I think, too, of Rita’s four children. Of their father, the lawyer, who could be so fun one minute and drunk and abusive the next. Of their mother, Rita, removed, making excuses for their father, offering promises on his behalf that they knew were lies. How confusing and harrowing their childhoods must have been. How furious they must be now. How they must not want to deal with their mother coming to them, as she had several times over the years, crying and begging for a relationship. Whatever she wants, they’d likely think, it was for one reason and one reason only: for her sake, always for her sake. My guess was that Rita’s children wouldn’t talk to her because they couldn’t give her the one thing she seemed to want even if she’d never asked for it directly: forgiveness.
Rita and I had talked about why she hadn’t protected her children, why she’d let her husband hit them, why she’d spent her time reading or painting or playing tennis or bridge instead of being present for them. And once we got past the explanations she’d given herself for years, we arrived at something she hadn’t been aware of: Rita envied her children.
Rita wasn’t unusual in this. Take the case of a mother who came from a household with little money and who now admonishes her child every time she gets a new pair of shoes or a new toy by saying, “Don’t you realize how lucky you are?” A gift wrapped in a criticism. Or consider the father who takes his son to visit prospective colleges and spends the entire tour of the college that he himself dreamed of attending but was rejected from making negative comments about the tour guide, the curriculum, the dorms—not only embarrassing his son but possibly hurting his chances of admission.
Why do parents do this? Often, they envy their children’s childhoods—the opportunities they have; the financial or emotional stability that the parents provide; the fact that their children have their whole lives ahead of them, a stretch of time that’s now in the parents’ pasts. They strive to give their children all the things they themselves didn’t have, but they sometimes end up, without even realizing it, resenting the kids for their good fortune.
Rita envied her kids their siblings, their comfortable childhood home with the pool, their opportunities to go to museums and travel. She envied their young, energetic parents. And it was, in part, her unconscious envy—her fury at the unfairness of it all—that kept her from allowing them to have the happy childhood she didn’t, that kept her from saving them in the way she so badly wanted to be saved when she was young.
I’d brought up Rita in my consultation group. Despite her gloomy, Eeyore-like exterior, I told my colleagues, she was warm and interesting, and because I was free of the history her kids shared with her, I could enjoy Rita the way I’d enjoy a friend of a parent. I liked her quite a bit. But could her children really be expected to forgive her?
Did I forgive her? the group asked. I thought of my son and felt sick at the idea of anyone hitting him, of my ever allowing that to happen.
I wasn’t sure.
Forgiveness is a tricky thing, in the way that apologies can be. Are you apologizing because it makes you feel better or because it will make the other person feel better? Are you sorry for what you’ve done or are you simply trying to placate the other person who believes you should be sorry for the thing you feel completely justified in having done? Who is the apology for?
There’s a term we use in therapy: forced forgiveness. Sometimes people feel that in order to get past a trauma, they need to forgive whoever caused the damage—the parent who sexually assaulted them, the burglar who robbed their house, the gang member who killed their son. They’re told by well-meaning people that until they can forgive, they’ll hold on to the anger. Granted, for some, forgiveness can serve as a powerful release—you forgive the person who wronged you, without condoning his actions, and it allows you to move on. But too often people feel pressured to forgive and then end up believing that something’s wrong with them if they can’t quite get there—that they aren’t enlightened enough or strong enough or compassionate enough.
So what I say is this: You can have compassion without forgiving. There are many ways to move on, and pretending to feel a certain way isn’t one of them.
I once had a client named Dave who had a problematic relationship with his father. His father was, by his account, a bully—demeaning, critical, and full of himself. He had alienated both of his sons from a young age and had a distant and contentious relationship with them as adults. When his father was dying, Dave was fifty years old, married with children of his own, and he struggled with what to say at his father’s funeral. What would ring true? And then he told me that as his father lay on his deathbed, he had reached out for his son’s hand and said, out of the blue, “I wish I’d treated you better. I was a prick.”
Dave was livid—did his father expect absolution now, at the eleventh hour? The time to make repairs, he felt, was long before you left this earth, not on the eve of your departure; you don’t automatically get the gift of closure or forgiveness from a deathbed confession.
He couldn’t help himself. “I don’t forgive you,” Dave told his dad. He hated himself for saying this, regretted it the second it came out. But after all the pain his father had put him through and all the work he’d done to create a good life for himself and his family, he’d be damned if he was going to soothe his father now with a sugary lie. He’d spent his childhood lying about how he felt. Still, Dave wondered, what kind of person says this to his dying father?
Dave had started to apologize, but his father interrupted him. “I understand,” he said. “If I were you, I wouldn’t forgive me either.”
And then the strangest thing happened, Dave told me. Sitting there holding his father’s hand, Dave felt something shift. He felt, for the first time in his life, genuine compassion. Not forgiveness, but compassion. Compassion for the sad dying man who must have had his own pain. And it was that compassion that allowed Dave to speak authentically at his father’s funeral.
