Et in Therapia ego
by Martha Graham Wiseman
Photo by Elīna Arāja for Pexels
Yes, you too have been among the therapy-addled, the therapy-graced, the therapy-nurtured, the therapy-salvaged. You too have consumed Sinequan, Prozac, Valium, Nardil, Luvox, Lexapro, Wellbutrin, Provigil, Nuvigil, Abilify. And you too have perused so many tracings of the ages and stages of melancholy and dysthymia and spleen and ennui, the nippings of the black dog, the ravening influence of Saturn.
Therapy is a peculiar space-time continuum. You enter it first, and you re-enter it, with hope and trepidation and a certain relief. You recognize the waves of energy and mass; you give in to the gravitational pull, because you have veered out of orbit. No instruments have been able locate you.
Or forget physics. Maybe therapy is redemption from the mire. Or surgery, to excise pain. Or exorcism, the possessing demons driven out. Or absolution.
A stew of metaphors. Is any one of them helpful? A raft of choices, on which you should be able to float, except that you’re going under.
What of depression, a word you did not know until you had lived in its embrace for some time? Depression as rubble or detritus, to be bulldozed away—a metaphoric action relying upon deliberate force, a hint of violence. Or depression as a raw field, or a rocky meadow, in need of determined clearing, labored plowing.
Less harshly, depression as arable land not yet cultivated. A field, perhaps, of eager emptiness. There—that’s better: more hopeful. Only there is no eagerness, and certainly no hope, except perhaps an eagerness and a hope to be freed from the void, by being released into a more and finally complete void. Then, you will no longer have any awareness of the weight of nothingness.
Into the vacuum, or the morass, have swept the therapists, a whole procession of them. You’ve done the sweeping, mostly. You’ve sought them out, and you’re—mostly—grateful.
Proverbial
A teacher, a teacher you loved, arranged your very first visit with a psychiatrist, in 1969. You were sixteen. She knew there was something amiss.
That psychiatrist seems in retrospect to have been a throwback to the fifties or earlier, in looks and manner. His chest sloped into a paunch, his hair was thinning, his face had a grayish pallor, his tie was short, and his questions formulaic. He said, “Let sleeping dogs lie.”
“What?” you said.
He repeated the proverb, then asked what it meant to you.
You bristled. “I don’t know—don’t bother sleeping dogs?”
He tried another: “A rolling stone gathers no moss.”
You were too insulated from popular music to think of the Rolling Stones, whom you may not even have heard, or heard of, at that time, weird as that sounds. What you did think of was Sisyphus, rolling his stone—you’d recently been reading Camus. You shrugged.
He gave up on the proverbs, which at the time you of course didn’t know were in common therapeutic use, like verbal Rorschachs. He asked about dreams.
You told him, foolishly, about a recent dream in which Anne, the teacher who’d brought you to his office, had comforted you, embraced you.
He said, “Do you have lesbian feelings?”
You screwed up your face with incomprehension. Part of you already knew you simply wanted a mother figure, but that knowledge wasn’t conscious enough to express. And you would have been chagrined to know how common—you might have even thought cliché—such a desire was. Is.
You were going away to college, you explained, so after a second visit, he and you agreed there was little point in going forward. He urged you, quite distinctly, to seek help when you got to college.
And you did seek help. That, in fact—seeking help—may have been one of the keys to your survival.
Here begins the therapeutic cavalcade.
We Call Him Counselor
Your first year of college: Mr. Cohen. Stooped even though he wasn’t old, perhaps a slight hunchback, black-haired, pipe-smoking, soft-spoken, deeply kind. You were a little in love with him, a bit of the usual transference, about which you were only just learning. The next year, a new city, a new college. Inevitably, desperation set in. You wrote Mr. Cohen a long letter. In his reply, he urged you to find someone to help you. And soon.
Elegance, Germanic
Your new college: a staff counselor, Mrs. Mannheim. She went against policy and agreed to see you regularly, all year. A strangely calming, still-discernible German (or was it Austrian?) accent, long silver hair piled up loosely, her body angular, her eyes penetrating. At the end of a year, she referred you to an outside therapist.
And How Do You Feel About That?
Ten years plus: You showed up in Mrs. Bromwich’s consulting room, often twice a week, sometimes as a member of a group, first five or six other students from your college, and then after a number of years, she insisted you join another of her groups, seven women whose company and insights, you pointed out, were not of your choosing. They had been more or less thrown together because they all were her patients, or clients, or regulars. You made it insistently clear that you despised group therapy. Finally, she gave in; you returned to individual visits only. Your father went in to talk with her. Your mother, too, when she happened to be visiting. Both were soothed, for Mrs. Bromwich was soothing.
