by Jayne Lind
“Yes?” Taylor prompted.
“I thought about all we talked about and Sam’s drinking. He always drinks more at Camp David and because of that, I try to avoid him as much as possible.”
“How do you do that; how do you avoid him?”
Beth said in an ironic tone, “Oh, it’s easy now days. He really isn’t interested in what I’m doing, so I can do what I want. Just so long as I make the proper appearances when I’m needed, he seems to be satisfied.” She sighed. “So in a way, it’s easier, easier than it was before. In other words, if he’s not paying me much attention, he’s also not trying to control me.”
“Yes, I have wanted to ask you about that, about your husband’s need to control, especially to control you. Could you say more about that?”
Beth looked pensive and gazed out the window for a moment. “Well, these things might sound trivial, but it was more a feeling, a feeling of being controlled. And it sounds contradictory to what I just told you about his not caring what I do as long as I put on a good appearance in public. But before we came here, to the White House, he always wanted to know what my plans for the day were, who I was seeing, where I was going and it seemed to me he was trying to isolate me. I think that since we’ve been here, he knows where I am and he knows I’m followed wherever I do go. So he doesn’t need to worry. I’m controlled by the circumstances.”
Taylor’s attention zoomed in on the word isolate, not a good trait, another clue to his personality. “How did he isolate you?”
Beth shrugged her shoulders. “Oh, he never liked any of my friends. He would say disparaging things about whomever I saw or spoke to on the phone. He wanted me to only socialize with people who could help him in politics. As you probably know, he was governor of Vermont before he became the president, but he’s been in politics forever, it seems, from soon after we were married.”
“So he controlled who you saw, your friends?”
“Yes. But I didn’t think of it as control in the beginning. I just thought he was being selfish, wanting me all to himself, and at first, that was flattering. He couldn’t be with me all day long because of his work, but he phoned me often during the day and always wanted to know what I was doing. I guess I was naïve, but it took me quite a few years to begin feeling closed in. He would question me over dinner each night and I began to think that maybe he thought I sat around all day, eating bonbons and watching television. So I would tell him everything. This was after I quit teaching, after Anna was born. I went through my day, hour by hour. Not until I told him everything I did, would he go on to talk about other things, such as what he did that day.”
“So you just thought he cared about you so much, that he was minutely interested in your day?”
“Um, yes, at first. But after a few years, it began to seem as if I wasn’t allowed any life separate from him. I knew he wanted me to help further his career and I was certainly willing to do that, but I wanted to have an identity of my own. I didn’t want to abandon my friends, friends I’d had all my life.”
“And he asked you to do that? Get rid of your friends?”
Beth hesitated a moment before she replied. “He wasn’t that overt. He would try to undermine my confidence in someone. He would find little faults with her…belittle her. And then, he began to be actually rude to my friends, to the point that I would be terribly embarrassed for them and began making sure they never crossed his path.”
Taylor was leaning forward. This was sounding more and more sinister to her. “Did you give them up?”
Tears glistened in Beth’s eyes as she nodded, “Some of them, yes. I’m ashamed to admit it now, but I held on to a few, two actually. I dug my heels in about those two. We had been in kindergarten together, we’d been all through school together, and I wouldn’t give them up.” She was silent for a moment, looking down at her hands. “I guess that’s when I began lying to him. I would omit something I’d done that day and I told these friends not to phone the house, that I would call them.”
“Can you remember your feelings around that time?”
“Yes, I don’t think I could ever forget how I felt,” Beth said softly. “I knew I was deceiving Sam and that wasn’t part of my character; I simply was not that kind of person. So I began to be resentful of him for isolating me to such an extent and I also began to look at him with different eyes. This was before Ben was born, and he’s twenty now, so it was a long time ago. It really was the beginning of the end of this marriage.”
“Yet you couldn’t get out….”
Beth took in a deep breath. “Looking back, that would have been best, if I had left him then, taken Anna and left. But I guess I thought we were simply going over a bumpy patch and I also wondered sometimes if I wasn’t being paranoid. Taylor, you have to imagine how it was. Sam is a very, very charming man. Everyone likes him. He doesn’t, or he didn’t then, make any enemies. So if I was unhappy, I thought there must be something wrong with me. I asked myself why I didn’t feel the same about him as everyone else seemed to.
“Except that everyone else wasn’t treated the way you were being treated.”
“Yes, I see that now, but then I think he was always able to persuade me that I was the one who was wrong.”
“And you began to lose confidence in yourself, in your judgment?”
“Yes, definitely. I didn’t like the fact I was lying to him, and of course, I saw and talked to these two friends less and less. Even with them, I didn’t feel I should talk about Sam. It seemed disloyal somehow.”
“So you kept it all inside yourself, bottled up.”
