Suddenly, here I was, forty-seven years old, smoking cigarettes again.
Thrown into a new environment by a disorienting job relocation, I found myself among people who were, mysteriously for this health-conscious age, smoking. Equally mysteriously, I began to join them, at first not inhaling at all, but then, before I knew it, escalating to two fully inhaled packs a day. Given my near inability to breathe without wheezing, I was mystified as to how, when I’d quit some twenty years earlier, I had ever been able to cram in four packs of Lucky Strikes on a daily basis. Never mind the lung capacity to withstand that much unfiltered nicotine and tar — where in the space of twenty-four hours did I even find the time to go through eighty cigarettes?
Beyond its utterly indefensible stupidity, my present addiction took on characteristics of the surreal: I often had an irresistible compulsion to light up my next cigarette even as I was dragging deeply and unsatisfyingly on my current one, all the while knowing for certain that it would be my last. I knew I was engaged in self-destructive behavior that gave me little pleasure, yet I felt as if in a trance, unable to control myself, the oral urge unrelenting.
Could therapy help?
Over the years, whenever depression and despair had reared and then refused to bow their ugly heads, I had tried, it seemed, almost every type of therapy, each one over time becoming pathetic, comical: the tiresome solemnity of my own self-pitying saga; the sanctity of the ritual of “going to the shrink”; the reliable rhythms of each earnest session as I recounted tales I had grown sick of from overrepetition — all that ancient history with the glaring gaps due to age and the mysterious embellishments from retellings now themselves too ancient to be distinguished from the original events; then, inevitably, the slow draining of meaning from the ritual — starting out as hopeful cynic; evolving into cautious believer; hitting a kind of wall and, from that point on, finding it difficult to end things, since the therapist would by then have become a burden of sorts, a dependent I couldn’t abandon; finally wresting myself free and then, years later, some crisis in my life sending me back to therapy once more, like starting up again with yet another woman, causing the cycle to begin all over, each time a little more bored with my own story, a little more reluctant to repeat it yet again for yet another paid professional.
Was it now time to go down that road once more? How many years had I been in — and then unable to get out of — therapy? And what had I ever gotten out of it?
When I was twenty-two, I went three (yes, three) times a week, to lie on a couch way up in Riverdale at the top of the Bronx, making sure my taxi-driving schedule, through not-always-compliant traffic, got me on time to my appointment, seeking there some kind of road map into “adult” life. What did I pay? Who knows. What did I discover? A quarter of a century later, almost all I can recall is a bit of practical advice: ashamed of my impulse to engage in “baby talk” with my wife-to-be, even to call her “baby,” I was transformed (no other word can quite convey the profound sense of inner shifting) when I heard my shrink — my shrink, the anthropologist — point out that, far from being unmanly, baby talk arose from the same tender impulse that lay beneath people’s addressing each other as “baby,” not only in bed, but in everyday conversation, even in song. How natural, how omnipresent it was. How much simpler the world suddenly seemed. The insight gave me permission to consider myself part of the human race, a man who could talk baby talk without shattering his fragile sense of masculinity.
This shift took place about six months into the therapy, and for probably six months more I struggled — silently and in vain — with my next problem: how to leave. My imprisonment ended over what I felt was a moral issue: though I’d given notice a week earlier of a scheduling conflict, my shrink insisted on charging me for the unheld session. Outright knavery, I felt. Emboldened by self-righteousness, I quit.
Then, at twenty-nine, I went once a week for a year to see a psychologist on the Upper West Side, who provided ballast as I split up with my wife. What did I learn? The only memory that survives is one of self-assertion: One day, instead of providing sympathy or an analysis of whatever terrible problem I had just described, my therapist, as usual, gave me an instructional anecdote from her own life — as if every aspect of my life could be illuminated by some experience of hers. I blew up. “Fuck that! I don’t want to hear about you,” I blurted out. “I want to talk about me.” I took that act of rebellion as the sign that I was ready once more to brave my self-inflicted slings and arrows without a therapist’s shield. It also did not hurt that I had started going out with an older woman whose nurturing abilities and psychological insights far exceeded those of the shrink I’d left behind. For the first time in my life, I felt recognized, special. (What do you need therapy for, anyway, when you’ve got a relationship that works?)
