I’ll Be Perfect—or Else

My new therapist’s house was enormous, a sprawling, late 19^th-century concoction of stone and slate perched on a ridge near the eastern edge of Philadelphia’s Main Line. You couldn’t actually see it until you’d come pretty far up the driveway, because the whole structure was tucked behind a row of towering trees. I was such a mess that Mom had to drive me to this first-time appointment, and now she was pulling up to the front door.

When I made no move to get out, she leaned across the seat toward me. “It’s going to go fine, Mim,” she said, patting my hand. “You know it will.”

I knew no such thing, but I nodded, a tiny jerk of my head. It was 1969, and I was 21 years old. I felt maybe eight.

Once I’d hauled myself out of the car and Mom had sped away, I got a better look at the imposing home. What had I expected? Something more comforting? Maybe a thatched-roof cottage with petunias trailing from flower boxes? I saw a handwritten note taped next to the doorbell directing patients to walk right in and wait in the foyer. I entered as instructed, and sat down on a cushioned bench. Down the hall was a closed door, behind which I heard intermittent murmurs. Trying to slow my breath, I gazed around the room—at the gleaming oak floors, high ceilings, and a huge, cut-glass chandelier that hung over the room like some benevolent, overdressed angel. I crossed my legs, bouncing the top one triple-time.

A few minutes passed, and then the door down the hall opened. A young woman came out and scurried past me to the front entrance. There was a pause, and then a middle-aged woman emerged from the room. She was elegantly dressed in a silk-and-tweed kind of way, her gray-streaked brown hair piled on top of her head in a verging-on-messy bun. She wore no makeup. “Make yourself comfortable, Marian,” she said, nodding back toward her office. Her voice was low and musical. “I’ll be along in a moment.”

And I entered another world—a second new world, actually, since entering the house had already felt like stepping into a movie, or maybe a dream. But while the foyer was grand and elegant, the office was a cozy haven. A worn Persian rug covered most of the floor. Along one wall was a long velvet sofa, and tucked in a corner stood an antique writing desk. Here and there, handwoven wall hangings spoke to me in unknown languages. Altogether, the room felt like shelter.

My new therapist, Margaret Temeles, was actually a psychiatrist, since that was pretty much who did psychotherapy back in 1969. She invited me to sit on the couch, while she took the chair facing me. Once we got settled, she leaned forward a bit, her hand on her chin and an encouraging expression on her face. I waited for her first question. But it didn’t come. She just kept looking at me, gentle and expectant.

I was getting a little freaked out. What was the deal with the silent treatment? Finally, I blurted, “Am I supposed to just—uh—start?” She nodded, smiling.

I have no idea what I said first. But it had to have been about despair. I hadn’t come to this shrink to understand myself better, or reach some life goal, or whatever else people came to therapy for. I was here to try to keep myself alive. I had to make her understand that, or there was no use sitting there on her lovely velvet couch.

“I don’t want to be here anymore,” I said. I watched Dr. Temeles’s face become grave and alert.

“I think about dying.”

I expected her to look shocked, but she only nodded. “That’s a terrible place to be,” she said softly, as if she knew the territory well. “I’m sorry you’re so miserable.” She paused. “Or maybe desperate is a better word. It sounds as though you feel desperate.”

I nodded, because it was exactly how I felt. I knew that if I tried to speak, I’d dissolve in tears. She waited a moment or two, and then said, “You know what? We’re going to get you out of that place. Together.” There was a note of steel in her voice. “It’s going to take some time. But we will. I promise.”

Dr. Temeles didn’t take my hand just then, but I felt as though she had. I could breathe a little better. She was still a stranger and maybe had a quirk or two—what was that thing about making me talk first? But I liked that she wasn’t trying to sell me a fast fix, which I’d have known was total bullshit. She was saying that with hard work and time, in this comforting room, we’d figure it out together.

I didn’t know if this person could actually help me. Or if anyone could. What I did know was that I felt somehow protected, sitting with her. She radiated a kind of quiet, determined commitment, and beneath that something that shimmered but I couldn’t quite name.

Toward the end of our second meeting, she paused and gazed at me intently. “I think you know I’m a psychiatrist,” she said.  I nodded. “But I’m also a psychoanalyst.”

Every muscle in my body tensed. No, I had definitely not known that. I didn’t know much about psychoanalysis except that it had been invented by Freud, that deeply weird man who peered into dreams and prodded people to jabber stream-of-consciousness nonsense. The penis envy guy. Could this woman possibly believe in this baloney?

