My mother would have been 98 today had she not died in 1995. She’s been gone
for a long time, but I’ve been thinking about her a lot lately. That’s because
I just retired from nearly 40 years as a psychotherapist. Based on what several
clients said about our work together as we said goodbye, I’ve been appreciating
how much my mother influenced who I was as a therapist.

I grew up in a loving and stable home, secure financially and emotionally.
My experience is much more fortunate than most of my clients’ (and colleagues’,
for that matter). Still, like a lot of therapists, I began my training as the
unpaid, attuned child in my family, skilled at listening and making things
better for others, sometimes subsuming my own needs in the process. In my case,
my first teacher was my loving and mostly functional mother, who was also
depressed and riddled with shame.

And no wonder: My mother’s father died when she was 13. She grew up dirt
poor and was traumatized by the fire-and-brimstone sin-centrism of her Catholic
upbringing—in elementary school, my mother was locked in a dark closet for
hours as punishment by the nuns.

Luckily, her mother raised hell with the school for at least that atrocity. Also luckily, my mother inherited that gutsiness and then some: At her eighth-grade graduation from Catholic school, when all the nuns were exhorting the girls to marry and raise big Catholic families, my mother responded, “Sister, no child of mine will ever be raised Catholic.”

My mother was even more heroically gutsy several years later, when she had her first child, my oldest brother. Her mother had refused to speak to her for marrying a Jew, but my mother kept up a one-sided correspondence, and planned a visit to the woman whose disownment softened upon learning she was now a grandmother. My mother marched alone up the steps to where her mother stood, arms outstretched. Instead of falling for the hug, my mother made her terms very clear: “Unless my husband is welcome in your house, you are never going to see that baby.” My father was welcomed (and my brothers and I were all raised Unitarian, the common Catholic-Jewish-cancellation outcome).

When my mother became pregnant with that baby boy who broke the estrangement logjam, she was 5’9” and weighed 126 pounds. Her doctor urged her to gain weight, which she did in spades. When I came into the world, my mother easily topped 250 on the scale and stayed there—a major source of her low self-esteem and shame for the rest of her life.

But I knew love before I knew shame, oblivious for years to anything but the fact that my mother and I formed our own delicious universe of intense mutual devotion. She generally regarded me as God’s gift to the universe, and I basked in our cozy duo.

This was long before I saw a therapist in my 20s, and learned that what I had mistaken for a great and close relationship was really unhealthy enmeshment (Love’s Executioner is indeed an aptly titled book about therapy). Still, I learned a lot from my mother about love, and security, and good mirroring, as we therapists call it. One of my graduate school professors pronounced that I seemed to be the product of good-enough mothering, and she was right.

I also learned a lot about the black hole of depression, and how to rescue my mother from its gravitational pull. I was good at being the light in my mother’s life when darkness threatened, of jollying her out of a low mood. I also learned a lot about shame—not because my parents ever shamed me, but because of feeling so keenly its hold on her. I eventually internalized society’s cruel derision of fat people and could feel acutely embarrassed about
my mother, but I also remained ever-vigilant of my adopted prejudice and her susceptibility, becoming her stalwart encourager and defender.

Unconsciously, I took these skills into my career as a psychotherapist. Especially as I gained confidence in using my own personality rather than “theory,” I have been more authentic, more encouraging, more attuned to my clients’ shame and determined not to add to it. In my last sessions with clients, several of them remarked that I had helped them feel far less shame. Thanks, Mom.

Thanks, too, for my high tolerance of sitting with the black hole of despair. Several of my clients said I had saved their lives. One, who had come in highly suicidal, remarked that I neither overreacted nor underreacted to her risk. Some of this comes from my early-career
work in suicide prevention. But volunteering on a crisis line as a newly minted college graduate with a BA in English and time on her hands (my ostensible reason for volunteering) is surely inseparable from growing up with a depressed mother I loved and worried about.

Have I mentioned that my mother was quick-witted and hilarious as well as depressed? That, and her outspokenness about injustice, whether at the hands of nuns, her own mother, or society, have been important influences on my personality and career.

Knowing since early childhood how to delicately balance being a comforting, accepting listener and actively injecting a sense of vitality, I’m good at using my humor and sunny nature to keep people away from the brink without resorting to the sanitizing gloss of mandated positivity. In fact, being funny, snarky, and suspicious of excessive positive thinking has been a signature of my therapeutic style. I’ve long urged clients to embrace their unseemly emotions. This has helped people fully inhabit themselves as complex
and vital rather than as “bad.”  So many of my clients have expressed thanks for my snarkiness, and for never making them keep a gratitude journal.

My final sessions with clients after decades in practice were a whirlwind of emotion—mine, theirs, all mixed up. Genuine rather than mandated gratitude flowed—for a long and satisfying career, for being able to help transform people’s pain, for being able to have transformed my own childhood pain into an asset to help myself and help others.

Mostly, though, I was overcome with a feeling of gratitude for my mother—for her love, humor, guidance, and inadvertent training as a therapist.

Thanks, Mom. And Happy Birthday.