Get Me Out of Here

by Rachel Reiland

  “And what is it that you see as so shameful and wrong?”

  I breathed deeply and swallowed hard. True confessions once again.

  “Wanting to be the center of attention. Underneath it all that's what all of this is about, being the center of attention.”

  There. I said it. The ball was in his court. How could he defend this one?

  “So you think there's something inherently wrong, inherently bad and shameful about wanting to be the center of attention?”

  He might as well have asked me what was so wrong about being an ax murderer.

  “Do I think there's something inherently wrong and bad about it? What kind of question is that? Of course there is! My God, Dr. Padgett, I've just confessed a mortal sin, and you're sitting there like I haven't said a thing.”

  “This isn't a confessional, Rachel,” he sighed. “And, in any event, I just don't see the sin.”

  “The sin is being totally self-centered. The sin is thinking I'm the only person in the world.”

  “The sin, in your eyes,” he said slowly, “is being like a child.”

  “In case you haven't noticed,” I seethed, “I'm not a child. It's high time I grow up.”

  “Not exactly true,” he replied. “You know that part of you is still a child. You believe the child exists. The problem is that you can't accept her. You never could. In a lot of ways neither could your parents.”

  “Don't you see?” I was exasperated at hearing the same old theories. “This isn't about love—a child's love or anyone else's. This is about clinging. About smothering. About a world centered around myself.”

  “Which is a perfectly natural state of childhood.”

  “I've read my damned Freud, okay? Spare me the id stuff, will you? It doesn't apply here.”

  “It really is sad that you've never been able to accept being a child.”

  “Doesn't the word ‘selfish’ mean anything to you? You think being self-centered is honorable or something? Would you tolerate it in your wife? Would you tolerate it in any other relationship? Hell no! And you shouldn't.”

  “This isn't like any other relationship for either of us. As a parent, as a wife, you can't be too self-centered. It would be very destructive. And you aren't too self-centered in those relationships. But it's safe here, safe to feel a child's feelings.”

  “Safe to be selfish?”

  Dr. Padgett sat back for a moment. This track was going nowhere.

  “You say you're familiar with Freud,” he said calmly. “Then you know that the id phase is just that, a phase. The child becomes more secure with herself and begins to discover that a world exists beyond her. Then the ego develops, a child's realization that she lives in a world with other people. That she needs to coexist with them in order to meet her own needs. Then comes the superego phase, where the child is not only aware of the existence of others but has some concern for their feelings and needs beyond what directly benefits her.”

  “And I'm stuck in the id mode,” I snapped, disgusted with myself. “Doesn't say much for a thirty-one-year-old mother of two, does it?”

  “You can't skip a phase, Rachel. You can't go to the ego phase without first going through the id. There are no moral implications to it. A child needs to be self-centered long enough to feel secure before she can move on. Whether you go through it when you're three or thirty-three, it doesn't matter. You have to pass through that phase and feel secure enough to move on. And, most important, the phase can and will pass.”

  “How?” I pouted.

  “Needs don't just go away on their own. They have to be satisfied. And if they aren't, they just fester beneath the surface and grow even more shameful and frightening. You have an inordinately strong need for attention because you feel, rightly, that you didn't get as much as you needed when you should have. You buried it in shame, which only served to make the need seem more intense until, finally, you became afraid to need because you figured it would overwhelm anyone you let it touch.

  “But your need won't overwhelm me, Rachel. It won't drive me away. You don't have to hold it in anymore, and you don't have to be ashamed of it. When you let go—and only when you let go—and feel free to feel the need for attention in all its intensity, then it can be satisfied. Until it isn't so important to you anymore.

  “Sure, even adults need and deserve some degree of attention. But once you reach this point, it isn't debilitating anymore. It doesn't obsess you.”

  “It's scary how much I need you,” I admitted, the tears beginning to surface. “I need you so much it hurts.”

  “It isn't all need,” he said softly. “A lot of it is love.”

  “Yes,” I replied in a tiny voice. “It is love too. It's really hard for me to say this, Dr. Padgett, but in some ways I love you more than I've ever loved anyone. And the scariest part of that is that I feel this love intensely, and I know that someday I'm going to have to say good-bye. I can hardly bear the thought; it just seems so unfair.”

  “When you do say good-bye, which will only be when you decide the time has come, it will be because you've gotten what you needed from this relationship. As painful as it might be at the moment, you need to move on. The love doesn't have to end there. Once you have felt it, it can never be taken away. A part of me will always be with you for the rest of your life.”

  The notion was strangely comforting to me as I sat there soaking in his words, astounded that we had been able to approach the topic of termination without the hysterical fear of loss. With the cloak of secrecy shed, the pain of need was giving way to the warmth of love and the security of feeling connected.

  I still didn't look forward to his two-week absence for Christmas vacation. Yet I felt a newfound confidence that, despite the pain of missing him, I could make it through the separation.

  “Whenever I do decide to leave,” I said, “I know it's going to hurt. I love you like a father. I really do. And I will never ever forget you.”

