Integrity Versus Despair

Rita is sitting across from me in her smart slacks and sensible shoes giving a detailed commentary on why her life is hopeless. Her session, like most of her sessions, feels like a dirge, which is all the more confounding because between bouts of insisting that nothing will ever change, she has been making changes both minute and monumental.

Back when she and Myron were friends, pre-Randie, Myron had made Rita a website so that she could catalog her art online. This way, he said, she could keep her pieces organized and also share them with others. But Rita didn’t think she needed a website. “Who’s going to look at it?” she asked.

“I will,” Myron said. Three weeks later, Rita had a website with exactly one visitor. Well, two, if you counted Rita who, truth be told, loved it. It looked so professional. Those first weeks, she spent hours each day clicking around on her site, coming up with ideas for new projects, imagining them on display. But her excitement waned when Myron started dating Randie. Why bother posting anything new now? She didn’t know how to work the darn thing anyway.

Then one afternoon, Rita ran into Myron and Randie holding hands in the lobby, and, to make herself feel better, she hightailed it to the art-supply store and splurged on materials. Carrying the goods up to her apartment, she tripped over a couple of kids who darted out from nowhere. The bags of brushes, acrylics, and gouaches, the canvases and cartons of clay—all of it came tumbling down, along with Rita, who was caught at the last second by a strong pair of hands.

The hands belonged to the kids’ father, Kyle, whom Rita had seen many times through her peephole but had never met. He was the dad from the “Hello, family” apartment across from hers, and he’d saved his neighbor from a potential broken hip.

After Kyle asked the kids to apologize for not looking where they were going, they all gathered up Rita’s supplies and carried them into her apartment. There, in her living room turned art studio, they saw Rita’s work covering the entire space—portraits and abstracts on easels, ceramics near a potter’s wheel, charcoals in progress hanging from a board on the wall. The kids were in heaven. And Kyle was stunned. You have talent, he said. Real talent. You should sell these.

They went back to their apartment, and shortly after, when Kyle’s wife, Anna, arrived home (“Hello, family!”), the kids begged their mom to go across the hall with them to see “the art lady’s” living room. Rita was stationed, as usual, at the peephole, and the knock came before Rita had a chance to back away. She counted to five, asked, “Who is it?” and greeted them with mock surprise.

Soon Rita was teaching art to Sophia and Alice, ages five and seven, and often joined the “Hello, family” for, well, family dinner. One afternoon, Anna came home and yelled, “Hello, family!” to Sophia and Alice, who were painting in Rita’s living room. The kids called back, “Hello!” and then Alice turned to Rita and asked why she didn’t answer when their mom said hello.

“I’m not family,” Rita said matter-of-factly, to which Alice replied, “Yes, you are. You’re our California grandma!” The girls’ grandparents lived in Charleston and Portland. They visited often, but it was Rita who saw them nearly every day.

Anna, meanwhile, had hung one of Rita’s paintings over the sofa in the family’s living room. Rita also painted two custom pieces for the kids’ room—a dancer for Sophia and a unicorn for Alice. The girls were elated. Anna tried to pay Rita for her work, but Rita refused, insisting they were gifts. Finally, Kyle, a computer programmer, convinced Rita to let him add a feature to her website, an online store. He sent out an email to the parents of Sophia’s and Alice’s classmates, and soon Rita was taking orders for children’s custom portraits. One parent also purchased ceramics for her dining room.

Given all of these developments, I had expected Rita’s mood to improve. She was coming alive, leading a less constricted life. She had people to talk to every day. She was sharing her artistic talent with others who admired it. She wasn’t invisible in the same way she’d been when she first came to see me. But still, her pleasure or joy or whatever she felt (“It’s nice, I suppose,” was the most she would say) lived beneath a dark cloud, a running litany of how if Myron really meant what he’d said in the parking lot at the Y, he would have dated Rita instead of that disgusting Randie in the first place, how no matter how kind they were, the hello-family weren’t really her family, and how she would still die alone.

She seemed to be stuck in what the psychologist Erik Erikson termed despair.

