“I’m Not Going To Work Today!”
A woman restricts her travel so that, eventually, she can’t even leave her bed.
“I’m not going to work today,” was the first hint that sixty-year-old Norma was developing an agoraphobic—fear of open spaces—symptom. For the past forty years she had been a bookkeeper in a manufacturing firm. As it turned out, the owner of the firm began an affair with her that lasted almost twenty years. In this respect, despite her rather modest salary she now owned her own condominium apartment as well as a luxury automobile that, ironically, she almost never used. Her closets were jammed with expensive, tailor-made clothing. She never cooked and each evening only dined in expensive restaurants. She lived on his expense account.
After awakening one morning, Norma said, “I’m not going to work today.” By the end of the morning she said, “As a matter of fact, I’m not going to work, period.” In a short amount of time thereafter, she would not leave the lobby of her apartment building. Then she couldn’t leave her apartment. This downward spiral continued and she couldn’t leave her bedroom. Then she couldn’t leave the area around her bed and, finally, she wouldn’t even leave her bed.
Norma had never married. She lived with her bachelor brother for a ten-year period prior to her bookkeeping job. At that time she was both financially and emotionally quite dependent upon her brother. This was simply a continuation of her especially strong reliance on her mother all during childhood when she would not leave home very much, preferring to stay with her mother as much as possible. Her father had abandoned the family early in her life. She said that her brother was the adventurous one while she always needed protection.
Norma claims things were generally uneventful in all of her growing-up years. She went through school with good grades, always did her homework, and always felt rewarded for her efforts. Yet, she would stick close to home and spent all vacations away with her mother and, at times, also with her brother. She never had an eating problem and for the greater part of her early adult life was of normal weight. She was a rather tall woman, standing about five feet nine or ten inches, so whatever extra weight she ever had was carried well.
When she went to work as a bookkeeper at this manufacturing firm, she was about twenty years old. For her first two decades working there, the boss of the firm, with whom Norma eventually had a long affair, was apparently never in any way suggestive toward her. Then it happened. When she turned forty, the office personnel with whom she worked threw her a real shindig that the boss attended. For his birthday gift to her, he gave her a business check in the amount of five thousand dollars. She was absolutely flabbergasted, and when she told one of her close friends on the job about it, the friend said: “Uh oh! Watch out. He’s after you.” Her response was: “Don’t be silly.”
But it wasn’t silly because immediately thereafter, they went to dinner, and then it all started—for the next two decades. And over these years, the boss showered her with gifts—cash and otherwise—and it was during this time that she saved some of it, invested the rest, and became quite affluent.
She also became royalty at the office, as it was no secret that she was the favorite and could do whatever she wanted. Everyone deferred to her, and her opinion about others carried all the weight necessary for whatever result occurred. She was universally liked by all her coworkers because she always went to bat for them whenever necessary.
Eventually, when her boss had his eightieth birthday, the roof caved in, so to speak.
Norma said that her employer/lover was a married man who obviously could not commit to her as a full presence in her life. “He always told me he wouldn’t leave his family,” she said, “and everyone in the office knew that that was true.” Yet, despite this, she was quite proud of her status at work, where everyone knew that she was the boss’s special person.
She actually said: “It felt like I was the queen.” She indicated that she felt protected. Then, of course, came the inevitable—the catastrophe.
At his eightieth birthday, the boss told her it was too much for him to continue managing two relationships, and that he wanted her to retire and no longer work at the office. Then he presented her with a timetable for his proposed vanishing act for her.
This was the pivotal blow to Norma’s psyche, to her ego, and to her sense of security, that began her descent into severe agoraphobia. It was an emotional blow of the most severe kind—especially to an exceptionally dependent person, and more, especially since there was apparently no preparation for it. Her boss/lover announced it to her suddenly and almost abruptly—blurting it out.
Her favorite restaurant was an Italian bistro that she had frequented almost every night for years. Of course, she was everyone’s favorite patron at the restaurant and she dined on the most expensive items on the menu. Now, confined to her personal circumference, she would order food from the restaurant and an employee would deliver whatever she ordered. Her only pleasure now was in eating and it seemed that she was using food to tranquilize the anger along with any anxiety that may have even suggested the presence of the anger. Given the absence of any even remotely defined aerobic exercise along with the consumption of greater and greater amounts of food, she began to gain weight. Within a period of about six months, Norma had gained 40 pounds to add to her already filled-out frame of 150 pounds. At 190 pounds, she seemed obese.
At first, after the breakup Norma complained of feeling upset, sad, and terribly disappointed, and said also that she noticed she was feeling “a little angry at him.” Actually, she was probably raging at him underneath, but didn’t know it or couldn’t face it. Usually, such a dependent person will conceal even the slightest note of anger largely because of the hope that the wished-for person on whom the dependency is based will return.
Her underlying rage was, in turn, based on the bare fact that she was left feeling helpless and, of course, entirely without any power. She was essentially disempowered. Her wish was also completely blocked or thwarted—the wish of needing this man’s constant presence and support, as well as the actual needing of her fix—the royal treatment she got at work.
In a sense, not moving out of her bed was her absolute insistence—symbolic though it may have been—that he come and get her. Therefore, her wish to remain in bed was her way of magically getting him back. In fact, in an unconscious symbolic way, staying in bed even meant that, indeed, he was back.
The difficulty here revolved around the nature of the anger and rage that Norma was suppressing. The magnitude of the rage must have been huge and surely threatened her psyche. The intensity of the implosion of this rage or fury—that is, the inner explosion of the fury or rage, also must have been great. In addition, the penetration into the psyche of such rage was also powerful, and over time, the symptom seemed to be simply another example of her lifetime dependency problem—a dependency of long duration. In this case the symptom became profoundly entrenched. This was practically a sure sign of a symptom that will endure—even last forever—if not for the use of some miraculous medication intervention.
Given this kind of rage, and without the use of medication, her psyche would have no choice but to eject the symptom from the domain of wishes and send it toward the realm of personality traits. And the point here is that whenever anyone referred to her, they said things such as “she can’t leave her bed.” In other words, she was becoming identified by her symptom as a trait of her personality which people, indeed, considered sick.
Over a period of time, the agoraphobic symptom was so severe that Norma hardly ever mentioned her boss/lover at all and only concentrated on her condition of refusing to leave the bed. She was behaving as though her anger and rage was delinked from the memory of the who—her boss/lover—despite the fact that she, indeed, very much remembered him. Nevertheless, in her unconscious mind this linkage of her anger on the one hand and his image on the other was drifting apart.
Here was an ironclad picture of a symptom swallowing the personality whole and then becoming the personality in the form of a symptom trait. In such a case, only medication could reach the symptom and only then could Norma use the symptom code of the one, two, three, and four of symptom cure.
The way it stood, however, was that her agoraphobic symptom represented a deep pathology or sickness in the form of a severe behind the line withdrawal, and the symptom, as an expression of her insistence that her employer/lover return to her, was, in turn, not to be. Yet, her symptom decreased her tension because in her unconscious mind it meant that her lover was actually there, even though he wasn’t.
Eventually, her refusal to leave her bed led to other refusals—mostly with respect to a refusal to be medically treated. Then came a sudden loss of appetite and then heart failure ended her life.