Panic Attack (19 page)

“Do you feel uncomfortable today?”
“Yes, I do. To a slightly lesser extent, but I feel like I’m... I don’t know... an outcast.”
Adam knew that probably sounded very whiney— like his own patients sometimes sounded— but he already felt better, just from verbalizing how he was feeling.
“Well, I’m sorry if I made you uncomfortable,” Carol said. “That certainly wasn’t my intention.”
She was backing off, giving him space to continue to vent. She also wanted to reestablish trust in the therapist- patient relationship, to make him feel safe and relaxed.
“As you can imagine, this hasn’t been an easy situation for me to be in,” he said.
“I’ll bet,” she said. “It’s probably bringing up a lot of issues for you.”
He was surprised she was taking the session in this direction so quickly.
“What kind of issues?” he asked.
“Issues of control or lack of control,” she said. “Issues with your family— your current family and your parents. You grew up in the same house you live in now, didn’t you?”
“You’re right.” He hadn’t thought much about this connection to his past that now seemed so obvious. “It is bringing up issues with my parents. It’s a very familiar feeling of being blamed, of being judged.”
“And it’s making you feel like the victim again,” she added.
He’d told her in previous sessions that he was often picked on as a kid and was unpopu lar in elementary school and ju nior high, and they’d talked about how these experiences had scarred him. He remembered that just this morning, with Dana, he’d brought up running away from the bullies in school. There had to be some significance to this.
He told her all about the night of the shooting, mentioning that he had been having the recurring dream about the giant black rat who’d transformed from a female patient when Marissa woke him up. He was able to describe all the events in a very clear, matter- of- fact way, and it felt good to talk about it in a safe setting, where he didn’t feel threatened. It was much different than when he talked to the press and the police, when he felt like he had to choose his words carefully because everything was being scrutinized
He told her the police believed his maid, Gabriela, had been involved in the robbery, and he made sure that he expressed his anger about this properly. He didn’t just tell her he was angry in a detached way. He made sure that he
felt
the anger, that he was
experiencing
the anger.
“I can’t believe she was able to deceive all of us for so long,” he said. “I’m usually so perceptive, nothing gets past me. I feel so furious. I feel so wronged.”
This was good— he was expressing himself well, using “I” statements.
“You didn’t know,” Carol said.
“But I feel so hurt by what she did to me,” Adam said. “If I’d just caught on sooner, I could’ve fired her and prevented all of this. They say she was a drug addict, and I don’t know how she was able to keep that a secret. I can always tell when somebody’s lying to me. It’s my best skill.”
“Addicts can be very clever,” she said. He’d said the same thing many times to his own patients.
He went on, describing what had happened after the shooting— how he’d expected to be treated like a hero and was shocked when he saw the way he was being portrayed by the media.
“I know how ridiculous this sounds now,” he said, “but I thought I’d be famous because of this, famous in a good way. I mean, you can’t believe how caught up I got. I thought I’d be the next Dr. Phil. I thought they’d film a movie about my life.”
“It was an exciting feeling,” she said. “It made you feel confident.”
“Yes,” he said, “and my glossophobia subsided, which was a very exciting, seductive feeling, too. Also, I have to admit, I enjoyed the attention. I know that’s childish, that as an adult I should want respect, not attention, but it felt very seductive— and addictive, which is strange for me because I don’t have an addictive personality.”
“It’s easy to feel seduced by your emotions when your self- esteem is low, when you’re unhappy in other aspects of your life. You experienced a psychological high, it was a very powerful feeling. Do you think you don’t get enough respect in your life?”
He knew what she was trying to do. She was challenging him, trying to draw out a defensive response, but he went with it, saying, “Yeah, sometimes. As you know, this can be a thankless profession.”
“Well, your colleagues respect you.”
“I haven’t been so sure about that.”
“You can’t expect people not to feel a little awkward,” Carol said. “It was an unusual situation, and I think everyone handles these sorts of things in their own way.”
He could see her point.
“What about at home?” she asked. “Has your marriage been good lately? Do you feel respected and appreciated?”
He thought about his bickering with Dana and his problems with Marissa.
