My mother, who doesn’t do much, lives in the far reaches of Northern California. She once played at being an artist—she painted, made sculptures, worked stained glass—but lacked discipline and drinks too much. She’s tough, cool, and one of the boys—a flirt who kept up with the men hunting deer, ducks, grouse, and elk as easily as she keeps pace with them at the bar. It has been a long time since she was pleasant to be around until she has imbibed her necessary dose of vodka, gin, tequila, whiskey, beer, or wine. Until my teens I failed to connect drinking to why she was brittle and snappy until midday only to unfold, growing voluble and funny as the day unraveled into night. As I told Dr. Kohl, “The mother I liked was drunk. Bitch mother was sober.”
In 1965, the year I was born, my parents opened the Paragon, a restaurant in Aspen. Occupied with the new business, they left my sister and me in the care of a string of live-in babysitters, including an eighteen-year-old girl and her 55-year-old boyfriend. Our community in Aspen was tight and lively. Gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson was a neighbor and friend. The levels of drugs, booze, and guns during the first decade of my life in Aspen, between 1965 and 1974, were abundant. I was nine when we moved to Robinson Bar Ranch, a hybrid hot springs–dude ranch in central Idaho. OshKosh B’gosh overalls, turtleneck, Keds sneakers, and long braids, Laura Ingalls Wilder style, were my look back then. For a year Nicole and I attended Stanley School, a two-room Quonset hut at the base of the Sawtooth Mountains. I was ten years old and the only student in fifth grade. The next year we were homeschooled by a hired teacher who taught a gaggle of kids whose parents lived and worked on the Ranch.
After three years running Robinson Bar as a restaurant and inn my family left to spend the dark winter months traveling in the South Pacific. We returned to Idaho on Christmas Eve 1978 from what was billed as a “round the world” trip four months and half the globe shy of our April goal. Given the limited options for high school in rural central Idaho we first rented and then bought a small second house in Sun Valley. Cutting the trip short meant I spent half of seventh grade, Nicole half of eighth grade, at the public middle school in Hailey. The following September we enrolled in the private Ketchum–Sun Valley Community School for the remainder of high school.
Unsettled, my parents shuttled that first year and a half between the Ranch and the house in Sun Valley as they did their best to ignore the drab marriage they’d tried to escape by traveling halfway around the world. By the end of my first year at the Ketchum–Sun Valley Community School my mother had left my father and they divorced. I was thirteen years old when my father left Idaho for the Bay Area. I lived pretty much parent-free in Sun Valley for the next four years, my sister with me for all but my final year of high school. My mother, having fallen in love with my best friend’s mother, had disappeared to enjoy her second adolescence. She spent the years between 1979 and 1983 living with various girlfriends or at the Tunnel Rock Café, a funky place she bought one hundred miles north of Sun Valley with the proceeds of the sale of the Ranch.
Before college I took a year off to live in Norway while pursuing the last gasp of my career as a cross-country skiing prodigy. I then spent four years at Middlebury College in Vermont, graduating in spring 1988. That first postcollege summer I lived in Taos, New Mexico, working in a bakery, as far away as I could get from anyone I knew. I returned east that autumn to work for the newspapers that had been held in trust for my father for nearly two decades, the same newspapers that had supplied the money to support the family in the absence of any truly profitable business. In January 1989 I escaped back up to Vermont, leaving the grim rust belt landscape west of Albany along with my humiliating newspaper apprenticeship as the boss’s daughter. In Burlington I rented an apartment and found a waitressing job. I left my apartment the following August to move in with Matt. A year later, right around the time I quit my waitressing job and started working at Chittenden Community Action (CCA) as a low-income advocate, I left Matt. I was used to living alone; having my own apartment again was like returning home after a long, unsuccessful trip.
∗ ∗ ∗
Working for CCA didn’t require calculated charm the way my former waitressing job did, although I soon discovered it stuck to me in the same way, only this time accumulating over the months to form a critical mass of human misery and hopelessness. The people who sat in the chair by my desk now needed real help—not just coffee, eggs, and toast on the double. I got to know many of them: a different sort of regular from what I was used to.
