The Golden Condom (15 page)

I coped with the tension quite differently from the way Peter did. Emulating his parents, Peter battened down the hatches; he retreated into himself and imploded, becoming inwardly furious, never sharing his feelings with anyone. On the other hand, I felt compelled to connect and made it my business to be my parents' darling and confidante—as attentive and delightful to them as Steven was burdensome and unappealing. Relationships were my source of power and sustenance; self-sufficiency was Peter's.

I also understood from personal experience why Peter was mesmerized into passivity and had failed to confront his parents or his brother. I was fifty—considerably older than Peter—when I finally broke the spell of forced obliviousness and inaction that my family wove around everything to do with Steven; at a dinner with my mother and brother years after my father's death, I could endure Steven's sullen silence no longer and told him to think about leaving the restaurant if he was going to refuse to talk. He stayed and at least minimally participated, but I remember my mother's horrified expression, as though I had committed a shocking breach of etiquette. When Steven died at sixty-four, we had been estranged for years, despite my attempts to reconcile in his last years. All this had a powerful underground influence on every aspect of my life (including my choice of a profession), which, as I discovered in my research, happens to anyone who grows up in families like ours. You do not leave your troubled siblings at home when you move out; they follow you into every subsequent relationship. These were things Peter didn't have to explain to me, and it helped him feel understood for the first time.

I thought I'd heard every possible awful sibling story in my practice: the doctor whose epileptic brother smashed the windows of movie theaters on family outings and tried to commit suicide when she was left to babysit for him (her mother screamed and cried while her father looked the other way), the lawyer whose schizophrenic brother tried to set her afire (her parents' only response was to stop keeping matches in the house), the teacher whose autistic brother urinated in her mouth (her father begged her to try to understand and befriend him), and the editor whose borderline older brother punched him in the face and broke his teeth (“He didn't know his own strength,” his mother explained). But I had never encountered anyone whose life had been constricted by the experience as severely as Peter's. The parents of my other patients all lived in a state of denial but were at least occasionally emotionally related to their higher-functioning children. In Peter's family, the tension was unrelenting, his parents' response entirely zombielike. They never complained or cried or showed any outward sign that they were living and forcing Peter to live in a madhouse without keepers. Relationships were nothing but torture.

Most of the Normal Ones I have known become helpers and caretakers in their personal and professional lives—a disproportionate number of members of the various “helping professions” (medicine, special education, rehabilitation, and assorted therapeutic specialties) learned at home—but Peter rejected the caretaking role with a vengeance; he only felt in control if he gave absolutely nothing to anybody. He worried that he might come across as arrogant and authoritarian to others, but he had no idea what to do about it.

We had our work cut out. Peter had concluded early on that the only way to survive with his sanity intact was to emulate his parents, which required him to remove himself from his own and other people's emotions as they had done. He had shut himself up in his own mind, letting no one in and sharing himself with no one. At work, he concentrated on expertly arranging sustainable energy deals; solitary sports and intensive study with his “masters” filled his leisure hours. But he admitted that he was terribly lonely for human contact, even though he fled from it. Intimacy of any kind was a language he could not decipher; he hired me as his translator.

One of my teachers at the psychoanalytic institute where I trained used to say, only half humorously, that “the most important prerequisite for a vocation as a psychotherapist is a depressed mother”; based on my history, I think that a suffering but inaccessible father and a damaged sibling should be added to the list of qualifications. In addition to empathy, you have to have a certain relentlessness and perseverance—and perhaps a touch of masochism—to reach someone like Peter.

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The first time I saw him, I was unexpectedly charmed by his sincerity, his intelligent gray eyes, and his boyish manner. He was so short and slight that he almost disappeared on my couch. Despite his athleticism—he was an expert fencer—his shyness and awkwardness of manner combined with the monotone in which he spoke made him seem like an alien who had applied himself to the study of human ways with only partial success. He was such a peculiar combination of physical grace and mental regimentation that he seemed to be two people incompletely melded together.

It surprised me to learn how successful he was professionally, since he was no glad-hander and shunned all nonbusiness relationships. Efficiency and attention to detail got him through. I was also astonished when he told me that he had a wife—an attractive and thoughtful woman with whom he barely spoke; they had not had a real conversation for most of the fifteen years they had been together. She occasionally told him, and showed him by how miserable she looked in his presence, that she despaired of ever reaching him, even though she stayed with him for reasons I understood no better than her husband did. They did share interests; both loved travel, and she had a reclusive streak herself. Somehow she tolerated his silence and appreciated him. But she regularly became so frustrated with his callousness (one time he let her go to the emergency room alone when she injured herself) that once she seriously threatened to leave. He begged her to stay, promised to reform, bought her a sports car—and soon reverted to spending more time with his computer than with her. Her unhappiness made him feel bad. He knew that she needed more from him, yet he could only regret that he could not provide it, as if doing anything was beyond his control. Still, neither he nor his wife wanted to be alone.

One of the most telling things that Peter revealed to me was his relationship with their dog—a huge, beautiful, and affectionate creature of an unusual breed. He left its care and feeding entirely to his wife—I thought it was her substitute husband—and never even petted the animal for fear that it would require more attention and involvement than he was willing to give if it became attached to him. Any relationship whatsoever seemed to him a potential prison of unrelenting demands. Like his parents, he never imagined he could set any limits on anybody.

I asked him once what it was like to be in the room with his wife, his dog, or even the garbage in the kitchen, all of which he saw as demanding his attention simply by sharing his space. “I draw into myself,” he said. “They're there, but they're like a chair—I'm totally disconnected from them, and they have no effect on me. I go off and find a distraction as soon as I can.”

