Fury (16 page)

I tell Alice that I keep coming back to what the Lark said about us “getting along better in
print
.” He'd said my
letters
“sparked something in him.” What really hits me in the jugular, I tell Alice, is the implication that he prefers the professional me to the real me sitting here in flesh and blood.

Alice burbles sympathetically. She makes some distinction between being admired, like a possession, for our talents, and being understood, taken seriously and loved as human creatures—humans who are, in turn, sometimes lonely, jealous, helpless, anxious, and, yes, even angry.

I'm intrigued, but I internalize too readily that feeling of inadequacy. Just the mention of it and it blossoms in me so furiously that I can't concentrate on Alice's bowed mouth.

Hot tears force themselves into my line of vision, and if I don't regain control soon, immediately and magically, I'll be forced to lean over and withdraw a tissue from the “ultra-soft” box that taunts me. I was just as skeptical about therapy as I was about homeopathy, but for the first time I wonder if there's something of my mother in me after all. Even here, where I am paying for an emotional outlet, I hear her voice saying, “You think you've had it so hard. Do you have any idea what I went through when I was a kid?”

I had collapsed into tears just as quickly at SAP. The group barely finished with introductions when I turned lachrymose and cried me a Nile.

“What are these tears about?” one of the therapists asked me with all the compassion of a drill sergeant. Her name was Sheila and she was the founder of SAP, the casher of checks marked “Pay to the Order of.” Not more than five years ago, she'd been a registered nurse (more Ratched than Nightingale, if I had to wager a guess). But at SAP, she stood before us as a board-licensed shrinker of craniums. She was Freud in Stuart Weitzman heels.

I felt silenced by the power of everything I might say. SAP was a place that subsisted on words. Every feeling had to be defined, qualified, and dismantled by the group at large. A person couldn't simply shrug there or let a brief spasm of emotion pass without comment. My embarrassment expanded with the widening pause.

I was crying as a result of a get-to-know-you game that Sheila and her partner, a woman named Trish, had devised, whereby we took turns sharing our first impressions of one another, both good and evil. “It seems harsh,” Trish said. “But out there in the world, everyone's making snap judgments about everyone else. Only in here, we're more open about it. In here, we're privy to what our peers think of us.”

According to my eleven coparticipants, I struck them as “meek,” “frail,” “wimpy,” “hypersensitive,” and “overwhelmed,” as though “everything was too much to take.” In addition, Daryl, SAP's resident metaphorist, described me as “a baby bird that needed taking care of.” This analogy hit me particularly hard. (Was it because I'd always felt like my mother resented how much I needed her as a kid?) I kept picturing myself wet, widemouthed, big beaked, and cadging at high pitch for a mouthful.

My counterparts had said things that were complimentary too. The rules of the exercise required it. But, by some stroke of selective amnesia, I simply can't remember the praise. And I don't just mean now, as I write this. I mean I couldn't remember the niceties a split second after they were said. It was what Trish, who had a habit of treating us like lobotomized turkeys, called the “Velcro/Teflon” phenomenon. Too many of us let the criticisms stick and the kudos dribble off.

Whereas my interactions with Trish and Sheila left me feeling humiliated, therapy with Alice is a far more tender thing.

That is not to say that Alice doesn't have me pegged from the first tear that rolls down my cheek. I sense she knows what ails me, but she must also sense how reluctant I am to accept her conclusions, ones that I don't ferret out myself. She lets me journal, research, and present conclusions I arrive at “on my own.” She avoids diagnoses. She eschews pathologies. She tries her best to encourage me when I am hot on the trail to some uncomfortable truth (she has a certain smile that says “you're getting warmer”) and rein me in when I go too far astray. She even appeals to the overachiever in me by assigning me homework and drafting up goals.

“So, just to get it straight, here's a list of things that we hope to accomplish,” Alice says as our first meeting tapers off to an end. “We would like to get you to a place where you can work again and sleep through the night. We would like to try to understand why you are what you describe as ‘sensitive to rejection' and generally ‘reluctant to reveal too much of yourself.' What else do we want to make sense of? The need to do things ‘perfectly.' Your difficulty lending words to your emotions. The rift between your ‘public' and ‘private' self. We want to help you find some empathy for yourself. To remember more of your childhood. Oh, and we want to find a way for you to really experience your anger. [
Looking up brightly.
] Did I forget anything?”

I'm sure I didn't tell Alice that I wanted to do anything as mortifying as “tap into” my anger during that first meeting. In fact, I'm pretty sure I didn't mentioned the big A at all, except to say that—until depression had emptied me of every idea and purpose—I had been researching and writing a book about it.

