Emotional Inheritance Read online

  It is the emotional defense mechanism of repression that trivializes our memories and strips them of meaning. Repression protects us by splitting a memory from its emotional significance. In those cases, the trauma is held in the mind as an event that is “not a big deal,” “nothing important.” The disconnect between ideas and feelings allows us to protect ourselves from feeling something too devastating but also keeps the trauma isolated and unprocessed.

  Our defenses are important for our mental health. They manage our emotional pain and design our perception of ourselves and of the world around us. Their protective function, however, also limits our ability to examine our lives and live them to the fullest. Those experiences that were too painful for us to entirely grasp and process are the ones that are passed down to the next generation. It is those traumas that are unspeakable and too painful for the mind to digest that become our own inheritance and impact our offspring, and their offspring, in ways they cannot understand or control.

  Most of the personal stories that I tell here are accounts of buried traumas from the past that were held silently between people, life events that were not fully conveyed but still were known by others in cryptic ways. It is the stories that have never been told, the sounds that have often been muted, that leave us undone. I invite you to come with me to break the silence, to trace and discover the ghosts that limit our freedom, the emotional inheritance that prevents us from following our dreams, from creating, loving, and living to our full potential.

  PART I

  OUR GRANDPARENTS

  Inherited Trauma in Past Generations

  We all have our phantoms. But as the psychoanalysts Maria Torok and Nicolas Abraham once wrote, “What haunts are not the dead, but the gaps left within us by the secrets of others.” They were referring to intergenerational secrets and unprocessed experiences that very often don’t have a voice or an image associated with them but loom in our minds nonetheless. We carry emotional material that belongs to our parents and grandparents, retaining losses of theirs that they never fully articulated. We feel these traumas even if we don’t consciously know them. Old family secrets live inside us.

  This section focuses primarily on the third generation of survivors. It turns a lens on the aftermath of the Holocaust, where repressed trauma often turns into nameless dread and untold stories are reenacted again and again. It explores the effects of early loss on the next generations, looks into the ways a grandparent’s sexual abuse might impact their grandchild’s life, and presents the secrets of a grandfather’s forbidden love as they appear in a grandson’s mind. When set against a backdrop of life and death, it is sometimes the erotic that offers a lifeline, a way into the land of the living. That which we don’t have permission to know haunts us and remains mystified, rendering us inconsolable.

  1

  LIFE AND DEATH IN LOVE AFFAIRS

  Eve drives an hour, twice a week, to get to her session with me. She tells me that she hates driving, and how much she wishes someone would drive her, wait for her outside my office, and then drive her back home. She doesn’t need that person to entertain her; they don’t even need to talk. It would be more than enough for her to just sit next to the driver and listen to the music in the background.

  I feel a wave of sadness listening to Eve describing herself sitting silently next to the driver. I picture the little girl she used to be, trying to be good and quiet, not to interrupt anyone, not to get in trouble, pretending she doesn’t exist.

  I asked her in one of our first sessions what her earliest childhood memory was. She said, “I was five years old, waiting outside school for my mother to pick me up, and she forgot. I figured that I had to sit there and wait until my mother remembered. ‘Be patient,’ I told myself.”

  A first childhood memory often conceals within it the main ingredients of future therapy. It frequently illustrates the reasons the patient seeks therapy, and portrays a picture of the patient’s view of herself. Every memory hides within it previous and also subsequent repressed memories.

  Eve’s first memory conveys to me the experience of being forgotten. Slowly it becomes clear that she was often left alone with no parental supervision and that she grew up, the oldest of four children, in a family where there was much neglect and emotional deadness.

  I feel drawn to Eve. She is in her forties, her long brunette hair flowing onto her shoulders, her green eyes usually covered with big dark sunglasses. Eve takes off her sunglasses as she walks into the room, then quickly sits on the couch. She greets me with a shy smile, and I notice the dimple on her right cheek. She takes off her high heels and stays barefoot, sitting crossed legged on the couch. Eve is beautiful, and in some moments, when looking at me with the eyes of a young girl, she seems lost.

  I wonder if Eve’s mother eventually picked her up, and I try to imagine how Eve felt waiting there for her, hiding her fear that her mother might never come.

  I ask, but Eve is silent. She doesn’t remember. In our sessions, she often becomes dissociative, gazing out the window as if she is with me but also not with me. Something about her is breathtaking, but at times she seems flat.

  Eve is frequently distant; she is careful about expressing intense emotion, and she lapses into long silences.

  I look at her and wonder if I, too, am assigned to be her driver, a grown-up in her life, someone who will be there on time, take control, and drive her to where she needs to be. I sit quietly, aware that it might take a while for her to look at me or say anything.

  “I was with him again last night,” she opens the session, referring to her lover, Josh, whom she sees a few times a week.

  Around 8 p.m. when his colleagues leave, he opens Line, the Japanese app they use to text each other, and sends her a message to come to his office. Eve explains to me that they needed a safe way to communicate.

