Fury (15 page)

Tissues. These were always my mother's main criticism of therapy. As a teenager she'd brought my sister to a counselor for the explicit purpose of getting her untimed testing on school exams (this required a letter from a psychologist, confirming conditions like anxiety or learning disorders)—not, she would have you know, because my sister needed someone to talk to. But my sister hadn't been in therapy a month before my mother began railing against the doctor's tissues. “They're just sitting right there on the table in front of her, almost as if he's encouraging her to cry! As if she'd been so abused and boo-hoo!” Shortly after, my sister quit going, because, she would later say, “He kept wanting me to talk about our family, and that wasn't why I'd gone to see him.”

As we talk, Alice seems awfully interested in what I consider to be the tangential details of my depression. She knows I've sought her out as the result of a recent breakup. Yet she keeps enticing me to tell her more about my parents, my childhood, my life since my first book and what compelled me to choose the anger topic for my second. I respond out of a sense of obligation, but my answers are brief.

As for my parents, I tell Alice that they are very supportive, particularly of my writing.

She nods meaningfully, taking a sip from a small carton of juice and again fixing me with her sparkling eyes.

I tell Alice my childhood was so average and uneventful that I have few distinct memories of it. I tell her I played with the other girls in the neighborhood (leaving out what an unwelcome tagalong I was, how I was frequently excluded and bullied). I say I've always had a roof over my head (but leave out how desperate I had been to sneak my way out of it). I tell her my parents had never divorced or anything (but not about the endless arguments with my mother, fights I had frequently tried to cope with by boozing to blackout).

I'm not trying to be rude, but I firmly tell Alice I didn't have any childhood woes. “Maybe we can just skip ahead in the interest of time?”

Regarding my first book, I tell Alice I'd written it at twenty-three in a fit of urgency. What the rush was, I still can't say. It had seemed imperative that I write it, that I'd felt the story might leave me if I didn't get it down right away. The words had run through my head and I'd panted along after them, typing nothing short of eighty words per minute and composing sentences even in my dreams.

And finally we get to my book-in-the-works. I admit to Alice that I set out to write a book about anger because I sensed I was conflicted about it.

“Why do you think that is?” Alice asks me, bringing the stub of her pen to her mouth. (In eight months together, this will be the only time she sits back and takes notes.)

“I don't know,” I say, shrugging. “Maybe because I'm a woman? It's not very feminine to get angry.”

“So, let me just make sure I have this right. You think your femininity is responsible for your writer's block?”

“No, that's not right. The fact that I'm a woman has nothing to do with my ability to be a productive writer.” I feel uneasy, confused about how we arrived at this topic of conversation. I rub my face with my palms.

“Is there a chance that the repressed anger that led you to write this book is the same force that's preventing you from seeing it through?”

It seemed more than likely. Later, at home, one of my researching jags leads me to look up the word “fury” in my
Oxford English Dictionary
. There beneath the first dictionary definition—“fierce passion, madness, wild anger, or frenzied rage”—is an obsolete definition. There was a time when “fury” also referred to “inspired frenzy; (artistic) inspiration.” Maybe, in all my attempts to stave off a fit of emotional frenzy, I've also cut myself off from a creative one. I learn that some psychotherapists, including Beverly Engel, believe “Repressed and suppressed anger can thwart creativity and motivation.”

It makes me a little nervous to sit in a one-on-one session with Alice. My only previous brush with therapy was an anger-management seminar I'd attended two years earlier, and I won't yet admit that that was anything more than research.

That seminar (in the interest of protecting the people I met there, let's call it SAP and say it stands for Self Actualization Program) was what its Web site described as a “group experience.” “Angry people feel alienated,” the sponsoring institution claimed during one of my first sessions there. And its program aimed to replace that isolation with feelings of inclusion and camaraderie.

I felt sick as I wheeled my pull-along suitcase into a budget motel off of the Interstate. All weekend our therapy was interrupted by the sounds of couples in the throes of extramarital affairs, midday ass smackings, and appeals to “fuck me harder.” I still remember the fishbowl on top of the check-in desk, where a fish floated three days dead in a bowl of rainbowed gravel, and the way the night manager suppressed a smirk when I told him I was there to attend the SAP weekend.

My SAP coattendees slouched on their patio chairs in all variety of maladroit poses. They were round-shouldered, cross-armed, cross-legged, and crooked, with their hats pulled down over their noses and their hands turtled into their sleeves. To avoid eye contact, we studied the wall's “Feelings Chart” as though trying to select an appropriate emotion. Listed in one column were “Unpleasant Feelings”: Bitter, Weary, Wary, Fuming, Vulnerable, Humiliated, and Lost. In another were “Pleasant Feelings,” the ones we'd never enjoyed: Calm, Certain, Sure, Assured, Satisfied, Fortunate, and Free.

