Comments III (Therapy)

Therapy is probably the best thing that has ever happened to me. In today’s world we don’t just go to the doctor to stay alive, we go to improve the quality of our lives… pain pills, antibiotics (which are sometimes life saving but often just clear things up faster and easier), flu shots, anti-inflammatories. Many of the treatments we get are to improve our lives, not save them. I feel the same way about therapy. I don’t go because I’m crazy (at least I don’t think I do ;-)), I go to improve the quality of my life. I may have started because I was falling apart but that was almost twenty years ago and I was so ashamed to be going I used to skulk into empty offices to call and make my appointments. I haven’t been going steadily through all these years. I’ve taken several long breaks lasting anywhere from two to four years, but I’ve always gone back when the “going got tough.”

I started therapy back when I was a very young single mother of two girls and they both caught lice at school. I was absolutely mortified and thought it was my mothering. Because my reaction was so outrageous to the whole thing, I knew I needed to seek help. I remember sitting in the bathtub and scrubbing my flesh with Comet and a wire brush. Weird, huh? I also went through a period of cutting up my arms, all sort of stemming from this whole lice thing. What I needed was an outside source, a professional if you will, to tell me I was okay. And I needed to believe it.

My first therapist was marginal at best. It seemed like we were in this big match to see if I would cry. I was a very tough lady (my second therapy once told me I was more macho than most men he knew ;)) and didn’t want to give in to tears. It seemed so important to my first therapist that it set us up to clash on the issue and whenever I would come close to tears he’d be ready to move in and “comfort” me and I could feel his expectation. That screwed things up and I would pull myself together and never give in to the emotions.

What my first therapist did, though, was set me up with a second therapist as my family therapist… to work with my daughters and myself. Now this guy was great. He had a terrific sense of humor and a way of putting me at ease that I’d never experienced before. I’d say something like, “This might sound crazy…” and he’d answer, “Good, that’s the best stuff!” Somehow that made it all okay to tell my shameful secrets which turned out to not be so horrible after all.

After some time in both therapies I stopped and felt pretty good then a couple years later I was watching a TV show about child abuse. I’ll never forget this moment… I even talked about this in therapy last week. I had been showing my daughters movies and watching specials with them so that any encounter they would have with a molester could be nipped in the bud and they would be protected. There was one scene in one special where a little black girl sat on a swing and they were interviewing her. She wasn’t all that young, about ten or twelve, and she was talking about a neighbor who had bribed her for sex (touching, etc.) with comic books and candy. The interviewer said, “But it wasn’t your fault. Don’t think that just because you took the gifts you were at fault. It is always the adult’s fault.”

Suddenly I remembered my brother doing the same thing to me. This was like a punch in the stomach. How could you forget something so earth shaking for so many years!? But now I remembered it clear as a bell and I figure it must have been because suddenly I didn’t feel guilty about it so much.

When my (cocaine) brother and I were about 10 (me) and maybe 13 (him) we were wrestling on my bed and he asked if I had ever had my breasts touched or something to that effect. I let him touch me. After that he wanted to do it again and would buy me candy or comic books for alloted amounts of time to touch me. At some point or another I reniged on him and took the candy/comic books but didn’t let him touch me. That resulted in encounters where he would catch me in the hallway and force me against the wall to claim his “time.” Either that or when my parents went out and left him to babysit me (good job on their parts), he would get me and I’d be forced to give in. I really hated that and I hated him. I hated when he put his mouth on my breasts and for years and years my skin would just crawl when I heard lip smacking sounds. I’d go nuts if I sat with a sloppy eater.

So, all this came back to me and I went to see the guy who had formally been my family therapist. I told him I had suddenly remembered my brother abusing me. He said, “Do you want to talk about it?” I answered, “No,” and we proceeded to talk about anything else for the next five years or so. During that time he was my parent really. He was the person I went to to make the big decisions in my life. He guided me through the relationship with my husband and put the brakes on me when I considered having an affair (not after we were married, but before). He kept my head straight and somehow helped me make many fewer mistakes than before.