Fury (20 page)

For some reason, when I recount these events for Alice, I find it much easier to guess what my sister had been feeling than to talk about how the mess had affected me. “She's suspicious of strangers,” I say. “I think we acquired that from our parents.” And, “Perhaps she just collapsed in on herself in that meeting. We were not raised to sing our own praises.”

Confiding in Alice about my sister helps me come around to the idea that I can't focus on myself without addressing my ongoing issues with my family.

But even as I begin to open up, my language on the subject remains detached. In addition to referencing Satir—“She's our family's distracter,” “I'm its placater/computer”—I quote from the stacks of family psychology books I've begun withdrawing from the New York Public Library. When I speak about the Lark, and boy do I, I say I've decided our relationship fits Robert Sternberg's definition of “fatuous love,” “strong on passion and commitment but low on intimate involvement.” When I talk about my relationship with my mother, I reference Nancy Chodorow, who said that girls never separate from their mothers as completely as boys do.

Alice, in her bubbly way, expresses a growing concern that our conversations are becoming “too academic,” and my anger “too intellectualized.”

I'm willing to admit our sessions are beginning to feel like an adult education class. Yet, instead of using our time together to tell her what I'm feeling, I find myself responding by reading up on “emotionology” (the way a group of people thinks about and describes their emotions). The next week, I tell that Alice that she's right. I am responding to my anger like a quintessential American. I'm depressed because I live in a time when Americans are freer than ever to express tenderness, passion, or fear but not serious anger. (I've read this in Carol and Peter Stearns, who coined the word “emotionology” to begin with.)

I watch Alice's mouth make a hyphen of itself. This is the closest she ever comes to actually frowning.

I imagine she privately combs her own experience and studies, looking for a fix: What to do with someone who avoids rubbing up against her emotions by turning them into endless theories and philosophical debates?

I tell Alice I've been reading a lot of linguistics books. I appreciate the detached, mathematical tone of semantics—the way linguists can reduce a feeling to a word and a word to a formula. Did she know there are a number of tongues (Russian, for one; Polish, for another) that have no exact equivalent for our English “anger”? From

Anna Wierzbicka's
Emotion across Languages and Cultures
, I've learned “the view of
anger
as something that can be manipulated—‘controlled,' ‘vented,' ‘released,' left ‘unresolved,' ‘directed' at this or that target, ‘stirred up,' ‘repressed,' ‘expressed,' ‘suppressed,' and so on” are untranslatable elsewhere in the world.

When the long-suffering woman wants to talk specifically about my anger at the Lark, I take issue with the word itself. I tell her the anatomy of “anger,” at least linguistically speaking, goes like this:

(I've taken to spending afternoons cowering in my apartment with the blinds shut, tearing through this emotional arithmetic. I devour these sentences that sound like caveman-speak, like the forlorn gruntings of Earliest Man.)

According to this, I tell Alice, my feelings about the Lark don't have all the hardware to qualify as anger. Most notably, the last step (payback) is missing. Sure, I want, in my own way, to rouse him, to convert him, and to persuade him to give our relationship another try, but I feel too limp, vacant, and unimaginative to attempt any kind of vengeful thinking.

I even pin my reluctance to get angry on a larger culture. “Anger,” Wierzbicka writes, cannot be taken for granted as “culture-free” or having a “universal standard.” I tell Alice our English anger is specific to us. According to linguists, the English “anger” reflects our perception that the emotion is internal, involuntary, and unbecoming. In a case study by linguist Cliff Goddard I see my own fears reflected in the words: “English ‘anger' includes an implicit negative evaluation—it is bad (or possibly merely not good) to be angry.”

In all my reading, I miss the part where linguists say that the fact that an emotion word is missing from our language doesn't mean we can't and don't experience the feeling. The fact that words like “rage” don't cross my lips doesn't mean the feelings aren't in me, lying dormant, waiting for a moment when I'm too distracted or weakened to guard the cage I've locked them up in.

I sense my dedication to my research list is maddening, but it isn't any more disingenuous than when I told Sheila at SAP that I “didn't know” why I was crying. The computer in me still thinks she can eke out a little bit of security by intellectualizing everything. I talk around subjects, restricting my language to generalizations and abstractions. I'm used to avoiding words as direct as “I” and “you” whenever I talk about my emotions. I'd been a child when I'd dug a hole for my emotions and now, over twenty years later, I don't have the slightest clue under what bush, stone, or flower bed I might have buried them.

It's a problem in my writing, just as it is a problem in my life. According to my editor, my first drafts are always stoic accounts of the facts. It is only in editing that I remember to include what I am feeling at the time of the story.

A good scapegoat is nearly as welcome as a solution to the problem.

—UNKNOWN

There comes a point in October when it seems as though everyone has a guru they want me to meet. I simply
must
visit “Iviana, the Park Slope acupuncturist.” I
have
to make an appointment with the city's best psychopharmacologist. If I don't go see “Brother Blackstone, the West Village energy healer, I'll never restore my ‘core frequency.'” My yoga teacher, Rolf, thinks a retreat at a Costa Rican coffee plantation will get me centered. Alyssa keeps urging me to fly out to the Peoplemaking center in Colorado and submit to therapy with its director, a man who is trained in Virginia Satir's “Human Validation” method.

They're only trying to help. But homeopathy taught me that the Staphysagria patient, an independent and introverted idiot, avoids social interaction. “This is a very introverted type, a fugitive, who runs away from people in order to avoid a repetition of his past, a childhood in which [she felt] helpless or worthless.”

Hunter is the only person I ever consent to call. Frankly, I am curious. My friend Devon describes him as a twenty-seven-year-old Catholic seminary student from the rural South who is trained in Reiki healing and quotes liberally from the
Yoga-Sutra
.

