33. Therapy

Doesn’t this dark angel seem worthy of a Wendy Brandes custom jewelry design?

Over the years people have asked how I managed to get through the challenging circumstances of my upbringing.

The answer is complicated. As a lover of bullet lists, I want to make a bullet list, but I don’t want to get ahead of myself. So I’ll try to tackle one bullet point per post over the next several posts.

The first bullet point is therapy.

Therapy is a particularly loaded topic for me since my parents used it as a way of gauging my progress against their agenda, which mainly consisted of avoiding parental responsibility.

Like Sally Draper, I was sent to therapy to be “fixed” but at some level understood that I wasn’t the problem. I can still recall sitting with various therapists, legs askew, hands fidgeting while professional eyes searched my eyes, looking for clues. What is wrong with Susan?

Meanwhile I continued working pretty hard as a young cellist and pianist and public school student, keeping an A- or B+ grade point average.

My crimes, for which I was kiddie incarcerated, had to do with staying with friends over weekends to avoid being home with my angry mother, and cavorting with boys, sometimes getting a neck hickey. Okay, there was also drinking, cigarette and dope smoking, and other similar risky behaviors, in which all of my Long Island, New York friends circa 1971 were similarly engaged.

The parents of my friends were appalled by what happened to me.

Therapy continued while I was locked up in the Suffolk County Children’s Shelter and later after I was released, the focus of it being on my behavior, not the behavior of my parents. It wasn’t difficult to put two-and-two together regarding who was paying the therapy bills and the therapy content delivered. I still remember one therapist remarking that yes, it’s difficult when parents choose not to parent, as if I should know that this is a typical situation a young person needs to accept.

I tuned out.

For solace, I turned to the life of the mind, and ultimately, after an unfortunate first marriage, embraced career and motherhood during my second marriage as a primary focus.

Note: doesn’t the above deco Jesus remind you of the Columbia pictures gal? (Jesus and Fashion — there’s a topic!)

I tried therapy on my own during college and my twenties and thirties, but kept encountering sad-sack practitioners, from a psychologist who scribbled on a pad and stared at me yet never spoke — well maybe once during the session he’d say something like “you seem angry” — to an LMFC who talked about herself incessantly while knitting then one day crawled under her desk to avoid a process server who interrupted our session to serve her divorce related papers, to another LMFC who routinely fell asleep during sessions.

The church seemed like a better bet, though I’m not a believer in any traditional sense. It helps considerably that the American Episcopal church is widely inclusive.

There was one brief period during my thirties, when I felt particularly vulnerable, of flirting with devoutness, but generally I self-identify as a secular humanist with great admiration for the aesthetic cultural heritage of the church and its highly-developed vision of the purpose of human life, which besides being a good person, involves understanding a) life is unfair, b) there will be death and destruction, c) carpe diem!

I also embrace ecumenism — there is much to learn from other faith traditions.

Martin and I, both avid fans of Joseph Campbell, relate to pre-Christian ideas of the plant god that we figure Christianity is layered on top of (so California!) — so technically we’re pagans or heathens, but whatever, no one is carding us at the door.

I let the seasonal liturgy wash over me, giving me thoughts to contemplate as I day dream during bible readings and sermons.

For example, this is the season of Lent, during which we’re reminded of the temptation of Christ by Satan, the fallen angel pictured in the two paintings above, and of the idea of victory over sin and death. (Every year some of my church women friends can’t help noticing that in paintings of the Temptation the fallen angel is way sexier than the figure of Christ.)

There have been many notions of victory in the history of the church, most of them focused on the afterlife in which Christ is the sovereign along with his pal God.

When we visited the Melk Abbey In Austria in December, we were both stunned by the amazing crown of victory on the high alter. Martin’s first thought was that any religious/political structure that could convince the people to devote their labor to gilding this church so elaborately could convince those same people to do literally anything.

I am slower to make those kind of judgments, but given what happened in Austria in 1939, it does make me wonder. Maybe I’ll have a better sense of things after I finish reading The Austrians: A Thousand-Year Odyssey.

My notion of victory, in the pagan/heathen context, has to with the cycle of life and death. For me, Winter is the time of death, Spring the time of rebirth.

As for life beyond our earthly life-and-death cycle? The Kingdom of God?

Think of Handel. Trumpets blowing. Large bouquets of lilies. Sipping Champagne.

 

Happy Spring! I wish you gorgeous flowers and romantic angels.

Note: There wasn’t sufficient interest in the Chanel book giveaway so it’s hereby canceled.

Update: Martin told me that by identifying as a secular humanist I’m essentially saying I’m atheist, but that’s not true. I believe in some kind of divine reality yet remain in full possession of my intellect in interpreting its nature.