TRANSCRIPT OF AUDIO FILE:

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT:

THERAPIST: Hi. Come on in. (pause)

CLIENT: How are you?

THERAPIST: Good, thank you.

CLIENT: Did you drive?

THERAPIST: Yes.

CLIENT: (laughs) In all that snow.

THERAPIST: The road were pretty clear and, actually, there were very few people on the roads.

CLIENT: Yeah, I suppose. It's terrible to walk, isn't it? (laughs) [00:01:01]

THERAPIST: It's actually probably worse to walk than it is to drive. There's nowhere to walk.

CLIENT: Yeah. They've cleared the sidewalks, but at the end at every intersection there is a puddle and you need extremely long-legged do be able to (both laughs) jump those or you get wet. (laughs) (pause) I think last time we left off I was talking about my uncle and we talked about guilt and all those good things. (long pause) (sighs) [00:02:50] I'm not sure what exactly I'm supposed to be feeling and what kind of positive feeling to associate with my mom. There are lots of positive feelings, but I don't know what to do with some of the negativity, except that I suppose I can see that limiting its effects is probably a goal; not having it hinder too much the things that I want to do. Every relationship has both negatives and positives, right? (long pause) [00:04:53] Do you think some relationships just don't recover from the negativity?

THERAPIST: I don't know.

CLIENT: Some people, when they connect, they're always positive and rarely negative. Some people are beyond the point where things can be good between them. (sniggers) (pause) [00:05:59] I think I saw a lot of that growing up, so I feel like I was surrounded by a lot of depressed people. (laughs) Is that me just making stuff up or does that sound right? Does it sound objectively correct?

THERAPIST: I can answer that, but why do you feel that's important?

CLIENT: I don't know. Just to understand where my feelings are coming from and what I can realistically hope to achieve. I would love to be Miss Sunshine, but maybe that's too optimistic and, therefore, unrealistic. [00:06:56] I might have a significant shade of grey in me always, so hoping that will go away I might just have to slide it to the back page. I have to live with it. You have to do your exercises to make sure you're not bed ridden. Maybe it's like that in my case because I'm always aware of the negativity or the sad, but maybe I can do exercise, mental exercises to not get dragged down by that, not focus on that too much. (pause) [00:08:02] Still, I wondering how I will feel more engaged or not feel that glass wall. That's what I was thinking, what's my goal? I can't be completely positive all the time. Maybe it's not possible for me. In terms of my mom, I always feel a little bit of negativity, whether it's resentment or bitterness or something; but it will be there. I just will have to remember not to act from it, you know? [00:09:01] (chuckles) (long pause) [00:11:19]

THERAPIST: What are you thinking about?

