Deborah Williams

I went to my first shrink under duress, which is perhaps not that remarkable: don’t all therapeutic forays start in moments of duress? In this instance, however, the duress was not mine but my mother’s, who had run out of ideas for how to cope with my increasingly alarming behavior. I myself refused to admit duress of any sort, despite being sixteen and adrift in my large midwestern high school, where booze and drugs circulated with the same ease as gossip, creating a toxic sludge that I didn’t know how to escape. 

That first shrink had a beard and smoked a pipe (but refused to let me smoke cigarettes on the grounds that my parents didn’t like me to smoke). I think his name was Ron and because I was sure he was in cahoots with my mother (he wasn’t), I only ever lied to him. I was fine, my mother was so uptight, my family just didn’t understand, I had a ton of friends. And as if to prove my claims, I brought him my friend Jill, whose primary talent was using a pin to declump her mascara while a Virginia Slims 100 dangled from her lips. “Talk to Jill,” I said to the shrink. “She’s way more fucked up than I am.” 

Maybe it was that visit or something else, but Shrink Ron soon gave up on me, or my mother gave up on him, or I gave up on all of it. That was the last shrink I saw until l I went to graduate school, many years later. Claudia, whose office was across from Dalton on New York’s Upper East Side, became my life raft in those early New York years. I’d known only one person when I first moved to the city and he smashed my heart into tiny, bitty pieces. I had a broken heart and no money: I was living on the largesse of my PhD fellowship, a princely nine thousand dollars a year. (Claudia’s services came through a clinic that my friends and I called the Discount House O’Therapy and it was a godsend). I was convinced that I was too dumb to earn a PhD — a feeling fostered by people like the woman in one of my classes who said, “You haven’t read Robbes-Grillet?” And my friends, those were the pre-google days, so trying to find something called Rob Grillay in the card catalog was fucking impossible.

Claudia was small and dark-haired, like my mother and my dearest friend (an expensive long-distance call away on the West Coast); Claudia’s office, as befits a shrink’s office, became my haven. I told her my secrets, including what I’d never told Shrink Ron, which is what had happened to me on the night before my sixteenth birthday. The story I’d told myself then was that everything was my fault; “no means no” was not a phrase that girls were taught in 1981. But a decade later, I was ready to find a different story. 

When Claudia told me that she was having a baby and quitting her practice, my response was textbook: wasn’t I her baby? How could she quit me? 

But quit me she did, passing me off to her replacement, a smudgy sort of woman whose name I don’t remember but who at one point asked me why my socialist grandparents came to live in Darien, Connecticut. 

“Socialites,” I said. “I told you they were socialites.” 

I don’t remember why the hell we were talking about my grandparents but I do remember thinking that if this woman couldn’t keep clear the distinction between socialism and socializing, we should probably part company. 

After the socialite confusion, I didn’t find a new shrink. I had made friends, read my Robbes-Grillet (over-rated), knew my uptown from my downtown, found the best pierogies, shopped only at thrift stores: I’d become a New Yorker. The plate tectonics in my life had shifted and then stabilized; my psyche no longer felt like it was riddled with landmines. 

I got my doctorate, got a job, fell in love, and moved into his rickety house in Greenpooint, way before that part of Brooklyn became the omphalos of hipsterdom. The boyfriend gave me a small room upstairs as my study; I told myself it was “the room of my own” that I’d always wanted. I told myself that because he was an artist, he needed the entire first floor as his studio. I told myself that our fights were a sign of an adult relationship; I told myself that our radically different outlooks signaled independence and maturity; I told myself that his nasty comments about critics being parasites were directed at the art world and not at me, even though I was halfway through revising my dissertation into a book (of literary criticism). I told myself I could fix my unhappiness and his anger; I told myself that what we needed to do was get married. Because how better to solve relationship problems than to get married?  

We got engaged and a friend sent me to her shrink. No judgements, my friend said, but maybe you ought to think about this whole marriage thing more carefully. 

Like I said, duress. I hadn’t realized how unhappy I was until I got into Bloom’s office on 56th Street and burst into tears.  Weeks and months and years worth of tears. How do you begin to rewrite the script you thought you’d written for your life? 

A good shrink has the same qualities as a good editor: she takes what’s there and begins to explore what else might be happening, asks questions about intention and meaning and language, makes suggestions about alternative perspectives, alternate interpretations. Bloom pointed out that whenever things in my life went badly, I said it was my fault, but that whenever things went well, I said it was due to luck. “Why is it,” she asked, “that you’re never responsible for the good things that happen to you?” 

I didn’t have an answer for that, but I began to revise. 

Other revision tools: “Is that an old feeling or a new one?” she’d ask me when I was upset about something. Was my reaction caused by some old wound being activated or was I responding in real time, to the present moment? 

“Stay in the uncomfortable place,” she’d suggest. I hated that. Why stay in the place of uncertainty and discomfort when instead I could lash out in anger or — my personal favorite — sulk for days? “It’s in the uncomfortable place that the work gets done,” she’d say. And with galling regularity, she was right. 

I kept going to Bloom long after the moment of duress had passed — I gave the artist back his ring, moved out, lived alone, married someone else, stayed married. Bloom was there for all of that, and for jobs, tenure, books, children. I stopped seeing her for good only when I moved to another country, but I brought her voice and questions with me. I think that’s what they mean by “internalizing.” 

Humans are creatures of narrative; we navigate the world with story. As I tell this particular story, I realize that it’s becoming a love letter of sorts to Bloom, who will probably never see it. She helped me find the stories I hadn’t wanted to tell — the stories I didn’t know I needed.