Session after session through the winter and spring I tested his resolve by challenging his commitment to me and to the professional rules.
“What do you have to lose here? Your professional integrity … if you felt that you didn’t do a good job?” At this he locked those strong eyes of his on mine and answered with what seemed like a non sequitur but wasn’t.
“You can be lonely,” he said. “Who would lose in the intimacy war?” he asked rhetorically. My nose had been rubbed in the rejection.
In his notes for that day Dr. Kohl wrote, “Pouring out her annoyance with Dr. Kohl.” It was the title of a list that included interrupting, feeling more depressed, having unprotected sex with Matt and then feeling sorry and filthy, biting my cuticles and fingernails until I tasted blood, bingeing, vomiting, and starving myself in between. I’d lost thirty pounds since therapy began.
Despising the remaining edges of my former softness, I slipped the rings from my fingers and put them in my dresser drawer along with my earrings and bracelets.
“I’m paring down” the “encumbrances,” I explained.
“It’s all magic,” he said. And it was, but it was a magic I liked because it made me feel different, more in control. I made and gave Dr. Kohl a papier-mâché collage with a baby figure at the center to represent the abortion I had on 11/11/88. The 11s liked it. I woke up five times in the night on May 5, 1991: 1:11, 3:11, 4:11. They were closing in.
“Freeing though, they’re pretenses,” was my way of dismissing the frippery.
“That’s a big word for a little girl,” he said with a laugh, meaning the magical logic I was wrapped up in came from what he referred to as my controlling, punishing three-year-old.
On me, weighing me down, the jewelry I removed was transferable, lies of prettiness I was sick of passing off as part of me. Long straight hair no longer complicates me either. No. Each strand was cut an inch or less from my scalp—you could generously call it a pixie. Raw. Think less Audrey Hepburn and more the kind of haircut you give your doll when you’re six.
On my monster-worthy six feet, my big head, newly shorn, looked unbalanced—I felt fragile and exposed. I was shy and embarrassed when Dr. Kohl saw me without my hair, smiling too much as if I knew I’d been naughty. His gaze calmly met mine, communicating that he knew precisely what I was up to. He argued that people don’t just cut off all their hair without talking about it first.
I was exhausted by a ridiculous life lived through the scraps of time I spent with him. The 11s were “bugging me” with their insistent presence and yet, as I explained to him, “I have to defy” this force because “I can’t control it.” I accused him of confusing me into a state of dependent unhappiness.
“Feeling more here is not me confusing you, it means something is happening here,” he said. But it wasn’t good enough.
“I thought a lot about leaving, freed me to make a decision, assessment, commitment,” I said to begin one late-spring session. “I felt a lot of important things happening. Forced myself into being more involved with what I could see happening: a strengthening process. I felt I was cementing myself.”
“You’ve been working hard already,” Dr. Kohl said.
“I felt pretty good over the weekend, pretty happy. Had an idea I could sustain that sense. Elation that I should stay on but wanted to wean off.” I meant wean myself off my attachment to him. “I don’t think I’ll leave.”
“Could you tell me?” he asked.
“Yeah, I could leave …” I said evasively. I paused, smiling. “But I won’t do it in the next month or so.”
“I know this game,” he said. He meant what he calls my obsession with the game of “Catch Me,” when a toddler runs away as the adult pretends to try to catch the child, letting just enough time pass before grabbing the giggling child, scooping her off her feet, and enclosing her firmly. The child feels a thrilling joy in the terror of escape but only because she knows she’ll be caught and embraced safe and secure as a baby in arms.
“That you would follow me makes it feel more serious.”
“It is a serious ‘game,’” he said.
“Yes, I sense it is very serious, very deathlike, to leave like that. I’d be picking up pieces for so long.”
“Like your parents, who upped and left important ‘things’ behind,” he suggested.
“IT’S MY VERSION OF SUICIDE I THINK. I’ve thought about actual suicide. Never came close to doing that, it didn’t attract me that much.”