You called Mrs. Bromwich frequently, in terrible pain, unable to figure out how to move into the next minute, let alone the next hour or the next day. She’d talk to you, listen to you, for as long as you needed. Well, not quite as long, since your need felt bottomless.
Mrs. Bromwich, whom you eventually called Betty, had short thinning flaxen-colored hair, freckles, and a way of settling herself in her armchair, easing her shoulders back and forth. She had a rather birdlike gaze. You felt absolutely dependent upon her presence in your life.
Then you took a break from therapy, during which you married David, the man you’d been living with for some nine years. Marriage did not solve anything, certainly not the psychic pain, but had you expected it to?
Enter Celeste Rouade.
You Tell That Girl
Of all the therapists you’ve consulted, depended on, cared about, lived through, it is strangely Celeste who takes up the greatest amount of space in your memory of treatment. No matter that she often misread you and perhaps misled you, she was and remains effective in looming large and vivid, then and now. It is her techniques, her words, her salves and her wounds, that stay with you, more so than those of most of the others, including the ones, especially Ruth, who led you through and challenged you to make profound and necessary changes.
Celeste’s consulting room was sunny and breezy, a corner area of her apartment. The room was closed off from the main living space by two sets of glass-paned doors hung with white gauzy drapes for privacy, a room that offered a quiet calm, intended, presumably, as a counterbalance to what went on there and to Celeste’s own brand of fierceness. Celeste herself was short and round, formidable and imposing, her hair thick and dark and curly, held back from her face tenuously. There was that edgy accent, that whiff of the Maghreb—wonderfully French, tinged with a self-confident readiness for a skirmish, a near-visible throwing down of the gauntlet. She moved, in her loose overshirts and long skirts, with a decisive grace. Sometimes her eyes widened and rounded in disbelief, a kind of shock that she seemed almost to welcome; sometimes they narrowed in an effort to size you up, pin you down. Her body and her mind married coarseness with delicacy. She made frequent use of a Gallic shrug, an unuttered “Mais bien sûr!” This could be inviting; it could also be dismissive. She was good at being both.
“How you doin’?” she asked—perhaps demanded is more appropriate—with a peremptory upward jab of her chin and then the half-inquisitive, half-accusatory nod of a perspicacious cat. This was her opening salvo at every session. You’d mumble some words, look down. You thought, Let me sink into this chair; let me sink all the way down, ‘til I’m unreachable.
Then Celeste would say, almost bark: “You’re depressed!” This was no longer news. You were in your early thirties, and you’d lived, you’re not sure how, in a state of chronic depression for more than fifteen years.
Indeed, looking back now over your journals—often a mistake—you are stunned by the level of pain you bore. Reading the reiterations of “I wish I were dead,” “I want to die,” is wrenching. It’s not that you’ve forgotten; it’s that, again, you don’t know how you got through.
Celeste had her own particular, if not peculiar, methods of helping you get through, and of getting through to you. At first, she sought, and asked you to seek, some trauma from your early life, some primal scene, something that had infected you but lain dormant for years, like a virus. You could dredge up no trauma, no primal scene, no source of initial infection. No screams...but the very word primal brought you back to a summer job nine years earlier, when you’d worked as a receptionist at The Center for Human Development, where so-called primal therapists, clearly under the spell of Arthur Janov’s bestseller The Primal Scream, saw clients. These clients, desperate or demanding, arrived for their “primals,” disappeared into soundproofed, perhaps even padded rooms, to scream their primal screams, re-enact their birth traumas, other traumas, alone or with a therapist or with a group.
That memory wasn’t especially helpful.
Undaunted, Celeste focused upon another goal: You must forgive your mother. Take aim and forgive.
Celeste believed in the clear path of the arrow. She was the arrow. Or the therapy was the arrow. But you were not prepared for archery. Your hand-eye coordination had never been good.
She had a point—you did blame your depressed mother for a great many things—but Celeste’s route to forgiveness was both too straight and too hazy.
She said, This is visualization, it’s a technique that works, OK? Picture you, and picture your mother and her needs or words, put each in a bubble. You tell that girl, let the bubbles float away. They are separate, they float to different places. You watch the bubbles disappear, the bubble of your unforgiveness, the bubble of your mother’s pain.
She said, Place one gold ring around yourself and another around your mother, and Niagara Falls—you’ve seen it?—separates you, you and your mother. You tell that girl in her gold ring—you see it?—to thank her mother in her separate gold ring, thank her for all the good things she gave. But you tell that girl to tell her mother, I don’t want these things that are not mine, OK?
