Category Archives: Psychological

The Other Anniversary

Posted on by
Reply

“And so we lift our gaze, not to what stands between us, but what stands before us.”

– Amanda Gorman, 2021 Inaugural Poem, The Hill We Climb

Think back to a year ago. No, not the insurrection, but the day before. On January 5th, both Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff won their Georgia run-offs, turning the U.S. Senate the palest – but still lovely! – shade of blue. Honestly, to most of us, the likelihood of not just one but both of these men prevailing seemed preposterous. But we opened our checkbooks, rolled up our sleeves, and got to work anyway. Their victories felt miraculous.

But of course it wasn’t a miracle at all. It was the determination, hard work, and generosity of everyone – doubtful and hopeful alike – who stepped up. Led by primarily Black grassroots organizers whose persistent movement building had just put the state in Biden’s column, legions of activists and volunteers knocked on doors, registered new voters, phone banked, wrote letters and postcards, texted, and donated hundreds of millions of dollars.

As a result, Democratic turnout, especially in counties with a large share of Black voters, smashed records. As Nse Ufot, head of the New Georgia Project said at the time, “The margins are so small that every action, including your vote, matters and will make a difference. Black voters got that message. Black voters recognized that we need to complete the task.”

Now we turn to the task of securing a better and more progressive future in 2022, “striving,” as Amanda Gorman reminds us, “to form our union with purpose.“

The hill we must climb in 2022 is indeed steep. Yet we’ve done it before and we’ll do it again. In the spirit of January 5, 2021, and of the poet, we greet the New Year with purpose and resolve.

*

I wrote this for the January issue of “The Drop,” a newsletter I produce for Airlift, an all-volunteer group near and dear to my heart. Airlift raises money for progressive grassroots organizations in key areas throughout the country. The groups we fund excel at turning non-voters into voters, especially in communities of color, women, and young people–exactly the groups who made all the difference in the 2020 election, and will do so again in 2022.

Boss

Posted on by
Reply

At the risk of revealing myself to be the troglodyte that I am, I’m only vaguely aware of Bruce Springsteen. Sure, I once bought one of his CDs a lifetime ago. I also once dated a man who was childhood friends with Springsteen; they and their friends roamed the boardwalk and bars together in Asbury Park. “We knew he was good, but we didn’t know he was that good,” he told me.

In this lifetime, I’m aware that Springsteen and President Obama started a podcast together. I’ve listened to my CD a handful of times, the podcast never. My careful titration of news via scrolling New York Times headlines informs me that Springsteen had a one-man show on Broadway until the pandemic shut it and everything else down last March, and that it has just reopened.

Which is why Terry Gross’s 2016 interview with Springsteen about his memoir, on which the Broadway show is based, just popped up on my Fresh Air queue again. So I gave it a listen.

The Boss was quite charming. He recounted with wry amusement that his father, taking advantage of Bruce’s helpless dependency following a serious motorcycle accident, brought in a barber to chop off his long hair, a source of constant Vietnam-era contention. At the time this act of butchery enraged him. But the decades bring perspective, which brings memoirs, which, if you’re famous enough, bring Broadway shows.

I also learned from Fresh Air that said show had been made into a 2018 film, Springsteen on Broadway, now streaming on Netflix. So I gave it a watch.

I didn’t much like the man who had so charmed me on Fresh Air. Springsteen’s self-mockery came across as arrogance. Plus he seemed kind of shouty, angry. This was probably due to Netflix’s close-in camera work of a lone performer far away from an audience of thousands. He knew what it took to be loud and brash enough to hold a crowd. Still, Springsteen came across as too well rehearsed to feel authentic. This impression was no doubt further cemented when he talked about being a fraud–hero of the working man who had never spent a day of his life on a factory, nor even worked five days in a row until doing this Broadway show. Still, Springsteen clearly comes by his pain and anger honestly, as story after story tells of his difficult relationship with his hard-drinking, constantly wandering father.

So I’m not that much of a fan, but any real fan would be thrilled to get a two-and-a-half hour concert, the songs augmented by the spoken word. Springsteen has the same inability to carry a tune as Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen, but he shares their gift for poetry.

I gradually warmed to the show, the man. Then midway through, his wife, Patti Scialfa, came on for a couple of duets, and I was electrified. Springsteen softened, transforming from wayward rebel into a mature man who was burnished rather than undone by his pain. Springsteen first met Patti when she was performing in the same bar. He recounted that the first words he heard her sing were, “I know something about love.”

Evidently.

