by Jeanne Safer
I asked him once what it was like to be in the room with his wife, his dog, or even the garbage in the kitchen, all of which he saw as demanding his attention simply by sharing his space. “I draw into myself,” he said. “They’re there, but they’re like a chair—I’m totally disconnected from them, and they have no effect on me. I go off and find a distraction as soon as I can.”
“But,” I countered, “you wouldn’t say that unless you had to defuse the effect they have on you; leaving mentally or physically allows you to get rid of their demands without having to interact with them.” He had learned to wall himself off and to escape early on: a child’s vision of independence that was actually a trap.
At first glance, Peter seemed almost Asperger’s-esque, yet his palpable anguish and longing for a mutual human touch told another story. He tried desperately to have a simulacrum of a normal life, which he “put on from the outside” by giving lavish gifts to clients and parties for remote acquaintances. He told me with embarrassment that he practiced smiling in the shower before he went to work to temper his oddness, but it did not help. I had never met a lonelier person or one who was more cut off or frightened of the very contact that some part of him clearly missed.
This strange, remote, yet tormented man aroused a conflicting welter of feelings within me. I admired his intelligence, his perseverance, and his courage, and I could sense the anguish beneath his often forbidding façade. But relating to him took a toll on me. He aroused a depth of rage and despair that was hard to contain, the intensity of which caught me unawares every time, even though I tried to prepare myself for it. My countertransference—the technical term for the therapist’s reactions to a patient based on her own unresolved issues in intimate relationships2—was particularly intense with him; clearly, Peter represented every difficult man I had ever cared about and wanted to reach. At least at this point in my life, my frustration and my wish to retaliate by cutting him off or saying something hostile or withering when he rejected me—which I had rarely been able to do with my own personal inaccessible loves—were conscious, and though the impulses plagued me, I rarely acted them out with my patient.
He always started our phone sessions robotically, announcing with a fixed combination of frustration and conceit that nothing had changed and that he did not remember what we had talked about the week before and had not taken any of the actions (writing in a journal, for example) that I had suggested and that he had agreed to perform. With disturbing frequency, he would do something really outrageous and offensive; once when he seemed out of breath and background noises made him difficult to understand, it turned out that he was race-walking during our session so as not to “waste the time.” On another occasion, I could hear him talking to someone in the background; he was consulting an auto mechanic about a problem with his car in the middle of our session. Discussing anything to do with our relationship or how he was treating me was irrelevant from his point of view, and he let me know in no uncertain terms that he considered any time spent on these topics a waste of money. In a flash, his voice would become so flat and his manner so cold and distant that it seemed as though he was not speaking to a living person. There was no way in. The way he addressed me, as from a height, made me so angry and hopeless that I could hardly contain myself.
Yet often, later in the same session, he would warm up. Then we would have a human-to-human exchange, often full of self-awareness, about why he had just behaved so obnoxiously, which usually had to do with feeling needy or unimportant; even if I had done nothing specific to arouse those feelings, he believed that his very dependency on me put him at a disadvantage. So he kept me continuously off balance, both to thwart my having any power over him and to have me experience firsthand the emotional roller coaster that was his constant, though hidden, state of mind. I hated being periodically erased by him, although I was beginning to understand him—and I was also endlessly tantalized by the prospect of getting through to this most recalcitrant of men. I tried hard to be patient with both of us.
Why couldn’t Peter leave his childhood experience behind or modify it? Why, I asked him, did the entire inner and outer world become the living room of his youth, with every person (and even the resident canine) he encountered playing the role of James or his parents? He could only say that the experience had been so awful he never got past it, that he feared that he might be irreparably warped by it, that he was too scared to change and didn’t know how. Living “underground” was safe, and better safe than sorry. Nonetheless, he was clearly mindful of what he was missing: life itself. It is never easy to answer why one person with a traumatic background overcomes it and has remarkably normal relationships, while another shuts down as he did—but his flashes of insight, and even of passion, about his predicament and its meaning made me believe that his seemingly impenetrable façade was a defense, rather than the fundamental truth about him. After all the tumult of his childhood, I saw that maintaining a state of equilibrium and calm, free from emotional upheaval, was paramount. This project consumed him to such an extent that he didn’t realize he had the capacity to tolerate a much wider emotional range, even when he felt it, either because expanding his inner horizons would force him to grieve over the waste of his life until then or because he was afraid of demands that would be made on him once others saw that he was open to emotion.
The odd but insightful interpersonalist Sullivan’s concept of “selective inattention”—in which a person avoids being flooded with anxiety by turning his focus away from disturbing emotions, people, and experiences—helped me understand why Peter continued to be so utterly suspended in his past. The problem with this defensive “security operation” (another Sullivanian term) is that you have to pay attention in order to learn from experience, which can never occur as long as you are constantly running away.3 I paid attention to him, and he knew it, which allowed him to begin, even if inconsistently, to pay attention to himself. I did not attack him as James did (even when I wanted to), but I also didn’t allow him to behave like his parents. I was a different kind of parent, whom he recognized was trying to understand and to communicate and who did not abandon him, even when I was frustrated. Since I came from the world outside his family, I offered him a new pair of eyes. There were moments when I thought he was learning to look through them.
