by Jeanne Safer
Simultaneously baffling and riveting in their intensity and their verisimilitude, these anxiety dreams—they were not true nightmares because I woke up troubled rather than terrified—eluded my most strenuous efforts to unravel them, frustrating all the skill at dream interpretation I had honed over decades. As many people intuitively understand, any dream that recurs with such regularity is trying to tell you something that you urgently need to know (and resist comprehending), but this particular one staunchly refused to reveal its meaning to me, try as I might to coax it forth.
With minor variations, the scenario was always identical: I find myself in an unrecognizable version of the neighborhood of the university, lost, alone, and disoriented. I have to get to a class I’ve somehow neglected to take, but I have no idea where to go or even what the subject is. There is nobody I can turn to for assistance even though there are other people around. As I desperately and unsuccessfully try to get my bearings, I realize why I’m there: I must get another Ph.D. in a field that is unknown to me and that is taught nowhere else, but I don’t know why I have to do this. Worst of all, winter is coming. I have to endure it all alone, all over again, in order to complete my research, interrupting my current life to finish this arduous project. How am I going to endure the cold, figure out where I’m supposed to go, or even meet my basic needs for food and shelter? I seem to have no resources—no purse, no phone, no credit card, not even a pencil and paper—and there is no haven for me, no comfort or solace. Sometimes I protest aloud to no one in particular that I already have a doctorate in my field, that I’ve had it for years, so why do I need to go to such lengths to obtain another one? I always wake up as I’m trying frantically to find my way to the bountiful supermarket that was one of my favorite places when I actually lived there.
The imagery and the emotional tone of these dreams depict the mental state of a person beset by what D. W. Winnicott labeled “the unthinkable anxieties,” primitive experiences of being overwhelmed by unmanageable emotions that cannot be processed because they occur in infancy before the development of language and the organization of cognition. I was reexperiencing two of them specifically—“having no orientation” and “complete isolation because of there being no means of communication.”8 The infant (and the adult who feels like an infant) falls prey to them when what Winnicott called the holding environment is disrupted.
My Golden One never appeared in any of these dreams as himself, but when I reread my diary, it suddenly became clear to me that he was my third experience (after my mother and my father) of a disrupted holding environment. Michael was the frigid “place” in which I was stuck, trying unsuccessfully to find help and sustenance (directions and food) when I felt I had no inner resources. Figuring out our relationship was the essential course of study that I had avoided since 1967; I had to go back to the source of the problem and reexperience the emotional state in its full intensity in order to complete my “education” in the meaning of my obsession with him.
As soon as I figured out what our relationship meant to me—that he was my imperfect replacement for my imperfect maternal father—the dreams stopped as if by magic, never to recur.
Just as I began to write about him, the dream paid me one final visit. The setting was the same, but this time Rick, my husband, was with me. I said to him, “Let’s get out of here. I don’t have to endure this. I really don’t have to prove anything now. I already have my Ph.D., and that’s enough—and besides, I’ve written six books.” I had only written five at the time; the one in which this essay appears is the sixth.
I knew then that I had finally graduated, and with the most advanced degree, from the School of Hard Knocks of Unrequited Love.
PART II
DIFFICULT LOVE
6
THE MAN WHO COULD NOT LOVE
LONG-DISTANCE CALL
I saw my patient Peter only twice in the ten years I was his therapist. He lived, literally as well as psychologically, in a distant state, so we had weekly phone sessions the rest of the time. He originally contacted me because he had read a book I wrote about life with problem siblings, and he thought I would understand what he had endured by growing up with his seriously disturbed older brother, James—a topic he had never discussed with anyone. James’s rampages, as well as the way his parents ignored them, continued to have a chilling effect on all Peter’s relationships, including the one he had with himself. At age forty, married and successful in business—he was an energy executive—his life was still both defined and confined by the traumatic atmosphere of his childhood home. James’s noisily menacing behavior and the even more frightening silence of his parents’ nonresponse and seeming obliviousness to it had tormented him daily throughout his first two decades. No matter what James did—cursing and screaming at everyone, throwing the television set, or trying to set the house afire—his parents ignored it and behaved as if nothing were happening. They made no attempt to stop James or to shield Peter from these terrifying outbursts.
Many parents are overwhelmed by having a troubled child, but Peter’s parents had themselves had a repressive upbringing and a cultural background in which discussion was not a part of family life. Their paralyzing fear of their own rage prevented them from taking any action whatsoever. The situation and their reactions to it unnerved them so deeply that they shut down entirely and psychologically absented themselves from the scene. Every evening, after James wreaked havoc, they would go about the business of eating dinner and blandly discussing the news of the day, after which they retreated—his father to his office (he always locked the door behind him to create a physical as well as a mental barrier to the chaos outside) and his mother to the kitchen (cooking was the only way she knew how to nurture her family)—as if nothing were amiss, leaving Peter to fend for himself. I had heard similar stories countless times before from other patients, but this scenario seemed especially relentless and damaging to the sensitive boy—Peter was ten years younger than James—who was forced simultaneously to witness his brother’s pathological lack of self-control and his parents’ pathologically excessive self-control. There was no way for him to get attention, much less find a refuge from dread, rage, and sorrow. All emotion—his own or anybody else’s—was unmanageable, even life threatening; from his perspective as a child, he lived in fear that James could become dangerously violent at any time. What benefits could Peter possibly get from other people? The daily diet of silence and violence to which he had been subjected had battered him to such an extent that he had learned early on to barricade himself emotionally; he concluded that love provided no solace and human bonds no sustenance.