Come to think of it, in the last year of our marriage, my wife and I went to a marriage counselor to . . . what? Save the marriage? Pave the way for splitting up? I remember nothing but the excessively soft-spoken demeanor of our therapist, who conducted our Thursday-night sessions at the Brooklyn brownstone he shared with his always hidden wife and his frequently heard young daughter, a child whose very existence symbolized a connection my wife and I lacked. Each shushing or ushering out of the girl was a mild rebuke that the client couple was not as “coupled” as the couple living in that Brooklyn brownstone. Come to think even more of it, I needed therapy to get into the marriage, to keep it going, and then even to get the hell out of it. Therapy served as either a lever to extricate me from some bind, or a support to keep me upright after the bind had been severed.
Four years later, when my father died and I found myself feeling unexpectedly lost, I went to see a Reichian therapist and began a once-a-week treatment that lasted nearly seven years. What did I learn? First, that I had a body, and second, that the energy that was supposed to course freely through it — in essence, the life force — was blocked in many places, not the least of which were my eyes: they were looking in, not out. Instead of letting the world in, letting it impress itself upon me, I was letting myself be hypnotized by internalized parental messages that had, over time, become my reality: “You are ugly, fat, selfish, stupid, cowardly,” and so on, I had heard incessantly, day in, day out, for thirty-nine years.
Each session, lying in my underwear on a freshly sheeted twin bed in the shrink’s soundproof office, I would try to reduce myself to basics: breathing deeply, rotating my eyes around the edges of their sockets, hammering the bed with my fists, and frequently, at my therapist’s urging, kicking and screaming in an effort to wake myself from the trance; occasionally, tears or laughter would signal that, for a moment, I had succeeded. He would press down on my chest to deepen my breathing, say, or squeeze my jaw muscles, then step back to see what often-remarkable result might ensue. On one occasion, my mouth and lips became inexplicably immobilized, numb: a mind-altering lesson in my body’s capabilities. After another session, I walked (fully dressed) out onto the streets of New York City and saw, with such startling freshness, the beauty, the clarity of the world. Pedestrians, delivery trucks, the traffic lights changing, the green leaves on spindly brown trees, the newly laid sidewalk with sawhorses protecting the concrete as it dried — the rapture inherent in all the color and motion and light, and in my being part of it. How absolutely thrilling simply to be alive! For a moment, filled almost to bursting, I glimpsed transcendence, the great, mysterious wonder of life — that it was not I who was at the center of things (what a relief!) but existence itself. I was only an infinitesimal link in the great chain of being.
Then one day, I experienced the unbelievable release of an ancient Mommy grudge: an image of myself as a baby, wanting her to soothe me or change me or simply pay attention to me, and finding instead her inexplicable, her inexcusable absorption in her own anxiety, her blindness to her responsibility to mother me — her blindness to me. I went off into hysterics. I cried and cried, the rage and resentment and need pouring out with such force that I couldn’t catch my breath, the tumble of words and emotions arrested by throat-catching sobs. “Why the fuck didn’t you take care of me?” I railed against . . . what? Her? The universe? Myself? I desperately wanted something from her, and, God damn it, I wasn’t getting it.
“It’s OK, it’s OK,” my shrink cooed as I sat up on the old twin mattress (the scene, I would guess, of many a similar outburst), screaming and crying and pounding, and at the same time witnessing this crazy emotional current run through me as if I were two years old. “Fuck you, you fucking bitch!” Why didn’t you do this for me, or that? the thirty-nine-year-old me cried out in the late 1980s about things that, if they actually did happen, did so during the waning days of the Truman Administration. I then wound up being soothed by a stranger who had somehow come to know more about me than anyone else in my life.