In the mid-1900s, Erikson came up with eight stages of psychosocial development that still guide therapists in their thinking today. Unlike Freud’s stages of psychosexual development, which end at puberty and focus on the id, Erikson’s psychosocial stages focus on personality development in a social context (such as how infants develop a sense of trust in others). Most important, Erikson’s stages continue throughout the entire lifespan, and each interrelated stage involves a crisis that we need to get through to move on to the next. They look like this:

• Infant (hope)—trust versus mistrust

• Toddler (will)—autonomy versus shame

• Preschooler (purpose)—initiative versus guilt

• School-age child (competence)—industry versus inferiority

• Adolescent (fidelity)—identity versus role confusion

• Young adult (love)—intimacy versus isolation

• Middle-aged adult (care)—generativity versus stagnation

• Older adult (wisdom)—integrity versus despair

The eighth stage is where people Rita’s age generally find themselves. Erikson maintained that, in later years, we experience a sense of integrity if we believe we have lived meaningful lives. This sense of integrity gives us a feeling of completeness so that we can better accept our approaching deaths. But if we have unresolved regrets about the past—if we think that we made poor choices or failed to accomplish important goals—we feel depressed and hopeless, which leads us to despair.

It seemed to me that Rita’s current despair about Myron was tied to an old despair, and that was why it was hard for her to enjoy any of the ways her life had expanded. She was used to viewing the world from a place of deficit, and as a result, joy felt foreign to her. If you’re used to feeling abandoned, if you already know what it’s like for people to disappoint or reject you—well, it may not feel good, but at least there are no surprises; you know the customs in your own homeland. Once you step into foreign territory, though—if you spend time with reliable people who find you appealing and interesting—you might feel anxious and disoriented. All of a sudden, nothing’s familiar. You have no landmarks, nothing to go by, and all of the predictability of the world you’re used to is gone. The place you came from may not be great—it might, in fact, be pretty awful—but you knew exactly what you’d get there (disappointment, chaos, isolation, criticism).

I’ve talked about this with Rita, about how for so much of her life she wanted not to be invisible, to be seen, and now this was happening—in her relationship with her neighbors, in the people who bought her art, and in Myron’s declaration of his romantic interest. These people enjoyed her company, admired her, desired her, saw her—and yet she seemed unable to acknowledge that anything positive was happening.

“Are you waiting for the other shoe to drop?” I ask. There’s a term for this irrational fear of joy: cherophobia (chero is the Greek word for “rejoice”). People with cherophobia are like Teflon pans in terms of pleasure—it doesn’t stick (though pain cakes on them as if to an ungreased surface). It’s common for people with traumatic histories to expect disaster just around the corner. Instead of leaning into the goodness that comes their way, they become hypervigilant, always waiting for something to go wrong. That might be why Rita still fumbled for tissues in her purse even though she knew a fresh box was beside her on the table. Better not to get used to a full box of tissues, or a surrogate family next door, or people purchasing your art, or the man you’re dreaming about giving you a big fat kiss in the parking lot. Don’t delude yourself, sister! The second you get too comfortable—whoosh!—it will all go away. For Rita, joy isn’t pleasure; it’s anticipatory pain.

Rita looks up at me, nodding. “Exactly,” she says. “The other shoe always drops.” It did when she got to college, when she married an alcoholic, when she had two more chances at love and those went out the window too. It did when her father died and she finally—finally!—started to have a relationship with her mother, only to have her mother diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, after which Rita had to care for this woman who no longer recognized her for twelve long years.

Of course, Rita didn’t have to bring her mother into her apartment during those years—she chose to because somehow her misery served her. At the time it never occurred to her to ask if she had an obligation to take care of her mother when her mother hadn’t taken care of her while she was growing up. She didn’t grapple with that toughest of tough questions: What do I owe my parents, and what do they owe me? She could have gotten outside help for her mother. Rita considers this as we talk, but then she says that if she had to do it over, she’d do it all the same.

“I got what I deserved,” she explains. She deserves this misery for all of her crimes—ruining her kids’ lives, lacking compassion for her second husband’s grief, never getting her own life together. What feels horrible to her are her recent glimmers of happiness. She feels like a fraud, like somebody who won the lottery but stole the ticket. If the people who have come into her life lately really knew her, they would be disgusted. They would run for the hills! She’s disgusted. And even if she were to somehow fool them for a time, a few months, a year, who knows, how can she be happy when her kids are so sad—and because of her? That doesn’t seem fair, does it? How can someone have done something so awful and still be asking for love?