Danielle, a woman with the habit of writing into her leather-bound notebook whatever the therapists at SAP said, was in her midthirties, Chinese, and beautiful in a way that seemed packaged too tightly, what with the high-chinned, sharp-shouldered, and too-erect way she delivered herself. “It's human frailty that endears people,” one of the therapists told us during our first night at SAP. “You guys have to learn to let people in. To show the world your imperfections.” I felt an affinity with Danielle. She traveled just as far as I did to attend SAP.

Danielle confessed to the group that she'd enrolled because she and her husband were fixing to get pregnant. And when the time eventually came—when their gametes fused, her breasts ballooned, and the smell of the morning coffeepot began to flex her gag muscle—Danielle didn't want to project all her unappeased furies onto the tiny person doing somersaults in her uterus. It struck me as a nice thought, and perverse in the way of all things brilliant. I mean, whose mother was that considerate?

Beside Danielle, there was Carly and Daryl, sitting in milk-white sneakers and matching tracksuits with the American flag embroidered over their hearts. They were attending SAP to doctor their long-ailing marriage. Their union, they said, resembled a flaming sack of crap. Should they stamp it out? Let it burn? They hoped the SAP team could help them decide.

Next was Nico, splaying his legs into the center of the circle and fanning his brown toes over the edges of his flip-flops. He was my age at the time, twenty-five, and Hawaiian, with a breadth and might to his frame. Even at Nico's most inconsolable—even when he talked about the horrors of his childhood, about the time his mother made him chew on the contents of his own soiled diaper—his sloe eyes stayed backlit, as though they'd retained the violet-red flare of the Big Island sunset.

Bev and Tate both stood at the brink of retirement and wanted to exorcise their anger once and for all. To puke it out of their systems, so to speak, so they could enjoy their post-nine-to-five lives in fraternal good humor. To hear them tell it, they'd spent decades seething, socking pillows and spending as much on therapy as they might've spent on lush summer bungalows. And yet they still found themselves flaring up over the smallest annoyances—wrong change, telemarketers, long lines at the post office—because they couldn't seem to pardon the massive ways they'd been mistreated by the people closest to them.

Finally, there was Raquel, who fast became my cohort, my angel and friend there. A San Francisco native, she was a hairstylist of the rangy, perfumed, gravel-voiced variety. When it was her turn at introduction, Raquel revealed that she was there at the insistence of her fiancé, who had attended an SAP seminar one month before.

These were SAP's primary players, those who monopolized most of the conversation because they enthusiastically chose to be there. But there were also a few barrel-bodied men enrolled because a court had required it. Some were road ragers. Others nose breakers. Many confessed to having pending sentences and prior arrest records. A spattering of soft-spoken and small-wristed women sat as far away from the convicts as our cramped room would allow. They hailed from households rife with domestic anger, and over the course of the weekend a few resolved to leave their abusive husbands, whatever it might take.

I suspect that if I'd been more forthcoming at SAP, I might have come to a few revelations that could've kept me out of Alice's office. But it had been easy to take a backseat to so many big characters.

Alone with Alice, without anyone else around to divert the conversation, I feel uneasy, exposed.

I can't fight the feeling that she is trying to trick me into incriminating my family. Anytime I make some blanket statement about the Lark, Alice seems to minimize the importance of my relationship with him. Instead, she asks me for what feels like the hundredth time, “Who does that remind you of?”

When I tell her I wanted to be close to the Lark but was afraid he'd think I was demanding, she challenges me by asking, “Is there someone else in your life who tells you that you're oppressive?”

When I tell her that I felt responsible for the Lark's moods when I was living in Brighton, she drills me. “Who else passes their emotions off on you?”

Although I sense the answer she's fishing around for, I flat out refuse to take the bait. I grow cautious and inarticulate whenever she begins this line of questioning. I begin to respond with gems like, “I've never given it much thought.” I'm aware that I am throwing out a lot of shrugged shoulders and muddled looks. Revealing anything about my family feels like a betrayal. I'd always lived by the idea that the first rule of the Zailckas family is like the first rule of
Fight Club
(don't talk about it).

Alice seems to sense my reluctance, so she switches tactics. She wants to know which of the Lark's words had hurt me the most. These things are sometimes retraumatizations, a.k.a. “the domino effect,” also known as “collapse.” She suggests (very gently) that my experience in Brighton might have reminded me of experiences when I'd been insulted or invalidated as a child. Perhaps memories I've ignored or minimized are making the current situation more agonizing than it needs to be. Later, in psychologist Alice Miller's work, I will find a further description of the kind of collapse that my own Alice is hinting at.

I look into Alice's blue-gray eyes, which are gentle with effusive kindness. She certainly doesn't fit my image of a therapist. I could try, I suppose, to talk to her like a girlfriend, even though she couldn't be less like my actual girlfriends, most of whom would laugh wildly at a phrase like “retraumatization.”