The therapist’s somewhat cold exterior turned out to mask not only this surprising tenderness, but also an ability to slice through confusion with razor-sharp insight. Once, riddled with guilt and feelings of inadequacy after an ex-girlfriend had berated me for failing to call and ask how she’d been doing for a week after we’d broken up, I found an unbearable weight lifted (temporarily) when my therapist asked, “What are you supposed to do? Aftercare?”
And then, after God-knows-how-many psychics and astrologers and transformational weekends (and even past-life therapy, in which I discovered I’d been a housewife in rural Poland at the turn of the century), there came into my life the most unlikely, and probably the most effective, therapist I’ve ever had: Don, a former est “trainer” (now dead from AIDS) with whom I spoke on the phone for an hour a week for three years. What do I recall? A ceaselessly positive approach to life. He had no interest in my past. Instead, we talked about the present and how, by changing the nature of the conversations I conducted with myself and others, and by understanding and employing special terms — terms with extra oomph, like “authenticity,” “invitation,” “request,” and “commitment” — I could make my relationships, my life, clean and productive.
For example: A friend would continually infuriate me because, regardless of how many times I explained to him that I felt cross-examined whenever he asked me, “What are you doing tomorrow night?” — and that I would feel less cornered if he would just say something like “I’m not doing anything tomorrow; want to do something?” — he would nonetheless persist in asking in the very way that made me uncomfortable. Don suggested that, rather than go on fruitlessly complaining to my friend that his behavior drove me nuts, I should simply “invite” him to “accept” my “request” that he alter it. If he accepted, and thus made a “commitment” to change, then any relapse on his part would trigger a “conversation” about his commitment and not get bogged down in analyzing why the behavior should or shouldn’t make me nuts. My friend’s failure to accept my request, or to live up to his commitment, would, in turn, give me the option of severing the relationship. Viewed this way, people were no longer inscrutably complex organisms with intricate histories and peculiar destinies, but blank slates ever capable of change (although my soon-to-be-ex-friend never did). The vast canvas of human interaction became something like a board game, with Don teaching me a handful of rules that made play both brisk and clear. His precepts offered a liberating escape from the need to relive and be victimized by the past, and a way to endlessly refuel the future with “possibility.”
And then, only last year — one of the few periods in my life when I wasn’t looking for therapy — at the suggestion of a friend who knew what a therapy junkie I was, I tried something called Stroboscopic Light Therapy. The preposterousness of it all was what intrigued me: Each day, for three weeks, I would have a thirty-minute telephone appointment with a therapist hundreds of miles away, during which I would sit at home in the dark, in front of a pulsating light machine, talking to the therapist on the speakerphone. When told to do so, I’d adjust the rate of flicker, insert one of fifteen colored lenses, and then, at the therapeutically correct moment, change to another lens, all the while dredging up memories and associations, pinpointing their locations in my body, and minutely describing my feelings and my perceptions of the ever-altering light. It was the absurdity of the total package that captured me, including the guarantee that a “cure” would occur by the end of three weeks — as if regularity and diligence, coupled with a device no more complicated to operate than a Thigh Master, could produce change, right there in my own home. Nothing more to buy. Easy, safe, convenient. It was ultimately so stupid that I had faith. I was hooked most of all by the guarantee that it would not be open-ended.
The cockamamie theory seemed simple enough: Being exposed to the colored lights (each somehow associated with a particular issue — orange, for example, with self-esteem) would facilitate a shift in my subjective relationship to the “truths” of my experiences and my memories of them. The strobe would work to “entrain” or “disentrain” the brain-wave activity, the audible click-click-click of the machine serving to reinforce the effect. The continual focus on where in the body the feelings are lodged would help to clarify them. The visceral feelings and beliefs to which I am attached would be released, or at least become less binding.
Yeah, sure.
And what did I discover? Like the huddled apes in 2001 staring at the moon, I found myself gazing into the light, seeking illumination, insight, sensation, excitement, something. And — with the help of my steadfast and sisterly, caring and nonjudgmental shrink — many, many times it came.
