Quiet Room - Lori Schiller [99]
“C'mon Lori, what's up? ”
She didn't need to prompt me. It all came pouring out. All my fear and pain and self-loathing for the strange, inexplicable feelings I was having for Dr. Fischer.
Dr. Doller spoke very carefully. What I was feeling wasn't unusual at all, she said. Nor was it wrong or bad. I wasn't sick for feeling that way, and I shouldn't berate myself for it. In fact, my feelings were probably helpful, she said. If I wanted to, I could learn from them. Therapy is like that she said. In the course of therapy, a therapist takes on many different roles to the patient. She can be mother, father, teacher, sister, brother, friend—even lover. The feelings I was feeling were good. They gave me a chance to explore. I should use them, and not feel ashamed of them.
Tension poured out of my body. It was as if she had punctured a terrible boil. Dr. Doller had taken all the badness in me and turned it into good. I was grateful to her, and at the same time pleased with myself for having confided in her.
Sometimes I got angry with Dr. Doller. I found the times she went on vacation especially difficult. While she was gone I would shred money—dollar bills, ten-dollar bills, twenty-dollar bills if I could get my hands on them—using the pun in her name to vent my hostility symbolically.
But sometimes—unlike Dr. Fischer, who kept a therapist's professional detachment—Dr. Doller got mad at me too. Once when I refused to take my medications she lost her cool and hollered at me. She threatened to take away my weekend pass unless I took the medicine the way I was supposed to. Later on she calmed down and apologized. I took the medicine.
The Voices reacted differently to Dr. Doller than to anyone else. They challenged me to destroy her the same way they ordered me to kill Dr. Fischer. They threatened that if I continued to see Dr. Doller, they would put both her and me in hell. But somehow it was different. Somehow I could feel in the Voices a fear that I had never felt in them before.
While I was sitting with Dr. Doller, I'd be in constant fights with the Voices. There were two of them in particular who were my enemies and hers. There they were, the two of them, howling warnings to me about her. But where the Voices usually yelled at me to kill someone before that person killed me, this time even though they said Dr. Doller was going to hurt me, I could tell that the Voices were yelling at me to protect them.
VOICE NO. 1: This asshole floods you with lies.
VOICE No. 2: Eat shit, you excuse for a doctor. Eat shit. Eat shit.
VOICE No. 1: You fuckin’ asshole. She's going to hurt you for life, shithead.
VOICE No. 2: She's worth manure, so spit on her goddamn brain.
VOICE No. 1: Give her a good punch and rip open her skull, that piece of shit.
VOICE No. 2: We will not be extinguished by power of M.D.
BOTH VOICES: By power of M.D. By power of M.D. By power of M.D.
They were frightened. The Voices were actually frightened. She was the doctor with power to destroy them.
Slowly, gradually, I began to be able to confide in her more and more, and through her to be able to open up more to Dr. Fischer. After speaking with Dr. Doller, I wrote to Dr. Fischer telling her how I felt about her. We talked about it, and about how my fantasies about killing her might really have more to do with my wanting to kill all those bad feelings.
Meanwhile, I was becoming more and more comfortable telling Dr. Doller what was really going on inside my head. It was strange. I told her some of the most disgusting, nauseating, horrendous, humiliating and private thoughts and feelings and she didn't seem repulsed. In fact, she always seemed to like me. She was never judgmental, even when I confided my worst secrets and fantasies.
In fact, it was her very matter-of-factness that I found so comforting. Once, after much inner turmoil, I finally confided to her a grisly fantasy that had been torturing me in which I killed and mutilated my father. The fantasy nearly overpowered