by Edith Eger
“I’m going to give you a big piece of duct tape, and I want you to put it over his mouth.”
“What?”
“Cover his mouth with this tape. Did you do it?”
She nodded. She gave a faint smile.
“Now here’s a rope. Tie him to that chair so he can’t get up.”
“Okay.”
“Did you tie it tight?”
“Yes.”
“Now I want you to yell at him.”
“Yell how?”
“I want you to tell him how angry you are.”
“I don’t know what to say.”
“Say, ‘Dad, I’m so angry at you for not protecting me!’ But don’t say it. Yell it!” I demonstrated.
“Dad, I’m so angry at you,” she said.
“Louder.”
“Dad, I’m so angry at you!”
“Now I want you to punch him.”
“Where?”
“Right in the face.”
She raised a fist and swatted the air.
“Punch him again.”
She did it.
“Now kick.”
Her foot flew up.
“Here’s a pillow. You can punch this. Really whack it.” I handed her a cushion.
She opened her eyes and stared at the pillow. Her punches were timid at first, but the more I encouraged her, the stronger they became. I invited her to stand up and kick the pillow if she wanted to. To throw it across the room. To scream at the top of her lungs. Soon she was down on the floor, pounding on the pillow with her fists. When her body began to fatigue, she stopped punching and collapsed on the floor, breathing fast.
“How do you feel?” I asked her.
“Like I don’t ever want to stop.”
The following week I brought in a punching bag, a red one on a heavy black stand. We established a new ritual—we’d begin our sessions with some rage release. She’d mentally tie someone up in a chair—usually one of her parents—and scream while delivering a savage beating: How could you let that happen to me? I was just a little girl!
“Are you done?” I’d ask.
“No.”
And she would keep punching until she was.
That Thanksgiving, after returning home from a dinner with friends, Beatrice was sitting on the couch, petting her dog, when her whole body started tingling. Her throat dried up, her heart began palpitating. She tried deep breathing to get her body to relax, but the symptoms got worse. She thought she was dying. She begged her girlfriend to take her to the hospital. The doctor who examined her in the emergency room said nothing was medically wrong. She had suffered a panic attack. When Beatrice saw me after the episode, she was frustrated and scared, discouraged to be feeling worse instead of better, and worried that she would have another panic attack.
I did everything I could to applaud her progress, to validate her growth. I told her that in my experience, when you release rage, you often feel much worse before you begin to feel better.
She shook her head. “I think I’ve gone as far as I can go.”
“Honey, give yourself some credit. You had a terrifying night. And you got through it without harming yourself. Without running away. I don’t think I could have coped as well as you did.”
“Why do you keep trying to convince me that I’m a strong person? Maybe I’m not. Maybe I’m sick and I’ll always be sick. Maybe it’s time to stop telling me I’m someone I won’t ever be.”
“You’re holding yourself responsible for something that isn’t your fault.”
“What if it is my fault? What if there’s something different I could have done, and he would have left me in peace?”
“What if blaming yourself is just a way of maintaining the fantasy that the world is in your control?”
Beatrice rocked on the couch, her face streaked in tears.
“You didn’t have choices then. You have choices now. You can choose not to come back here. That is always your choice. But I hope you can learn to see what a remarkable survivor you are.”
“I’m barely holding on to my life. That doesn’t seem very remarkable to me.”
“Was there ever a place you went, when you were a girl, where you felt safe?”
“I only felt safe when I was alone in my room.”
“Would you sit on your bed? Or by the window?”
“On my bed.”
“Did you have any toys or stuffed animals you’d play with?”
“I had a doll.”
“Did you talk to her?”
She nodded.
“Can you close your eyes and sit on that safe bed now? Hold your doll. Talk to her now like you talked to her then. What would you say?”
“How can I be loved in this family? I need to be good, but I’m bad.”
“Do you know all that time you spent alone as a child, feeling so sad and isolated, you were building a huge store of strength and resilience? Can you applaud that little girl now? Can you take her in your arms? Tell her, ‘You were hurt, and I love you. You were hurt, and you’re safe now. You had to pretend and hide. I see you now. I love you now.’”
Beatrice held herself tightly and shook with sobs. “I want to be able to protect her now. I couldn’t then. But I don’t think I will ever feel safe unless I can protect myself now.”
This is how Beatrice decided to take her next risk. Beatrice acknowledged that she wanted to feel safe, that she wanted to be able to protect herself. She had learned about a women’s self-defense class beginning soon at the nearby community center. But she delayed registering. She feared she might not be up to the challenge of fighting off an attack, that a physical confrontation, even in the safe and empowering environment of a self-defense class, might trigger a panic attack. She came up with all kinds of reasons not to pursue what she wanted, in an effort to manage her fear—the class might be too expensive, or it might already be full, or it might not have enough participants and might be canceled. With me, she began to work through the fears underlying her resistance to pursuing what she wanted. I asked her two questions: What’s the worst that can happen? and Can you survive it? The worst scenario she could imagine was experiencing a panic attack in class, in a room full of strangers. We confirmed that the medical release form she would be asked to fill out when she registered for the class would give the staff the information they needed to support her in the event of an attack. And we discussed the fact that she had experienced a panic attack before. If it happened again, she might not be able to stop it or control it, but at least she would know what was going on. And she already knew from experience that a panic attack, though frightening and unpleasant, wasn’t deadly. She could survive it. So Beatrice registered for the class.
