Get Me Out of Here (10 page)

Dad had been far harsher on his daughters than his sons, particularly verbally. To a man who coveted control and saw any emotion, particularly tears, as weakness, his daughters could provoke the worst in him. In his mind women were weak, manipulative, overemotional, and inferior. The special bond I'd felt with him was not as Daddy's little girl, but as my best attempt at being Daddy's little boy. This realization helped explain why I had always hated being female.

Adopting the hatred of femininity from my father, I'd viewed my mother this way as well. Granted, she could be nurturing at times, and sometimes I could feel great love for her. But I could not recall having ever respected her. I'd seen her as everything negative Dad claimed was inherent in being female. And I'd vowed to be nothing at all like her.

It was hardest of all to admit that my mother had a great impact on my life, which continued to affect me years after I'd left home. She'd given the appearance that Dad was in control when all the while she'd been a matriarch in her own right, a more powerful figure than I'd cared to admit. Highly dependent upon my father for many of the simplest tasks or crises, she didn't want to share him with any of us. So she took the role of gatekeeper, a medium of sorts, listening to the things we wanted to tell him, the feelings we wanted to share, and responded by telling us her own rendition of “how Dad felt,” as if Dad could not speak for himself. She'd created distorted or fictitious stories, twisting our words to Dad so that he would come home and discipline us upon her command. She'd helped plant the seeds for my airbrushed portrait of life as it had been, repeating the mantras so often I believed them to be true.

It had been critical to her to get as much of Dad's time as was possible with his workaholic lifestyle. Thus she had feigned illnesses and twisted events that had occurred before his arrival home to become terrible things “we had done to her.” Then she quietly left the room as Daddy pulled off the belt—the knight in shining armor rushing to the aid of the damsel in distress. She'd done the same thing with me and my siblings, pitting one against the other, endlessly comparing and contrasting and playing upon the natural rivalries until we were a family of brothers and sisters who seldom associated with each other. She'd made herself the center of it all. She, too, had shared Dad's view of the inherent inferiority of females and thus had openly favored her sons; she viewed her daughters as competition for Dad's affection.

Dreams and fantasies smashed to pieces. Violent and angry defenses turned to seemingly inconsolable sorrow. Why had Dr. Padgett insisted upon opening this box? So what if it was the truth? What purpose had it served? Why couldn't he have left well enough alone?

Now I was not just filled with self-loathing and anger, but also despair. The bubble had been irrevocably burst, and I feared my vulnerability. I began to wonder if any feelings or beliefs I had were genuine or if everything was an illusion.

One day during this period I was lying in bed and began to examine my thighs. They appeared huge, dimpled, and growing. Fat. Soft. Weak. Like Mom. How had I lost track of this? When had I lost self-control? Filled with disgust, I vowed that this, at least, was one thing about myself I could change. Dad had despised fat daughters, and I knew that Dr. Padgett must secretly harbor the same disgust. Thus a little before the Thanksgiving holiday, my diet began.

At five feet, six inches, and 140 pounds, I knew I needed to lose at least ten of them. Perhaps fifteen or twenty. I'd been cautious about diets ever since the adolescent episode when my weight had plunged to a skeletal 75 pounds. I had managed to lose the “baby fat” after childbirth successfully without going to extremes. I was convinced that this time I would be able to manage as well.

Early winter was a time of hard work. To help dig our way out of the financial hole, I did as much freelance accounting work as I could. I stepped up my volunteer activities in the church. For once the house was immaculate. I purchased several of the latest exercise videos and faithfully worked out to them each day, often doing two or more workouts in succession.

This same fierce motivation and drive became a part of therapy. Determined to make the most effective use of every session, I'd stopped arguing with Dr. Padgett. I worked hard to reveal my thoughts and fears, explore the past, and understand the insights offered by the doctor and myself.

The work of therapy was not confined to sessions. Nearly each day I would write for hours, reflecting and analyzing even further. I would often stay up until one or two in the morning preparing for therapy by reading psychoanalytic books and becoming well-versed in its terminology.

On the diet front, the scale was moving in the right direction. I was losing weight and was filled with drive, energy, and a sense of control. Everything was coming together. I could feel the “old me” returning, the “can-do” me. Transformed and confident, I was determined I would overcome my problems. I had the will.

