“It’s because I hated being the patient of therapists like that,” he admitted. “It terrified me. It didn’t ever make me feel safe. You have to be aware of how big a power difference there is between patient and therapist. And if you really want to work effectively with people, you have to keep surrendering your power. And that means being humble and making mistakes and fumbling and being comfortable with that.”
That fumbling made it easier for me to fumble, too. In our first meeting, I simply uh-huh, okayed every time I got confused. I’d wanted to feel smart and competent and act like I understood what he was saying. But now, I knew that would get me nowhere. So I asked ten times as many questions in my second session, interrogating Dr. Ham on everything I was unsure of. I asked him to define all the jargony terms he liked to drop on me. I asked him why he made the decisions he’d made. And I asked him what I really should have done with my aunt in the car that day. Why counting colors had just been okay to him, but not good enough.
Dr. Ham admitted he’d approached the story about my aunt with “asshole energy” and had perhaps been overly critical too quickly. But, he said, “In my mind, the most helpful thing for you is to be reconnected with another person. Self-regulation is a very insular thing. That’s just survival. Like, ‘I’m not going to actually learn how to be connected to you, but at least I’m going to be able to regulate how upset I get from you.’ And I don’t want you to just be self-regulating in a corner by yourself. Shame makes you want to hide and tuck away. But what if instead you were in this state where you could ask, ‘Who are you? What do you need from me right now? And what do I need from you?’?”
What would I have said to my aunt if I hadn’t been triggered? If I’d had the time and mental ability to ask all of those questions? Maybe I would have said something like: “I understand that having difficult in-laws was part of your experience, and for that I’m sorry. But I love my in-laws, and in America, they are my only family. So you saying they aren’t my real family—it’s hurtful. Instead, I’m going to need you to support my positive relationship with them.” Would she have reacted well to that? Would she have shut me down? Could it have strengthened our bond instead of being just a weird temper-tantrum-y moment we had to move through and put behind us? Maybe I could have tried to show myself to her?
“If it works, you could have a cheesy, lovey outcome where you both reconnect with each other and you are hugging her at the end,” Dr. Ham said. “Or, you could state your needs to her, and she could not respond in the way you want. And you could stay mad at her and disappointed in her and be okay with it. Because you’re recognizing why she acts the way she does. And you’re forgiving yourself for reacting to her, and acknowledging, ‘I need more than that from her.’?”
“I’m reconnecting with myself,” I said slowly. “That counts, too?”
“Yes.”
This was Dr. Ham’s whole theory: that because of its repetitive nature, complex trauma is fundamentally relational trauma. In other words, this is trauma caused by bad relationships with other people—people who were supposed to be caring and trustworthy and instead were hurtful. That meant future relationships with anybody would be harder for people with complex trauma because they were wired to believe that other people could not be trusted. The only way you could heal from relational trauma, he figured, was through practicing that relational dance with other people. Not just reading self-help books or meditating alone. We had to go out and practice maintaining relationships in order to reinforce our shattered belief that the world could be a safe place.
“Relationships are like sports. It’s muscle memory, it’s all the action of doing. You can’t just read about tennis and know how to play tennis. There’s a lot of dueling involved. Interpersonal dueling!” As he saw it, his office was a safe place to practice dueling. Learning how to listen, how to talk, how to ask for what I needed.
The Google Doc took the sports metaphor one step further. Dr. Ham loved to play squash. He was really competitive at it. But whereas other players would just practice for hours on end, he’d also record his games. He would set up a little camera in the corner of the room and watch his videos afterward to see where he’d made mistakes, how he could adjust his form. This allowed him to get better quickly. Relistening to my therapy sessions was meant to employ the same technique.
“It’s a courageous thing you’re doing,” he said. “Not everyone can watch themselves play. A lot of people are too self-conscious.”
It would make sense if this form of therapy creeped other people out. After all, it took me months to adjust to the sound of my own voice when I first started working in radio. At the time, all my weird breaths and lisps gave me the heebie-jeebies. But because of my job, this process felt familiar. With an energy I hadn’t felt in months, I told Dr. Ham at the end of our second session, “I feel good! I feel optimistic!” It had been only two weeks, but I felt as if I had some solid techniques to bring to conversations in my life. Some real, concrete ways to love the people around me better.
A few days later, I was on the phone with Kathy as we talked about our weeks. She started to say that her co-worker was annoying but then drifted off. “Eh, never mind,” she said. “It was nothing. Anyway, how is your work going?” My immediate reaction was to let it go and move on in the conversation. But then I paused. Something about my new, heightened awareness clued me in to the way her voice had trailed off. I should follow up on what she was saying. My second thought was to complain about annoying co-workers or even trash-talk her co-worker whom I knew nothing about in order to comfort her. But instead, I asked, “No, wait. What were you saying about your co-worker? How did they make you feel?” Given the space and opportunity, she shared some vulnerable thoughts about her fears at work. Stuff I never would have gotten to hear if I’d moved on or jumped ahead in the conversation. Afterward, I felt closer to her, and I think she felt closer to me, too. For the first time in months, I ended a conversation feeling capable. Like a good person.
Maybe this was going to work.
CHAPTER 39
Going to Dr. Ham’s office felt like going to the gym: It was a training ground built to work out your mind and heart, to make them stronger. And it reminded me of another training arena for younger people. A couple of years earlier, while doing some research for a potential This American Life story, I had visited a place called Mott Haven Academy, a charter school in the Bronx where most of the student body was in foster care. The school let me spend an entire day observing its students, and I noticed immediately that it felt very different from your average school.
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