Love's Executioner (10 page)

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Authors: Irvin D. Yalom

Tags: #Psychology, #Movements, #Psychoanalysis, #Research & Methodology, #Emotions

BOOK: Love's Executioner
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This was all the information I could handle (and all that I thought I needed). I have only a dim recollection of the rest of the hour. I remember that Matthew encouraged Thelma to ask more questions. It was as though he, too, sensed that she could be released only by information, that her illusions could not endure the beam of truth. And I think, too, that he realized that only through Thelma’s release could he obtain his own. I remember that Thelma and I both asked many questions, each of which he answered fully. His wife had left him four years ago. She and he had increasingly diverging views about religion, and she could not follow his conversion into a fundamentalist Christian sect.
No, he was not gay. Nor had he ever been, though Thelma had often asked him about that. It was only at this moment that his smile narrowed and a trace of irritation entered his voice (“I kept telling you, Thelma, that straight people live in the Haight, too”).
No, he had never had a personal relationship with any other patient. In fact, as a result of his psychosis and what had happened with Thelma, he had, several years ago, realized that his psychological problems posed an insurmountable barrier, and he had stopped being a therapist. But, committed to a life of service, he did psychological testing for a few years; then he worked in a biofeedback lab; and, more recently, he had become the administrator of a Christian health maintenance organization.
I was musing about Matthew’s professional decision, even wondering whether he had evolved to the point where he should go back to doing therapy—perhaps he now might make an exceptional therapist—when I noticed that our time was almost up.
I inquired whether we had covered everything. I asked Thelma to project herself into the future and to imagine how she might feel several hours from now. Would she be left with unasked questions?
To my surprise, she began sobbing so forcefully that she could not catch her breath. Tears poured down upon her new blue dress until Matthew, outracing me, handed her the box of tissues. As her sobbing subsided, Thelma’s words grew audible.
“I
don’t
believe, I simply
can’t
believe that Matthew really cares about what happens to me.” Her words were directed neither to Matthew nor to me but to some point between us in the room. I noted with some satisfaction that I wasn’t the only one she addressed in the third person.
I tried to help Thelma talk. “Why? Why don’t you believe him?”
“He’s saying that because he has to. It’s the right thing to say. It’s the only thing he can say.”
Matthew did his best, but communication was difficult because of her sobbing. “I mean exactly what I said. I’ve thought about you every day these eight years. I care about what happens to you. I care about you a great deal.”
“But your caring—what does it mean? I know about your caring. You care about the poor, about ants and plants and ecological systems. I don’t want to be one of your ants!”
We had run twenty minutes over and had to stop even though Thelma had still not regained her composure. I gave her an appointment for the following day not only to be supportive but also because it would be best to see her again quickly, while the details of this hour were still fresh in her mind.
The three of us ended the hour with round-robin handshakes and parted. A few minutes later, as I was getting some coffee, I noticed Thelma and Matthew chatting in the corridor. He was trying to make a point to her, but she was looking away from him. Shortly afterward, I saw them walk away in different directions.
Thelma had not recovered by the next day and was exceptionally labile throughout our session. She wept often and, at times, flashed into anger. First, she lamented that Matthew had such a low opinion of her. She had worked and worried Matthew’s statement that he “cared” for her until it now seemed an insult. He had, she noted, mentioned none of her positive features, and Thelma convinced herself that his basic posture to her had been “unfriendly.”
Furthermore, she was convinced that, probably because of my presence, he had adopted a pseudo-therapeutic voice and manner which she had found patronizing. Thelma rambled a great deal and swerved back and forth between her reconstruction of the hour and her reaction to it.
“I feel like an amputation has taken place. Something has gone from me. Despite Matthew’s high-sounding ethics, I believe I am more honest than he. Especially in his account of who seduced who.”
Thelma remained cryptic on this matter, and I did not press her for explication. Although I would have relished finding out what “really” happened, her reference to “amputation” intrigued me even more.
“I haven’t had any more fantasies about Matthew,” she went on. “I’m not daydreaming any more. But I want to. I want to sink into the embrace of some warm daydream. It’s cold out and I feel empty. Now, there is just nothing.”
Like a drifting boat torn loose from its mooring, I thought—but a sentient boat desperately searching for a berth, any berth. Now, between obsessions, Thelma was in a rare free-floating state. This was the time I had been waiting for. Such states don’t last long: the unbonded obsessional, like nascent oxygen, quickly melds with some mental image or idea. This moment, this brief interval between obsessions, was the crucial time for us to work—before Thelma re-established her equilibrium by latching onto something or someone. Most likely she would reconstruct the hour with Matthew so that her version of reality could once again support her fusion fantasy.
It seemed to me that real progress had occurred: the surgery was complete, and now my task was to prevent her from preserving the amputated limb and quickly stitching it back on again. My opportunity arrived soon, as Thelma proceeded to lament her loss.
“My predictions of what might happen have come true. I don’t have any more hope, I’ll never have any more satisfaction. I could live with that one-percent chance. I’ve lived with it a long time.”
“What was the satisfaction, Thelma? A one-percent chance for what?”
“For what? For those twenty-seven days. Until yesterday there was always a chance that Matthew and I could go back to that time. We were there, the feeling was real, I know love when I feel it. As long as Matthew and I were alive, we always had the chance to return to it. Until yesterday. In your office.”
There were still a few threads of illusion to be severed. I’d almost totally destroyed the obsession. It was time to finish the job.
