Chapter 35

Berlin

April 2012

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” Marlene yelled at the top of her voice.

Robert worried what the neighbors would think.

They had moved from Prague to Berlin a year before, after Marlene finished her clinical internship, and they had lurched from one angst ridden, agonizing argument to the next. Robert had begun to think it would be better to die than keep living like this.

“What kind of man doesn’t want to have a child and build something up with the woman he says he loves?” Somehow, she had managed to increase her volume ten decibels.

These conflagrations always unfolded the same way. Marlene, her irritation boiling to the point where she could not contain it any longer, would launch into Robert, usually about the children topic. Robert would immediately shut down emotionally. He felt like a radio in an electromagnetic storm. He could not put together a coherent thought. His brain and emotions scrambled, and his whole body felt chilled to his core.

“Well?” Marlene screamed. She was perched at the opposite end of the black, velvet sofa, her body rigid with anger. “Do you again have no fucking thing to say?”

He did not. He could not. Robert was frozen, and he and looked at her blank-faced, which intensified her fury.

Marlene jumped to her feet. “I will walk out that door and go to my brother’s and this is over—over!—if you don’t have some response.”

Robert just looked at her.

“Fine,” Marlene spat. “Fuck you.” She stormed into the bedroom and crammed some clothes into her backpack.

When she emerged, Robert was standing in the hallway, his hands in his trouser pockets. “Oh, for fuck’s sake,” he barked. “What are you doing?”

Marlene stopped in the vestibule, clutching her knapsack in one hand. “I’m going, Robert. I’ve had enough of this shit.” She turned and flung open the apartment door.

“You live to make my life a fucking nightmare!” he shouted. Robert’s relationship with Marlene had opened a well of love and connection like he had never known with any other woman, but it had also tapped a reservoir of frustration worse than any he had felt and unleashed a fury he had never indulged.

Marlene looked back at him, let loose an exasperated hiss, and stormed out.

Robert instantly felt relieved, though he knew the respite would be brief. He wished Marlene would not return, but she would. Marlene was never gone for long. This was not the first time one of their eruptions had ended this way, though they usually burned out before reaching the dramatic exit.

Twenty minutes later, reading on the bed, Robert heard the key turn in the apartment door.

Marlene plunked the backpack on the floor and sat on the edge of the bed beside him. Robert’s body stiffened. She said, in a soft, pleading tone: “Come with me to the therapist. That’s all I ask.”

Robert drew a deep breath and exhaled sharply. “Fine. I’ll go to the fucking therapist.” He knew his response was unnecessarily harsh, and it had exploded out of him despite the fact he had resolved to be less confrontational when she returned. He saw the anger flash anew in Marlene’s face, and then her swallow it down.

“Thank you,” she said. Marlene took the book from his hands and put it on the bedside table. She took one of his hands and placed it on her breast and slipped his other up her skirt between her legs. She leaned over and kissed him deeply. The volcanic arguments always ended this way.

It was not merely make-up sex. They always returned to this subterranean space undisturbed by the rampaging sandstorms on the surface. Every time. Robert had not experienced anything like it. His previous relationships had all followed the same trajectory: initial flirtation, overwhelming attraction, unquenchable carnal desire, quick professions of eternal love, suffocation and a passive aggressive campaign against his partner, the death of all physical desire, bitter separation. But with Marlene, the tensions rose, she lashed out, he sat stonily until he exploded—and when the maelstrom passed, they collapsed wantonly into each other and tried again.

“You and me,” Marlene said as they lay entwined on the bed. “We’re something else.”

* * *

Robert was as prickly as a porcupine all the way across Berlin on the U-Bahn, to the appointment with the therapist. Marlene let his barbed comments dissipate into the crisp November air. Seated in Frau Frei’s therapy room—a sunny parlour in the pre-war apartment where she also lived—Marlene poured out a vociferous stream of emotion, aggravation and pain at the therapist’s initial prompting.

