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My first therapist, “Annette”, called her, “The Dismayed Woman.”
DW was perpetually disappointed by everyone and everything, especially me. I’ve known her for a long time. Perhaps for as long as memory serves. I used to think she and I were the same person.
Her main thing is contempt. She’ll let out sharp, disappointed sighs, roll her eyes, and turn her head away because she can hardly stand the sight of whatever displeases her, often muttering, “For God’s sake . . . Do I have to do everything?”
When I was an adolescent, she would carve up people’s feelings using her words like a scalpel. “Honesty” is how my insecure, lonely, angry teenaged self described her precision targeted nastiness. As if she could hurt people’s feelings out of her depression. As if she could hurt people’s feelings out of her lonliness. As if she could hurt people’s feelings into success, a boyfriend, happiness.
The moment Annette gave my critical voice a name, The Dismayed Woman, I felt my inner critic become a separate entity from me for the first time in my life. She was this whole other consciousness in my mind. She was not me, afterall, and I was not her. I remember leaving Annette’s office and feeling lighter, as I repeated her name: the Dismayed Woman, the Dismayed Woman.
We, Annette and I, began to treat DW as a co-patient in our sessions. She would stand off to the side, often saying nothing. She didn’t have any complaints about my being in therapy nor did she have any criticism of Annette.
Not yet, DW said under her breath one day.
Annette and I would talk about DW. What displeased her, why she was never pleased, what she complained about.
Some things DW would say to me:
-you’re a terrible mother
-your kids are sociopaths
-your husband’s a loser
-you can’t ask for help
-no one wants to help you
-you have to do it yourself
-you were never going to make it as a writer anyway
-you are getting old
-you’re balding
-you’re a starter wife
-you’re going to be homeless
-you’ll die in poverty
-you are going to die alone
Before that, when I was younger, she would say things like:
-you are alone
-you are alone because you suck
-you’re ugly
-you’re Asian, and therefore you are ugly
-you’re fat
-your father wanted a son, not a daughter
-girls and women suck
-you have to get A’s or no one will know you exist
-you have to get A’s or you’re worthless
-nobody wants to be your friend
-you’re going to be a virgin forever
-stop eating
-throw up
-you suck at throwing up
-don’t eat
Was this my mother’s voice? I asked Annette. Maybe. But, she said, that doesn’t matter because she’s not your mother. She’s a creation of your mind. You made her.
But don’t think for a second of unmaking her, Annette warned during another session, somehow knowing I was thinking of how to get rid of this cunt. She’s here for a reason, Annette said and waited for me to come up with the reasons why I shouldn’t smoke the bitch.
DW was quick to supply me with answers. Her voice, hard and honed with self-righteousness, said, Without me, you would have failed university. You wouldn’t be funny. You would never have left that sociopathic first boyfriend. You wouldn’t have gotten into a Masters program for creative writing. You would be fat. No one would have ever married you and you certainly wouldn’t have kids. Smoke me? Bitch. I made sure you acted right, looked right, talked right, dressed right. You think you made me? HA!
I told Annette that maybe DW probably kept me from failing out of university.
You see! said Annette. It’s no wonder DW still thinks you need her. I mean look at you, Hairee. Even with all your trauma, you managed to get into a Masters of Creative Writing program at a great school, you married a doctor from Harvard, and you have two beautiful kids. She gave me a look that was both hopeful and satisfied. You could have turned out so much worse. She looked at me eagerly, waiting for my agreement.
I couldn’t let her down, so I nodded along and made the right sounds.
This is an example of when a culturally sensitive therapist is essential for therapeutic progress. A culturally senstive therapist would know that an educated, middle class, middle aged Asian immigrant woman like me is steeped in The Model Minority Myth. People like me have been conditioned as part of the conditions of entry to the country/society/culture to be agreeable, passive, demure, quiet, other pleasing, competent, small, clean, tidy, responsible. It’s either Marie Kondo or a pestilential prostitute. It’s a stereotype of Asian women created by Whites to set us up as their proxy in their fight to keep Brown and Black people down. It’s a set up: the minorities fight eachother while Whites stay out of the frey.
Now, while this is the political effect of the Model Minority Myth, the personal effect it had on me was that I swallowed the myth whole and turned myself into a people pleaser, excelling at reading the room, and understanding and meeting White expectations.
