A letter

Earlier (https://pessimisticshrink.blogspot.com/2014/07/intervention-tidbit-1.html), I wrote about “Greyhound therapy,” a term of scandalous meaning – clandestine busing of undesirable psychiatric patients to another state – that I co-opted to describe a different and benevolent approach. This was for a client to leave, sometimes wrenchingly, a long-toxic relationship (typically with authoritarian parents and enmeshed family), to cut the umbilical cord and begin anew with troubles in tow in a far-away state. I used to find myself suggesting this drastic renaissance to maybe three or four clients a year, though it’s now been a long time since I’ve found the occasion to propose it. I don’t know that anyone ever carried it through as a direct result of our work.

Here I want to describe a different but, one could say, related intervention. It cuts ties, too, in an internal way. At this moment, I cannot think of a reason that I might suggest – a client's situation might suggest – one severing instead of the other except that traveling might be for the young. My own experience is to have done both, young and older.

Many clients were, in their childhood, the black sheep or “identified client” or scapegoat in their family. The stories I could tell of children who were the deliberate torture object of sick parents, who mother told to “shut the fuck up” or “stop whining” if they expressed a feeling, who were punched in the chest, sexually abused with the family’s knowledge, who were painted shit while the siblings were on pedestals, who were the designated slave, breadwinner and de facto parent to also-abandoned siblings, who were colluded against and shunned by three generations of inbred clan. Many years on, everyone grown or old or migrated away, the familial ether settled underground, binding all across different states, muttered and impotent until someone – my client – stirs the pot because he or she – finally he or she – needs help or wants to hope. Then the bipolar sister pounces, slathering her venom, the Borderline Medea* mother stabs anew, factions find a way to abuse her financially or emotionally, stain her reputation on Facebook. She is devastated again, still the child, ever the target, ever invisible.

On the couch is a person who has never completely grown up. He tries, but his back is too bent by all the people and injustice he’s carried. Or she grew the most cynical, chronic trauma-based personality that keeps her chained in the basement where she lived as a little girl. With so much a failure in her adult life, her deepest pain may be how she knows she is still seen by her family, how there has never been an inkling of justice.

I wonder if my client feels it is time to rip the smiles from their faces, the neurotic complacence from their brains. Time to make them very, very uncomfortable or angry. Time to rip off their shut eyelids and cause her to be seen for the first time ever.

I suggest a letter, a letter sent to every family member at once, that comes from blood but no wound, from serene anger, strength and knowledge. It says:

To this family –

I know you are all sick. You’ve lived in the dark and the shit all your lives, as if that were better than the rose you bore. The child. Me. Let me introduce myself. I’m the one you didn’t want, had no ability or desire to care about, needed to be silent and defective. The one you dumped your pain into. I’m the sibling who took care of brother and sister, which a parent should have done, so now you are botched, helpless and vindictive. I’m the niece you never talked to, aunt and uncle. I suppose that wasn’t your job. But you might have been a human being. Grandfather: I’m the grandchild – you crap – you forced sex on. Do the others think you’re the respected and loved foundation of our family? You are sick, you have been eternally sick, and you are in hell.

After many years being lost, set on a blind path by you, I have grown because I’ve had to. You – mother and father, sister and brother, aunt, uncle, cousins – never had to, and you didn’t. I’ve learned in my therapy that many people never grow up. I see and hear and know you, and you continue to wallow in your own filth.

You will not have any more contact with me. You won’t see my children, you won’t know my celebrations, and I won’t remember your funerals. Maybe it would be nice if you could wake up and see what you are, that you were inhuman to abuse and degrade and make invisible a child, and are still children yourselves. But I don’t expect it. What I do expect is that your always-whining and always-masturbating denials will echo among you until you bite your faces off and fall asleep drunk. And I’ll be as oblivious of them as you have been of me.

I don’t, of course, give my clients these lines to say. I only reflect their own pain and describe a possible value of autonomy, and the pain of losing even a poisonous dependency and being so alone. Some do write a letter.

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* Christine Ann Lawson, Understanding the Borderline Mother