek Bowhammer)

Categories
psychoanalysis

michael’s suicide

A book about suicide has recently been published by Harvard UP and I feel no desire to read it. Since there is the very tiny, very remote possibility the author may chance here, I want to say, immediately, that I have nothing against him, not a thing. Well, except for the fact that his research is about

Serotonin transporter gene’s relation to psychopathology; development and empirical tests of interpersonal and cognitive theories of depression, suicidal behavior, and bulimia nervosa; understanding the antecedents and temporal parameters of suicidal crises; defining the structure of psychopathological syndromes, using taxometric and structural equation modeling techniques,

and one of the articles he coauthored (why are people in the social sciences so into co-authoring while us monkeys in the humanities write our own stuff?) is titled “Association between serotonin transporter gene polymorphism and family history of completed and attempted suicide.”

What I mean is, I have nothing against him as a professional helper because I have no way to assess how good he is at helping people, but I have a lot against a model of psychological inquiry that frames pain in such a way that it can be measured, quantified, taxonomized. Dr. Joiner, of course, is hardly the only psychologist in America who thinks about mental anguish in these terms; in fact, he is part of a large, ever-expanding tribe.

(I even understand why one would want to think about mental pain in these terms. Psychologists are in the business of alleviating pain, and if we can box pain, reduce it as it were to nuts and bolts, and find the right spanners for those very nuts and bolts, then bingo! lots and lots of people are going to feel so much better. And, after all, why not try to make it easy? Maybe it is, after all, easy. Maybe it is all a matter of nuts and bolts and spanners, and if we put our heads together and try to figure it out we’ll find the holy grail of mental solace, we’ll nail that fucker mental pain, bomb the shit of it, pulverize it out of existence, send it to kingdom come. So, see, I understand them. Sorta.)

In fact, this is not a post about Myths about Suicide, which seems to have helped at least one person (the reviewer who brought me to it). This person is a suicide survivor: her ex-boyfriend killed himself barely a year after they broke up. She lives in tremendous anguish. She thinks that the book is required reading material. She thinks the book might help save lives.

Nor is it a post about psychological approaches. I’ve been yacking simply to delay getting to the heart of what I want to say, which is this. The ex-boyfriend guy who killed himself and caused the book reviewer (and doubtless many others) untold anguish videotaped his suicide note, and this videorecording, which is posted on youtube, is such a striking human document, it’s branded itself in my mind and heart. It is a surprisingly accessible video, deemed by youtube itself appropriate for all ages; it is level-headed, dispassionate, calm, even a little humorous. It is, as I said, remarkable. I’m not going to post it here, but here’s the link to it.

In the video, Michael (following his desires, the family published his full name) describes his life as a bad movie he’s had to sit through for his 30-something years; he talks of a terrible anguish that’s dogged him from day one; he says, I don’t see why I should continue sitting here and watching this awful movie. He acknowledges he has been loved, and thanks those who loved him for making the journey a little less tormenting. He encourages viewers to imagine there might be people in their lives who feel the way he does, people we might not even imagine are in such pain, and, if we can, to make things easier for them, provide a little solace along the road.

He regrets what he’s about to do. He knows he’ll cause a lot of pain. He repeats “It’s not your fault; it’s just me.” He begs people not to feel responsible. He hopes they might not be too hurt, too angry. He says, “I know this is selfish, but this time I just have to do something for me.” He sounds like he’s had all he can take.

Michael has a good job. He has friends. He talks about his family in nice terms. There is no animosity at all in his speech.

He has prepared a letter he’s going to send out seconds before he dies to everyone who knows him. From the video, it seems clear to me that he has tailored the letters to the various recipients. He says repeatedly that he’s sorry, but he doesn’t grovel and doesn’t over-apologize. He sounds and looks extremely dignified.

He has made very detailed plans to cause as little inconvenience to people as possible. He is going to call 911 on himself a few seconds before he dies to avoid traumatizing someone who may happen upon his body. He says he could have quit his job and blown a month on a holiday before dying, but that would have deprived his family of his life insurance and he didn’t want to do that.

I could continue. I am tempted to continue. I want to relay the entirety of Michael’s speech. I want to memorize Michael’s speech. I want to spend hours on each little turn of phrase. I am completely captured by Michael, his goodbye, his death.

And now I’m stuck, I don’t know what to say. Because I have dallied with suicide too and what Michael says resonates in me with the clarity of perfect understanding. In fact, quite frankly, I admire him.

If I had seen this two, three years ago, I might have felt so disturbed by the contrast between his courage and my pusillanimity, it would have been hard to bear. But I have found help when I thought help was entirely beyond the domain of possibility, and I feel differently now. The hopeless, solid, impenetrable despair Michael describes and that characterized my (longer) life too is and will always be a thing of the past. I have seen beyond the fog curtain. I know there is another future for me. If my analyst bailed out on me today, I’d still have seen the future on the other side of the fog. At the same time, I know the chances that anyone in such depths of despair might find the good help I have found are so slim as to be almost nil. I know what my analyst did to make me see through the fog and I know that it’s a little magic, a little miraculous, a little unique.

I cannot commit myself to the view that suicides should be prevented at all cost, regardless of circumstances. Some people have nothing left in the tank. Some people need the simple mercy of being able to check out.

Because of my work I’ve been reading a lot on disability, and the mantra of the disability scholar is access/accommodation. Take in-utero genetic medicine (not something we are yet able to do) and in-utero genetic diagnostics (a blunt tool we are using somewhat recklessly). There is a ton of money that’s being spent on this stuff. Disability advocates say, “Before you spend money on preventing us from existing, why don’t you spend more money on making life easy for us so that we and those who care for us won’t have it so damn hard?”

I’m going to make the same argument for suicide. Instead of fostering an anti-suicide culture with its accoutrement of laws and punishments (see for instance all the various measures that allow medical and police authorities to detain suicidal people), why don’t we create a culture in which people in agonizing inner pain are offered genuine help?

By genuine help I don’t mean the quick or not-so-quick remedies thought up by professionals in mental health or pharmacology that aim at getting rid of the pain. Getting rid of the pain, just like getting rid of disability, inevitably comes with the semantic, rhetorical and ideological association that pain is bad. Which, in turn, brings the negative association that people in pain are bad, i.e. have something wrong with them we must at all cost fix.

Thinking of pain in the simple terms of badness, unacceptability, and correction does exactly nothing to help people in pain. It helps, instead, those who are not in pain to feel better about themselves and their anxieties with respect to the inevitable encounters with pain that lie ahead of them.

Alleviating pain is one of the most serious imperatives for any human being, but dispatching pain is very different from alleviating pain. For one, pain has value. For two, pain is simply non-dispatchable. We can hold on to the fiction that pain is dispatchable for as long as we like, but it will be to our detriment. For three, pain can only be alleviated in relationship (we need each other). For four, engaging in a pain-alleviating relationship (i.e. a relationship, period, if that relationship is worthy of its name) is one of the most rewarding enterprises a human being is afforded in this life, and refusing to engage in such relationships is impoverishing beyond measure. For five, we must, as a society, move away from a culture of fixing toward of culture of engagement.

A culture of engagement requires, among other things, a return of the mental health profession to long-term, expert, compassionate, slow, loving, giving, patient, undemanding, not-money-driven, not-result-oriented practices. If we are unwilling to give the Michaels of the world serious access to this kind of healing, we are going to have to let them die without stigma and without posthumous punishment.