It was compassion, too, that helped me help Rita. I didn’t have to forgive her for what she’d done with her children. As with Dave’s father, that was up to Rita to reckon with. We may want others’ forgiveness, but that comes from a place of self-gratification; we are asking forgiveness of others to avoid the harder work of forgiving ourselves.
I thought of something Wendell had said to me after I’d listed my own regrettable missteps that I took great pleasure in punishing myself for: “How long do you think the sentence for this crime should be? A year? Five? Ten?” Many of us torture ourselves over our mistakes for decades, even after we’ve genuinely attempted to make amends. How reasonable is that sentence?
It’s true that in Rita’s case, her children’s lives were significantly affected by their parents’ failures. She and her children would always feel the pain of their shared pasts, but shouldn’t there be some redemption? Did Rita deserve to be persecuted day after day, year after year? I wanted to be realistic about the considerable scars they all bore, but I didn’t want to be Rita’s warden.
I can’t help but think about her evolving relationship with the hello-family girls next door; what if she had been able to offer her four children what she offers them?
I put the question to Rita: “What should your sentence be, as you approach seventy, for the crimes you committed in your twenties and thirties? They were significant crimes, yes. But you’ve felt remorse for decades, and you’ve tried to make repairs. Shouldn’t you have been released by now, or at least out on parole? What do you think is a fair sentence for your crimes?”
Rita considers this for a moment. “Life in prison,” she says.
“Well,” I say. “That’s what you got. But I’m not sure that a jury that included Myron or the hello-family would agree.”
“But the people I care most about, my kids—they’ll never forgive me.”
I nod. “We don’t know what they’re going to do. But it doesn’t help them in any way for you to be miserable. Your misery doesn’t change their situation. You can’t
lessen their misery by carrying it for them inside you. It doesn’t work that way. There are ways for you to be a better mother to them at this point in all of your lives. Sentencing yourself to life in prison isn’t one of them.” I notice that I have Rita’s attention. “There’s only one person in this entire world who benefits from you not being able to enjoy anything good in your life.”
Rita’s forehead becomes a series of lines. “Who?”
“You,” I say.
I point out to her that pain can be protective; staying in a depressed place can be a form of avoidance. Safe inside her shell of pain, she doesn’t have to face anything, nor does she have to emerge into the world, where she might get hurt again. Her inner critic serves her: I don’t have to take any action because I’m worthless. And there’s another benefit to her misery: she may feel that she stays alive in her kids’ minds if they relish her suffering. At least somebody has her in mind, even in a negative way—and in this sense, she’s not completely forgotten.
She looks up from her tissue, as if considering the pain that she’s carried for decades in an entirely new way. For maybe the first time, Rita seems to see the crisis she has been in the midst of—the battle between what Erik Erikson called integrity and despair.
Which, I wonder, will she choose?
42
My Neshama
I’m at lunch with my colleague Caroline.
We’re catching up, talking about our practices, when Caroline asks if the Wendell referral she gave me a while back ever worked out for my friend. As an aside, she says that our call brought back memories from when she and Wendell were in graduate school together. A classmate of theirs had a massive crush on him, but it wasn’t reciprocated, and Wendell actually started dating another—
Whoa! I stop her. I can’t hear this. The referral, I admit, was for me.
Caroline looks shocked for a second, and then she laughs and iced tea begins spurting from her nose. “Sorry,” she says, wiping her face with a napkin. “I thought I was referring a married guy to him. I just can’t imagine you with Wendell.” I understand what she means. It’s hard to envision somebody you know as the patient of somebody else you know, especially if you knew that person back in graduate school. You know too much about both of them.
I tell her I was ashamed back then—about my breakup, my book fiasco, my health issues—and she shares her own struggles with trying to conceive a second child. Near the end of our lunch, she also tells me about a difficult patient and how she had no idea during the initial consultation how difficult this patient would be—how abrasive, demanding . . . entitled.
“I have one too,” I say, thinking about John, “but over time, I’ve come to like him quite a bit—to care about him deeply.”
“I hope mine works out that way,” Caroline says. Then, an afterthought: “But if not, could I send her to you? Do you have the time?” I can tell from her tone that she’s kidding—mostly. I remember talking to my consultation group early on about John and his enormous ego and constant put-downs. Ian had quipped: “Well, if it doesn’t work out, just make sure you refer him to somebody you dislike.”
“Oh, no,” I say now, shaking my head. “Don’t send her to me.”
“Then I’ll refer her to Wendell!” Caroline says. And we laugh.
“So,” I say to Wendell the following Wednesday morning. “I had lunch with Caroline last week.”
He’s silent, but his magnet eyes are on me. I start telling him how Caroline felt about her patient and how sometimes I feel that way about patients, how every therapist does, but still, I say, it bothers me. Are we judging people too harshly? Do we not have enough empathy?
“I can’t pinpoint why,” I continue, “but I’ve felt strange about that conversation all week. It makes me uncomfortable in a way it hadn’t at lunch, and—”
Wendell’s brow is furrowed, as though he’s trying to follow my train of thought.