Dr. Kohl noted on his intake that CCA was “emotionally very dangerous” work. He was right. The parade of suffering and especially the kids with their vacant looks and flat affects pulled me down. Happy endings were rare. A little salve here, a Band-Aid there; nothing much ever changed. I was perpetually ashamed: how fucking spoiled I was, how devoid of the simple grace to be content in the material paradise that has long been mine.
Most nights I got lost in a novel—The Master and Margarita, The River Why, A Confederacy of Dunces, The Adventures of Augie March. When books failed me or I needed a break from the relentless quiet of the room that seemed to turn up the volume of my thoughts, I took breaks by bingeing and purging. Frosted Flakes afloat in cold milk. A pint of Mint-Oreo Ben & Jerry’s. Buttery, salty fusilli. Avoiding the obligations answering the phone might impose, I cringe at its sound, rarely answering. The cycle was unstoppable. I soaked in the scalding, soapy water of the bathtub, hoping some part of me might dissolve.
Dr. Kohl argued from the start that surviving by isolating myself had worn out its usefulness. What had once been a necessary adaptation to protect me from rejection was cutting off any real chance at happiness. He has prodded me to form relationships outside his office and spend more time in contact with my sister and the few friends I have. But rather than getting better as I continued therapy over the summer and fall of 1990—socializing more, throwing up less often, feeling happier, sleeping better—I got worse.
Maybe Dr. Kohl’s wrong and I am a natural loner. It feels that way. But he calls me an “unlikely misanthrope,” meaning that although I cultivate being alone it’s unlikely I’m incapable of emotional connection. He theorizes that I avoid people out of fear, insecurity, arrogance, and sheer habit. I’m not so sure. Being alone feels real.
In November, four months in, it seems, however, he wasn’t sure.
“Can she not feel real contact?” he wrote in a note to himself. “I feel contact with her here or has it not been there?”
CHAPTER 4
Fabulous Patient
The ritual. An hour before every 8:00 A.M. appointment I sit down on the leatherette banquette of Henry’s Diner for pre-session prep. I sort myself out on paper the best I can. There, at 55 Bank Street in the same booth by the window under the fluorescent lights, I’ve been an irregular regular: Mondays and Thursdays. I don’t chat. I don’t know anyone’s name. No one knows mine. Once, a waitress called me “Honey” or maybe “Hon,” but it must have felt as wrong to her as it did to me. She never tried it again.
They take my order and write it down every time even though it never changes: Cinnamon toast, $2. Regular coffee, $1.25. Total $3.25 + 9 percent meals tax of 29 cents = $3.54 + tip. Somebody delivers a clean glass ashtray, Green Wave cup and saucer, coffee, Dairlyland creamers, and a set of silverware swaddled in a white paper napkin. I always leave $6 on the red-flecked Formica table next to the scalloped edge of the paper placemat. The tip ensures the occasional swapping out of the dirty ashtray and a steady flow of timely refills.
At 7:55 A.M. I walk the two blocks to Dr. Kohl’s office, where his black Lamborghini reliably presents itself, slick as a wet snake, the engine still hot from the 22-minute drive from Charlotte. Fresh off the road, it exudes heat steady as fresh blacktop into the usually chill Vermont mornings. Metal clicking, contracting, expanding; the engine does its expensive thing quite alone in its special parking place in front of the tidy white-painted brick building. Dr. Kohl is an understated, modest ma
n; the car appears to be his one indulgence.
By the time I arrive he’s inside, but there’s no point in trying the door before 7:58 A.M., when he unlocks it. Once in a while when he’s late his car is there but, having gone inside to do whatever he does before his day begins, he finds me trying the door as he comes to turn the latch.
