This week, I went back into therapy. The last time I went — almost twenty years ago during a period of intense conflict — the therapist recommended that I read The Psychology of the Transference by Carl Jung, which I found gripping in its psychological dissection of a medieval alchemical treatise. While its application to the situation in which I was enmeshed wasn’t immediately obvious, as I spoke to the therapist and repeatedly read this work (it’s not very long), I felt something shift inside of me that allowed me to ‘move on’ in a way that left me feeling relatively resolved and ‘complete,’ which of course is a kind of metaphorical alchemy that is a goal of psychotherapy and possibly life itself.
Lately, however, I have once again found myself trapped in a difficult situation that has occupied a fair amount of ‘real estate’ in my mind. I have been ‘fixating.’ My hope in seeking therapy was — or is, since this process is still unfolding — to find a way to ‘let go’ of some of these obsessive thoughts so that I could focus my attention on the nicer parts of life.
This current conflict arose last year when, in the wake of my father’s death, and without warning, I was disowned by oldest brother’s family. The way I learned about being disowned was that my brother’s family was hosting a wedding for their daughter to which one of my siblings was invited but I was not. After learning about this development, I confronted my brother, who told me that I didn’t deserve to be invited because many years ago I had once said that I ‘didn’t want to be an uncle’ and that I had not paid enough attention to my niece when she was in grad school in New York City. My niece subsequently backed up this assertion in an email in which she neglected to mention the many times I had contacted her during this period with a thought to get together, overtures to which she had not responded or, in the instances that she had, she had forgotten about.
I found the situation emotionally shocking, given that until this conversation, I had been in constant touch with my brother and he had never mentioned any misgivings about our relationship, and I found it logically infuriating because of his (and his daughter’s) failure to acknowledge facts that did not support the narrative they had constructed. As a lawyer, I wanted to expose the flaws in their argument and to cross-examine their testimony. I wanted to prove that I was not a bad uncle or — as they also claimed — a bad brother and a bad son to my parents. I was also infuriated that the rest of my family accepted this situation, which I saw as being as much an affront to them as it was to me. I wanted to resurrect my father, who I felt confident would have supported me in the proposition that, if nothing else, it was an offense to fairness and good family relations to invite one sibling to a wedding and not another. Why did they not seem to care?
I also wanted my family to understand how humiliated I felt by my brother’s actions, which raised all sorts of horrible memories of growing up closeted and misunderstood, in suicidal despair because of the certainty that I was ‘different’ and ‘flawed’ and telling myself that I would rather die than be openly gay.
But of course I couldn’t resurrect my father, nor could I change my brother’s opinion or actions. I couldn’t change the rest of my family, either, any more than I could society at large, which is equally incapable of providing the empathy I sought. I could only change myself.
But saying and doing are two very different animals, and I found that I was unable to resolve my thoughts about my oldest brother. I was in a constant state of disbelief about what he had done and his justifications for doing it.
I didn’t want to ‘forgive and forget,’ which, though I understand the impulse, is something that I believe, after watching my father and mother succumb to dementia, can lead to severe mental problems. I also didn’t want to forget the anger and humiliation and grief I felt — if anything, I wanted these feelings to be memorialized so that I could always remember why I felt them — but I no longer wanted to be consumed by these emotions. I needed to find some peace.
But I wasn’t able to do it. At any given moment of the day or night, I found myself rehashing the events and arguments as if I were preparing for a court case, but one that is continually being postponed, which is a form of hell.
This week, after contacting several therapists and ironing out who was ‘in network’ and who was not, I had sessions with two therapists. They both assured me that what I had gone through was terrible, but they also said that they could help me in the way I wanted to be helped. I will only move forward with one of them, but it was good to get a few opinions, to know that I was not the problem, even if I had a problem.
They told me I was going to be okay, and the clouds begin to lift.