“That much,” he echoed. “The only person you could make a commitment to was yourself,” he said. “I’m Cree,” he gently mocked, “I’ll get my shit together so I can make a promise I’ll never leave.” But “It’s just the old you trying to give me presents. It doesn’t work that way.”
I wasn’t sure what to say but as always it felt good to have him see through my posturing, my brazen attempt to please him—even if I didn’t realize that was what I was trying to do. What he meant by giving him “presents” is the work I do to entertain him, amuse him, please him, be a good—no, a perfect—patient.
“It doesn’t work that way …” echoes in my head. I understand why it doesn’t work that way but I don’t know exactly how it does work.
Cutting my hair, making threats to leave, biting my nails as I did all through my childhood—I regressed physically, practically begging to be taken care of.
Hell, at that moment I figured if I could strip myself so easily, why not slip right out of the light?
CHAPTER 9
Unholy Pleasure
It was mid-May, just two weeks before I burned myself for the first time, when I told him, “I feel exposed.”
He said, “That’s what happens to a 3-year-old when an adult walks in the room while she’s walking around self-centered and secure in her fantasy.” He was right, of course, his answer a surprise and a revelation. I do feel shocked and a tad embarrassed, as if I’ve been caught pretending, talking to myself. But the biggest problem I have to overcome is that the 11s don’t like Dr. Kohl, resent him for tricking me into spilling our secret magic.
Awakened into immediate, lively omnipresence, the 11s threaten, calling me out with the aggressive appearance of the number and its multiples, its special signal present everywhere, demanding my attention with constant noise. The power looms, patiently waiting to finish the job. Perhaps they intentionally relaxed their vigilance all those years just to catch me out now? Maybe long ago the timer was set to end here—it’s all part of the larger plan. Now the magic whispers in my ear while betraying me fully, knowing I’m off guard, a disposable decoy, easy for the taking. Or worse, far worse, maybe Dr. Kohl is theirs. An obedient soldier carefully planted, groomed, in on the plot. A test of my fidelity to the secret. If so, I’ve failed and this is their masterpiece, the final score soon to be tallied. They play to win. It might be over soon, as they knew it would be, the victory all theirs in a twinkling.
“I’ve exposed too much. I’ve revealed the magic. YOU’VE WRECKED IT,” I told him.
“What enables the other system is connected here,” he said.
“NO. The other system is a rejection of this. A new magic.”
And the “involuntary thoughts of jamming obscene things in your vagina. You must feel violated,” he said.
This is a recurring compulsion. Horrible thoughts that spring like fleas, alighting on my consciousness uninvited when a truly disgusting object appears on the street or sidewalk—dog shit, roadkill, phlegm. It’s a long-standing annoyance. When these revolting images arrive I’m briefly humiliated and disgusted with myself even though I haven’t done anything but look down.
“Those thoughts come out of nowhere. They control me more than I control them.”
At this he observed again, this time to himself, I’m feeling “SUPER VIOLATED.” At that moment, stuck in the chaos of this primitive terror, I needed to resist him.
“Oh, I don’t mind this shit anymore,” I told him.
&nb
sp; “Therapy?”
“Yes, I have a sense of being shown something here I can’t have, an evenness, a world where things make sense, are manageable, understandable.”
“Love, caring, security,” he said. “Being connected in a normal way.”
“I don’t know if I buy that.”
“From yourself?”
And then I laughed, because what else was there to do? I wasn’t buying it from myself. It sounded too sweet to be true and it’s not even close to how I experience the world when I’m outside his office.
“I’m anxious all the time, self-conscious, exhausted. And the way I feel changes so much hour to hour.”
In his notes to himself for the day he wrote, “What’s precarious is how she feels about herself.” I burned myself for the first time on June 2, 1991. It was somewhere past midnight. I was reading while the space right behind my forehead seemed to expand, the pressure building until concentration was impossible. It was a feeling I’d been growing more familiar with: as if all the thoughts in my frontal cortex were combusting, neurons wildly firing as on the 4th of July.
