Categories
psychoanalysis

break

I’m taking my first voluntary break from therapy in 7 years. I never missed a session unless I really couldn’t go (maybe once or twice altogether) or I had overdosed on drugs and I was too fucked up or too in the hospital to go (more than once or twice; in truth, in 7 years I overdosed so much that hospitalization became necessary only once).

Until a very short time ago (a month? a week?) I couldn’t have voluntarily skipped therapy. There were many times when I wished I could. Leaving another invariably feels to me like being left by another, and the sense of abandonment is intolerable. Now, though, I’m probably rehearsing departure. Clearly, I’m not fearing abandonment. I am so traumatized.

I feel as if my therapist were doing me untold violence. I feel cleaved on the sides of me — off goes an inch from my hips, cleaved clean; off goes a bit of my shoulder; my body’s contours are squarer, less curvy. I’m being cut as to fit into a box.

I feel denied. My feelings, my words. I have never been contradicted, interrupted, corrected so much. It’s part of her new policy. She won’t let me get away with flights of fancy. The result is not authenticity, for me at least. It is the very opposite of authenticity. I’m cutting my own self down to size, just to please her. Maybe I can make this work. Maybe I can make this work. Please don’t be mad. Please stop berating me.

My therapist has become the monster woman.

Categories
psychoanalysis

when a 7-year-old analysis breaks down

It seems I was able to speak directly about my analysis only during its first years, and even then, not so much.

It’s been the hardest thing I have ever done.

It’s been the only thing I have ever done that has healed (to some extent: I’m still very much a work in progress) structural damage and given me the capacity to live.

I didn’t know how to live.

I didn’t want to live.

Three days before my birthday, my analyst changed everything. This is a difficult story to tell. This is a story I want to tell. This is a story I don’t know how to tell.

I worry, even behind this wall of anonymity, about protecting my analyst, who is a very serious, very committed, very able professional.

I worry about being judged — my being judged; her being judged; our being judged. Outside clarity is such an easy delusion. Everything is black and white, from the outside. Things are so complex and rich and evolving on the inside. I hate the quick judgments I have received when I’ve told that my therapy is going poorly. I hate that people’s experience of therapy is so shallow that they can easily say, “Oh you have to change therapist,” without even hearing the second sentence of the story.

But then people do do that, don’t they? They protect you. They see harm and, since they love you, they say, “Run!”

I haven’t run. I have stuck it out through this terrible crisis like a pro. She has too. I give her credit for it. But now I see the end coming. The unraveling. The insoluble impasse.

It’s killing me more than the thought of leaving her is killing me. She’s hurting me. She beating me. She’s floundering.

When I tell her she’s floundering she flounders. Alternates between anger and resentment at the accusation and moments of clarity, admission, honesty, courage.

She has decided (this is part of the change) that she will be unflinchingly honest with me. Someone told me a couple of days ago that honesty without compassion is cruelty.

My wonderful, loving analyst has turned into a cruel analyst.

It’s hard to have been loved so damn much for 7 years and now be the object of cruelty. It’s stunning. It’s disbelief. It’s trauma.

She’s floundering. She’s fucking up. If she can’t find herself again, and stop being furious at me, I’ll have to go.

Categories
psychoanalysis

advice, often not a good idea

It’s very hard to give advice because, unless you know the person very well, and you know very well what she needs right then, you are going to misfire. I don’t mean that you are going to give bad advice, I mean that you are going to give advice when advice is not what’s wanted or needed. You are always better off listening quietly, if you can, and if something helpful comes to mind and you can’t help yourself, suggest it in as few words as you can manage and very tentatively.

What this is, it’s an exercise in strength: the strength of listening without giving advice unless advice is specifically requested.

If you feel you need to say something — and saying something is a good idea — ask questions. Questions let the person know that she is important, that you are interested in her, that you want to know, that you are trying to understand. This will allow her to understand, too. But if she says, I don’t want to talk about it, well then you have your cue.

Give advice only when it’s explicitly requested and even then, make sure the person actually wants it, instead of just needing to be confirmed in a course of action she has devised for herself. People know best what is good for them. Be a good listener and support people who open up to you.

Categories
psychoanalysis

soothing the wracked baby

I talk to my therapist in a session we arranged at the last minute because she had a cancellation. I feel laid waste to by pain. Terrible pain. Terrible sadness, exhaustion, and restlessness. I want to find a measure of peace. I try to find it in the session (we are close to the end) by play-acting with her. It’s a game I like. I ask her if she would like to go with me places. I run through countries in the world, American states. It soothes. It calms me down. Exploring is for another day. We’ve already explored so much in this arduous session. I’m in so much pain.