The intensity of their music-making, their chemistry burned through the screen. But it was when Springsteen stood alone and began to talk that I was won over:

“Trust in a relationship is a fragile thing,” he began. “Because trust requires allowing others to see as much of our real selves as we have the courage to reveal . . . it means allowing others to see behind our many masks, the masks we wear, overcoming the fear. Or rather, learning how to love and how to trust in spite of it. That takes a little courage, and a very strong partner.

This seemed like a great toast for our daughter’s wedding next year! Until Springsteen continued:

“‘Cause in this life you make your choices, you take your stand, and you awaken from that youthful spell of immortality where it feels like the road is gonna go on forever. And you walk alongside your chosen partner with the clock ticking. And you recognize that life is finite, that you’ve got just so much time. And so together you name the things that will give your life in that time its meaning, its purpose, its fullness, its very reality. And this is what you build together. This is what your love consists of. This is your life. And these are things you can hold onto when the storms come, as they will.”

Hmm, maybe a little dark for first-time newlyweds? But it was perfect for people who have been together for a long time, and later on I read what I’d jotted down thanks to the miracle of closed-caption TV to my husband, who agreed.

The part of Springsteen’s performance that really slayed me, though, was about a surprise visit from his father. Right before Springsteen’s first child was about to be born, his father drove 500 miles unannounced (“As was his style,” Springsteen remarked). They were sitting together at 7:30 a.m. over beers (“That was also his style”), and suddenly, “My dad, never a talkative man, blurted out, ‘You’ve been very good to us.’ And I nodded that I had. And then he says, ‘And I wasn’t very good to you.’”

This fleeting, sort-of apology was almost imperceptible. But Springsteen’s perceptions are keen:

We are ghosts or we are ancestors in our children’s lives. We either lay our mistakes, our burdens upon them and we haunt them. Or we assist them in laying those old burdens down, and we free them from the chains of our own flawed behaviors. And as ancestors, we walk alongside of them, and we assist them in finding their own way, and some transcendence. My father, on that day, was petitioning me for a role in an ancestral life after being a ghost for a long, long time. He wanted me to write a new end to our relationship, and he wanted me to be ready for the new beginning that I was about to experience. It was the greatest moment in my life with my dad. And it was all that I needed.

I knew Springsteen was good. But I didn’t know he was that good. He is an ancestor for us all.

One Year Out

Posted on by
Reply

A year ago, my psychotherapy practice safely operating through a screen, I gave away my office furniture and turned in my keys. I felt lucky about my month-to-month lease but wondered if I was making a mistake. Might things get back to normal with summer here? Premature reopening and optimism soon gave way to an escalating spike in cases and deaths, making it clear that Covid disruption was going to be profound and long-lasting.

As always, I asked my clients how they were doing. After long consideration, one replied, “I’m okay,” before adding, “When things are really okay, that’s when I’ll freak out.”

My client’s remark captures the coping through numbness that has typified the last year and a half. We’ve all experienced the Groundhog Day sensation of being trapped in the same day over and over again. Cut off from our normal lives, we’ve also had to cut off our feelings to survive.

For a long time in therapy, Covid crowded out everything else. Sessions felt like highly repetitive check-ins, with reminders to breathe and practice self-compassion. A close therapist friend and I marveled that people were willing to pay us for this. Feeling helpless and shell-shocked ourselves, we lost sight of the value of simply being there.

Gradually, there was room for deeper exploration. My clients still talked a lot about Covid, but they also talked about the 2020 elections, George Floyd’s murder, and, of course, the issues that brought them to therapy in the first place. Despite not meeting in person, it began to feel like therapy again.

Unsurprisingly, each person’s pandemic experience was filtered through psyche and circumstance. For one client who lives in constant terror at the best of times, leaving the house even while triply masked felt like stepping into a fusillade of invisible Covid bullets. Family dynamics were illuminated through heartbreaking rifts over the virus. People—including me–had to confront their often intense feelings of hostility and judgment toward unmasked people they passed on the street. There was plenty of resilience, but also a quiet unraveling.

In the midst of exhaustion and angst, something else emerged over the last year and a half: greater self-knowledge, clearer boundaries and priorities, a sense of wanting to retain some of what Covid necessitated. So many of my clients have expressed gratitude for life becoming simpler, for not having to engage with activities or people they don’t particularly like, for discovering what’s truly important to them.

With vaccines bringing relief and freedom, we are beginning to feel what we have needed to keep at bay: grief, loss, and anger, but also hope and gratitude. There’s a profound savoring of the little things we used to take for granted.