First, there was the sheer joy of discovering that, even though I had grown tired of endlessly retelling the story of my life and had (mistakenly) thought that the past had somehow lost some of its powerful grip, there were, sleeping inside me, all these memories — painful, fearful, glorious memories — that the light seemed to awaken, archaeological treasures that kept floating to the surface. As I stared into the light, I also saw that the word “memories” seemed to demand quotation marks — the memories were so distant (or so fictitious), it was as if I were both discovering and inventing them at the same time. In a way, it didn’t really matter whether they were real, because they produced such powerful feelings in my body:
I am achy and nauseous after a week cooped up at home from seventh grade, taking that first woozy stroll outside, down quiet afternoon streets, sunny and devoid of kids, the world, bleached free of color and noise, fanning out limitlessly before me; I am utterly crushed when my brother, playing with Robby the Robot, my spectacular reward for having my wisdom teeth pulled, manages to break the toy only minutes after it is taken out of its box; I am ecstatically cheering during the second game of a Sunday double-header at Yankee Stadium: Mickey Mantle has just hit a home run into the late-afternoon sun, my father beside me smiles contentedly; I am laughing uncontrollably as I pass notes back and forth to a friend in sixth grade, to another in my high-school physics class; I am tongue-tied and unable to swallow when, on the staircase of her apartment building, I pass Susan, the unattainable object of my prepubescent crush; I am giddy and anxious, wanting time never to end the six-hour Monopoly game with my brother; I am straining to quench the thirst of a hot summer’s day while my mother, fearful of disease, repeatedly pulls me back by the collar of my shirt, preventing me from ever getting a truly satisfying mouthful of cold water from the kitchen faucet; I am bursting with longing to have all the jumbled anxieties and conflicts of my family jell into a harmonious whole as I set the special dishes for Passover dinner, the only meal of the year the four of us eat together; I am trembling with awe on the corner of Grand Avenue and 181st Street in the Bronx as massive, low-lying clouds, almost black, race across the sky, missing the darkened apartment buildings, it seems, by inches.
The lights made it clear somehow that all these memories are part of my biochemical makeup, still existing in the parts of the body where I first felt them — the stomach, the chest, the arms, the head. These memories not only seemed to have dictated my life, they seemed to have taken on such iconic significance that subsequent events were but teflonic footnotes, without resonance or weight, compared to what had gone before.
One particular moment stands out:
Transfixed by the light, I see the block where my parents’ grocery store had been; it’s all gone now, the victim of urban decay. Some guy in a dark room somewhere in Manhattan, looking back over time, shouting out my memories into a speakerphone, I well up. That kid who grew up on that block is gone; the people are gone; the buildings are gone; the crepe-paper window display for the Miss Rheingold contest is gone, along with the commercial jingle: “My beer is Rheingold, the dry beer / It’s not bitter, not sweet / It’s the extra-dry treat / Join the millions who buy Rheingold beer.” It’s all gone, those sweet, bitter days of my youth, scattered by forces that seem to pull everything apart. But, miraculously, I see, it’s also all still here, astonishingly alive, stored in the very organs of my body. The details of my story are suddenly no longer textbook dry and tiresomely familiar, but rich with texture and nuance. Everything that happened or failed to happen is no longer a source of grudges and resentments, but a radiant source of feeling to be treasured simply for its having been.
Then, too, the therapy cast a pitiless spotlight on the deadness and hopelessness that I’d doggedly carried around since I was . . . God knows. Ten? Two? and that prior therapeutic experiences had failed to eradicate. A hopeless stance toward life based on a few irrefutable “givens”: that it is a grim undertaking, a kind of Old Testament curse I am doomed to live out pleasurelessly; that I don’t deserve to exist, except to serve others (bobbing and weaving all the time to protect and entertain them so they will never catch on to how terrible, how absolutely frightened, inadequate, and not a real man I am, and always with the gut-wrenching fear that I’m just at the point of being taken to task for failing even at that); that only other people are entitled to experience pleasure, my needs and desires are irrelevant; that intimacy always seems to come up short, the one last little step to love seems never to be taken; that there is a gap between myself and others that I can never fully traverse — only in separation do “I” truly exist; in relationship, I serve.
