Get Me Out of Here

by Rachel Reiland

  Where is he? Where is the man who said all those gentle loving words? Why won't he comfort me right now? Why won't he tell me some of those stories about his little girl?

  “I don't understand this,” I began to cry. “This is horrible for me. Can't you at least comfort me? She's torturing me! How can you be so cold?”

  “There is no she; there's only you. One you. And when you can confront your fears, you won't need to be anorexic anymore. I can help you face the fears but not if you don't participate. And right now you're letting the child take complete control.”

  “I can't believe this. I thought you loved me. How can you just leave me hanging here like this and not do anything?”

  A look of impatience flashed over his face then quickly passed.

  “This isn't therapy right now. This is acting out. When you are ready to participate, I'm here. But I can't work with you unless the adult is present.”

  How dare he lead me on the way he does and then turn on a dime.

  “You're right. This isn't therapy at all. This is a big scam, a rip-off. You think you can pick my brain, play me like an instrument, sucker me in, and just collect your goddamned fees. Well, fuck you! I don't need your stupid rules and your stupid limits and all the other shit you come up with to pull my strings like a puppet. How dare you call me a child. If I end up dead, it'll serve you right.”

  “I call you a child when you act like one. You have to decide if I care or not. If you can't believe it by what I've done, then whatever I say or don't say isn't going to make a difference. I think you need therapy, and there have been plenty of times when you've agreed. But that's your decision too. I can't keep you here if you don't want to be.”

  “I don't need you!”

  “You say that, but you don't mean it. You need me so much it scares you. You're afraid your need is so vast that somehow it will swallow me alive or drive me away. But it hasn't, and it won't. The only way therapy will end is if you end it. You can leave before it's finished, before your needs are met. You can leave in a rage. But it will hurt you much more than it will hurt me.”

  The rest of the session was a babysitting of sorts. I raged and roared, rocked and swiveled the chair with frenetic intensity, retorted back with every slicing insult I could think of and every string of profanity I could muster. But Dr. Padgett didn't return the outburst. He simply sat and waited and repeated the same points. He also didn't say the comforting words or tell the loving stories I so desperately sought. When time was up, I rose quickly, hurled the tissue box from the end table against the wall and stalked out. He didn't follow me.

  I was still fuming by the time I'd reached my car. I wanted revenge. To land a blow on him that would take him down. But any revenge against him would be empty. That damned blank screen. He didn't even care enough to get pissed at me.

  So I reached into my glove compartment, found a pen and pad of paper, and began to scrawl one more attempt at the last word, hoping somehow to destroy him. When I was finished, I walked over to the doctors' parking garage.

  Doctors. I hated them all. Such pompous beings, always playing God. The lot was filled with BMWs, Cadillacs, and Porsches with a stretch of vanity license plates befitting the vain arrogance of physicians. DOCTOR. DOCTR. DR-III. DOC. Which one could be Padgett's?

  Finally I found a red Mazda with a sunroof—JMP. John M. Padgett. This must be the car. The reserved-parking-space sign confirmed it. Rich sonofabitch, how dare he exploit me for money! Lifting up the recessed windshield wiper carefully, although I was tempted to break it, I placed my note right in front of the driver's seat where I knew he would have to remove it and read it. I stood there for a minute before I took my pen and scrawled a few more words on the outside of the folded paper.

  I know where you live, asshole, and now I know what you drive!

  By the time I'd reached home, the anger had faded and I felt some satisfaction in my eloquent revenge. I even ate most of what was on my plate, much to Tim's relief.

  By sunset on this late spring day, I was filled with remorse. I wished that I could go back and retrieve the note. But certainly Dr. Padgett had left for home by now. The deed had been done. I needed Dr. Padgett. I didn't want therapy to end. I wasn't sure if I ever wanted it to end; perhaps this is what scared me the most.

  But I'd threatened him, harassed him, and left the evidence. I had broken the law. He had the right to exit therapy now, despite his promises, out of sheer self-preservation. I'd gone into that session filled with love, the warm feeling in my heart of being cared for, the burning desire of need. And I had proceeded to leave the session filled with hatred. I Hate You, Don't Leave Me. Right down to the last letter. Filled with self-hatred, wishing I were dead, I finally fell asleep. Tim didn't know about any of this. I was afraid that if I told him, he would know what an evil soul lay within the emaciated figure sleeping beside him. The mother of his children. He would leave too.

  The adult showed up to the next session.

  I was like the parent of an unruly child, dragging her into the drugstore, making her confess to the manager about the shoplifting she'd committed the day before. I knew that there were no excuses, no disorder that could justify what I had done. No child within had done this without my knowledge or consent.

  The greeting smile again. How could he do that in light of what I'd done to him?

  When we entered his office, there, on the table, sat the white piece of paper with the words scrawled on top, still folded exactly as it had been when I'd placed it on his windshield. I was puzzled.

  This time the little girl voice did not come out, nor did the defensive profanity of the tough guy. I neither leaned forward nor slumped backward. I looked him straight in the eyes.