A culturally sensitive therapist will know that about an Asian woman and pay attention to her agreeableness.
DW, because she doesn’t give a fuck about any of that Model Minority bullshit, scoffed at Annette and rolled her eyes. I couldn’t blame her. I was thinking the same thing as her: But . . . that husband is trying to ruin my life and take my kids away from me. DW’s take was more along the brutal lines of: Used you up like the starter wife. Kept you around to do all that labor for free for 12 years and now you have no job, no career, and your writing aspirations are a fart in the wind.
I tried to come up with worser case scenarios than what I was actually going through. Do you mean I could have become a drug addict? Or . . . a child molester? I asked. Exactly, she said.
***
Kind of a low bar, no? DW scoffed on our drive home. Is having escaped pedophilic tendencies and crippling drug addiction and poverty supposed to be give you a more grateful perspective on your situation? I had no answers for DW. Jesus Christ.
Let’s just say there were some moments with Annette that gave me . . . pause.
But identifying DW and separating her from my Self provided me with enormous relief. DW wasn’t much bigger or powerful or smarter than I was. She was just a lot more suspicious, paranoid even, cynical, sometimes full on nihilistic, bossy, and contemptuous. Often a bully. I’m just being real, she would say when, for instance, she would declare blanket statements like, Men are losers. Part of me would think, I mean, men can’t all be losers. Right? But she would say it louder, Men are losers! White people suck! People are stupid! I’m just keepin’ it real!
That was her claim to my psychic fame–being really loud and scorning all nuance. This is how we’re gonna survive. Do as I say if you want to live. Then she’d drive me to people please, get good grades, binge and purge, keep a clean house, cook dinners, overlook the redflags since he’s a doctor. She managed to do this by never letting me forget my own bad behaviors. She was brutal, grinding down my self-esteem, shaming me to death, working me to exhaustion.
I remember whenever I would get a story idea and wanted to sit down to start working on it, she would sarcastically say, What are you doing? Get published? As if! If I sat down to read, she would remind me that the house was a mess. And what was I doing reading when I had kids to raise, weight to lose, laundry to fold? I stopped reading for several years. If I was listening to a podcast while cooking dinner, with the kids watching something on Netflix, she would hold the stopwatch counting down the minutes before the episode would be over and hissing at me to hurry up because screen time rots kids’ brains! You’re being a bad mother! On my way to pick up the kids after school and dreading the hours until bedtime, she would tell me to not fuck up.
The first time I asked DW to hold my beer:
Every night my kids and I sit down in the living room to read for 20 minutes. It started out as assigned homework and then becsme a family ritual. It is by far one of my greatest accomplishments, shepherding my kids to love reading.
One night, back when the kids’ dad was still around, he wanted to share some factoid from his book. DW immediately sighed. And just as she was about to launch into some unsolicited advice about not interrupting the kids reading and to keep his anecdotes to himself, I gave DW a sharp look and she stepped back, arms crossed, dubious as to my approach, and closed her mouth.
I decided to observe instead. The kids listened to their dad read a passage about Bruce Lee developing a martial art technique called jeet kune do, a blend of ancient kung fu, fencing, boxing, and philosophy. I could feel DW’s eyes eyes rolling so far back behind her head that she must have gotten a good look at our brain stem. White dude talking about the only Asian celebrity hero he could think of to his half Korean kids. At the same time, Bruce Lee was the shit. A martial arts genius and philosopher was not bad for a role model. And look at that: the kids were interested and they were having a moment of connection with their dad.
Afterwards, I gave her a look that said: one point, Hairee. Zero, DW.
Had DW been permitted to speak . . . . And then the moment of epiphany: she needed my permission to act. It had always been mine to give. If she took over, it was because I let her. In fact I had let her take control on my behalf for so long, I conflated DW as me.
And that’s the first time I experienced that greatest of freedoms: knowing something about myself that had previously been unkown to me.
***
Richard Schwartz is the founder of Internal Family Systems (IFS). IFS offers a bunch of terminology that therapists can introduce to patients to help them talk about their problematic thoughts or behaviors. Those thoughts and behaviors get ascribed to parts of the patient separate from what Schwartz calls the Core Self. The Core Self is the wise, compassionate, empathic, reasonable, regulated adult that Dick says is in all of us. When we don’t act or think like that full grown, well adjusted adult, it’s becuase another part of us is in charge.