But once she was there in the room, in her sweatpants and sneakers, surrounded by the other women, she lost her nerve. She felt too self-conscious to participate. She was afraid of making mistakes, afraid of calling attention to herself. But she couldn’t bring herself to leave after getting so close to her goal. She leaned against the wall and watched the class. She returned for each session after that, dressed to participate, but still too afraid. One day the instructor noticed her watching from the sidelines and offered to coach her one-on-one after class. Afterward, she came to see me, her face triumphant. “I could throw him against the wall today!” she said. “I pinned him. I picked him up. I threw him against the wall!” Her cheeks were flushed. Her eyes glistened with pride.
Once she had the confidence that she could protect herself, she began taking other risks—adult ballet classes, belly dancing. Her body began to change. It was no longer a container for her fear. It was an instrument of joy. Beatrice became a writer, a ballet teacher, a yoga instructor. She decided to choreograph a dance based on a Brothers Grimm tale she remembered reading as a child, “The Girl Without Hands.” In the story, a girl’s parents are tricked into giving their daughter to the devil. Because she is innocent and pure, the devil can’t possess her, but in revenge and frustration, he
cuts off her hands. The girl wanders the world, with stumps where her hands used to be. One day she walks into a king’s garden, and when he sees her standing among the flowers, he falls in love with her. They get married and he makes her a pair of silver hands. They have a son. One day she saves their young son from drowning. Her silver hands disappear and are replaced with real hands.
Beatrice held out her hands as she told me about this story from her childhood. “My hands are real again,” she said. “It wasn’t someone else I saved. It was me.”
CHAPTER 22
Somehow the Waters Part
TIME DOESN’T HEAL. It’s what you do with the time. Healing is possible when we choose to take responsibility, when we choose to take risks, and finally, when we choose to release the wound, to let go of the past or the grief.
Two days before his sixteenth birthday, Renée’s son Jeremy came into the den where she and her husband were watching the ten o’clock news. In the flickering lights from the TV, his dark face looked troubled. Renée was about to reach for her son, wrap him up in the cuddly kind of hug that he would still consent to on occasion, when the phone rang. It was her sister in Chicago, who was going through a bad divorce and often called late at night. “I’ve got to take this,” Renée said. She gave her son’s cheek a quick pat and turned her attention to her distressed sister. Jeremy muttered a good night and headed toward the stairs. “Sweet dreams, baby,” she called to his retreating back.
The next morning, Jeremy wasn’t up by the time she was putting breakfast on the table. She called up the stairs to her son but got no response. She buttered the last piece of toast and went up to knock on his bedroom door. Still he didn’t answer. Exasperated, she opened his door. The room was dark, the blinds still closed. She called to him again, confused to find that his bed was already made. A sixth sense drove her toward the closet door. She opened it, a gust of cold dread at her back. Jeremy’s body hung from the wooden rod, a belt around his neck.
On his desk she found a note: It’s not you, it’s me. Sorry to disappoint you. —J
When Renée and her husband, Greg, first came to see me, Jeremy had been dead for only a few weeks. The loss of him was so fresh that they weren’t grieving yet. They were in shock. The person they had buried wasn’t gone to them. It felt as though they had put him in the ground alive.
During those early visits, Renée sat and sobbed. “I want to turn back the clock!” she cried. “I want to go back, go back.” Greg cried too, but quietly. Often he would look out the window while Renée wept. I told them that men and women often grieve differently, and that the death of a child could be a rift or an opportunity in their marriage. I urged them to take good care of themselves, to let themselves rage and weep, to kick and cry and scream and get the feelings out so that they didn’t make Jeremy’s sister, Jasmine, pick up the tab for their grief. I invited them to bring in pictures of Jeremy so that we could celebrate his sixteen years of life, the sixteen years his spirit had resided with them. I gave them resources on support groups for survivors of suicide. And I worked with them as the what-if questions rose up like a tidal wave. What if I’d been paying more attention? What if I hadn’t answered the phone that night, if I’d given him that huge hug? What if I’d worked less and been at home more? What if I hadn’t believed the myth that white kids are the only ones who commit suicide? What if I’d been on the lookout for signs? What if I’d put less pressure on him to perform in school? What if I’d checked in on him before I went to bed? All the what-ifs reverberated, an unanswerable echo: Why?
We want so much to understand the truth. We want to be accountable for our mistakes, honest about our lives. We want reasons, explanations. We want our lives to make sense. But to ask why? is to stay in the past, to keep company with our guilt and regret. We can’t control other people, and we can’t control the past.
At some point during their first year of loss, Renée and Greg came to see me less and less frequently, and after a while their visits tapered off altogether. I didn’t hear from them for many months. The spring that Jeremy would have graduated from high school, I was happy and surprised to get a call from Greg. He told me he was worried about Renée and asked if they could come in.
