coordinates: back at my US home base in Eugene, Oregon visiting my mamma and friends who are like family
“Shit,” he says, “it’s all fucking shit. I entertain the masses. I make magic for the whole damn room. They’d all be bored as hell in their little predictable boy-girl romantic comedies without me, but no one wants to hear my side of the real story. She’s been talking to everyone, and everyone believes I’m the bad guy. She’s been playing nothing but power games since I broke up with her.”
She broke up with him.
“She wouldn’t have sex with me. Now she won’t even talk to me.”
“Why do you think that is?” I reply.
“She’s a selfish bitch, I already told you!”
I take a breath and say nothing. A painful 20 seconds pass.
“I don’t know,” he whines.
“Well, this is therapy. Think about it.”
He brings his hand to his face and scratches his nose while his eyes glaze over. I can see from his body language that he is disassociating from the pain again. Dissociation can be understood as the body’s way of turning down the volume dial from 11 to 0 when the pain gets too intense.
His faraway gaze and still silence contrast starkly with his usual dramatic gestures and loud voice. He has floated out of himself. I remind him to breathe and reassure him that disassociation is normal when you make contact with your emotions after being disconnected for a few decades. It takes two or three minutes for this wave of numbness to pass through his system.
If he doesn’t stay grounded and calm he might have a flashback to the trauma that’s at the root of all of this. That… would not be ideal, to say the least. In flashbacks, people relive the sensations of the traumatic memory as if it was happening now. Instead of the usual way of experiencing it as a memory of the smell of the whiskey, they smell it as if their abusive, drunk father is here in the present moment. They see the images, smell the smells, hear the sounds, and feel the panic of flesh pressed against flesh as if the past events were reoccurring in the present.
Flashbacks aren’t like normal memories. They burst through in fragmented fashion as if through a shattered funhouse mirror of disconnected sensations. They lack a linear, coherent story with a beginning, middle, and end. He could become spontaneously violent or have a panic attack if that happens.
His most violent episodes happened when he was having a flashback. He mostly doesn’t remember those episodes either, only their aftermath.
I scribbled in my notebook “scapegoat?” to remind me to ask him later whether it was he or his brother who had been the frequent whipping boy of the family. I’m guessing it was him, given how hard it is for him to take responsibility for his actions. As a kid, everything was his fault according to his mom. Now he refuses to believe he could do anything that would harm another. What he does is always their fault.
I notice he’s more animated again. The disassociation has passed, and he’s back to himself. The anger returns as well.
“She won’t have sex with me because… I don’t know. She’s trying to control me. Unless I do things exactly like she dictates she’s not happy.”
All Harley wants is for him to leave her and the kids alone.
He continues, “She’s playing the kids against me. I’m not down for her games. She’s not gonna get away with it. She’s gonna be seen for how selfish she really is. This fake front she’s putting up for everyone to see isn’t gonna last.”
I prompt him to check in with his feelings. “As you say all of this, what emotions are coming up for you?”
“It wasn’t personal. None of what happened between us was personal. It wasn’t about her. Why can’t she see that?”
He runs past my question about feelings again. I wonder if he ever lets things get personal in his personal relationships. Did anyone in his childhood make sure he was personally taken care of? I have plenty of reasons to think they did not.
His mom ensured that not even his brother liked him. Parents with high degrees of narcissistic dysfunction often sow discord between siblings. Consciously or unconsciously, they can’t afford to have siblings unify in a front that resists their unceasing power trips. To do this, the parents mark one of the kids as the golden child who can do no wrong. The other plays the unwilling role of the villain.
Joker does remember his mom spitting vile words at him. “Arthur, why can’t you be more like your brother? He always listens to me. You’re just like your father… that piece of shit.”
Arthur grew up hating his twin and bullying him. When they were eight, he broke all of his brother’s new box of 128 crayons to exact homemade justice, a vain attempt to right the scales of how differently they are treated. Though they were close as little kids, they grew to hate each other, and that hatred persists till today. Arthur never could admit to himself what horrible things he did to Jeremiah. He blocked out those memories entirely until we started working together. Arthur barely speaks of his twin.
Jeremiah spent 11 years in therapy, and he’s much better now. He moved away from New Jersey when he was 18. He changed his phone number. He has an ex-wife in Miami and lives comfortably as an engineer working for a defense contractor in Tampa.
With his therapist’s encouragement, Jeremiah doesn’t talk to anyone in the family anymore. Therapists often recommend to the golden child that they disconnect from their abusive home entirely.
I’m working on getting the Joker to write a letter of apology. Even if he never sends it, it would be a major milestone to feel remorse and admit he’s sorry.
Arthur struggles to feel anything at all, even happiness. No feelings are safe to feel, not even the good ones. He put them all in strongboxes with dusty padlocks and shoved them under the rug of his unconscious when he was a tiny boy. What use are feelings if you can’t control them, he wonders? He doesn’t trust himself to control what might happen if he opens those boxes.
Arthur continues on his monologue without looking to see if I’m listening, “She is going to continue to do this unless I do something to stop this madness. Does she think she can go on like this avoiding me forever? We have kids together. She’s going to have to deal with me at some point. Well, she’s…”
“I’m going to interrupt you there. It sounds like you have a great understanding of your thoughts. How do those thoughts feel in your body?”