The flashing light illuminated all these crippling beliefs. At various points in the therapy, my shrink asked me to come up with a mantra to express the particular despair-filled assumption the color was then shedding light on. (As I strained on these occasions to get the words exactly right, I felt ashamed for trying to be so pedantically precise about my whining.)
When I did finally settle on the wording, I was supposed to repeat it, over and over, each time giving it a varied dramatic reading. The more I tried to express exactly what was making me nuts (for example, “I feel unsafe with people because I don’t trust them to understand me and treat me properly”), the more I found myself unable actually to hold on to it. Then, without warning, one of those magical therapy moments would occur, the fog would lift, and despair would be transformed into hope. By the tenth repetition, I would laugh embarassedly: “I don’t believe this,” I’d proclaim, climbing out of the pit. “I feel good. That life stance is stupid.” As I basked in the glow of the feeling and the color, the prospect of approaching life with uninhibited delight would bring a sense of fullness to my chest.
At times like that — the moment-to-moment attention to the color and to my body’s reaction to it: a catch in the throat, an itchiness around the eyes, a hollowness in the stomach, an agreeable lightness in my arms, a rush of saliva, the beating of my heart — life suddenly seemed less constrictive, as if to say, Hey, surprise, I’m not dead yet. Something new and gratifying can still be found. The apathetic certainty had somehow vanished. I was tickled.
As the end of my three weeks approached and I became more aware that feelings are located in specific parts of my body, I seemed to inhabit my body differently, and I saw how much of my misery was due to not recognizing — sometimes even denying — the biological reality of me. For example, some part of me felt as if I were a boy who had never grown out of a boy’s body. But after looking at blue-green (the color of “wholeness”) for a couple of days and watching it become purer, less distorted, I started to “grow into” the body of an adult. Amazingly enough, I was not a little boy, but a man over six feet tall. Feeling a new sense of pride at my manly bulk, I started to walk slower, with less of a bounce, more grounded, impressed by having the musculature of a (dare I say it?) man. When the three weeks ended, I turned off the stroboscope and embarked on a period in which I consistently felt more physically alive and less frightened by life than I ever had before.
But nothing lasts forever.
Within a year of the unexpected rebirth the light therapy brought, and despite all the misty memories of all the prior therapy, here I was headed down the road to feeling bad yet again — this time physically. Lost in a miasma of smoke and self-disgust, I found at least one part of me punched the elevator button to go up to my first hypnotherapy session so determined to stop smoking that I not only recalled the concept of hope, but could actually feel it.
My hypnotherapist talked a lot — about the difficulties of quitting and the common misconception of hypnosis as some kind of witch doctor’s voodoo. But he also frequently interrupted himself to ask if I was understanding him, and managed to convey in the process an earnest enthusiasm and subtle self-deprecation that made me like him. Near the end of the first session, however, something terrible occurred: with an excess of compassion, he suggested that, if in the time before we next met I happened to smoke, I should not waste any energy in beating myself up about it. What he intended as comforting advice, though, I heard as permission — virtually a command — to run downstairs and retrieve from the garbage can on the street one of the Virginia Slim Light Menthols I’d thrown away with such conviction as I’d entered the building.
By the second or third session, the old therapy-despair started sinking in. As I answered questions about my childhood, I saw myself sitting there forever, searching for an escape route from the topiary maze of my psyche, when all I had come for was to break my smoking habit. Then, shortly into the fourth session, I realized my body was contracting as severely as if I had been called to the principal’s office to be reprimanded. I hesitated to interrupt him, but finally could bear it no longer. I asked him to stop, please, stop talking. He had become noise.
