—
Catherine was right. Estrangement is not freeing. It has not felt joyful. It has not been happy. It has only felt necessary, and even that is something I question all the time: Does this make me selfish? Does it make me cruel? Then I think of the Thao Nguyen lyric, You made a cruel kid. Come look what you did.
The silence now is not so different from the lonely holidays I endured over the years, an extension of the months of silence we’d exchanged but more total. There is one major difference: I don’t have to work on earning his love anymore. I can just work on accepting that I will never have it. That is far from peace. But it is what it is.
CHAPTER 34
Removing my parents from my life protected me, but it did not fix me. The excision was not healing in and of itself. Instead, it cleared the way for me to rebuild. Because now came the hard part: replacing them.
Many believe that in order to heal from C-PTSD, we must receive kind and compassionate parenting. If we can’t receive that from our own parents, then we must find a new parent to do the job.
One form of therapy actually enlists other people to assume the role of your parent. There are group therapy retreats in which other patients take turns “parenting” one another. Your new stand-in parent makes the apologies your parent cannot give you, then provides you with the generous affirmations you deserved to hear as a child—that they are proud of you, that you are inherently good and beautiful. For many, this provides closure and allows them to foster new beliefs about themselves.
And there are many other therapies built around teaching adults to reparent themselves. EMDR is one of them. In my first EMDR session, I embraced a child version of myself, “saved” her from her abuse, and told her she deserved love. But subsequent EMDR sessions were less effective, and I never was moved as starkly as in my first experience. Plus, Eleanor, her worksheets, and her constant coughing got on my nerves. After about three months, I stopped seeing her.
* * *
—
It was now seven months after my diagnosis, and summer had turned into fall. Even though I’d applied to a waitlist in the spring, it had taken this long to be paired with an affordable trauma-therapist-in-training through the National Institute for the Psychotherapies. Mr. Sweater-Vest had a gentle smile, but it was offset by his eyes, which seemed terrified of me. Among other modalities, he practiced Internal Family Systems, or IFS, a form of therapy that asks patients to break up their mind into subpersonalities—a kind of internal family unit. Let’s say you’re an alcoholic. You might consider that drinking is not your entire identity. There is just one part of your personality that wants you to drink all the time. IFS practitioners call it your “firefighter,” because firefighters react to triggers and try to put out the fire by comforting you—often with unhealthy habits like drinking, binge eating, or doing drugs. This framework allows you to see your firefighter as part of your “family unit” and to subsequently forgive him for his tendency to throw beer on everything. He’s just trying to calm you, after all, and maybe you needed him for a time. But also, maybe you can retire him from service now and use another, healthier part of your “family” to care for yourself. I know many people who found IFS to be instrumental in their healing process, so I gave it a whirl.
My new therapist, Mr. Sweater-Vest, asked me to draw caricatures of all of my subpersonalities. I doodled a jump-roping girl: my silly, fun side. A six-armed North Korean traffic controller: my obsessive manager. A Stepford wife with a meatloaf: my nurturer. A sword-wielding Arya Stark figure: my fighter. And a black puddle of sludge: my needy sad sack. He tried to get me to talk to these cartoons, to celebrate them and thank them for their service. But befriending them was a block I couldn’t get over.
“What do you want to say to your puddle?” he asked me.
“Um…I have no idea. I…am not a fan of the puddle. I wish the puddle would go away forever. So…I…hope you dry up one day? Sorry?”
Mr. Sweater-Vest looked peeved.
“No? It doesn’t seem you like that. Can you give me some direction? Is there something I should say to it?” I asked.
He just forced a smile and shrugged. He was trying to be quiet, hoping the growing awkwardness would force me to eventually feel so itchy that I’d fill in the space with my talking. I knew this technique because I used it all the time with my interview subjects. Well, you can’t use my own tricks on me, buddy. I fixed my gaze on him and we had a stare-off. His eyes started to take on that uncomfortable, scared-doe look, and something about his fear made me want to put him in my crosshairs.
“You have to trust the process,” he eventually said, “or this isn’t going to work. Where does your skepticism of this process come from? Do you want to explore why you have a hard time trusting others in the first place?”
“I know why I have a hard time trusting others, I just don’t know what I’m supposed to say to a fucking puddle.”
In retrospect, maybe I didn’t talk to the puddle because I was too afraid to face and accept the part of myself I hated most. Or maybe I was rejecting reliance on family, even a made-up family in my head. Or maybe some people just don’t jibe with talking to imaginary inanimate objects. In any case, IFS never really stuck for me. I exited the sessions with a voice in my head saying, That was stupid. You’re wasting your time, or maybe you’re just too dumb to get this. I knew that voice was my mother. But I still couldn’t get her to shut up.
* * *
—
Once in a while, when I felt like I needed a pick-me-up, I still went to meditation classes. On a few occasions, I tried out MNDFL, an intimidatingly hip meditation space that looked as if it were straight out of an episode of Black Mirror. It had one very white, empty room with an enormous floor-to-ceiling circular window displaying a lush garden. It was peak wellness-as-gentrification, but it was also in the network of my fitness app, so I got to go for dirt cheap.
One of the times I went, the person directing the meditation was a beautiful man of indiscriminate nationality with a lovely, soothing British accent—straight from central casting. I set my pillow down between my legs, closed my eyes, and listened.