Silence.
“I don’t even know why I’m doing this,” he snaps.
“Why do you think you are?”
“I told you — I don’t know. I don’t have time for this. I could be doing a million other things that were more fun than this, like putting hot skewers into my eyeballs.”
He stands up to leave. Our session still has 40 minutes left.
I’m surprised he’s come into therapy at all. Most people, men especially, who are caught in these patterns of narcissism are so walled off from the shame that lurks beneath the surface that they never feel it. Their grandiose belief in themselves as the “winner” and others as the “loser” protects them from the coldness of the reality of how their actions affect others. They don’t feel shame until some horrific consequence like losing their wife and kids happens and then they suddenly do feel it.
Today he did.
When his first wife and child in utero died, it sent him down a spiral of hatred and violence. Since Harley and the kids left, he’s underwater like never before.
Last month he quit taking painkillers and drinking. Worse than the detox, without a chemical numbing agent to keep it at bay, his previously hidden depression was overtaking him with a vengeance. He wasn’t sleeping. He was having outbursts of rage. He told me it was a struggle every day to resist the urge to check out and buy more pills. Even though he deleted his supplier’s number, he knew he could find more if he tried. Once he no longer suppressed his emotions, they bubbled up to the surface faster than he knew how to deal.
I knew he needed help, and so did he.
I admired his courage. Few men ever came to this point of opening up the dark boxes of the psyche and letting the demons out into the sunshine. Whole generations of men numbed with bottle and pill the horrors of war and violent childhoods only to later become abusers themselves.
Now though, I see more and more men coming forward to break the cycle of abuse and abuser.
I know this is the moment where I win his trust or lose it forever. If he walks out the door he’s not ever coming back.
“What do you think all of this standing up and storming out is about? What is your anger about? What’s really at stake?” I ask.
“I can’t do it anymore. I can’t stand having anything control me, even oxys or alcohol. I don’t want that thing over top of me, no matter how angry I get when I’m off it. I don’t want to *need* anything. Not you, not the drugs, not anything or anybody.”
“Good, I get that. You’re in the worst part of this process, you know? It won’t always be this hard. You’re gonna have a totally different experience of being in your body when you’re through this. And I want you to know you can slow this whole thing down. You don’t have to go so hardcore and drag yourself through this cold turkey. Sandpapering yourself through the healing process doesn’t help. You know you have a choice about this, right?”
“Yeah, I know. I want to do this. I want to feel the pain. I’m not afraid of it.”
He looks afraid in that manic sort of eyes-bugged-out way. He sits back down and looks straight at me.
“Ok,” I say. “What’s right at the core of this? What do you fear most about your anger?”
“You know, I don’t even think I fear my anger. Other people do. I’m tired of making myself a good little boy. I’m tired of dialing it back and talking quietly. I can’t stand that being the only tool that I’m allowed to use. At first, people love the show, but then there’s a Big Bad Joker Day and all hell breaks loose. If they can’t stand me, they can take a step back.”
“Where do you feel that?” I prod.
Arthur finally pauses long enough to move his awareness from his racing thoughts to the sensations in his body. He runs his hands over his belly. “Right here. It’s all a knotted-up mass. It’s like cracked asphalt with sticky goo coming up through the pothole in the middle. It’s burning right now.”
His guts are moving so much I can hear them from where I sit. His body carries many scars, both visible and invisible from many wounds, inflicted by both weapon and word.
“Good, I’m going to give you some statements to repeat. Here goes — ‘even though I’m angry that other people can’t deal with me sometimes, I still completely love and accept myself.’”
He pauses. I’ve previously instructed him not to say things that don’t resonate in his body. I can tell by his silence that this statement didn’t land.
I prompt, “Does that feel totally true?”
“No.”
I try again with another statement for him to repeat, “Even though I’m angry and other people get overwhelmed, I’m totally ok. I can accept that I’m having a hard time loving myself right now.”
He repeats it this time.
I give him another statement.“Hello, anger, my old friend. I’m learning how to work with you in a different way.”
He repeats that as well.
“How does it feel to say that?” I ask.
“Good, it feels good.” His shoulders relax.
“Let that soak in like warm rain, then. Take a deep breath all the way down to your toes and blow out anything that’s ready to release. Imagine little bits of coal dust are leaving that black pothole and blow them out.”
He releases a deep sigh.
“What else is there?” I explore.
“I’m pissed at Harley,” he mutters in a quiet, wounded tone.
“It’s ok to be pissed. It’s also ok to miss her, you know? It’s ok to be sad, too. How’s it feel to hear that?”
Arthur lets a wave of sadness and grief crash through him and pull his face down into his hands. He doesn’t stop it. It will not be the last brave thing I see him do.
The journey to healing the roots of his anger will take time. With guidance, he will go back to the moments in his childhood when he swallowed his words to avoid the wrath of his abusive father. He will cry rare tears when his unconscious bubbles to the surface memories that previously had been hidden. He’ll understand how to be with himself even when people are overwhelmed and afraid of him. He will recognize and heal his co-dependent reliance on others to fill the bleak emptiness inside. In time, he will learn how to both shine bright as the fiery, mischievous life of the party, and with equal comfort go home to a quiet house, wash his face, and return his own gaze in the mirror.