I quote to her one of Blaine’s lines that I am a drama queen and that nothing really bad ever happened to me. Is that true? Is the hurt I feel inside unjustified?
“You’ve been through a lot of pain,” Sherrye stops me. “But I want you to look at something. Do you see that you can only even talk about yourself in comparison to other people? There is something called the ‘looking-glass self,’ where you judge your self-worth based on what you think other people think of you. You base your identity off the love you perceive others can give you, and then you readjust your opinion of yourself accordingly.”
When Sherrye says these words, my opinion of myself shifts once again. I’ve never realized how utterly penetrable such a thing was.
“Here’s the key,” she says. “You don’t actually know what I think of you. You are, in essence, guessing what I think of you. And then based off of that guess, that’s how you are determining your self-worth. Do you see how dangerous that can be?”
That’s what I have been doing my whole life, I realize. Always looking outside of myself for validation that I am okay, that I am worth something. Never believing that the key to self-esteem lay inside myself all along. You can’t drink it into yourself. You definitely can’t fuck it into yourself. You can’t work it into yourself either.
The more I trust her, the more I start spilling to Sherrye all of my unspeakable stories. She pours me glasses of water and hands me tissues to calm me down. She nods attentively, but I can see clearly from her questions what is happening as she tries to follow along.
“Now . . . who is this again? Okay, this is another person? And what is Twitter exactly?”
Sherrye can’t keep up. Hell, I can’t keep up either. I’m using all these meaningless transitory details to avoid articulating feelings that are so difficult for me. Eventually, after a few sessions of trying to constantly steer conversations away from my early life to prattle on about the minutia of some Post assignment, Sherrye confronts me.
She wants to know why I won’t talk about my childhood. Why have I been ignoring for so very long that little person inside of me who has been hurting and acting out?
“My inner child?” I repeat, and then I laugh bitterly. “What a bunch of bullshit.”
I haven’t heard from that little girl in years. She knows her place. I’ve made sure of that.
Sherrye never takes any of my dismissive or angry bait. She never “reacts.”
“I understand what you mean,” she says compassionately. “But it’s a lot more than that.”
I cry through my anger. I let myself actually feel the sensations that I did as a little girl and how frozen I become when even thinking about criticizing my parents or acknowledging any pain. It is my job to protect them. Why can’t people see that?
But week after week, Sherrye persists. As she gently guides me through the story of my life—to the most difficult parts—I realize that the little person is still there.
She hasn’t left me. She’s just completely terrified.
ONCE I OPEN myself up to all the feelings I never let myself acknowledge as a child, it feels like a dam breaking. The tears never seem to stop. The softness feels too soft. I think I am in danger of disappearing completely. The world becomes harsh, painful, ugly . . . dangerous.
“I can’t take it, I can’t take it, I just can’t take it,” I yell at Sherrye, sounding exactly like my father when he’s in a rage.
“You can,” Sherrye tells me. “Pain is not going to kill you. You’re not betraying your family by talking about them. It’s okay to acknowledge what you feel inside.”
But when I do, it feels like all I am doing is reopening old wounds.
I call my dad one night and tell him I’m trying to do my Fourth Step as part of my AA program, where you look at resentments you’ve carried throughout your lifetime. I write out a list for my father, and it’s late at night when I call. Instantly, my father snaps at me when I tell him what I’d like to do.
“Do I want to hear what a shitty father I was? No, Mandy!”
I hang up the phone, shell-shocked and inconsolable. How stupid and naïve I was to think such a thing was even possible. The next time I see Sherrye, when I try to tell her about what happened, I can barely speak at all I am crying so hard. This is all one giant bad idea, I tell her. I’m only making things worse.
“Okay, you need to go to an Al-Anon meeting,” Sherrye says. “You. Have. To. Go.”
But my dad isn’t a drunk. And Al-Anon is a twelve-step group for friends or families of alcoholics to deal with their volatile behavior. Hell, my dad wasn’t even allowed to drink for a long time because the doctors thought it would affect the metal plate in his head. But both his birth parents and his adopted parents were alcoholics. And his head injury has caused him to have the mood swings of one.
“Fine,” I relent. “I’ll go to yet another twelve-step meeting. Pretty soon my life will be nothing but fucking twelve-step meetings.”
When I arrive at my very first Al-Anon meeting on the Upper East Side inside a sterile office space, I notice that the pained, nervous smiles of everyone around me are communicating a code of sorts. We all seem to share a secret language of perfectionism and extreme self-criticism. We want so badly to be loved. We want so badly not to be rejected. We are on high alert constantly, crippled by hyperawareness, trying to sense what might be the alcoholic’s