From our first conversation, I had a sense that this was not going to be a typical therapeutic encounter. Peter asked to have sessions mostly by telephone (this was before the days of Skype) because he only rarely came to New York. I was reluctant, since I rely on and enjoy the personal contact and all the nuances and bodily cues that are subliminally communicated when my patient and I are in the same room, and I sensed that making a connection with him would be hard enough without additional obstacles, but I was willing to try. In this, Peter knew himself well; he turned out to be freer and more communicative on the phone than when we met in my office, and he probably would never have been able to endure the sustained emotional onslaught of in-person therapy. The very remoteness allowed him to feel more protected and more in charge of the process—critical things for someone so damaged by human interactions—so he could experience and express more than he would have in any other circumstances. Even so, his ability to relate to me fluctuated wildly within virtually every session, and it often vanished altogether.
Peter insisted on paying for six months’ worth of sessions in advance—something no one had ever done before or has done since—because it was “more convenient.” But I believed the real reason was that prepayment meant writing fewer checks and thus being reminded less frequently that he had to pay to have somebody to talk to. It also served to gua
rantee my attention; since money was the only commodity he thought he had, he assumed it was mine, as well. Leasing me, I thought, was his way of preventing himself from becoming attached to me—and he (unlike his parents and himself as a child in relation to James) would then be less at the whim of my moods. It gave him the illusion of control.
THE SIBLING MASTER
Peter sought me out, he told me, because he always tried to find “masters” to study with in his areas of interest (martial arts was another one of these), and he had the financial resources to hire them. I was gratified by, but also wary of, this flattering description because of the expectations it set up and the grandiosity it implied; what if all I had to offer was just an ordinary relationship, something that had never given him anything but pain and fear?
In addition to our long-distance arrangement and our unusual financial agreement, Peter’s attitude toward therapy was also new to me. He seemed to be looking for nuggets of wisdom, which he would go off to digest on his own, periodically returning for another helping. He planned to tape our sessions; he wanted news he could use and talking points to carry around in his pocket to help him initiate conversations with people he knew. Relating to and sharing his emotional life with another human being was not something he understood or actively sought; growing up in his family provided no model for needing or trusting or communicating with anyone. As a therapist, I used self-awareness, empathy, and my knowledge and experience to enter his inner world and accompany him back into his childhood, but this did not seem to be what Peter had in mind. Harry Stack Sullivan, founder of the interpersonal school of psychoanalysis (and quite a character himself from a seriously disturbed background1), defined the analyst as “an expert in human relations,” a job description I was not at all sure suited me. I feared that I might end up feeling exploited and discarded and that my would-be acolyte would be bitterly disillusioned. Being a dispenser of life lessons seemed an unnatural assignment, the opposite of the unique if strange intimacy that I was used to sharing with my patients. How could we ever really connect?
I might not have had the kind of wisdom to impart that Peter envisioned, but I certainly had empathy about his sibling problem; treating “Normal Ones”—my term for the higher-functioning brothers and sisters of the physically or mentally impaired—had long been a therapeutic specialty of mine. I was one myself; my own older brother, Steven (who was seven years my senior), had never been as frightening or as destructive as James, but he had social and school trouble throughout my childhood and always seemed to be angry. My parents, though not as emotionally incapacitated as Peter’s, also had no idea how to help their son or to address the tumultuous environment he created in our house. Steven and my mother screamed at each other regularly, while my father mostly tuned out; he gave up on his son early on and turned to me, his daughter, who then became his heir apparent. Of course, neither Steven nor James was ever sent for therapy, which would have exposed to the outside world their parents’ private shame for having a disturbed child; this type of refusal to confront or to seek treatment for even serious pathology is all too common in dysfunctional families. At least my mother had wanted to take Steven, but she capitulated to her physician-husband’s resistance. I never realized how profoundly I was affected by the whole situation until I wrote about it in middle age.
I coped with the tension quite differently from the way Peter did. Emulating his parents, Peter battened down the hatches; he retreated into himself and imploded, becoming inwardly furious, never sharing his feelings with anyone. On the other hand, I felt compelled to connect and made it my business to be my parents’ darling and confidante—as attentive and delightful to them as Steven was burdensome and unappealing. Relationships were my source of power and sustenance; self-sufficiency was Peter’s.