  “When Josh first suggested we use this app, I thought he said ‘Lying’ instead of ‘Line,’ and I said to myself, ‘What a strangely inappropriate name for an app.’” She laughs and then adds sarcastically, “I think there should be a network for cheaters, maybe a chat room where they share information and give each other advice, like the groups they have for new mothers. Someone should have made a business out of it, don’t you think? Millions of people are lost and confused, not sure how to survive adultery.” She smiles but seems sadder than ever.

  She doesn’t look at me. “Josh and I bought a membership to SoulCycle as an alibi for meeting each other in the evenings. It’s a good excuse to come home sweaty and go right into the shower.” She pauses and adds, “Washing his smell off my body always makes me sad. I would rather go to sleep with it.”

  Eve takes a breath, as if she is trying to calm herself, and then adds with a smile, “Josh thinks SoulCycle can make money from selling an ‘alibi package,’ where people can buy false memberships at a discount price.”

  I smile back, even as I know that none of this is funny. There is so much confusion, guilt, and fear in her witty way of telling me things. Suddenly she is fully present and I feel the intensity of her pain. She is alive, I think, and I wonder out loud if she wants to say more about her love affair.

  During our first session Eve told me that she was married and had two children. Her daughter had just turned twelve and her son was nine. She told me she had decided to start therapy because something terrible had happened, something that made her realize she needed help. Then she told me about Josh.

  Eve spends a few evenings a week in Josh’s office. Josh is a creature of habit and they have a routine: first they have sex, then they order food, and when they have finished eating he drives her home.

  Eve tells me about their sex, first hesitantly and then in detail.

  “With Josh, nothing is in my control,” she says, looking to see if I understand what she means. She explains that in her submission to him she feels held. She feels that he knows everything about her and about her body, and that she can lose control under his domination.

  “He brings me back to life, do you know what I mean?” She doesn’t wait for an answer.

  Life and death, from the start, are strong forces in Eve’s narrative. We begin exploring the links between sex, death and reparation, and the uncanny ways these are related to Eve’s family history. Her mother, I learn, had lost her own mother to cancer when she was fourteen years old. For two years Eve’s mother took care of her dying mother but a part of her died with her. Eve and I will slowly realize how through sexual submission she gets in touch with her longing to be taken care of, to stay alive and to repair a traumatic past.

  Eve looks at her watch and starts putting on her shoes, preparing for the end of the session. Then she leans back and says quietly:

  “When we are done and Josh drives me home, I become emotional. I love having sex with him and I love when he drives me.”

  There is another moment of silence, and she says, almost whispering, “I look at him holding the steering wheel, a serious look on his face, and I think that he is the most handsome man I have ever met. And I want to kiss him but I know it’s not a good idea; after all, we are not in his office anymore, and we make believe that he is my car-service driver.

  “He drops me off a few blocks from my building, and when I say good night my heart breaks a little. I really don’t want to go upstairs, back into the highway of my life. Josh knows exactly how I feel, and without me needing to say anything, he tells me, ‘Don’t forget how much I love you. I’ll see you on Wednesday. It’s very soon; it’s sooner than you think.’

  “I make a face and he knows that I think Wednesday is years from now and that I will have so many feelings and thoughts that he won’t be a part of until Wednesday, and he says, ‘I’m on our app. I’m here, even if I’m not physically with you.’”

  She puts on her sunglasses. “This is usually when I stop feeling anything and leave the car.” I see that she becomes disconnected in order to leave him, and that she does it again right before my eyes as she tells me about it. I lose her to a long silence before she leaves.

  Many of my patients come to see me because of my professional writing and teaching on the subject of sexuality. I see men and women who feel destroyed by a partner’s affair, others who had or are having affairs, and those who are lovers of married people. Their stories are different and their motivations are diverse, but all these people reveal themselves to be tortured as they struggle with their own secrets or with the secrets of the people in their lives.

  While I am aware of the transactional aspect of every relationship, I also believe in love. I believe in the power of attachment between two people, in loyalty as one of the basic foundations of trust, and I consider destructive and creative forces to be part of every relationship. We love and at times we also hate the people we love; we trust them but are also afraid of the injuries and hurt they might cause us. One of the goals associated with growth is the ability to integrate positive and negative feelings: to hate lovingly, to love while recognizing moments of disappointment and anger. The more we can know and own our destructive urges, the more able we become to love fully.

  Life, to some degree, is always about that tension between the wish to destroy—ruin the love, goodness, and life itself—and Eros, which represents not only sex, but also the urge to survive, create, produce, and love. That tension exists in every aspect of our lives, including in our relationships.

  Psychological awareness helps us to identify and bring those urges and wishes into consciousness, and to question our choices and the choices of the people who came before us. When it comes to affairs, that work is multilayered, and the distinction between destruction and death, and survival and life isn’t always obvious.

