narrating therapy

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the first time i had psychotherapy it was between my early and mid-twenties (i think that means i was exactly 24!). i was contending daily with serious suicidal thoughts; i didn’t know, then, how to translate suicidal thoughts into small performative moderately-safe token gestures, so it was all extremely real and extremely paralyzing. i was hanging tough, doing what i needed to do, which at the time consisted mostly of showing up for my university classes and studying or pretending to study for term exams, but it wasn’t going well. i lived in a two-story house of strange girls i had just met. i had been living at home, but things had gotten extremely rough with my mom and she had kicked me out.

so now i was living in this place in my university town a 100 mi. from my hometown, without a car, without anything, barely any furniture, barely any money. someone had given me a clunky black man’s bike on which i biked everywhere. but i had nowhere to go except class, and i don’t think i went to class much, really, at least i don’t remember going to class. i do remember taking myself once a day to the university cafeteria and eating the minimum necessary to stay alive. i would surreptitiously take some bread and an apple home with me and that would be my dinner.

my roommates were never there so, in fact, i had the house all to myself. at home, i shared a small bedroom with my two sisters and there was rarely a time when i would be in a room alone, so the empty house with no furniture felt terribly desolate to me. the landlord was an extremely creepy guy who lived with his elderly mother in a structure adjacent to ours and believed in entering our place unannounced with his own keys, so when i slept i locked my bedroom door and the french windows that gave onto a small balcony. there was no doubt in my mind that the creepy guy could get in if he wanted to, but i had to sleep sometime.

in fact, i was exhausted. i slept soundly at night. in the morning i would bathe, dress, and get down to studying. i have no idea how such studying went on. my desk was a door on two trestles which i kept immaculately neat. at lunchtime, i’d get on my bike and ride to the cafeteria. after lunch i came back and had a long, deep nap. when i think of it now, i am surprised i was able to sleep so deeply in spite of the psychic agony i was in. i spent the rest of the day in my room or roaming the streets of the beautiful medieval town where i lived.

i was always, miserably alone. i had tried to connect with some acquaintances, but i think word had gone around that i was unstable and people kept me at arm’s length. when the suicidal thoughts got really bad i talked to someone who talked to someone who found me a therapist. i was so desperate i would have opened my heart to a gorilla at the zoo if someone had told me it would help. my therapist was a white-haired, minute religious priest who dragged a leg. he was a psychoanalyst but i didn’t see him as an analyst. i saw him once a week and sat across from him in front of a large desk. during our sessions he wrote constantly, barely looking up at all.

the first time i saw him he invited me to sit and proceeded to ask me a series of questions in a most detached, bureaucratical way. at some point the questions got very personal. he asked, “do you masturbate?” trying to muster the same detached, clinical tone, i said, “yes.” “where?” silence. “on the vagina or on the clitoris?” silence. the priest looked up and considered me through his thick astigmatic lenses. “i don’t know what that means.” “you don’t know what what means?” “clitoris.” “oh.” silence. “well, it’s a small area of your genitals, just above the vagina.” “i don’t think i know the answer to your question.” “what question?” “where i masturbate.” “okay.”

i think that was the last time we ever talked about sex. in fact, i don’t think we ever did much talking at all in the approximately two years in which i saw him. he was the distant, quiet, unsmiling kind, while i was petrified by resistances of all sorts. we spent many sessions in complete silence: i sat in my chair quietly and left when time was up.

yet this strange, cold therapy made a huge impression on me. i became extremely attached to my little priest and looked forward to seeing him every week. the trip to his office was full of emotion and anticipation. the trip back full of pleasure. i felt something i had never felt before. it wasn’t love, exactly, or attention. it wasn’t emotional. it was a sense of cognitive enhancement, on the one hand, and psychological validation, on the other. my thoughts and feeling were interesting and important to someone who counted, who knew about these things, who had studied people like me. i wasn’t trash and i wasn’t a sad burlap bag of sad feelings. i was someone whose thoughts were worthy of investigation and analysis.

but this is what i want to say, this is what this whole narrative has been leading up to. i found my interaction with my therapist, such as it was, one of the most fascinating interactions i had ever had. i became enamoured of the idea of writing a short story, a novel, a play based on it. for the longest time, years really, i thought, this is fascinating literary material. this relationship felt more interesting, more worthy of being written about than a love story, a family story, a friendship.

this is the way i feel now about my current therapeutic relationship. i do not, as i did then, think that i should write a novel about it (though, now that i think of it, are there novels — not memoirs: novels — that take place solely in a therapist’s office and focus on one single therapeutic relationship from the patient’s point of view? i can’t think of any. maybe they are too difficult to write). but i do find that this is one of the most interesting relationships i have had in my entire life. i think about it constantly. there is something that is going on here that taps into the deepest depth of me. there is a truth to it that i have never found anywhere else. this truth electrifies me now as it did those twenty years ago, when i was desperately lonely and miserably suicidal and i would have talked to a gorilla in the zoo but talked instead to a small old priest with the complete works of freud on his bookcase.

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Filed under being from somewhere else, chronicling therapy, friends, memory, mental health professionals, pain, sadness, sexuality, suicide, therapy, writing

Tags: aloneness, family