I Am Going to Therapy
[i]From one of my therapy sessions. You can see why I am so crazy.[/i]
PATIENT: I want to go back to what I talked about at our session on December 18. Yeah, Tuesday December 18. That was our last session before the holiday break. I raised important trauma issues at that session, but I had additional ideas about that. I don’t think we completely explored the underlying trauma issues. So what I talked about was the events of Saturday December 24, 1966, when I was 13 years old. I had just turned 13 the day before. That’s why I remember this. Anyway, what I said was that there was a huge snowstorm that day. It was a blizzard. And, you know, I looked that up to confirm and, there are things on the Internet about that storm. It’s called the great Christmas Eve blizzard of 1966. That morning my parents got into a huge argument in the kitchen. My father got enraged. He started beating his fists against his head. Maybe he was foaming at the mouth. But I don’t specifically recall that. But maybe he was foaming at the mouth.
THERAPIST: Do you remember why your father was so angry?
PATIENT: My father always got depressed around the Christmas holidays. His mother died on New Year’s Day in 1933 and his father had died on Christmas Eve in 1929. And I don’t think he ever got over that. It was like pathological mourning. He never got over their deaths. His parents died thirty years before, but he was still caught up with that. It’s like what you deal with at the Wendt Center. Loss and grief. So the holidays were always a difficult time for my father. I told you about the time my parents got into a huge argument in the kitchen when I was about ten years old, and my father tried to strangle my mother. He tried to kill her. And that happened at Christmas time. It’s the same thing. My father always got depressed and aggressive during the holidays.
So, anyway, it was a Saturday, so my mother did her grocery shopping on Saturdays. So there was no food in the house. She needed to go to the supermarket. And the blizzard was already so bad that my mother couldn’t drive the car to the supermarket. So she had an idea. She would take my snow sled and tie a cardboard box to the sled and haul the sled to the supermarket. Then she would fill up the cardboard box with necessary grocery items, and drag the sled back home with the groceries. So she had my sister go with her to the supermarket. My sister was nineteen years old at the time. So they went off. My father had gone to my parents’ bedroom, I think. He had a radio in the bedroom and he would listen to the radio there. So while my mother and sister were out, my aunt called. My mother’s older sister. She wanted to speak to my mother. I told my aunt that my mother and sister went to the supermarket. And my aunt was furious. She wanted to know why I didn’t go to the supermarket with my mother in the blizzard instead of my sister. I explained that I had just taken a shower and my mother didn’t want me to get a chill. So my aunt really lashed out at me.
Then around six o’clock we had dinner. And my mother said that she had ordered a birthday cake for me at the Gimbel’s Department store at the mall, which was about two miles away. [My thirteenth birthday had been the previous day.] She told me she wanted me to go with her to the Gimbel’s because she didn’t want to lose the deposit she had put down on the cake. So at about 6:30 PM my mother and I trudged off in the blizzard to the mall. And, you know, the storm was even worse now than it had been earlier. And there were really bad winds. It normally takes about a half hour to walk to the mall. But in the storm it took us about two hours. And we got to the Gimbel’s at around 8:30; the store closed at 9 PM. And there was a bus that stopped at the Gimbel’s door. We took that bus to go home.
So in some ways it was really an unpleasant day, what with my parents arguing and my aunt attacking me on the telephone. But, you know, here’s the part that’s really weird. I actually have nostalgic memories of that day. Memories of that day always flood back at Christmas time. And, you know, I sometimes think that if somebody could magically allow me to relive one day in my life, it would be that day. It’s kind of crazy, because, as I say, it was an unpleasant day. So why would I be nostalgic about that day? Seems kind of crazy.
So that’s what I talked about at our session on December 18.