Robert was harder work. Frau Frei labored patiently to pull every terse sentence from him at first. But then he opened up, bit by bit. Eventually, he talked more about his feelings and his family than he had before to anybody. To his astonishment, Robert actually felt a little less burdened by the end of the two and a half hours.

“Well,” Frau Frei said, looking down at the pile of notes she had taken during the session. “To look at you, a first child and a second child, one of you,” she said toward Robert, “more cognitive and structured, the other,” she said toward Marlene, “more emotional and spontaneous, I would say you are a perfect couple who should have a beautiful, mutually-supportive relationship.” The matronly therapist shuffled through her notes. “But, sadly—and I mean that, it makes me truly sad—there are these other things that pose enormous barriers.”

Robert looked over at Marlene in the wicker chair beside him and felt an engulfing sadness himself.

“Ms. Schröder,” the therapist continued, “you are the daughter of an overprotective, older father and an angry, emotionally distant mother. It compels you to try to manage every relationship and makes you unable to establish your independence. Of course, you’ve developed this overly-intense desire for an unquestionably secure relationship, and a child which locks it into place.”

Marlene nodded and wiped the tears from her face. She had been crying for an hour.

“Mr. Stevens, you are the son of an adolescent minded father and an emotionally devastated mother. What more could we expect? You had the responsibility for your mother’s emotional well-being thrust upon you nearly from birth, which forced you into this role of adult-child, made you unable to set boundaries or express your needs in a relationship, and imbued you with an unusual desire for independence.”

An unexpected sense of relief and calm filled Robert. It was the first time his emotional reactions made any sense to him.

“I … I must admit,” Frau Frei said, “that I am unpleasantly surprised by what we have uncovered here today. When Ms. Schröder and I spoke briefly on the telephone, I expected that yours would be a fairly typical case which primarily required some strategies for better communication. But this … this is difficult, complicated. I believe you both suffer from a severe attachment disorder, but it expresses itself in the exact opposite ways. You are matter and anti-matter. You clearly love and care very much for each other. However, your parents have saddled you with terribly heavy burdens. It was inadvertent, of course—they also are emotionally and psychologically damaged— but that makes it no less destructive for you.”

* * *

Robert and Marlene returned to Frau Frei a month later. They delved deeper into the same issues of their family histories and the cycle of their emotionally unhinged clashes, but the two-hour session was their last together. Despite his initial skepticism and hostility toward the idea of therapy, Robert had embraced it by the close of their second visit; still, it had become clear to them and Frau Frei that at this point, more couple’s therapy likely would yield few results. A month later, Robert came back alone.

“You told me again today,” the therapist said, “that the thought of having a child makes you feel physically ill. Nauseated, you put it. Would you say that’s an extreme reaction?”

“I suppose it is, yes,” Robert said. He took a sip of the hot tea Frau Frei always offered at the start of each session. Robert was glad he had come again, but talking openly about his feelings caused him severe stress and stoked his anxiety. His throat was tight and unquenchably dry. “I just feel like I’ll have to give up everything in my life that makes it worth living and spend the next twenty years slaving away to do nothing but raise a child.”

“What would you have to give up that makes your life worth living, if you and Marlene had a child?” Frau Frei asked.

Robert took a sip of his tea. “Travel. Reading. Solitude. Independence.”

Frau Frei smiled at him. “Yes, children certainly can wreak a bit of havoc on solitude, at least for the first few years. And, of course, activities such as reading and travel become more complicated, although I know parents who managed those needs with the child-rearing well, after they worked through the changes. It isn’t easy, of course. Your concerns are understandable.”

“And independence?” Robert asked. “How can you really maintain any freedom when you’re responsible for a child? It dictates every decision, large and small. And I’m not saying that’s wrong. It’s what’s right. Raising a child is the most consequential duty you can take on, and it has to become the center of your life.”

