My therapist graduated me
BY SÉAMUS ISAAC FEY
and what’s to come of my personality
if I can’t make jokes about being broken.
When my therapist asked if I thought I was
healed, I said maybe. What does a healed person do?
Think of his mother as he stirs
the red sauce in the pan with the wooden spoon.
How, on his brother’s eighth birthday, she threw
one just like it across the room screaming
you’ll find my body in the forest.
Does someone healed think that his mother’s
safest violence was directed toward herself?
How that was the best option in a basket
of cruel impossibilities. Every kitchen takes on the shape
of your mother’s sometimes. Consider the linguistics
of domestic— pertaining to the house, the running
of a home, family— and violence,
which has a definition and an aftermath.
How, when the two form a confluence,
you may find yourself haunted by the countertop,
or the ghost of your alive-mother (who is dead
to you) smoking a cigarette on the side of the couch
that she liked when she was really thinking.
Does fear strike you? Because you knew,
between her thinking or catatonic, the far
more dangerous phase was the thinking.
If you opened your mouth the wrong way
(sometimes the wrong way was open at all)
her thinking ended in a new scar of yours. Mine.
Have I healed if sometimes I’m just sitting there
and, unknowingly, I’ve entered a portal that tastes
like the past but has none of its materiality?
Or is the act of coming back here, when it’s time to leave
the portal, to this earth, an act of the healed? Maybe.
Thank god
BY SÉAMUS ISAAC FEY
My brother says when gratitude flows through him, he knows it
is god. I’m not religious, but I don’t mind if a god is the source
of my brother’s gratitude, part of his will to live. Thanks, god.
I am, however, religiously annoying— Is your seatbelt on?
I’ll ask, mid conversation. Did you call your guidance counselor?
What did you eat this morning? The questions I offer in prayer.
When I think of god I think about Plato. How he called poets god’s
mouthpiece (pejorative.) He felt that we don’t really think or create,
we simply channel the divine. Sometimes I think I feel god at dawn,
writing my morning pages. Or in the evening, when a line strikes
me as I’m trying to rest. How do I sleep at night? Thanks for asking,
I don’t. I’m the oldest of nine. There are eight extensions of me
out there in this treacherous world. Every day they wake up, I find god.
EMDR
BY SÉAMUS ISAAC FEY
What’s coming up for you now? My therapist asks.
Anger, I say.
For your child self or for you right now?
Yes. Then, I laugh.
What’s funny?
EMDR has brought up a lot of toxic masculine urges. Like, for example, on the current memory of my biological father— what keeps coming up is that I wish he would try me now. With what I’m bench pressing, I know if he spoke to me or put his hands on me like he did when I was helpless, I’d give myself the chance I never got.
And what would you do?
I’d clock him.
Okay let’s go for it. Punch him in his face.
EMDR involves bilateral stimulation, and there are a few ways to do this. In my sessions, my eyes follow a ball that moves from left to right on my screen, stimulating both sides of the body. I can make the ball whatever color I want, or even an animal, of which sometimes I choose the dragon or the crane. I imagine the animals are intended for children. Today, to switch it up, I picked the green ball. I watch the ball and step into the memory. My child self sits on the windowsill, my father is a few feet away, gearing up to hurt me. Then, I step in between them and proceed with the punching. The ball on the screen stops moving.
What’s coming up for you now?
Well, it was glorious and
And?
And I’m thinking of Confucius: “Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves.” And while of course I’m very strong and manly and all that, I’m also a soft hearted intellectual. I know where that path goes.
Go with that.
I watch the green ball until it stops, the top of my head begins to ache. I’ve learned to take this as a sign the therapy is doing its mysterious work. The work I can feel is happening, yet its mechanics are such that the body keeps a secret from me.
What’s coming up now?
The Menendez Brothers. How they put a stop to it. How they felt they were out of other options. How it cost them so much of their lives. How I can’t go back and take tiny me away, and since ending my parents’ reign of terror isn’t on the table either, I think the best action is to sit with my tiny self.
Go with that.
I watch the ball and sit with the little one on the windowsill. Perhaps it’s my imagination, but I feel a little lighter, just knowing he’s no longer alone.
What’s coming up for you now?
He’s no longer alone.
Go with that.
It is July. Meaning last month was June. Meaning I was supposed to be celebrating. There’s a reason they recommend against this therapy if you don’t have a solid foundation, as it can take you to dark places you’ve been. They also recommend against it if you struggle with active suicidal ideation. I would call mine dormant, always underneath but unlikely to burn down the town. In June, I was seventeen again, solidly unstable. This is to say, I spent all month wanting to kill myself. You can’t say these things in therapy.
Where’d you go?
I stayed right there, with him, I say. My therapist pauses. She’s good at her job. She knows when I’m omitting. Sometimes she pushes, sometimes she knows I won’t budge.
Go with that.
Once, when omitting, I told my therapist I didn’t think it was her business. That I am entitled to a certain piece of myself that is kept away from everyone. That it is my contingency plan, my survival space. I didn’t mean to sound defensive. Of course, I sounded defensive.
What’s coming up for you now?
I clocked him again.
Okay. Go with that.
It is July. And I’m mostly okay, aside from the anger. I give my therapist the PG version of what I must. This is to say, I never really wanted to clock my father, I wanted to kill him. There’s a slight difference. And I didn’t always want to kill him myself, most of the time I just didn’t want him to make it home. You can’t say these things in therapy, can you.
What’s coming up for you now?