  “I'm sorry, Dr. Padgett. I was really out of line. I shouldn't have tried to hurt you like that. You didn't do anything to deserve it. I know I can't come up with any excuses, but I do want to apologize. I'm really sorry. I understand if you can't see me anymore. I crossed the line. I didn't mean that stuff, not really.”

  He listened to the apology. But as it turns out, it wasn't as necessary as I thought. When he'd seen the note on the windshield, he had removed it and had figured it was from me. But he hadn't opened it.

  Among Dr. Padgett's therapy boundaries was the rule that a patient's emotions, particularly those of the turbulent inner child, should be confined to sessions. So he had decided not to read the note. He did, however, invite me to read the note to him right there, in session.

  I declined, telling him that it was basically a repackage of the same insults I'd hurled the day before.

  He accepted my apology nonetheless. Instead of the lecture or the terse warnings that were warranted, he changed the topic away from the letter and toward the feelings that had prompted it.

  Immediately I was filled with love for him. This was a man who truly meant what he said about unconditional love. This was a man fully committed to keeping his promises.

  “Therapy is a lot like parenting,” he told me. “A child needs the parent in ways that the parent simply doesn't need the child. The parent may love the child and not be able to imagine life without the child, but it is a different kind of love. The child is wholly dependent on the parent, but it doesn't work the other way around. Healthy and loving parents wouldn't dream of exploiting the child's vulnerability. But abusive parents do. Your parents did. You couldn't help that you needed them so much. But that need brought you pain. You had no other choice but to rely on them. There was no one else to take care of you. But now you have someone else.

  “Every child needs to feel safe, to love completely, and not to have that love exploited. You cannot relive your childhood. But you can get what you need here. And you can become whole.”

  I loved him so much at that moment I couldn't believe how I could have harbored the hateful thoughts that had prompted the note. At times like this I could not imagine how I could have hated him—ever. In times of hatred I sometimes wished I could sum
mon these warm feelings of love. But they always seemed to elude me. Intellectually I knew the goal of therapy was to fuse these conflicting emotions into a whole. But for now I simply clung to these tender moments of intensity, savoring them for as long as they lasted. They were enough to get by, enough to keep me coming back.

  A pattern was emerging here, I noticed, an ironic twist on an old biblical saying: “Ask and ye shall receive.” With Dr. Padgett the phrase was transposed: “Ask and ye shall not receive; do not ask and ye shall.”

  When I came in hungering for his tonic words of love and comfort, yearning so much it burned within me, Dr. Padgett was often distant. He repeated his same line, “If you can't believe I care about you based on all that's happened here, what I say or don't say isn't going to matter.”

  It was the times when I least expected it, felt I least deserved it, that he would open up with his warming words of love and comfort. As he would often say, “Love isn't something to be earned. It's something to be given.”

  In the previous session I had accused him of trying to pull my puppet strings. Projection again. I was the one who was trying to control him, and he was not going to let that happen. But slowly I was learning that I wasn't always going to hear exactly what I wanted to hear. Maybe it was truly because, as he said, what I wanted wasn't always what I needed.

  Anger and fear temporarily lifted. I went home and spent a peaceful evening playing with the kids and watching mindless sitcoms with Tim. For once I slept well with no nightmares to rouse me from a restful sleep.

  I'd gotten into the habit of arriving to the hospital an hour early to take long walks and reflect on what was most pressing in my mind. Strolling through the meticulously kept gardens of the hospital grounds, I rarely had harsh thoughts toward Dr. Padgett. Yet once I entered the office, there was no predicting how I would behave.

  Sometimes I walked for an hour or two, thinking kind thoughts. But once I crossed his threshold, I was besieged by rage, and the gentle eloquence I had planned would turn to bombshells of insults.

  Outside the walls of the office, I was getting better at emotional self-control. Inside them, however, was another matter entirely. In my moments of loving and feeling loved, I would feel remorse for the bitter attacks of a session or two before. I'd be filled with regret as I looked into the eyes of a man I couldn't imagine wanting to hurt. Yet I knew I had often done everything in my power, not only to hurt him, but also to destroy him. I didn't understand why I could not control myself despite my best intentions. It made even less sense why he continued to put up with me.

  At these times his chair became a slowly rising pedestal, and I looked into the eyes of more than a therapist—a saint. I tried to put words to this consuming love that I felt, to let him know just how remarkable and kind I thought he was. To let him know how I felt right then, before the moment passed. In this session I tried once more.

  “I've treated you like shit, Dr. Padgett. I've told you off, threatened you, and maliciously insulted you. But you stay here anyway. You keep being kind to me. I don't deserve you.”

  “You do deserve me,” he replied. “That's the whole point. Every child deserves parents who give love unconditionally, who don't exploit vulnerability but nurture it with kindness. Not because of anything a child does or says, but because the infant simply is. A child shouldn't have to earn this love. It's a birthright.

  “I'm not by any means perfect. I don't have to be. All I have to be is good enough. You think this kind of love is rare. But it isn't. It happens all the time for most children. Most parents are good enough parents. And, quite frankly, it's really not that difficult to love you. There is a lot in you to love.”

  It still didn't make sense. I had been downright hateful to him so many times. What could he possibly see in me to love? I wasn't a child. I was almost thirty years old. His kindness, in ways, was only deepening my remorse.

