“Okay,” Eleanor says. “Now, send Joey in to rescue the baby version of you from this situation.”
Buzzers on. Eyes closed. Strong Joey. I imagine him striding in with his big-ass muscles bulging as I watch from the sidelines. He yanks the child version of me away from my mother. “You have to come with me,” he says. To my mother, he snarls, “This is unacceptable. Stop. You are not going to hurt her.”
Baby me starts to cry. “No! It’s my mom. What are you doing? Who are you? Don’t take me away from my mom.”
“You have to leave this. You don’t deserve to be treated like this. You have to leave.”
“I can’t leave. They need me. I have to protect them.”
“No, you don’t.” Joey hugs baby me extra tight. “You don’t have to fix anything to deserve love. I love you for who you are. You can fuck up. You can do whatever you want and you’ll still deserve love.”
Baby me struggles, tries to fight her way out of his grip, bites his arm hard enough to draw blood. Finally, Joey holds her at arm’s length, looks her in the eye, and says, “THEY DON’T LOVE YOU.” He points at my parents. “They don’t love you like you deserve to be loved. They are buried in their own misery and hurt to the point where they just cannot give you the kind of love that you need.”
Buzzers off. Tears still flow freely down my cheeks.
I sum up what has happened.
“Does baby Stephanie want to leave yet?” Eleanor asks.
“No.”
“Can you send in anyone else to help?”
“I don’t know.”
“What about adult Stephanie? She might recognize you.”
Joey disappears. I step forward and I kneel down next to her. “Listen,” I say. “I understand why you want to stay. It’s because you don’t know any kind of love outside of this. But I promise there’s different kinds of love out there, and you will meet other people who will give you what they can’t.”
Baby Stephanie looks at me hatefully and says, “But all those people left you.”
It’s like she’s slapped me. And then I’m angry. Tough-love time. I point to my parents. “But they both leave,” I say.
She seems shocked. Somehow, she hadn’t known.
“It’s true,” I yell, and now I’m loud. “They both abandon you in a few years. All the hard work that you put in to save them, all the mediation, the effort, none of it pays off. They don’t appreciate it at all. They never thank you.”
I see her harden. I know she believes me. It’s time to get her out.
Buzzers off. Eleanor pulls me out again. I tell her what happened. She says, “But what if she can’t go? Can you give her the tools that she needs to stay?” Buzzers on.
I want her to leave so bad. My real body is crying out of fear for her. I think of all the rational tips and tricks I could provide her with, things that could defuse conflict situations, but she’s already doing them.
“I just want you to know that you haven’t actually done anything wrong. Just remember that eventually you will be loved, I promise,” I say. “And…I want you to know how powerful you are. Your vigilance. Your diplomacy. You are only a small child, but you are the nucleus that keeps this family together. With or without you, these two toxic adults would be fundamentally unhappy. But you make them less unhappy, if anything. Their grief is not your fault.”
I grab her and pull her to me. I am trying to impart a lifetime of love and warmth in a single embrace.
And then that’s it. Buzzers off. It’s over.
I emerge, dazed and blinking in Eleanor’s cluttered office.
“How did you feel?” she asks.
“Less…hypnotized than I thought,” I reply, which is a ridiculously inadequate description of what just happened, but…do I have words for what just happened? I thank Eleanor, shake her hand, and stumble into the hallway, where I stand for a few minutes, staring blankly at the wall.
* * *
—
I had recalled that moment of abuse two hundred times and not once had I ever cried. I never flinched. I always felt calm all over, a flat, barren nothing. Past therapists told me many times, “The abuse was not your fault.” And I felt that windless chill and responded, “Yeah, sure. I know that.”
“Do you?” they asked. They forced me to repeat it, made me sit on their couches and awkwardly recite “The abuse I suffered was not my fault” over and over.
“And how do you feel now?” they’d ask, hopefully, after I was finished.
“I guess good?” I said. “Yeah, it’s true. It wasn’t my fault.” But I was a void when I said that. A voice and a body reading facts from a leaflet.
Real life is not Good Will Hunting. Robin Williams himself could’ve looked me in the eye and yelled and whispered “It’s not your fault” ten or twenty or two hundred times, and I would not have collapsed into his arms sobbing about my lost youth. I would have blinked back at him, “Yeah, sure, I know.”
But this had been something else. Those little buzzers had worked some kind of electronic Robin Williams magic. I didn’t just understand the weight of my abuse logically. I felt it, like a blade through flesh, like a bone popping out of place. I felt it like a lover saying it’s not going to work: sharp, immediate, and terrifying. I actually felt, with searing clarity, the horror of what happened to me—maybe for the first time ever. I felt how tremendously sad it was that I was forced to make my parents feel loved at such a young age. I felt how courageous I must have been to endure that torture, day after day for so many years, by the people I trusted most in this world. I felt a sense of love and adoration for my childhood self that I’d never been able to summon before.
There is a difference between knowing and understanding. I had known that this wasn’t my fault. EMDR unlocked the gate to the next realm, toward understanding. The difference is one between rote memorization and true learning. Between hypothesis and belief. Between prayer and faith. It seems obvious now—how can there be love without faith?
* * *
—
I learned two critical things that day. First: Just because the wound doesn’t hurt doesn’t mean it’s healed. If it looks good and it feels good, it should be all good, right? But over the years I’d smoothed perfect white layers of spackle over gaping structural holes.
And the second thing I learned was: My parents didn’t love me.