MANIPULATIVE?

“Helen said she didn’t believe my grief was real,” I tell Toni, “that real grief is quiet. Another time she told me that everything I was saying sounded rehearsed.”

“When feelings weren’t allowed in your family,” Toni observes, “they’re liable to come out defended.”

“What do you mean, ‘defended?’” I ask.

“Well, people defend their feelings in a variety of ways.” She lists four, which I resolve to remember, but on the drive home, reviewing our session, I can only remember three of them.

Later I plunk down on the sofa with a pencil while I’m microwaving some meatballs, determined to remember the one I seem to be blocking. As I write down various words that pop into my mind, suddenly it comes back to me—“manipulative.”

After giving some thought to what Toni said about feelings coming out defended, I wrote in my journal:

“When you haven’t been allowed to experience or express your feelings—fear, anger, grief—as a child, you’re not going to be able to experience or express them in a pure form as an adult either; instead they’re liable to be adulterated by other feelings and attitudes. For example, if your parents told you—or treated you as though—you were being manipulative whenever you expressed sadness, you’re liable to imagine or fear you are being manipulative whenever you do. If they didn’t believe your sadness was real, you may doubt or question its reality too, so that your sadness becomes contaminated with self-doubt, anxiety, shame, etc. that affect its expression.

“A therapist who isn’t experienced is liable to mistakenly assume that a client’s feelings aren’t real because they don’t look or sound like feelings in their pure form. So Helen could imagine that my somewhat histrionic grief wasn’t deeply felt because it didn’t look or sound to her like authentic grief. Unfortunately, it was. I suspect the way I expressed grief seemed histrionic to her because I unconsciously ‘amped it up’ in a desperate effort to overcome the incredulity that I expected, from experience, to encounter—as if sheer intensity were my only hope of breaking through the other person’s wall of disbelief.

“I say ‘unfortunately’ because Helen’s incredulity only served to heighten my own self-doubt, alienating me still further from my true feelings and compounding the problems I came into therapy with.”