Yet reopening is also triggering the jitters. How are we to interpret a masked or maskless face? Will letting down our guard lead to a disastrous spike? Must we don social artifice, return to functions and relationships we haven’t missed, invest in elaborate ventilation and contact tracing plans for our offices? What happens now?

Perhaps my client’s prediction is coming true as our numbness begins to thaw: Now that things are better, it’s safe enough to freak out.

Nomadland: Wanderings through Late-Stage Capitalism and the American Psyche

Posted on by
Reply

“The purest form of listening is to listen without memory or desire.”

– Wilfred Bion

I don’t really understand the influential nineteenth century psychoanalyst Bion, but his words suffused me as I watched Nomadland, the widely acclaimed film based on Jessica Bruder’s 2017 book and starring the brilliant Frances McDormand.

An article about Nomadland’s director Chloe Zhao describes the essence of her film-making: “Zhao tried to make herself porous, immersing herself in life there and attempting to get past the familiar narratives offered up to expectant visitors.” This porosity feels akin to Bion’s philosophy. It is hard to achieve. 

Just how hard struck me while watching Nomadland. The film is about a widow, Fern, who loses not only her husband but her job, house, and town in the Great Recession. She takes to the road along with a proliferation of older itinerant Americans who live in their vehicles as they travel from one short-term, low-wage job to another. I expected it to be a searing indictment of America’s winner-take-all system that creates down-and-out losers I could pity from a distance of privileged political righteousness.

There are traces of that, but I encountered something quite different. More accurately, I confronted within myself assumptions and biases that got in the way of truly listening, truly seeing each individual. It reminded me a lot of psychotherapy.

Nomadland begins with an economical background sketch: U.S. Gypsum shuts down its plant in Empire, Nevada. A few months later, the town’s zip code is discontinued. It’s like an intake form; we know the broad outlines and can begin to develop a story, but we are ignorant. Unless we have memory apart from the film, we may not even know about the 2008 housing crash and economic collapse that wiped out so much more than a zip code: people’s jobs, savings, homes, and lives. 

The murkiness of our comprehension is accentuated by the film’s naturalistic lighting: so many scenes are shot in the dark, it is hard to discern what’s happening. We form impressions of the people we meet, but it takes time to get to know them, especially if our preconceptions obscure. 

I expected, for example, to feel the heavy horror of victims frozen in trauma and was instead startled by the film’s gentle sweetness. Grief is etched in people’s faces but so are easy laugh lines and the pleasures of ingenious solutions for cramped spaces. The sense of community and resilience often overshadows the pervasive loneliness and precarity of the nomads’ lives. 

The film seems like both a triumph of empathy for each person’s complex humanity and a glossy valorization of overcoming hardship. One critic notes in “What Nomadland Gets Wrong About Gig Workers” that “it feels less like artistic license than a betrayal of workers’ reality.” Perhaps Zhao, by downplaying the structural societal context, obscures something important. Yet what do our socioeconomic-political lenses miss about what the film gets right about grief, the interplay between closeness and distance, resilience and brokenness, freedom and confinement?

I couldn’t help but ponder Janis Joplin’s, “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose,” or my ambivalence about our resilience fetish. Every time we lionize heroic coping, our complicity in tolerating a system that demands it mounts.

Nomadland’s emphasis on deep character exploration rather than the larger cultural context reminds me of psychotherapy’s shift from the intrapsychic to the interpersonal to the importance of externalities. I think of the optical illusion:

Do we see two profiles or an urn? Is our vision flexible enough to take in the totality? 

*

Originally appeared in Impulse, an online publication of the Northern California Society for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy

The Paranoid Style in American Politics, 2020 Edition

Posted on by
Reply

“The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” historian Richard Hofstadter’s 1964 essay, is as relevant as ever. “American politics has often been an arena for angry minds,” the essay begins. We have certainly seen this, particularly during the Trump years in which grievance, chaos, and division have reigned. At times it has felt crazy (and crazy-making), but Hofstadter is at pains to state that he is borrowing the clinical term “paranoid” to describe “the heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy” among more-or-less normal people that’s existed from the country’s founding through the present day.

Hofstadter’s essay was published in tumultuous times, with the anti-communist fervor of McCarthyism serving as his contemporary exhibit of the paranoid style and its capacity for wreaking havoc.