ASIDE: IFS is currently a really popular parts work modality in psychotherapy in the US. But parts work, thinking of the human being as made up of different parts, has been around for millennia, seen in ancient spiritual and philosophical traditions like Hinduism (one of the oldest, if not the oldest religions) to the more recent ideas of Freud, namely, id, ego, and superego.
While I mostly find professional terminology off putting, they can be handy as shorthand for more efficient communication. So here are some from IFS:
There are the Exiles who are the wounded parts that hold the trauma or pain; Managers, who protect me by preventing harm; Firefighters, who react when something bad happens; and the Self, who is that adult me, who has always been there, undefiled by trauma and pain.
DW is a Manager. For decades, she has made sure I passed my courses, earned my degrees, filled out the forms, applied for jobs, studied for the standardized tests, arrived at my appointments on time, behaved politely, oberved expectations of the model minority myth. She’s also the one who told me to stop eating, to drink more so I would be likable, to binge and purge, the one who told me that if I’m no skinny, smart, and funny, what are you good for?
My Self, meanwhile, was in the trunk of the car, while my manager was left to her own devices to figure out how to drive with no license or navigation instructions. My Firefighter, who deserves a blog post of her own, sitting on the front passenger seat, would sometimes grab hold of the wheel thinking she was driving us to safety, but took us further onto inhospitable roads. My Exiles huddled on the floor in the back, terrified to speak or move. My Self wasn’t there to help not because I chose to be locked up in the trunk.
Then my parts, me included, we had an emergency on the road. The road of a bad marriage we’d been on for over a decade got bombed by substance abuse and narcissism, leading to separation and divorce. My parts scrambled to figure out another route. So loud were their wails of despair and terror and rage, I woke up in the trunk. My Self, disoriented and suffering from atrophy from laying hidden for so long, got DW to let me out. The parts had no choice but to wait for me to get my bearings as I sat there in the back seat with my Exiles. Probably a good idea. They stared: who the fuck are you? I shook my head. I had no fucking clue.
Enter Annette. She was the first to identify DW. This was as far as she could guide me in my therapeutic journey. So I went and found another therapist who could take me further along.
Enter “Jackie.” With Jackie I was introduced to my Firefighters and my Exiles. She also helped me put my Self back together. Unlike what Schwartz says about the Self always being inside of us, my Self had to be put together from the thousands of fragments of me I had dispersed for the use and abuse of other people over the course of my life. During a sesssion with Jackie, I literally saw hundreds and thousands of cubes of me, stretched out over 47 years of time and space, slowly but surely being wound back to me from the single thread that kept each piece connected to me all this time. They returned to me, their home, stacked themselves one upon the other, and reconstitute my Self.
It was only then that I was able to get the Exiles off the floor, get them buckled into their car seats next to the Firefighters. DW, my Manager, insisted on sitting in the front passenger seat. Fine by me. And my Self, I, was finally behind the wheel.
None of them were immediately convinced of my driving and navigation abilities. Each of them would reach for the wheel sometimes and chuck me in the back like I weighed nothing. But over time, they did that less often. I also got better at telling them get out my driver’s seat, and put on their seatbelts.
DW, especially, is quite comfortable in the passenger seat. Sometimes she’ll even sit in the back with the Exiles because she no longer hates their guts. Her hate came from feeling the need to tell them shut the fuck up when they cried or complained. She hated herself for it and hated them for making her hate herself. I mean I get it: she thought she was doing them a solid by keeping them from getting screamed and yelled at and beaten for having needs, but now that I’m taking care of all that she doesn’t have to parent them (badly). I’m the parent and she knows I’ve got this.
DW has changed a lot. For instance she was ecstatic when I purchased a Roomba on Amazon Prime Day, telling me I deserved this and way cheaper than using my time to vacuum everyday. My time? I asked, unable to believe my ears. When did she ever value my time? Yeah, you’re time is too important. You’ve got better things to do with it. Like writing this blog post. Now get going!
No guilt. No shame. Nowadays when I write, I lose my sense of time. Because I’m allowed to. By DW. By me.