Psichologiniai sunkumai vis dar kartu su gdos jausmu iekoti pagalbos. Elva bent forward, holding her hand to her mouth as though to exclude someone in the room, showed me a remarkable number of enormous teeth, and said, I whomped the shit out of him!. Therefore, as I considered whether I could treat him, I minimized potential obstacles to treatment and persuaded myself that he was more unsocialized than malignantly antisocial, and that many of his noxious traits and beliefs were soft and open to being modified. For a love obsession drains life of its reality, obliterating new experience, both good and badas I know from my own life. To yield to her now would render me absolutely ineffective. she asked. Did I want to ally myself in any way with Matthew? Chrissies death and Pennys deep disappointment in her two sons must have kindled her regret at having given up her girls, must have made her feel that not only did the wrong child die, but the wrong children were adopted. His mother was outside. The other thing I think about, but cant talk about, is suicide. Marvin at sixty-four had suddenly, six months ago, for the first time in his life, developed disabling migraine headaches. I just couldnt bear the disgrace now of coming back to see you. So I decided to take your advice, but Phyllis will not cooperate. I was determined to avoid that role; instead, I placed my faith in the assumption that, if I could help remove the obstacles that lay in her path, Betty would, on her own, take the initiative to care for her body. Penny was still a haunted woman, but her demons now dwelled in the present rather than the past. Take your choice, each was told. Sometimes he talked about his physical discomfort and his loathing of chemotherapy, but most of all he talked about women and sex. Hes the one person who has ever known everything about me. With you it seems to have exploded all at once. Betty was horrified, and visions of her fathers baldnesshe had been shaven for his brain surgeryreturned to her. Why do you surrender your power to Matthew? Thats not entirely true. Her pyrrhic victory safely in her grasp, she could afford a little generosity and, as she was leaving my office, she thanked me for my efforts and said that if she ever went back into therapy, I would be her first choice as a therapist. He had flung open the sluice gates of awareness, only to be inundated with death anxiety. Julian Barnes has, in Flauberts Parrot, illustrated in a beautiful and whimsical manner a persons inexhaustible complexity. Well, I ate the sandwiches. There was no time in my schedule, however, and we arranged another session in two days. Thats exactly why I would never, not in a hundred years, dream that he would treat me like this. Whats the point of it all? Maybe I was wrong, but I think her eyes said, Are you satisfied now? I did not comment on her gaze. Thus her descent from two hundred fifty pounds set her spinning backward in time through the emotionally charged events of her life: leaving Texas for New York (210 pounds), her college graduation (190 pounds), her decision to drop the pre-med curriculum (and to give up the dream of discovering the cure for the cancer that killed her father) (180 pounds), her loneliness at her high school graduationher envy of other daughters and fathers, her inability to get a date for the senior prom (170 pounds), her junior high graduation and how much she missed her father at that graduation (155 pounds). Needing no reference books for my writing, I traveled light and had only a stack of my session notes for about fifty patients. I was reminded of another patient I had treated the year before, a forty-four-year-old excessively responsible, conscientious physician. Could I have done it, let go of his hand, helped him die, told him, Go! Its his house mainly, you could sayhis money bought it. it is our own ideas of him which we recognizethese words provide a key to understanding many miscarried relationships. The patient has either to forego growth or to grow and jeopardize the union. What a time to stopin the midst of work on important issues and with Betty still camped outside the one-hundred-fifty-pound roadblock! Does anyone have any hunches about the rest of the dream? I asked. If hes the spiritually minded person you think him to be, then surely hes experienced much guilt at your distress and would take pleasure in helping.. So I took pains, for example, to tell Marge (I assumed Me heard everything) how much I enjoyed Mes insouciance, vitality, brashness. Moreover, Phyllis did not permit Marvin to entertain at home either. I hoped that the establishment of an intimate bond with me might sufficiently attenuate her bond with Matthew so that she could pry herself loose from him. Now that youre looking better, Saul, lets go back to work. He put