CLIENT: Sorry. Trying to . . . (sighs) (pause) I feel sort of lost in terms of not knowing what I want my relationship with my mom to look like; and with Chris also, perhaps. [00:12:08] I guess what I wanted was for her to be independent, like very early on. I wanted that and that just didn't happen. A series of things happened that I feel like they shouldn't have happened, (chuckles) which made her kind of seem a figure of pathos for me. [00:13:05] I don't know why because earlier, in a previous life in Nepal, it seemed like whatever happened to her, she was not a figure of pathos, she was the figure of admiration. She was fighting everything, everyone, the system, patriarchy. But here, somehow, the narrative got completely twisted in my head, I suppose. I don't know why I thought that but . . . (pause) [00:14:05] This Thursday I went to court to kind of support one of my mom's friends. She recently got laid off from her job. She worked at a bank. She's old; she's almost 60 and she has very bad knees. She walks with a crutch. She's extremely good with what she does. She was a teller. They fired her, apparently, because she took $20 from a customer. It's all really made up stuff like, "She was pressuring the customer to open the CD and he felt uncomfortable so he gave her $20." (chuckles) [00:15:01] This was the most ridiculous thing. First of all, I've known her three years. She's not capable of pressuring anyone or anything. Even if she did, it's impossible to imagine. It's the manager's word against her. They don't have the customer saying, "I feel pressured." On the phone if someone calls you and says, "Would you like to enroll . . ?" you just hang up. You don't give the $20 and then hang up. At Target when they're like, "Open an account," you're not like, "Okay, here's $10, but please don't ask me to . . ." You don't do that. Anyway, they made the story and she had to defend herself. [00:15:59] Then my mom was like, "Something similar happened to me," and then I remembered eve that was so true. I was living with Chris in Cambridge and my mom was alone in Virginia and she got fired from her job. The hearing had to take place over the phone. This was when she moved to Ohio. I remember that the case they made against her was that she was working at a day care and they first said she fell asleep at naptime with the children. My mom was like, "I didn't fall asleep. I was lying down and showing them how to do it." I don't know. Both people's statements something was weird to me. Maybe she did fall asleep. Who knows? Maybe she's right. [00:17:10] That didn't come through or the judge didn't believe their statement, so then they came back and said that she was in the kitchen with this child and the child was in a high chair and not buckled and this other teacher had to come running in the kitchen because the child was about to fall. My mom was like, "I was right there in the kitchen with the child. If the child was actually falling, I would have caught the child." Again, it was like the employers were against her. [00:18:00] I just felt very weird about it. I didn't feel very defensive against the employer. I felt I wanted to distance myself from my mom. I don't know. I didn't want to be there for her. I was like, "Why is this happening? Why aren't we proper, respectable people? Why is my mother, first of all, working in day care and why are these silly allegations being cast on her?" I don't know. I guess being with Chris I felt pressured to be respectable, you know? (chuckles) It's really weird to even articulate this feeling, like I've never actually articulated it. He comes from a nice family. They're not super rich or anything; they're middle class. [00:19:02] We were supposed to be middle class, too, but because of my dad never working and doing all the stupid things that he did, we were lower class, lower middle class. Then when we moved to the U.S. we were working class. (laughs) So despite my mom's degrees from really good institutions and all that, we were working in hotels and she in daycares and stuff. The narrative that I made up was that we really kind of had to step down significantly. Not only did we lose our community, even though the community in Nepal was not ideal because it's not ideal for women like my mom whose husbands leave them. [00:20:05] We didn't have that much of a community. We didn't have friends and stuff. My dad never let me play with friends. (chuckles) I was forbidden to go out of the house. Still, there was this larger community that could have been there. Here, that was gone and then we were struggling with money. The struggle with money was there in Nepal as well, but it was like the psychological struggle of not being able to find work. That's what everyone says about America. Those who want to come here want to come here because they think that their hard work will be duly rewarded. [00:21:00] That was, at least, what I had heard growing up. "That's why people want to go there," my mom said, "because here in Nepal there are all these barriers. You just won't be able to get . . ." I didn't really completely understand by getting your hard work rewarded. I suppose the rewards were monetary, but they took on other forms, as well. So that was the reason to come here and it just didn't happen. It didn't happen for several years. I guess we thought it would be instant, but (chuckles) even when it didn't happen instantly, it just didn't happen. Even now, it's like it hasn't happened. Now I don't even know what that would look like. I've seen Nepalese immigrants do very well for themselves, especially in Virginia. [00:22:04] They have huge houses, but I don't want that. It just feels like that's not a goal for me. I feel like I have other goals now, more to do with getting published and having a small but significant name in the intellectual community rather than having a house and stuff. Yeah, just being with Chris and him coming from a good family and my mother messing up, it felt really embarrassing. I felt like I was supposed to be on this track. [00:23:01] I don't know. It's weird. Instead of feeling righteous anger against the system and now, in the abstract, I guess I do. We all go to protest or whatever or criticize this or whatever. But at that time, I just couldn't articulate that and just kind of internalized the thing that was happening to my mom. All of Chris's friends are respectable. It just seems like no one has the kinds of embarrassing things happen to them that I have. Now I feel like we've already said previously, like I have this weird assumption that everything bad happens to me and nothing bad happens to other people. [00:24:03] Other people aren't sad; they're always happy and positive. I guess that is where I'm coming from because some of them actually did seem to be able to deal with their embarrassing things. They didn't really make it very public. It seems like for me it was too public or . . . I don't know. (pause) That's kind of the source of me wanting to shut people out and really feeling like they are Goliath. Some of the people Chris knows, I just think of them and I just want to say to them, "You guys are just so well off." I don't mean just monetarily, I mean socially, like psychologically (chuckles), you guys are well off. [00:25:05] You guys have parents who are so responsible. They give you cars on your birthday and they have houses in Virginia. You can crash with them for months, years, if you break up with your boyfriend. You actually have the luxury of breaking up with your boyfriend. Where the hell am I going to go if I want to break up? I can't even through a legitimate tantrum of walking out. (laughs)

THERAPIST: Sure you could.

CLIENT: I don't want to. It doesn't feel . . .

THERAPIST: You don't want to, but that's different than you can't.

CLIENT: I would go live with my mother who is more like a child? (laughs)

THERAPIST: You can tell your mother that you can't pay her rent anymore because you have your own rent to pay. [00:26:01]

CLIENT: I don't know if I even want to get back there. I don't know if that's my goal. (chuckles)

THERAPIST: I'm not encouraging you, I'm simply saying that you have choices. You're saying, "I couldn't do that if I wanted to." I'm like well you could, actually (pause)

CLIENT: Yeah. Yeah. I wish I could just stop going on about things that are just not going to happen. I'm not going to be this woman that I'm thinking about, with parents who have a nice house or parents are together. Parents are parents, you know? (chuckles) It's not going to happen for me in this lifetime, so I should just move on.