“A grim prospect, isn’t it?” the therapist replied. “It’s difficult to imagine anyone surviving it and remaining sane.”

“I do understand, though, why it’s okay for most people,” Robert insisted.

“For most people, but not for you.”

“Yes. I … I just can’t imagine it not eating at me every day, consuming my life and all my energy, and making me bitter and angry, and a terrible parent.”

“Are your parents bitter and angry, or your friends who have children?” Frau Frei asked.

“No, of course not,” Robert said. “But they’re different. They’re delighted by it, more or less, despite what it does to their lives.”

“They don’t appear to require the same level of independence you do.”

“They don’t,” Robert said. “But I know that’s a problem with me. It’s not normal.”

“What’s normal?” Frau Frei scoffed. “If you feel it, it’s normal for you.”

Robert was not convinced, but he liked that someone seemed to understand him.

“But this question of independence is a big one for you,” the therapist said. “Has it always been an issue in your other relationships, before Marlene?”

Robert thought about it, looking out the parlour’s big windows at the cold, pouring rain. “I never thought of it being so,” he eventually said. “In each one, we had other, specific issues we couldn’t resolve. But when I think about it, my need for independence was always there, at least in the background, and it seems connected somehow to the other things, now that I think about it.”

Frau Frei nodded and scribbled on the tablet in her lap. “In what way, do you think?”

Robert sipped the last of his tea and refilled his cup from the vacuum pot on the small table beside his chair. “I always felt … smothered. Suffocated by what they needed, regardless of the particular issue. And like all I wanted to do was to get away from them and get my life back.”

She scribbled again on her tablet. “So, your life with your partner, in the relationship, felt as if it were something being imposed on you and separate from your real life, the life you wished you could lead.”

“Yes,” Robert said. He had ruminated on these ideas and questions more times than he could count, but saying them aloud was entirely new. The mere act of speaking them made him feel lighter. “In every relationship,” his mind was jumping from one former love to another as he talked, “I felt … I came to feel … responsible. Responsible for doing the things they wanted and they needed, regardless of what I wanted.”

“And needed,” Frau Frei added.

“And what I needed,” he said, realizing it for the first time. “And now with Marlene, too. I adapt to the other person and lose myself. At first, it’s fine, because the relationship is new and exciting, but then those feelings of loss and suffocation creep in and grow. In the end, all I feel is frustration and depression.”

“Have you ever discussed these feelings with your partners?”

“Jesus, no,” Robert said.

“Why? That seems the logical thing to do, don’t you think?”

“I have often wanted to, but I just can’t. I’ve even had conversations in my head about what I could say and how I could explain what I feel. But then, when the moment arrives to say it, I can’t open my mouth. I’m paralyzed.”

“Well, that certainly is miserable,” Frau Frei said. “Why do you think that, instead of just confronting the issue and talking about it, you adapt and abandon yourself and spiral down into frustration and depression?”

“Fear, I suppose,” he said after a minute. “I’m afraid that if I start some argument and push too hard, it’ll destroy the relationship.”

“And what has this approach achieved in your past relationships?”

Robert grinned and felt both silly and suddenly aware. “Destroying them.”

Frau Frei smiled. “Well, at least you’ve conducted sufficient field tests to establish with great certainly that this method is ineffective. Unless, of course, the goal is to blow up a relationship.”

“Which it is not,” Robert said.

“No, it is not. Why do you think you do this?” she asked. “Why do you think you react and feel this way in a relationship?”

Robert pondered the question until the silence made him uncomfortable. “I really don’t know,” he said, sighing. He felt sad and deflated. “What do you think?”

“Well,” Frau Frei said, chuckling and fumbling with her pen. “We’re here for you to talk about what you think and you feel. But it’s a fair question, especially after I’ve been holding your feet to the fire for nearly two hours.”