his head between his knees and held his breath, but without avail. One evening in the midst of a marital dispute, she uncharacteristically drank too much, went out of control, threw plates against the wall, and narrowly missed her husband with a lemon pie. Later I find what I assume was in the envelope on the street, and it is a dirty old shoe with the sole coming off. If we stare too hard into the past, its easy to be overcome with regret. Theyre jerks with no cojones, they sit around whimpering and saying nothing., Tell me what happened in the meeting from your perspective., Sarah talked about the rape, she tell you that?, And Martha did, too. I end this retrospective with an observation my younger self would have found surprising: namely, that the view from eighty is better than expected. Its past. Id like your permission to phone Matthew and invite him to join us. Supplemental Materials. The inevitable decision loomed. When I was sick, she took me to the county hospital and shouted, This orphan needs medical attention!. If I were going to be helpful to Betty, I had to sort out, to trust, and to act upon my feelings. I hate to be loves executioner. My predictions of what might happen have come true. Then I couldnt focus the slide. Saul was really digging in but, though I began to question my choice of a direct approach, I persisted. Phyllis, Marvin and Yalom never met together, Love's Executioner General Chapter Overviews, CH 7 Yalom - Transference & Transparency/ CH, . All your life youve worked. I sat there and wondered, Now what do I do? But my instincts luckily led me to what proved to be an inspired gambit. Though I had never before worked with anyone who had lost a child, I ought to be able to help her since much of her grief was reducible to guilt. You havent yet talked about having cancer. (I had been urging Carlos to reveal to the group that he had cancer, but he was procrastinating: he said he was afraid hed be pitied, and didnt want to sabotage his sexual chances with the women members. I personally think you judge yourself too harshly. That notion rains true in the book "Love's Executioner," by Irvin Yalom. Thats the way our relationship works. I had wanted to learn about bereavement, and Penny had, in only twelve hours, taken me, layer by layer, to the very nucleus of grief. I could see Sauls discomfort as he revealed these plans to me. Thats a question, not necessarily the question. I contained it better than he, and had long since learned to prevent it from dominating my life. Her stutter always annoyed me. Just mashed egg, salt, pepper, mayonnaise served on very fluffy white bread., Did it work? Good try, Doc! In fact, I was astounded at his enthusiasm: by the fourth meeting, he told us that the group was the high point of his week, and he found himself counting the days till the next session. As a result of her injury Marie had lost her job, and her financial situation was precarious. If I antagonized Me in any way, she would simply take her revenge on Marge. I tried to help Thelma talk. Over the next several months of therapy, I continued faithful to Marge. But there is timing and judgment. Although Penny did not ask for more time, it was obvious we had to meet again. A year ago when I first accepted Marge as a patient, I knew thered be calls; as soon as I saw her, I sensed what was in store for me. But watching Marvin change over the last several weeks has been impressive. She is naked and standing with her legs spread apart. I will never, never talk about Matthew to my husband. I thought I had known him well a week, a month, six months before. Dr. Z. contained his feelings during his initial major surgical procedures (apparently he had done an excellent job), but they came pouring out during the postoperative course. I gave her everything she wanted. Underneath obsession, what would I find? And so much pain, so close to the surface, only minutes deep. For those twenty-seven days. Heres what I want you to do. If I hadnt kept his secret from my therapists all these years, maybe the dominoes might have fallen differently., I dont understand. I could get long winded here (in fact my colleagues and I half joked about writing a response to this book called Yaloms Executioner in which we deconstruct everything wrong with it) but I wont. Yet had I spent hours with Mike and shared all this information, still I would not have adequately conveyed my experience of Marie. Marvin said he finally understood a dream: the dream meant that he had turned women into goddesses and then believed he would be safe if he could appease them. Besides, if I were in any way to label her behavior as problematic, she would feel humiliated and would never forgive me for that. Even though I didnt talk about him all those years, I still thought he should know which