I set aside The Idiot and as I did I noticed an old scar on the tender, white skin of my right, inner forearm, maybe two inches long, with tiny dots to either side where the stitches left their trace. It was the remnant of an incision to remove a benign fatty lump years ago. Unremarkable, the scar was almost pretty in its delicacy, but it bothered me.
A careless, unsympathetic doctor had left his mark on me when he removed that lump and I suddenly didn’t want evidence of him there, on my body. The scar was foreign, like the jewelry, fingernails, and long hair I’d already rid myself of. Destroying it was not destructive; it was a way of wiping away the taint, of purifying myself. The realization that I could erase the faint white line by burning it away with a lit cigarette appealed to me the moment it came to mind. That was the first time I felt the unholy pleasure.
In my Thursday session with Dr. Kohl the following day I swept in and told him what he already knew.
“When I’m not here I feel really angry with you and it disappears when I come here,” I told him. “It’s a real battle; I guess I don’t trust being here, yet on another level I trust it more than I’ve ever trusted.”
“I can’t see any of your negative qualities, it’s so one-sided.” I was seething with resentment at the peace of mind I’d given up; the interior logic of the 11s telling me enough was enough. Part of me believed in his ability to make me right if he only would—the way a child feels her parents are omnipotent.
Willing my allegiance to them, willing my difference from him, that was why I began to mark out my loyalty on my skin in a pattern that followed right rituals. Ever since, it’s been logical and obedient—never mistaken. I’ve placed each one, listening and watching, getting into line. Stay right. Burn me please. Right here. Make a mark. Show your strength. Time to stop the dalliance with Dr. Kohl. The enemy. Burning is a sublime offering I’m more than a little proud of.
“I’m miserable all the time, self-destructive, exhausted.” Seeing him twice a week wasn’t enough. I wanted all of him—or none.
“2 hours is only part of what you’re angry about,” he said.
“Yes,” I agreed, “it’s what the 2 hours do to me.”
He suggested that the limited time we had together, the smallness of his presence in my life, ended up feeling a lot like what my parents did to me: sparing too little time, leaving me alone and short on affection. As he’d noted in my chart three months prior, “Isolation perpetuates childhood.”
I confessed to throwing up the previous week on Thursday but not over the weekend. The session wound down, ten minutes to go. And then I said it.
“I had this compulsion to burn my arm with my cigarette. I did it and it worked. I didn’t vomit.” I was hoping for an impassioned response. I wanted to jolt him, to get his full attention, and to have it I’d go as far as necessary. But the fantasy reply—whatever it involved—didn’t arrive.
“You’re furious with me,” he stated calmly. “Maybe,” he suggested, “I’m having difficulty dealing with your rage, like your father.”
“True,” I said. “My parents were the same as it is here. When challenged they smoothed it all over like you do. I say something, you comment on it … admit it … it’s perverse and sick.” This isn’t true—as I explain later when he asks what’s different about being with him; I say, “The way you’ve responded to things, you haven’t ignored things, they get somewhere, I’m not left with them.”
But at that moment, postburn number one, I was just mad.
“Chaos, Anger, Rage. Visit Suicide Observation,” he wrote in a note to himself that day, adding, “Set limits on violence toward self.” Beside it he drew a crude diagram of my arm to record the location of the relatively minor blister I’d created, the blister I would refinish within the week by reburning it properly. It took time to learn that 3rd-degree burns don’t hurt at all once done properly.
It seems he did pay attention to the burn—very much so. But from my perspective that day the act made little impression.
So I tried it again. And again. My surprise at the pleasure of the process and its long aftermath as the burns healed took me by surprise. A plain Band-Aid concealed a rapidly expanding map of dreamy, powerful secrets I happily tended. “Oh, it’s just a bug bite,” or “It’s nothing. Poison ivy,” I’d say if anyone asked.
The initiation on June 2 was unworthy of my later skill—nothing more than a severe 1st-degree. As June passed I practiced, getting better and liking it a great deal. I’d found a lively new way to clear my head of the terrible pressure and all that alarming desire.