In sessions Dr. Padgett began to rehash old terms, introduce new ones, and point out examples each time one occurred. Old academic terminology started making sense.

“Transference” was happening when I made Dr. Padgett a substitute for someone else in my life—an important person from my early years when I'd been afraid to respond. By uncovering these buried feelings, we could explore them more closely.

The “blank screen” explained why Dr. Padgett maintained relative anonymity and lacked emotional reactions. The less he revealed about himself, the more transference was fostered.

“Black-and-white thinking” was based on absolute extremes—natural in very young children but unsettling in adult relationships. I saw people as either good or evil. When they were “good,” I vaulted them to the top of a pedestal. They could do no wrong, and I loved them with all of my being. When they were “bad,” they became objects of scorn and revenge.

In relationships with those closest to me, the “good” and “bad” assessments could alternate wildly, sometimes from one hour to the next. The unrealistic expectations of perfection that came with the good-guy pedestal were destined to be unfulfilled, which led to disappointment and a sense of betrayal.

“All-or-nothing thinking” and “splitting” came in tandem with black-and-white thinking. Every strong feeling was not only absolute, but eternal. It didn't matter if a person close to me had occupied the pedestal ten minutes ago and been the object of my abundant love. When the emotions changed, it was as if that love had never existed and the hatred I felt today would be the way I felt forever. The means by which I coped with these alternating extremes was called splitting. If I couldn't get what I needed or expected from either Tim or Dr. Padgett because I was in the throes of bitter anger at one of them, I would turn to the other one in his stead. It was the only way I could bear such wildly vacillating emotions about the people to whom I was closest and expected the most.

“Projection” occurred when I assumed my thoughts were their thoughts, my motivations their motivations. If I angrily accused Dr. Padgett of hating me and wishing I'd just “snap out of it,” it was because I hated myself and wished I could snap out of it. I was most likely to project my deepest fears and feelings of self-hatred because they were simply too disturbing to acknowledge within myself.

When a person close to me fell off the good-guy pedestal, my initial reaction (through the clouded eyes of my impossible expectations) was rage and betrayal. I felt the horrifying fear of abandonment. Dr. Padgett described the anger coupled with the desperate clinging as “I hate you, don't leave me.”

All of these theoretical terms made sense. I became adept at pointing them out and expounding upon them with intellectual ease. I was a prized pupil aiming to please. If I could grasp all the terminology and processes, I could intellectually conquer my problems.

Thinking came easily to me. But it also kept me at an emotional distance. It was as if I were watching a play, discussing the plot, finding the meaning, but forgetting that I was the central character, and that it was real.

This strategy was not lost on Dr. Padgett, who began to mention that the intellectualizing was actually a form of defense. I didn't want to feel. I was using a barricade of jargon to repress all of the childhood feelings and hide behind a facade of sophisticated adulthood.

By the time I'd reached my goal of 120 pounds, I knew that my “diet” wasn't like the two I'd successfully managed after childbirth. Instead it was an echo from my anorexia of 1978: the isolation, obsession, and the detachment from relationships in favor of frenetic activity. The number on the scale told me it was time to begin eating regularly again. Yet the mere sight of a plateful of a nondiet meal filled me with nausea. I couldn't bring myself to eat it, or I would just sample a small portion and shove the plate away, claiming I was full. Eating a candy bar would lead to hours of unbearable self-recrimination as I watched my thighs “expand” before my very eyes. The only relief came with skipping the next meal and doing a triple workout. It was a penance of sorts. Only a scale reading the same or lower granted me absolution.

Tim, aware of my adolescent history and postbaby diets, was concerned. He began to ask if I was taking this one too far. So I began lying, dumping platefuls of mashed potatoes in the trash when he wasn't looking, carefully obscuring it behind a paper towel or discarded cereal box. I'd claim I had the flu or a big snack right before dinner. Lies.

I didn't need a psychiatrist to tell me what this was. I wasn't in denial. I was aware of it but was unable to control it.

Feeling in the grips of something beyond my control, I continued my pattern of openness with Dr. Padgett and filled him in on my discovery.

“Dr. Padgett,” I said, “I know I'm at a normal weight right now. I don't look like I'm emaciated or anything. But I'm anorexic, and I know it. I can remember it so clearly from back then, and this is the exact same thing. What do I do?” Humble penitent to the confessor again, I was turning myself in. I expected my father's threatening reaction, my friends' nagging, or Tim's fear.