Hofstadter notes the phenomenon’s “apocalyptic and absolutistic framework”:

Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, what is necessary is not compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish. Since the enemy is thought of as being totally evil and totally unappeasable, he must be totally eliminated.

Hofstadter notes a key phenomenon of the modern right wing–feeling dispossessed (or at least knowing how to manipulate others experiencing or frightened of dispossession):

America has been largely taken away from them and their kind, though they are determined to try to repossess it and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion.

Hofstadter then brings his socio-political commentary into the psychological realm: “It is hard to resist the conclusion that this enemy is on many counts the projection of the self; both the ideal and the unacceptable aspects of the self are attributed to him.”

This dovetails with the hallmark feature of clinical paranoia, as described by Nancy McWilliams in Psychoanalytic Diagnosis (1994,The Guilford Press): “The essence of paranoid personality organization is the habit of dealing with one’s felt negative qualities by projecting them; the disowned attributes then feel like external threats.” (p. 205). McWilliams also notes the reliance on denial and high levels of innate aggression among those who skew paranoid. They struggle with anger, resentment, envy, vindictiveness, and—most of all—fear:

The paranoid stance is a combination of fear and shame. . . Paranoid people use denial and projection so powerfully that no sense of shame remains accessible within the self. The energies of the paranoid person are therefore spent on foiling the efforts of those who are seen as bent on shaming and humiliating them. (p. 208)

Paranoia, whether clinical or socio-political, is difficult to treat. It remains to be seen how much the passions of the moment will dissipate if not constantly stoked, or if a dangerous fringe that has made it into the mainstream has metastasized beyond control.

Screen Time

Posted on by
Reply

I see my client’s face. A bit pixelated, true, but more centrally framed now that the camera angle cutting her off just above the chin last week has been adjusted. I glimpse my own image and “office” in the small rectangle. Oh, no, has the covering slipped from my daughter’s old dresser? How many times will the screen freeze today?

Still, it’s better than nothing. I’m lucky to have a private space, with no children to homeschool or shush—the daughter whose room I’m in is long grown. Cursed, blessed technology exists now, at least for most people with the wherewithal to find their way into somebody’s private practice. I have been on Zoom support sessions for clinicians, and hear horror stories from those who work with people who are impoverished, undocumented, hungry, homeless, imprisoned, sick, overwhelmed by life even in the best of times. Some people they’ve been unable to reach altogether.

The fact that things are so much worse for others is frequently brought up by my clients who can and want to keep seeing me. They feel grateful and guilty. I feel the same way.

Still, we sit and talk. I talked too much at first, trying to compensate for the feeling of disconnection through excess verbiage. Eventually I remembered the value of listening, with an assist from Zoom, which goes haywire when more than one person (or rectangle) is speaking.

Nothing sounds quite right. I read somewhere that the time lag is part of what makes video calls so tiring. Exhaustion turns to panic when suddenly the client’s voice sounds stretched out and underwater, or every other word is dropped. What if they are revealing something crucial, and I miss it? I briefly wonder if bandwidth, too, engages in repression or dissociation, or if it reflects the client’s usual experience of feeling unheard and my own inattentiveness.

Sometimes, I prefer just the phone. I came into the mental health field more than 40 years ago as a crisis line volunteer, and like a duckling, I imprinted on the first thing I was exposed to. I’ve always been struck by how people can often go deeper, be more vulnerable on the phone.

Still, whether via Zoom, doxy, FaceTime, or phone, psychotherapy in the time of Covid has felt a lot like those many check-in calls I fielded on the crisis line. People say the same thing, over and over. It’s the same conversation we’re all having now, as coronavirus infects not only our cells and the economy but every nook and cranny of mental space. My colleague asked two analytically inclined clients if they wished to explore some of what they were delving into before. “Absolutely not!” they both said. I’ve wondered with clients what we might be talking about if we weren’t talking about the pandemic. “That’s a good question!” they say, before returning to coronavirus. Remote video platforms aren’t the only ones with bandwidth issues.

Time feels so strange, endless and fleeting at once. Clients wonder, How long will this last? When can we return? And even if we do, will I ever feel safe? Wondering the same, we do our best to hold people, not knowing how long we can all hold on.

Titanic

Posted on by
Reply

I keep thinking about the film Titanic as we begin to absorb the public health and financial impacts of hitting this coronavirus iceberg.  First there’s the feeling of nothing much happening, or maybe it’s something, but we’ll all be fine. Awareness that the ship is going down creeps in at different paces to different people, and reactions vary. Quick-wittedness, denial, altruism, selfishness, desperation, calm. The entire panoply of human nature unfolds while the orchestra plays on.