CHAPTER 10
Sympathy to Ingest
“Can I hold her?” Dr. Kohl wrote in my chart in March 1991. The answer was no: “Too sexual, too blurry of boundaries.”
He considered this embrace long before the burning started, taking the idea seriously enough to write it down, his countertransference testing his training to the extent that he entertained satisfying the impulse.
The treatment well in process, I fused with Dr. Kohl as what Freud called the “analyst-parent-love object.” I put immense demands on him. The level of my “acting out” both in session and outside would have put most therapists to the test—burning, vomiting, arguing, provoking, imagining, and talking about suicide. I regressed rapidly. As is often the case with bulimic self-harming patients, “aggression and aggression to the self,” as the psychoanalyst Otto Kernberg writes, “are fused in the patient’s efforts to destroy the analyst’s capacity to help” her. Worse, “the therapeutic relationship easily replaces ordinary life, because its gratifying and sheltered nature further intensifies the temptation to gratify primitive pathological needs in the transference and acting out.”
My whole world was 112 Church Street. I lived for my appointments.
Dr. Kohl couldn’t stop me even if part of me wanted to stop, to bring the contest of wills to a close. That’s not how the process works. The dance had to go on both because I couldn’t stop it and because he was trying to follow through on treating me. Throughout June I burned myself frequently. He told me if I didn’t stop by the end of August, then I would have to go to the hospital or end treatment. The distant deadline gave him time to argue with me about the burning. He wanted to work through it with me rather than giving up as my parents had done. I’d regressed in treatment so he attempted to parent me; abandoning me in the middle of my tantrum would have duplicated what my parents did—leaving me alone to fend for myself. He told me he didn’t want to do that—he wanted to prove to me that people could be counted on but he also said there was a limit to the damage he could tolerate. August 31 felt so distant as not to be real.
I enjoy feeling soiled by taking pleasure in wanting him. I’m grateful for the way the tension and confusion fall away when I’m in his presence. Most sessions leave me feeling that I can recognize myself in the present for long enough to make
missing him worthwhile. I can’t pass up the desire, no matter how much it makes my hours outside his office unbearable.
With a body and a mind at odds with one another, post-orgasmic or postburn moments deliver a brief détente before the duality and the longing for what I can’t have kick back in. The quiet a burn earns hangs on longest, a ghost of the act with me as I tend the wound. Burning serves too many purposes to account for—particularly since I don’t even understand most of what it does for me. I do know it’s better than any fix I’ve tried; soothing the knot in my gut, clearing my head, and evaporating my anxiety.
My ongoing desire to hold a cigarette to my skin reflects my detachment from my body, a tool at best, evidenced by the violence I do to myself when I make myself throw up or ski so hard I burst a lung, as I did during a cross-country race in high school. So I took to the unexpected appeal of burning my body that started by so tentatively erasing the line of that old scar as if it were written in pencil. Gratified enough to be rid of it, I replaced what had been alien with a self-fashioned circle and let myself go from there.
Dr. Kohl suggests that burning “cauterizes my desire” and “closes off sexual feelings.” He’s aware of my desire for him and how it repeats through satisfaction in session, renunciation when alone, shame at wanting what I can’t have, regret at having revealed myself, and the punishment that follows. The cycle regenerates like the Hydra; containing the monster and its infinite regrowth requires branding its severed stumps.
Gaining mastery over myself, I kept at it. Position: chair, feet up on the heater, hot milky Earl Grey tea in The Mug by my side, the McGarrigle Sisters cooing “Kiss and Say Goodbye” or Leonard Cohen “Who by Fire.” The latter feels like my theme song as I listen to him rasp “and who in her lonely slip, who by barbiturate.” I’d discovered a source of purifying exultation gained through intense mental and physical concentration. The willful perseverance as I hold the cigarette down erases everything but sound, which only intensifies in the void of concentration I experience as a kind of rapture.
Lights On, Rats Out Page 6