THE DOCTOR IS IN

Note: An alert reader found this post on Backstory, where it had wandered unsupervised and unnoticed. I gave it a cookie and brought it home. I will be more vigilant in the future.

FORCING IT

A writer friend,* "Paula," recently confided that she is seriously blocked for the first time in her adult life. "I have a lazy streak," she said, "so sometimes I resist writing that I know I want to do. But if I put myself in boot camp--chain myself to the computer for a day or two, not letting myself watch Lost until I've written 10 good pages--I can usually force myself back on track."

Not this time. "It's been weeks--months, if I'm honest. I was phoning it in for quite a while before I broke down completely. Now when I sit at the computer, all I want to do is cry and eat."

She is my friend, not my client, so I probed tentatively. "Are you writing about something especially upsetting?"

"Nope." She had been ambushed by disturbing content before, she told me, but was usually able to work through it; on the rare occasions when she couldn't, she would switch topics and ride on. "This is different--I can't settle on anything. I'll start a story, decide it's crap, switch to something else, get bored--it's like I'm not a writer anymore, or I never was. The only reason I want to write is that it's what I'm supposed to do, what I've always done. I don't have anything I want to say, or anyone I want to say it to."

I knew that Paula and her boyfriend of six months, "Nate," had been going through some difficult times lately, and wondered whether the stress of their arguments was distracting her. She hesitated. "Usually, writing is a relief from relationship angst. It lets me turn off the noise for a few hours and escape into my own world. It's different this time, though. I can't turn it off; I can't find the key to that world. I don't know if the arguments are causing the problem, but they're definitely in the picture.

"The arguments are different, too," she reflected. "I love Nate, but he is intense, and when he's angry he's not rational. Things get heated, emotionally violent." She doesn't believe Nate would hurt or threaten her physically, but "all that old stuff gets stirred up," she said, referring to abuse in her childhood that she had told me about previously. She said she was thinking about reentering therapy to deal with flashbacks and anxiety episodes brought on by the fighting. "But I wrote my first novel while my sister was dying," she reminded me. "I'm upset about my differences with Nate, but not devastated the way I was then. So something else is blocking me."

Children who are abused usually take the blame onto themselves. There is a developmental advantage to believing that the important adults in our lives are wise, benign, and in control--we rely on them to meet our basic needs and to interpret the scary, mysterious world for us, so we are safer if we can trust that they love us and know what they are doing. The disadvantage is that when they hit or push us, or behave in sexually inappropriate ways, or get drunk and forget to feed us or comb our hair, we go through all sorts of contortions to convince ourselves that they are good people who are acting the way they should. And one of the most common, and destructive, conclusions abused children come to is that the abuse must be their fault, and what they deserve. If Mommy beats me, if Daddy gropes me, they reason, the problem can't lie with them, so I must be at fault. They are not sick, ugly and dirty--I am. If I were a good girl, this wouldn't be happening.

"How do you feel after one of your fights with Nate?" I asked.

"Crazy. Miserable. Dirty, like I need a shower."

"Could those feelings be interfering with your writing? Not the fights themselves, but they way they make you feel about yourself?"

She didn't know. 

"You might want to pay attention to what goes through your head as you sit at the computer," I suggested.

A few days later she emailed me to say, "Yup. We nailed it." She had opened up a story she had started a few weeks before, and found herself thinking, This is garbage. Everything I say is crap. "It was a short leap from that to, I'm garbage. I'm crap. I don't want to write because I feel toxic--like anything that comes out of me is radioactive sludge."

She is definitely going back into therapy, she told me. I suggested that she also stop forcing herself to sit at the computer, because she might experience this "boot camp" regime as more abuse. "Write in your journal," I suggested. "If all you can think about is the pain, write about that. If another thought or feeling comes up, focus on that, put it into words, let it ground you. Don't worry about writing "good" or publishable prose right now. Just use your skills to stay in touch with yourself, and to keep priming the pump."

Paula is smart, resourceful, and very, very brave. I am confident that she will address the issues stirred up by her relationship, make the right decisions about the relationship itself, and find the key back into the world of her imagination. She is a terrific writer, so I look forward to meeting her there.

*who gave me permission to write about our conversation here, "as long as you fuzz it up a bit," and who will vet this column before it appears. Just in case you're afraid that something you don't want generally known will show up here one day.