Then in just the last few days I made a connection with an earlier event. It was on January 20, 1961. I was 7 years old. And I can remember that day because it’s the anniversary of President Kennedy’s inauguration. And there was a blizzard on that day too. And I looked it up and it’s called the Inauguration Day blizzard that affected the east coast. I woke up that morning and I had a few blisters. I showed my mother and she said it looked like chicken pox. So my mother called the pediatrician and he told my mother to bring me into the office. The doctor’s office was in his house, so he was in the office that day despite the storm. My father was home that day from work. I’m guessing his place of work was closed because of the storm. And I remember him watching the inauguration on TV. So I guess I was too sick to walk in the storm and my mother had an idea. She bundled me up and had me sit on my snow sled and she carted me off to the doctor’s office. His office was just about five blocks away. It’s just like what happened when I was thirteen: the blizzard and my mother using the snow sled. The thing is that chicken pox is a viral infection. You can’t treat it with antibiotics. So I have no idea why the doctor wanted my mother to bring me into the office.
[At a later point in the session I talked about this event as it related to the disturbed dynamics between my parents:] So, in later years, my mother always used this incident to berate my father. She would always say, “You never loved him the way I loved him. I took him to the doctor’s office in a blizzard. You wouldn’t do that. You stayed home. But I did that! I took him to the doctor’s office in a blizzard.
[The therapist did not comment on this event.]
So, here’s the thing. There’s this idea called screen memories. Did you ever hear about that?
THERAPIST: Yes.
That’s what I’m thinking that these two events are related to each other. The thing is that neither of these events is really traumatic. But they may be a screen for that injury I told you about when I was two-and-a-half years old. I had a serious injury in my mouth in the summer of 1956, when I was two-and-a-half. My mother was cleaning the kitchen, and washing the kitchen curtains, and she placed the curtain rods on the kitchen table. She was on the telephone ignoring me. I picked up one of the curtain rods, I’m guessing to get her attention because I didn’t like the fact that she was ignoring me. I put the curtain rod in my mouth and I fell. The curtain rod punctured the soft palate in the roof of the back of my mouth. And my mother told me that there was a lot of bleeding. She said she was afraid I would bleed to death. And I’m guessing that is part of why this was traumatic for me is that I internalized my mother’s panic. She contacted the doctor – the same doctor who treated my chicken pox – and he was on vacation. And that confirms that it happened in the summer to some extent; the fact that the doctor was on vacation. I was two-and-a-half in the summer of 1956. Of course, I don’t remember any of this. But my mother would tell me this story from time to time. And that tells you that it was important to her, because why did my mother keep telling me about this even years later? The doctor was on vacation. And he had referred his patients to a young doctor named Dr. Shley. I don’t remember him at all. Maybe I saw Dr. Schley only once. So I don’t know what my mother did with my sister. My sister would have been 8 years old. And if this was summer, my sister would have been home from school. Maybe my mother left my sister off with a neighbor. I don’t know. So the doctor had to cauterize the wound. That’s what my mother said. So it must have been serious if the doctor had to cauterize the wound. And I guess that was painful for me in itself because when you cauterize a wound it burns the skin.
So, I’m thinking that’s definitely traumatic in a real sense. The chickenpox incident when I was seven and my thirteenth birthday weren’t really traumatic in a real sense. But the curtain rod incident was definitely traumatic. And I’m thinking that my feelings of nostalgia about my thirteenth birthday and the chicken pox incident from age 7 are screen memories for the earlier traumatic event from age two. And I’m thinking that that’s where my nostalgic feelings come in. I’m curious about the possibility that in a screen memory there can be affective reversal. So the traumatic event was painful and disturbing, a later memory screens out the memory of the earlier events but also screens out the mental pain by transforming the pain into nostalgia. And I did some research on that and I found that that can be true. For example, I was reading about aging Holocaust survivors. It’s been found that some of them actually develop nostalgic feelings about their concentration camp experience. Well, of course, there’s something going on there because the concentration camp experience was a painful experience. And I was reading about this phenomenon called “affective reversal.” The later nostalgic feelings reverse the pain of the earlier traumatic experience.
THERAPIST: I think that what you’ll find is that for many Holocaust survivors, the camps were the last time they saw their relatives, so they have nostalgic feelings for their lost relatives.
