“That…really? It’s not a crazy thing, to feel lonely?”
“No, especially when life is delicious. You just ate the best food for the whole weekend and then all of a sudden you are eating crackers and water all day. You’re like, what? I’m not supposed to miss the good stuff? You need to stop judging your body and its natural feelings.”
On another day, I talked about how deeply depressed I got after logging on to Twitter. Looking at other colleagues’ career advances made me insecure. I tweeted something irreverent, got worried that it might be construed as offensive, and then immediately deleted it. How very C-PTSD, I complained, to get triggered over Twitter.
“Social media is stressful. Everyone feels this way,” Dr. Ham said.
“Do they actually, though?”
“Yes. They do. There could be real consequences to you tweeting something irresponsible. This is a valid thing to be afraid of.”
And then there were several days when I was feeling miserable at therapy about tiny things. I didn’t even want to bring my feelings up, they felt so stupid and small and not worth talking about. How dare I be sad about rereading an old, depressed blog entry? Or about the fact that I didn’t get a fellowship I applied for?
Dr. Ham saw through my veneer, though. On those days, he knew I was hiding from him. Knew I wasn’t quite being honest, even though I was trying to be present. He’d keep pushing me that something was wrong until I’d snap back at him, “I’m fine. You don’t know everything, you know. You’re not psychic.”
During one of my fine moods, Dr. Ham tried to get me to conjure baby Stephanie and nurture her.
“Great,” I deadpanned. “I’ll tell her that this is not her fault, and she doesn’t have control over everything, and it’s okay, and she has people who love her, and all that shit. Wonderful.”
He looked at me, surprised at my anger. “Wait, wait, wait. What just happened?”
What was happening was that these goddamn hokey tools took up so much time and effort, and sometimes they didn’t work, and…
“I’m just feeling tired,” I said. “Just mad that I have to do any of this in the first place. I’ve been working really hard for such a long time. I’ve been coming to you for months now.” (Eight weeks, to be exact.) “So when am I going to be fixed?”
Dr. Ham pivoted. “Look. There’s this really cheesy exercise—I’m embarrassed to say it, it’s so cheesy. But you like artsy-crafty things, right? Do you want to draw a circle?” He handed me a pad of paper and a pen.
I gave him a withering look. Usually artsy-crafty exercises were particularly cloying to me. But I relented and took the pad and pen and drew a circle because at least this was new. “Now what?”
“Draw on the inside the feelings that you’re allowed to have. That you allow yourself to have. And on the outside, write the feelings that you’re not allowed to have.”
“Okay.” Inside the circle I wrote: Happiness. Anger sometimes. Outside the circle, I wrote: Stressed out. Sadness. “I’m not allowed to be sad,” I said as I scribbled. “I’m allowed to be capable and in charge of my narrative. Not helpless and stupid.”
Dr. Ham laughed at me.
I sat with my circle a while, filling things outside of it, and then turned it around to show him. “There. Do you like my chart? Most feelings are on the outside. But see how it just says SMART! really big in the center of the circle. That’s mostly what I’m allowed to be.”
He leaned forward and squinted at it. “Looking at that, I imagine a tiger mom.”
I flipped the chart over to take another look. Crap. My mother, on the page, again. “Oh my God. Yeah.”
“Now, Part B of this stupid exercise is—imagine if you ever have a little child. What would you allow your child to have?”
I knew this exercise was really a variation on taking care of child Stephanie, but still, the point he was making was potent. If I did this to myself, would I traumatize my future child by putting this on them? “Oh my God!” I moaned. “This is a nightmare! It’s terrible!”
“You would never do this to your child,” he insisted.
“Yeah. You would do this—” I drew a giant circle around all the feelings.
“Right. You’d allow everything.” Dr. Ham sat in silence with me for a while. Then he said, “You’re tiger-childing your recovery—you’re telling yourself you have to be perfectly happy all the time. And if you’re feeling sad, you’re fucking up. You’re not really recovering.”
“Yeah,” I whispered.
“That’s not how it works.” Silence again. “Listen—let me tell you about hearts.”
I rolled my eyes and scoffed, prepping myself for another woo-woo purehearted Buddhist story.
“No. Real hearts. The heart as a muscle,” he said. “A healthy heart doesn’t pump at the same rate all the time. That would actually be a really unhealthy heart. The healthiest hearts are adaptable, and the quicker they adapt, the better. When you start running, your heart should ideally speed up quickly. Then, when you rest, it should slow down quickly. It’s the same for your emotions. When something really tragic happens, it would be weird if you were still happy, right? Or if you just sat there with no reaction. When something tragic happens, you should be there with that pain, feeling that sadness. When something unjust happens, you should feel how aggravating it is. And then, after you’ve sat with those feelings for the appropriate amount of time—and it could be an hour, or a day, or months, depending on the severity of what happened—then, you can go back to a state of rest. Or joy. Or whatever. Being healed isn’t about feeling nothing. Being healed is about feeling the appropriate emotions at the appropriate times and still being able to come back to yourself. That’s just life.”
* * *
—
Negative emotions are of course terrifying in the context of our society’s obsession with happiness. But they’re especially bad for anyone struggling with modern psychiatry’s pathologizing perfectionism. When I’d first read those books about people with complex PTSD, so many of them had described us as emotionally erratic and said we had trouble self-soothing. For the past two years, I had felt some form of shame whenever I wasn’t in a state of blissed-out gratitude and appreciation.