In the middle of the session she says, “Children feel this way. They are exhausted but they can’t find a way to get soothed. The mom [I brought up the mom] tries everything, wracks her brain to come up with ideas. She sings to them, gives them milks, touches them, rocks them. Sometimes nothing helps. Sometimes you just have to sit with them.”

I give my therapist something to soothe me with. Talking about trips to this place, this other place. When she doesn’t like the place, she says something funny that gives me a sense it’s not her favorite place to go but if I really wanted to go there she’d go with me. I laugh. It’s the only solace I can get. I engage her with it. She plays along. She accepts that this is how this pain-wracked baby will be soothed. Then time is up. The baby feels a bit better. The inconsolable baby can now sleep.

When I wake up I feel the slow re-entry into despair. Instead of allowing despair to envelop me I hold on to the warmth, the game, the dog lying next to me, the peace I found only a few hours before inside me. I go back there. I go back to a place of comfort. It works. Awakening is not disastrous. I am doing this. I can do this.

Categories
psychoanalysis

the threshold of death

When I want to die I come to you. I never find you. Sometimes I find someone else. That is nice. After spending some time with that someone else, I no longer want to die.

I want to die now. I want not to exist. I want nothing related to me never to have existed. I want utter and complete disappearance — from everyone’s memory, from everyone’s heart, every trace of me erased. I want to die.

How many people walk years, all of their lives, with this deep deep longing for death?

I like to put myself on death’s threshold. That, for me, is the place of love. No one, in my mind, can possibly love me as much and they would love me if I were about to die. I have been told that’s an entirely mistaken belief. I have been told that that is a fraught space, that exhaustion, frustration, anger and pain mix with love at that junction. Love is not pure and nowhere near its height. I have experience this myself. Yes this is an unmovable feature of my belief system. It’s a pillar around which I have built my understanding of love, loneliness, despair, comfort. I can bang my head against the proof of its wrongness till my head is broken and brain matter leaks out, and still believe it. I cannot not believe it.

I wish I could talk to Fran. I wish I could talk to Ornella. I wish I could talk to Gabri. I wish I could talk to Annalisa. I wish i could talk to Margherita. I wish I could talk to Ester. I wish I could talk to Carolyn. I wish I could talk to Luisa. I have lost so much. None of them wants to talk to me. Except Fran, who is dead.

Categories
psychoanalysis

diana nyad, friends in pain, and deep books

Diana Nyad, 64, just made history by being the first person ever to swim from Cuba to Key West without a shark cage. She also didn’t have a wet suit or flippers. It’s her 5th attempt. She’s been trying this for 35 years. Amazing.

I am not completely positive that she’s gay but I think she is. All the best things are done by gay people. We have nothing to lose. (Sorry, going through a tough patch).

Not that i’ve seen her land. CNN had only one guy with a camera and this one guy was 200 ft from where she touched land. Dude had to rely on regular beach goer (there were thousands) to tell him that she actually touched land and what she looked like (fine). Meaning: CNN cannot spare TWO GUYS to go and check whether this history making lady is actually making history.

S’s email this morning crushed me. I am absorbing everyone’s pain these days. As he was describing his pain I felt NO DISTANCE, like what he was experiencing had ridden the ethernet and landed right into my psyche. I feel his falling apart and I feel that I, too, was falling apart.

I’m persisting with Tell the Wolves I’m Home but it’s not carrying me. Plain language. Competent, nice, but plain. I want depth. i want so much depth I can lose myself in it. That’s what I need. No depth in this book or any of the dozen  i’m in the middle of reading. No depth at least that speaks to me. No depth that taps into me.

It’s not easy to find books. I could start and drop a hundred, but it’s not as easy as that. One develops a relationship with a book. There is emotional investment. At least this is how it is for me.Last night i couldn’t sleep until the middle of the night again. This morning I woke up at noon. If it continues like this, I won’t be able to make therapy on wednesday. I’ve resigned myself to this. I tell myself that it’s okay even though it isn’t.

**************

Working on this online class has floored me. Flattened me. At some point, like S, I felt that I, too, was flying apart in a million little pieces. I had to up my meds. Nightmares, terror, this fear of breaking breaking breaking.

Why this class? Why now?

I feel I’m reliving something deep and traumatic. Something early. My therapist suggests I’m reliving the beginning of suicidality. A little kid that wants to kill herself.  A little kid who wants to die. Maybe as young as a baby.

I remember being on my grandmother’s balcony and feeling suddenly dizzy with fear that I would jump. I retreated inside immediately. How old was I? Was it the same day that I felt like I was leaking out of my vagina as I was climbing her stairs? Maybe my first experience of the terror. My self, leaking out of me through my lowest orifice. Vagina or urethra. Who knows. I felt so abysmal, I had to lean again the wall. Couldn’t keep climbing. My mom barely noticing, telling me “I’m going to go ahead inside.” Six, seven years old?