“Thelma, what I have to say now is not pleasant, but I think it’s important. Let me try to get my thoughts out clearly. If two people share a moment or share a feeling between them, if they both feel the same thing, then I can see how it might be possible for them, as long as they are alive, to re-establish that precious feeling between the two of them. It would be a delicate procedure—after all, people change, and love never stays—but still, perhaps, it is within the realm of possibility. They could communicate fully, they could try to achieve a deep authentic relationship which, since authentic love is an absolute state, should approximate what they had before.
“But suppose it was never a shared experience! Suppose the two people had widely different experiences. And suppose one of them mistakenly thought her experience was the same as his?”
Thelma’s eyes were fixed on me. I was certain that she understood me perfectly.
I continued. “What I heard in the session with Matthew was precisely that. His experience and your experience were very different. Can you see how impossible it would be for each of you to re-create the particular mental state you were in? The two of you can’t help one another with this because
it was not a shared state
.
“He was in one place and you were in another. He was lost in a psychosis. He didn’t know where his boundaries were—where he ended and you began. He wanted you to be happy because he thought he was the same as you. He wasn’t having a love experience, because he didn’t know who he was. Your experience was very different. You cannot re-create a state of shared romantic love, of the two of you being deeply in love with one another
because it was never there in the first place.
”
I don’t think I’ve ever said a crueler thing, but to make myself heard, I had to speak in words so strong and so stark that they could be neither twisted nor forgotten.
There was no doubt my comment struck home. Thelma had stopped crying and just sat there stock still considering my words. I broke the heavy silence after several minutes:
“How do you feel about what I said, Thelma?”
“I can’t feel anything any more. There’s nothing else to feel. I have to find a way to live out my time. I feel numb.”
“You’ve been living and feeling one way for eight years, and now suddenly in twenty-four hours all that is pulled away from you. These next few days are going to feel very disorienting. You’re going to feel lost. But we have to expect that. How could it be otherwise?”
I said this because often the best way to prevent a calamitous reaction is to predict it. Another way is to help the patient get outside of it and move into the observer role. So I added, “It will be important this week to be an observer and recorder of your own inner state. I’d like you to check in on your internal state every four hours, when you are awake, and jot down your observations. We’ll go over them next week.”
But the next week Thelma, for the first time, missed her appointment. Her husband called to apologize for his wife, who had overslept, and we agreed upon a meeting two days later.
When I went to the waiting room to greet Thelma, I was dismayed at her physical deterioration. She was back in her green jogging suit and had obviously not combed her hair or made any other attempts to groom herself. Moreover, for the first time, she was accompanied by her husband, Harry, a tall, white-haired man with a large bulbous nose, who sat there squeezing a grip strengthener in each hand. I remembered Thelma’s telling me about his teaching hand-to-hand combat in wartime. I could picture him strangling someone.
I thought it was odd that he accompanied her that day. In spite of her age, Thelma is physically fit and had always driven herself to my office. My curiosity was piqued even more by her comment in the waiting room that Harry wanted to meet with me today. I had met him once before: in the third or fourth session I saw him together with Thelma for a fifteen-minute discussion—primarily to see what kind of person he was and to learn about the marriage from his perspective. Never before had he asked to meet with me. Obviously something important was up. I agreed to speak to him for the last ten minutes of Thelma’s hour and also made it clear that I would feel free to report back to her the entirety of our discussion.
Thelma looked weary. She slumped into her chair and spoke slowly and softly in a resigned tone.
“My week has been a horror, sheer hell! My obsession has gone or almost gone, I guess. Rather than ninety percent of the time, I spend less than twenty percent of my waking time thinking about Matthew, and even that twenty percent is different.
“But what have I been doing instead? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. I’ve been sleeping twelve hours a day. All I do is sleep and sit and sigh. I’m all dried up, I can’t cry any more. Harry, who is almost never critical of me, said to me last night as I picked at my dinner—I’ve hardly eaten anything this week—‘Are you feeling sorry for yourself again?’”
“How do you explain what’s happening to you?”
“It’s like I’ve been in a magic show and now I’ve come outside—and it’s very gray outside.”
I felt goose bumps. I had never before heard Thelma speak metaphorically; it was as though someone else were speaking.
“Say some more about how you feel.”
“I feel old, really old. For the first time I know I’m seventy years old, seven zero—that’s older than ninety-nine percent of the people walking around. I feel like a zombie, run out of gas, my life’s a void, a dead end. Nothing to do but live out my time.”
These words were said quickly, but the cadence slowed for the last sentence. Then she turned to me and fixed her eyes on mine. That in itself was unusual, for she had seldom ever looked directly at me. Maybe I was wrong, but I think her eyes said, “Are you satisfied now?” I did not comment on her gaze.
“All of this followed our session with Matthew. What happened in that hour to throw you like this?”
“What a fool I was to have protected him for eight years!”
Thelma’s anger enlivened her. She took her string purse from her lap, placed it on the floor, and put a lot of energy into her words. “What reward did I get? I’ll tell you. A kick in the teeth! If I hadn’t kept his secret from my therapists all these years, maybe the dominoes might have fallen differently.”
“I don’t understand. What was the kick in your teeth?”
“You were there. You saw it. You saw his callousness. He didn’t say hello or goodbye to me. He didn’t answer my questions. How much effort would it have taken him? He
still
hasn’t told me why he cut me off!”
I tried to describe to her how I had seen things differently, and how, in my view, Matthew had been warm to her and had gone into lengthy and painful detail about why he had broken off with her.
But Thelma rushed on, not listening to my comments. “He was clear about only one thing—Matthew Jennings is sick and tired of Thelma Hilton. You tell me: What’s the perfect scenario to drive an ex-lover to suicide?
Sudden dismissal with no reasons given
—that’s exactly what he’s done to me!

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