What sticks with me the most from the film are the parents in steerage, cuddling with their children in cramped metal cots. Mothers and fathers know they’re all doomed, but they do what they can– speaking in soothing tones to their still-oblivious sons and daughters, telling stories, performing the ritual of nightly prayer, holding them tight. Love creates a cocoon of security: False, but also true.

Psychotherapists call this “felt security.” It reflects not so much the dire dimensions of the actual situation, but the reassuring sustenance drawn from the relationship with a loving, trustworthy, and reliable caregiver. Those parents in steerage send the message, “I am here with you right now, and in this moment together we are okay.”

A lot of us, even those who are not parents, have been doing a lot of that recently as we try to maintain a sense of normalcy and well-being in the midst of a global pandemic and economic meltdown. Posting pictures of sunsets, flowers, the family dog, funny memes; poetry chain letters; neighbors opening their windows to sing, clap, or howl; sewing masks for front-line workers; donating to especially hard-hit groups; buying gift cards from our favorite restaurants and small businesses; moving our normal activities like school, yoga, fitness, book groups, phone banking, work from real life to Zoom—all help knit together a sense of security.

Titanic also depicts a society similar to ours in terms of class and economic inequality. The rich are the most protected while the poor suffer, even though they’re all in the same boat. The unsinkable Molly Brown, a member of the privileged class, decries the entitlement and selfishness of her peers, urging them to make more room on the lifeboats to save far more people. Her plea goes largely unheeded.

We are seeing the same dynamics play out now: just look at the back-and-forth of the recent $2.2 trillion relief bill passed by Congress. Thanks largely to Democrats, more room was created to help the most vulnerable. Far more will be needed.

Just as not everyone perished in the Titanic, we will somehow survive this. But whether or not we view all as deserving a place on the life boats will determine who and how many.

Marriage Story: On the Screen, in Politics, and IRL

Posted on by
Reply

I’ve seen the film Marriage Story twice. Following the uproar over a conversation Warren and Sanders had in 2018 about whether a woman can beat Donald Trump feels like watching it a third time.

Two couples: The fictional Nicole and Charlie, an amicable but divorcing duo with an eight-year-old son who want different things, and the real-life Warren and Sanders, like-minded good friends and political colleagues who both want to be president.

Befitting their long histories of mutual admiration and affection and their desire to protect what matters most (a child, a progressive movement), both couples initially observe non-aggression pacts: mediation instead of divorce lawyers for Nicole and Charlie, close policy alignments and no bad-mouthing for the presidential rivals. But as differences emerge and each seeks advantage in order to prevail, initial vows give way to some definite hot-mic moments.

So it goes in movies, in politics, and in life. The same experience is rarely received or recalled in the same way.

Given that a woman’s electability against Donald Trump has featured prominently in so many political conversations over the past three years, it’s entirely plausible that Sanders told Warren that a woman couldn’t win the presidency in 2020. Or maybe he just pointed out how a lying, sexist Trump would weaponize gender in a society riddled with outright misogyny and unconscious bias. It’s also entirely plausible that Warren heard his words correctly. Or that she didn’t, but understood the implicit message, “better not try,” a warning women hear all the time.

In Marriage Story, Nicole hears this warning, too, and for a long time heeds it. Every time she tries to implement their initial agreement to try living on both coasts, Charlie dismisses her wishes. After all, they are a New York family, with a flourishing theater life there. Besides, LA, television . . . Seriously? Nicole continually acquiesces, losing herself in the process until she has had enough. No wonder she is susceptible to the ruthlessly empathic and effective divorce attorney Nora, who knows exactly how to fashion Nicole’s inchoate dissatisfactions and longings into the story of a reclaimed self.

The shift from acquiescence to “Enough!” seems abrupt, excessive. But it comes from tolerating a lengthy accumulation of insensitivities, intended and inadvertent injuries, and the preeminence of others’ needs and desires until finally we reach a tipping point. Suddenly, we’ve had it.

Getting fed up is at the heart of so much conflict and also of so much necessary change, both personally and socio-politically. It drives not only Nicole’s and Warren’s persistence, but also the #MeTooMovement, Black Lives Matter, Sanders’s (and Trump’s) political appeal, and the success of so many women candidates in the 2018 mid-terms.

“Enough!” It drives a great many of us. For better and for worse.

*

A slightly different version of this piece initially appeared in NCSPP’s Impulse, a publication for therapists. The topicality of the Oscars and the political spat is past, but the themes are timeless.

