WASTELAND

My very first session with Beth had gone well, I remember—I’d even thought she teared up a little when I told her my story. But it soon became clear that she’d decided to take a “tough love” tack with me. And the more I appealed to her for a gentler approach, the more rigid, critical, and judgmental she became. Alice Miller writes that it’s an integral part of the process for a patient to feel disappointed or frustrated or angry at their therapist at times, but Beth took it as a personal affront. And the smaller and more inadequate she made me feel, the more powerful and admirable she appeared to me. If I was deep in the heart of transference, she was deep in the heart of counter-transference. The only way to get on her good side, I saw, was to appease her, so I set out to become the perfect patient just as I’d tried, as a child, to be the perfect daughter. And so our therapeutic relationship became about her feelings, not mine.

“I dreamed I was traveling with strangers through a strange landscape of tiny, flat, barren islets and labyrinthine channels, the shallow waters bright, clear yellow and seemingly devoid of life—a wasteland extending as far as the eye could see. We got out of the car to stretch our legs, took off our shoes, and began wading about; I was nervous, fearing this bizarre terrain might produce some menace, some fearsome animal—an electric eel, leeches, or carnivorous fish. And sure enough, through the clear waters, I saw the approach of several large, red-spotted, fanged fish. Frantically, we tried to scramble back onto the land, but the low banks were so slippery we could hardly climb out. At the last possible moment, I managed to pull my legs just out of the reach of the jaws of the snapping fish. Then we began to run back the way we had come. When I got to the car, I glanced behind me and saw in a waterway a dark reptilian shape—several feet in length—crawling menacingly toward me before I scrambled into the car.

“In the next scene I was alone in a public bathroom with numerous stalls. There was urine on the floor and on the toilet seats of all of them. I began to wash my feet in a sink, lathering and scrubbing to remove anything from those sinister waters that might have accrued—any bacterium, fungus, or microscopic parasite.”

                                                                             …

Beth thought that it was appropriate to express all of her angry, critical, disapproving feelings about me, but I’m convinced it wasn’t. I believe the wasteland of yellow water—urine—where nothing could grow represented the environment she created for me in therapy.

Throughout my childhood and adolescence I’d managed to hold myself together, despite the trauma I’d suffered—through sheer force of will, it seems to me in retrospect. But maybe there was always going to be a day of reckoning. When I realized, in the wake of Britte’s rejection, how broken I was, I understood that it was time to let go—to allow myself to experience and address all the feelings I’d been struggling for so many years to suppress or control.

With Dr. F., Dr. G., Dr. A., Helen, and Beth, I was trying to find a safe place to do this, but my therapy with Beth turned out to be such a fiasco I decided never again. I would have to make it on my own.