This, she says, is why there’s no hope for her. She balls up a tissue in her hand. Too much has happened. Too many mistakes were made.

I look at Rita and notice how young she appears as she tells me this—her cheeks puffed out, her arms folded across her chest. I picture her as a girl in her childhood home, her red hair pulled back neatly with a headband, wondering if she was at fault for her parents’ distance from her, brooding over it alone in her room. Are they mad at me? Have I done something to upset them, to cause them to take so little interest in me? They’d waited so long to finally have a child; had she not lived up to what they had hoped for?

I think, too, of Rita’s four children. Of their father, the lawyer, who could be so fun one minute and drunk and abusive the next. Of their mother, Rita, removed, making excuses for their father, offering promises on his behalf that they knew were lies. How confusing and harrowing their childhoods must have been. How furious they must be now. How they must not want to deal with their mother coming to them, as she had several times over the years, crying and begging for a relationship. Whatever she wants, they’d likely think, it was for one reason and one reason only: for her sake, always for her sake. My guess was that Rita’s children wouldn’t talk to her because they couldn’t give her the one thing she seemed to want even if she’d never asked for it directly: forgiveness.

Rita and I had talked about why she hadn’t protected her children, why she’d let her husband hit them, why she’d spent her time reading or painting or playing tennis or bridge instead of being present for them. And once we got past the explanations she’d given herself for years, we arrived at something she hadn’t been aware of: Rita envied her children.

Rita wasn’t unusual in this. Take the case of a mother who came from a household with little money and who now admonishes her child every time she gets a new pair of shoes or a new toy by saying, “Don’t you realize how lucky you are?” A gift wrapped in a criticism. Or consider the father who takes his son to visit prospective colleges and spends the entire tour of the college that he himself dreamed of attending but was rejected from making negative comments about the tour guide, the curriculum, the dorms—not only embarrassing his son but possibly hurting his chances of admission.

Why do parents do this? Often, they envy their children’s childhoods—the opportunities they have; the financial or emotional stability that the parents provide; the fact that their children have their whole lives ahead of them, a stretch of time that’s now in the parents’ pasts. They strive to give their children all the things they themselves didn’t have, but they sometimes end up, without even realizing it, resenting the kids for their good fortune.

Rita envied her kids their siblings, their comfortable childhood home with the pool, their opportunities to go to museums and travel. She envied their young, energetic parents. And it was, in part, her unconscious envy—her fury at the unfairness of it all—that kept her from allowing them to have the happy childhood she didn’t, that kept her from saving them in the way she so badly wanted to be saved when she was young.

I’d brought up Rita in my consultation group. Despite her gloomy, Eeyore-like exterior, I told my colleagues, she was warm and interesting, and because I was free of the history her kids shared with her, I could enjoy Rita the way I’d enjoy a friend of a parent. I liked her quite a bit. But could her children really be expected to forgive her?

Did I forgive her? the group asked. I thought of my son and felt sick at the idea of anyone hitting him, of my ever allowing that to happen.

I wasn’t sure.

Forgiveness is a tricky thing, in the way that apologies can be. Are you apologizing because it makes you feel better or because it will make the other person feel better? Are you sorry for what you’ve done or are you simply trying to placate the other person who believes you should be sorry for the thing you feel completely justified in having done? Who is the apology for?

There’s a term we use in therapy: forced forgiveness. Sometimes people feel that in order to get past a trauma, they need to forgive whoever caused the damage—the parent who sexually assaulted them, the burglar who robbed their house, the gang member who killed their son. They’re told by well-meaning people that until they can forgive, they’ll hold on to the anger. Granted, for some, forgiveness can serve as a powerful release—you forgive the person who wronged you, without condoning his actions, and it allows you to move on. But too often people feel pressured to forgive and then end up believing that something’s wrong with them if they can’t quite get there—that they aren’t enlightened enough or strong enough or compassionate enough.

So what I say is this: You can have compassion without forgiving. There are many ways to move on, and pretending to feel a certain way isn’t one of them.

