Love's Executioner (9 page)

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Authors: Irvin D. Yalom

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

BOOK: Love's Executioner
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“But the main thing is that he is willing to come in for a three-way meeting. You know, it’s funny, he even sounded eager—as though it has been me avoiding him. I told him to come in to your office at my regular hour next week, but he told me to ask you if we could make it sooner. Now that we’ve decided to do it, he wants to do it as soon as possible. I guess I feel the same way.”
I suggested a time two days hence, and Thelma said she’d inform Matthew. Following that, we reviewed her phone conversation once again and planned the next hour. Thelma never did recall all the details of her phone conversation but she did remember what they had
not
talked about. “Ever since I hung up the phone, I’ve been kicking myself for chickening out and not having asked Matthew the two really important questions. First, what
really
happened eight years ago? Why did you break off? Why have you remained silent? Second, how do you really feel about me now?”
“Let’s be certain that you don’t also finish our three-way meeting wanting to kick yourself for something you didn’t ask. I promise to help you ask all the questions you want to ask, all the questions that might release you from the power you’ve given Matthew. That’s going to be my main job in the session.”
During the rest of the hour, Thelma repeated a lot of old material: she talked about her feelings toward Matthew, how they were
not
transference, how Matthew had given her the best days of her life. It seemed to me that she droned on interminably, went off into tangent after tangent, and, moreover, said everything to me as though for the first time. I became aware of how little she had changed and how much depended on something dramatic happening the next session.
Thelma arrived twenty minutes early for the session. I was doing correspondence that morning and passed her in the waiting room a couple of times as I conferred with my secretary. She was dressed in an attractive, tight royal-blue knit dress—a daring outfit for a seventy-year-old woman, but I thought she pulled it off well. Later, when I invited her into my office, I complimented her on it and she told me, with a conspiratorial hush and a finger crossing her lips, that she had spent most of the week shopping for it. It was the first new dress she had bought in eight years. As she touched up her lipstick she told me that Matthew would arrive in a minute or two, precisely on time. He had told her that he didn’t want to spend too much time in the waiting room because he wanted to minimize the possibility of running into colleagues who might be passing by. I could not blame him for that.
Suddenly, she stopped talking. I had left my door ajar, and we could hear that Matthew had arrived and was speaking to my secretary.
“I came to some lectures here when the department was in the old building. . . . When did you move? . . . I really like the light, airy feel of this building, do you?”
Thelma put her hand to her breast as though to still her heartbeat and whispered, “You see? You see how naturally his caring comes?”
Matthew entered. It was the first time he had seen Thelma in eight years, and if he was in any way startled by the physical aging she had undergone, his boyish, good-natured smile gave no evidence of it. He was older than I expected, perhaps in his early forties, and conservatively dressed in an un-Californian three-piece suit. Otherwise, he was much as Thelma had described him—slender, mustached, well tanned.
I was prepared for his directness and sincerity and, therefore, not thrown off by it. (Sociopaths often present themselves well, I thought.) I began by briefly thanking him for coming.
He immediately rejoined, “I’ve been wanting a session like this for years. It’s
my
place to thank
you
for bringing it to pass. Besides, I’ve read your books for years. It’s an honor to meet you.”
He’s not without some charm, I thought, but I did not want to get involved in a distracting personal or professional discussion with Matthew: it was best for me to keep a low profile in this session and for Thelma and Matthew to interact as much as possible. I turned the session over to them: “We’ve got a lot to talk about today. Where to start?”
Thelma began: “It’s funny, I haven’t increased my medication.” She turned to Matthew. “I’m still on antidepressants. It’s eight years later—my goodness, eight years, that’s hard to believe—but it’s eight years later, I’ve probably tried eight new antidepressants and they
still
don’t work. But the interesting thing is that all the side effects are greater today. My mouth is so dry I can hardly talk. Now why should that be? Does stress increase side effects?”
Thelma continued to ramble and to consume huge chunks of our precious time with preambles to preambles. I was in a dilemma: under ordinary circumstances, I might have attempted to clarify the consequences of her indirect discourse. For example, I might point out that she was staking out a role of fragility that would immediately discourage the open discussion she said she wished. Or that she had invited Matthew here to speak freely and yet immediately mobilized his guilt by reminding him that she had been on antidepressants since he left her. But such interpretations would only result in most of the hour being used as a conventional individual therapy session—exactly what none of the three of us wanted. Besides, if I were in any way to label her behavior as problematic, she would feel humiliated and would never forgive me for that.
But too much was riding on this hour. I could not bear for Thelma to waste this opportunity with indirect meanderings. This was her chance to ask the questions that had plagued her for eight years. This was her chance to be released.
“I’m going to interrupt you for a minute, Thelma, if I may. I’d like, if you two agree, to have the role of timekeeper today and to keep us focused. Can we spend a minute or two establishing our agenda?”
There was silence for a short time until Matthew punctured it.
“I’m here today to be helpful to Thelma. I know she has been going through bad times, and I know that I bear the responsibility for that. I’ll be as open as possible to any questions.”
That was Thelma’s perfect cue. I gave her a starting glance. She caught it and began.
“There is nothing worse than to feel bereft, to feel that you are absolutely alone in the world. When I was a child, one of my favorite books—I used to take it to Lincoln Park in Washington, D.C., to read on the benches there—was——”
Here I shot Thelma the sharpest, nastiest look I could muster. She got it.
“I’ll get to the point. I guess the bottom line is”—and she slowly and carefully turned to Matthew—“what do you feel about me?”