  “I'll never forget you either. The feelings are mutual.”

  The object of my love and fantasy had returned my feelings with warm feelings of his own, neither running from my intensity nor demanding his own needs be met in parallel fashion. It was an outcome I never could have anticipated even a year ago. My painfully hidden secret hopes and fantasies had intersected with reality.

  The lifelong dream was indeed coming true. I loved him, I had let him know, and he hadn't run away in horror.

  The holiday passed quickly and relatively smoothly.

  It wasn't until two days after Christmas that I found the time to escape to my room and pull out the pen and legal pad to write. I realized that nearly a week had gone by without writing my thoughts. I literally had to look at the calendar to calculate how many days remained until sessions resumed—a figure I had known during every waking moment of Dr. Padgett's previous vacations.

  At times I still felt the angst of missing him, a melancholy feeling as I imagined what he might be doing with his family, wishing I could be there to enjoy it with him.

  But, for the first time, I didn't resent his absence. Surely I preferred that I see him. But I no longer felt as abandoned. I knew he would be coming back, and I knew that the separation didn't sever our feelings.

  Tim and I had hosted Christmas dinner once again. The simmering resentments, the absurd game of musical chairs, my father's outbursts, and my mother's alternating grandiosity and victim's pout had not changed. Nancy, as usual, didn't lift a finger. Sally still saw me as her waitress. Joe and Jackie fended off the direct and indirect attacks on their relationship, and Bruce played the middleman.

  The script hadn't changed. The way I dealt with it, however, did.

  With an emerging confidence, I calmly told Sally that what she saw on the table was what we were offering. If she felt her kids were being nutritionally deprived, she was more than welcome to bring her own food.

  When Nancy called the next day, as she always did, to vent her caustic opinions about Jackie
and Sally, I told her that I didn't see things quite the same way and preferred not to discuss the matter. And, for the first time that I could ever recall, when my father began to badger us, I openly disagreed with him.

  In sum, I viewed the situation from the perspective of an adult and acted like one. While the members of my family were obviously stunned, there were no explosions. Armageddon did not come. It was the calmest family gathering I'd attended in years.

  Afterward I noticed that nearly all of them were keeping a distance from me. The family roles had been set for so long that the change in my attitude and behavior left them confused and not universally pleased. Only Joe and Jackie seemed to be drawn closer to me. For years they'd interpreted my silence during the attacks on them as passive agreement. Now they knew differently. With all I had been through myself, I couldn't fathom judging them for the strained and often difficult course of their own relationship.

  People could grow; people could change. If anyone knew that, it was me.

  I was feeling good about myself and my ability to handle both my family and my separation from Dr. Padgett on the eve of 1994's first therapy session. Tim and I had taken the kids out sledding, and all of us glowed with satisfied exhaustion as we sat in front of the fire when the phone rang.

  It was Nancy.

  “Rachel, there's something on my mind, and I have to discuss it with you,” she said with the authoritative air of the oldest child.

  “What's up?” I asked.

  “You've been acting strangely lately. I'm pretty concerned about it.”

  Yeah, real concerned. I'll bet you are.

  “How so?”

  “You're so distant these days. Quite frankly I think you're getting pretty rude and arrogant.”

  “Hmm …”

  “I'm serious,” she continued, clearly irritated that I had not crumbled into a diplomatic litany of apologies. “You're different.”

  “You're right. I've changed.”

  “Well, it's pretty disturbing to the rest of us. The way you treated Mom and Dad, the way you talked to Sally. You were very cold, you know. Very rude.”

  “So suddenly you care about how Mom and Dad feel? How Sally feels? This is news.”

  “See?” she exclaimed. “See what I mean? It's that kind of thing. That … that … I don't know…. That attitude you've got now!”

  “What attitude?”

  “You're so … so flippant. You really don't care what you say anymore; you don't care whose feelings you hurt.”

  “I say what I think is true,” I replied calmly, noting that the calmer I was, the more emphatic she became, a fact not necessarily displeasing to me. “I have a right to my opinions, and you have a right to yours. Obviously there are some things we don't agree on.”

  The baby of the family had stepped out of the role of compliant peacemaker, and Nancy had no intention of accepting it.

  “You know, I'm beginning to wonder about that therapist of yours. He's driving you away from your family. What kind of a therapist is he anyway?”

  My family had driven me away years ago and had been turned against each other for as long as I could recall. The only difference was that now I was realizing that sad fact. But I couldn't let the comment about Dr. Padgett pass.

  “Dr. Padgett is a damned good psychiatrist,” I replied, trying to maintain my calm facade but feeling the anger rise within me. “He's helped me change in ways I've needed to change.”

  “I liked you better before.”

  “It isn't about what you like or you don't like, Nancy. It's about me liking me.”

  “What kind of bullshit is that?” she exclaimed. “You're part of a family. You knew all of us before you ever met him.”

  Hold your temper, Rachel. She's trying to get a rise out of you.

  “I really don't like the direction this conversation is taking. What I do with my life is my own business.”

  “Well,” she sniffed, “I don't like the direction you're taking. You're acting like you're better than anyone else in this family.”

