A
long-time dear friend of mine, with whom I’ve drifted in and out of contact
since teenhood and blessedly reunited with recently, has at mid-life handsomely
achieved professional status in her life’s true calling, as a
psychotherapist. Or Analyst. Or Life Counselor. I have to apologize, as I don’t really know
her accurate and correctly referenced classification. But in reality, chances are a good many of
her ensuing clients, or patients, as it were, will reference her as The
Shrink.
This
whole therapy thing is no small box of Cracker Jacks. It’s the Las Vegas of self-help, and in a
world of diminishing health care coverage, the industry shows no sign of
slowing down, on any professional level.
It has been the target of humor good and bad, sophisticated and banal
since the double-digit Greek and Roman years, and that’s been an industry just
as lasting. Mainly because it’s a science equally inexact and respected enough
to never, ever be thoroughly dismissed.
Dismissable
to this day only by those who cannot tolerate it, financially, mentally or
emotionally. Those would be pretty good
reasons. I’d cop to the financial one,
basically, though even though I’ve never really considered myself averse to
traditional office-visit tradition, I’ve just never really believed myself in a
ready state to confront the subconscious of my brain and soul in a way that’ll
really make those high-priced visits pay off from day one. Once you sign up for
a commitment like that, generally the instinctive desire is to make this work
from the outset, like an academic course, or chiropractic treatment. Get the pain and gain underway with purpose
immediately, and make the whole expenditure a valuable one. You’re not gonna sink half your life savings
in co-pays ostensibly, unless you know exactly how each and every trip to the
minibar is gonna go down.
The
unfortunate inability to establish this very application is what truncated my
one or two very dedicated efforts in the distant past. It all came to a head one day when the
licensed clinical professional seated directly before me at her desk during one
of my afternoon diatribes fell fitfully asleep.
I very, very silently rose, stepped out, issued my co-pay cheerfully to
the young concierge and chose not to return.
I would have returned the lady’s apologetic voicemail that arrived late
that night, but some relationships are just better off ended.
While
my long-time crony, couched at last in her rightful theraputic-analytic
righteousness, was demanding to know why I’ve long refused to delve back into
therapy, as any particular individual bearing any early-life trauma or hardship
of any sort should, in order to maintain a successful, cured existence on
Earth, I very honestly explained why, beyond reiterating my economic
constraints:
I’ve
long maintained a therapist of my own.
The
fellow, of voice only, has lived in my frontal cortex for pretty much most of
my life. He has no actual name, but I
guess he’s what Disney’s Jiminy Cricket would have referred to as my
Conscience. That’s the built-in guide
that little song from Pinocchio says you’re supposed to be equipped
with. Mine most blessedly has.
MC
(my conscience) may not have always won out over the course. Like during my early life as a fat
pre-adolescent reaching for the second devil’s food donut in the Entenmann’s
box, alone in the kitchen with it. But
even back in those years, conversations with MC both short and long, over walks
to school, car rides, strolls through the downstairs courtyard beneath our
apartment, strolls up and down our block in our earliest suburban times, not
one of those aimless childhood moments alone was without the critical
companionship and time spent with the therapist no price could acquire.
I
guess my mother, for all her sophistication, my aunt and uncle, for all their
pragmatic intolerance, kind of set me up right where the internal head gear
device was concerned. I knew how to talk to myself, how to address my thoughts,
how to intellectualize my fears and disturbances.
Usually,
it came down to a puzzling chess match.
My mom, in my earliest acquaintance with her, was an alcoholic,
classified as the “functional” kind.
That means that she’s capable of being the office-working, ever-present
superhero everyone knows and relies upon each day. But she’ll also find the down time she needs
to get pounded off her ass, stumble home stinkers and f@#k up everyone’s
night. If my formative life amounted to
an uncountable battery of sporadic f@#kd-up nights, that didn’t even really
infringe on my bedtime, how bad could my life have been..?
Fact
is, it could have all been much worse if I’d not had in-residence the honorable
MC, or acting Analyst I’d installed at an age too young to chart.
I
may have been four or five when these comforting one-on-one silent
conversations in my mind first commenced.
I don’t know where I’d have been without them. And the fact is, that’s one fear I never had
to maintain. “MC” was always there.
At
age four, for example, as the day wound down in Class K-2 at P.S. 203 in
Springfield Gardens, while Mrs. Sachs, our matronly teacher implored us to
begin putting all our toys and crayons away, I was, while doing so, as others
rapped with their classmates, in a strategy session with my mental health
professional over how I’d best respond later this evening, when my mother would
predictably arrive home from work an hour later than usual, falling over
herself, reeking of scotch and ready to strike out at my aunt. I had to steel myself on keeping cool inside.
“Remember…..it’s just gonna be a night…Be solid and get through it. Hold your breath when she embraces you if you
can’t stand the smell…” Good tip.
As
a conscience, MC worked pretty damn hard every day, and so did I, as a
patient. In most ways, it was everything
effective therapy is supposed to be. If
I flunked a math test for example, and left school that day in the fifth grade
suicidal, over the slow journey home, I asked myself in-session, “So why did
you really flunk this test..? Is it
because you can’t learn..? Is it because you don’t want to
learn..?? Why can’t you do what every other kid in that classroom can..? You belong there….so why can’t you..??”
