After a while Sammy quietly asked, “And?”
“I couldn’t do it. Paula, it was like you and the kids were somehow reaching out to me and holding me back. Although, I can’t imagine why after I’d…”
Sammy supplied, “Dumped us when we no longer fit into the image you were trying to create for yourself.” He seemed to be vacillating back and forth between being totally set against his father and being pulled a little toward him. “You kind of make me sick, you know. How could we ever trust you after…everything you’ve done to hurt us?”
Lance stood up as though he were going to leave. “I guess maybe you can’t.”
Paula barred his path. “I’ll try to trust you again, Lance. I’ll help you if I can. We got through the problems we had when we were first married: financial, physical, and your stepmother, who did everything she could to destroy our faith and commitment to each other. Remember?”
“It wasn’t Marnie. Sometimes she was actually a good mother figure to me. It was her drinking, strictly her drinking doing the talking and thinking, when she…”
Paula put her hand tenderly on Lance’s arm as though he were a helpless, hurting little child. “I know. I know. And I also know that I want to help you find yourself and get your life back in order.”
Sammy untangled himself and stumbled to his feet. “Then I’m leaving. The hell with both of you! I can assure you that if he hasn’t got the guts to do it, I have! I—”
I interrupted, trying hard to sound gentle but authoritative. “Sammy, a lot of the thinking here is distorted at the moment. Won’t you stay and hear everyone out before you make decisions that may not be the same as you would make after everything is on the table and we get things all sorted out? Remember the problems we had getting your jigsaw puzzle pieces put together?”
“Yes, but…”
“I knew you would, Sammy. You’ve come so far in your ability to cope. Your problem-solving skills often really astound me. I…”
“I didn’t say I would.”
I grinned at him. “You didn’t say you wouldn’t, either. Please stay, just for me, if that’s the only thing that will keep you here.”
“Okay. But don’t try to make me a part of this, put-the-blame-on-us, squeezing out of his own consequences crap.”
“You can just listen. You don’t have to say a word if you don’t want to.”
“I won’t want to.”
Lance grabbed Paula’s hand and held it so tightly she squeaked. “Oh, Paula, I can’t believe what I’ve done to the life of our firstborn, our son! I let whiteout take over and rule my brain, my reasoning, my actions. Honestly, I hadn’t faced the fact…hadn’t realized that I was really totally addicted until the night I saw my beloved Sammy…using. I couldn’t bear it then. I can’t bear it now. I went crazy because I loved him so much. I couldn’t let him waste his life, too. The mental picture of both of us slouched against a wall on skid row, having no goal in life except our next fix, knocked me over the edge. I lost it. I totally lost it, and I’ll be forever sorry. Forever, eternally, constantly sorry.” He knelt at Sammy’s feet, his face stained with tears. “Please, please, son, don’t let me be a bad influence in your life. Take after your mother; listen to her counsel. She’ll never guide you incorrectly. I’m so, so sorry, and I wish with all my heart that you could forgive me…but I understand if you can’t. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to forgive myself.”
Sammy’s right hand reached out almost in slow motion, seemingly against his will. “I once thought I couldn’t forgive myself for what I did to Mo.”
Lance looked up at Sammy as though he were the father and asked innocently, pleadingly, “What did you do?”
“I listened to Mom when she said Mo would forgive me, and to Dr. B. Actually I even remember the exact moment and place when I forgave myself.”
“Oh, Sammy, I’m so proud of you, and happy for you. Your mom told me a little about your horrendous experiences, which were probably instigated by my neurotic, drug-crazed actions. How could I have done that when I love you so much? You are the greatest accomplishment of my life. My hero, my…the best part of me.”
Sammy slid off his chair and scrunched down on the floor beside his father. “I’m not any of those good things. I’m just a weak, lily-livered, rebellious teenager who tried to blame all of my brainless, awful actions on you. Tried to hurt you by hurting myself. How stupid, how nincompoop stupid I was.”
Lance cradled and rocked him. “What stupid nincompoops we both were, but I never stopped loving you!”
“I think that was maybe the worst part. I’d always almost idolized you even when you sometimes nagged me to clean my room and do my chores around the house and stuff. When I saw you weren’t perfect, I…I…”
“Oh, Sammy, forgive me, forgive me, forgive me.”
“I not only forgive you, Dad…I, in some crazy way understand. You did what you did that night because…you loved me.”
The two of them got up and went over to the couch and sat down with Paula. Lance sat between them, and they all three held hands. Between sniffles Sammy said, “I lied when I called you a child abuser—the brutal, sadistic beating I told everybody you gave me, and the vile cursing out were so exaggerated that I can hardly believe I made them up, but I did! I didn’t have any black eyes or broke bones or even bruises, other than a bruised ego, and I enlarged that from a molehill to a mountain. I’m the one that needs to ask your pardon, Dad. Please, Dad…”
The rest of his sentence, if there was one, was smothered in a deep hug from both his parents. Over and over they weepingly assured and reassured him of their great, and forever, unconditional love for him. I excused myself to the women’s room so they could have some privacy. However, the recorder remained on.
