“You’re going to your shit spot,” Dr. Ham cautioned when I did this. “You’re triggered right now. Don’t go there.”
Whenever he issued this warning, I’d fight back: “I’m not going to my shit spot, I don’t even know what a shit spot is, I’m not triggered.” And he’d say, “Okay,” until I realized I was triggered, and then I’d be embarrassed that I hadn’t known I was triggered, and I’d just sit there and cry and rocket myself straight into I’m-Going-to-Die-Aloneville. At some point during these hourlong ordeals, when I was busy saying the worst things about myself, Dr. Ham would try unsuccessfully to stifle his chortles, and he’d call me stupid. For some reason—which I can only attribute to Asians! That’s how they are!—I would not take this personally and would instead yell back, “I’m not stupid, you’re stupid, STUPID!” We’d both laugh, and then I was back in a position where I was ready to do the work.
* * *
—
One night, I had a dream that I was taking a painting class. I made friends with two of the women, and we all got close as we created frescoes of sunsets and ranches. During seaside villa day, one of them started talking about her divorce. She was going on and on and on about it, and I said to her, “Oh yeah, that really sucks. By the way, should we paint this section blue?” My dream friend screamed, “I’m so sick of you! You’re a terrible listener! I’m never talking to you again!” and stormed off. I chased after her, screaming, “Wait! Wait!” and sobbing and shouting at myself, Oh no! I didn’t attune to her! I didn’t intuit what she needed!
Dr. Ham laughed at this dream, too. “Why is it so literal?”
“I know!” I said. “My subconscious could try to be a little less on the nose.”
* * *
—
And then, six weeks in, I watched the video that changed the tone of therapy completely.
I’d been clicking through old Saturday Night Live videos on YouTube when I discovered that Dr. Ham had a channel. Scrolling through, I burst into giggles. Trust dorky, jargony Dr. Ham to give his videos the least punchy titles humanly possible. I clicked on the video labeled “Healing Attachment Trauma through Attuned Love.”[1]
The video was a recorded session between a father and daughter. Dr. Ham was facilitating their conversation. There were no images, just audio transcribed with white words on a black background. If I had to guess, I’d have said the daughter was in her twenties, the father a big, rough New Yawker. It was immediately clear that the daughter didn’t have the best relationship with him because she didn’t feel cared for by him (relatable). When her father would get angry, he’d lose his temper and yell that she was spoiled and selfish, which made her afraid to approach him if she needed anything. This dynamic seemed to have been profoundly aggravated by the death of a family member. Her parents had been in so much pain after this person’s death that nobody was around to help their child process her feelings. Afterward, whenever she tried to express anxiety or sadness, her parents would dismiss her, saying she was being dramatic or even suggesting that their pain was worse than hers.
The daughter was hesitant and withdrawn at first. But with Dr. Ham’s coaxing, she cried, her voice shaking as the words tumbled out of her mouth, quick and uncontrollable avalanches of anger and sadness that she’d clearly held back for years. “You were okay after, but I wasn’t. I wasn’t okay, because I was holding your pain. Who can I talk to? Who’s there for me? No one!…And I don’t get an opportunity to feel coddled or protected because I’m so busy listening to you. It’s frustrating because I know you want to protect me…but then all the moments I need you to protect me…where the fuck are you?”
At first, the girl’s father was defensive. He didn’t remember saying the things she claimed he’d said. And how was he supposed to know she needed him if she hadn’t come to him? Was he supposed to read her mind? Ah, so familiar. I remembered having almost this exact conversation with my own father a hundred times before.
But with the girl and Dr. Ham ganging up on him, the father eventually realized he’d messed up. His armor of defensiveness cracked, and instead, he hurled himself into despair. “I fucking suck at relationships,” he said hopelessly. “I just lash out when I shouldn’t. I don’t have control. For so long, I just wanted to be that great dad.” There was a long pause, then a strangled confession: “But I’m not.”
This, too, was familiar. In rare conversations with my father when we had reached this point, when I had made him cry, I’d felt somewhat seen but not satisfied. Because his self-hatred put me in the position where I had to comfort and parent him again. This recognition was raw and unpleasant, but now there was something else. Something different and even more disconcerting.
Watching this video, I didn’t just recognize myself in the daughter—I saw myself in the father, too. I fucking suck at relationships. This man was stuck fully in his shit spot of self-flagellating hatred. He was me, sitting on the curb, wailing that I wanted to die instead of addressing the problem at hand. I picked my cuticles uncomfortably as I listened.
Luckily for this family, in this conversation, Dr. Ham was there to halt this line of thinking. “Why are you responding like that?” he interrupted the father in his characteristically blunt way. But his voice was gentle and generous. “How is that responding to her? You’re not being attuned to her. Don’t go that far. Be sad about what happened, but don’t go so far as to say you’re a bad dad.”
Then the daughter cut in. “I’m scared that what I’m telling you, you’re taking as, I suck, I’m the worst. It goes to that dark place in your head where it’s all the bad things that you were told were bad about you, that were like, You suck, you’re bad. And I’m like…no! Fuck! No!” She smashed her fist down on something. “You’re not! You’re just not there yet. I don’t want you to feel hurt. I want you to feel motivated!”