therapist I was seeing. Penny said nothing. But, above all, we talked about her angerabout how it had driven away her family and her friends. Its so self-punishing, so perverselike grinding an aching tooth. I had also, I told her, compared myself unfavorably with others on many occasions. She was absolutely persuaded that no theoretical explanation whatsoever was needed, and that I should let my stories speak for themselves. It is through willing, the mainspring of action, that our freedom is enacted. It was like trying to keep your house heated with a furnace thermostat placed too close to the window. Though she continued to take it, it had not helped her: she was deeply depressed, cried every evening, wished she were dead, slept fitfully, and always awoke by four or five a.m. She moped around the house and on Sundays, her day off, never dressed and spent the day eating sweets in front of the television set. My next car is going to be a Maserati., But if cars are dream symbols of bodies, why would you, in your next life, get the body, or the life, that you hate above all others?, Carlos had no option but to respond. I had spent too many hours in my youth silently hating my mothers vicious tongue. I spent the morning working on a paper, and around noontime I strolled down to the end of my driveway to collect the mailI usually read the mail as I eat lunch. Harry is full of Boy Scout honor slogansthe Boy Scouts, thats all he thinks aboutbut underneath hes a violent man. I encouraged her to plunge into her grief; I wanted her to explore and express every facet of it. . Tears poured down upon her new blue dress until Matthew, outracing me, handed her the box of tissues. But it was not until she stumbled upon an extraordinary revelation about the dangers of losing weight that she could make the decision to begin her diet. Once, when he learned about the spread of his cancer to his brain, I held him in my arms while he wept. Perhaps just as often the opposite is true: other anxiety masquerades as sexual anxiety. If, on the other hand, we explored other themes, even such important issues as her relationship with Harry, she considered the session a waste of time because we had ignored the major problem of Matthew. Now, I know that its his house, too. Marvin continued to be refreshingly open during the first several weeks of therapy. Remember that I said that each of us establishes in the group the same kind of social world we have in our real life?, Now, look whats happening to you in the group! I dismissed this angle as being just thatan angle, one of my dumb, harebrained, manipulative ploys that always backfire. Were these previews of coming attractions? Then Id daydream about slicing that artery, relieving the pressure, and letting the blood out. Every session was an ordeal, and Betty often left my office badly shaken. I need your commitment to hang in there with me., You have it. It arrived about ten days after the second. He knew I would disagree. I thought psychiatrists werent supposed to give direct advice. This is the first time Ive come across a blog post reviewing Yaloms work! She seemed phlegmatic, her skirt was wrinkled and twisted, her hair unkempt, and her face lined with discouragement and fatigue. Ever since I hung up the phone, Ive been kicking myself for chickening out and not having asked Matthew the two really important questions. No, no, no! As long as one believes that ones problems are caused by some force or agency outside oneself, there is no leverage in therapy. Group therapy for Dave was, I knew, a high-gain but high-risk venture, and I wanted to facilitate his entry into it. In one of my daydreams yesterday, I could see Matthew, eight years ago, bragging to one of his friends (and placing a bet on it) that he could use his psychiatric knowledge to first seduce me and then totally destroy me in twenty-seven days!. document.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. . I woke up extremely frightened. Marvin felt better after our session and was highly optimistic until, a few days later, a curious event occurred. That was surprising since the writer seems so youthful, energetic, and often unrestrained and sophomoric. Suppose we were able to write it a week from now? And evolution, too, referred to her, not to Chrissie. Perhaps it could still be done. But I never found anyone. Tell me about that decision., I checked you out. "Good" therapy, with a "good" patient is at bottom what kind of venture? Thats an important part of the reason Matthews acceptance of her loomed so large: He knew me as very few people ever haveas I really am, completely open, nothing held back.. Marge said this as though it were an original thought, and it was apparent that she had not remembered everything Me had said. Penny continued to stare. And Matthew?