Beth nodded and they both were silent. Taylor knew, more than Beth could know, what it was like for her. It was all there in the textbooks and in the stories of some of her clients. She’d heard this tale, with different variations, many times. Those with personality disorders are difficult enough to live with, but add politics and alcohol to the mix and it would be exponentially harder. Even though the session had already taken half an hour and even though Taylor was getting used to the fact that she had no control over the length of the sessions, she decided to tell Beth something she believed she needed to know. “Beth, do you know what a personality disorder is?”
She looked startled. “Yes, vaguely. Why? Do you think that’s what’s wrong with Sam?”
“I think so and Dr. Bolton does as well.”
“Does that mean he’s crazy?” Beth asked, with a look of panic.
“No, it’s not the same thing as being psychotic. Let me give you a mini-lecture on personality disorders. It’s important that you to understand what I’m talking about.”
Beth nodded her assent.
Taylor began with a bit of trepidation, yet she had often given this information about personality disorders to clients. It was not something the general public understood and it could be invaluable to a client whose spouse, family member, or friend fit into one of these categories. It helped immensely to understand what he or she was dealing with.
“When I was in my doctoral program,” she began, “I became fascinated by personality disorders. As we learned about each one, all of us students were sure we had one, in other words, we found bits of our own personality in each description.” Taylor smiled, “It’s like the medical school syndrome. Medical students are famous for thinking they have each disease as they study it. But having one or two traits aren’t enough. One has to have almost the full spectrum to qualify for a disorder. A personality disorder is just what the name implies—the personality is slanted, skewed, in a way that is different from those who just have some of the personality traits.”
Beth was leaning forward, fully attentive to what Taylor was saying.
She went on, “We all have a personality. We change somewhat as we grow up and grow older, but our basic personality remains the same. The reason that it remains basically the same is because we’re born wi
th it. Our environment can make it better or worse, but the core personality is there.”
Beth nodded, “So what you’re saying is that how we act has more to do with nature than nurture? I remember that discussion from my one course in psychology and it seems to be brought up now and then on television shows.”
“Yes, that’s what I believe,” Taylor replied, “but not everyone agrees with me. I’ve always been fascinated by this topic and so I’ve studied it a great deal over the years. Yes, I think personality disorders are definitely genetic.”
Beth looked alarmed as she said, “So do I need to worry about our children? About Ben and Anna?”
“No, not really. It isn’t like some definite disorders that seem to be passed down through the generations. I think that personality disorders are more like anomalies, in other words, something went wrong during the passing on of genes during conception and/or development in the womb. So it’s not inevitable. Just because I think someone was born with a disorder doesn’t mean that person can pass it on—do you see the difference?”
Beth sat back in her chair. “Yes, I hope you’re right. But how would one know? How would I know?”
“Personality disorders usually show up in adolescence,” she went on, “although there are precursors for some personality disorders. To complicate matters, most teenagers go through a phase of being self-centered and acting out, so it’s hard to diagnose correctly until a person is in their early twenties.”
Beth sat looking at her, silent for a moment. Then, “This is really a lot to take in, Taylor,” she said quietly.
“I know. And we can talk about it more in the coming days, but I really do believe it will help you in the long term.”
“So are you saying that Sam can’t help it? Can’t help acting the way he does?”
“Yes and no. When I was in school, we were told “rots a ruck”, that no pill would help and that therapy wouldn’t help. Therapy could help if that person would come into therapy and would stay in therapy, but the mark of a personality disorder is that the traits are so deeply ingrained in the person who has it, that he or she does not recognize it as a problem. In fact, if there is anything wrong, he or she always blames it on someone else.”
Beth was silent for a moment, never taking her eyes off Taylor’s face. It was almost as if Taylor could see the information being assimilated in Beth’s brain. Her forehead was wrinkled and she was sitting in that perfectly straight position, the perfect posture Taylor noticed when she saw her on television. Taylor waited, giving her time to absorb all of this.
After a few moments, she said, “So you keep using ‘disorders’ plural. How many are there and which one does Sam have. Do you know?”
“There are nine disorders recognized by mainstream psychology so far. The President, I’m beginning to think, has an anti-social personality disorder.”
“Anti-social, that doesn’t fit Sam at all,” Beth protested. “He’s in his element in a crowd.”
“I know; it’s confusing. The name has been changed three times since I’ve been in this field. It used to be called psychopath, then it was changed to sociopath, and then to anti-social. The name was changed to make it sound less dangerous. The connotations of psychopath and sociopath had become known in the popular usage as someone who would physically harm others. There are many sociopaths who never commit a crime and who are never violent. It is only the ones who do commit a crime, who go to prison, who get publicity.”
“Go on, I need to know all this,” Beth said.
“Personally, I prefer the name sociopath and one of the defining traits of a sociopathic personality disorder is that the person doesn’t have normal guilt. And because they don’t have guilt, they do things that other people would feel guilty about. Another of the defining traits of a sociopath is that they lie. When a normal person lies, he or she feels guilty about it and remembers it, but if someone lies all the time, they often forget what version of the truth they told and can be caught lying.”
“You are right, he does lie. All the time. And you’re saying he can’t help it? Doesn’t he know he’s lying?”