The Limits of Tolerance

Posted on by
Reply

As the long-time clinical consultant for a crisis hotline, I grapple with an old question that’s arisen with a new and urgent focus: How should we respond to callers who use racist, sexist, homophobic, and other offensive language?

Therapists absorb and metabolize strong affect and hurtful words all the time. Our role is to listen and understand, to find the person behind barriers of hate, fear, and ignorance. We are also taught to meet people where they are.

But what if where they are crosses a line? Ventilation can offer relief, but it can also cause harm to the listener and the speaker. Setting limits is part of good clinical care.

Listening to intensely prejudicial language not only taxes the tolerance of the counselors, but makes them feel complicit in perpetrating trauma and injustice. The staff is skeptical about my talk of metabolizing agents, sometimes simplistically so, but often with good reason.

Hateful speech increases prejudice and dehumanization. Exposure to it has severe and long-lasting effects on both physical and mental health. Not only is it important to protect counselors from burnout and trauma, but also to safeguard those who spew offensive language. “We are not doing our callers any favors by tolerating behaviors that would get them in trouble everywhere else,” a wise African-American long-time staff member always reminds us.

This dilemma extends far beyond the counseling relationship. We are living in an era of vitriol unleashed by the President to devastating effect. Many counselors see it as their duty to challenge such venom on the crisis lines.

No one is proposing cancel or call-out culture, which the black feminist and activist Loretta Ross describes as toxic, a system of “punishment and exile that mirror[s] the prison industrial complex.” Ross goes on to say, “Call-outs are justified to challenge provocateurs who deliberately hurt others, or for powerful people beyond our reach.” This does not describe our callers, who generally come from the least powerful margins of society. The point of our work is to try to reach, not drive people further underground into isolated and silent bunkers of reinforced conviction.

Ross proposes instead a culture of calling-in: “a call-out done with love.” This is what we strive for on the crisis lines. We discuss in our meetings the balance between opening up and shutting down, countertransference, self-care, pitfalls of shame and self-righteousness, ways to limit-set that are constructive rather than retaliatory, the limits of tolerance.

Over the years I’ve reminded the staff of an old African proverb: “Sometimes your mind can be so open that your brains fall out.” Now, they remind me of the same thing, and we stumble on together.

*

Originally published in NCSPP’s Impulse

Ties that Bind

Posted on by
Reply

Tara Westover’s acclaimed memoir, Educated, is about many things: growing up in an extreme fundamentalist family under the thrall of a paranoid father, in an environment both idyllic and abusive; her attempts to break free; and education in both the sense of formal learning and its more expansive meaning–the process of self-discovery.

I happened to listen to Educated after finishing a monthly case conference led by Dr. Jane Rubin about working as a psychotherapist with developmental trauma. The memoir is a compelling example of the complexities we explored: the traumas themselves; the additional and more severe consequences of misattuned responsiveness from a child’s primary caregivers; and the terror of change that makes the dread not to repeat as powerful as the dread to repeat.  

A reviewer summarizes Westover’s dilemma: “Will she come home? Can she come home? Or will home be more damaging to her spirit than the broader dangerous world her father fears?”

A better question is can she leave home? Educated illustrates repeatedly the psychological difficulty and cost of doing so.

In “To Free the Spirit from its Cell,” Bernard Brandschaft (1993) writes of the danger change poses to attachment, and the pathological accommodations necessary to preserve “emotionally enslaving early ties.”

Therapists encounter these dimensions of trauma all the time. Patients who have seemingly progressed but who cannot go further remain, in Brandschaft’s words, “imprisoned in the gulags of their minds.” What might seem a baffling resistance is an expression of identity grounded in fierce loyalty and love.

In a Fresh Air interview, Westover says, “Abuse is foremost an assault on the mind. If you’re going to abuse someone, you have to invade their reality and you have to distort it.” She describes how abuse is normalized and depicted as deserved, how shame is internalized. She was only able to break away after she had “grown her own mind,” become a different self—one who still hopes for, but no longer awaits, signs that her family has changed.

A patient once gave me “The City,’ by C.P. Cavafy (1894), which reads in part:

You said: “I’ll go to another country, go to another shore,

find another city better than this one.

Whatever I try to do is fated to turn out wrong . . .

You won’t find a new country, won’t find another shore.

This city will always pursue you. . .

 As Educated so beautifully attests, it is not impossible to free the spirit from its cell, but it is heartbreakingly difficult.