spinnerface: part I
Saturday 21 March 2009 | I like a cookie
Circa 3 am. I wake slick with sweat from a ghost-nightmare but for a long time am too scared to move, let alone open my eyes. After about half an hour I peek around. There aren’t any angry ghosts, just a fluffy warm black cat and the Brujo, who’s making all kinds of burbly sleepy noises (not to say snoring). I pick up the cat, who’s by now groggily licking my ankle anyway, and head for my study, using her as a kind of innocent feline shield against all hostile spirits who might be blocking the way. She curls up again at the foot of the spare bed (itself haunted by having held many ex-lovers in the last five years) and I slither down into the beautifully cool sheets. The window’s been open all night and there’s blessedly fresh air. I have a merry war lately with the B., who insists on sleeping in what I call “a lightless airless tomb.” As part of turning forty it seems required that I wake up every night at some point to discover myself unbelievably hot, coated in sweat, burning with a mysterious fire, baking from the inside out like a brick, or a potato on coals. Nightmare optional.
In the dream I’m Toni Collette from The Sixth Sense, only I too can see dead people. And it has become this exhausting burned-out compassion-fatigue situation, where I can’t go anywhere or do anything without being importuned by some demanding ghost who needs my help to get over to the other side. The difference between me and Haley Joel is that for me to help the ghosts, I have to actually relive their violent death for them. I reenact it, experience it all over again, die as they did—and then they can be free. Somehow the undead just want to be, per DBT, validated. So when I experience their final moments along with them, they know: Yep, it was really just as awful as they thought it was, and they’re content. Of course for all the people around me who can’t see any ghosts, I just seem completely cracky—holding concourse with empty air, lunging around, thrashing and grappling with nothing, making horrifying gargling sounds, and then “dying” on the floor à la the theatrical-suicide-obsessed Harold (from Harold and Maude). Only to pick myself up after a few minutes’ recovery, dust myself off, shake out my clothes, and go on with my day as best I can. It seems pretty funny now but let me assure you, in the dream, no one’s laughing.
In fact, in the dream, people are saying, in low voices, out of my earshot, things like obviously psychotic and needs medication and should probably be institutionalized. My husband, who’s played by Bruce Willis but who is not a ghost [spoiler! if you live under a rock in Papau New Guinea, or, like, Idaho], is really trying his best to be supportive and believe my credulity straining stories, and is also trying to protect me from all the appalled family members who just want to put me on Haldol now; but it’s definitely taking a toll on the poor guy, having me and Haley Joel around the house seeing ghastly visions all the time. Though it’s nice, I think defensively, that at least the kid and I can validate one another’s terrifying experience of the world. I’m especially grateful for his company because we’re basically under house imprisonment, being too scared to go outside. Inside there are fewer ghosts that find us and require our services; mostly just the ones who died in or near our apartment building. But outside we’re accosted by any random number of them. It makes it hard to, like, finish the grocery shopping, or even just go get the post, when you have die elaborately at a moment’s notice, etc. So we mostly stay cosily indoors and cut out pictures from catalogues and magazines, like Mrs. Ramsey and James in To the Lighthouse. Bruce may be a little jealous of our closeness, it occurs to me.
Things are made worse for him during a family Christmas gathering, both halves of our extended family looking on in horror as I’m forced to reenact the death-by-swordfight of a Spanish colonist. When I finally rise, tottering and dusty, there’s not a sound. Everyone is paralyzed and silent, until finally my father-in-law turns to my husband and says flatly, “Everything we have. Every penny. To fix this.” “No, no, Dad,” Bruce assures him hastily, “We’re working on it. It’s under control.” I smile brightly and wonder why they’re all so freaked out. They couldn’t even see and feel what I just did—the blood, the slicing metal, both legs severed below the knee.
But the final straw for my longsuffering Bruce comes during a dinner party. I’ve just lifted the first forkful to my mouth when I double over in pain, apparently having to suffer the death of an optimistic young pregnant woman by peritonitis. We excuse ourselves and head for an upstairs bathroom, where Bruce holds back my hair as I retch pointlessly into the toilet, going through her final motions, feeling her confusion and denial; the hostess is in the doorway wringing her hands and again my husband reassures her: It’s fine, everything’s fine, when obviously nothing is fine. Suddenly I pause, sitting back against the wall, catching my breath. “I feel better,” I say, or the ghost-woman says through me, her last words; and then something ruptures inside me, and we die. When I come to, Bruce is giving me this battered, burned-out look and I know it mean, I love you but I can’t take this anymore.
Maybe I just shouldn’t have phở chay right before bed.
Obviously, the concept of validation plays a significant part in the dream; that and incomprehending blood relatives, bewildered significant other. My being (understandably, in the dream) phobic about leaving the house; my thinking cynically, Don’t they understand that no matter how many tranks they poke down me, this isn’t just going to go away? And then there’s Marsha Linehan: “Borderline individuals are the psychological equivalent of third-degree-burn patients. They simply have, so to speak, no emotional skin. Even the slightest touch or movement can create immense suffering.”
Any discussion involving the word “borderline,” even when initiated by me, fills me with the almost overwhelming desire to stick my fingers in my ears and go la-la-la I can’t heeeear youuuu. So with mixed feelings I link you to this Time article, which the Brujo actually read in a Jiffy Lube waiting room and tore out to bring home to me. We laughed at its silly graphics and paternalistic otherizing the way you laugh at a low-budget horror movie when all the lights are up bright; ha ha ha, ha ha! But as soon as I’d finished reading it, I felt more nausea than amusement. (Though I have put Ms. Spinnerface up in my office, joking with el B. that I might make a little flickable indicator so he can know where I am at any given moment—Fear of Abandonment? or Transient Paranoia?)
