Treating With Silence Chapter 4

There is only silence.

As no further information was revealed, the media became disappointed and eventually lost interest in her. She faded into obscurity like other once-hyped murderers whose faces we remember but whose names we forget.

It should be said that not everyone has forgotten her. Her myth and her enduring silence still fascinate some people, including myself. As a psychotherapist, I believe that Gabrielle's death has clearly caused a deep trauma in her brain, and her silence is a manifestation of this trauma. Unable to face up to what she had done, she is like an old car, clattering, barely running, and finally stopping. I hope to help her start the car again - to help her tell her story, heal her trauma, and make her fully recovered. I want to give her psychotherapy.

Without wanting to toot my own horn, I felt uniquely qualified to help Ava Alicia. I am a forensic psychotherapist who works with some of the most damaged and vulnerable members of society. Something about Alicia's story resonated with me personally. I felt very sympathetic toward her from the beginning.

Unfortunately, I was still working at Broadmoor at the time, and if it hadn't been for fate, treating Alicia would have been - and certainly would have been - a pipe dream.

In Alicia's sixth year as a resident, the Grove Clinic began hiring for a forensic psychotherapist. I saw the ad and knew I had a role to play. I decided to follow my instincts and apply for the position.

3

My name is Max Faber, I'm 42 years old, and I chose to become a psychotherapist because I myself have been traumatized. That's a fact. They asked me this question during my job interview, but I didn't answer it truthfully.

"What do you think attracted you to a career in psychotherapy?" Maya Sharma asked me, peering over her elegant glasses.

Maya is a psychotherapist at the Grove Clinic. She is not far from 60 years old, with a round face and a bit of charm, and long dark hair with a few silver strands. She smiled at me - as if to hint that this question was extremely simple, just a warm-up, and the tricky questions were still to come.

I didn't answer right away because I felt like the other members of the interview panel were looking at me. I was very conscious and I kept eye contact. I took my time and gave a prepared response. I told a moving story about how I worked part-time at a nursing home as a teenager and how that sparked my interest in psychotherapy and led me to choose psychotherapy as my major in graduate school, and so on.

"I think I'm trying to help people," I said, shrugging. "That's all, really."

This is of course just nonsense.

I mean, of course, that I wanted to help people, but that was a secondary goal of mine...especially early in my training. My real motivation was purely selfish. I was seeking to help myself. I believe that this is true of most people who go into psychotherapy. We are drawn to this particular profession because we have been hurt ourselves...we study psychology to heal ourselves. Whether we are willing to admit this is another matter.

As humans, we have few memories of our infancy. We tend to think of ourselves as emerging from this primordial mist with our full personalities, like Aphrodite from the foam of the sea; but studies of the evolution of the human brain tell us that this is not the case. When we are born, our brains are not fully developed...not like sacred Mount Olympus, but like a lump of wet mud. As psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott said, there is no such thing as infancy. Our personalities are not formed in isolation, but inextricably linked to something else...shaped by forces that cannot be seen or remembered. That is our parents.

This is frightening for obvious reasons - who knows how humiliated, tortured and abused we have been in our childhood? Our personalities are formed without our knowledge. For example, I grew up feeling nervous, fearful and anxious. This anxiety seemed to exist before I existed and seemed to exist independently of me. But I suspect that its root lies in my relationship with my father, because I never felt safe around him.

My father's unpredictable tempers could turn any situation, no matter how peaceful, into a minefield of danger. An innocent remark or a slightly different opinion could set him off into a rage that would set off a chain of explosions that would leave everyone in danger. One roar from him would shake the house. I would run upstairs to my room, duck under my bed, duck against the wall, breathe the fuzzy air, and hope the bricks would swallow me up and make me disappear. But my father would grab me and pull me out to take his punishment. He would whip out his belt, whizzing through the air, and whip me around, tumbling from side to side and burning. Then he would stop the beating just as suddenly as he had started. He would throw me to the floor and let me crumple like a toddler throwing a doll in anger.

I never figured out what I did wrong to make him so angry or whether I deserved the beating. I asked my mother why my father was always so angry with me. She shrugged and said, "How should I know? Your father is completely crazy."

She didn't say it jokingly. If a psychiatrist today had diagnosed his condition, I suspect the diagnosis would have been a personality disorder. He had lived with it his entire life, never receiving treatment. It was caused by a childhood and adolescence dominated by hysteria and physical violence. Threats, tears, and broken glass.

