We Have To Stop For Today....

 

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.