The embarrassment and excitement of his proximity outside the formality of his office thrill and sicken me. The experience is surpassed only by weigh-ins on the doctor’s scale in the bathroom located just off his office. It seems I’m not the only one with an eating disorder. Once we’re inside the tiny bathroom together, the intimacy of the space, his presence so close I can hear his breath, his arm reaching close to slide the weight up or down the metal arm of the scale until it finds my equal, prompts a frisson of sexually charged humility I can live off for days. When he marvels at my anticipation of the number to the half pound I smile; I don’t own a scale but this is no great feat for anyone worth her Axis I eating disorder.
You might call my refusal of all pleasantries at the beginning of each session a tic: he nods me in from the waiting room, and inside there’s never so much as a “Hello,” no chatting about the weather or the weekend or any other polite throat clearing. Once we’re settled I go. You might think this would be awkward. It always is. Maybe I like the awkwardness because it collapses the distance between the public space out there and the private one with just us inside behind the double soundproof doors.
Fabulous patient that I am, I launch right into whatever I’ve planned to say in that loaded moment a second after the bag and coat are heaped on the floor to the side of the leather chair. By then Dr. Kohl faces me, clipboard in lap, chair pulled out from behind the desk for an unobstructed line of contact. A fresh page for the day with my name and the date at the top waits to be covered in the ink of his pen—then it’s time—55 minutes to go.
I feel liberated with him. Usually an expert with pleasantries—they lubricate and diffuse virtually every interaction to a repulsive degree, shorting out real contact—I refuse them in his office. It’s the only place I’ve ever been where I’m free to not pretend to be something I’m not without fear of judgment. He never makes me feel like a freak. I decided early on that if I don’t tell the truth, if I’m a coward, the delicate process would be a fraud and I’m far too reverential of what goes on between us to compromise it.
The practice of free association, the act of speaking without censoring what surfaces in the mind, was invented by Josef Breuer in the 1881 case history of Anna O., the ur-patient of psychotherapy. It was Anna O. who invented the term “talking cure” to describe what Freud referred to as the “cathartic method.” It was also Freud who developed the rich significance of this kind of speech over the course of his seminal career. Anna O. called the process of unearthing unconscious thoughts “chimney sweeping.” Smart girl. How apt that the material just beneath conscious thought figures in Anna’s phrase as a wasteland, burned through, messy cinders the residue of memory. That’s what it feels like to me. And yet I’m still surprised when my feelings and desires get lost in the sooty mix Dr. Kohl and I generate together. The marvels of the subconscious and the devilry of the process: snatching that first “free” association before it’s covered up by the mind’s censors, bringing my unconscious mind’s scary detritus to the surface. The process demands disturbing honesty—direct, unfiltered speech so far buried I don’t even realize it’s mine. But in the context of Dr. Kohl’s office, with him as my confessor, I forgot I’d been trained to monitor thought before speech.
If I’d known the first thing about psychotherapy when I began maybe all of this disruption wouldn’t have been such a surprise. As I’ve learned, treatment would be a failure if no mess were made; it’s practically the point. Given the workings of transference and countertransference—the baggage the patient and doctor bring to their relationship from past experience and how it mingles in treatment between the two—it’s impossible to predict what will evolve between doctor and patient.
Once the patient is invested there are, as Freud noted, “two alternatives: either she must relinquish psychoanalytic treatment or she must accept falling in love with her doctor as an inescapable fate.” As dated as this view may be, I’m with the poet Anne Sexton, who called this imbalance the “big cheat.”
Why did it have to be that way? Maybe because the falling in love, what Freud calls the “erotic transference” brings out an extraordinary opportunity, even a central opportunity, for analysis. “To urge the patient to suppress, renounce or sublimate her instincts in the moment she has admitted her erotic transference would be not an analytic way of dealing with them, but a senseless one.” I was drawn in by Dr. Kohl himself but also by the artificial premise of two people sitting in a room facing one another with nothing more on the agenda but forming a relationship.