Of course, I had my happy moments, but they were usually when my dad was not at home. I remember one winter when he went to America on a business trip for a month. During those thirty days, my mom and I were able to move freely around the house and garden, away from his critical eyes. In December of that year, a heavy snow fell in London. The whole garden was covered with a thick layer of white snow. My mom and I built a snowman. I don't know if it was a subconscious action, but we made the snowman look like our absent owner: the snowman was bloated, and I named it "Dad". I used two black stones as eyes and two curved twigs as eyebrows. It really looked a bit like him. To make it more like him, we put on his gloves and hat and let him hold an umbrella. Then we hit it with snowballs and giggled like naughty children.

That night there was a heavy snowstorm. When my mother went to bed I pretended to be asleep. Soon I was sneaking out into the garden and standing in the heavy snow, holding out my hands to catch the flakes, watching them disappear between my fingers. It was a mixture of sadness and joy. It was as if some truth was stuck in my throat, but I didn't know how to express it; my words were so few and my words were like a torn net that couldn't catch what I wanted to say. In a way, holding on to the disappearing snowflakes was like holding on to happiness; the possession was fleeting. It reminded me that there was a world outside this house: a world that was vast and beautiful beyond imagination, a world that I couldn't touch at the time. These scenes have flashed back to me over the years. The pain wrapped around these memories made the brief light of freedom seem even brighter. It was a light in the endless darkness.

I realised that my only hope of staying alive was to escape - not just physically but mentally. I had to leave home, to get away. Only then would I be safe. At 18, I got the grades I needed to go to university and finally left Surrey and the prison-like semi-detached house - I thought I was free.

Actually, I was wrong.

I didn't understand it then, but it was too late - my father had been internalized, projected inwardly, buried deep in my subconscious. Even if I went to the ends of the earth, he would always be with me. His hateful, heartless, angry voice would always be with me - shouting at me, calling me a wimp, shameless, and worthless.

My first semester of college was in the dead of winter. The voices became obsessive, paralyzing, and they took over me. I was paralyzed with fear, unable to leave the house, attend any social events, or make any friends. I wished I had never left home. There was no hope left. I was defeated and trapped. I was cornered and there was no escape.

There was only one way to put an end to it.

I went to various pharmacies and bought a lot of paracetamol. I bought only a few boxes at a time to avoid arousing suspicion. But I didn't need to worry because no one was paying attention to me. I felt like I was invisible.

My room was cold. I clumsily opened the package with my numb fingers and forced myself to swallow the bitter pills one by one. Then I climbed onto the narrow and uncomfortable bed, closed my eyes, and waited for death to come.

But death never came.

What I got was a burning pain in my stomach. I bent over and vomited, vomiting bile and undissolved pills all over myself. I lay in the dark, my stomach burning and hurting endlessly. In the darkness, I gradually realized:

I don't want to die, at least not now, I haven't lived enough.

This thought gave me a glimmer of hope, however dim and vague, but it at least made me realize that I couldn't do it alone:   I needed help.

I found help through the University Counseling Service. My therapist was Ruth. She was plump, white-haired, and looked like a kind grandmother. She had a sympathetic smile on her face -- and I believed in it. She didn't say much at first, but just listened quietly. I talked about my childhood, my family, and my parents. I found that no matter how painful the details were, my heart was indifferent. I was disconnected from my emotions, like a hand disconnected from the wrist. I talked about the painful memories and suicidal impulses -- but I didn't feel anything.

Yet, occasionally I would look up into Ruth's face. To my surprise, she had tears in her eyes as she listened to me. It seemed hard to understand, but those tears were not hers.

Those tears are mine.

I didn't understand it at the time. But that's what psychotherapy is. The patient gives his therapist his overwhelming emotions: she takes on all his fears, experiences them for him, and then slowly reflects back to him her feelings about those experiences. That's how Ruth reflected my feelings back to me.

Ruth and I continued our relationship for several years. She became an integral part of my life. Through her, I internalized a new kind of relationship with another person: one based on mutual respect, honesty, and kindness...rather than recrimination, anger, and violence. I gradually began to feel differently about myself...less empty, less afraid, and more capable of feeling. Although the hateful voice inside never completely left, I now had Ruth's voice to counter it, and I was paying less attention to it. Over time, the voices in my head quieted, sometimes even temporarily disappearing. I would feel calm...sometimes even happy.

It's clear that therapy saved me. More importantly, it changed the quality of my life. This form of talk therapy was crucial to my transformation. In a deeper sense, it defined me.