I once had a client named Dave who had a problematic relationship with his father. His father was, by his account, a bully—demeaning, critical, and full of himself. He had alienated both of his sons from a young age and had a distant and contentious relationship with them as adults. When his father was dying, Dave was fifty years old, married with children of his own, and he struggled with what to say at his father’s funeral. What would ring true? And then he told me that as his father lay on his deathbed, he had reached out for his son’s hand and said, out of the blue, “I wish I’d treated you better. I was a prick.”

Dave was livid—did his father expect absolution now, at the eleventh hour? The time to make repairs, he felt, was long before you left this earth, not on the eve of your departure; you don’t automatically get the gift of closure or forgiveness from a deathbed confession.

He couldn’t help himself. “I don’t forgive you,” Dave told his dad. He hated himself for saying this, regretted it the second it came out. But after all the pain his father had put him through and all the work he’d done to create a good life for himself and his family, he’d be damned if he was going to soothe his father now with a sugary lie. He’d spent his childhood lying about how he felt. Still, Dave wondered, what kind of person says this to his dying father?

Dave had started to apologize, but his father interrupted him. “I understand,” he said. “If I were you, I wouldn’t forgive me either.”

And then the strangest thing happened, Dave told me. Sitting there holding his father’s hand, Dave felt something shift. He felt, for the first time in his life, genuine compassion. Not forgiveness, but compassion. Compassion for the sad dying man who must have had his own pain. And it was that compassion that allowed Dave to speak authentically at his father’s funeral.

It was compassion, too, that helped me help Rita. I didn’t have to forgive her for what she’d done with her children. As with Dave’s father, that was up to Rita to reckon with. We may want others’ forgiveness, but that comes from a place of self-gratification; we are asking forgiveness of others to avoid the harder work of forgiving ourselves.

I thought of something Wendell had said to me after I’d listed my own regrettable missteps that I took great pleasure in punishing myself for: “How long do you think the sentence for this crime should be? A year? Five? Ten?” Many of us torture ourselves over our mistakes for decades, even after we’ve genuinely attempted to make amends. How reasonable is that sentence?

It’s true that in Rita’s case, her children’s lives were significantly affected by their parents’ failures. She and her children would always feel the pain of their shared pasts, but shouldn’t there be some redemption? Did Rita deserve to be persecuted day after day, year after year? I wanted to be realistic about the considerable scars they all bore, but I didn’t want to be Rita’s warden.

I can’t help but think about her evolving relationship with the hello-family girls next door; what if she had been able to offer her four children what she offers them?

I put the question to Rita: “What should your sentence be, as you approach seventy, for the crimes you committed in your twenties and thirties? They were significant crimes, yes. But you’ve felt remorse for decades, and you’ve tried to make repairs. Shouldn’t you have been released by now, or at least out on parole? What do you think is a fair sentence for your crimes?”

Rita considers this for a moment. “Life in prison,” she says.

“Well,” I say. “That’s what you got. But I’m not sure that a jury that included Myron or the hello-family would agree.”

“But the people I care most about, my kids—they’ll never forgive me.”

I nod. “We don’t know what they’re going to do. But it doesn’t help them in any way for you to be miserable. Your misery doesn’t change their situation. You can’t lessen their misery by carrying it for them inside you. It doesn’t work that way. There are ways for you to be a better mother to them at this point in all of your lives. Sentencing yourself to life in prison isn’t one of them.” I notice that I have Rita’s attention. “There’s only one person in this entire world who benefits from you not being able to enjoy anything good in your life.”

Rita’s forehead becomes a series of lines. “Who?”

“You,” I say.

I point out to her that pain can be protective; staying in a depressed place can be a form of avoidance. Safe inside her shell of pain, she doesn’t have to face anything, nor does she have to emerge into the world, where she might get hurt again. Her inner critic serves her: I don’t have to take any action because I’m worthless. And there’s another benefit to her misery: she may feel that she stays alive in her kids’ minds if they relish her suffering. At least somebody has her in mind, even in a negative way—and in this sense, she’s not completely forgotten.

She looks up from her tissue, as if considering the pain that she’s carried for decades in an entirely new way. For maybe the first time, Rita seems to see the crisis she has been in the midst of—the battle between what Erik Erikson called integrity and despair.

Which, I wonder, will she choose?