THERAPIST: Well you're not going to have that, but then you draw a connection that you're not going to have a nice life for yourself. [00:27:03]

CLIENT: I don't know why.

THERAPIST: You make a lot of inferences from that.

CLIENT: Yeah. It seems like the basis for a nice life. Maybe it's just one basis.

THERAPIST: Part of it is it's hard to feel like it's a basis for a hard life if you have a lot of shame associated with it.

CLIENT: With what?

THERAPIST: Shame.

CLIENT: Shame associated with what?

THERAPIST: With not coming from a "good family with nice parents," respectable people.

CLIENT: I don't know why I have all this shame (chuckles), but I do. (chuckles) (pause) [00:27:57] I suppose I feel like people won't like me. But then I've been there as well, at the spot where people don't like me, so it's not just shameful or embarrassing as I think it is. (chuckles) I mean it is, but it's not lethal. (pause) I criticize people all the time for a lot of things not to their faces, but if criticism was what I'm worried about, it's like a weapon that everyone has. I have it, too. It's like I shouldn't be gun shy because I have a gun, too. [00:29:04] (pause) Maybe that's not the problem, right? What people think can't be that debilitating to me as I think it is.

THERAPIST: Well it certainly reflects an image of yourself. It may have nothing to do with how people see you, but it reflects an image of yourself that you then project onto other people.

CLIENT: The image of . . ?

THERAPIST: This image that you're shameful, you come from sort of shameful parents, not nice, not having dignity, almost being sort of debased.

CLIENT: Yeah. (pause) [00:30:08] How do I change that perception of myself? (pause)

THERAPIST: You have a hard time separating your life choices in your own life from your parents, especially your mother; and you don't want to. You feel guilty. You feel like as much as you feel shame, it creates a kind of identity for you. (pause)

CLIENT: There's much that is different. [00:31:01] Very different, I suppose. I guess I don't focus on that.

THERAPIST: Even your saying that you can't leave Chris because you've nowhere to go, I imagine that's what your mother felt like with your father.

CLIENT: Yeah, she probably did. (chuckles) Maybe that's why she came to me. (pause)

THERAPIST: So tell me about the ways you're different.

CLIENT: I'm shorter. (laughs)

THERAPIST: That's very remarkable. That's an important difference. [00:31:58]

CLIENT: (laughs) You're being funny.

THERAPIST: I'm trying to be. I don't really know how funny it is. I'm trying to make a joke.

CLIENT: (laughs) I guess I was, too. We have different degrees, educational degrees. (pause) How am I different? (laughs) I guess I'm more Americanized than she is. She had parents growing up who were actually parents. (laughs) She had siblings. [00:33:01] I'm sure it wasn't all peachy and everything for her, but she says it was better for her; her childhood was actually a childhood. I don't know. I think I'm nastier than her (chuckles), but that's because I'm more apprehensive of people. I have less patience. I can be mean, I guess, which she cannot be mean. Like on purpose, I'll be mean, and I don't think she can be. [00:34:03] She was ambitious at one point. I guess she still has the ambition. I'm ambitious, too, I think. (pause) I don't know. I think we're close, but we're not as close like she doesn't talk to me as much as I'd like her to talk to me, so it's just me drawing a lot of inferences.

THERAPIST: What would you like her to talk to you about? [00:34:59]

CLIENT: Just stuff; treat me as an adult. For years she didn't tell me what my dad was up to. And even now, she doesn't want to burden me. But it's a burden that I would like to have, not in the sense of problems, but like talking to me about her friends and what she feels. I would feel like she was respecting me and treating me like an adult if she did that, but she doesn't do that much at all. It's okay to take money from me. That's not important, but telling me stuff that actually I would like to hear is a burden. (chuckles) (pause) [00:36:04]

Earlier I was saying we are very different because when I chose to be with Chris, someone who was the antithesis of my dad. Then I fell for Victor and he is in my head, dangerously close to being like my dad. So I guess my mom and I fell for the same kind of man. I just keep telling myself not to be like her so that I can try and forget about Victor.

THERAPIST: But in a different narrative your mother didn't fall for your dad, she was placed with your dad.

CLIENT: Yeah, but then the reasons why she continued being with him, and there can be several layers to that, but I think one layer was that she felt she needed him. [00:37:09] She was maybe attracted to his dark side, perhaps. She felt like she could change him. She felt like he was essential to her happiness. She couldn't be happy without him all things that I think I felt for Victor, sadly. (chuckles)

THERAPIST: Victor one of the things you were hoping for was that you could win him over.

