The end of the vanishing act: Sober 13 months and counting

I stopped drinking a little over a year ago. The last time I raised full glass to chapped lips, April 14, 2018, I drank furtively in a darkened kitchen, finally acknowledging that the only one who could stop this slightly swaying train was me. I was not a full-blown, stereotypical alcoholic, not physically and dangerously dependent on booze, but most nights I was a bit wobbly, a bit absent. Most days I was looking forward to that first anxiety- and boredom-softening glass of wine. And I belonged to a wine club, which ensured that my supply never ran out.

That night I was disgusted with myself. The drinking wasn’t enjoyable, the process of absenting myself abhorrent. To fade away without notice, to be a part of a group where not noticing is a habit, is painful on multiple levels. Not for the first time, I made the decision to stop, to end the double ache of negated invisibility, to stop a pattern in which there can be no good conclusion. I fell in love with someone who learned early that acknowledging reality could be dangerous, while I grew up with a tendency towards melodrama deepened by an often-unrealized need to be seen. This romantic match is not an unusual combination, but is one that can lead to repetition of patterns. The drinking, more low drama than high, wasn’t doing any of us any good. And who was I fooling, anyway? It was time to grow up and accept responsibility for being present in life.

So far, the sobriety experiment has stuck. I’ve gotten through holidays, birthdays, celebrations, family visits here and there, and one inadvertently stressful anniversary dinner in which complementary glasses of champagne were placed before us. I have had hard days at work and sudden, anxiety-provoking surprises. I’ve been sad and mad. I’ve rewatched the entire run of Mad Men with its cocktail obsessions. And, slowly, parts of me are returning. I am reading more. My temper is generally even, my sleep, for the most part, better. The dinner conversation flows and, when it doesn’t, I mostly take it in stride. Those wide ribbons of feeling that first brought me to this blog—the depression, the desire, the angst rooted in trauma—are certainly still here, but less desperate, less monumental and all-encompassing. 

On occasion, I still miss the feeling drinking brings, the slow melt, the blurred lines. Perhaps a return to the occasional drink, the celebratory glass of bubbly, the slowly sipped mojito would not result in another slip down the slope of boozy desperation. But the benefit of being present far outweighs the risk of returning to perpetually hiding and waiting to be found. Here I am, where I’ve been all along.

(Maybe don't) tell the story

Things my (former) therapist told me that I wish she hadn’t:

• Details of a night in the early 1970s when her husband, on a manic binge, picked up a woman at a well-known downtown eatery, got knifed by said woman, and called my therapist to take him to the (mental) hospital

• Her regrets over an affair she had with a friend of her husband, a man who took advantage of her youth and vulnerability in the wake of the knifing

•  “Yes, go back to school now! Better to do it now, before you’re 40!” I was 41.

• The weight issues of her daughter and the daughter’s partner

These revelations, given over a friendly cup of tea as we eased into our sessions, were conversational. My appointment was the first of the day. The husband was long dead. Perhaps her border collie was not a good listener—she needed someone to talk to. Though the conversations always made me uncomfortable, it wasn’t until later that I realized their inappropriateness.

Then there was the marriage counselor (a different marriage, a different state, a different time). Intuiting the relationship’s inevitable breakup, he provided a dramatic narrative to counter our lack of spark. He described a violent scene from his childhood, a habitually abusive parent, the resultant broken arm. You say your childhood trauma affects your ability to trust—it could be worse! he seemed to be saying. I remember nothing else about the therapy except the sandwiches my then-husband and I would eat before session in a park near the office.

And so now I am a therapist. I understand the urge to say too much. A client’s story or situation can activate the churn within. Health history. Family history. Depression history. Family depression history. That sinking feeling. Self-hatred. Fear. Anger. Dread. Shame. Embarrassment. All universally human experiences, all part of me, all tugged upon in session at some point. Yes, I survived what was an objectively traumatic adolescence. I’ve watched people die. I know what it’s like to not be chosen, to feel the hollowness of rejection. I was that age and angry, so angry, too. Does this shared experience–if you accept the premise that there is something shared about it—mean that I truly understand their experience? And if I do “truly” understand, does my expression of this apparent understanding help the person in front of me?

The answer is not straightforward. Sometimes it may help to share. But the potential to cause harm when disclosing is always there. I have self-disclosed in ways that have been appreciated. I have self-disclosed in ways that were more about me than the person in front of me. It helps to take time to think about whether self-disclosure is in service to the client. Very little good comes out of giving in in the moment to an impulse to share.

I don’t remember why we ended marriage therapy. Our time in that city and in the marriage was short. I stopped seeing that individual therapist after she broke her leg, had to change the parameters of her practice, and let me know via text. Both still see clients. Perhaps both continue to be leaky containers, allowing their own pain to spill into their sessions. As for me, I become more careful over time, crafting my boundaries, allowing a little room for sharing when indicated and carefully thought through, not perfect, but human and, hopefully, healing.

