SHAME

“I’m having a hard time with my memoir,” I tell Toni. “And it’s not just grief that’s hanging me up; it’s shame too. Every time I start a new vignette, I think, no, I’d better leave this out. But then I feel the same way about the next experience I try to write about…and the next.”

“What are you ashamed of?” she asks.

“That I just kept walking into one situation after another in which I got victimized,” I say. “I can’t imagine why anyone reading my memoir would have any sympathy for me, I was so hapless.”

“And why do you think you kept getting victimized?”

“It’s complicated,” I muse. “I suppose one problem was I didn’t have the ability to discriminate between safe and unsafe people.”

“Well, when you’ve had such narcissistic parents, you’re not going to be able to recognize narcissism in other people,” she says quietly.

“And to the extent that I was able to discriminate, I didn’t trust my own judgment and perceptions.”

“How could you?” she asks. “Who in your life ever validated them?”

“I know I was afraid of hurting other people. I think feeling responsible for my brother’s burn made me hyper-conscientious about that. I’d feel guilty if I thought I hurt someone, no matter what the circumstances or what they might have done to me; I often didn’t protect or defend myself out of fear of doing harm; my childhood experience was that hurting someone else had the potential to be hugely consequential, while my being hurt didn’t—or so I imagined.”

Later in the day I write down more reasons that occur to me. At my next session with Toni I read them out loud:

“Another difficulty was that my feelings were so intense a lot of the time I didn’t think it would be appropriate to express them because I knew they were an over-reaction. And then there was the fact that it was easy for me to empathize with other people and to understand why they did what they did, which, even if it didn’t assuage my hurt feelings, made me feel less justified in having them.

“At the same time, I was reluctant to risk alienating anyone. I already felt so desolated that I couldn’t tolerate any more loss. Besides, my experience was that one loss was likely to precipitate another—and another—like toppling dominos, until I wound up with nothing left, including a sense of self. This happened after my parents’ divorce, after I left Spain, and again years later when I lost my job at Tiburon College. I’m still liable to panic after any significant loss, terrified that it’s going to snowball.

“Which reminds me of something Pia Mellody wrote,” I say, “that some people’s abandonment issues are so crippling it actually may be better for them to stay in a bad relationship than leave it. I appreciated her acknowledging this because, though it goes against the conventional wisdom, in my own experience it’s been true.”

“So,” says Toni, “your writing about the many times you wound up getting victimized just demonstrates what happens to people when they’ve suffered a lot of emotional abuse—they can’t recognize when they’re putting themselves in harm’s way.”

“And it’s not just that you don’t know that you deserve better,” I say. “You don’t know there is better.”

“Exactly,” Toni nods.

I feel tears start in my eyes. “That reminds me of when I was in therapy with Dr. A., the psychiatrist I went to when I got back from L.A.,” I say. “One day after I’d been seeing him for almost a year, I told him about a heart-to-heart I’d had with Ella when she was visiting—and how good I felt about it. He said he didn’t believe it had happened the way I’d described it. When I asked him why not, he said it didn’t fit in his picture of me—he didn’t think I was capable of intimacy. I’ve always wondered if he reached this conclusion partly because I never asked him any questions about himself. I felt so fragile back then, I was afraid if he were to tell me that he was divorced, for example, it would be the final proof to me that love was just a four-letter word, that it didn’t really exist. I was hanging onto the hope that it did by the most tenuous thread, and I felt if it were to break, I would too.”