The problems I have with the article don’t really kick into outrage until the case history of poster-child Lily, a so-called borderline personality disorder sufferer. Now let’s not even wade into the whole borderline-is-a-political-minefield-and-anti-feminist-wastebasket-diagnosis, because I was all over that shit in 1990 when I first read Kate Millett, okay? It’s more interesting to note that DBT helps people with lots of other issues (OCD, eating disorders, and perhaps most importantly bipolar and unipolar depression) and that Linehan herself is in favor of retitling BPD something like “emotion regulation disorder,” and/or putting it on the spectrum with mood disorders where it obviously belongs. (Although the DSM-V workgroups are, despite controversy, not talking.)
Here’s the graf introducing the reader to crash-test-dummy Lily, who still lives with her parents:
To have coffee with Lily (a pseudonym), you wouldn’t get much sense of how she has suffered. She is 40 but could pass for 30. She has blue eyes and long blond hair that falls across her shoulders in slightly curly tendrils. On the December day we met at a diner outside Seattle, she wore a pink wool cap pulled down tight and an Adidas jumper zipped all the way. She was friendly but not terribly expressive, and she carried an aura of self-protection.
Okay, so already I have problems. Why did they pick this woman? Why did they pick a woman? Why not, I don’t know, a working-class father of three with anger management issues? Because we’re still in One Flew over the Girl Interrupted Hollywood soft-focus territory, that’s why (blonde curls! a pink wool cap!), and I growl and grimace every single time I read this.
IBut then it really tore for me when I got to this:
In the beginning, Lily resisted Linehan’s assistance. She felt no one could truly understand the depths of her pain. But Linehan was the first therapist who responded to Lily with more than just endless psychoanalysis and pills. Instead, Linehan taught her practical methods of getting by day-to-day. Once, just after she started with Linehan, Lily locked herself in her parents’ bathroom and swallowed six or seven antidepressants in a half-hearted suicide attempt. Her father broke the door down; her mother called the police. Lily never lost consciousness, but the cops said she had to go to the hospital anyway. Linehan advised Lily’s parents not to accompany her. She also told them they needed to get Lily to work the next day. Lily learned that she wouldn’t be cosseted.
Maybe I’m thinking I know Linehan better than I actually do, i.e., at all, but I would bet my heavily annotated copy of the training manual that she would never, ever use the word “cossetted” in reference to a client. Part of the reporter’s emphasis here (toward change and away from acceptance) might be that he’s (!) getting this version from Lily rather than Linehan; and maybe Lily really does believe that DBT is all about “tough love.” Or it might be the writer’s socially constructed and maintained bias against self-injury (cf. the barely disguised glee with which he informs the reader, “The methods of self-harm that borderlines choose can be gruesomely creative”). It’s a shorthand, “cossetted”; I get it. There’s apparently no time in the story to articulate the dialectic behind, say, DBT’s draconian-seeming 24-hour rule (no contact with the therapist for 24 hours after the client has attempted to harm himself, which is to motivate him to call for coaching before he gets in the weeds). But we don’t know any of the actual situation behind these apparently ruthless actions on Linehan’s part—I mean, Lily’s parents could be incorrigible helicopters, and maybe Lily doesn’t want them anywhere near her; maybe her job is a safe place for her, somewhere she’s with friends and structure that helps keep her sane. Maybe she took the half-dozen pills during an interminable four-day weekend during which her parents followed her around the house dotingly, wanting to play Scrabble and drink cocoa. We don’t know enough; but the author assumes we do.
And don’t even get me started on how a “typical example” is the screwdriver-in-the-eye guy. Right? So typical.
More honestly, all I really know is that I read this entire piece and squirmed inside with a deep unanswerable discomfort. In my head the DBT asks me quizzically, smiling, “Well, why the hell did you read it then?” and I sass back, “Because, you know, it’s an article! It’s words on a page—someone hands me words on a page, I’m gonna read them!” and then we just grin at each other. There are words that can still do that to me, combinations of words. Parasuicidal. Suicidal gesture. Contain the behavior into something dismissable, minimize its seriousness, and above all distance yourself from it as quickly and definitively as possible. When does parasuicidal get upgraded to suicidal? When on the second or third or tenth try, the person in pain succeeds? It’s not easy to take yourself out; there are a lot of internal barriers. Few people can swing it on the first go. That doesn’t mean they won’t later.
“Borderline patients seem to have no internal governor; they are capable of deep love and profound rage almost simultaneously. They are powerfully connected to the people close to them and terrified by the possibility of losing them—yet attack those people so unexpectedly that they often ensure the very abandonment they fear. When they want to hold, they claw instead.” They, them. Otherize much?
And yes I am aware that all this protesting weakens my ethos severely.
This is not to say that Dora’s own insights were incorrect; they were at once correct and yet untherapeutic. Freud is not interested in all truths, and certainly not in Dora’s, except in so far as they block the operation of his own. Because Dora’s insights are part of her illness, Freud had to hammer away at them as functions of her resistance to his insight. Her truths were not therapeutically useful ones. (Philip Rieff, of course, which makes your heart break for 17-year-old Susan)
Here I take a much-needed break and stand in the backyard watching swallowtail butterflies flirting with one another in the syringa canes. Their butter-yellow wings match the pink-and-yellow cluster flowers. I’m eating a little cajeta empanada the Brujo brought back for me from Nogales, the last of four. It’s beautifully, beautifully warm, and the B. and I were going out, either deserting or to IKEA, because I’ve never been and I think it would be funny to watch all the Arizonans eating lingonberry pancakes; but now we’ve both been sucked into our blogs. I’m thinking I’ll drag him out into the world (he only has two days of spring break left and is hermitty) and save part II for later.
