Door Number Three - Softcover

One
 
 
When we were still on speaking terms, my mother once asked me, "How on earth will you ever know if you've cured anyone?" It was a loaded question to ask a psychology major. It encompassed entire realms of parental disapproval: a sly challenge to my pride, a devout Catholic's skepticism for any form of secular salvation, an implied reprimand for my abandoning my "vocation"--I had just left the seminary--and, of course, an Irish mistrust of a world without suffering.
Our arguments were the ideal initiation into my profession. From them I learned that the crucial element of conversation is the unspoken, the deftly avoided chuckhole that words swerve around--which dictates by denial, deception, and omission the path and shape of human conflict. She taught me to keep a lookout for the invisible choreography we all dance when we think we're merely talking. It took me years to decipher the astonishing levels of guile in her words. In that sense, she was my first analysis. She taught me that nobody is who they appear to be, and nobody says what they really mean, especially if they love you.
So I answered her, or the implied question I felt I could return with the most spin. "It's a science, Mother. Doctors know when their patients are cured. I will know."
"Well," she said with a forgiving sigh, "I've no doubt you'll learn from your failures."
I always wondered whether Mom's benediction should be formally recognized, take a place on the wall of my notoriously ragged office. All my clients comment on it, my idea of interior decoration: Leave it where it falls. It's an habitual sloppiness I no doubt developed as a declaration of independence from a childhood home obsessed with cleanliness, which, as you know, is next to You-Know-What. I'd get it notarized and framed and mount it above my scummy aquarium next to my diplomas: an Official Certificate of Failure. I could put it on my business card: John Donelly, B.S. in Psychology, Master of Social Work, A.C.S.W., Licensed Therapist, Lapsed Catholic, Failure.
All of which is a roundabout way of saying: This is the story of my greatest failure. Laura came into my life in the spring of 1990. To say she was the most unusual client I've ever worked with would be an understatement of vast proportions. To say I didn't cure her is laughably beside the point. In fact, she did for me exactly what I'd always hoped to do for all my clients: she changed the way I thought, felt, and lived forever. She split my life into two neat historical periods: Before Laura and After Laura. She was not just the only client I've ever fallen in love with, she was the only client I ever wanted to kill.
I was in my fifth year of private practice. An appropriate description of therapy: practice. It's a craft at which I always feel like an apprentice, an amateur in the process of learning. Therapy is the jazz of sciences: free-form, unscored, and largely improvised. Amidst the rare sweet passages when everything syncs up and harmony prevails, there are a lot of bum notes. No wonder people regard it with suspicion, and rank it for discomfort somewhere between dentistry and plumbing.
Usually people seek me out only after reaching some state of critical mass: a job lost, divorce, depression, abuse, addiction. They come with sharp hurting eyes, or bewildered pleading smiles; they come bitter or blaming, or full of polite reassurances that they have no idea why they're here; it's really their spouse that has the problem.
But by far the worst off are the ones who come benumbed, unaware of their torment, at best able to admit that their lives have become unmanageable. I brace myself for them. I don't tell them that they have to work back to the point where it hurts again; if I did they wouldn't stay. And I want to help them, perhaps more than they want to be helped. For I know them well: people who choose survival and cheat themselves out of life, people who squelch their grief and block out any chance for joy. I've been to that dark place and I tell them: there's a way out. I tell them joy and suffering are not mutually exclusive, they flow from the same valve. Close that valve and you may not hurt as much, but neither will you shine.
How many people have entered my office, sat opposite me in the blue overstuffed chair, the Kleenex box beside them, the clock in my line of sight (not theirs), sat down with the mess of their lives and waited for me to work a miracle? They expect me to do something to them. They charm or chat and tell me lots of delightful stories, until at last they use up their routine, and like a newscaster who has finished his report too soon, they feel the great emptiness of the clock, the beating heart, the imperfect, unscripted human gap that aches to be filled with the only terror that heals: the terror of being ourselves. How we suffer to avoid it.
It is this reluctance that forces people into the most artificial encounters: two strangers alone in a room, talking about the most intimate troubles. Friends specialize in acceptance. Families in saving face. Neighbors in keeping up appearances. The clergy in moral absolutes. So to the therapist falls the lot that no one else will take: confrontation. Which is why most people see me only as a last resort. They'd prefer to search in the light for something lost in the dark.
I listen; I talk; I encourage, and together we build a trusting place: a halfway house between the inside and the outside of themselves, a safe place where the issue is Reality. Often I find myself moved by their struggles and the little offerings of courage they make me (not yet aware they give it to themselves).
What flavor of shrink am I? Well, I use a sort of smorgasbord of methods. My discipline derives from Depth Psychology, the discoveries of Freud and his devotees; I believe in the contents and structures of the human unconscious, the benefits of dream analysis. Hell, I believe in whatever works, from Prozac to primal screams. The fact is individual problems require individual treatment, not theories. Having said that, I admit that the heaviest emphasis in my work is on the theories of Carl Jung (a mental genuflection here). While I'm not strictly a "Jungian," and I have no official certification in that area, I do try to practice what he preached. And I am continually amazed by the efficacy of his ideas in my daily work. I've seen too much synchronicity, witnessed too much of the human shadow, seen over and over the healing guidance of the psyche, to doubt the breathtaking depth of Jung's insights. There are many useful tools available to shrinks. Jung's, however, in my opinion, seem to cut deeper, heal stronger, and salvage more real growth from real trauma. In my experience, he works. End of commercial.
If I'm due any credit for this healing, it's only because I have a gift. A reflexive hypervigilance I learned as a survival tactic to get through my childhood. An early warning radar system I used to gauge my mother's moods, dodge her disapproval, maneuver my way through a maze of mysterious and unspoken demands. I can actually read a person's disposition at a glance--a very neurotic holdover from my youth that serves me well in my profession.
Or, it did until Laura. I simply could not "read" her. And though her story was incredible, it contained no obvious patterns of disturbance, no subtle hints at the dark secrets that normally take months to uncover, no sense of self-deception or guile, and no clues as to what this striking, well-adjusted person was doing in my office on a cold May afternoon. I couldn't even hazard a guess at her ethnic background: this tall dark-haired woman with the brown skin of a Native American, the green eyes in the almond shape of an Asian, and an elongated English face and chin. Surely the genetic uniqueness alone might have enticed me into believing this creature (I...