“So what do you want me to do, lie down here?”  I heard the sullen tone in my voice.

“Maybe, at some point,” she said mildly. “Sometimes it’s easier to talk if you’re not looking right at someone.” I considered this. No. I wasn’t about to become the subject of some sarcastic New Yorker cartoon—sprawled on a damn couch, for God’s sake—and I was just about to mutter something to that effect when she headed me off at the pass. “For now, let’s just sit,” she said. “We’ll see how it goes.”

But she wasn’t finished with her surprises. “I’d like to see you more often than you may have been expecting,” she said. “In psychoanalysis, we usually see patients several times a week. Given all you’re dealing with now, I’d like to start off by seeing you every weekday.”

My jaw hinged open. Five days a week? It sounded surreal and decadent, the sort of thing indulged in by self-obsessed Manhattan types. At the same time, I became aware of something dense and suffocating lifting off my chest. Five days a week, as crazy as that sounded, meant that I’d be able to sit in this reassuring room with this soft-spoken woman for an extraordinary amount of time. I’d have to clear it with my parents, obviously, since the bill would be beyond outrageous. But if they said yes, it meant that nearly every day of the week, I’d have a time and place to be as haunted and desolate as I actually was, and not be alone with it.

The alternative was to do what I’d been doing for months, which was to stay home with my mother and father, huddle in the corner of their living room couch, and knit. At present, the scarf I was making was—no lie—seven feet long.

My parents said yes.

Dr. Temeles may have been a psychoanalyst, but she didn’t behave like any I’d ever heard about. She didn’t talk much about dreams, and she didn’t try to involve me in any stream-of-consciousness rubbish. Hidden longings for penises never came up. We did talk about the sources of damage in my past, but we didn’t start there. We began with the emergency at hand—my here-and-now relationship with myself.

One morning, a few weeks into therapy, I was cataloging my recent failures—as a college dropout, a deficient girlfriend, and an all-around sofa-hugging loser—while she nodded neutrally. When I finally wound down, she leaned forward.

“You know what I’m hearing, Marian?”

I shook my head. No clue.

“You’re very hard on yourself.”

That stopped me cold. As preposterous as it might sound, the idea that I was overly self-critical had never, ever occurred to me. I took for granted that I had an entirely accurate fix on myself, that every hissing, hectoring self-judgment I made was true. And that the only recourse was to make myself over. To be awesomely, totally, flawless.

“Hard on myself?”

“Yes,” she said, in a kind but brook-no-nonsense tone. “I think you are.”

If you say so. I imagine I looked scornful, but it didn’t slow her down. “You know,” she continued, “there are many ways to look at any situation.” When I remained silent, she went on. “For example, let’s take your relationship with Dan.” We’d just been talking about my boyfriend—or rather, about how I was massively messing things up with him. As evidence, I’d cited all the times I’d said something stupid and then went suddenly wordless in his presence, and how these bouts of silence were beyond pathetic and would obviously lead to his dropping me, which would be more than I could bear, and then….

“Forgive my interruption,” she said. “You just said you sometimes freeze up around Dan and don’t know what to say next.” I nodded miserably. “And when you’re quiet, how does he react?”

I shrugged, sighing. “You know.”

“No, I’m not sure I do.” Dr. T, as I’d come to call her, softened her retort with a smile.

“He’s totally bored!” The woman in front of me was no fool. Why couldn’t she see the obvious?

“Has he said or done anything to indicate that he’s bored?’

I’d never known Dr. Temeles to be so confrontational, and it was annoying me. Until now, she’d been wonderfully soothing and understanding, like the best mom ever. Now she was getting all in my face.

“Look, I can’t remember specific examples!” I snapped. But in the silence that followed, an image surfaced. I saw Dan and my two teenage brothers clustered around the basketball hoop in our driveway, jostling and whooping. “Okay,” I said, “when he comes over to the house, sometimes he plays basketball with my brothers before he hangs out with me.” Just thinking about it chilled me. “So, what does that tell you?”

“Hmmm,” she said. “It tells me that he might love basketball.”

I let out a loud, irritated sigh.

“Let me just throw out a possibility,” she said. “Maybe he doesn’t get a chance to play very often, and you have two brothers who are knocking around the house all summer and are more than ready for a game.” She paused. “I’m not saying that you shouldn’t discuss this with Dan and let him know how you feel. That’s probably a good idea.” She paused, as though to underscore the merits of having such a conversation.

In some alternate universe, I could see the wisdom of this suggestion. But the idea of talking with Dan—or anyone—about my wants or needs was laughable. I just shrugged.

