Shite Sandwiches

“There is no love in your family.” The Turkish-born psychiatrist summarized my lived experience in a single sentence. I just didn’t know it yet.

It was both earth-shaking and yet felt a little nefarious. “No love?” I wondered wordlessly. “In MY family?” “Is that really what he said?”

I hashed that one line over and over in my head for years.

When the psychiatrist said that simple, explosive line during our biweekly session, I honestly had no idea what he meant. “No love?” “In MY family?” “But, but?” It somehow felt like someone pouring ice-cold mineral oil down my spine through the back of my shirt. I wasn’t sure what I was really feeling but I knew the feeling was foreign and confusing and cold. Ice cold.

I once saw a woman psychologist on the Canadian West Coast. I remember her well-groomed spotlessly clean white West Highland Terrier. I remember she had a long, beautiful green leather couch in her drawing room. I was envious of her beautiful living room and dapper dog.

She listened to my story with keen attention. I trotted out the “no love in my family” story. “A Turkish psychiatrist I once saw,” I told her, “said there was no love in my family. No love? Imagine that? My parents and siblings tell each other we love each other all the time!”

I was slightly frustrated and reluctant to let go of the fantasy that mine had been a happy, wonderful childhood. That I came away from it hurt and confused and beset by dark and difficult feelings was on me. Something was wrong with me. Because they loved me. They told me so all the time.

At one point, the kindly West Coast psychologist looked up from her notebook with reading glasses perched stereotypically on the end of her nose: “Your confusion is understandable,” she said. “If someone feeds you shit sandwiches all your life and tells you they are feeding you steak, you are bound to be confused.”

First, “No love in my family?” Now this. Shit sandwiches that were supposed to stand in for steak? Psychotherapy was nothing else if not extremely confusing and full of strange utterings.

It took many years to realize what these sage advisors actually meant. With time, their insights eventually touched and deeply impacted me. It was true that my childhood was filled with neglect and abuse – sexual, emotional, and psychological. But no one “wanted” to hurt us, I believed.

Caregivers so utterly wrapped up in their own personal problems who have unresolved trauma holding the reins of their own behaviors and being don’t necessarily realize what harm they are doing. Not to themselves and much less to others.

Parents who are intelligent enough to realize these deficits are bad things for a child want very much to cover them up. Or more likely, they are inclined to act as if they are not important. “That’s life,” I often heard my mother say. Along with, “Hand me that bottle of pills from beside my bed, will you sweetie?”

At other times, her head hung limply into the toilet bowl, Mom would retch thick black-green liquid that smelled terrible. She would quickly cover: “It’s only bile, dear. I’m throwing up bile because there’s nothing else in my stomach.” If there was medical import in that statement, it was lost on me as a ten-year-old.

Seeing my mother’s head in the toilet and knowing she was “sick” again was familiar and made more sense. Fluffernutters for supper again tonight.