No more Ms. Nice Guy

 

A logical chain of therapy process led to my asking a 36-year-old client: “Can you permit yourself not to be a nice guy?” She came in with the standards: depression and anxiety, and with a new appendage she called NVLD, “non-verbal learning disorder.” The symptoms, as she and the literature described them, were basically those of Asperger’s social ineptness, so we pretty much settled for the latter. No need for silly new “disorders.”

She knew even as a child that people didn’t seem to like her. A babysitter was abusive. My client, while not exonerating the abuse, wondered if it had been her “hyper” nature that had offended the babysitter. Her mother had what I could call Toxic Nurse Syndrome. How many women become nurses to sublimate, in a twisted way, their own childhood mess? Who are lovely to their patients and abhorrent to their children? Plenty. Her daughter was invisible to her. She would be “displeased” to hear her child’s “truth”: Stepfather, who entered the scene in the client’s early twenties, was mentally and physically abusive to her, and yet her mother married him and asked her to move on, get over it.

“Betty” had grown a defense mechanism that was similar to the “euthymic defense,” my term for fake happy – clients smiling, laughing, chipper, sweet, bubbly, joking when talking about situations that were not happy or funny, about people who had been abusive. Her defense was to be the consistently “respectful” child, the “goody two-shoes” (it disturbs me to hear a client use that phrase which was already wince-worthy in the 1950s). We came up with a theory. With such a manner, why would people – children and adults – not like her when she was young, and why would the same problem continue in her adult life? It was the pain of the historical abuse seeping through, sabotaging her. We knew she needed to get the pain out from beneath its benign cover, find her anger and give access to it, reclaim her underground continent of unhappiness and knife wounds of frustration. Release encapsulated injustice.

I’ve worked with clients in this vein for two decades, but I don’t think it ever occurred to me until now to take a step back and ask my question: Are you ready to become a heavier, darker person, not nice, who stands resolute before thirty-plus years of abuse, brooks not one more second of false diplomacy by parents or siblings? Are you ready to feel harder, see the world through x-ray eyes? Are you someone who could become a different person, a different personality, even though that would shift all relationships, probably kill some of them?

I think that’s a question prominent as the sun, but I’d never seen it clearly enough to name it to clients. Do we assume they are ready to change at this level? This is very, very different from “ameliorating” depression, “stabilizing mood,” palliating anxiety, excising some OCD behaviors. This is to become unself, which we could euphemize by calling it “your true self, who you should have been,” but which would be alien. And unknown to the person who’s always lived her life.