“What is happening?” Saralynn asked. “Is your father angry?”
The suggestion of her father’s anger triggered Mallie’s memory of his yelling at her. In the scene in her mind, she had inadvertently bumped the little table next to his chair and spilled his drink all over the rug. At the same time, she knocked over the blue ink that she had been using to draw the pictures. The ink spread like blue octopus fingers across the light-colored tan rug. Her father was reacting with fury at her. His eyes were bugged out like a wild animal and his hand was raised against her as if he wanted to strike her. Her memory recalled his exact words: “Valeria, you God-damned stupid little idiot! Look what you’ve done! Get out of here! Get out of my sight!” Mallie automatically winced at the sound of his voice in her head.
“Get up and sit in the child’s chair,” Saralynn said quickly.
Mallie obeyed, and in two steps she was seated in the little chair.
“Now,” Saralynn said, “let yourself experience what you felt as a child. Look at your father in his chair in front of you. What were you feeling as he said those words to you?”
“Frightened,” Mallie said. It was easy to remember exactly how she felt as the child in front of her raging father. “Terrified.”
“What do you want to say to your father?”
“I want to run out of the room—get away from him.”
“Stay there. Tell him what you’re feeling.”
Mallie hesitated. She tried to mouth words but no sound came out. She saw herself running up the stairs to Bernice, getting as far away as possible from her father’s anger.
“Say it, Mallie,” Saralynn ordered her. “Don’t run away this time. Say exactly what you are feeling.”
With her eyes closed, she gripped the arms of her little chair. She whispered, “I hate you. I didn’t mean to spill the ink!”
“Say it louder so he can hear you.”
“I hate you! You’re mean. I’m terrified of you,” Mallie said, firing the words at him, as if they were bullets that could obliterate the angry look on his face.
“Now, get up and sit back in your father’s chair,” Saralynn said. “Become your father again. Think about what the child has just said to you. How do her words make you feel?”
Mallie closed her eyes. She tried to imagine herself in her father’s mind, hearing his own child say: “I hate you. I’m terrified of you.” He must have been shocked at himself. He must have wondered: What have I done to her? How could I have been so angry? As if Mallie could feel the emotion creeping up inside of him, the color of the anger turning from fire-engine red into deep blue, she dropped her head in remorse. She felt her father’s self-loathing. He wanted to take back his words—he wanted to tell the child he was sorry, that it didn’t matter. The drink wasn’t important. The ink wasn’t important. She was important.
“Say it,” Saralynn said. “Say what you’re feeling.”
“I want to say ‘I’m sorry,’” Mallie whispered. “I want to say ‘I love you.’”
Back and forth, from chair to chair, from father to daughter, Saralynn led Mallie through countless painful memories. At one point, when Mallie was in her father’s head, revelations came out about his own painful childhood, his mother’s bipolar disorder, his father’s polio that left him disabled and incapable of being a normal father. Sam Malcolm had felt rudderless as a child and took an authoritarian control of his own life. That authority became stronger and verged on violence later when coupled with alcohol.
In the end, as Mallie sat in the child’s chair, the counselor asked, “Can you forgive your father now?”
With tears in her eyes, Mallie said, “Yes.” She felt the burden of her father’s own childhood pain. She felt her father’s remorse and his love for her. Her childhood fears—the fear of her father’s anger, the fear of failure—none of her report cards were good enough—the fear that when he yelled at her she was not loved—all of it flew away.
Saralynn explained that it was important to forgive her father and say goodbye to him—actually goodbye to her childhood perception of him. When Mallie reached that point, he would no longer hold the same subconscious influence over her. “It is that unforgiven influence that holds the hand of control over all your relationships with men,” Saralynn said, “including your husband.”
Dealing with Joan Malcolm was different. It was far easier for Mallie to get into the mind of her mother and envision: dark, perfectly coiffed hair, her sea-blue eyes, her Revlon true-red lipstick, her long thin feet in black suede high-heeled shoes. So many times in Mallie’s childhood she had clomped around the house in her mother’s high-heeled shoes pretending she was actually Joan Malcolm.
When Mallie first sat in the child’s chair, she relived the mother and daughter experience that occurred in Goldsmith’s department store when they were looking at dresses for Mallie’s eighth-grade dance. Mallie knew what her friends were wearing, either an off-the-shoulder or a strapless dress, mostly taffeta and shiny. Joan Malcolm picked out a black velvet dress with a white lace high collar and long sleeves for Mallie. In the child’s chair, Mallie recalled all her emotions about that dance, the pain of wearing that buttoned-up black velvet dress. Everyone had teased her and said she looked like a pilgrim. She had been humiliated and hated her mother for making her wear it.
In the child’s chair, Mallie recognized that her anger toward her mother came from her belief that her mother tried to control every aspect of her life. When she became her mother, she began to understand the motivation behind her mother’s actions. Some of the stories Mallie had heard and dismissed about her mother’s childhood became real.
