She Wanted It All - Kathryn Casey [67]
TRACEY: “Me—he asked if there were other issues & I told him I was really pissed off about the report from the night nurses [about the backrub incident]. By the way, I absolutely do have a sexual interest in you—He asked if we had a special relationship—he defined that as a relationship with more to it than other random patients—I said yes—He said that is not a problem. They don’t discourage this unless it gets in the way therapeutically. We just need to go outpatient.”
Celeste ended by writing: “Quick!”
Timberlawn’s outpatient program was waiting for them at the end of their inpatient stay, when they’d spend days at the clinic for therapy, then be free to do as they wished in the evenings. Tracey and Celeste already had plans. Steve had rented a room, number 103 at the Sumner Suites, across from the clinic, for $69 a night, for him and the twins to use while in Dallas and for Celeste to stay in when she graduated to the day program. There, Tracey and Celeste could explore their sexual relationship without fear of discovery. “Celeste told me she’d never been with a woman,” says Tracey. “She said she didn’t like sex with men and couldn’t have orgasms. She wanted me to teach her.”
At Timberlawn, Celeste and Tracey clutched together often, so much so that therapists noted it on their charts. Their journals were filled with affirmations: “Believe in Ourselves! I am worthwhile! I am loved! I don’t deserve all this self-hate. This self-blame. Helplessness becomes powerlessness. Be willing!”
Tracey wrote: “I want love …I want to be held …I want a safe attachment to someone.”
Yet, for weeks, Tracey made little progress, suicidal thoughts slipping in and out of her consciousness. Milholland pegged the stumbling block as her inability to place the blame for the abuse on her mother, not herself. It wasn’t until a session in early April that the therapist felt she was making headway.
“Sometimes I think about going to hell to find my mother,” Tracey told her that day. “When I find her, I hand over all the responsibility for what happened to her. I say, ‘This was your fault, not mine. I was only a child. You were the adult.’”
“What do you worry about?” the therapist asked.
“I worry that I won’t be able to leave, that I’ll be stuck in hell forever with my mother,” she answered, crying.
By early April, Tracey’s insurance money was drying up, and she faced discharge to Timberlawn’s day program. Her meds were still giving her problems. At times her speech was slurred and she appeared to be drunk. Yet, Milholland assessed the risk of her committing suicide as having decreased from a ten, on a ten-point scale, to a six. “I’m not free-falling to suicide anymore,” she told the therapist. Tracey didn’t say why, but much of her new peace centered on her relationship with Celeste, which, at the time, she says, was flourishing. She did, however, tell Milholland that they planned to room together again, off-campus, during the outpatient program.
“What’s your relationship like?” the therapist asked.
“Just friends,” Tracey answered.
Days later in Celeste’s therapy, Dr. Miller questioned the wisdom of such a plan. “Patient offended at being confronted on friendship with homosexual peer,” he wrote in her chart. He advised Celeste that rooming with Tracey during outpatient sessions wasn’t a good idea. As he saw it, Tracey was too possessive.
Tracey would later say that Celeste told her something very different that night—not that Dr. Miller questioned the wisdom of their plan, but that the clinic staff contacted Steve and made him aware of their friendship. “He doesn’t want us to be roommates,” she said. “He has money and power. You’ll see. He’ll get what he wants.”
Frightened that she was losing the woman she’d made the linchpin of her recovery, Tracey panicked. The next days, she waited anxiously, hoping Celeste was wrong.
Two days later Miller brought up Celeste’s discharge plans again and urged her to break off the friendship with Tracey. “Counseled against rooming with peers when discharged. Discussed