Deep Sea Diving

Speaking of therapy, I had my own therapy session yesterday evening. RJ, maybe you have too many meta-discussions about therapy with your therapist, but I don’t have enough, and yet last night we did. She usually starts a couple of minutes late. Last night I got there, and she opened the office door and welcomed me, and as I walked in she excused herself for a couple of minutes. When she came back we first went over some financial stuff, except she thinks she might have forgotten to record a payment in her records. She seemed a little flustered. Something seemed slightly off. Then we were about to begin, and literally as soon as I inhaled to begin speaking, the phone rang. The phone rang! This is my biggest pet peeve. I’m now on my fourth therapist in ten years, and she’s the only one who lets phone calls interrupt the session. Usually it’s very quick — she tells the person “I’ll call you back later” — but I don’t think she should be picking it up during my session in the first place. I don’t even think the ringer should be on.

So I said, bashfully, not looking directly at her, “It kinda bothers me that you take phone calls during my therapy session.” Her eyes lit up, and she said, “Okay… what are you really trying to tell me?” Straight out of a TV movie, right? I mean, total therapy cliché. So first we talk about how I’m often so hesitant to criticize someone or stick up for myself because I want people to like me. My identity is built on me being a nice, intelligent, talented guy. And won’t they all be oh so impressed by my self-sacrifice?

Then we move on to the problems I have with her sometimes. Like consistently starting a few minutes late. Or how every few weeks the phone rings during the session. And basically I think she gives too much of her reactions away. I don’t think she’s enough of a blank wall. Sometimes that can be good, because at least she’s not obnoxiously hiding the ball. But sometimes… she seems… well, too human.

Oh my god! Humanity! How dare you interject humanity into my therapy session, right? I talked about how my therapists in the past had all been men, and wore ties, and how she’s a woman and every week she comes in wearing a different color and how I feel like this undermines her authority. The whole thing just feels too informal sometimes, and it makes me worry that we’re not doing therapy the “right” way, that we’re not following the rules and that therefore I’m not getting my money’s worth, and this is all going to have tragic consequences, and how do I know I’m entrusting my psyche to the right person? This is so me. Oh my god, the universe is going to implode if we don’t follow the rules. Ignore the rules or make your own rules and horrible things are going to happen.

She wanted to get back to this whole male/female thing, and so I talked about how a man wearing a tie just seems like more of a reliable authority figure to me. Sort of like my dad. BINGO! And we’re off. I’ve been angry and pissed at my dad for so much that I’ve felt he’s done to me, for the way he’s sometimes treated me, and yet at the same time I’ve been afraid to get out from under him. He was always reliable, he always set the rules, and I knew I couldn’t go wrong if I listened to him. He knew how to do things. He knew how to make mechanical repairs. He knew how to rent a car and plan a vacation. He knew to add up the check in the restaurant to make sure we weren’t getting overcharged. He knew how to tell people off when they were trying to cheat him. He knew how to make his way in this world. He knew what the rules were, he knew how to do all these things, and he did them right, and I’d think to myself, how could I possibly attempt to do things any differently than the “right” way, and how could I even attempt to do these things by myself at all? I mean, he’s so perfect. And he was the boundary. He was this stone archway around and above me. Protecting me, doing everything correctly and so well, and lecturing me on how I didn’t know how to do things. “Don’t put the stamp on the envelope crooked!” “Don’t put the dishes in the dishwasher that way!”

And at night he’d come home from his generic office job wearing his suit and tie and sometimes he’d have some candy for me. Usually M&Ms or Chuckles or Chiclets. It was so great.

And I looked like him in many ways. I had his curly hair. “You look just like your father!” people would say. They’d take a look at me and immediately know whose son I was. And one night I dressed up in his office clothes. I put on his glasses, his vest, his tie. I was this little bitty version of him. And we have similar brains — intelligent, an aptitude for math and science and the biting argument. In more recent years we could go toe to toe, like two powerful wizards who know each other’s tricks, throwing ineffective spells at each other. And I’d sometimes be yelling at my mom about something that my dad had done to piss me off, and she’d get a smile on her face and shake her head in disbelief and say, “You know, it’s amazing how similar you two are,” and I’d want to scream. I didn’t want to be similar to him.

Last night I told my therapist once again about my first memories of my mom and my dad.

My earliest memory of my mom is from when we were living in a two-family house in Queens. I was no older than three, because when I was three we moved out of that house. She and I sat on the floor of my bedroom, playing with the Fisher Price Little People™ Sesame Street Playset. I felt love and nurturing and companionship.

My earliest memory of my dad isn’t a real memory, but a dream. I had it when we were living in that same house. In the dream, I was standing alone in our kitchen at night. The kitchen had these ugly 1970s bright green walls and the lights were on. Suddenly this man walked into the room dressed from head to toe in a black scuba outfit, and although I couldn’t see any of his features I knew it was my dad. He had black flippers on his feet and his face was hidden behind a scuba mask and his body was covered in black. He seemed like a stranger. I was scared to death. What was he trying to scare me like this? Why was he doing this to me?

I have no idea why my earliest impression of my dad is based on fear. I doubt he physically abused me, but when I was a tiny bit older, I knew that he had a bad temper, and he could be menacing and he could yell, and he did hit me sometimes. He could be unpredictable, sometimes loving and proud of his son and sometimes terrifying and contemptuous of his son’s great incompetence, and because there didn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason as to what would trigger the bad stuff, I was afraid to act at all. Often I didn’t like him very much.

Of course, the answer is that it never really had anything to do with me. It was all about him. I kind of know that now. It’s just that the rest of me has to learn it.