When Joan Malcolm was four years old growing up in Chicago, her mother, Mallie’s Montell grandmother, took her for a walk on Michigan Avenue. It was her nurse’s day off and the first time they had ever been alone together. At one point when they stopped for a red light, Joan realized that she was no longer holding her mother’s hand. Actually, her mother was nowhere in sight and she was alone on the busy street. What was she to do? She decided to retrace her steps down Michigan Avenue looking into stores along the way. Toward the end of the second block, she peered though a large window to see her mother sitting in the back of the showroom trying on hats. Joan walked calmly into the store, realizing that her mother had not even missed her. At that point, Joan took control of her life and was determined to grow up and take better care of her own children. That care felt to Mallie like unfair control.
In the end, Mallie readily forgave her mother and said goodbye to her.
On the second day, Mallie had to put Larry in the chair and experience their married life through his eyes, as well as through her own unfiltered lens about herself. The objective was to discover how blind she had been to much of her part—her 50 percent—of the failure of their marriage.
In one of the Gestalt visualizations, Saralynn led Mallie back through the experience of reading the letters she had found in Larry’s suitcase, the letters from so many women all over the world. In Mallie’s own state of insecurity involving the other women in Larry’s life, she had not been open to hearing her husband’s underlying fear that he would lose his job if he criticized her father or anything about Memphis. She did not suspect that her husband was worried that he had severed ties with his family’s connections in Rhode Island, and that if he lost his job in Memphis, he did not know how he would support his wife and three boys. She’d had barely a glimpse of the lack of trust that was building between her father—the president of Malcolm Brothers—and Larry, or the teasing Larry endured from the other employees of the company. It was not that he had not told her lies about the other women in his life or that he had not had multiple affairs, but for the first time, Mallie could see that she had gone deep into herself in defiance of Larry and raised walls around herself he could not penetrate. She had tried to protect her own insecurities and not understood his insecurities. She did not understand at the time that his pride was as wounded as hers. Sh
e did accept the fact that the damage which had been done through the years by both of them had left the marriage in irreparable shreds. Eventually, after many trips back and forth inside of Larry’s head, Mallie was able to forgive Larry and say goodbye to him.
At the end of the first three days of counseling and all of the Gestalt experiences, Mallie was exhausted. She had relived and rethought many of the defining experiences with both of her parents and with Larry. Saralynn had saved the last Gestalt session for her confrontation with Tom Matthews.
In a rare moment of teaching negative visualization at the end of the session involving Tom, Saralynn suggested to Mallie that she envision a coiled, poisonous snake in the corner of the priest’s study. The idea had made Mallie’s skin crawl. “That will help you stay away when you’re tempted to return to that place,” Saralynn said. “It’s not that the snake was always there. There was an element of support and a positive experience for you for a time. You learned a great deal about yourself. You began to see yourself as an attractive, vital woman again. But there’s a deadly snake there now, and you must protect yourself.”
Mallie assured Saralynn that she would not go back to St. Michael’s. Ever. Besides her resolve never to see Tom Matthews again, she knew the chapel might not even exist for much longer.
Chapter Fifty-one
In the group meeting on the third afternoon, James wrote a list on a blackboard. “These are your life priorities,” he said, “the proper order of your responsibilities.”
1) Yourself
2) Your spouse
3) Your children under eighteen
4) Your children over eighteen, parents, siblings, and friends
5) Your job or your occupation.
“These priorities can change from time to time, depending on the urgency of the need. You may have a sick child who requires immediate and exclusive attention. You may have a parent or a friend in trouble. Or you may have a crisis in your job. Those situations take precedence over everything else until they are resolved. But when the crisis is over, you must go back to taking care of yourself first.”
In his words, Mallie heard echoes of what she had learned at Faith at Work and at St. James in England. But they still sounded so selfish to Mallie. Me first? It was a difficult concept.
Someone in the group asked the question: “Isn’t that the opposite of what the Bible teaches? Aren’t we supposed to think of God first? And then of others?”
James responded with a question. “Who do you think you are?” he said.
No one spoke.
He waited several seconds before he answered his own query. “The first commandment says: ‘Love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and all thy soul.’ If we are sons and daughters of God, then, just like our earthly parents, we carry God within us. We are not God—not a single one of us—but in a very real sense, we are a part of God as God is a part of us. It is that divine part of ourselves—our higher self, our creative self, our soul—that must be our first priority.”
Mallie remembered that Bruce Larson at the Faith at Work had spoken about the creative spirit as the deepest part of ourselves, a wellspring that poets and painters instinctively know, whether they call it God or not. James was confirming the truth of that idea.
Each new day at the center, in addition to her counseling sessions with Saralynn and the group meetings with James, she spent time with volunteer resource women from Knoxville. These women talked openly about life before the process at the center and life afterward. Every woman made her feel more comfortable, less judged—her greatest fear about coming to the center in the first place.