She took a sip of her own tea and appeared to collect her thoughts. “I have two observations. First, there is a relationship dynamic I like to call parental partnerization. Many therapists call it emotional incest, but I prefer the other description. It is less sensationalist.”

“And what’s that?” he asked. It sounded horrible.

“It’s when a parent replaces his or her spouse with the child for emotional support. In your case, your mother had—and appears still to have, from what you’ve told me—a host of unresolved traumas, which is completely understandable from her abandonment by her birth mother and her difficult life with her adoptive father. Your father, from your description, seems to have been an amiable, wellintentioned overgrown boy—especially when you were a child—who was not psychologically and emotionally capable of helping your mother see her troubles clearly and seek the professional help she desperately needed.”

Robert had not heard of such a concept, but he thought it fit.

“The effect, for the child, is … horrendous. Children aren’t prepared, emotionally and psychologically, to bear the responsibility of easing a parent’s sadness and trauma. But they also have no capacity to understand the situation or resist it. They feel the parent’s pain, take on the burden of it, and adjust their behavior. They adapt, and they avoid all confrontation as much as they possibly can, so they don’t add to the ill parent’s pain. As adults, if this partnerized relationship with the parent endures throughout their childhood, in intimate relationships they are over-responsible, conflict avoidant, unable to communicate their feelings and needs, and have an insatiable desire for the independence they could never feel from the parent. Does that sound like anyone you know?”

Robert was stunned, and swept by another wave of relief, as he had been during their first session. “It does, indeed,” he said.

“It appears to me to fit,” she said, “but I must caution that identifying it only marks the beginning of a long, difficult road to recovery. It will require much determined, inner work. But I fully believe you can heal yourself if you want it.”

Robert had not had the chance to consider the longer-term implications of her revelation. “I understand. But it still feels liberating to have some kind of explanation that makes sense. I’m forty-three years old, and I’ve never had the slightest understanding of why I feel and how I behave in relationships.”

“I’m happy to hear you feel like that,” Frau Frei said. “I would like to add one other thing, from a broader perspective.”

“Please do,” Robert said. The sessions were mentally, emotionally and physically exhausting, but they also flew by, and Robert felt he could stay another two hours.

“There is a lot of discussion in my field about intergenerational transmission of these traumas. Some people think they are passed along by parents’ and grandparents’ behavior, or genetically, or through the limbic system, or through the spirit or soul. I’m not convinced about any of them in particular, but I do believe it happens. And these traumas have a way of making themselves known, erupting in the lives of those who have inherited them. It is as if they want to be resolved, for some generation finally to address them and put them to rest, once and for all.”

Robert did not see where she was going with this. Mysterious transmission of trauma across generations sounded flaky. But he liked and trusted Frau Frei, and he tried to keep an open mind as she continued.

“To me, what you are experiencing could be such a phenomenon. Your mother’s partnerization explains your reactions and behavior, but the intensity of your feelings exceeds what I would expect. Indeed, what I have seen with many others in my practice. You have not only your abandoned mother in your history—searching for connection and identity—but also your biological grandmother, who must have been very bruised emotionally and psychologically to give away her children as you’ve described. And her trauma likely descended from your great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents, although you know so little about them. Only an intergenerational accretion of unresolved traumas, I believe, can account fully for what you feel.”

Robert still thought it sounded a little crazy, but part of him also found it intriguing. “How would I even begin to sort that out?”

“Perhaps you should consider going to Spain,” she said, “to the areas where your great-grandparents lived, and try to make some connection to your roots.”

“But all I know are Barcelona, Galicia and Asturias,” Robert said. “That’s a pretty poorly defined target.”

“It is, and I don’t know whether it would help you at all. But to me, it seems like a way to begin. There is no way to predict what you will or won’t find. One other thing,” Frau Frei said. “I think your painfully strong aversion to having children also could be related to this rootlessness you feel, and that also could be partly from your mother and ancestors. Going there could perhaps help you crack that open, as well.”