Lance said, “I’ve never been happier in my life. I don’t want to ever let you go. I want to stay like this forever.”
Paula remained silent.
“Me three,” Sammy agreed.
“When I think of all the years I’ve wasted away from my family, empty, useless searching for nothing years spent futilely wandering in a barren, cold wilderness, never realizing that what I was looking for was what I had so carelessly left behind, I…I feel like I’ve finally grown up from being a selfish, self-centered little boy. I want to be a real dad now, to hold my son and my little girls in my arms and try to make up for…things that can’t be made up for. I’ve been so miserably, hopelessly lost, I—”
Sammy interrupted. “I know exactly how you felt. I felt the same lost, lonely, empty, self-destructive way. After you hurt me, not nearly as much as I told everybody that you had, though, I just seemed to go on a crusade to hurt myself.”
“This family’s got a lot of making up to do,” Paula said.
Lance giggled. “So let’s get to it.”
“Yeah,” Sammy said, “let’s go forward toward the bright sunshine and never, ever, ever look back at our yucky pasts.”
“Way to go,” Lance agreed.
“The only way to go! Dr. B’s going to be proud of us. Remember when we first came in, and we were ready to rip out each other’s throats? I wonder if she’s going to give the whole family a take home assignment.”
I reentered the room during the last half of Sammy’s sentence. “Since you mentioned it, I think I will give you each a copy of the DISTORTED THINKING EVALUATION. Sammy, you’re working on it, but it might be valuable for all of you to discuss it together.”
Sammy poked his dad in the arm. “I think we both need to do that a lot.”
Lance poked him back. “At this point you’re the guru for us two.”
As they were leaving, Paula looked at me quizzically. “Do you think we need to come back again to…sort of solidify things?”
Sammy laughed loudly. “I know what she’s going to say.” He closed his eyes tightly, wrinkled his forehead deeply, put his index fingers to his temples, and made a high screeching eerie sound. “I thiiiiiink you should iiiiiiiif you th
iiiiiink you should.”
We laughed together. “Smart aleck kid. He reads my mind. Call me after you’ve checked your calendars.”
As they walked out, Sammy was saying, “Mom, can Dad have dinner with us?”
Paula giggled. “I thiiiink he should iiiiiif he thinks he should.”
SUMMARY OF SESSION
FAMILY SESSION WITH MOTHER (PAULA)
AND FATHER (LANCE)
Sammy and his father Lance entered the session with great hostility, Sammy toward Lance, Lance toward himself. Listening Therapy was introduced. Both father and son admitted their mistakes and asked each other for help. DISTORTED THINKING EVALUATIONS were handed out as homework. Truces have been accepted. The Gordons seem on the right recovery road.
Samuel Gordon Chart
Saturday, October 1, 7 A.M.
Telephone Conversation
SAMUEL (SAMMY) GORDON, 15 years old
“Yo, Dr. B. I know you’re really busy and all like that but…”
“But what, favorite friend Sammy?”
“I need to talk to you. I’ve got to talk to you before you meet again with the family.”
“Do you feel comfortable talking about…whatever…on the phone?”
“Yeah. I guess it would be as humiliating and shameful one way as the other. It’s…it’s about…my dad. I can’t believe I told you so many unforgivable things about him. Lies…lies…lies all of them.”
I interrupted, “Now wait a minute, Sammy, you’re being unfair to yourself. I heard him say what he had done to you.”
“I deserved it. Every bit of it.”
“Whooooa, boy. Don’t you think you both were out of control at the time?”
“But I made things sound a million, trillion, zillion times worse than they were. I wanted to hurt him make you think he…you know…”
“Okay. So that maybe wasn’t the smartest or the kindest thing you’ve ever done in your life. Are you going to be condemned forever for it? Isn’t there one single way you can think of to smooth out that crinkle in your life as you’ve smoothed out all the others?”
“Well…maybe…no…. What do you think?”
“I not only think, I know you can do it by yourself, possibly, probably, you can do it even better by yourself. Then, not only will you have won the battle you will see yourself as the winner you are, always were, always will be!”
“What do you think about my making an appointment with Dad as soon as I get off the phone? We could go sit in the beanbag chairs under the bright light in the laundry room and I could deeply and sincerely tell him how I feel now. How does that strike you?”
“It strikes me as being a fantastically wonderful idea if it strikes you the same.”
“Do you think I should tell him about…the impression I tried to leave with you so you’d hate him as much as I did, or should I just wipe that out of my mental computer? Could you do that, too?”
I closed my eyes and squinted them. “It’s done!”
“Man, I can’t believe how much better I feel. I thought finding a solution would be pretty near impossible and it wasn’t all that difficult. Do you think he’ll forgive me?”
“Do you think he’ll forgive you?”
“I think he already has.”
“How are you coming with the forgiving yourself part?”
“Cinchy. Bye. See ya in a couple of hours, minus the garbage.”
“What garbage?”
Samuel, Paula, Lance, Dana,
Dorie Gordon Family Chart
Saturday, October 1, 9 A.M.
Twelfth Visit
“Hi, Dana and Dorie. I’ve heard so much about you I almost feel like we’ve met before.”