She said, Take this piece of paper, it is your mother’s “unsuccess”. Crumple the paper, throw it across the room, throw it away, throw away that unsuccess, which is this ball of paper. Throw it! You tell that girl you do not need it anymore.
She said, Picture yourself as a young child. You see her? (All you see is a snapshot, memory’s stand-in: you, at perhaps three years old, with your father. Not your mother.) You see that girl? You tell that girl you understand. You tell that girl you understand she feels things she cannot say in words.
You tried to tell that girl, more vivid as absence than presence, what you, the thirty-something-year-old girl almost as hard to conjure, were told to tell her.
You could dutifully repeat, aloud or in your mind, everything Celeste instructed you to tell that girl. You could throw crumpled paper, close your eyes and try to envision bubbles, waterfalls, rings. But “that girl” was permanently unavailable, although you must have shared Celeste’s hope that your so much younger self could be re-enlivened, re-inhabited. Some part of you might have known such a hope was futile. But like many people riddled with hopelessness, you wanted to be led by hope. By such certain hope.
And she loved you. She told you so. At the end of your phone calls to her, when she’d listened to you weeping and assured you yet again you were depressed, she’d say, “I love you!” before she rang off.
Your husband, David, was a very bright, very talented, and very angry man, and Celeste found him very impressive. He was enlisted in your treatment: she gave him tasks to do at home, including helping you conserve energy by not talking, taking you on outings, painting the apartment in new colors. Celeste seemed to think that you were obstructing his love and therefore your own happiness, and you tried to agree. She stated flatly, when you admitted apropos of sex that you suffered frequent yeast and bladder infections, “This is your chastity belt.” You were a medieval sinner, only in reverse.
About two and a half years into your work with Celeste, she issued her ultimatum. “You want to save your marriage?”
Well, yes. You knew she was right: your marriage was on the line. That line, vibrating dangerously, led Celeste to proclaim that if indeed you wanted to save the marriage, you had to see a sex therapist. You were embarrassed and humiliated. And frightened.
Not Everything You Wanted to Know about Sex
You obeyed Celeste, as you always did. You met Roberta, the sex therapist, who told you on that first visit that she could not work with you until some of your anxiety could be alleviated. She sent you to another psychiatrist, Alana, for medication.
Roberta gave you articles to read about sexual phobias, at least one of which was apparently your diagnosis. David sometimes joined you in your sessions. Roberta wanted to help you both be “fulfilled.” You were given new tasks. You were earnest. David was earnest, rather desperately so.
How long did you see Roberta? A year, maybe? Two years? You remember very little of what was actually said in her little office. You remember that she was long and lanky, handsome. You remember that once she remarked, probably in response to your saying how much you disliked your body, “But it seems you have a beautiful body.” David was there, and he agreed, a little lasciviously. You remember one of the tasks you and David were given to do together: to visit Eve’s Garden, a “discreet” sex shop, and pick out—the choice was mostly yours, with David urging you on—a toy, an aid, a something supposedly geared to pleasure. You turned as pink as the plastic dildo you quickly chose, so as to bring the expedition to an end. And you remember leaving her office—it must have been wintertime—and walking out into the dark evening with a piece of paper in your hand, a sort of prescription for “dialators”. You knew she’d spelled the word wrong, which somehow made handing over the piece of paper to a pharmacist (it would be too awful to have to say it) and receiving the graduated sizes of black plastic not at all lifelike phalluses, or rather their tips, even more hauntingly shameful.
Why Go On?
Celeste announced that she was going away, taking some time off. Okay, sure. Then she told you, “I cannot help you anymore.” You were being dismissed. She went on: “I do not know what else to do for you, I don’t know how to help you. I have tried. You are still depressed.”
You stared at her.
“I do not believe,” she said finally, “in therapy that goes on forever.”
She gave you the name of another psychiatrist, and so ended the years of Celeste.
I’d Like to Talk to You about Your Anger
You reacted poorly to the psychiatrist Celeste referred you to, a jazz buff who displayed his guitars in his office, a middle-aged man yearning for his hip, perhaps hippie years. In fact, you couldn’t stand him. As you left his office after your first visit, he said, with pronounced earnestness, “I’d like to talk to you about your anger.” He succeeded in infuriating you.
You went to a second session out of some leftover loyalty to Celeste and told him the arrangement was not going to work for you. You didn’t want to talk to him about anything at all.
You called Alana, the psychiatrist who’d been overseeing your medication, and begged her to take you on as a patient. You felt stranded, you explained. And she obliged. She never turned you away, even when you couldn’t pay her.
