Michelle
Michelle, Implacable Advocate of Self-Care
As a popular therapist in New York City, I see a lot of fascinating clients with complex personal issues. I've worked with Michelle now for over two years and no matter what I say to her she always finds fault. She has this infuriating habit of pigeonholing my words and impaling me on minor errors of syntax. She takes the phrases I use to search her heart and mind and, with the cold indifference of an Internet search engine, tells me they fit zero categories and have zero relevance. Sometimes she makes me feel like the dumbest shrink who ever lived in the borough of Manhattan.
A few weeks ago, Michelle met a decent, good looking guy on jury duty. They had lunch, a few dates and one night she let him stay over. "It wasn't very satisfying," she told me a few days later in her therapy session. "He couldn't keep his momentum. Actually he didn't have much to begin with. I mean he was gentle, even wanted to hold me, but that's not what I needed. Aside from that, he went to a mediocre school, is in a dead-end job and has no idea what he wants to do with his life. Before he left, he told me I was too strong for him, that he'd be much better with a woman who needs taking care of. Can you believe it? Those were his exact words, a woman who needs taking care of! Why would anybody, especially a man, want to be somebody's caretaker? And don't start with that banal, pre-packaged crap about my childhood. My parents may not have been ecstatic about having to take care of me, but the crucial, material point is that they did a highly competent job of it. They gave me a comfortable, upper middle class life topped off with an excellent education that got me a high paying job in one of the top investment firms in Manhattan. Besides, as far back as I can remember I was always able to take care of myself. It came easily to me. I wouldn't let my parents or anybody else take care of me. I hate it when somebody twiddles all over me or tries to do little things like open doors or offer me a seat on the subway. Stupid things."
For a time last year Michelle had a problem with her job. Her boss told her she had a reputation for being overly critical and hard on people. Prior to that, in most of her therapy sessions she'd go on and on about the sloppy thinking of the analysts she works with, how they leave the office before finishing assignments and can never be depended on to follow through on details. After I suggested to Michelle that her grumpiness toward her co-workers might be a way of making them feel the way she does, that is, a disguised way of expressing her own belief that she'll never get genuine support or a kind word from anyone, she softened a bit and said, "I suppose I could be making them feel as shitty as I do most of the time." In the weeks ahead, Michelle was easier on the analysts and eventually solved her image problem. This was one of the few times she ever gave me credit for scoring above zero in our work together. What she didn't understand then, and still doesn't, is that while she did manage to smooth out her behavior on the job, she still has to solve the deeper problem.
The problem gets played out again and again in her relationships with men, that is whenever she lets go of her job long enough to have a relationship with one. It starts with her fear of having conversations at dinners or parties. "I don't know what to say," she tells me. "I have to drink three glasses of wine to loosen myself up enough to say something, anything. And dancing, forget it. I'm terrified. I feel all cemented up, unable to move." It's no surprise that Michelle has had the same nightmare off and on ever since she was a child. She's a little girl lying in bed in the middle of the night. A strange person enters the room. She has no idea if it's a man or a woman. She freezes up under the covers, not daring to move, too terrified to look and see who it is. She always wakes up in a sweat. The last time she described her nightmare, she broke into tears "It's nearly impossible to put words on it," she said. "I was petrified. I couldn't move or look or make a sound." When she stopped crying, she had this raw, terrified look on her face, the same one I sometimes glimpse in our therapy sessions when she's resting and not criticizing me.
A lot of painful things happened to Michelle as she grew up. Her younger sister had a learning disability, became a drug addict and now lives in a half-way house. Her father developed Alzheimer's at an early age and is now in a nursing home. Her mother, barely able to cope herself, always prized Michelle for her self-sufficiency and was quick to correct her whenever she made mistakes or said the wrong thing. She never spent time bearing witness to the little details of Michelle's life or made her feel important. She never saw the stress Michelle lived under, like her struggle with Bulimia in her last year in high school. Michelle has never been able to tell her about the Bulimia and feels it wouldn't do much good if she did now. She's probably right.
Michelle has practically lived her whole life shut down because she was never encouraged to show her true self openly or spontaneously. Sometimes I tell her, "You can get a lot of pleasure from being spontaneously stupid, especially when you're as smart as me." Every once in a while I'll get her to admit I'm smart enough to laugh at. But she still can't fully enjoy comic relief, that wonderful break in empathy humor gives us from feeling the shame of our past and present bloopers, especially the present ones, not to mention those of our friends. Right now I'd settle for getting Michelle to laugh more at my bloopers, then maybe at some of her own.
It's hard to imagine Michelle enjoying the roses in Monet's garden at Giverny. Certainly not because she lacks knowledge of Impressionism. Her smug, insufferable attitude is the problem. On her last visit with her mother, she was struck by the improvements made to the grounds over the years. "The water lily pond, manor house and garden used to be in an abysmal state," she told me. "Thanks to the Annenberg Trust and other American donors, they were all restored. But the French still have those chintzy reproductions of Monet's paintings hanging in the studio to the side of the house. It's stupid to put those things up when most of the originals are just a stone's throw away in the Paris museums. And the gardeners are a joke, totally ignorant of Monet's grand obsession for making the garden into a year-round, living palette of colors. Last Autumn, they had snap dragons, china asters and red geraniums but no golden rod. In the Spring it was tulips, irises and daffodils but the peonies were missing. And this Summer, we got roses, hollyhocks and delphiniums but they misplaced the fox gloves and nasturtiums. They've reduced the whole thing to a prosaic little garden that anyone could find in a Disney theme park." As I listened to Michelle, I grew more and more irritated. I found myself wishing she'd betrayed her insufferable arrogance in her unrelenting inventory of the Giverny flora with a furtive, wistful look at other people, especially couples, strolling in the garden, savoring the fragrance of the roses.
The psychoanalytic literature is filled with stories about people like Michelle, Bill, Ellen, Susan and Vinny. The stories describe caught up in unbearable thoughts, feelings and horrible unconscious images of themselves that got lodged in them as they grew up, as their true selves were pushed into hiding. Most of us can only catch glimpses of our true selves in dreams or conscious projections like the picture on the Psychotherapy Group in the Village home page of roses in Monet's garden at Giverny. This picture is what Jung called an anima projection. It comes from someone deeply touched by the beauty of the roses who had to take that picture.
Will Michelle ever open up enough to let herself feel the beauty of Monet's roses and the longing they might lead to, the longing she barely lets herself feel in her everyday life?