Episode 375 : From between the shadows

Tewksbury: Alright, refresh my memory. Wasn't it your mother who first sparked your interest in psychiatry?

Frasier: Yes, it was. I remember the exact day. I was eight. I'd come home crying because one of the older boys had thrown my copy of "The Fountainhead" under a bus. My mother explained to me it wasn't because he didn't like the way I walked or because I wore an ascot to school, it was because he didn't like himself. And at that very moment, I became a student of human behavior. It was as if someone had given me an instruction manual explaining why people acted the way they did.

Tewksbury: Not to mention a way to distance yourself from painful emotions.

As a youngster, I was always interested in human behaviour. But instead of taking up psychiatry, I decided to venture into a new world of computer programming because, as I said to a family friend at that time, I find it easier to tell machines what to do than convince humans.

One would think that with an understanding of human behaviour, it would be easier to convince others, but it turned out that I used it to understand why people behaved, and more to understand why people behaved in a way that would hurt me. During my impressionable teenage years and later till mid-twenties, I was willing to understand why anyone would hurt me, and put it down to “their frustrations and inability to cope”.

When I began watching episodes of Frasier, my interest in human behaviour was re-kindled and I began deriving more behaviour patterns out of it. I picked up some armchair psychology, and soon terms like “validation”, “trauma”, “resentment”, “emotional scars” and “sibling rivalry” became everyday vocabulary.

But something lurked beneath the surface and I was not able to put my finger on it. The maturity that came with onset of the 30s and arrival of Anna into my life quelled some of that uneasiness but I could not find out what it was about.

One evening, Anna and I were watching an episode where the young protagonist was lashing out at his sports coach, even though the coach was the person he most looked up to and respected. ‘Why would he do that?’ Anna asked, probably to herself.

‘He has a fear of abandonment. He has a difficulty in accepting his father who left him and joined the army, his mother died when he was young and his only role model was his coach who left town to take up employment elsewhere. He believes that anyone he gets close to…’ and then I paused before saying ‘...will eventually leave him’.

That was when it hit me. All my life I used to claim that the people I cared for would leave me at some point in their life. Whenever I pointed out instances, I would be consoled that people have reasons for doing what they did.

But it never made me feel better and I never understood until then that I was suffering from a fear of abandonment. An irrational fear that instilled itself in me from the time I knew I had a sibling. Those times when I was sure that my parents preferred Edwina to me, to the times when I was convinced that cousins and relatives were happier to see her than me. The things I would pretend to say in jest while a small part of me believed what I said. While it did not lead to a breakdown in the sibling relationship between us, family has this uncanny ability to make things worse.

Lilith: Which one of us do you suppose humiliated him more?
Frasier: Oh, I think I did. I've been trying to console myself with the idea that without embarrassing parents, there'd be no psychology. Poor kid.

It also brought to light that I was more emotionally flawed that I had ever imagined. A battle is half-won when you know who the enemy is and are prepared for it. But I did not expect to discover just how much the fear had manifested itself. The more I thought about it, the more instances I could recall: of friends who had “left” me when they changed schools, or of colleagues who “left” me when they took up employment elsewhere. It got worse when I recalled my doomed relationships where the girls would “leave” or “reject” me (I was sure they did that because they found some quality lacking in me), and led me to a point where I left someone before she could because I was convinced that she would.

Anna would always demand to know why I would rarely let her go alone and always insisted on accompanying her. ‘What if something happens to you while crossing the road? Motorists are so careless these days’ would be my response. Having witnessed how she was nearly mowed down while crossing the road, I was determined not to let her out of my sight.

But unknown to me, it was masking a deeper fear of her “leaving” me if something were to happen. That fear came out in the open one night when I had to take her to the emergency ward at a nearby hospital when she complained of chest pain. The doctor said it was probably just indigestion and the saner part of me believed it too. But that night, I felt like a little boy lost in a ward full of sick people connected to clanging medical instruments that sounded like death knells.

Notions of inadequacy were nurtured by my decisions at school and college, and further fed by lack of application at work. The last five years of professional achievement went a long way in laying those ghosts to rest, but sometimes they come out to say boo.

Then one day the trauma of being hurt in my relationships came to the fore when I realised how much baggage I was carrying. ‘She really hurt you, didn’t she?’ Anna remarked when I made some offhand remark about women. I stopped in shock because we both knew what she was talking about, and until then I was sure I had put it all behind me. I had not expected her to peel off all those layers in an instant and stick a mirror into my face. And with that started an attempt to forgive and forget, but every time the past re-surfaces it is an uphill climb once again.

I am more flawed than I pretend to be, and these days I wonder what else is left to know. Sometimes I wonder if I need a therapist to get me out of the mess I created, or just continue with the therapist I have been using all these years.