The Psychotropics
Alana had a special rocking chair she sat in. In what looked like an enormous old apartment, now repurposed, her office was a tiny room among numerous others, psychiatrists’ offices all, you suspected, from the noise-canceling machines humming outside the doors. Alana had protuberant eyes (perhaps a thyroid condition?) she fixed steadily on you and curly, possibly highly permed shoulder-length dull-brown hair. She was skinny and wore tight-fitting clothes, high heels, and, in winter, to your chagrin, a fur coat.
Alana, who’d started you on Prozac so you could manage work with Roberta, added other psychotropics. She believed heartily in the physiological basis of depression and anxiety, although her reasoning—“The fact that these drugs work, that they alleviate symptoms, means that the cause is chemical”—seemed a little tautological to you. Nevertheless, she got you over your reluctance to taking medication, which did at least seem to buffer you a little from some of the worst of the pain and paralysis. Alana also believed in talk therapy, and she became your new lifeline.
Calls to Alana were routinely answered by a Mrs. Levy, a secretary or a service or possibly her mother. You never saw her. Alana tended to answer these calls very late at night—11, midnight, one in the morning. When asked why, she said simply, “That’s the only time I have to make the calls.” Once, just as your marriage to David was unraveling, she met you at her office quite late in the evening. She saw you through—in both senses of the phrase—the dissolution of the marriage and the after-time, when you flailed in a slightly different way than you had during the years you’d lived with David.
Try Again
Then you moved, and of course you looked for a therapist. Generous, loving Lori now kept you functioning, the stable, vital center of your churning world, through all kinds of shifts, within and without; through crises—9:30 at night, you’re frantic, she says, “Meet me at the office in 15 minutes,” and there she is; through afternoons when all you could do was lie on the bed in your garret apartment and talk to her on the phone; through the gradual, unexpected burgeoning of passion and tenderness: through all this, Lori sustained you. You wanted to be her friend, and sometimes friendship felt very close. She said, several times, I will disappoint you as a friend, but you did not believe her. After five years, though, she said she didn’t think she was helping you anymore, and you knew she was right, though you didn’t want to hear it. You and she did try a few times to meet as would-be friends, but you were both uncomfortable: this was something she could not sustain. Maybe you could not, either.
Lori referred you to Ruth; she wanted you in capable hands. Lori said, Ruth will understand. It was Ruth who made you work the hardest you’d ever had to work in therapy; Ruth who wouldn’t allow you to continue to so fully embrace and project the identity of a depressive. To give up this cherished and despised identity seemed like a denial of your true self. How dare she suggest such a thing? That self had been true but was now, you eventually saw, stretched too thin to contain all of you. Ruth pushed you. She caught you out, sometimes harshly. She never gave up, and though you longed to do so, neither did you.
Ten years of Ruth’s scrupulous, even relentless, deeply supportive vision. Ten years of sometimes excruciatingly difficult work—there is no other word for it. You ended once, left things open. A year after your father’s death, you returned to Ruth for some months. When you ended this time, when you were saddened to lose her, she said, “You won’t lose me. You can’t. I’ll be with you.” She was right.
Retrospective, Metaphorical
Therapist as soother, interrogator, excavator, translator, archaeologist, bulldozer, extension-division consultant, high-wire act safety net, astronomer, horticulturalist, real estate developer.
Does this help?
Not an Epilogue
Admit it: you will never be free of depression and anxiety. Perhaps they were hardwired from conception, perhaps passed down behaviorally, cognitively, by a deeply depressed mother and a violently anxious father, two people you find it hard to imagine being together, which they barely were in your lifetime. Perhaps your neural networks were altered by chronic suffering. What you do know is that you did not die, as much as you wanted to, and you did not at least in part because there was usually someone—a therapist, a psychiatrist—who was a steady presence. Even Celeste, despite her combination of ineffectiveness, weirdness, and actual harmfulness, seemed to provide a net; you trusted that she did—until of course she didn’t. But you knew enough to get yourself to Alana, and to the others who followed. The drugs have helped, of course; perhaps they’ve saved you, although they do not prevent depressive episodes and fraught washes of terror.
When you feel somewhat steady—and loving someone, living with that someone who loves you, is steadying—you can tell yourself that you manage to live with such episodes, live through them. You can’t fight them; fighting never works. But when the fog of self-hatred or inexplicable sadness or the slightly sick sensation of dread descends, you forget again that you can manage. Here it is again, you think. And again.
And again, you survive. Somehow.
Martha Graham Wiseman (she/her) has been an acting student, a dancer, and an editor. She taught English at Skidmore College until retiring in 2020. Her essays have appeared in The Georgia Review, Fish Anthology 2021, Ponder Review, Dorothy Parker’s Ashes, Under the Sun, The Santa Ana River Review, and The Bookends Review.