At this point, I didn’t have faith in the dad to be able to respond thoughtfully to this. It didn’t seem as if anybody else was optimistic, either. The daughter admitted she couldn’t even look at her father. Dr. Ham clearly didn’t know how to direct him further without causing him more pain. “I think you somehow have to let her pain seep in and be still in your attention. I don’t know how to do that…I need your heart to fully absorb her experience,” he said, but I could tell he was floundering nervously. Everyone felt resigned to the fact that the daughter was not going to get what she needed today.
But then—suddenly, when we least expected it—it was as if the hand of God touched the man. The quality of his voice changed from hesitant and fearful to simply…full. “I just feel a lot of love towards her right now,” he said. His voice was still trembling but not because he was scared of what he should say. His voice was trembling because he couldn’t find the words for the fullness of his love. “I’m waiting for her to look at me,” he said joyfully. He was not resentful of the fact that she couldn’t meet his eyes. He was laughing, reveling in the presence of his beloved girl. He was full of grace. “My whole feeling right now is just to hold you. I’m here. I’m here for you. To hold you. To do whatever it is you want me to do.”
It wasn’t even the words, really; the very tone of the father’s voice had immediately changed the frigid timbre in the room. A fire had been lit. The daughter’s anger melted. She let herself into his arms. The father and daughter embraced each other and cried, the sobs muffled by each other’s clothing. Even though so few words had actually been said, something healing had just occurred.
“That was the right answer,” Dr. Ham said proudly.
* * *
—
I sat back and closed the video. The image that occurred to me was of Anne Sullivan forcing Helen Keller’s hand under the pump and spelling out the letters W-A-T-E-R on her palm. This video had similarly baptized me, awoken me to a shocking truth:
Punishment doesn’t work.
I was taught that punishment and shame were the logical and necessary reactions to screwing up. The benefit of punishment was that it would keep my wild and terrible natural tendencies in line. It would shame me into being better. “Justice is the firmest pillar of good government,” after all, and justice meant people had to pay for their mistakes. When something went wrong, there had to be fault. There had to be blame. There had to be pain.
Now I knew I was wrong. Punishment didn’t make things better. It mucked things up even more.
The father’s self-punishment did not grant him his daughter’s forgiveness. It did not whip his sins out of him. Instead, it removed him from his family by isolating him in a prison of self-loathing. Locked in this prison, he couldn’t hear what his daughter needed. He couldn’t give her what she was asking for. There was blame and pain in spades. But all of this actively prevented him from making amends, from healing his relationship with his daughter.
Punishment did not ease Willow or Jeremy or the other children at Mott Haven back into their circles of friends. Punishment excludes and excises. It demolishes relationships and community.
When I was a little girl, my mother used to ask me all the time, “Who do you love more? Mommy or Daddy?” I knew from a very young age to be diplomatic, to say, “I love both of you equally,” even though this always seemed like a disappointment to both of them rather than a reassurance.
The question would come up during fun times—mornings when we all snuggled in my parents’ bed—and tense fights, when they dragged me out of bed in the middle of the night to arrange some premature custody agreement. Finally, one day I was fed up, or maybe I was just tired. So when my mother asked, “Who do you love more?” I answered, “I guess Mommy. Because she punishes me more. So she must love me more.”
I could not believe it had taken me this long to realize that punishment is not love. In fact, it is the opposite of love.
Forgiveness is love. Spaciousness is love.
It was only when the father in the video was able to escape his self-punishment that he could see what was actually happening. He shed his dark glasses and witnessed his daughter, saw her in blindingly bright, multicolored truth—a remarkable girl, his girl, a girl who felt alone and needed her dad to parent her. Only then was he able to see that he possessed all the power to give his daughter what she needed. It was the opposite of shame that allowed him to really be there.
Over and over, the answer is the same, isn’t it? Love, love, love. The salve and the cure.
In order to become a better person, I had to do something utterly unintuitive. I had to reject the idea that punishing myself would solve the problem. I had to find the love.
* * *
—
The next week, one of the reporters I was editing was struggling against me. She refused to take any of my edits and sent me three drafts in a row that were almost identically incomplete. Finally, after I pushed her yet again to add more narration, she emailed me suggesting that maybe this relationship wasn’t working—maybe she needed to be reassigned to a different editor. As soon as I read the email, I went into full triggered mode. I’m not good at my job, I messed up, oh my God, I’m a mess, if I were a kinder, better person she wouldn’t feel like she hates me, oh God. My immediate instinct was to shut down and run: If she hates me I should just not work with her. Fine. Good riddance. She can pick another editor. Bye.
But this time I also knew: This self-punishment was all a waste of time. It solved nothing. What was really happening in this situation?
I now had a bunch of tools in my kit. I took a multipronged approach to solve this problem. I ate some food and then sat and meditated for a while to calm my body. I felt better but still was plagued with self-doubt. So I reached out to someone I trusted and knew had the emotional space for a five-minute perspective check—my old Snap Judgment boss, Mark—and asked for his take on the situation. He assured me that I am a fantastic editor but that tons of people have trouble taking criticism. This was not about me.
I sat with that a moment. I remembered how people with C-PTSD can often assume problems are about them—not out of selfishness or narcissism but because they want to have enough control to be able to solve the problem. But if this was not about me, then what was she struggling with? What did she need? Could I provide it? I tried to prepare for the fact that I might not be able to, and that’s okay, too.