Creatures of a Day: And Other Tales of Psychotherapy Read Free Page A

right stuff around him: a San Francisco condo with a panoramic view from Golden Gate to the Bay Bridge; a lovely, socially prominent wife; a mid-six-figure salary; and a Jaguar XKE Convertible. And all of this at the advanced age of thirty-seven.
    Yet he had no right stuff inside . Choked by self-doubts, recriminations, and guilt, Charles always perspired when he saw a police car on the highway. “Free-floating guilt searching for a sin—that’s me,” he joked. Moreover his dreams were relentlessly self-denigrating: he saw himself with large weeping wounds, cowering in a cellar or cave; he was a low-life, a lout, a criminal, a fake. But even as he demeaned himself in dreams, his quirky sense of humor shone through.
    “I was waiting in a group of people who were auditioning for a role in a film,” he told me, describing a dream in one of our early sessions. “I waited my turn and then performed my lines quite well. Sure enough, the director called me back from the waiting area and complimented me. He then asked about my previous film roles, and I told him I had never acted in a film. He slammed his hands on the table, stood up, and shouted as he walked out, ‘You’re no actor. You’re impersonating an actor.’ I ran after him shouting, ‘If you impersonate an actor, you are an actor.’ But he kept on walking and was now far in the distance. I screamed as loudly as I could, ‘Actors impersonate people. That’s what actors do!’ But it was pointless. He had vanished, and I was alone.”
    Charles’s insecurity seemed fixed and unaffected by any sign of worthiness. All positive things—accomplishments, promotions, and messages of love from wife, children, and friends; great feedback from clients or employees—passed quickly through him like water through a sieve. Even though we had, in my view, a good working relationship, he persisted in believing that I was impatient or bored with him. I once commented that he had holes in his pockets, and that phrase resonated so much that he repeated it often during our work. After hours of examining the sources of his self-contempt and scrutinizing all the usual suspects—lackluster IQ and SAT scores, failure to fight the elementary school bully, adolescent acne, awkwardness on the dance floor, occasional premature ejaculations, worries about the small size of his penis—we eventually arrived at the primal source of darkness.
    “Everything bad began,” Charles told me, “one morning when I was eight years old. My father, an Olympic sailor, set out on a gray windy day on his regular morning sail in a small boat from Bar Harbor, Maine, and never returned. That day is fixed in my mind: the horrendous family vigil, the growing angry storm, my mother’s relentless pacing, our calls to friends and Coast Guard, our fixation on the telephone resting on the kitchen table with a red-checkered tablecloth, and our growing fear of the shrieking wind as nightfall approached. And worst of all was my mother’s wailing early the next morning when the Coast Guard phoned with the news that they had found his empty boat floating upside down. My father’s body was never found.”
    Tears streamed down Charles’s cheeks, and emotion choked his voice as if the event had happened yesterday, rather than twenty-eight years ago. “That was the end of the good days, the end of my father’s warm bear hugs and our games of horseshoes and Chinese checkers and Monopoly. I think I realized at the time that nothing would ever be the same.”
    Charles’s mother mourned the rest of her life, and no one ever came along to replace his father. In his view, he became his own parent. Yes, being a self-made person had its good points: self-creation can be powerfully reaffirming. But it is lonely work, and often, in the dead of night, Charles ached for the warm hearth that had grown cold so long ago.
    A year ago, at a charity event, Charles met James Perry, a high-tech entrepreneur. The two became