All Is Not Forgotten(19)

That sounds right! Like I couldn’t help myself! I found myself watching the news all day and every evening. I flipped between CNN, CNBC, Fox, waiting to hear about another attack. I had “rape” on a Google alert. Can you believe that? Part of me actually wanted this monster to strike again so there would be a chance to catch him. I’m a horrible person. I don’t even give a shit anymore, you know? It feels good to admit it to someone, let it do whatever it’s gonna do. Send me straight to hell. Send me to jail. Whatever. Being back in the hospital with those same doctors and my daughter again in the f*cking ICU! Fuck it. Fuck me. I should have known she wasn’t okay. I’m her father, for Christ’s sake. But I know now from the shock I felt in that hospital that I had let myself believe it.

*

What Tom didn’t say on that day, but what he did finally admit to me weeks later, was that he also vowed to stop deferring to his wife. The first fault line had given way. The fracturing of their marriage, their family, had begun. And so it was, on that morning after Jenny cut herself open, that Charlotte became the new villain—both to Jenny and her father.

This was not a surprise to me. But the art of therapy is to allow a patient to come to his own conclusions. It must be this way, and as a therapist, it requires great patience to nurture this process without corrupting it. How easy it would have been for me to lead Tom to this conclusion, that he was angry at his wife for making him believe their daughter was recovering. A few carefully placed words. A sentence here and there. Reminders of the facts that would make this case against his wife. It was, after all, Charlotte who insisted Jenny have the treatment. And Charlotte who demanded they forgo therapy and remove her to Block Island, where she would be in relative seclusion. Charlotte who insisted and persisted in mimicking normalcy in spite of Jenny’s loss of interest in her life. Charlotte who reprimanded her husband whenever he brought up the subject of their daughter’s rape. I said nothing of the sort. I was very careful. A therapist has tremendous powers of suggestion. Tremendous powers, period.

I will not say whether or not Tom was justified in his feelings. Feelings do not require justification. On the one hand, Charlotte had been adamant in her version of the truth. The rape had been erased from her daughter’s mind. And so it never happened. It is obvious now to see that she was wrong. But she was not without the very best of intentions. Nor was she entirely delusional. Dr. Markovitz had administered the drugs, and Jenny’s memory had been compromised. She didn’t remember the rape. Charlotte cannot be blamed for not understanding the human mind and the devastating aftereffects of the treatment. Those were just beginning to surface. And that brings us back to Sean Logan.





Chapter Eight

Sean Logan was a Navy SEAL. He’d grown up in nearby New London, the same town as Charlotte Kramer. His father had been in the navy, and his grandfather had died a decorated marine. He had six siblings, three older and three younger, making him the lost middle child. He was a beautiful man to look at. I don’t care if you’re a man or a woman, straight or homosexual, young or old. You could not look at Sean Logan and not be struck by his physical beauty. It was not one thing—his light blue eyes, his thick dark hair, the masculine bone structure of his cheeks and brow. These things together created a perfect canvas. But on that canvas was always painted some kind of emotion. Sean was not able to hide them. His joy, which I did not see until years later, was boundless. His wry sense of humor, infectious. He could make me laugh like no other patient I have ever treated, even in spite of my efforts to remain stoic. The laughter would erupt from my mouth like lava from a volcano. His love was deep and pure. And his pain was intoxicating.

Sean did not go to college, although he had earned a scholarship to Brown University. He was that driven, that smart. But he could not sit still within himself. We are all (most of us) at times overwhelmed by our feelings. Think about the first time you “fell in love.” Or the first moment you saw your newborn baby. Perhaps you experienced profound fear in some kind of near accident, or extreme rage when someone hurt you or your family intentionally. You might go days without eating much, without sleeping through the night, without having control of your thoughts as they fixated on the source of the disruption to normal life. You might think you feel “happy” if the source of this disruption is positive—“falling in love,” for example. But it is not “happiness.” The disruption is created by the fear of not knowing how to assimilate this new situation into normal life, not knowing if it will stay or go. Your brain is actually in a state of adjustment, trying to figure out what it will need to do to accommodate the change in this new emotional environment. Actual “happiness” is when the relationship settles down and becomes stable. When you sleep through the night next to your new love because you know she is here to stay.

Imagine never getting to that settled place after a disruption, and instead feeling that new, powerful emotion all the time. It is not sustainable, and truly quite painful to endure.

We in my profession usually diagnose this affliction as anxiety in one form or another. Sometimes it lends itself to OCD. Other times we just call it generalized anxiety disorder. Anxiety disorders are on a continuum like all mental illness. We must have names for things so we can communicate about what we see, but it is not the same as diagnosing a physical ailment like the flu. There are no little bugs we can see through a microscope. All we have are our observations and, hopefully, intelligent deductions.