I sat cross-legged on his couch, welling up with tears. I needed some downtime, repose. After a minute or two of deep breathing and quiet, I surprised both of us by asking him for something. What I needed, I said, was for him to perform some sleight of hand with me: Let’s just agree, I said, that I have already stopped smoking. Since each moment we are alive is nothing more than the present rushing headlong into history, wasn’t it logically possible for me to make statements like “I used to smoke” or “I have stopped smoking” without telling a lie? As long as no cigarette was actually being inhaled, what required me to say, much less believe, “I am a smoker”?
He bought it, but then began to warn me of some pitfalls I might encounter if I traveled down this path. I held up my hands, palms forward, signaling him to stop again. No. No image of myself smoking. Please. I don’t want to see that. I don’t want to entertain the possibility — which would seem to make it a certainty — that I could begin again. No relapses. No tolerance. No forgiveness. I just want this fucking habit gone. If you won’t tell me what to do, I’ll tell you what to tell me to do. Later, tomorrow, next week, I can come back and once again examine the psychoexistential problem of life in general, or mine in particular, but for now, let’s not talk about how difficult anything is; let’s just make this pact. Don’t fight me. However stupid, wise, deluded, or insightful it may be, let’s just agree that my smoking is a thing of the past; our pretense will become reality. I’ll deal with all the other shit later.
He agreed. I felt wonderful and basked in this self-created calm. The session was over. We shook hands. I paid the bill. He wished me good luck. I had become my own therapist. I had stopped smoking.
So, yeah, nothing does last forever.
Most of the time I’ve been writing this essay, I’ve been puffing away on one cigarette after the other. The happy ending you just finished reading — which really did happen — has become merely the end of a chapter. The change I thought I had achieved by listening to my body and becoming my own therapist did occur, but then, within a few weeks, to the frustrated amazement of those who care about me, I started smoking again. As much as I love Hollywood movies, I had always felt cheated by them: they were simply not the way life works out. Yet here I was, trying to tie up all the loose ends into an image as corny as any I’d ever winced at in a movie theater: me riding off into a smoke-free sunset.
Significantly past the midway point in life’s journey (very significantly past it, if I keep on smoking at this rate), I look down the length of my cigarette at all this therapeutic history and see . . . what? A series of relationships whose goal was to break habits and escape fears — relationships I ended whenever I felt confident I had broken the habit or escaped the fear. Each time I stopped, a part of me really believed that I had finally arrived at my ultimate destination — a lifetime at Free Parking — but later I found I had not reached that magical spot on the map where mind and body are so totally integrated that there is no longer any danger of the transformation coming undone.
Is there such a place? Hundreds and hundreds of hours and thousands and thousands of dollars of therapy have certainly given me insights and taught me enough tricks and techniques to make my passage through life’s storms a little easier. I’m pretty sure I’m generally less depressed than I used to be, and the reason must be, at least in part, all that therapy . . . right? But does therapy create permanent change? Life seems to throw at us so many opportunities for our own particular collapse that permanent change looks like an impossibility.
Maybe the misery is no longer systemic; maybe it’s just “normal” misery. But, looked at a certain way, my life has been a series of periodic reawakenings to yet another fine mess I’ve gotten myself into, and no matter how many man-months I’ve spent on the couch, every so often I find I’m headed down a road that seems guaranteed to lead to something bad. Even though I might be entitled to an entry in the Guinness Book of World Records for most therapeutic experiences, I still can’t tell whether life is about the cyclical recurrence of pain and relapse, or whether this view is just the product of my own fatalistic outlook that keeps proving itself to be the case, or perhaps — even worse — whether right around the corner there’s a real breakthrough out there, waiting to happen.
I just put out another cigarette in my ashtray. I’m thinking about the moments of wholeness I’ve experienced in therapy and wondering whether I’ll ever light up again.
“Confessions of a Lifelong Therapy Addict” was originally published in Family Therapy Networker. It appears here by permission of the author.
— Ed.