“No, I don’t,” he said, “and I know I probably haven’t been doing a lot to change that. What happened the other night certainly didn’t help.”
“You said you don’t feel like you did anything wrong that night.”
“I don’t. Well, except for shooting him so many times. I think that was a mistake.”
“Every decision you make can’t be the perfect one, Adam. You can only try to do your best.”
“I know, you’re right,” he said,“but...there’s something else.” He sipped some water, collecting his thoughts, then said, “There’s something . . . I didn’t tell anyone yet. I didn’t tell the police. I didn’t even tell Dana.”
As a seasoned therapist who’d heard it all, nothing usually shocked Carol, but Adam noticed her growing concern. “Something about the shooting?” she asked.
“Yes,” Adam said.
She was waiting intently for him to continue.
“I didn’t lie to the police about anything,” Adam said. “Everything I told them was entirely truthful, exactly as I remembered it. But I . . . well, I omitted something.”
He paused again, wondering if he was doing the right thing, starting to tell Carol about this. He wasn’t concerned about her talking to the police— she wouldn’t,
couldn’t
violate their confidentiality— but he was afraid it could affect their professional relationship. Well, it was too late now, and if you couldn’t tell your therapist about these sorts of things, who could you tell?
“Before I shot the guy, Sanchez, he said something,” Adam said. “It all happened so fast, it was hard to pro cess it at that moment, but I remembered it afterward. He said . . . I
think
he said, ‘Please don’t.’ That’s all I heard, those two words. I still know I did the right thing, because even if he was saying
Please don’t kill me
or
Please don’t shoot me
or whatever, there was no way in that situation I should’ve believed him. I mean, I did see him reach for something. It might’ve been his flashlight, but it looked like a gun, and he could’ve shot me. He could’ve shot my whole family.”
“So what exactly do you feel guilty about?”
“I don’t know if guilt is the right word,” he said. “I feel . . . regret. I feel like I made a mistake.”
“You’ve made mistakes before, haven’t you?”
“None that involved killing somebody.”
“It happens every day, Adam. You think policemen and firemen don’t regret their decisions from time to time? You have to do the right thing and be forthcoming with the police, but you can’t blame yourself, and you can’t let it interfere with other aspects of your life. Besides, you said you thought he had a gun, right?”
“Right,” Adam said.
“So yes, you heard him say those two words, but it happened very quickly, and you don’t know for sure what he was trying to say or why he was saying it. It sounds to me like you’re making a lot of assumptions.”
He was aware that she was just supporting him, that she didn’t actually believe any of this. Still, the pro cess was helping.
“I feel shame about what I did,” he said. “I feel anger. I feel . . . foolish.”
“Everyone has regrets,” she said. “You don’t have to beat yourself up about it. You had a lot of unexpressed anger, and then an event happened, something beyond your control. Someone broke into your house and you had to make a fast decision, but it was the best decision you could’ve made at the time, under the circumstances.”
“I really need to reparent myself, don’t I?” Adam asked.
The need for reparenting had been a major issue in previous sessions. Carol knew all about his emotionally withholding parents and his related propensity towardself- loathing and self- blaming.
“I think it could be useful to use some of your reparenting techniques,” she said. “Just don’t be so hard on yourself. So maybe you made a mistake, or maybe you didn’t make a mistake. Remember, Adam— you’re allowed to make mistakes once in a while. Every decision you make doesn’t have to be perfect.”
Her advice was fairly generic and, almost verbatim, what he would have said to one of his own patients. Still, it had resonance for Adam and really seemed to hit home. He thought,
Every decision you make doesn’t have to be perfect, every decision you make doesn’t have to be perfect,
and he experienced a relaxed yet intense buzz, an emotional high he sometimes had after a particularly productive therapy session.
He had two more patients in the afternoon— he was supposed to have three more but had another no- show—and he felt much more effective than he had earlier in the day, much more like his usual self. Whenever any self- doubt crept in he’d think,
Every decision you make doesn’t have to be perfect,
and he’d feel instantly reassured.