I also understood from personal experience why Peter was mesmerized into passivity and had failed to confront his parents or his brother. I was fifty—considerably older than Peter—when I finally broke the spell of forced obliviousness and inaction that my family wove around everything to do with Steven; at a dinner with my mother and brother years after my father’s death, I could endure Steven’s sullen silence no longer and told him to think about leaving the restaurant if he was going to refuse to talk. He stayed and at least minimally participated, but I remember my mother’s horrified expression, as though I had committed a shocking breach of etiquette. When Steven died at sixty-four, we had been estranged for years, despite my attempts to reconcile in his last years. All this had a powerful underground influence on every aspect of my life (including my choice of a profession), which, as I discovered in my research, happens to anyone who grows up in families like ours. You do not leave your troubled siblings at home when you move out; they follow you into every subsequent relationship. These were things Peter didn’t have to explain to me, and it helped him feel understood for the first time.
I thought I’d heard every possible awful sibling story in my practice: the doctor whose epileptic brother smashed the windows of movie theaters on family outings and tried to commit suicide when she was left to babysit for him (her mother screamed and cried while her father looked the other way), the lawyer whose schizophrenic brother tried to set her afire (her parents’ only response was to stop keeping matches in the house), the teacher whose autistic brother urinated in her mouth (her father begged her to try to understand and befriend him), and the editor whose borderline older brother punched him in the face and broke his teeth (“He didn’t know his own strength,” his mother explained). But I had never encountered anyone whose life had been constricted by the experience as severely as Peter’s. The parents of my other patients all lived in a state of denial but were at least occasionally emotionally related to their higher-functioning children. In Peter’s family, the tension was unrelenting, his parents’ response entirely zombielike. They never complained or cried or showed any outward sign that they were living and forcing Peter to live in a madhouse without keepers. Relationships were nothing but torture.
Most of the Normal Ones I have known become helpers and caretakers in their personal and professional lives—a disproportionate number of members of the various “helping professions” (medicine, special education, rehabilitation, and assorted therapeutic specialties) learned at home—but Peter rejected the caretaking role with a vengeance; he only felt in control if he gave absolutely nothing to anybody. He worried that he might come across as arrogant and authoritarian to others, but he had no idea what to do about it.
We had our work cut out. Peter had concluded early on that the only way to survive with his sanity intact was to emulate his parents, which required him to remove himself from his own and other people’s emotions as they had done. He had shut himself up in his own mind, letting no one in and sharing himself with no one. At work, he concentrated on expertly arranging sustainable energy deals; solitary sports and intensive study with his “masters” filled his leisure hours. But he admitted that he was terribly lonely for human contact, even though he fled from it. Intimacy of any kind was a language he could not decipher; he hired me as his translator.
One of my teachers at the psychoanalytic institute where I trained used to say, only half humorously, that “the most important prerequisite for a vocation as a psychotherapist is a depressed mother”; based on my history, I think that a suffering but inaccessible father and a damaged sibling should be added to the list of qualifications. In addition to empathy, you have to have a certain relentlessness and perseverance—and perhaps a touch of masochism—to reach someone like Peter.
* * *
The first time I saw him, I was unexpectedly charmed by his sincerity, his intelligent gray eyes, and his boyish manner. He was so short and slight that he almost disappeared on my couch. Despite his athleticism—he was an expert fencer—his shyness and awkwardness of manner combined with the monotone in which he spoke made him seem like an alien who had applied himself to the study of human ways with only partial success. He was
such a peculiar combination of physical grace and mental regimentation that he seemed to be two people incompletely melded together.
It surprised me to learn how successful he was professionally, since he was no glad-hander and shunned all nonbusiness relationships. Efficiency and attention to detail got him through. I was also astonished when he told me that he had a wife—an attractive and thoughtful woman with whom he barely spoke; they had not had a real conversation for most of the fifteen years they had been together. She occasionally told him, and showed him by how miserable she looked in his presence, that she despaired of ever reaching him, even though she stayed with him for reasons I understood no better than her husband did. They did share interests; both loved travel, and she had a reclusive streak herself. Somehow she tolerated his silence and appreciated him. But she regularly became so frustrated with his callousness (one time he let her go to the emergency room alone when she injured herself) that once she seriously threatened to leave. He begged her to stay, promised to reform, bought her a sports car—and soon reverted to spending more time with his computer than with her. Her unhappiness made him feel bad. He knew that she needed more from him, yet he could only regret that he could not provide it, as if doing anything was beyond his control. Still, neither he nor his wife wanted to be alone.
One of the most telling things that Peter revealed to me was his relationship with their dog—a huge, beautiful, and affectionate creature of an unusual breed. He left its care and feeding entirely to his wife—I thought it was her substitute husband—and never even petted the animal for fear that it would require more attention and involvement than he was willing to give if it became attached to him. Any relationship whatsoever seemed to him a potential prison of unrelenting demands. Like his parents, he never imagined he could set any limits on anybody.