Dana: “I’ll bet it was all bad if it was from my buggy big brother.”
“Wrong! It was all good! I suspect that when he’s around you he’s too embarrassed to tell you how he really feels, so he’s more comfortable teasing.”
“When he came home this last time he treated me and Dorie like we were angles, like we were perfect, like we didn’t ever do anything wrong, like we couldn’t do anything wrong.”
Sammy put his hand playfully over her mouth. “Enough already.”
Dorie chimed in, “Now he’s back to his old self, mainly picking on us and trying to be the boss all the time.”
Paula put her finger to her lips. “Shhh, we’re trying to impress Dr. Sparks with what a neat, nice, comfortable, healthy, normal, loving family we are.”
The kids giggled and assumed nervous, pious positions.
After they had all seated themselves, I asked, “Anyone want to tell me what’s been happening in your lives?” They all started talking at once till I tinkled the little crystal bell. “Sammy, want to tell Dana and Dorie what that means?”
“It means we’ve started playing the Listening Therapy Game.”
“Will you tell the girls about the Listening Therapy Game rules?”
“Yeah. As you’ve seen, this family can’t do without them, even when there are only two or three of us playing.”
Lance looked at Sammy and grinned widely.
“Whoever is talking gets to talk for two minutes if they want to. That’s how long it takes the sand to run from the top half of the glass bottle into the bottom. During that time no one can interrupt, comprendé?” Sammy instructed.
“Sí,” both girls answered in Spanish.
“Oh, I forgot practically the main thing. Everybody has to listen because maybe they’ll be chosen to tell what’s been said.”
Ten-year-old Dorie made a face and said, “Yucky.”
Sammy looked at me playfully. “Is yucky a toxic word?”
I shrugged. “For now, why don’t we continue with the Listening Game. Paula, would you like to fill us in on how you’ve seen the last seven days?”
“Well…Lance came home with us after our last session, and we had dinner. Then he and the kids talked and played Scrabble, and I Doubt It till long past their bedtimes. Then Lance went back to his hotel, and the kids and I went to bed.”
It was obvious Paula was being very cautious about a situation she wasn’t completely sure of.
Every part of Dorie’s body had been fidgeting since Paula had first started speaking. Something inside her had almost a life of its own. Paula asked, “Can Dorie take the rest of the two minutes?”
“If she wants to.”
Dorie’s words erupted every which way out of her mouth. “And Sunday morning Dad took us to McDonald’s for breakfast. We all love sausage and Egg McMuffins and Mom won’t let us have them often, and then we went to Sunday school, and up the canyon to see the leaves, and for a ride on the little old mine train, and we bought Mrs. Field’s cookies, and went to lunch, and took the ski lift up to the top of the mountain so we could see the whole wide world below us, and we played we were the Von Trapp family in The Sound of Music and ran through the trees, trying to hide out from the bad people, and…”
Sammy poked her and turned her face toward the timer. The last few straggly grains of sand were sifting through its narrow middle.
Dana raised her hand timidly. “Who gets to say what they said?”
We all pointed to her.
“Ummm, Mom said how nice and comfy and warm it was to have Dad home again. It was, in a way, like he’d never been away, even though I was little when he left and Dorie was almost a baby.”
Dorie: “Was not! I remember Daddy clear as anything, on my sixth birthday taking just the two of us on a date, and…ooops…sorry.” She’d remembered the timer.
Dana: “We were like one of the old rerun TV families with everything sort of fairy-tale, they-lived-happily-ever-after-like and everything, just like Mom said. And I think, in a way, she wanted him to stay with us, but she didn’t dare ask, and I think he, in a way, wanted to stay, and he didn’t dare ask either.
“And Mom said sometimes Daddy played games really dumb on purpose just so he could let us win. Seeing him be silly is almost the most fun part.?
??
I smiled. “It always astounds me how often people hear someone saying things they haven’t said at all, sometimes positive, sometimes negative. Dana, are you sure you were repeating just what your mom said?”
She thought for a second. “I think so, yeah.”
“Did the rest of you notice how much she added? Things that probably really did happen, or feelings that she had?”
Seriously, Paula, Lance, and Sammy all nodded their heads in the affirmative.
“People think listening is easy. It isn’t! We often hear what we want to hear. For instance, Sammy, when you were angry with your dad, could you possibly have honestly thought you heard him say things that were much worse than the things he really did say?”
“I’m absolutely sure of that now!”
“Can anyone else think of other times when that might have happened?”
Dorie asked, “Are we using the timer?”
“No.”
Dorie: “Well, when Mom gets mad at me for not cleaning my room or doing my jobs around the house or something, I sometimes feel that she’s calling me lazy and dumb and stuff. But then if I go in my room and cry or just think about it, I know she’s just trying to get me to do what I should be doing without her having to nag. And I guess it’s more like I’m calling myself lazy and stupid because I feel that’s what I am.”
“Could you be trying to blame her for your problem?”
“Ummm…yeah, in a way, I guess.”
“What might you do the next time something like that happens?”
“Maybe like…try a little harder to remember exactly what she really did say?”