  “I'm not acting like I'm better or worse than anyone else. I'm finally saying what's on my mind, and none of you are used to that. If you don't like that, well, you're entitled to your opinion. You don't have to like it.”

  “How selfish can you be? All of a sudden you don't give a damn about anybody but yourself. That therapist isn't helping you. He's screwing you up!”

  “And you care? Is that why you blast Jackie and Joe every time you get a chance? Is that why you haven't said a civil word to Sally in years? Is that why you slam Mom and Dad every chance you get?”

  “You're hateful. You know that? How dare you say those things!”

  “Not hateful, Nancy. Just honest.”

  “You don't give a damn about any of us, do you? Families are supposed to love each other. Sisters are supposed to stick together.”

  “It's up to you,” I sighed. “If you want to stick by me, then you're going to have to accept the person I've become. If you choose not to, well, that's you're business not mine.”

  “What about Mom and Dad then? They're your parents. How can you act like that to them?”

  This from the woman who, in her days of therapy and well beyond, had blamed them quite openly and belligerently for her every shortcoming.

  “They're going to have to accept me too. If they really love me, they will. If they don't, well, then I guess we'll all just have to learn to live with it.”

  “God, you're so distant. Mom's always been right about you. You're selfish as hell. Don't you even love your own parents?”

  “I'm not sure what I think anymore, Nancy,” I said, unsettled by the realization that I wasn't sure of the answer to her question. “I'm sorting everything out. I'm not sure who I love. Sometimes I've wondered if I've ever really known what love is.”

  Why do you have to be so goddamned honest, Rachel? Nancy's not going to understand this. Just lie and say, “Sure, of course I love them.” It might be true.

  “This is downright scary, Rachel. Let me ask you another question then. I'm your sister; do you love me?”

  At the moment it was the furthest thing from my mind.

  “I told you, Nancy, I'm not sure how I feel about anything or anyone anymore. I need some time to sort things out.”

  “You really are crazy, aren't you? Maybe you'll get enough of a grip to understand the horrible things you've just said.”

  “Maybe I will,” I said unsteadily, now as upset as Nancy, both of us in tears.

  With that, Nancy hung up on me.

  My newfound confidence had been severely tested, and I was not sure if it would hold. Angry that she had destroyed what had been a quiet and relaxing evening, I was at least grateful that, tomorrow, I would see Dr. Padgett again and perhaps make sense of it all.

  Chapter 27

  January 1994.

  It had been two and a half years since I had first entered the hospital and begun the painful introspection of therapy. Now I was in a frightening black hole, an emotional purgatory. I was no longer convinced that slow suicide was the answer, yet I was unsure of what to do with my potentially long life.

  I had stopped running. But in doing so I found myself in an unfamiliar place. Much of what I had come to believe in the past had been refuted. I could no longer rely on the past. I could no longer rely on anything.

  With the decision to live came the much more difficult choice of how. As dysfunctional as it was, I still had a family of origin, as well as a family of my own. My decisions would not just affect me, but my children too.

  If I were to simply turn my back on the Marstens, I'd also be depriving Jeffrey and Melissa of grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. Here I was, teaching them lessons about family, about caring for each other. How could I explain it to them if I opted out of my own family?

  I'd come to the realization that nothing was black and white, that I was neither perfectly good nor perfectly evil. The issues of responsibility in rela
tionships were never clear-cut. I wondered how much I contributed to the dysfunction in my family.

  How many times had I reveled in Nancy's slander of my siblings? How many times had I been secretly pleased to outdo one of them, to see one of them abused because it further enhanced my own standing?

  It was an emotional maze that grew exponentially. The deeper I delved into these issues, the more elusive the answers seemed to be.

  I couldn't trust my own emotions. Which emotional reactions were justified, if any? And which ones were tainted by the mental illness of borderline personality disorder? I found myself fiercely guarding and limiting my emotional reactions, chastising myself for possible distortions and motivations.

  People who had known me years ago would barely recognize me now. I had become quiet and withdrawn in social settings, no longer the life of the party. After all, how could I know if my boisterous humor were spontaneous or just a borderline desire to be the center of attention?

  I could no longer trust any of my heartfelt beliefs and opinions on politics, religion, or life. The debate queen had withered. I found myself looking at every single side of an issue unable to come to any conclusions for fear they might be tainted.

  My lifelong ability to be assertive had turned into a constant state of passivity.

  Anger was also a perplexing dilemma. Could such an emotion ever be justified, ever be rational? Upon sensing the slightest stirrings of anger within, I quickly doused them. Rage is one of the primary defining characteristics of borderline personality disorder. Any outburst could represent succumbing to my illness.

  And yet I had a lingering fear that my story would follow the script of A Clockwork Orange. That, perhaps, deprived of anger as the rogue had been stripped of violent instinct, I would be denied the fuel of my life.

  It was a painful state of near nonexistence, another trap. Perhaps I had finally reached my core, found my essence and identity. And nobody was there. Nothingness. I was an empty shell.