Repetitions of riddance

How language empowers and seduces us both

Photo by Nigel Tadyanehondo on Unsplash

“A strong egoism is a protection against falling ill, but in the last resort we must begin to love in order not to fall ill, and we are bound to fall ill if, in consequence of frustration, we are unable to love.” ~ Freud, On Narcissism

In a recent Substack column, astute cultural observer Ted Gioia comments on “generation loss”, a term for the degradation of signals or images as they are repeated or replicated over time, as in a photocopy of a photocopy of a copy, etc.  Or as in the telephone game, where “Today the library is hot” might morph into “Sharon Stone is my girlfriend.”  

Psychology and recovery jargon is also repeated until we become numb to its particular meaning, gliding by without notice, like a framed image in the hallway. This is true of clinicians and patients alike.

Consider “Tricia,” a long-ago patient of mine who often said things like: “There’s my codependence again.   I need help with codependence.  How can I not be so codependent?”

The first few months of Tricia’s weekly therapy sessions were littered with such statements, until I too became numb to them. This in regard to her vexing inability to find a girlfriend.  Her new prospect (Jana) was lovely and charismatic, but possibly alcoholic. 

What did “codependent” mean to Tricia?  It was a concept gleaned via her involvement in al-Anon, the term a shorthand for “I need help with wounds from my alcoholic mother.”  But what kind of help?

In al-Anon, “codependent” was a marker or symbol of (among other things) community.  Tricia attended meetings regularly and stayed involved, and felt hope for the first time in regard to her romantic and sexual life.

But what the phrase does not say, in the therapy context, is also important.  To me it is like a doorbell, waiting for someone to answer.  What specifically does the term mean to the one I am talking to?  The idea that there are globalized, uniform definitions of any term (including “empathic” and “trauma”) is seductive, and false.

What the word seemed to say to me about Tricia was, I don’t like myself and feel like a fuck up.  Behind its more general use, in other words, lie a Victorian novel redolent of grief and unspeakable pain.  But that world had been so heavily devalued in her life, as aspects of her development remained imprisoned.

This is but one tragedy of addictive systems, their divisive impact and the binary of good/bad. Alcoholism leads to a zero-sum game where, ultimately, everyone loses.

Tricia seemed to think her early experiences and their impact, what led her in other words to need al-Anon, was obvious and not worthy of discussion.  She had come to me, she often said, for help with romance.  She seemed almost threatened by my tentative curiosity about looking closer.  But it was still early going.

I admired her devotion to al-Anon, and how fluidity with recovery language had eased shame and helped her find her “peeps.”  But in our work, such statements took on a totemic aura, like traffic cones detouring around fears and anxieties. Nothing to see here, keep movin’…. 

After a promising start, where she often expressed relief at finding someone who “got” al-Anon, our sessions became like whispers through bulletproof glass.  Something was muffled, and I even came to doubt myself; what was I missing?

For instance when I asked Tricia to tell me more about her past relations, she appeared reluctant; she dove deep with her last therapist and it didn’t do much, plus her problems were in the present.  She would tell me a few scant details, and went back to discussing Jana, to whom she had a strong attraction, also a source of doubt. Had she fallen in love with yet another problem drinker?

Here I myself was already tripped up around concepts of past versus present, as if they are completely separate. I was also influenced by Tricia’s anxiety around being viewed as “codependent,” by her sponsor and peers for instance, as my wanting to know more about this was also threatening.  Al-anon is for learning about avoiding codependence, like alcohol or drugs for those in AA, period.

I hate feeling as though I am pissing on a therapeutic parade.  After all, Tricia was happy to have found a caregiver-figure who apparently spoke her language, “got” al-Anon, leading to her renewed enthusiasm for therapy.  I found myself reluctant to disappoint her, even as I sensed it was inevitable.

She was intensely bright, a rising star at her law firm, parsing every text and message from Jana as a possible answer to the game “drunk or not a drunk?”  She would read messages to me and ask, “What does ‘I’m sorta hungover but ok’ mean, Darren?  Who’s hungover on a Tuesday?  It freaks me out.  Or is it none of my business? I mean she does work in the restaurant business, wining and dining is part of the deal. Think I’m being a little codependent here.”

I said something like, “Sounds like that all this provokes anxiety.”  “Well duh,” she would say, “my last girlfriend was alcoholic and abusive.  Obviously not desiring to check that box again.”

I said something about unpacking her feelings, to which she said, “I just said them.  I don’t want to date another alcoholic, which just triggers all my codependence.  Surely that makes sense?”

Some patients long involved in recovery (or other parallel communities) are challenging in that the accompanying jargon, helpful in those settings, become a blinder to vulnerability in the treatment setting.  A patient’s asking, “I need to set a boundary but I can’t so what do I do?” is, again, the beginning and not the end of a discussion.  What kind of boundary is needed and, more importantly, what is scary about saying “no”? (Usually this is tied to the risk of abandonment.)

How to explain the value of better understanding these highly individualized albeit painful dilemmas?  Why isn’t “I don’t want pain” the end of the story?  When I am pressed on the matter, it can feel like trying to defend my favorite color or cuisine. 

How to “explain” the lived value of empathic understanding? Tricia and I were playing very different language games.

Then, disaster: Jana got bombed at a dinner party and humiliated Tricia, who was furious and ready to bail.  Jana profusely apologized the next day, blowing up Tricia’s phone, saying “that never happens, I swear, and won’t again. Pls give me another chance? [heart emoji]”

Tricia said she wanted to give Jana a break and run for the hills (that divisiveness again.)  She feared that another chance was codependent, ending it avoidant; equally thorny was the idea of discussing with Jana why the evening was such a nightmare.