Susan O'Doherty, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist with a New York City-based practice. A fiction writer herself, she specializes in issues affecting writers and other creative artists. Her book,  Getting Unstuck Without Coming Unglued: A Woman's Guide to Unblocking Creativity (Seal, 2007) is now available in bookstores. Send your questions to her at Dr.Sue at mindspring dot com.

Comments

[Sarah]

The thing about abuse is- it makes it very, very hard to let yourself be vulnerable and writing in any deep way requires vulnerability. It becomes not safe to write, never mind the whole issue of doubting your ability to write well. It took me years to get to a place whre I didn't feel afraid that some danger would come crashing in if I took my attention away from the outside world long enough to write deeply.

The other thing that strikes me about this story: why is the first answer to "go back into therapy" to help her figure out why her boyfriend's abuse bothers her? Of course it upsets her, and would even if she didn't have a history of it.
Why doesn't she just get the hell out? You are right on target that abuse victims feel they are to blame, but the cycle is being repeated here. He's "emotionally" violent", so much so that she can no longer write. Emotional violence is something many people will put up with, but it's like slapping around your soul- punching you in your very core- and the threat of physical violence is always not far behind. He needs to go.

[Susan O'Doherty]

Sarah, I think you are reading quite a bit into this narrative--natural for a fiction writer. I don't think Paula ever said, or felt, that Nate was abusive--just that the intensity of their arguments, on both his part and hers, stirs up old issues for her.

People who have been abused are vulnerable to being abused again, and this is always something to watch out for--but I think it's important to distinguish between past and present experiences, and to guard against the impulse to shoot the messenger.

[Sarah]

The phrase used was "emotionally violent", and it was coming from Nate, not her, at least that's how it's written here. I'm just saying- red flag time. That, along with the fact that she can write through times of grief but not, apparently, through times of feeling threatened, would make me question her present relationship, not just assume that it's all about the past. My priority would be: first, feel safe in the present, before tackling issues from the past.

[Katharine Weber]

I agree (based on my reading of this) that she certainly needs to feel safe in the present, but I would question the rush to throw him out of her life.

Is she attracted to him because of or despite his emotional volatility? What part of this present conflict is actually something from the past being triggered? Is Nate himself a work in progress who wants to do his own work for change?

A phobic/avoid response, without teasing apart the elements that have gone into creating this very problematic atmosphere in their relationship, which has spilled so terribly into her writing life, doesn't seem (to me) like the ultimate solution.

[Susan O'Doherty]

All of this is fascinating. Usually when I get a letter, all the information I have to work with is on the page. These are people I actually know, and without giving away any identifying material, I can tell you that the emotional violence, according to Paula, is mutual, a new experience for both partners and disturbing to both. It may, indeed, be necessary to end the relationship--not for her to kick him out but for both partners to reluctantly call it quits--but both hope to work through it and come out in a better place.

What I had hoped to communicate in the column is that what interferes with Paula's ability to write is NOT the arguments in the present, but the memories of early abuse that are stirred up by heated exchanges with someone she is vulnerable to. My point is that this phenomenon is another possible contributor to writer's block, and one that I have not seen explored before. Speculation about how Paula should handle her relationship, based on sketchy second-hand information, is probably not that fruitful, though of course it is extremely interesting.

[Katharine Weber]

I agree that this is not about her relationship to Nate, it is about her relationship to her writing, and I want to clarify that my comment was about optimal consideration of her life situation in the context of her writing life, which is why I was in disagreement with Sarah's comments.

[Sarah]

But it seems to me, Susan, that you are speculating as much as I am, by, for instance, saying that the arguments in the present are NOT what is causing her writer's block. That may or may not be true, right? How can any of us truly know, based on this limited information? But because my point about current feelings of vulnerability and fear regarding her boyfiend distracts from your larger point, which is about early abuse, my interpretation is disregarded.

When someone's situation is presented with a certain point in mind (i.e. childhood abuse can cause present-day writer's block, certainly a statement no one would argue with,) I believe it's best to be clear about that up front. Because you were not more direct about what point you were trying to make, and you also inserted details that widened the interpretation (like using the phrase "emotional violence"),
it's not surprising, given the constraints of a short column, that other reactions ad interpretations from readers might arise.

With case studies like this one, as in fiction, every reader will take away their own interpretation of what's really going on, based on their own experience, unless (or perhaps, even if) the writer takes ownership up front of what point it is they are trying to make.

[Colleen Thompson]

I just wanted to say how much I enjoy your column. Very insightful! Thanks for the good work, Good Doctor.