“I think as a profession,” I say, attempting to clarify, “we can’t keep it all inside, but at the same time—”
“Do you have a question for me?” Wendell asks, interrupting.
I realize I do. I have many: Does Wendell talk about me with his colleagues at lunch? Do I still feel to him like my patient Becca felt to me before I stopped seeing her?
Wendell had used the singular, though—not “Do you have questions for me?” but “Do you have a question for me?” He did that, I recognize, because all of my questions boil down to an essential one, a question so loaded that I don’t know how to say it aloud. Is there anything that makes us feel more vulnerable than asking someone, Do you like me?
It seems that being a therapist hasn’t made me immune to responding to Wendell in the ways that patients respond to me. I get frustrated with him. I resent being charged for a cancellation when I’m sick (even though I have the same cancellation policy). I don’t always tell him everything I should, and I unwittingly (or wittingly) distort what he says. I’ve always assumed that when Wendell closed his eyes in our sessions, it was to give him space to think something through. But now I wonder if it’s more of a reset button. Perhaps he’s saying to himself, Have compassion, have compassion, have compassion, the way I used to do with John.
Like most patients, I want my therapist to enjoy my company and have respect for me, but, ultimately, I want to matter to him. Feeling deep in your cells that you matter is part of the alchemy that takes place in good therapy.
The humanistic psychologist Carl Rogers practiced what he called client-centered therapy, a central tenet of which was unconditional positive regard. His switch from using the term patient to client was representative of his attitude toward the people he worked with. Rogers believed that a positive therapist-client relationship was an essential part of the cure, not just a means to an end—a groundbreaking concept when he introduced it in the mid-twentieth century.
But unconditional positive regard doesn’t mean the therapist necessarily likes the client. It means that the therapist is warm and nonjudgmental and, most of all, genuinely believes in the client’s ability to grow if nurtured in an encouraging and accepting environment. It’s a framework for valuing and respecting the person’s “right to determination” even if her choices are at odds with yours. Unconditional positive regard is an attitude, not a feeling.
I want more than Wendell’s unconditional positive regard—I want him to like me. My question, it turns out, isn’t only about discovering whether I matter to Wendell. It’s also about acknowledging how much he matters to me.
“Do you like me?” I squeak out, feeling pathetic and awkward. I mean, what can he possibly say? He’s not going to say no. Even if he doesn’t like me, he could throw it back to me by asking, “What do you think?” or “I wonder why you’re asking this now?” Or he could say what I might have said to John if he’d asked me this question early on. I would have told him the truth of my experience, which might have been less about whether I liked him and more about how hard it was to get to know him when he kept me at arm’s length.
But Wendell does none of that.
“I do like you,” he says in a way that makes me feel he means it. It sounds neither rote nor gushy. It’s so simple—and so unexpectedly moving in its simplicity. Yes, I like you.
“I like you too,” I say, and Wendell smiles.
Wendell says that while I want to be liked for being smart or funny, he was talking about liking my neshama, which is the Hebrew word for “spirit” or “soul.” The concept registers instantly.
I tell Wendell about a recent college graduate who, considering a career as a therapist, asked if I liked my patients, because, after all, that’s who therapists spend their time with each day. I said that sometimes patients seem one way on the outside, but that’s often because they’re confusing me with others from their past who may not have seen them the way I do. Even so, I told this young woman, I feel genuine affection for my patients all the time—their tender places, their bravery, their souls. Fo
r, as Wendell is saying, their neshamot.
“But in a professional way, right?” the young woman persisted, and I knew that she didn’t quite understand, because before I met my patients, I didn’t understand either. And as a patient myself, it was hard to remember. But Wendell has just reminded me.
43
What Not to Say to a Dying Person
“That’s not a thing!” Julie says. She’s talking about a coworker who had a miscarriage—a fellow cashier at Trader Joe’s—and how another coworker, trying to console her, said, “Everything happens for a reason. This one just wasn’t meant to be.”
“‘Everything happens for a reason’ is not a thing!” Julie repeats. “There’s no divine plan if you miscarry or have cancer or your child is murdered by a lunatic!” I know what she means. People make misguided comments about all kinds of misfortune, and Julie has been toying with the idea of writing a book she plans to call What Not to Say to a Dying Person: A Guide for the Well-Meaning but Clueless.
According to Julie, here are a few things not to say: Are you sure you’re dying? Have you gotten a second opinion? Be strong. What are your odds? You need to be less stressed. It’s all about attitude. You can beat this! I know somebody who took vitamin K and was cured. I read about this new therapy that shrinks tumors—in mice, but still. You really have no family history of this? (If Julie did, the person asking would feel safer; it could be explained by genetics.) The other day, someone told Julie, “I knew a woman who had the same kind of cancer as you.” “Knew?” Julie said. “Um, yes,” the person replied sheepishly. “She, uh, died.”
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