Tricia said, fraught with despair, “I need to decide for myself what to do, not wait for her explanation.”  She liked Jana quite a bit, yet wondered if this were due to her…(you guessed it.)

I said, “Communication is important in a relationship.  Maybe you want to make sure she understands why this was scary for you.”

“But she apologized.  And do I really want to open up so soon?  That’s what happened last time, and it was used against me later.”  She shook her head.  “This is all just too much.”

“Maybe that’s a clue right there.”

“Or is that my avoidance?”

I told Tricia she had a right to her feelings, to which she said, “Feelings lead to rash decisions, like stupidly falling in love with another alcoholic.”  She winced, crushed by self-loathing.

I said, “Look, this is why they call it ‘dating.’”

“But I always date the wrong people.”

“It’s hard to break out of the old patterns, but I think I can help with that.”

“Great.  How do you do that?”

I paused. “You can start by deciding what you need, with Jana for instance.”

Tricia opted for a compromise, asking Jana via text if she was sure the night before was an infrequent occurrence, since it “freaked me out a bit”.  Jana texted back, “I apologized, why do you ask? [smiley face]”

Tricia read this to me in the next session, then asked, “Now what?”

I said, “Well, what do you want to say?”

“Not sure.  That’s why I’m asking my therapist.”

“How about the plain truth?  Like, you have a history with alcoholics in your life and it’s very troubling for you.”

She scoffed.  “Why not just tell her my life story.”

“Al-Anon is a part of your life. A big part. Sort of like being in AA.”

“But in AA, other people’s drinking is no one’s business,” she said, visibly impatient, “and in al-Anon we don’t ‘check up on the alcoholic.’  This is really frustrating.”

I felt the same.  She wasn’t hearing a thing I was saying.  But that in itself was a clue.

I said, “You don’t seem very happy with me right now.”

“I just…I don’t know what to do.”

I thought on this. “I think you do.”

“Without being codependent, I mean.”

“I think we’re both being codependent,” I said, “and maybe that’s the problem.”

This puzzled her.  “What does that mean?”

An image had come to me: an anecdote shared early on, where as an eight-year-old Tricia was walloped in the face by her inebriated mother for asking “what’s for dinner.”  “I’m not your personal chef!” her mother yelled, hand swinging, before storming off.  Tricia lay crying on the carpet. 

The worst was her father’s response.  From down the hall she saw her father seeing her lying on the floor, lip bloodied; he shook his head at her with searing disapproval.  From then on Tricia tiptoed around the landmines of any wisps of curiosity or feeling, in other words being herself.

I said to Tricia that I did not want to disappoint her, because I understood how important Jana was to her; but in a way we were both avoiding the real problem here, which was the terror of being hurt again.  I wanted to protect her from the inevitable, probably because I didn’t like seeing her hurt. (This moved her to the point of surprise.)

I said, the problem was that disappointment could not be avoided. Dating and life and all of it is unpredictable. Probably we needed to discuss what her dealbreakers were, with Jana or whomever. And, all due respect, who gets sloppy drunk with a potential partner at a small dinner party?

Tricia reached for a Kleenex, eyes watering.  “Why does this keep happening?”

“Good question, and we’ll get to it.  But for now I think we need to figure out what you need here.  You said something fairly mild, and Jana had a strong reaction.” 

She chewed on a thumbnail, suddenly looking like a vulnerable adolescent, love-starved but afraid.

I need add the matter of her parents’ homophobia, mom especially, so that seeking out any romantic connection was a kind of “betrayal” of her role as the family scapegoat.  (Her family was deeply conservative.) 

Tricia was still figuring out how to be loved in a toxic system, how to draw drops of water from the driest rock, to love who she wanted without again upsetting the abuser (now internalized.)

I said something about alcoholic systems holding us hostage, at which point she asked if I had history with it, since I seemed so familiar with how it all worked.

I hesitated. “Avoid disclosure,” some say. But what the hell; it would affirm her intuition.  I told her yes, my dad had a real problem with booze; in fact he sounded like Tricia’s mother.

“Oh,” she said, “I’m sorry.”

I said, “This ‘heads I lose, tails you win’ circle we’re going in reminds me of being at home with him.  You can’t win for losing.”  Sort of like the dance Trish and I had fallen into.

In the end we were able to drop that “great taste/less filling” debate, in favor of a solution—mostly Trish’s—where she revealed herself in manageable doses. 

Jana told Trish shortly after that she understood Trish’s fears and wanted to get back into therapy herself. She never did.  (Alcohol misusers are great promisers.)  Eventually Jana’s continued defensiveness, and a repeat of the dinner party fiasco, revealed the answer Trish wanted (and dreaded): a sad relief.

Our relationship had grown in the meantime, we saw that the more Trish wanted to push away the pain of the past, the more likely she was to repeat it.  That pain is often an aspect of more vulnerable self craving a voice and an empathic hearer.

Trish began dating again.  She told me after meeting someone that she wanted to take a step back from her new prospect, realizing that she’d been unduly pursuing, out of anxiety her interest wasn’t mutual. 

“Sounds a bit codependent,” I said.

She laughed.  “You’re catching on!”

Trish and I were able to define codependence in the context of her treatment: as a kind of city rather than single house or room, as a shorthand for something we both understood, motivated by vulnerability overly stigmatized in her early “conditioning.”

Our words are deeply embedded in our relational contexts; language aids and entraps us both.  Helpful phrases wear like toothbrushes or trends.  There is no escaping these cycles.  Our unconscious hopes and longings can lead where pride, shame, or fear can be loathe to go—via a silence as familiar as the inflections of any mother tongue.