But Adam knew that this was only a temporary ego boost, that he still had major issues to deal with if he wanted keep his self- esteem high. He had to be easier on himself, not criticize himself as much, and— this was key—
he had to stop neglecting himself
. He was such a people- pleaser, so focused on patients and helping others, that he hadn’t been paying nearly enough attention to his own needs. He had to start taking the advice he gave to his patients every day and apply it to his own life, and this started with his most important personal relationship— his marriage. He hadn’t been expressing himself well to Dana at all lately, and he’d let too much anger and resentment go unresolved.
At the end of the day, when the other therapists had left, he went into his office and closed the door and turned on classical music— Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos— very loud. Then he kneeled in front of the couch and started punching the couch cushion as hard as he could. Physical activity was a great way to vent and relieve stress, and he always suggested that his patients express anger in a safe way, like screaming or punching pillows. Imagining that the cushion was people who had done him wrong, like Gabriela, the reporters from the
Post
and
News
, and Grace Williams from
New York Magazine,
gave his punches some extra oomph.
After about five minutes of good cushion pounding, he felt much more relaxed and ready to do some actual problem solving. One area of his marriage that certainly needed improving was his and Dana’s sex life. They didn’t do it nearly enough, and if he were his own therapist, he would tell his patient to schedule time for sex, make it a priority, and be more creative sexually. So before Adam left the office he called Dana and told her he wanted to make love tonight at ten o’clock.
“Why?” she asked.
Adam wasn’t sure whether she meant why did he want to have sex with her or why at ten o’clock as opposed to eleven or midnight. Deciding to take a less confrontational approach, he said, “Because I love you very much and I miss being close with you.”
Okay, so maybe he was overdoing it a little, but he felt like he was communicating honestly, not apologizing for his emotions.
Later, on his way to the subway, Adam stopped off at a Ricky’s drugstore where he remembered seeing an adult section and bought a sexy cheerleader’s outfit in Dana’s size. Several times she had told him about a fantasy she had of making love while dressed as a cheerleader, but they’d never explored it because he’d never had a cheerleader fantasy himself. That had been selfish of him, to flat- out reject her fantasy. He certainly wasn’t opposed to her dressing as a cheerleader if it was a turn- on for her, and it was wrong of him to have stonewalled her like that.
At home, he noticed that Dana seemed to be in a much better mood than she’d been in this morning and the past couple of days. She was starting to believe that Gabriela had been the second intruder in their house the other night and that the threatening note had been left by some prankster. She was also encouraged by a new theory the police had, that Gabriela may have been killed by a drug dealer she was in debt to and who possibly had nothing to do with Carlos Sanchez.
“I thought she needed the money for her father,” Adam said.
“She did,” Dana said, “but her sister doesn’t think she would’ve robbed a house to pay for her father’s operation, and I don’t believe it either. I know she lied to us about a lot of things, but I can’t imagine her actually coming into our house to rob us unless she was hooked on drugs and needed to pay off a drug dealer.”
This logic made sense to Adam, and he hoped it was a sign that things were on their way to returning to normal.
Dana cooked a nice dinner— chicken cutlets, rice pilaf, a salad— and they ate at the dining room table, finishing the merlot from last night. Marissa was out with her friends in Manhattan, seeing some band, so they had the whole house to themselves. Adam actually couldn’t remember the last time he and Dana had a quiet, romantic dinner alone, and he made sure to ask her a lot of questions about her day and things that were going on with her in general, knowing that in the past she’d had the complaint that he didn’t take enough interest in her.
At one point Dana asked, “Why are you acting so nice?”
Her tone was vaguely accusing, but he answered honestly, “I know I haven’t been the greatest husband in the world lately. I want things to improve around here, that’s all. I’d like it if we made the marriage more of a priority.”
He was purposely trying to use I-statements so she couldn’t interpret anything he was saying as criticism. Her eyes started to tear, but he knew it was because she was so happy, realizing how much he meant to her. He reached across the table, held her hand gently, and said, “Remember our date tonight.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I’m a little tired.”
If she’d said this last week, he might’ve backed down, but instead he did what he would’ve instructed a patient to do in a similar situation—
don’t be passive, be assertive; ask for what you want and you’ll get it