Atta girl! I positively beamed at her.
Matthew’s answer made me gasp. He looked straight at her and said, “I’ve thought about you every day for the last eight years! I care about you. I care a great deal. I want to know what happens to you. I wish that there were some way in the world of our meeting every few months so I could catch up on you. I don’t want to be cut off.”
“Then,” Thelma asked, “why have you been silent all these years?”
“Sometimes caring can be best expressed by silence.”
Thelma shook her head. “That’s like one of your Zen riddles that I could never understand.”
Matthew continued, “Whenever I tried to talk to you, it made things worse. You asked for more and more until it reached the point when I couldn’t find a way to give any more. You called me a dozen times a day. You showed up time and time again in my office waiting room. Then when you almost killed yourself, I knew—and my therapist agreed—that the best thing was to cut it off completely.”
Matthew’s statement, I thought, bore an uncanny resemblance to the releasing scenario Thelma had shared in our role-playing session.
“But,” Thelma commented, “it’s natural for a person to be bereft if something so important is taken away so suddenly.”
Matthew nodded understandingly to Thelma and briefly put his hand on top of hers. Then he turned to me. “I think it’s important for you to know exactly what happened eight years ago. I’m speaking to you now rather than to Thelma because I’ve already told her this story, more than once.” He turned to her. “Sorry you have to hear this whole thing yet again, Thelma.”
Then Matthew, ingenuously, turned to me and began: “This is not easy for me. The best way to do it is simply to do it. So here goes.
“Eight years ago, about a year after I finished my training, I had a serious psychotic break. During that time I was heavily into Buddhism and was sitting Vipassana—that’s a form of Buddhist meditation—” When Matthew saw me nod, he interrupted his story. “You seem familiar with it—I’d be very interested to know your opinion of it. But today I guess I’d better continue. . . . I was sitting Vipassana for three to four hours a day. I considered becoming a Buddhist monk and went to India for a thirty-day meditation retreat in Igapuri, a small village north of Bombay. The regimen was too severe for me—total silence, total isolation, sitting meditation for fourteen hours a day—and I began to lose my ego boundaries. By the third week I was hallucinating and thought that I could see through walls and had total access to both my past and future lives. The monks took me to Bombay, and an Indian doctor put me on antipsychotic medication and called my brother, who flew to India to take me home. I was hospitalized for about four weeks in Los Angeles. After I was discharged I immediately flew back to San Francisco, and it was the following day that I met Thelma, sheerly by chance, in Union Square.
“I was still in a very fragmented state of mind. I had turned the Buddhist doctrines into a real craziness and believed I was in a state of oneness with everybody. I was glad to run into Thelma—into
you,
Thelma,” turning to her. “I was glad to see you. It helped me feel anchored again.”
Matthew turned back to me and, until he finished his story, did not again look at Thelma.
“I had nothing but good feelings for her. I felt one with Thelma. I wanted her to have everything she wanted in life. More than that—I thought her quest for happiness was my quest as well. It was the same quest, she and I were the same. I took the Buddhist credo of universal oneness and egolessness very literally. I didn’t know where I ended and another started. I gave her everything she wanted. She wanted me to be close to her, she wanted to come home with me, she wanted sex—I was willing to give her everything in a state of perfect oneness and love.
“But she wanted more and I couldn’t give more. I grew more disturbed. After three or four weeks my hallucinations returned, and I had to re-enter the hospital—this time for six weeks. I hadn’t been out very long when I heard about Thelma’s suicide attempt. I didn’t know what to do. It was catastrophic. It was the worst thing that had ever happened to me. I’ve been haunted by it for eight years. I answered her calls at first, but they kept coming. My psychiatrist finally advised me to sever all contact, to be totally silent. He said that would be necessary for my own sanity, and he was certain that it would be best for Thelma as well.”
As I listened to Matthew, my head began to spin. I had developed a variety of hypotheses about his behavior, but I was not remotely prepared for the story I had just heard.
First, was it true? Matthew was a charmer. He was smooth. Was he staging all this for me? No, I had no doubt that things were as he described them: his words had the unmistakable ring of truth. He freely offered the names of hospitals and his treating physicians if I should want to call. Furthermore, Thelma, to whom he said he had told this in the past, had listened with rapt attention and offered no demurral whatsoever.
I turned to look at Thelma, but she averted her glance. After Matthew finished talking, she began to stare out the window. Was it possible that she knew all this from the start and had concealed it from me? Or had she been so absorbed with her own distress and her own needs that, throughout, she had been completely unaware of Matthew’s mental state? Or had she known for some brief period and then repressed the knowledge because it clashed with her own vital lie?
Only Thelma could tell me. But which Thelma? The Thelma who deceived me? The Thelma who deceived herself? Or the Thelma who was deceived by herself? I doubted that I would find the answers to these questions.
Primarily, though, my attention was fixed on Matthew. Over the last several months, I had constructed a vision—or, rather, several alternative visions—of him: an irresponsible, sociopathic Matthew who exploited his patients; a callous and sexually confused Matthew who acted out his personal conflicts (with women in general or mother in particular); an errant, grandiose young therapist who mistook the love desired for the love required.
Yet he was none of these. He was something else, something I had never anticipated. But what? I wasn’t certain. A well-intentioned victim? A wounded healer, a Christ figure who had sacrificed his own integrity for Thelma? Certainly, I no longer viewed him as an offending therapist: he was as much a patient as Thelma and, furthermore (I could not help thinking, glancing toward Thelma, who was still staring out the window), a
working
patient, a patient after my own heart.
I remember feeling dislocated—so many constructs exploded in so few minutes. Gone forever was the construct of Matthew as sociopath or exploiter-therapist. Instead there arose a haunting question:
In this relationship, who had exploited whom?

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