The there and now

I was off that evening, off in a way that felt shameful and grubby (and here perhaps I have already revealed too much). My job was to understand the barriers, the projections, the undigested dreck getting in the way. But all I could see were my own struggles. I don’t know how someone could tug both on the here and now and the there and then, but this someone, in that moment, did.

Writing about my work is risky business. I deal with the private lives of others. No one I work with should recognize themselves directly in my writing. But I also write to work through, to play out what is going on inside. An inevitable part of being a therapist is the way the people I accompany through the murk of emotion and personal history often touch the unsolved within me. It’s the unexamined stuff within that is the most dangerous. Like family secrets, it holds the power to obscure truth and mangle thinking. The unthought, the suppressed, muddies my vision and stunts my voice.

I thought this inability to see things clearly that evening was related to memory, to what I remembered too well and what I could no longer bring to life. My experiences with trauma and abandonment overlaid the gaps and obscured the differences between us. Then there is the boy, now entering the dangerous and creative time of becoming, his shift from child to proto-adult foreshadowing an independent life. Take one child in the in-between, others in the fertile pulse-thrumming headiness of change, and an adult with childhood and adolescent trauma constantly and consistently tugged upon… It’s too much to carry without help.

There are other interactions that wrap me in swirls of grief, both the clients’ and my own, the melancholia of time passed and gone, the people missing who can no longer share in the conversation. When the grief comes in session, I necessarily increase the space between me and the client, occupying the territory of observer more completely than usual. This place is dangerous, too, if I don’t return to myself. This was the territory I occupied that evening and much of the next day, a desolate landscape of strangulated grief and an overwhelm of fear, confusion, and self-blame.

It is through writing that I return to myself. And therapy. And in allowing room to make mistakes, to acknowledge that I am robust enough to understand and communicate the truth.

Here I am.

Planned obsolescence

The boy and his friends created a spoof religion. There was trouble in the school yard—proselytizing, competing cosmologies, groups of converts squabbling over truth. A heretic classmate brought a thin metal rod to press his point, accompanied by a fellow traveler with a camera to film the potential violence. Nothing came of it but the frisson of excitement.

I recommended Lord of the Flies to the boy. He got the point. In the last weeks of group supervision, burned out on the whole affair of collaboration, stuck in the atomistic world view formed in my sparse childhood with its crumbling cliff’s edge of connection, I let my crank flag fly. We’re all doomed, I say. The die has been cast for us. Maybe for the planet, too. Nothing gold can stay. I see in shades of gray. At this moment, the cloud cover in my mind is heavy, waiting for a brisk front to wipe the slate clean again.

All I have to offer is humanity bound in imperfection, a tug on your sleeve, a whisper as you pass, a glance that you may or may not catch as I brush by. I’m in love with this language and how it flows from the source, that ache in my chest and the memory of minds gone like my mind and all the rest will eventually go. I work one human to another, the self in all its crenulations and battered glory meeting another self. We’re doomed. We’re problematic. Let’s create meaning and connection in the face of eventual nothingness while we still can..

I think about this a lot.

The boy coughs upstairs, hiding away after being away, recovering from an intensity of civics and civility. I had a life before him and will have something different after he leaves. This leaving happens in bits and pieces, in independent moves and symbolic pushes. What is now shall dissipate. What comes after will endure the same fate. Time creates us. If we’re lucky, it will allow us to become memories. Eventually even that status shall go.

It is a life’s work to accept this disappearing, to live in the moments we create. I do what I can.

Transmission

I was a bit down yesterday. There have been shifts in my practice, must be goings and almost goings and those who slip one foot out the door before sidestepping back in. I’ve been blindsided. I’ve had hunches confirmed. I plan difficult conversations that go in unexpected directions and I am simultaneously relieved and unsettled.

My work requires me to hold other peoples’ psyches. I carry the ambiguity and ambivalence, the unconscious urges and unexpressed thoughts, for all of us. There is guilt and indirectness. There are hidden messages and agendas. There are my own blind spots and tired places. Sometimes I just want to let sleeping thoughts and feelings lie, even when it is my job to keep them in mind.

I felt melancholy and used up. It was rainy and gray and I had work to do. I made a fire because fire soothes me. I worked through it. People will come and go and maybe there are things I could have done and maybe there are not. I pride myself on my faith in the process, on this weird optimism that makes my work feasible. Holding a space, grasping the threads of hope in the fabric of unprocessed experience, feels useful. But sometimes the threads slip through my fingers. They break. They sever. Maybe I was the one who did the cutting. Maybe I was the one who looked away while someone else wielded the shears.

I let the emptiness fill me. I took comfort in the fact that I shared this alien, alone feeling with others, the apprehension that there is nobody and we are nobody and nothing is worth anything. That’s a sort of thread, too, a melancholic line so slack that we don’t know we’re woven out of the same loose cloth.

I thought of the versions of me across time, the unbearable lonely eras that I bore and now give witness to.

I am not alone. I have you, for this moment. And in the moments when you are not here, I will remember you and the time we shared, one mind to another.