  “Come on, Dr. Padgett. Let's be serious. I've cussed you out so many times I couldn't even begin to count them. I've insulted everything: your profession, your motives, your integrity, your competence, even your masculinity. I've threatened you and your family. How could anybody but a masochist or a martyr put up with this?”

  “Have your kids ever thrown a temper tantrum?” he asked. “Do they ever want something that seems insignificant, and yet, to them, it's like the holy grail? And when you don't let them have it, they pitch a fit with everything in their being?”

  I thought of Melissa, who a few days before had desperately wanted to use a crystal vase as a teapot for her dolls. My little girl, usually so good-natured, had rolled around on the floor, pummeling her tiny fists, writhing like a possessed creature.

  I described the incident to Dr. Padgett.

  “What did you do? Did you get angry? Did you scream at her or spank her?”

  “No. I might have been a little irritated, but she's just a little kid, and she was awfully tired. I didn't give her the vase, but I pretty much let it pass.”

  “Have your kids ever told you that they hated you?”

  I had to smile at this one. It was the running joke of the preschool mom set. All of us, at one time or another, vied for the title of “meanest mommy in the world.”

  “Sure,” I answered him.

  “But you're smiling. Didn't you take it personally? Didn't it hurt you?”

  “No, of course not. They don't really mean it.”

  “Ah, that's where you're wrong,” he responded. “For the moment, when they are right in the middle of an emotion, they mean it with all of their being. When they say they hate Mommy, they absolutely mean it—the same black-and-white thinking you do sometimes. That same inability to feel intense anger and intense love at the same time. That cookie or crystal vase is as important to them at the moment as anything—a job, a home, a marriage—could ever be to an adult.

  “But the parent can handle this because he or she knows this is simply the way two-year-olds can be. The hate is tempered with the intense and pure love that prompts them to tell you an hour later that you're the best mommy in the world.”

  I smiled again. Tim and I had long ago agreed that God had made toddlers so sweet at times to make sure their parents didn't strangle them when they acted like little monsters. Survival. Although, really, toddlers were a joy far more than they were a headache. It wasn't hard to love them at all.

  “Another question for you. Let's say Jeffrey or Melissa were ten or twelve years old and still dropping to the floor, kicking and screaming every time they didn't get their way. What would you think then?”

  “I'd be really worried. I'd think something was seriously wrong.”

  “Would you hate them then?”

  “No, of course I could never hate them. They're my kids.”

  “So you'd be very worried because you'd know that continuing to act in such a way at those ages could be very harmful for them. But you'd still love them. And you'd be worried precisely because you loved them.”

  “Yes,” I was beginning to see where this was leading. This was a time I preferred to listen rather than speak.

  “When you were a little girl, you were afraid to express these strong emotions. You were afraid to leave your bedroom at night or cry out of fear, much less throw a tantrum. In your world it wasn't safe. If you dared to express your anger, your fears, that would not be accepted. You were afraid that if you told your parents that you hated them, they would, in turn, hate you. And you needed them, as all children need their parents. You couldn't risk that.

  “So you buried those feelings. You had to out of sheer survival. And, in the meantime, a part of you never grew out of that phase—a part buried out of fear and self-preservation that has never left you.

  “What I feel when you lash out as you do, lose control as you do, isn't hatred, Rachel. How could I hate a child? Yes, I worry about you. Because you've grown up in many ways, you have a much greater command of language than you had back then. So the words you say can be quite hurtful
to people who don't understand that they come from the child within and not from the adult. This can destroy relationships.

  “And, as an adult, you have the freedom and the access to indulge in much greater forms of self-destruction than a two-year-old could ever have. You can drink and use drugs. You can smoke. You can be promiscuous. You can kill yourself if you want to, run into the streets at night, choose to eat everything in sight, or starve yourself. It's dangerous when the raw black-and-white emotions of a child are harbored in an adult's mind and body.

  “Your rages might irritate me sometimes. But they don't make me angry. They don't make me want to leave you any more than my own toddlers' tantrums made me want to desert them. This isn't a normal adult relationship with adult expectations. It's a unique one where you're safe to express your childlike emotions and not be judged or reprimanded. It's safe here for you.”

  I found consolation in his words. And yet I still had difficulty accepting the notion that I was in any way a child. I'd earned a degree from a prestigious university. I had an emerging career. Perhaps it was offtrack right now, but I did have one. I was in a marriage and had two children. At times I had taken his childhood analogies as being rather patronizing. Now they were more embarrassing. Shameful.

  “Those are kind words, Dr. Padgett. And I don't doubt for a minute that you mean them. You do have a role, and you are great at that role, a lot better than I would ever have expected. Better than I deserve. But look at me. I'm an adult sitting here. A skinny one, maybe, but still an adult. Sitting in here crying like a baby sometimes. Acting like a child. Don't you think it's kind of pathetic? How could you possibly respect me?”

  “Sad, maybe, but not pathetic. In fact, quite courageous in that you're willing to look inside yourself and face what's there. Anything you've managed to do in your life has been like climbing a mountain with a two-hundred-pound weight on your back. How could I not respect that?