Love's Executioner (14 page)

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Authors: Irvin D. Yalom

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

BOOK: Love's Executioner
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There was no question now that I had his attention. I decided to increase my leverage by triangulation, and I approached the same issue from another direction:
“And, Carlos, something else comes to my mind right now. Remember your dream of the green Honda two weeks ago? Let’s go back over it.”
He enjoyed working on dreams and was only too glad to apply himself to this one and, in so doing, to leave the painful discussion about his daughter.
Carlos had dreamed that he went to a rental agency to rent a car, but the only ones available were Honda Civics—his least favorite car. Of several colors available, he selected red. But when he got out to the lot, the only car available was green—his least favorite color! The most important fact about a dream is its emotion, and this dream, despite its benign content, was full of terror: it had awakened him and flooded him with anxiety for hours.
Two weeks ago we had not been able to get far with the dream. Carlos, as I recall, went off on a tangent of associations about the identity of the female auto rental clerk. But today I saw the dream in a different light. Many years ago he had developed a strong belief in reincarnation, a belief that offered him blessed relief from fears about dying. The metaphor he used in one of our first meetings was that dying is simply trading in your body for another one—like trading in an old car. I reminded him now of that metaphor.
“Let’s suppose, Carlos, that the dream is more than a dream about cars. Obviously renting a car is not a frightening activity, not something that would become a nightmare and keep you up all night. I think the dream is about death and future life, and it uses your symbol of comparing death and rebirth to a trade of cars. If we look at it that way, we can make more sense of the powerful fear the dream carried. What do you make of the fact that the only kind of car you could get was a green Honda Civic?”
“I hate green and I hate Honda Civics. My next car is going to be a Maserati.”
“But if cars are dream symbols of bodies, why would you, in your next life, get the body, or the life, that you hate above all others?”
Carlos had no option but to respond. “You get what you deserve, depending on what you’ve done or the way you’ve lived your present life. You can either move up or down.”
Now he realized where this discussion was leading, and began to perspire. The dense forest of crassness and cynicism surrounding him had always shocked and dissuaded visitors. But now it was his turn to be shocked. I had invaded his two innermost temples: his love for his children and his reincarnation beliefs.
“Go on, Carlos, this is important—apply that to yourself and to your life.”
He bit off each word slowly. “The dream is saying that I’m not living right.”
“I agree, I think that
is
what the dream is saying. Say some more on your thoughts about living right.”
I was going to pontificate about what constitutes a good life in any religious system—love, generosity, care, noble thoughts, pursuit of the good, charity—but none of that was necessary. Carlos let me know I had made my point: he said that he was getting dizzy, and that this was a lot to deal with in one day. He wanted time to think about it during the week. Noting that we still had fifteen minutes left, I decided to do some work on another front.
I went back to the first issue he had raised in the hour: his belief that he had missed a golden opportunity with Ruth, the woman he had met briefly at a church social, and his subsequent head pounding and self-recrimination for not having walked her to her car. The function that his irrational belief served was patent. As long as he continued to believe that he was tantalizingly close to being desired and loved by an attractive woman, he could buttress his belief that he was no different from anyone else, that there was nothing seriously wrong with him, that he was not disfigured, not mortally ill.
In the past I hadn’t tampered with his denial. In general, it’s best not to undermine a defense unless it is creating more problems than solutions, and unless one has something better to offer in its stead. Reincarnation is a case in point: though I personally consider it a form of death denial, the belief served Carlos (as it does much of the world’s population) very well; in fact, rather than undermine it, I had always supported it and in this session buttressed it by urging that he be consistent in heeding all the implications of reincarnation.
But the time had come to challenge some of the less helpful parts of his denial system.
“Carlos, do you really believe that if you had walked Ruth to her car you’d have a ten- to fifteen-percent chance of marrying her?”
“One thing could lead to another. There was something going on between the two of us. I felt it. I know what I know!”
“But you say that every week—the lady in the supermarket, the receptionist in the dentist’s office, the ticket seller at the movie. You even felt that with Sarah. Look, how many times have you, or any man, walked a woman to her car and
not
married her?”
“O.K., O.K., maybe it’s closer to a one-percent or half-percent chance, but there was still a chance—if I hadn’t been such a jerk. I didn’t even
think
of asking to walk her to the car!”
“The things you pick to beat yourself up about! Carlos, I’m going to be blunt. What you’re saying doesn’t make any sense at all. All you’ve told me about Ruth—you only talked to her for five minutes—is that she’s twenty-three with two small kids and is recently divorced. Let’s be very realistic—as you say, this is the place to be honest. What are you going to tell her about your health?”
“When I get to know her better, I’ll tell her the truth—that I’ve got cancer, that it’s under control now, that the doctors can treat it.”
“And—?”
“That the doctors aren’t sure what’s going to happen, that there are new treatments discovered every day, that I may have recurrences in the future.”
“What did the doctors say to you? Did they say
may
have recurrences?”
“You’re right—
will
have recurrences in the future, unless a cure is found.”
“Carlos, I don’t want to be cruel, but be objective. Put yourself in Ruth’s place—twenty-three years old, two small children, been through a hard time, presumably looking for some strong support for herself and her kids, having only a layman’s knowledge and fear of cancer—do you represent the kind of security and support she’s looking for? Is she going to be willing to accept the uncertainty surrounding your health? To risk placing herself in the situation where she might be obligated to nurse you? What really are the chances she would allow herself to know you in the way you want, to become involved with you?”
