What was, what is, and what (may) never be

What do you remember about being a teenager?

 My memories of adolescence are a push-pull of opposing forces. The teen years were a confusion of insider jokes and outsider status, of sweat and insecurity, of styling mousse and endless possibility. Sheer joy intermingled with instability, sadness, and trauma and the path I traveled was perilous—but often exciting. Music and fashion were paramount. Crushes were huge. Pulled by forces that felt beyond me, my moods had the strength and inevitability of the tides. The possibility of managing my emotions would have been as alien as the concept of turning 50. 

It can be easy from the vantage of age and the calming of circumstance to wonder if I ever really was fifteen, filled with the surety of pop culture truths and the power of love to save me. Now I’m the parent to a teen (albeit one with a very different temperament and life experience) and a therapist to teens. And I’ve been working on this post for a long stretch, trying to think about how to meld lived and learned knowledge into something palatable for my professional blog.

Former adolescent, parent to an adolescent, therapist to adolescents . . . my training intermingles with what was and what is. My life history and process of working through deepen my therapeutic approach. Similarly, my best writing is rooted in the personal. However, writing in this way in a more professional space feels vulnerable and, perhaps, questionable. In addition, the concepts I am most curious about don’t lend themselves to click-friendly, prescriptive writing. 

For example, I’ve been curious lately about the effects on parents of having an adolescent. Based on parents I’ve encountered and my own internal mapping, I believe your attachment and trauma history can affect how you experience a teen’s natural process of individuation. A person’s childhood relational trauma, particularly if unexamined and unprocessed, can make parenting an individuating, authority-challenging teen painful (think Ghosts in the Nursery a decade later). Old wounds tied to attachment and abandonment reopen. Parents may respond to this in various, often unconscious, ways as they try to manage their emotions, ranging from totally checking out to intruding on their child’s life.

Crossing Paths by psychologist Laurence Steinberg is one of the few broad studies on the topic of the effects of adolescents on their parents, albeit a dated and not necessarily culturally diverse one. Steinberg focuses on the rise of youth contrasted with the lessening possibilities of midlife. He also looks at the parent’s general life satisfaction. If things are bad in your job and/or marriage, if you have little outside of your children to provide verve and purpose to your life, well, chances are that their adolescence is going to hit you hard.

Steinberg sorts the potentially more challenging emotional effects of parenting a teen into five categories: jealousy, abandonment, loss, powerlessness, and regret. At the same time, he doesn’t examine the potential early life causes of those feelings. True, this focus is perhaps not absolutely necessary to spur change. Recognizing that you may be feeling less “acceptable” emotions about your child’s blossoming and sudden disrespect can help you cope. In addition, having other interests and connections apart from your kids is generally a good thing. But there are other layers beyond the immediate, beyond the here and now, that are useful to excavate and grasp. Without awareness of the effects of the past we may find ourselves replicating or avoiding it, closing ourselves off to what is vulnerable and unfed within.

The questions I am asking, the hunches I am carrying, are not easily researched or explained. My own early life, heavily examined, written and rewritten, is close to the surface. My tendency to reflect upon my fears of and reactions to parenting the boy, who will someday (soonish) leave us, keeps me—I hope—from holding him back. It keeps me—I hope—from disappearing to avoid the pulls of his long leave-taking upon my vulnerable heart. But would writing about my personal experiences potentially help parents of clients without freaking them out?

Yeah. Well. I don’t know. It’s complicated. There are no neat how-to lists, no rules for smarter parenting and better businessing for these circumstances. So I post it here, for a very limited distribution, as I work it through. I was young, lonely, and angry once. I grew up and felt much of the same. Still do sometimes, though I’ve learned how to cope with those feelings, how to ride them out. And when parenting makes me feel like an abandoned child, I remind myself that I am a grownup and will be connected to this boy one way or another as long as life flows between us.

(Semi)permeable

I’ve had to make the choice lately between professional and personal writing, between the boundaried and the lightly bordered, between my own emotions and the semipermeable guise of being a therapist. These two emotional worlds can sometimes meet, even in writing, but there are times when I am compelled to toss aside the measured and meted, when it needs to be about my needs and untidy emotions.

What do you do when your head is full of other peoples’ stories, when life is built around work and family, and all your reading is of a psychological nature? When do the filters become a part of you, and you become a balanced, careful self, incapable of indulgence? So often I glide and elide along the thin surface of my own subconscious, focused on what lies beneath the surface of others.

I sometimes crack open at night. Two nights ago, back on one of those short binges of 3am sleep interruptions, I woke up crying, missing my father and reminded again of the permanence of death, the absolute quality of the absence. But more often than not, I wake up anxious, worried about the boy, about a client, about the crumbling state of the world. These are the things I cannot touch in my waking life, not while keeping the brokenness together, while showing others that to be broken is to be human. There is no other way. Once we accept this, we can take those broken parts and reshape ourselves again and again.

I’m an optimist. I’m a weakling. I am strong beneath the weakness, vulnerable under my self-obscuring cloak. I play a role and I am a role. The mask can become real, but at night it melts into me and I am fifteen again, letting the ache roll out of my chest, as sure of myself as a toddler, a bundle of this way and that way, a rummage of self and other coexisting in contradiction.

There is no selfishness in this sense of self, just me in all my messiness.

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.