Where the myth breaks apart is with the idea of a breakthrough. For Lindsay, the breakthrough was more like a seep-through, coming gradually, over twenty-five years, the product of steady, intense work in sessions that sometimes were as frequent as three times a week. While Lindsay was going to classes and getting straight As and having boyfriends and going skiing and climbing, she was dashing away for an hour a week, sometimes two or three, to tell her therapist her family secrets. And while this took a very long time, Silvern made sure the pace remained unrushed. Unlike the movie therapists, she did not want to seem overly invested in the outcome of each session. That kind of pressure can turn a patient into a performing seal, just doing whatever she feels the therapist expects. At its worst, that pressure can be retraumatizing.
As a first step, she did very little but listen to Lindsay carefully for several sessions, paying attention to which subjects were overwhelming, or “fragmenting,” to her, and which closed her down entirely. To become fragmented, she explained, was to be so walled off from difficult elements of yourself that those difficulties would only grow stronger, more insistent, more destructive. The solution, or the goal, was to help Lindsay find her own strengths and then develop them to help herself cope with these challenging subjects—to “integrate,” as Silvern put it, the difficult parts of her psyche into the rest of her life, rather than cordon them off.
Lindsay wanted to move faster, of course. She wanted to get the problem solved—for someone, anyone, to send the worry away. But for her brothers’ and her own sake, she also wanted answers from Silvern about the nature of mental illness—the causes. Could trauma or abuse cause insanity? Is it possible that Peter or Joe or Matt were at Pueblo because of something Jim did to them?
It seemed like a tidy enough explanation. But if that were true—and to be sure, no studies have ever suggested that abuse does cause schizophrenia—that would mean that Lindsay was at risk.
After all this time, she still was terrified of becoming mentally ill. Silvern made it clear to Lindsay how much bravery it would take for her to get past this fear.
* * *
—
LINDSAY PAID FOR the sessions herself. Silvern would put whatever she couldn’t pay on a tab. Lindsay continued to pay it off for years after graduation, settling it finally after starting her own business in her late twenties.
She never asked her parents to pay. Both Mimi and Don rejected the whole idea of therapy. Why dig all that up again? Let the past be the past. Exactly the response that made Lindsay ashamed in the first place, afraid to tell them the truth about what Jim did to her.
Silvern focused on getting Lindsay to tell her own story—to reclaim the past on her own terms. This was about more than just trying to face up to reality. It was about removing all of the filters that had been imposed on her. Children, Silvern explained, rely on the adults around them to interpret what’s happening to them. They use their parents’ constructed systems: This is good and that is bad; this person is untrustworthy, and that person is somebody you can count on. Shame and guilt are ways that children usually process those traumas when the grown-ups around them have failed them.
Exhibit A for Lindsay, of course, was Jim.
Jim was still in all of their lives, a member of the Galvin family in full standing, turning up on holidays, popping by Hidden Valley Road whenever Lindsay visited, even living back home for a time after Kathy left him. Now that she was back in Colorado, Lindsay was working hard to make herself okay with that, showing up at events like Margaret’s wedding as if everything was fine. But Jim was only getting more volatile, now that his wife and son were out of the picture. And Lindsay was getting tired of pretending.
Lindsay asked her therapist: How can I be around him? How can I go home, knowing he’ll drop in at any moment? And if I refuse to come home, can I deal with the upset that would create?
Silvern would help Lindsay fantasize about what she could do with her anger toward Jim. Lindsay thought about killing him—a lot—and then she felt guilty for those thoughts. But her biggest concern, even bigger than confronting Jim, was that she would have to tell her mother. What if Mimi didn’t believe her? Then, she thought, I would somehow be another crazy one.
She was stuck in the same dilemma she experienced as a little girl: If you were angry, you were unstable. If you cried because you got a B on a test, maybe it was time for you to go to Pueblo.
Lindsay’s father remained idealized for her—in her mind, at least, her only ally left on Hidden Valley Road, despite his frailty. But she and Silvern talked a lot about the particular way Mimi had of silencing Lindsay. She wouldn’t say, “Shut up.” It was more like “You think you’ve got troubles?” She attacked Lindsay’s emotions by undermining them, dismissing them, or invalidating them.
Feelings were scary in the Galvin family, Silvern said. There had been too many out-of-control horrors for it to be otherwise.
* * *
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SILVERN CALLED RESILIENCE “that wonderful term for something we don’t understand.” Resilience is the subject of umpteen academic studies, of course, and if someone could figure it out, they would rush to bottle the solution. In Silvern’s experience, it was sometimes a matter of luck that a person has the right temperament to absorb trauma in a way that still allows them to be open to new experiences, to go through life with armor.
But there are all sorts of coping mechanisms, some more self-limiting than others. Lindsay was a tough kid, donning a mask of self-reliance and stubbornness that served her well through childhood, and then eventually that mask fused to her real face. The question was how well that mask was still working for her now: hypervigilant, uncomfortable with failure, terrified to present herself to others as anything less than perfect.
Silvern told Lindsay that when somebody copes by being more armored, it can wind up hindering them later. They have a narrower road to travel going forward—a more fenced-in, claustrophobic life. Her hope for Lindsay was that she end up in a place where she would be willing to trust new people, to let down her armor under the right circumstances.
To get there, Lindsay would have to learn to recognize post-traumatic stress in real time, as it was happening to her—so that she would be able to recognize, for example, that a blistering argument she had with a friend one night was at least in part because of the rape scene in the movie they’d just seen.
* * *
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THERE CAME A time in her sessions when Lindsay decided to talk about what had happened to her at the party in eighth grade, the night in the closet. She was vague about it at first—“there was an incident with some boys.”
Silvern knew that Lindsay had to go at her own pace. First, she needed to work through all the self-blame.
She lied to her mother. She went to a party when she shouldn’t have. Didn’t she deserve what happened next?