I've also been thinking more about what Fern said to me at SAP, about my heart chakra muffling my throat. I've become a lot more accepting of alternative medicine since that long-ago weekend. I'm even a little more open to the idea that emotion can be stored in the body as “energy.” And Devon has described a profound experience in which Hunter has “cleared away the blocked energy in her root chakra.”

In the years Devon and I have been friends, she's often described herself with words like “logical,” “analytical,” “unromantic,” and “pragmatic.” Given all that, I'm surprised she'd spend time lying on her back while Hunter applied his “touchless healing” to her.

“It was the strangest thing,” she confesses. “While Hunter was working on me, I became really conscious of my feet. I'd never realized just how alienated I had been from them. Sure, I walk around on them all day. I stuff them into boots. But I don't think I'd ever really
felt
them before. They've been floating down there in deep space.”

I might have thought Devon was certifiable if I hadn't felt the same way about my throat. Some part of me still wanted to shrug off Fern's diagnosis, but another part had begun to realize that I rarely
felt
my throat in my day-to-day life, not even when I spoke, choked down dinner, or cleared it with a tidy
a-hem
. Alone in my apartment, I found myself tracing my voice box down from my cocked chin with a fingertip. Reiki practitioners call the throat the “midway point between the heart and the tongue”; they say it is the energy point that determines how we communicate, express ourselves creatively, and voice our emotions. I'm aware of my neck, and in a cerebral way I know my throat exists somewhere in there. But most of the time it feels as though my head hovers three inches above my clavicle, unmoored and indifferent to the rest of me.

Perhaps there's some connection between my numb throat, my lack of self-expression, and my unspoken anger. In a 1915 meeting of the American Psychopathological Association, G. Stanley Hall claimed “anger is the acme of self-assertion.” And Virginia Satir often referenced the throat when she encouraged people to speak their truths: “Just let the words come out of this beautiful throat of yours and see what happens.”

I think too about my vocal cords. My voice fluctuates between the qualities Virginia Satir ascribes to computers and placaters. It's either “dull and monotonous,” or it's “squeaky,” as if lacking the air to maintain a “full, rich voice.”

One Tuesday afternoon I decide to call Hunter. I turn the phone over and over in my hands in a state of livid anxiety. I have no social graces. In the weeks since I've begun seeing Alice, I've felt terribly exposed, and it's kept me dodging situations in which I have to confront new people. I feel my embarrassment mount as I began to dial. I realize I'm hoping to get an answer from Hunter, yet I don't know what question I am hoping to ask.

As it happens, I have little cause to worry. Hunter picks up the phone as if he'd been anticipating my call at precisely that moment. He pauses humanely while I sputter through my prerehearsed introduction. When it's his turn to speak, I relax at the sound of his gentle voice and receptive demeanor. I have no idea what he looks like. I imagine him as a lithe young man with a halo of kinked hair and a shock of beard on his weak, boyish chin. I imagine him shirt-less and shoeless, fingering a corncob pipe in a cottage by a creek. I suspect he strings wind chimes and whittles wood for fun.

We talk for a bit about Reiki, a spiritual practice developed in 1922. Hunter talks about its creator, Mikao Usui, who spent three weeks fasting and meditating on Mount Kurama in Japan, where he claimed to receive the ability to move people's healing energy around with his palms, redistributing it between the seven chakras, the energy points found in the coccyx, ovaries or prostate, navel area, heart area, throat area, pineal gland (or third eye), and the top of the head (in the part where you find a newborn's fontanel).

While I used to think Reiki stank of charlatanism, I've realized that a similar concept exists in psychology. In treating families, Virginia Satir used to say that her goal was to redirect “blocked-up energy,” allowing people to deal with their self-esteem and to establish communication and rules for being human that relate to the eight levels of the self. Even her eight levels closely resemble Reiki's seven energy points. She sees everyone as made up of a physical level (the coccyx), intellectual level (the fontanel), emotional level (the heart), sensual (the ovaries or prostate), interactional (the throat), nutritional (the navel), and the contextual and the spiritual (the pineal gland).

I tell Hunter what Fern had said to me at SAP about my heart standing in the way of my throat.

“That would make sense,” Hunter says with a voice as Southern and moist as fresh tobacco. “Especially if you're the kind of person who is so sensitive to other people's emotions that you deny your own.”

There is a poignant little pause. “Let's just say, for the sake of argument, that I am that kind of person. Out of curiosity, how would I open my throat?”

There is another long pause. Hunter doesn't have most people's aversion to dead air. Just when I begin to worry that my cell phone has dropped the call, his previously soft-spoken voice bursts open and blooms bright.

“Some people say to gargle with saltwater,” he tells me. “If you're into yoga, you could spend some time in fish pose. Or plough pose. Or shoulder stand. Whenever you meditate, you could envision a turquoise sunburst. You could sing. You might chant ‘ham.' Whatever you do, you should make noise. Hum. Scream. Create a vibration. From sound comes communication, and communication is the main point of the
vishuddha
, the throat chakra. The throat is connected to our idea of who we are. It's the place where the affairs of the mind meet the feelings of the body. The throat allows us to describe our experiences. It's the source of all art and creativity.”

“That sounds about right. These days, I can barely write a check, let alone my next book.”

“Balancing your chakras is a life's work,” Hunter says. “So is facing your fears and asserting yourself. Emotions aren't things you experience once and then check off your list.”

He says he makes an effort to pay attention to his own energy points every day. He attends to them when he meditates, goes to therapy, studies religion, and meets with his spiritual adviser.

Because Devon told Hunter about the book I was writing, we also talk about anger. When I tell him that I think the Buddhist approach to emotion seems repressed, Hunter tells me I've missed some very important passages in my reading.