PATIENT: I want to go back to what I talked about at our session on December 18. Yeah, Tuesday December 18. That was our last session before the holiday break. I raised important trauma issues at that session, but I had additional ideas about that. I don’t think we completely explored the underlying trauma issues. So what I talked about was the events of Saturday December 24, 1966, when I was 13 years old. I had just turned 13 the day before. That’s why I remember this. Anyway, what I said was that there was a huge snowstorm that day. It was a blizzard. And, you know, I looked that up to confirm and, there are things on the Internet about that storm. It’s called the great Christmas Eve blizzard of 1966. That morning my parents got into a huge argument in the kitchen. My father got enraged. He started beating his fists against his head. Maybe he was foaming at the mouth. But I don’t specifically recall that. But maybe he was foaming at the mouth.
THERAPIST: Do you remember why your father was so angry?
PATIENT: My father always got depressed around the Christmas holidays. His mother died on New Year’s Day in 1933 and his father had died on Christmas Eve in 1929. And I don’t think he ever got over that. It was like pathological mourning. He never got over their deaths. His parents died thirty years before, but he was still caught up with that. It’s like what you deal with at the Wendt Center. Loss and grief. So the holidays were always a difficult time for my father. I told you about the time my parents got into a huge argument in the kitchen when I was about ten years old, and my father tried to strangle my mother. He tried to kill her. And that happened at Christmas time. It’s the same thing. My father always got depressed and aggressive during the holidays.
So, anyway, it was a Saturday, so my mother did her grocery shopping on Saturdays. So there was no food in the house. She needed to go to the supermarket. And the blizzard was already so bad that my mother couldn’t drive the car to the supermarket. So she had an idea. She would take my snow sled and tie a cardboard box to the sled and haul the sled to the supermarket. Then she would fill up the cardboard box with necessary grocery items, and drag the sled back home with the groceries. So she had my sister go with her to the supermarket. My sister was nineteen years old at the time. So they went off. My father had gone to my parents’ bedroom, I think. He had a radio in the bedroom and he would listen to the radio there. So while my mother and sister were out, my aunt called. My mother’s older sister. She wanted to speak to my mother. I told my aunt that my mother and sister went to the supermarket. And my aunt was furious. She wanted to know why I didn’t go to the supermarket with my mother in the blizzard instead of my sister. I explained that I had just taken a shower and my mother didn’t want me to get a chill. So my aunt really lashed out at me.
Then around six o’clock we had dinner. And my mother said that she had ordered a birthday cake for me at the Gimbel’s Department store at the mall, which was about two miles away. [My thirteenth birthday had been the previous day.] She told me she wanted me to go with her to the Gimbel’s because she didn’t want to lose the deposit she had put down on the cake. So at about 6:30 PM my mother and I trudged off in the blizzard to the mall. And, you know, the storm was even worse now than it had been earlier. And there were really bad winds. It normally takes about a half hour to walk to the mall. But in the storm it took us about two hours. And we got to the Gimbel’s at around 8:30; the store closed at 9 PM. And there was a bus that stopped at the Gimbel’s door. We took that bus to go home.
So in some ways it was really an unpleasant day, what with my parents arguing and my aunt attacking me on the telephone. But, you know, here’s the part that’s really weird. I actually have nostalgic memories of that day. Memories of that day always flood back at Christmas time. And, you know, I sometimes think that if somebody could magically allow me to relive one day in my life, it would be that day. It’s kind of crazy, because, as I say, it was an unpleasant day. So why would I be nostalgic about that day? Seems kind of crazy.
So that’s what I talked about at our session on December 18.