Even if I had understood the usefulness of my emotions when I began to see Dr. Kohl the knowledge wouldn’t have done me any good. Reason had no chance. I fell in love with Dr. Kohl fast, quickly experiencing an entirely novel depth of affection and longing. I failed to calmly accept my feelings for him and the implied rejection—his inability to reciprocate my love—that was a condition of the analytic situation. I learned by hard experience what Freud meant when he wrote that whether the doctor’s rejection is verbalized or not, “the patient will feel only humiliation, and she will not fail to take her revenge for it.”
If I was ever afraid of what Dr. Kohl might have thought of me and consciously tailored my words to please or manipulate him, I would have squandered the conspicuously precious time I had with him. However brave I felt speaking “truth,” our exchanges still felt like mind games played out in gestures, facial expressions, and our choice of words. The mistakes we made were as telling as the successes. No matter the results, I delighted in every moment of it.
CHAPTER 5
Hard to Fake
I’d long believed my childhood was privileged and, if not ordinary, not a significant factor in my uneven mental state; I liked to give myself full credit for that. I experienced what Dr. Kohl called depression as a sort of miasma I passed through in high school and college; as therapy progressed it settled for good, a thick fog I can’t find the edge of.
“I’m alienated and separate,” I told him a month or so after my first session; it’s a feeling that “creates a distance from other people. I’m more authentic, not being fake, when I feel depressed. My ability to withdraw avoids compromising” myself.
“How old is the depression?” Dr. Kohl asked.
“Last year of high school,” I replied, not quite certain how far back my desire to withdraw and hide could be called “depression.” What I can date to high school is the all-consuming self-loathing and hopelessness. The self-sufficient, calm person I present to the world, the one I see as an act, has long drained me. Pleasing and polite, this competent persona is so at the ready I confuse her with the real me.
I’m a chameleon, able to adapt to please almost anyone. Of course this leaves me questioning everyone else’s authenticity. Because I’m so changeable it’s difficult to trust who I am unless I’m alone, not pretending. When alone I look back and feel tainted by contact as my smooth performance jars against a hypersensitive core. Curt tones, scents of exclusion, subtle hints I’m intruding, mild criticisms, even compliments—none of it shows but all of it penetrates. I respond to most requests and invitations as traps, future obligations to put on a show. When I do talk about myself truthfully my internal self deflates the moment—what I should have kept private hits the air.
I can be cold or even mean without realizing it. As adept as I am at reading others, I have a limited sense of my own affect. Anyone who puts on a polished or calculated performance repels me—maybe because I know too well how to play that game myself. With the exception of a tiny handful of people, I don’t care what people think of me—I’m far too busy most of the time managing my own thoughts. I’m almost too
good at being around others but I always pay the price for my own show later, when I realize I’ve lost track of what I think, of who I am or want to be. Time alone or with Dr. Kohl is the only cure.
I’ve survived the time between therapy appointments these fourteen months by filling it with the only contact I can tolerate: a smoke with my only real friend in town, Jess, a skinny, sweet butch lesbian I could talk to all day; a long-distance call with my sister replete with a blood-quickening fight that’s as rich and unfiltered as my exchanges with Dr. Kohl; attending my two graduate classes at the University of Vermont, where, as I was in the last two years of college, I’m the A+ student who never talks to anyone but the professor; and of course, performing sad duties forty hours a week at Community Action. In the gaps of this life I fit in familiar, comforting sex with my old boyfriend, Matt. These messy exchanges are mostly driven by some animal need for human contact—I mean touch, not even sex.
I broke up with Matt last September for many reasons—he’d cheated on me for one. His body is skinny as a Chinese long bean; he has fair wavy hair halfway down his back and kind lucent blue eyes compassed by wire frames holding thick lenses. I felt lonelier when I was with him than alone—at once used and unwanted. The way I experienced my time with him echoed the way I felt growing up: I was handy, often quite useful, but never the priority.
When I discovered Matt had cheated on me for a second time I told Dr. Kohl how I had refused to so much as open, never mind read or respond to, the letter of apology the woman Matt had slept with slipped under my door. I put the unopened letter back under her door. But then it felt wrong.
“I don’t know if I should have done that.”
Lights On, Rats Out Page 3