CLIENT: Yeah. That's because he wasn't my husband.

THERAPIST: Your father, your mother I can't imagine feeling that she won him over. He was always with other women. [00:38:04] That he was her husband, I can't imagine, was very comforting. If anything, I can imagine it was worse.

CLIENT: Yeah, but I guess what I'm trying to find similar, was that she hoped to change him. She hoped that he would change and come back to her and remain to her and find her fulfilling. I guess I felt the same way. Yeah. (pause)

THERAPIST: You don't want to leave your mother behind.

CLIENT: Behind where?

THERAPIST: When I say "behind" I have this idea of just having a good life with good things, with nicer things than her and more happiness and more relationships and more confidence. [00:39:13]

CLIENT: Yeah. For the longest time I would say that I want to make her life beautiful, like I want to give her things, so I got really screwed up. (chuckles) Somehow that didn't happen. And even if it did happen, my perception warped and changed so much that, even if I was giving her nice things, they weren't enough. They weren't satisfactory.

THERAPIST: Right. You talk about buying her nice clothes and, still, she walks around in rags.

CLIENT: Yeah. It completely turns it on its head. (chuckles) It's like there are nice things but they're invisible or out of reach or a whole bunch of crap is piled on top of them, so they're inaccessible. [00:40:10] It's as though you never did that nice thing for her, you know? It reverses itself.

THERAPIST: It conflicts with her outward appearance of being essentially wretched.

CLIENT: That's a strong word. (chuckles) (pause) Why did you say "wretched?"

THERAPIST: Because it has the connotation of sort of being impoverished and being sort of debased; kind of wanting to present a kind of pathetic view to the world like showing up with a bathing suit underneath tattered clothes. There's sort of wretchedness to it, like in the Dickenson sense.

CLIENT: Dickinson?

THERAPIST: Charles Dickens. That's what I meant. I haven't read Dickenson in 20-some-odd years, but I don't know why that came to mind.

CLIENT: That's kind of what I was producing in my little piece that I'd ended the previous session with. The description was like that. There was beauty; there was beauty in that piece. That was the tension. I feel like I'm still there in 2009. I'm still there. I'm stuck, and for even longer maybe 2005 or, I don't know, maybe since I was born. (laughs) [00:42:07] I've not always thought of her as wretched or debased. (pause) There are things that debase her. I remember I have these memories we were going somewhere on the train. The three of us were on a train and my dad was just abusing my mother. It was nighttime and they thought I was asleep. Of course, I wasn't. It was this horrible it was the most horrible things he was saying. He just kept going on and on and on and on. This other passenger, a man, was there, too. He was pretending to sleep. [00:43:00] I just wanted to possess his body, wake up, throw my dad off the train right then and there. (laughs) I wasn't capable of doing that myself because I was probably seven or eight or ten or something; but the man could have. That debased her. She was this beautiful thing who could fight, but this horrible monster was debasing her, saying all these nasty things. (chuckles)

THERAPIST: You want to protect her and you're angry at her.

CLIENT: Yeah, because maybe, after my dad left, she still kind of hung onto that narrative of debasement. It's that that I want to get rid of. (laughs) He's gone, but he's left his language behind. [00:43:59] I want to send him a package with that in it. (laughs) I think that's when I'll feel like we're finally rid of him when we stop thinking like him and stop talking like him.

THERAPIST: But you fear that he's essentially in her bones.

CLIENT: He is in my blood, too, but we could have a transfusion. (chuckles)

THERAPIST: It's called therapy.

CLIENT: Yes, that's why I'm here. (laughs)

THERAPIST: We are going to need to stop. I was going to ask you if you had gotten a chance to call your insurance company with the address.

CLIENT: I did; I just didn't get through to the right people, so I'll try again today. I have it on my calendar.

THERAPIST: I have a phone number for them. I can e-mail it to you. If you could even ask them about statements, I'll let you know what statements are lost in their system or, apparently, sent to you. I don't know. I can give you the months that they haven't . . . [00:45:01] I think it's October, December and then January that they're probably still processing; but it's three months. I appreciate your help. I don't know why it's so tough, but I'll e-mail you.

CLIENT: Have others been processed, like November was processed?

THERAPIST: November was processed and it was in the same batch as October, so I have no idea (chuckles), so I'll give you the months. I appreciate your help. We'll figure it out.

CLIENT: Yeah, no problem. Sorry about this.

THERAPIST: Not your fault. Okay, take care, Cecelia.

CLIENT: See you.

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