But Dr. T had a bigger point to make. “What I’m really saying is that when Dan plays basketball with your brothers, it doesn’t automatically mean he doesn’t love you. It absolutely does not mean there’s anything wrong with you.” She let her words sink in, and then added, “There are other ways to think about it.” Raising her eyebrows, she shot me a conspiratorial look. “Chances are it just means he’s a guy.”

That made me laugh.

Over the next many months, I had versions of this conversation with Dr. Temeles scores of times. Over and over again I fought her premise, which was that my scathing self-judgment was the central problem, not what I believed to be my glaring inadequacies. Her perspective felt like rah-rah good cheer, not remotely connected to the truth. But she persisted.

The second thing Dr. Temeles zeroed in on was my long-held plan for solving my problem, which was personal metamorphosis. By then I’d attempted enough geographical cures—Chicago, Berkeley, Philadelphia—to know that switching locales wasn’t going to do the trick. But I still clung to the dream of perfecting myself. With Dr. T’s capable assistance, of course.

But she was clear from the start: If my primary goal was self-transformation, she couldn’t help me. “In my experience, people don’t change all that much,” she said. “Particular attitudes and behaviors, yes, we hope so. But not a person’s basic personality.” Certainly, she said, no human being was capable of doing what I was aiming for—killing off the person I was and being reincarnated as someone entirely different. Not just different. Flawless.

“Think about animals,” she said. “A bird doesn’t get to be a cardinal one day and a hummingbird the next.” She was smiling, but I could tell she wasn’t kidding. “The whole thing is to get, deep down, how wonderful you are already. Without changing a thing.”

I shrugged in response. Whatever.

Dr. Temeles was tireless in her efforts to help me believe—to actually feel—that I deserved a place on the planet. And she could get creative about it. At one point, she asked me to draw up a list entitled “What I’m Supposed to Be All the Time,” which I’ve kept all these years so I can say with authority that I scribbled 29 separate items, including needing to be entertaining, articulate, persuasive, spontaneous, witty, charming, sexy, likable, relaxed, open, organized, talented, original, assertive, perceptive, productive, socially responsible, and emotionally stable. It’s probably worth mentioning that I’d prefaced each of these descriptors with the word “very.”

When I read the list out loud to Dr. T, we cracked up together. It was insane. “So, I’m supposed to be all these things all the time—including being ‘emotionally stable?’” I lifted my arms in exaggerated wonder.

“Well, of course,” she deadpanned. “Learning how to do 29 things extremely well all the time is the reason you’re here. You didn’t know?”

I giggled, and something heavy lifted off my chest. The barest bit. But I felt it.

We did this a lot. Laugh. Revel in the ludicrous. I can see now that our bantering may have been a bit of a tightrope act for Dr. Temeles, since humor can cut both ways, and if a therapist uses it at the wrong moment, or veers toward laughing at a client, it can quickly turn disastrous. But Dr. T never crossed that line. Mostly, she chortled in response to my attempts to be funny, which made me feel seen and likeable. But it was more than the humor thing.

Whenever we were together, Dr. T seemed to radiate pleasure in simply being with me. Even the slouching, sighing, mumbly-voiced me. I have no idea how she managed it, but each time we settled into her office she perched on the edge of her chair expectantly, her fist tucked under her chin the way she’d done at our very first meeting.

“So,” she often began, her eyes sparkling, which was my cue to launch into whatever I wanted to talk about that day. The fullness of her attention was like a massage; I could feel my muscles loosening, my breathing slowing down. Walking out of her office after a session, I nearly always felt lighter than I had walking in.

Weeks of therapy with Dr. T turned into months, and then years—three and a half in all. During that time, I’d be ambushed by more ferocious attacks of self-hate and I would inch, again and again, toward the edge. But I managed to hang on—sometimes, barely. I can’t prove that my therapist’s simple, caring presence mattered. But I believe that Dr. Temeles’s particular way of being helped me cling to my life until that clinging gave way to a kind of determined hand-holding—first with her, and then, very gradually, with myself. At some point, I began to experience something wholly unfamiliar—small, unbidden explosions of gratitude for my life.

I’ve tried, again and again, to unravel what exactly Dr. T was doing as she sat with me for those hundreds of hours. What could she have known, or hadn’t known but simply improvised, that could be of use to someone who arrived at her office with the wish to give up her life? All I know is that from the start, and like few other people in my life, my therapist saw me. More than that: she got me. The immense gift of that. The lifeline of that.

Whatever she was doing, it felt like love.