A six years old stops climbing the stairs, leans confused against the wall — you can bet I’d be paying attention. I’d reach him immediately, sit on the stair next to him, scoop him into my arms (if he can bear to be touched), ask him what’s wrong, ask him to tell me everything. I would keep him close to me all evening. I would keep an eye on him like an eagle.

My dog is off color today. S (different S) and I are both acutely aware that she’s a bit off. One might not even notice. We are on it like it’s serious. My mom didn’t know serious when it came to me. I guess it was all very very serious. It had been serious from day one. She had taken an early stance: she wouldn’t do serious.

Yesterday I told her (reformed and much improved, often lovely self) that I was going through a tough patch. She talked to me about Syria. I said, “I’m going through a tough patch. ” I said, “For a while I considered asking you to come.” She said, “I didn’t tell you, but I had thought of starting to pack.” So you did notice. “Of course I did.” Why are we talking about Syria? “I think about you all the time. I pray about you.” Enough with the prayers! “Excuse me, I believe in prayer.” I believe in prayer too! But I also like it when people fucking TALK to me! If you have to choose between praying for me and talking to me, please talk to me. Talk to me. Talk to me.

“Honey, I’m sorry you are having such a hard time. I’m really sorry. I wish I could make it all better. I realize it’s very tough. I’m sorry.”

Thank you.

**************

Good things about me:

  • I love my dogs well and I have a great bond with them
  • I figured out that the clock would give away the interview-tampering in The Newsroom almost immediately
  • People feel loved and understood by me
  • I have a preternatural capacity to empathize (see Octavia Butler)
  • Everyone loves me (I must be doing something right?)
  • I am smart, though I suspect that my emotional intelligence may make up for some weaknesses in my rational intelligence
  • Yesterday I did yoga. I’ll do it again today. Hopefully.
  • I have an amazing fashion sense.
  • I’m an articulate speaker

Sucky things about me:

  • I exist in the world
  • I exist in the world
  • I exist in the world
  • I exist in the world
  • I exist in the world
  • I exist in the world

**********************

I’m fighting a very tough fight these days. I have some good companions. I wish I had more. I wish I had a close female friend. But it’s okay, I have good companions. They help me. It helps me. It helps me survive.

I don’t know why I am surviving.

As I said, I am reliving the beginning of my suicidality. It’s no joke. A little baby, wanting nothingness. Me, now, wanting that nothingness, and all the nothingnesses I ever wanted since. As many as the stars in the sky. People, if you do one thing, please don’t belittle, ever, the tremendous effort it takes to just be alive — however poorly one does it.

Categories
psychoanalysis

not understanding

Occasionally you must resign to the fact of not understanding. The goal is understanding, but not understanding is often a step in the process of understanding. You must embrace time. You must embrace delay. You must live in  incomprehension, knowing that the empty is meaningful.

Not understanding is a void. Things happen that demand understanding and not understanding is as bad as trauma, because not understanding is unpacked trauma. Not understanding is sitting in the quiet still eye of the hurricane. The sky is blue and all moisture is sucked out of the air. Hurricane all around you. Destruction.

The void is empty of words and sentences and sometimes even feelings except despair.

This is what you must wait out.

Categories
psychoanalysis

rage again

Each outburst of rage leaves me in a hell pit of frustration and rage.

Categories
psychoanalysis

listen to what i’m saying — 2

When she says, “Every time I ask you for something you make me pay for it,” she’s talking about/to my dad, my uncle. I disappear and become a proxy.

She creates situations in which I’m forced to act like the bully, then she splits from the reality of me, the daughter who loves her and does much for her (and receives much from her), gladly and promptly, and regresses into trauma.

She doesn’t know she needs me to be the bully; she doesn’t know she needs me to be her brother, her husband, so that she can finally get it right, assert herself, win.

I need not to be the bully. I also need not to give in. If I give in I’ll lose myself. I have to hang on to my own self. But if I hang on to my own self, I play the bully.

Trauma ensnares us in a game of no-win. If I give in we both lose. If I hang on and play the bully we both lose.

The only way is to talk. Talk. Talk. Talk. Name the game. Game the game. Outwit the game.

But I know so much more than she does. Will she listen? Will she be able to face the anxiety of going to the airport with the right document but not the document that makes her feel safe, just so that we can both be free of this deadly game?

The anxiety is just a symptom. But symptoms keep us going. She has so many anxieties, so many phobias. Do I want to tamper with them?

This one is not so bad. This one is recent.

But: do I want to have this conversation? Do I want to name the game to her, unravel it slowly, word by painful word — make her see, make her understand? Because it will be exhausting, and I’m (coincidentally?) exhausted already.