Then in just the last few days I made a connection with an earlier event. It was on January 20, 1961. I was 7 years old. And I can remember that day because it’s the anniversary of President Kennedy’s inauguration. And there was a blizzard on that day too. And I looked it up and it’s called the Inauguration Day blizzard that affected the east coast. I woke up that morning and I had a few blisters. I showed my mother and she said it looked like chicken pox. So my mother called the pediatrician and he told my mother to bring me into the office. The doctor’s office was in his house, so he was in the office that day despite the storm. My father was home that day from work. I’m guessing his place of work was closed because of the storm. And I remember him watching the inauguration on TV. So I guess I was too sick to walk in the storm and my mother had an idea. She bundled me up and had me sit on my snow sled and she carted me off to the doctor’s office. His office was just about five blocks away. It’s just like what happened when I was thirteen: the blizzard and my mother using the snow sled. The thing is that chicken pox is a viral infection. You can’t treat it with antibiotics. So I have no idea why the doctor wanted my mother to bring me into the office.
[At a later point in the session I talked about this event as it related to the disturbed dynamics between my parents:] So, in later years, my mother always used this incident to berate my father. She would always say, “You never loved him the way I loved him. I took him to the doctor’s office in a blizzard. You wouldn’t do that. You stayed home. But I did that! I took him to the doctor’s office in a blizzard.
[The therapist did not comment on this event.]
So, here’s the thing. There’s this idea called screen memories. Did you ever hear about that?
THERAPIST: Yes.
That’s what I’m thinking that these two events are related to each other. The thing is that neither of these events is really traumatic. But they may be a screen for that injury I told you about when I was two-and-a-half years old. I had a serious injury in my mouth in the summer of 1956, when I was two-and-a-half. My mother was cleaning the kitchen, and washing the kitchen curtains, and she placed the curtain rods on the kitchen table. She was on the telephone ignoring me. I picked up one of the curtain rods, I’m guessing to get her attention because I didn’t like the fact that she was ignoring me. I put the curtain rod in my mouth and I fell. The curtain rod punctured the soft palate in the roof of the back of my mouth. And my mother told me that there was a lot of bleeding. She said she was afraid I would bleed to death. And I’m guessing that is part of why this was traumatic for me is that I internalized my mother’s panic. She contacted the doctor – the same doctor who treated my chicken pox – and he was on vacation. And that confirms that it happened in the summer to some extent; the fact that the doctor was on vacation. I was two-and-a-half in the summer of 1956. Of course, I don’t remember any of this. But my mother would tell me this story from time to time. And that tells you that it was important to her, because why did my mother keep telling me about this even years later? The doctor was on vacation. And he had referred his patients to a young doctor named Dr. Shley. I don’t remember him at all. Maybe I saw Dr. Schley only once. So I don’t know what my mother did with my sister. My sister would have been 8 years old. And if this was summer, my sister would have been home from school. Maybe my mother left my sister off with a neighbor. I don’t know. So the doctor had to cauterize the wound. That’s what my mother said. So it must have been serious if the doctor had to cauterize the wound. And I guess that was painful for me in itself because when you cauterize a wound it burns the skin.
So, I’m thinking that’s definitely traumatic in a real sense. The chickenpox incident when I was seven and my thirteenth birthday weren’t really traumatic in a real sense. But the curtain rod incident was definitely traumatic. And I’m thinking that my feelings of nostalgia about my thirteenth birthday and the chicken pox incident from age 7 are screen memories for the earlier traumatic event from age two. And I’m thinking that that’s where my nostalgic feelings come in. I’m curious about the possibility that in a screen memory there can be affective reversal. So the traumatic event was painful and disturbing, a later memory screens out the memory of the earlier events but also screens out the mental pain by transforming the pain into nostalgia. And I did some research on that and I found that that can be true. For example, I was reading about aging Holocaust survivors. It’s been found that some of them actually develop nostalgic feelings about their concentration camp experience. Well, of course, there’s something going on there because the concentration camp experience was a painful experience. And I was reading about this phenomenon called “affective reversal.” The later nostalgic feelings reverse the pain of the earlier traumatic experience.
THERAPIST: I think that what you’ll find is that for many Holocaust survivors, the camps were the last time they saw their relatives, so they have nostalgic feelings for their lost relatives.