Ultimately,
we took it to the painful acknowledgement that my mother, in all my math
hangups, took the low road of “walking me through”, by originally trying to
demonstrate problem-solving with homework assistance, and then simply
completing the workbook assignments for me, without as much as my verbal
request. It was just easier. Even if I knew better.
Easier
while knowing better is what the excruciating awareness of one’s crime is made
of. It’s what Watergate was in fact made
of. It’s what white-collar sentences are made of. While at age ten I wasn’t really putting all
that together, I did know I was in some, at least partial way at
fault in not counteracting any of this.
My only recourse were those afternoon sessions, the ones that uprighted
the upside-down Wonderland I was living in.
As
I recall, that Wonderland Alice was trapped in was pretty functional. In fact, she was kind of the weirdo that
didn’t belong. As I grew up, the
injustices and wrongs I either dealt with or ended up committing against myself
rendered me to myself a weirdo, an outcast a lot of kids around me didn’t
understand. Usually, a kid with little
patience will respond only one way to a kid he doesn’t understand:
aggressively.
So,
naturally this worried grammar-school fat kid was also the beat-up, threatened
persecuted kid, for all the wrong reasons.
MC didn’t cut me any slack for that either. He reminded me that this is just something
you have to live through in order to get to the next chapter in life, the one
where I’d be a fun-loving, girl-dating, tall, skinny, hot-looking Shaun Cassidy
in high school, all hair and denim, chilling out on Camaro hoods.
Ten
years out of fifth grade, I was a wretched, skinny little alienated nebbitz of
a disenchanted college kid, with no prospects, roaming home from my part-time
supermarket job to yet our third, spare little apartment, once again deep in
strategy over how I’d deal with my life-long roommate of more than ten years,
my mother. Things were of course
different now. She didn’t return home
from work drunk all that much. After a
sober seven years, she was a little more tempered after time spent on the wagon. She waited ‘til she got home to get
slammed. But if all those same
structures were in place, so was my life-long therapist, the reliable MC. What the hell would he have cost me by now if
he were a human being..??
And
we weren’t limited to life’s larger confrontations, either. Sometimes I just needed a reminder not to
spend that extra five dollars when I could wait and get whatever it was for
three. Or maybe an alert to mind the
light at the corner when the cars are speeding by. It may have been a reminder that the VCR it
looked like we were finally going to scrounge up the $400 for was just not
going to happen this time around, and that there’s still too much to be
grateful for. Maybe it was a reminder at
age eleven that while I was really looking forward to going to the new Woody
Allen movie on Sunday, and then my mom asks me if we could sit this one out
today because she’s just not feeling too well, I need to just let it go and
appreciate all that I have anyway. MC
never really steered me wrong.
In
fact, he only steered my wrong when I slammed the door in his face and avoided
him. Sure enough, it happened, somewhere in my thirties. That was around the time I was too neglectful
to accept my self-neglect. That’s around
the time the panic attacks and autoimmune problems moved in. I would, in demonically possessed fashion
find myself dashing up the block, ducking into phone booths (there were still a
good many around) not to make a phone call, as I had few if anyone I could open
up to about this kind of emotional emergency, but just to quietly cry a good
five minutes of tears. I hadn’t cried
since I was ten. How could I articulate this crisis to anyone..? I couldn’t
relate it to myself…
Before
all the imbalances set me off, I was starting to recognize a frightening
detachment from family members I loved and respected. People I’d not regularly visited since
teenhood. I’d kept no friends other than some long-timers who were emerging
after years to appear self-dangerously disturbed. It all led to an isolation I could no longer
bear to sort out. MC and I parted ways.
But
alas, we would re-unite just a few years later or less. I had to re-learn how to hear and acknowledge
him, and embrace what was now more uncomfortable than ever. MC has talked me through repairing my body,
my self-courage, and changes in my life that just kind of had to happen, like
dealing with job transition, courtship and marriage, re-locating to a new
flat. Not necessarily life’s most
stunning accomplishments, but they were certainly mine.
The
most challenging times in our professional relationship are probably those I
face today. Middle age is a frightening
tightrope. It is in too many ways a
jaywalked crossing of a near-fatal traffic intersection at rush hour, with no
lights. MC has no need nor any room to cut me any slack now more than
ever. And yet, he remains the wiser of
us.
In
my most fearsome pockets, he will be there not to excoriate, but to calm me, to
remind me that in a world of what appears a population alienating, an economy
threatening, and a human odometer doomed to disrepair and incapacity one day
despite every advanced health awareness set in place, nutrition, exercise,
constant flossing and the like, I am well and stronger beyond my greatest
fears.
And
when we ascend from the subway and I make it to work, as I approach the
entrance, as the case has been since childhood, I never hear MC utter the
phrase, “we have to stop for today’. I’m
usually the one to call an end to the session.
I’m the one with other appointments.
He’s earned himself a rightful nap.
Noah
F.
