I come in I sit in the leather chair. Everything looks the same but the furniture has shifted east slightly. She looks thinner—better maybe. I notice that this is the earliest session I ever had, at 8:30, and yet she is dressed very well, the same way she would dress at the other sessions, but I didn’t notice it then.
I look at her face and she greets me and I realize that I would have recognized her in a crowd but not as my shrink. I would have said hi and not known where I knew her from. I think that it’s been a while since I’ve been here but I have no idea how long. I have trouble with so many of the details and timing of the last 3 years or so. Last 5 years or so?
When was the last time I was here?
It’s been a couple of years.
And I know last time I was here it was something to do with him but what was it?
You had just put him out of your house.
And then I start to cry very hard.
You’ve been in and talked about some horrible, very difficult things, and you’ve never cried like this. What do you think about that?
I think to myself that this sort of line of questioning is why I, for the first time, avoided coming to therapy. It’s also the reason why I came anyway. And then I think to myself, two fucking years?
My problem with my problems has always been one of articulation. I know that even the idea that I can trace the origin of something as illusory as “my problem with problems” is…a problem, but this is what I do. So to tracing it back:
My first encounter with the little hell that can be one’s life was through the dysfunctions of my early childhood. I was what I today would call a severely emotionally neglected child. That still sounds a bit extreme when I say it but I feel that it is true. A few years back I wouldn’t use the terms because I thought they were too harsh. Now I know it’s not that, they are not too harsh, they just don’t give enough nuance. It is hard to properly describe but essentially I was being damaged, emotionally, as a kid, on a consistent basis. In that time I was told by my mother (the primary on the case) and it was confirmed by the rest of my (her) family that there was a reason for this pain I was enduring. My mother was a teenager who had been “forced” to have me at a very young age, thus becoming emotionally stunted and bitter and unable to do any better than she was doing—but she loved me. Yes adults thought wise to tell a child this.
I can’t lie: it made sense to me. She’s a mess but that’s not my fault. She treats me like shit but that’s not her fault. They said she can’t help herself: after all, she didn’t want to have a kid. No 16 year old wants to have a kid. Now what can she do? Pretend to be a grown up? She can’t do that. She must be this fucked up selfish person, she's never grown up, they said. I was happy to have A Reason since I didn’t have much else going on. I realize now that I grew up strung out on reasons. This is what my therapy is often about: me chasing reasons like a fiend. Life, it turns out, is deeply unreasonable.
There being A Reason began to connect quickly with There being No Reason For me to complain. Why complain if I knew the whole reason was... nobody's fault? I was told that was just a selfish thing to do, and something beneath me since I was such a precocious, good child. I knew better than complaining.
Today: pain is never articulated. For me it’s metaphor, always. Pictures. Pain never is what it is, for me it is like something else. Today it still needs to be distilled or costumed to safely sneak into the world. Back in the day it couldn't come out at all. First it was like something that went up my throat and burned at the top of it, enough that nothing came out, no words. Just tears. And the tears, because of the burning, would be very hot on my face. And my face would get very hot and then I would get dizzy from the heat. Like motion sickness but while feeling immobilized. That was when I was little. But to this day there is a way in which I have trouble being hurt and saying so and if I muster up all that it takes then likely my head will start to burn up—it’s probably not real, say, to the touch. But I feel it burning.
Then a second phase where I discovered there was a "silent" way of speaking, and it was writing. Now pain was many images in my poems. An exit sign falling out of sight. A vacant temple raided by traceless people. Murder before morning time. Blood running down to the feet. Picnics with ghosts. And other images I can't remember. Precise ones. All evocative but with time, they are evocative only of a memory of having not felt the pain but of having expressed it well in poetry. I can't remember the way the pain felt, I just remember how the poem said the pain felt. The connecting theme here: distance and control. And not articulating the pain, just thoughts about the pain. Narrative. Words. Stories of why and where and when and especially a lot of stories of what next.
When therapy became a part of my life I could do a lot with it but not articulate the unallowable. I confronted then this problem of articulation. Feelings, you know, they need to make sounds. I am learning this right now when I am 30 years old. I feel like I learned it before and it was so messy that I forgot it deliberately. And yet here I was swearing up and down that all the lessons learned in the psych hospital had stuck. But not really: I had transformed all that real emotional work into really good "psych ward" stories to tell while drunk, but forgot the fundamental insight I attained there. Which is that what is inside making you hurt must come out of you, hot cheeks, dizzy head, terror, and all. You didn't control the coming in of the darkness, so you won't get to control the coming out.
Today I had a therapy session where I felt out of control for the entire hour. I did not know what I would say before I said it. I did not know how I would sound to myself and I was terrified. I felt like an idiot, I couldn't come up with any words really. So I cried and told myself, I gotta watch that next time around, I don’t feel like fucking crying in this lady’s office, this sucks.
The same's been happening at home. I have been crying a lot. I have been hurting in an audible way and it freaks me out. You have to cry into the pillow because it is very loud. Or crouch down like you are hiding from some horrible monster that's coming. Make sure your back is on a wall so you don't get jumped. Cover your head. Sit still in a corner for a whole hour and don’t notice it go by. All you can do is stop at the point where you are exhausted. I know I’m supposed to be articulating without the metaphors but just this once: sometimes it’s like a supernova of your insides, where it feels like your skin might burst at the seams; but, at the same time, all the air around you turns into these heavy things that are crushing you. So if something could be exploding and caving at the same time, and if that thing was you. If that happened, you’d have to sit and cry it out. Open your mouth. And not let it be done to you in silence anymore.
It’s just you and your life: you need no euphemisms. You are not faint of heart.
<< Home