  One significant reason why people come to therapy is to search for unknown truths about themselves. That investigation starts with a wish to know who we truly are and who our parents were, and it always includes the dread of knowing. Why does Eve have this relationship with Josh? Why now? What part of it is about a need to survive and bring herself back to life, and what part is attached to death and destruction? In what way is her present life a reflection of the lives of the women who came before and an attempt to heal not only herself, but also her wounded mother and her dying grandmother?

  Infidelity is destructive in the sense that it always causes damage to a relationship, even if that damage is at first invisible. But people have affairs not only because they want to destroy or get out of their relationships; paradoxically, infidelity is sometimes an effort to stay in a marriage. Cheating is often a way to balance power in the relationship or to fulfill needs that are not met. In many cases, while the affair is a sexual acting out and an indirect way to express negative feelings like hostility and anger, it is also a way to protect the marriage from those feelings while maintaining a status quo within the relationship.

  Through sex, feelings that are not allowed in the relationship itself, particularly aggression, find their expression. It is not unusual for people to describe sex outside the marriage as more aggressive, and sex in the marriage as more gentle and “civilized.” As partners unconsciously protect each other from aggression, they numb the relationship. When there is no room for aggression, there is usually no sex either.

  The same dialectic tension between life and death exists in sexual desire and especially in long-term relationships. In his book Can Love Last?, American psychoanalyst Stephen A. Mitchell discusses the clash between adventure and security in sexual life. Mitchell emphasizes that romance, vitality, and sexuality are factors that make one’s life not only worth living but also worth cultivating and savoring. Romance, he suggests, has a great deal to do with an existential excitement about being alive. Over time, sexual romance easily degrades into something much less enlivening or maybe even deadening, because it thrives on danger, mystery, and adventure, not the safety and familiarity of a long-term relationship.

  Can we continue to desire the people we feel most safe with? Mitchell asks. He suggests that it is the delicate balance between security and danger, the familiar and the novel, that is the secret for long-term love. In her innovative book Mating in Captivity, psychotherapist Esther Perel elaborates on that paradox of domesticity and sexual desire and works to help couples open a playful space for adventure and therefore sexual excitement in their relationships. Perel further develops those themes and others to examine the complexity of infidelity.

  A psychoanalytic investigation is a complex and nuanced journey into one’s delicate heart. Danger and security, destruction and construction, life and death, and the plight of multiple generations appear, in different ways, in each and every one of those journeys.

  During our first session together, Eve doesn’t take off her sunglasses. She sits on the couch with her legs crossed and sobs.

  “I messed up my life,” she says. “I don’t know, maybe I already destroyed it. I’m not sure what to do.”

  She tells me that her husband is a good man and that she has a satisfying marriage.

  “I actually love my husband,” she says. “We have such a sweet family, my kids are so wonderful, and they are everything I have always dreamed of. I have everything I wanted and maybe I’m just too greedy.” She then tells me about the night that made her realize that she had lost control of her life.

  “We usually meet in his office, but that weekend was different because both his wife and my husband were away, and we thought it was a good opportunity for us to spend the night together. We never did that before and I think both of us were excited but also anxious.”

  She asked her babysitter to stay the night with the kids, and Josh reserved a room in a hotel across the street from his office. Eve tells me that if her husband looks at the app where they can see each other’s location, he could easily find her. They had installed the app earlier in the year so they could keep track of their daughter, who had just turned twelve and had started walking to school on her own.

  “The app became a huge problem, as I was aware that my family could always see where I was. I know this doesn’t sound believable, but I really hate lying,” she says, almost apologizing. “I would rather not give any explanation than to have to lie. I decided to turn my phone off that night, so I wouldn’t have to lie about where I was.” She sighs. “Oh God. What a mess.”

  Eve pauses, tears in her eyes.

  “My night with Josh was even better than I had imagined it would be. It is hard to put into words how I felt because I didn’t know a feeling like that even existed. We were finally in a peaceful place, just the two of us, and we had what seemed like an endless amount of time. It felt like we were a real couple, completely devoted to each other, completely in each other’s bodies and minds. We had sex for hours and I kept whispering in Josh’s ear, ‘I love you. You make me so, so happy.’

  “‘I know, baby, I’m happy too,’ he said.

  “‘Do you think we can make this place our home?’ I asked him, referring to the small hotel room that seemed so perfect in that moment.” Eve lifts her head and looks at me, “As I tell you this now, I realize that I just projected all my wishes on that stupid hotel room. I feel like such an idiot. When we were lying down and I put my head on his shoulder, I didn’t think about anything. Nothing else existed in the moment. I was truly happy.”

  Eve pauses briefly. She doesn’t look at me and continues. “There is something unusual about being in Josh’s arms. Something about his touch. It’s like he is both strong and gentle at the same time and I feel that I totally lose myself when I’m with him. It’s a feeling I’ve never had before. But I guess that was the problem. That’s why the night ended so badly.” She sighs.