5. Not our fault
In my twenties, I got the wrong idea about vulnerability. The books I read said if you want an intimate relationship, make yourself vulnerable, which I took to mean I had to reveal every embarrassing thing about me—flaws, failings, and past episodes of shame. But I had too many of all of those. I wanted intimacy more than anything else, but I already felt bad enough about myself and couldn’t imagine making that awfulness public. I couldn’t see how two people who spent their time together trading ugly stories about their defects could possibly create a relationship of warmth and love and light.
I proved myself right one evening when I was out dancing at my favorite salsa club. I got to talking with a woman who was there for her first time and we hit it off. The band was blaring so we went up to the balcony where it was just a bit quieter. For thirty minutes, we told each other hard truths about ourselves. At first we were a little giddy, I guess about being so bravely honest, but then we became somber, and finally grim. Afterwards, I thought of it as parallel emotional vomiting. Once we were done we couldn’t stand to look at each other and never spoke again.
I remember going to therapy workshops in my early twenties, where people would have life-changing breakthroughs after just ten minutes of personal work in front of the group. At first I was jealous. I’d go through the same exercise and wouldn’t budge an inch. I watched some excellent therapists throw themselves at the brick wall of my defenses and bounce right off. I compared myself negatively to the people who were happy successes and was miserable. That’s until my Calvinist arrogance came to my rescue.
I decided, “No, those people aren’t better than me, they’re simply sloppy craftsmen. They built shabby, second-rate defenses, easy to break down. They don’t deserve the credit they’re getting. But me, I’m one of the elite. I built my defenses to last a lifetime. And I built them when I was a little kid. I should be given an honorary PhD for my precocious psychological engineering.”
These defenses of mine were making a mess of my life, but I stuck with them like till death do us part. Then one day that still, small voice inside that speaks to other people in noble, uplifting epiphanies, finally spoke to me, and said, “Kid, you’re in trouble.”
So I signed up for intensive therapy, the kind of thing that was happening in the early 70s in California. It kicked off with a scary three-week program of isolation that promised to take you to places where no ordinary talk therapy had ever gone. I told a friend I wanted this to be like surgery. I wanted the therapist to go in and cut out the bad parts. I prayed that after he was done there would be at least a little something of me left.
But in my first session, my therapist, David, a soft-spoken guy, said: “I can’t take care of you. You’re going to have to do the work. You’re going to have to take the journey yourself. Down the road there will be blessings, but first comes the pain.”
Now, it so happened that three weeks before I started this therapy, which was going to drag me back into childhood, my parents were coming to visit me. I knew the therapy was going to trigger an earthquake in our relationship, but I didn’t ask them to postpone till a better time. Instead I handled the stress by getting a fierce migraine, the only full-fledged migraine I’ve ever had. It was so disabling that my doctor put me in the hospital for three days. My friend Linda came in and spent hours with me. The day after I got home and was back in action she said, “You know, I liked you better when you were sick.” I understood she was saying something profound. I wasn’t shocked or ashamed, I just felt the truth of her statement. But I had no idea what to do with it. I couldn’t put it to work. So I tucked it away in my memory and moved on.
I get it now, though. It takes a whole lot of energy to keep yourself shut down, but the migraine had wiped me out, and that’s why, by default not by decision, I was suddenly vulnerable, and why Linda and I could have those sweet, sweet moments at the hospital. I don’t remember what we talked about, but I remember the surprising feeling of closeness. Something I longed for. Yet the minute I got my energy back I got my defenses back.
David, though, was an expert at breaking down defenses. He was kinder than a migraine, but relentless. Breakdown to breakthrough, that was the name of the game. There was a discipline you had to agree to. You lived in a motel across the street from the Center for the initial three weeks. Every morning you went in for a two-hour session. But otherwise you had to go cold turkey on ordinary life with its compulsive busyness. You weren’t allowed to read, listen to the radio, talk with anyone, or do anything except sit there and look at your screwed up life. It was the opposite of a meditation retreat where you get to empty your mind and stare contentedly into nothingness.
The discipline was rigorous, but I was a hard case, so it took me ten grueling days to break. On the day before Thanksgiving, at the end of our session that morning, David asked me how I thought I was doing, like what grade I’d give myself on my therapy. I told him, “I get a B.”
“I think that’s about right. How is it for you to get a B?”
“My friends who have gone through this therapy before me each came back home with an A-plus. But me, just like always, I’m putting in the work, I’m following the rules, I’m diligent, but the heart of it, that part I just don’t get, not with this or with anything.”
After the session, I drove off to a silent, solo lunch at King Henry VIII burgers. When I got back to the motel, I sat in the car for half an hour not wanting to face whatever was waiting for me inside. Once back in my room, I looked at my lonely chair, paced a bit, then made myself sit, and instantly, not wanting to, started crying, then sobbing, then whispering into the sobbing, “I hurt, I hurt.”
Such a little thing, such a big thing. I had never admitted to having feelings. How could I be an emotional virgin at twenty-six? Well, I had been taught from early on how to smother feelings. And I did that with extraordinary dedication. Now, though, I let myself sink into the hurting, deeper and deeper until I touched bottom. And finally I understood. It was so simple. The more I could feel for myself, the more I wanted to fight for myself.
This was the turning point, but it was not salvation. It did not fix my life. It got me on the right road, that’s all. I’ll be forever grateful to the Center and to David for that gift, but there was still a long journey ahead of me.
I started calling this new kind of vulnerability primal, as in primal tenderness. But why that word? Because in my own personal lexicon “primal” means babies, it means our earliest, deepest need for love, a life-and-death need.
And how do babies experience love? If you stand over a baby’s crib and tell her in earnest, flowery poetics how much you care about her, that means nothing. Maybe the sound of your voice will soothe her, but the meaning of your words won’t reach her.
But if you provide milk, cuddling, warmth, wiping, bathing, and attention, lots and lots of attention, then she will feel your love, body and soul. When we meet their need for nurturance, that’s the language babies understand. And nurturance is the primal language of human beings no matter how old we get.
Babies are really good at asking for what they need. They may not have sophisticated verbal abilities, but they’re tenacious communicators. If they’re hungry, they cry to get our attention. If no one comes, they keep on crying, but now there’s an angry edge. And if still no one comes, the anger subsides into distress. And then if they continue to suffer neglect, the crying stops and they slip into a terrible, defeated silence. Studies at orphanages where there were too many babies and too few caretakers show that babies can die from lack of touch and attention. They can die from despair.
And here we are now, a whole species dying from despair. We’re failing at our relationships, group to group and nation to nation. We have an urgent, global need for primal nurturance, but we haven’t figured out how to give it to ourselves, not as a species.
What would it be like for us to step out from behind our collective defenses and admit just how scared we are? And how helpless we feel. I wish there were some way for us to come together, all of us at once, and cry our way down to the bottom of our pain. But that would be so awful I wouldn’t want to be there for it. I’d call in sick that day.
Still, not wanting to do it doesn’t mean we don’t need to. Because if we can’t take ourselves to heart, all the way down to the bottom, really all the way down, why would we ever care enough to fight for ourselves as fiercely as we need to fight?