Many times, in between withdrawing and insulting me, he told me softly that he considered talking to me his last chance to join the world. This was very moving to me. He almost never missed an appointment, all the while announcing that he dreaded making every call, although he admitted that he felt better as we went along and also after the session ended. His recall of our conversations was spotty at best, however, and he needed me to prompt him. Eventually, I got over being annoyed at this implicit demand (perhaps he wanted to make sure I was really paying attention?) and told him what had transpired between us. Then he could resume our dialogue. I was learning to take him as he was.
Over time, I realized in more depth why he seemed so surpassingly disintegrated and peculiar. For Peter, caring for anybody was a danger to be avoided at all costs, because if he noticed or responded to another’s needs, he would feel compelled to put his own needs aside entirely and do whatever that person demanded of him. Reciprocity and naturally maintaining boundaries were both inconceivable to him; where would he have seen either (or would it have registered if he did see) before we met? An impossible bind loomed before him: he was unable to live with people or without them—and this included me. His dreams revealed this to both of us with compelling immediacy.
THE FIRST RUNG
Dreams, I told Peter, tell the truth—particularly truths about ourselves that we would rather not know but need to know; they have fascinated me my entire life, and I taught dream interpretation for many years. Luckily, he grasped this principle intuitively and took his dreams seriously from the start; he knew they were his and his alone. Until our last couple of years together, he hardly remembered any, but then, when
he was finally ready to attend to them, they started to reveal his emotional life with astonishing clarity. He saw that each was an eloquent and poignant metaphor for his existential predicament. Psychoanalyst and animal researcher John Mack, in his profound book Nightmares and Human Conflict, says that these terrifying dreams are “involuntary poetry,” and Peter’s certainly fit this description.
In the first dream he recounted to me, he was living in an underground bunker in a war zone and only dared to stick his head out periodically before retreating to save his life. The meaning of this siege mentality was obvious to both of us: his carapace of imperious indifference served the same function as a turtle’s—to protect the vulnerable creature inside. It had formed so early and covered him so completely that he could not conceive of surviving without it. He feared that feeling anything, let alone caring about what others felt, would deplete his precious, limited resources. He carried his bunker on his back.
But Peter was not yet ready or able to give up his refuge—he had nothing reliable with which to replace it—and so this dream and his insights about it led exactly nowhere. At my wit’s end, I tried another tack, more behavioral: I went on a campaign to get him to do little things at home, at work, and with me—like taking out the garbage (he kept himself magisterially aloof from all household chores), initiating the briefest personal conversation with his wife, going to the company coffee shop, e-mailing me any thoughts he had between sessions—but to no avail. Even when he did a little something—he actually took the dog for a walk once—it was always a one-off. Whatever we accomplished during the hour he unwove like Penelope during the week by very active inattention and grimly determined inaction.
A combination of willfulness (his only means of self-assertion was to refuse to do what was asked of him) and terror of the unknown still kept Peter locked in place. He neutralized my every attempt to nudge him forward. I felt like I was the psychotherapist of Bartleby the Scrivener, the tragic hero of Melville’s story who responded to every request by saying, “I prefer not to.” He accused me of only doing it for the money, and I began to wonder if he wasn’t correct.
But on rare occasions (but on more occasions than ever before) there would be flashes of another Peter. He would answer some inquiry of mine seriously and passionately with the impacted intensity of years of suppression. When James, his former tormentor, lay dying, Peter wrote him a poem declaring that he loved him, recalling this tragic man’s aesthetic gifts and the good moments they had shared that had been unknown to me until he read it to me. The poem was found next to James’s deathbed; Peter had gotten through to him at the end, something I had been unable to do with my own brother, and he knew I was glad for both of them. At the same time, Peter also threw his considerable expertise and energy into charity work. His efforts garnered millions of dollars in contributions that strangers admired and were touched by. Was he beginning to open himself to self-expression?
Then, just when I started to believe that we were actually making inroads and no longer had to start from scratch repeatedly, he did something so chillingly detached that I was unprepared for it even after long experience: I was hospitalized unexpectedly—and for an extended period of time—with a serious illness. I informed all my patients and received many touching responses. Peter reacted to my announcement without a word of concern, only an awkwardly worded question about whether his next regular session time would still be available, which of course was impossible under the circumstances. His utter lack of empathy shocked and hurt me, although on some level, I realized that he was denying my vulnerability and the anxiety that my unavailability and possible loss stirred up in him. I berated myself for grandiosely thinking—and not for the first time—that I alone could unlock his hidden heart. Had he regressed with a vengeance to his familiar aloofness because he was panicked by the fear of losing me—or was he simply showing his true colors? Had I barely made a dent with all my efforts? I berated myself for my blindness and egoism at having cherished the fantasy that in extremis I would be exempt from his withdrawal. However, when I confronted him with his behavior and told him how heartless it seemed—I did not hold back how hurt and angry I was—he sincerely apologized.