“Probably not one in a million,” Carlos said in a sad and weary voice.
I was being cruel, yet the option of
not
being cruel, of simply humoring him, of tacitly acknowledging that he was incapable of seeing reality, was crueler yet. His fantasy about Ruth allowed him to feel that he could still be touched and cared for by another human. I hoped that he would understand that my willingness to engage him, rather than wink behind his back, was my way of touching and caring.
All the bluster was gone. In a soft voice Carlos asked, “So where does that leave me?”
“If what you really want now is closeness, then it’s time to take all this heat off yourself about finding a wife. I’ve been watching you beat yourself up for months about this. I think it’s time to let up on yourself. You’ve just finished a difficult course of chemotherapy. Four weeks ago you couldn’t eat or get out of bed or stop vomiting. You’ve lost a lot of weight, you’re regaining your strength. Stop expecting to find a wife right now, it’s too much to ask of yourself. Set a reasonable goal—you can do this as well as I. Concentrate on having a good conversation. Try deepening a friendship with the people you already know.”
I saw a smile begin to form on Carlos’s lips. He saw my next sentence coming:
“And what better place to start than in the group?”
Carlos was never the same person after that session. Our next appointment was the day following the next group meeting. The first thing he said was that I would not believe how good he had been in the group. He bragged that he was now the most supportive and sensitive member. He had wisely decided to bail himself out of trouble by telling the group about his cancer. He claimed—and, weeks later, Sarah was to corroborate this—that his behavior had changed so dramatically that the members now looked to him for support.
He praised our previous session. “The last session was our best one so far. I wish we could have sessions like that every time. I don’t remember exactly what we talked about, but it helped me change a lot.”
I found one of his comments particularly droll.
“I don’t know why, but I’m even relating differently to the men in the group. They are all older than me but, it’s funny, I have a sense of treating them as though they were my own sons!”
His having forgotten the content of our last session troubled me little. Far better that he forget what we talked about than the opposite possibility (a more popular choice for patients)—to remember precisely what was talked about but to remain unchanged.
Carlos’s improvement increased exponentially. Two weeks later, he began our session by announcing that he had had, during that week, two major insights. He was so proud of the insights that he had christened them. The first, he called (glancing at his notes), “Everybody has got a heart.” The second was “I am not my shoes.”
First, he explained “Everybody has got a heart.” “During the group meeting last week, all three women were sharing a lot of their feelings, about how hard it was being single, about loneliness, about grieving for their parents, about nightmares. I don’t know why, but I suddenly saw them in a different way! They were like me! They were having the same problems in living that I was. I had always before imagined women sitting on Mount Olympus with a line of men before them and sorting them out—this one to my bedroom, this one not!
“But that moment,” Carlos continued, “I had a vision of their naked hearts. Their chest wall vanished, just melted away leaving a square blue-red cavity with rib-bar walls and, in the center, a liver-colored glistening heart thumping away. All week long I’ve been seeing everyone’s heart beating, and I’ve been saying to myself, ‘Everybody has got a heart, everybody has got a heart.’ I’ve been seeing the heart in everyone—a misshapen hunchback who works in reception, an old lady who does the floors, even the men I work with!”
Carlos’s comment gave me so much joy that tears came to my eyes. I think he saw them but, to spare me embarrassment, made no comment and hurried along to the next insight: “I am not my shoes.”
He reminded me that in our last session we had discussed his great anxiety about an upcoming presentation at work. He had always had great difficulty speaking in public: excruciatingly sensitive to any criticism, he had often, he said, made a spectacle of himself by viciously counterattacking anyone who questioned any aspect of his presentation.
I had helped him understand that he had lost sight of his personal boundaries. It is natural, I had told him, that one should respond adversely to an attack on one’s central core—after all, in that situation one’s very survival is at stake. But I had pointed out that Carlos had stretched his personal boundaries to encompass his work and, consequently, he responded to a mild criticism of any aspect of his work as though it were a mortal attack on his central being, a threat to his very survival.
I had urged Carlos to differentiate between his core self and other, peripheral attributes or activities. Then he had to “disidentify” with the non-core parts: they might represent what he liked, or did, or valued—but they were not
him,
not his central being.
Carlos had been intrigued by this construct. Not only did it explain his defensiveness at work, but he could extend this “disidentification” model to pertain to his body. In other words, even though his body was imperiled, he himself, his vital essence, was intact.
This interpretation allayed much of his anxiety, and his work presentation last week had been wonderfully lucid and nondefensive. Never had he done a better job. Throughout his presentation, a small mantra wheel in his mind had hummed, “I am not my work.” When he finished and sat down next to his boss, the mantra continued, “I am not my work. Not my talk. Not my clothes. None of these things.” He crossed his legs and noted his scuffed and battered shoes: “And I’m not my shoes either.” He began to wiggle his toes and his feet hoping to attract his boss’s attention so as to proclaim to him, “I am not my shoes!”
Carlos’s two insights—the first of many to come—were a gift to me and to my students. These two insights, each generated by a different form of therapy, illustrated, in quintessential form, the difference between what one can derive from group therapy, with its focus on communion
between,
and individual therapy, with its focus on communion
within.
I still use many of his graphic insights to illustrate my teaching.
In the few months of life remaining to him, Carlos chose to continue to give. He organized a cancer self-help group (not without some humorous crack about this being the “last stop” pickup joint) and also was the group leader for some interpersonal skills groups at one of his churches. Sarah, by now one of his greatest boosters, was invited as a guest speaker to one of his groups and attested to his responsible and competent leadership.

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