“But,” I countered, “you wouldn't say that unless you had to defuse the effect they have on you; leaving mentally or physically allows you to get rid of their demands without having to interact with them.” He had learned to wall himself off and to escape early on: a child's vision of independence that was actually a trap.

At first glance, Peter seemed almost Asperger's-esque, yet his palpable anguish and longing for a mutual human touch told another story. He tried desperately to have a simulacrum of a normal life, which he “put on from the outside” by giving lavish gifts to clients and parties for remote acquaintances. He told me with embarrassment that he practiced smiling in the shower before he went to work to temper his oddness, but it did not help. I had never met a lonelier person or one who was more cut off or frightened of the very contact that some part of him clearly missed.

This strange, remote, yet tormented man aroused a conflicting welter of feelings within me. I admired his intelligence, his perseverance, and his courage, and I could sense the anguish beneath his often forbidding façade. But relating to him took a toll on me. He aroused a depth of rage and despair that was hard to contain, the intensity of which caught me unawares every time, even though I tried to prepare myself for it. My countertransference—the technical term for the therapist's reactions to a patient based on her own unresolved issues in intimate relationships
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—was particularly intense with him; clearly, Peter represented every difficult man I had ever cared about and wanted to reach. At least at this point in my life, my frustration and my wish to retaliate by cutting him off or saying something hostile or withering when he rejected me—which I had rarely been able to do with my own personal inaccessible loves—were conscious, and though the impulses plagued me, I rarely acted them out with my patient.

He always started our phone sessions robotically, announcing with a fixed combination of frustration and conceit that nothing had changed and that he did not remember what we had talked about the week before and had not taken any of the actions (writing in a journal, for example) that I had suggested and that he had agreed to perform. With disturbing frequency, he would do something really outrageous and offensive; once when he seemed out of breath and background noises made him difficult to understand, it turned out that he was race-walking during our session so as not to “waste the time.” On another occasion, I could hear him talking to someone in the background; he was consulting an auto mechanic about a problem with his car in the middle of our session. Discussing anything to do with our relationship or how he was treating me was irrelevant from his point of view, and he let me know in no uncertain terms that he considered any time spent on these topics a waste of money. In a flash, his voice would become so flat and his manner so cold and distant that it seemed as though he was not speaking to a living person. There was no way in. The way he addressed me, as from a height, made me so angry and hopeless that I could hardly contain myself.

Yet often, later in the same session, he would warm up. Then we would have a human-to-human exchange, often full of self-awareness, about why he had just behaved so obnoxiously, which usually had to do with feeling needy or unimportant; even if I had done nothing specific to arouse those feelings, he believed that his very dependency on me put him at a disadvantage. So he kept me continuously off balance, both to thwart my having any power over him and to have me experience firsthand the emotional roller coaster that was his constant, though hidden, state of mind. I hated being periodically erased by him, although I was beginning to understand him—and I was also endlessly tantalized by the prospect of getting through to this most recalcitrant of men. I tried hard to be patient with both of us.

Why couldn't Peter leave his childhood experience behind or modify it? Why, I asked him, did the entire inner and outer world become the living room of his youth, with every person (and even the resident canine) he encountered playing the role of James or his parents? He could only say that the experience had been so awful he never got past it, that he feared that he might be irreparably warped by it, that he was too scared to change and didn't know how. Living “underground” was safe, and better safe than sorry. Nonetheless, he was clearly mindful of what he was missing: life itself. It is never easy to answer why one person with a traumatic background overcomes it and has remarkably normal relationships, while another shuts down as he did—but his flashes of insight, and even of passion, about his predicament and its meaning made me believe that his seemingly impenetrable façade was a defense, rather than the fundamental truth about him. After all the tumult of his childhood, I saw that maintaining a state of equilibrium and calm, free from emotional upheaval, was paramount. This project consumed him to such an extent that he didn't realize he had the capacity to tolerate a much wider emotional range, even when he felt it, either because expanding his inner horizons would force him to grieve over the waste of his life until then or because he was afraid of demands that would be made on him once others saw that he was open to emotion.

The odd but insightful interpersonalist Sullivan's concept of “selective inattention”—in which a person avoids being flooded with anxiety by turning his focus away from disturbing emotions, people, and experiences—helped me understand why Peter continued to be so utterly suspended in his past. The problem with this defensive “security operation” (another Sullivanian term) is that you have to pay attention in order to learn from experience, which can never occur as long as you are constantly running away.
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I paid attention to him, and he knew it, which allowed him to begin, even if inconsistently, to pay attention to himself. I did not attack him as James did (even when I wanted to), but I also didn't allow him to behave like his parents. I was a different kind of parent, whom he recognized was trying to understand and to communicate and who did not abandon him, even when I was frustrated. Since I came from the world outside his family, I offered him a new pair of eyes. There were moments when I thought he was learning to look through them.

Many times, in between withdrawing and insulting me, he told me softly that he considered talking to me his last chance to join the world. This was very moving to me. He almost never missed an appointment, all the while announcing that he dreaded making every call, although he admitted that he felt better as we went along and also after the session ended. His recall of our conversations was spotty at best, however, and he needed me to prompt him. Eventually, I got over being annoyed at this implicit demand (perhaps he wanted to make sure I was really paying attention?) and told him what had transpired between us. Then he could resume our dialogue. I was learning to take him as he was.