New Tools

On a visit to Chicago this past summer, I stood in my sister and brother-in-law’s kitchen in tears. I was having issues in my relationship, and I needed to own up to my part of it, I just didn’t know how. I proposed my dilemma to them as trained social workers.

“I feel like I have this dysfunctional toolbox. All of the tools that I learned as a child in regard to relationships don’t seem to work. I need a new tool box, with functional tools.”

I had been searching for new tools my whole life, and figured I should have found them by now. It began when my parents encouraged family therapy before I could even remember. We had to work through the issues around their divorce, but I was only five, and I’m not sure my brain was developed enough for shrinking. Later, as a single mother, my mom took my two sisters and me to see an Episcopal priest at a church. All I remember from those sessions was my middle sister kicking her feet up onto the coffee table in protest, which only angered the priest. Then there was Nini, the therapist that my sisters and I went to see with our dad when we were older. Nini had seen everyone, including my step-family, because becoming “The Brady Bunch” wasn’t as easy as it appeared on TV.

By the time I reached nineteen, it was time for my own therapist, one that would be unknown to my family. She was a Jungian therapist who analyzed my dreams and I found her all by myself. When I shared a dream I had about using my sister’s license as my fake ID, she concluded that I was having “identity issues.” Before I could admit to her that I actually was using my sister’s license to get into bars, she admitted to me that she also wasn’t unknown; she had known my stepmother on the tennis court. I decided to leave that therapist because it was time to go back to college anyway.