I begin to fear Alice is a “ventilationist”—a term I'd first come across in the work of Freud's nemesis Wilhelm Reich. His disciples had grown out of a small group of renegade psychoanalysts who worked in New York in the 1950s, and in a time when other therapists were preaching the value of self-restraint, ventilationists encouraged their patients to kick, scream, bash mattresses with tennis rackets, and generally go to town with their feelings. Whereas Freud thought it was society's job to manage people's primitive instincts, such as anger, Reich believed the human unconscious was a virtuous thing. Only society's repression turned ordinary people into ogres.

The ventilationist movement gained momentum in the late 1960s, riding the coattails of self-improvement and sexual freedom. Its proponents argued that it was unhealthy to bottle up any emotion, particularly rage, that could, in turn, cause high blood pressure, disease, depression, neuroticism, addiction, and (ye olde floppy) impotence. Ventilationism gave way to the kinds of retreats you often see in grainy documentary footage: people strewn around grassy fields in various degrees of undress screaming primally or complaining about the bourgeoisie values of cookie-cut parents who'd imprisoned them in patterns of “self-control” and denied them the outlets to vocalize their rage. Michael Murphy and Dick Price formed the Esalen Institute in a poolside motel in northern California, and within seven or eight years, there were nearly two hundred such centers in America urging autonomy and the liberation of anger, encouraging attendees to just let it bleed.

Critics of the ventilationists cite Sigmund Freud, who believed giving full rein to our angers, egos, and desires would have devastating social consequences. Some naysayers suggest that the selfishness ventilationists herald has created a culture of isolated and greedy individuals who are unusually vulnerable to politics that exploit their fears and advertising that preys upon their desires.

Today, ventilationists claim we repress our anger with the help of a number of addictions. They contend we stuff it down along with a bag of cheese puffs or light a cigarette, convinced our rage too will go up in smoke. They say compulsive spending can be an attempt to squelch feelings. Likewise, gym rats, workaholics, sex fiends, and gamblers abuse their long-suffering treadmills, BlackBerrys, privates, and savings to escape from the long arm of rage.

The ventilationists insist entertainment is the biggest of all American addictions. For that reason, SAP made each of us sign a contract vowing we would abstain from newspapers, television, radio, and Internet for the full course of our stay. “Emotions will be surfacing for you,” Sheila insisted. “And you aren't allowed to detract from them, not with YouTube, CNN, stock indexes, or the Sunday
Times
.” We weren't allowed to make phone calls either. Trish told us, “If you need to talk about something, talk about it in here, in this room. If you think something is bullshit, say so. If something's not making sense to you, please let us know. What we want to build is a loving and receptive environment, where your hearts can open up in a tremendous way.”

I broke as many of SAP's rules as I possibly could without straining something in the process. Just one day into the program and I became the archprincess of multitasking, surfing Internet news headlines with my cell phone cupped against my cheek and speaking in clipped, furtive whispers.

I had gone to bed the first night with every intention of following SAP's rules. But a curious thing happened that morning. I awoke to the orders of a bull-horned voice, saying, “Put your hands in the air! I repeat, put your hands in the air!” It was 6:10 A.M., according to the splintered integers that stared back at me from the motel's clock radio. And when I parted the room's putrid, plastic curtains, I saw a police chase straight out of
The Driver
. At the intersection less than a stone's throw away there were twenty police cars and as many drawn guns. Sleep weighed heavily on me at the time. I had not yet reinhabited the world of conscious logic, and it took me a second to realize they didn't have their 9 millimeters aimed straight at me, but rather at the man who tumbled out of his bruised Chevy pickup and sank onto his knees.

In the clutches of a death sweat, I went about packing my bag. At that point, SAP hardly seemed worth staying for; I mean, what kind of self-respecting psychologists practiced in this kind of no-tell motel? Why had they selected a location that, a local woman would later inform me, was a drug drop house and an infamous site on the city's guided tour of streetwalker stabbings?

Then, abruptly, a wave of indignation surged over me, narrowing my eyes and steadying my hands. I thought about the price of enrollment. I thought about the aims of my research. I spewed the contents of my suitcase back out again. I felt threatened at SAP. But perhaps I had felt threatened from the very start of the seminar and too frightened to reveal my feelings. I wouldn't glom onto one pesky shoot-out and use it as an excuse for escape.

I had, however, found a suitable excuse for some harmless transgression. Sheila and Trish's rules seemed patronizing, dictatorial, and outright cultish.

I might have looked like a child to Sheila. The day before, I had overheard her telling Trish, plain as day, “So, about Koren. Was she ever molested? It's just—look at her. Her development's so arrested. She looks so much younger than she really is. Poor thing, I don't even think she's aware of it.” But she could go suck a copy of
The Ego and the Id
. I was the quintessence of the autonomous adult. And as such, I was fully entitled, if not civically bound, to read the morning paper over a sticky stack at the neighborhood IHOP.