14a. The Monotonous, Grinding Mechanics of Long-Term Talk Therapy: A Partial Summary, Part One

My therapist Judith and I argued for years over her calling my mother “psychotic.”

My mother, I maintained, was a fucked-up person, but she wasn’t psychotic. Judith never met my mother; she only knew what I said about her, and you can’t diagnose people you never met from someone else’s description.

Unlike Judith, I had met my mother, many times, under many circumstances, and I knew her better than anybody, so wasn’t I the better judge of how “psychotic” she was or was not?

Also, it would better suit my narrative if she were psychotic, because then I could exaggerate how bad she was for more sympathy. So if I was arguing against my own self-interest that she wasn’t psychotic, then it must have been extra-true, right?

Because, if she were truly psychotic, and I was her daughter, wouldn’t that make me truly psychotic too?

So when I say, “I argued with Judith,” I mean, I argued with Judith for years.

After a while, I just closed up shop. I rolled down the metal security gate to my shop and padlocked it shut. Judith would refer to Joan’s “psychotic behavior,” and I wouldn’t say anything, because the word just bounced off the gate. Anytime she used the word, I paused, noted it with an asterisk, *no, then moved along.

I tried not to get into a specific discussion of the word, choosing to think of it as an exaggeration, a metaphor, a rhetorical device. Not literally psychotic. Figuratively psychotic.

This was all I could admit: Sometimes my mother acted as though she were psychotic. But she wasn’t. Sometimes her normal human shittiness almost crossed the line into psychosis; sometimes her behavior overlapped a little with that of a psychotic person, but I wasn’t going to mistake commonality for causality.

For one thing, my mother was a very successful entrepreneur. She started working as a secretary right out of high school, and she worked her way up to respected business owner. A psychotic person could not be successful at self-employment, because their illness would prevent the necessary clarity and rationality.

For another thing, she was not delusional. I am way more prone to delusions of grandeur than she was. If anyone has a Messiah complex, it’s me. Nor was my mother paranoid. Racist, absolutely; prone to blaming unseen forces for problems she’d created for herself, definitely. But she didn’t have phobias or overwhelming fears — in fact, there were many times when it would’ve served her to have been more fearful.

So Judith was wrong, even though she was never wrong about anything, ever.

It’s funny, because the shrink with the German accent in the old jokes always asked, “Why do you hate your mother?” And mine was always asking, “Why do you love yours?”

*

The idea was that I would replace my mother in my psyche with Judith. Meaning that, when I looked for a warm feeling of being loved, understood, and supported, I would picture Judith and not Joan. When I needed guidance in a situation, Judith would appear on my shoulder to be the voice in my ear.

Joan would lose all her power over me. I wouldn’t need her anymore—rather, I didn’t need her anymore, and I would finally integrate that knowledge rather than fight it.

Talk therapy, like Buddhism, assumes that our attachments create our suffering. But while Buddhists would have you universally detach, therapy wants you to replace unhealthy attachment with healthy attachment: being attached to that which sustains you, instead of that which drains you.

Intellectually, I was on board with replacing unhealthy attachment. I was all aboard! I was the skipper of the S.S. Healthy Attachment, calling all to sail the tranquil waters of emotional stability with me!

The hope that I could one day stop loving and yearning for my mother, stop fearing her anger or indifference, stop feeling like I was unlovable because she couldn’t love me, kept me afloat. Judith kept me afloat. (Also, medication.)

But Judith was paid to be in my life. I knew she truly cared about me, but I paid her to truly care. She would still care if I didn’t pay her, but she wouldn’t spend time with me. I could try to make Judith my mother, but I wasn’t her daughter. She could try to recreate me, but she did not create me.

It wasn’t enough.

I tried to explain this to my current therapist, Robin, a few years into our work: You shrinks ask us, essentially, to love you, but you can’t really love us back. There’s an inherent imbalance in your importance to us and our importance to you.

You’re very important to me, Robin stressed.

Yeah, but we’re asked to love you. And we don’t even know you! You’re not supposed to be yourself with us, you’re supposed to have boundaries. The intimacy is shared, but it’s not reciprocated.

But…

Look, I teach classes. There are eight students, twelve, five—however many students. And there’s only one of me. I hold more power, in their minds, than their classmates do. (Unless they want to have sex with each other.) You hold more power than your patients.

Therapy is not about winning arguments with your shrink. There is, however, a satisfaction when it happens, and you narrow that power gap for a second. See? Sometimes I know shit too.

On the other hand, I do love my students. Not all of them, not all the time. But I have to love them a little bit, if I’m going to help them. They have to know that I care about them, or why would they share their work with me?

And yes, I have my favorites. I am impartial in group settings, but not privately. I prefer diligent workers, generous classmates, and exceptional talents. I’m also prone to like people who seem to like me.

There are students that I love, to the extent that I know them. Some I’ve referred to, outside their hearing, as proteges, which is both pretentious and presumptuous. Nobody signed up to study “under” me; I’m not Uta Hagen. Yet there are a few students I’ve seen as spirit-successors.

One of the most unethical things Judith ever did was to tell me she loved me, and that I was like a daughter to her. That I’d absorbed what she’d taught me so deeply, I could be qualified to be a Junior Judith, to carry on her legacy after her death. There was me, and another long-ago patient who had passed, and we were the most special.

This maternal love from Judith was partly my salvation, and partly my undoing. I could attach to Judith, but I couldn’t fully detach from my mother, and this kept me clinging by the fingernails to both of them.

I sat on Judith’s couch and defended myself, made excuses for caring about my mother, like I was that friend who just won’t leave their shitty partner, but won’t stop bitching about them to you either.