“It is surmised that they do know, but rationalize that it’s for the cause, whether the cause is personal or in the case of politics, for the good of the party. In any case, there is a definite element of self-delusion going on. Sometimes, from what is known so far, the sociopath really remembers reality as he or she constructed it, rather than as it really happened.”
Beth shook her head from side to side, “Taylor, this explains so much, so much of what’s happened over the years. He really doesn’t think he’s ever wrong. And it does make someone like me, who is so close to him, think that I’m in the wrong, think I must be a little bit crazy.”
“I know,” Taylor replied, “And that’s why I’ve told you all this. It will help you to understand your feelings and actions over the years as well as help you to understand your husband.”
Beth looked at her watch. “I must go, Taylor. I should have left ten minutes ago and I’m surprised Lillian hasn’t called.” She always left through the Queen’s bedroom rather than through the hall door Taylor used. She turned around with her hand on the doorknob. “Thank you, Taylor. You’ve given me a lot to think about.”
***
Sam woke up on Monday morning with a groan. Too much to drink, man, he told himself. His head felt fuzzy and he had a pounding headache. He stumbled into the shower, barely making note of the fact that Beth wasn’t in bed. She seldom was when he woke up and when he came to bed at night he was never able to wake her. She even moved away when he tried to get near her. To hell with her—she’s a terrible wife anyway. The warm water helped. It always did, but his head was still throbbing. He turned off the water, dried off, and poured a glass of water from the bathroom tap. He swallowed an 800 mg tablet of ibuprophen, knowing from experience that it usually worked. He was famished and barked into the phone for breakfast. By the time he was dressed, a table with his breakfast had been brought in. He loved all of this. It was exactly like living in a luxury hotel. Excellent food brought to your room, everyone at your beck and call.
Sam had always wanted to be President of the United States. From the time he was a little boy he thought this would be the absolute pinnacle. He would be top man and everyone would look up to him. Born to a wealthy family, he never had to think about money, it was never even spoken of. Beth told him after they were married that only rich people don’t talk about money. So there had been no desire there, no yearning to amass wealth. He could always buy anything he wanted and that even went for politics. It was easy. Just take the right people to dinner at expensive restaurants; just tell them what they want to hear. Money to campaign? No problem. Just tell his father he needed a bit more for this or that. Easy. Everything had always been easy.
Until lately. When he first walked into the Oval Office, he felt a thrill he’d never before experienced. When he first sat behind the desk, when all the staff treated him with what he interpreted as a sense of awe, certainly deference, he felt an inner thrill. This was it! This was what he’d always wanted. And it was as good as he had thought it would be. But lately his polling data was down and Capitol Hill seemed to be against him, even those of his own party. Everything he tried to do now became difficult, whereas it had always been easy before. And then there was Beth. She looked terrible, she had aged, and she treated him like he was her enemy. After all he had done for her. She’d had no money and came from the type of family he had always looked down on. He bought her everything she wanted and she seemed to love it, but now she acted like she hated him.
He knew he couldn’t keep up this amount of drinking at night, but it was the only thing that worked. It was the only thing that blotted out the pain. The pain that he couldn’t tell anyone about, the pain that he had never before experienced. The pain of not being in control.
He took his time eat
ing breakfast, reading the newspapers as he ate. The editorials hadn’t been kind to him lately, in fact, some were downright negative. He threw the paper he was reading to the floor. His aide had already told him twice he was late for a meeting. One more loss of control; meetings were scheduled without his permission. Necessaries, his chief of staff told him—meetings over which he had no discretion. Well, another day to face. His headache was almost gone. He looked at his watch. Eight hours before he could have a drink.
***
The news wasn’t good. “The latest CNN poll puts you at below 40 percent Mr. President,” Glenn Harkins said. He hoped the President wouldn’t explode, as he usually did. Glenn didn’t like these meetings, at least when the news was bad. Frankly, he would be glad when this administration was over. Not because he wasn’t in agreement with its policies, but because he didn’t like working with this president.
The President didn’t say anything, but Glenn felt he was staring at him as though he could bore a hole through him. Glenn often thought that no one ever knew what the President was going to do next, he was so volatile.
Donald Bond spoke up. “As you know, Mr. President, we have to get those poll numbers up over fifty percent if we’re going to win this next election.”
“So what do you guys need to do to get the numbers up? Sam asked as he began pacing around the room, waving his arms up and down in the air, “You act like I’m the reason for this when you know damn well it’s the media. They’re all against me! I’ve got enough on my hands with this war.” He zeroed in on Glenn. “Listen to me, you were hired to get me a second term. If you’re not up to the job, say so and get out. Do you hear me?”
Glenn flinched internally. His dislike for this man was growing week by week. In the beginning, he had respected President Carlson. Now, that respect was diminishing daily. The President seemed erratic and his temper was growing worse. He dare not show any of this, however, and simply responded, “Yes, sir, I’ll see what we can do.”