“Why does it at times feel like a foreign language?”
“Who knows how we actually learn our communications?” he said. “It’s not always a simple matter of repeating what we’ve heard our parents say. Sometimes rooted into our words are competitive feelings, a need to fight for our space, a need to defend ourselves. It’s just a matter of being able to do that clearly, with confidence and without creating more conflict. And sometimes we have to push back. Just not all the time.”
It was a bit frustrating for her to think she needed help communicating when she was a highly educated physician!
“But you don’t always need help,” Dr. Norton reminded her. “You apparently communicate with your patients in an authoritative and empathetic way, something you no doubt learned in medical training.”
She had, and when pushed she had to admit it had not come easily. It was in fact an older and experienced nurse who had coached her, reducing the lessons to a simple, You’ll catch more flies with honey.
This was somehow harder.
“I’m going to be in therapy forever,” she complained to Dr. Norton.
“You’ll be in therapy as long as you are impatient,” he had countered. “If you think about it, you have a lot less work to do than a client who is battling early childhood abuse or addiction or some other difficult situation.”
While Dr. Norton was exceptionally kind to her, very encouraging and hopeful, he did not mince words. Being selfish and given to angry outbursts was a disorder. Perhaps not the worst imaginable disorder, but still... And behaving in a way that was jealous and entitled? Disorder, also. It was completely survivable, he assured her, as long as she was in the driver’s seat and wanted to make a change.
“Let’s be clear,” she said. “I just want to make a change so that in the end I get my way and don’t feel hurt and abandoned anymore.”
“I suspect that’s one of the best motivations there is,” he said.
He seemed to still want to talk a great deal about her family and her childhood, though she couldn’t imagine what that had to do with anything. The fact was, she’d had a very nice childhood. She had loved her mom and dad very much, and when her baby brother came along, she loved him. She couldn’t remember ever not loving them.
Little by little she began to remember very small things from when she was four, five or six years old. She remembered that she had to sit on her mama’s lap because her brother was sitting on Daddy’s lap. For a while her daddy slept in her brother’s room and didn’t sleep in her room because there wasn’t as much room for that extra bed. Her mom and dad both worked and she remembered that she was in a program at school and her grandmother went to her program while her dad went to Michael’s. It seemed like a Christmas program.
“My mother wasn’t very patient,” she said. “I probably get it from her. And when Bess was born I thought, Yay, another girl. I took care of her all the time, watched over her, fed her, changed her. I was so relieved not to have to contend with another boy.”
But then Bess turned out to be different from other children and didn’t adjust to preschool or day care. She had trouble being touched, had difficulty around large groups of children. She needed lots of special education and sometimes medication to relax her compulsions and help her focus.
“I’m going to go out on a limb here and suggest that, as the firstborn, you got a lot of attention and praise and affection. And then a baby came along who required the same, and that left your cup a little empty, sharing all that adulation. And then a third baby came to the family and this one turned out to really be special needs and you lost more of your position.”
“But I loved them!” she said. “And I helped, I really helped.”
“Of course you did, but you also suffered a little loss and maybe unintentional neglect.”
“Because they had to read to two or three children instead of just one? Even I am not that ridiculous and selfish!”
“Of course you’re not, Jessie. But you are vulnerable,” he said. And there was something about the gentle way he said it that made her heart melt. “And who knows what was going on with your parents at the time. You weren’t the only living being in that house with a life. A complicated, sometimes difficult life.”
She learned that sometimes it was possible to experience loss as a child and not spontaneously get over it. There were times it set up a pattern of always expecting to be left out. Hurt. A sense of longing that is difficult to satisfy. Dr. Norton asked her to examine relationships that were meaningful to her and how she had been affected.