One of the resource women was an English teacher at the Maryville High School near Knoxville. She had been married to an alcoholic for twenty-five years before she came to the center. After her week of therapy she discovered her own worth and made plans to divorce her husband. She was happily remarried. Another woman had grown up with an older sister in an “iron lung” from a childhood polio attack. She had felt guilty and responsible for her sister all through her life—she had been the one who wanted to go swimming in the city pool where her sister apparently contracted the polio. She discovered that she had tried to atone for her action by locking up her own life with her sister in the iron lung. She broke that chain of guilt and began a new life. Listening intently to their stories, Mallie heard the word “free”—as if those women had been birds confined to a cage where they could not fly. Whatever cage Mallie had lived in, she decided that “free” was what she wanted to be, and she would do whatever it took to achieve it.
In the group session on the fourth afternoon, James and Saralynn worked together, showing examples of the dynamics of a marriage. The first exercise included four volunteers from the assembled group, two women and two men. The two counselors knelt on the floor in front of each other and instructed a man and a woman to stand behind each of them.
“How many people are there in a marriage bed?” James asked the group.
No one spoke. Finally someone said, “Two?”
“Try six,” James said. He pointed to Saralynn and himself on their knees and then to the couple standing behind each of them. “One man and one woman and two sets of parents. That’s a pretty crowded bed!” He laughed, a big, expansive, easy laugh. “Not only do a bride and groom bring their parents into their marriage bed, but also into every aspect of their lives: how to celebrate Christmas properly—how to raise children correctly—how to fight—and how to deny one another. Those carefully programmed, ingrained responses are always there, all just beneath the surface.”
Mallie thought of her marriage to Larry. She could imagine that he had expected her to be like his mother, Edie. He adored his mother. Mallie adored Edie, too, but she was not Edie and never could be. She realized that she had expected Larry to behave like her father—to be as admired and successful as Sam Malcolm. But he was not her father. She had tried to be a wife like her own mother, as clearly as she had understood Joan Malcolm—a totally inappropriate wife for Larry. The theory made sense. Her blindness to his and her own expectations had been a part of her failure.
“Why do you think Saralynn and I are down on our knees?” James asked the group.
Before anyone could answer, Saralynn spoke. She turned her head to look up at the couple looming above her. “Because this is the place—the height—where I viewed my mother and father when I was a child. This was my position of powerlessness. This was where I learned my first life lessons, and unless I consciously learn to make new decisions based on experience, I will remain subconsciously chained to those ideas I formed as a child. They will follow me wherever I go and whatever I do.”
The cage, Mallie thought—that’s the psychological cage that I have lived in since my childhood and the place I have been struggling to escape.
Chapter Fifty-two
When the teaching session was over on Thursday afternoon, Mallie decided it was time to speak to James. She had not had an opportunity to work with him or have any personal conversation with him since she arrived on Sunday. Partially out of her mother’s politeness training, she wanted to express her gratitude for her time at the center.
“Excuse me,” she said, after he finished speaking with a couple and appeared to be leaving the room. “James?”
He turned to look at her. She suddenly felt spotlighted. His intense blue eyes that often laughed during a session were serious and focused on her with curiosity.
“Yes?” he said.
“I’m Mallie Vose.” She put out her hand and spoke quickly, surprised at herself that she felt uneasy. “I just wanted to thank you for starting this counseling center. This week has meant so much to me.”
He took her hand in both of his and smiled. “Thank you,” he said. Then he gestured toward the back corner of the room. “Come, sit down with me for a minute.”
She felt hesitant. He always seemed so busy and here he was asking her to sit down with him. She followed him to two empty chairs in the cor
ner. There were people still milling around the room and talking in groups.
“Tell me why you came here,” he said.
Mallie took a deep breath. She had spoken so quickly—perhaps flippantly—at the introductory meeting. That experience seemed so long ago. Obviously, he did not remember anything she said. She would tell him again, this time more forcefully. “I’m on the brink of a divorce after nearly eighteen years. I have three boys, three teenagers, and I fear for the loss of their family center. I lost my father to a stroke this year. I fell in love with my counselor, a married Episcopal priest who betrayed me. I knew I had to get away from him.” She hesitated, then added, “I was afraid if I didn’t do something—something different in my life—I would die.”
James Preston did not register any emotional response to her litany of reasons for coming to the center. “And what have you learned since you’ve been here?” he asked her.
“Well, I’ve forgiven myself for my 50 percent of the failure of my marriage and said goodbye to both my parents and to my husband—and to the priest.” As she spoke she thought, of course, that he would be pleased with what she had done. She was pleased.
He looked at her with steely eyes, not with damnation, but certainly not with praise. “So, if you’ve said goodbye to all those people, how are you going to replace that loss in your life?”
She felt sick to her stomach. She had not expected him to question her accomplishments of the week. Saralynn had told her that she had done good work. At that moment, in front of James, she felt like a threatened child again. Fearful. Helpless. She had no answer. “I don’t know,” she stammered.
He took her hand. “I suggest you find out before you leave here. Keep working. This is your best chance.” He stood up and smiled at her. “I trust you will.” He let go of her hand and walked out of the room.
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