Does she want to make sure that she’s welcome? Does she want to make sure that she has my attention? Does she want to know that, in spite of my exhaustion, there is a welcome spot as wide and as deep as the ocean she’s crossing for her in my heart? Today I found myself thinking, If she can’t let go of the wrong document, she can stay home. Is she pushing me to say, I want you at the cost of my sanity, of my subjectivity, of my autonomy, of my exhaustion?

Our minds are dancing a very tight long-distance tango.

Categories
psychoanalysis

listen to what i’m saying

My mother wants the wrong form.

When you come to the United States from a country for which the US doesn’t require a visa you need to fill out an online form. It’s called ESTA, for Electronic System for Travel Authorization. Three years ago I filled out the form for her (confronted by these tasks, her otherwise most efficient English becomes null), saved it to my computer, and emailed it to my sister. My sister printed it out and gave it to my mom. Why doesn’t my mom fill out the form directly at my sister’s? She doesn’t.

The form I sent to my sister three years ago was not the right form. It was the form I had filled out, instead of the receipt the system spits back after it runs your credit card and takes your money. But since the US government only requires that you fill out the form, not that you present it to anyone at all, it didn’t matter.

The form lasts a year. Last year we did it again, over the phone, just like the previous year. This time I sent to my sister the receipt, which is what you are supposed to keep for your records, even though — I repeat — no one will ask you to see it.

My mom called me out of herself with rage and agitation. She gets that way. There is a strange little button in her mind that causes her to turn into someone who is fighting for her life, even when the circumstances are most benign.

She wanted the same form as the previous year. I told her, But it’s the wrong form. She said that was the one she wanted. I sent it to her.

Today the third annual form filling operation took place. I could sense that my mom was tense, but didn’t remember the misadventures of last year so I did what I had to do and told her I’d mail the form to my sister. “What form?” The receipt. “I want the other one.” It all came back to me like a wave of anxiety and strife and barely contained explosions. “Mom, it says here that no one will ask you to see it anyway, but that the one you should keep to your records is the receipt.” “Well I want the other one.” “Why?” “Because I believe it’s the right one.” “But it isn’t the right one; I sent it to you by mistake three years ago; I should have sent the other one.” “When I went to check in the woman at the counter asked me for that one.” “How did she do that? How did she indicate which one she actually wanted?” My mom gets seriously worked up. “You want the truth? You want the truth? I left the receipt at home.” “Well I guess it doesn’t make much difference because they don’t need it anyway.” “The woman insisted I gave her that one.” “She can’t have insisted on having one over the other, since you said you had only one on you.”

Barely held tempers explode. She wants to wrong form. I can’t send it to her. I won’t send it to her. I can’t send it to her. I hang up.

This exchange left me depressed, drained, terribly upset. Like I was wearing pants that were too tight and I couldn’t get comfortable. Like I had a needle stuck in my shin. Like a bad toothache. I couldn’t settle down for the rest of the day. I felt as obsessed as my mom. I couldn’t get the rage to subside. My rage fueled by her rage. “Every single time I ask you for something you make me pay for it.” The injustice.

***

Last week my therapist shows up after the weekend with a bandaid above her eyebrow. What happened? I walked into a door. Did you get it stitched? Not straight away, and when I went they told me it was too late. They also told me to stay out of the sun.

We spend quite some time the rest of the week talking about this wound, the stitching that didn’t happen, the bandaid, the scar that will form, is it going to be big, is it going to be visible, does it hurt.

On Friday, she’s still wearing the bandaid. “Why are you still wearing the bandaid? it’s been a week.” The nurse at UC told me that the most important thing was to keep it protected from the sun, so I expect I’ll be wearing it for a while. “Why?” To avoid bad scarring. “Is the wound very wide?” No, it’s just a little line. “So the scarring can’t be that bad. I mean, people get wounds all the time. It’s okay.” Well that’s what the nurse said. “Nurses say all sorts of things. You’ve had injuries before. Did you cover them for months? Did you get terrible scars?” No answer. “We are inside. It’s not sunny inside.” It’s a hassle to put the bandaid on more than once a day. “But it’s not even sunny outside. It’s an overcast and rainy day.” Silence.

I start blowing a gasket. I tell myself, Don’t blow a gasket. Instead I say, “Will you look it up? Will you at least consider the possibility that you don’t need to go around with a silly bandaid on your face for months just because a nurse blurted out something? You do know that if you ask two doctors about something you’ll get two different answers, right? You can find out for yourself, you know?”

Okay.

“Will you do that? Will you consider it? Will you look it up?”

Yes.

“You promise?”

By then the fury has turned into anguish. I have tears in my eyes. I can’t bear this. I can’t bear this.

I promise.