Childhood Trauma – Page 18

A liar is a person who willfully deceives others. Lance Armstrong and Bernard Madoff lied to protect themselves, and in the process deeply hurt innocent people.

A person who lies to himself is just a person, a regular human being like you and me, who doesn’t want to hurt anyone, including himself. We all grow up with a set of beliefs that by the time we become adults, are so embedded that it takes extraordinary methods to remove or modify them.

Jake Robb, a 41 year-old LA psychiatrist, and protagonist in Skin Dance, a mystery, had a long overdue fierce argument with his father. Jake always knew how angry he was at his father, but had never directly dealt with him. When he did, an amazing thing happened.

It was morning, sun shining through the space between the drapes, the aroma of fresh coffee, someone moving about in the kitchen. What was extraordinary to Jake, maybe even a considerable miracle, was that he had slept through the night. The endless awakenings and constant early morning arousal that had been going on for two years hadn’t happened.

Jake spent years lying to himself, not about his anger, but about the other side to all this rage, his love. It gets pretty convoluted, but most of us live with ambivalence, the existence of love and hate that lie side by side.

We’re supposed to love our parents. Judeo-Christian-Islamic-Buddhist-Bahaian beliefs make that very clear. But, what if we can’t love them, and the anger or love is hidden deep inside us? It can effect all aspects of our lives — who we choose as a mate, how we relate to peers, the pain or sense of disconnect that we experience when we’re around the parent or parents that are the object of all this feeling.

Knowing the truth about ourselves is essential. Taking Prozac or Zoloft etc., can help you feel better, but it won’t give you the information that’s hidden in your unconscious. Psychotherapy can be a very useful tool to help you tease out the threads of the past. It won’t do a lick of good to a liar. (Listening to country western music is giving me a whole new vocabulary.)

Art Smukler MD is the author of Skin Dance, a mystery, The Man with a Microphone in his Ear, and Chasing Backwards, a psychological, murder mystery.

A patient told me a haunting story.

Forty years ago, a young man from New York had occasion to order a piece of machinery for his boss from a company in Virginia. The young woman he spoke to was engaging and very helpful. One thing led to another and they started chatting on the phone as the piece of machinery was being built.

When the job was done and ready for shipment, the young man prevailed on his boss to allow him to go in person to make sure that the machinery was up to the expected standards. When he told the young woman the plan, she was delighted and offered to meet him at the train station. She would then personally escort him to the plant.

“How will I know you?” The young man asked.

“I’ll be wearing a red dress.”

When the train arrived, just as promised, a pretty, dark-haired woman wearing a red dress was waiting for the young man. As he descended from the train, she smiled and waved from her wheelchair. The young man, who had no idea that she had suffered from polio and had been wheelchair-bound from the time she was a child, fell instantly and irrevocably in love.

They married, raised a family, and had a wonderful relationship.

My patient, who just recently met the now 62-year-old lady with the red dress and her husband for the first time, said with a sigh, “They were in love.” He sighed again. “Most of us married people love our spouses, but this was different. They were obviously still as madly in love as when they first met on that railroad station forty years ago.”

So why do I, a person who has never seen or met this lady-in-red, also love her?

I love her positive attitude and her ability to accept what she couldn’t change and still make the most of her opportunity to have a good life. It is what I want for myself, my wife and children, my friends and my patients. The woman-in-the-red-dress never defined herself as a woman in a wheelchair with polio, but only as an attractive, intelligent, exciting person who never bothered mentioning the fact that she was impaired because in so many ways she wasn’t.

The story is for me what love stories are all about. Love, mystery, spirituality and the magic of the human condition. It is what I believe in, what I write about, and what I dream about.

Don’t forget to subscribe to Inside the Mind of a Psychiatrist.