I was struck by the changes in their appearance. They had both aged, but in different ways. Greg had put on weight. His black hair was flecked with silver. Renée didn’t look run-down, as Greg’s concern for her had led me to believe she might. Her face was smooth, her blouse crisp, her hair freshly straightened. She smiled. She made pleasantries. She said she felt well. But her brown eyes held no light.
Greg, who had so often been silent in their sessions, spoke now, with urgency. “I have something to say,” he said. He told me that the previous weekend he and Renée had attended a high school graduation party for their friend’s son. It was a fraught event for them, full of land mines, devastating reminders of what the other couples had that they didn’t have, of Jeremy’s absence, of the seeming eternity of grief, every day a new host of moments that they would never experience with their son. But they forced themselves into nice clothes and went to the party. At some point during the evening, Greg told me, he realized that he was having a good time. The music the DJ played made him think of Jeremy, and the old R&B albums his son had taken an interest in, playing them on the stereo in his room when he did homework or hung out with friends. Greg turned to Renée in her elegant blue dress and was struck by how clearly he could see Jeremy in the slope of her cheeks, the shape of her mouth. He felt swept away by love—for Renée, for their son, for the simple pleasure of eating good food under a white tent on a warm evening. He asked Renée to dance. She refused, got up, and left him alone at the table.
Greg cried as he recounted this. “I’m losing you too,” he said to his wife.
Renée’s face darkened, her eyes looked blacked out. We waited for her to speak.
“How dare you,” she finally said. “Jeremy doesn’t get to dance. Why should you? I can’t turn my back on him so easily.”
Her tone was hostile. Venomous. I expected Greg to wince. He shrugged instead. I realized this wasn’t the first time that Renée had perceived his experience of happiness as a desecration of their son’s memory. I thought of my mother. Of all the times I had seen my father try to nuzzle her, kiss her, and how she would rebuff his affection. She was so stuck in the early loss of her own mother that she hid herself in a shroud of melancholy. Her eyes would sometimes light up when she heard Klara play the violin. But she never gave herself permission to laugh from the belly, to flirt, to joke, to rejoice.
“Renée, honey,” I said. “Who’s dead? Jeremy? Or you?”
She didn’t answer me.
“It doesn’t do Jeremy any good if you become dead too,” I told Renée. “It doesn’t do you any good either.”
Renée wasn’t in hiding from her pain, as I had once been. She had made it her husband. In marrying herself to her loss, she was in hiding from her life.
I asked her to tell me how much space she was allowing for grief in her daily life.
“Greg goes to work. I go to the cemetery,” she said.
“How often?”
She looked insulted by my question.
“She goes every day,” Greg said.
“And that’s a bad thing?” Renée snapped. “To be devoted to my son?”
“Mourning is important,” I said. “But when it goes on and on, it can be a way of avoiding grief.” Mourning rites and rituals can be an extremely important component of grief work. I think that’s why religious and cultural practices include clear mourning rituals—there’s a protected space and structure within which to begin to experience the feelings of loss. But the mourning period also has a clear end. From that point on, the loss isn’t a separate dimension of life—the loss is integrated into life. If we stay in a state of perpetual mourning, we are choosing a victim’s mentality, believing I’m never going to get over it. If we stay stuck in mourning, it is as though our live
s are over too. Renée’s mourning, though it was painful, had also become a kind of shield, something that fenced her off from her present life. In the rituals of her loss she could protect herself from having to accept it. “Are you spending more time and emotional energy with the son who is dead, or with the daughter who is alive?” I asked.
Renée looked troubled. “I’m a good mother,” she said, “but I’m not going to pretend I’m not in pain.”
“You don’t have to pretend anything. But you are the only person who can stop your husband and your daughter from losing you too.” I remembered my mother talking to her mother’s picture above the piano, crying, “My God, my God, give me strength.” Her wailing frightened me. Her fixation on her loss was like a trapdoor she would lift and fall through, an escape. I was like the child of an alcoholic, on guard against her disappearance, unable to rescue her from the void but feeling that it was somehow my job.
“I used to think that if I let grief in, I would drown,” I told Renée. “But it’s like Moses and the Red Sea. Somehow the waters part. You walk through them.”
I asked Renée to try something new to shift her mourning into grief. “Put a picture of Jeremy in the living room. Don’t go to the cemetery to mourn his loss. Find a way to connect with him right there in your house. Set aside fifteen or twenty minutes every day to sit with him. You can touch his face, tell him what you’re doing. Talk to him. And then give him a kiss and go on about your day.”
“I’m so scared of abandoning him again.”
“He didn’t kill himself because of you.”
“You don’t know that.”
“There are an infinite number of things you could have done differently in your life. Those choices are done, the past is gone, nothing can change that. For reasons we will never know, Jeremy chose to end his life. You don’t get to choose for him.”
“I don’t know how to live with that.”
“Acceptance isn’t going to happen overnight. And you’re never going to be glad that he’s dead. But you get to choose a way forward. You get to discover that living a full life is the best way to honor him.”