Shortly after this highly charged exchange, Peter surprised me by informing me that he had reinitiated a relationship with his aged mother (his father had died years before). He had been visiting her regularly. The more feeble and demented she became, the tenderer were his attentions; he actually talked to her with great patience. He was such a good son that the attendants of the nursing home constantly remarked on his devotion and told him that they wished others would emulate him. He even recalled, and discussed with joy, good times with her that he had never mentioned before, when they were alone together on summer weekdays without James. He could embrace her wholeheartedly because he knew there was a time limit on what could be expected of him—he would have a reserve left after she was gone—so he gave his considerable all. This inspired me to go on with him. When she finally died, Peter delivered a loving eulogy in which he revealed for the first time publicly what his family life had been like. (“The undercurrent of disruption and the threat of violence consumed so much of my mother’s life that it would be a dishonor not to acknowledge it at the end of her life,” he said. “May the unrelenting, enduring, and shocking suffering that our family had to privately endure be released on this day.”) The mourners wept and embraced him.
In his next session after this apotheosis, however, he fell completely and totally silent as soon as I picked up the phone, and he stayed silent. Shaky starts for these encounters were typical of him, unused as he was to conversation in the world outside our calls, but now he said not a word for the entire forty-five minutes, which he had never done before. This would have been awkward in person, but on the telephone, it was unbearable. I felt imprisoned in the empty air space, and his withdrawal now felt like a refusal, not an inability, to make the effort. Had I convinced myself—I had certainly done it with other men—that he had more to give, that he had the capacity to feel more, than he really did? At this point, he was capable of knowing what he felt (frightened of intimacy? hopeless? furious and under my thumb?) and of expressing it; not doing so was willful. At the end of this interminable session, I gave him an ultimatum in my calmest voice: “If you don’t make the effort to talk to me, I won’t continue to work with you. Otherwise, we’re wasting my time and your money. I’ll give you one more chance in our session next week, and that’s it.” I was not at all sure that he would even bother to call.
I had no idea what he would do; was it really over between us—and in this lousy way? I was wary about how the next session would unfold and was prepared to make good on my word to end the charade; part of me even anticipated breaking up with a touch of sadistic pleasure. I had an urge to retaliate for all the disappointment and frustration he and every unrelated boyfriend in my past had caused me and I had not-so-patiently borne. I took a perverse fantasized pleasure at finally having the power to end a frustrating relationship—a power I had never thought I had in the past.
I braced myself for his next call. Something in my voice must have told him that I’d meant what I’d said, because he broke his silence at the very start by telling me a dream in anything but his usual monotone:
“I’m climbing a cliff, a vertical cliff. It’s so real. I’m looking up to see where I can grab next. It’s so windy up here that I could drift away. I can’t go up or down safely—if I move at all, I’m going to fall to my death. I’m frightened, but I say okay, I’ll try to let go.”
He understood that this dream was a topographical representation of his existential dilemma, and he promised to think about it. I was hesitantly pleased that he took it seriously and had read the metaphor accurately. I decided to bide my time. Still, I worried, was this another fencer’s feint to get me back in the match?
But Peter was true to his word and began the next session by recounting, in a voice full of feeling, an even mo
re powerful dream:
“This time, instead of being up high, I was down low—I was at the bottom of a body of water. My feet were stuck on the bottom. I couldn’t stay there any longer, but I couldn’t get up to the surface. I realized I’m going to run out of breath here. I can’t float—even gravity wasn’t working in my favor. I’m going to die. Then I see that there’s a wall on the side, like a ladder with grooves for my feet. I grab it, I hold on, I go up it, and I make it.”
The threat of losing me and not being able to do anything about it had caused him to fall from the height of arrogance to the depth of despair, and from either place, there seemed to be no way out—until he saw the ladder and grabbed on at the last minute. He asked to continue for another six months, and I agreed, on the condition that he never again give me the silent treatment. My reactions were a complex mixture of professional gratification, genuine caring for him, and a touch of pleasure that I had “won.” This I accepted as a normal human response; a saint couldn’t do this work.
Then, just as we were ending, he added something poignant and revealing. “I’m afraid if I’m cured, I won’t be able to see you anymore.” This was the first time he had ever admitted that I mattered to him. I promised, holding back tears that luckily he could not see, that we could still be in touch even if he was no longer my patient.
Somehow I wasn’t dismayed or offended at his initial backtracking the next week, when he suggested, as was his wont, that I must have felt happy not to lose the income. I expected it and saw through it and called him on it; I felt convinced that too much had changed for him to revert utterly. I said, “You know it’s not true that I just see you as a revenue stream. You pay me for my time, but you can’t pay me to care about you—that’s freely given. What’s the real reason for your discomfort?”