Perhaps Dr. Padgett knew how I would react to any of these—see the threats as persecution, ignore the nagging or invest it with ill motives, or revel in the fear. So he didn't respond as I had expected. He didn't tell me that I, of all people, should know better and demand that I “better snap to reality and start eating.”

Instead he saw the re-emergence of anorexia as evidence that I was, indeed, repressing a child within. And that the child was reacting vehemently. The solution to this most recent problem was not to give lectures on eating habits, but to explore the emotions of my inner child. This anorexic episode was not a coincidence, but just the latest form of defense. Not wanting to eat was linked to not wanting to feel. “Think of your buried fears and irrational feelings as being like those little roly-poly bugs,” he said. “You know, the ones that crawl around under rocks. When you turn a rock over and expose them to light, they quickly form a little hard-shell ball. When the threat of exposure is gone, they quickly run under the closest rock.

“You have painful and frightening feelings within you, so frightening that you'd rather suffer indefinitely, sometimes rather die, than look at them in the light of day. Your defenses are the rocks you hide under. Therapy is a process that seeks to put your worst fears, the roly-poly bugs, into the light, which is exactly what a part of you wants to do. The part you've been displaying here recently.

“But it isn't the only part of you. The other part is so desperately afraid that she'll do nearly anything to avoid the scrutiny. So she finds more rocks the bugs can hide under. The rock of rage. The rock of I-don't-give-a-shit-about-anything. The ‘fuck you, Dr. Padgett, I hate you’ rock. The rock of suicidal ideation. And now the latest one, the rock of anorexia. This isn't a separate illness, Rachel; it's just one more rock to hide under, one more place to avoid facing the same feelings.”

Who is this other part? Who is this inner child he's always talking about? I hate that child! She has destroyed me at every turn, intent on sabotage. She wants to kill me. Now she's trying to destroy therapy just when I've regained control and settled down to some hard work. She wants to kill me. Well, I want to kill her!

“I never said therapy was going to be easy,” Dr. Padgett continued. “I never said it wasn't going to be frustrating, stopping and starting, and that sometimes one step forward will be followed by two steps back. Each time we turn over a rock and expose those bugs, those feelings—the bugs—are going to run to another rock and hide.

“But one day, Rachel, there won't be any rocks left. One day we'll turn over the last rock. With no place left to hide, the bugs, the feelings, will scamper away for good. And you'll experience a life you've never believed you could have.

“The rock of anorexia is a big one, very intense. It might seem as if all is lost and things are getting worse. The fewer rocks there are, the more bugs will be found under the ones that remain. But we're getting closer to those feelings, Rachel. Much closer. Together, the two of us are going to lift up this rock too, like we have all the others so far. This isn't a time to run; it's a time to feel.”

Only if that wicked little child lets me, Dr. Padgett. Only if she lets me
.

I weighed 110 pounds. The critical mark. Two conflicting parts of me were in a virtual war over the needle on the scale, which had stubbornly clung to 110 pounds for well over two weeks. Perhaps a few pounds under where it really should be, I thought as I stood on the scale—something I was doing several times a day now. But at least I'm maintaining my weight. The episode is over, and I can move on with therapy. But another part of me was overtaking this rational part of me. This “me,” restless at the frozen mark on the scale, considered the plateau a failure. This “normal” weight was a mark to be surpassed. Only an increased dedication to the diet and working out could get me to where I needed to be. I was aware of the life-or-death ramifications of self-starvation. But my alter ego of sorts was equally convinced that losing more was a matter of life and death.

Ultimately that other part began to win, and I lost weight once again. Occasionally I passed out, once in front of a client. More than once I was gripped by stabbing chest pains, most likely the result of a panic attack. It reminded me that singer Karen Carpenter had died not of actual starvation, but of a heart attack resulting from her diet. I was becoming frightened as I realized this diet could kill me. It was like being in a struggle for survival against a murderous foe, except I was the one who was fighting for survival
and
I was also the murderer within.

“Dr. Padgett,” I pleaded in tears at a session in early February, “this inner child, she's taking over. Can't you do something about her? I can't do anything anymore. I know this is dangerous, but I can't stop her. I want to stop the diet. I really do. Help me.”