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CHAPTER SEVEN
“THIS FEELS RATHER DIFFERENT from last time,” I said. No response.
Alicia sat opposite me in the chair, head turned slightly toward the window. She sat perfectly still, her spine rigid and straight. She looked like a cellist. Or a soldier.
“I’m thinking of how the last session ended. When you physically attacked me and had to be restrained.”
No response. I hesitated.
“I wonder if you did it as some kind of test? To see what I’m made of? I think it’s important that you know I’m not easily intimidated. I can take whatever you throw at me.”
Alicia looked out the window at the gray sky beyond the bars. I waited a moment.
“There’s something I need to tell you, Alicia. That I’m on your side. Hopefully one day you’ll believe that. Of course, it takes time to build trust. My old therapist used to say intimacy requires the repeated experience of being responded to—and that doesn’t happen overnight.”
Alicia stared at me, unblinking, with an inscrutable gaze. The minutes passed. It felt more like an endurance test than a therapy session.
I wasn’t making progress in any direction, it seemed. Perhaps it was all hopeless. Christian had been right to point out that rats desert sinking ships. What the hell was I doing clambering upon this wreck, lashing myself to the mast, preparing to drown?
The answer was sitting in front of me. As Diomedes put it, Alicia was a silent siren, luring me to my doom.
I felt a sudden desperation. I wanted to scream at her, Say something. Anything. Just talk.
But I didn’t say that. Instead, I broke with therapeutic tradition. I stopped treading softly and got directly to the point:
“I’d like to talk about your silence. About what it means ... what it feels like. And specifically why you stopped talking.”
Alicia didn’t look at me. Was she even listening?
“As I sit here with you, a picture keeps coming into my mind—an image of someone biting their fist, holding back a yell, swallowing a scream. I remember when I first started therapy, I found it very hard to cry. I feared I’d be carried away by the flood, overwhelmed. Perhaps that’s what it feels like for you. That’s why it’s important to take your time to feel safe and trust that you won’t be alone in this flood—that I’m treading water here with you.”
Silence.
“I think of myself as a relational therapist. Do you know what that means?”
Silence.
“It means I think Freud was wrong about a couple of things. I don’t believe a therapist can ever
really be a blank slate, as he intended. We leak all kinds of information about ourselves unintentionally—by the color of my socks, or how I sit or the way I talk. Just by sitting here with you,