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Max's Story
Several years ago I treated a 55-year-old man named Max who had been referred to me by a major university. Max had been an aeronautical engineering professor whose research laboratory specialized in jet engine propulsion. For many years, he had received military grants to help design new fighter planes.
Everyone at the university knew Max's work was his life. He used to tell his students that he lived, ate, and breathed aeronautical engineering. During the 1990s, however, defense spending decreased, Max's grants weren't renewed, and the university told him they couldn't afford to provide him with free lab space.
Max took a severance package, with benefits, and stopped working.
What no one knew was that Max had been drinking four to five beers a day while putting in twelve-to-fifteen-hour days at the lab, seven-days-a-week. Often, he wouldn't go home to his apartment at all, spending the night on the couch in his office.
Max had been married briefly, but had no children. He had no outside interests. He had no friends. His work had been all-consuming to him, like a drug.
Without anything to keep his mind focused, Max used more of the only other drug he knew: alcohol. He started drinking a six-pack a day, then switched from beer to whiskey. Within a few months, he was drunk most of the day, every day. He paid no attention to his bills or to keeping up his apartment. Finally, he was evicted and began living on the streets.
The trip from professor to homeless man had taken less than 100 days.
The university continued to pay Max's medical insurance, which covered more than a dozen inpatient "detoxes" over the next few years. It covered over thirty emergency room visits for injuries Max sustained falling down on the street and or getting beaten up in bars. It covered his treatment for repeated bouts of pancreatitis, a painful, potentially life-threatening inflammation of the pancreas caused by drinking.
inally, the managed care representative at the insurance company, a former practicing psychologist, decided it was time to try to find out why Max was drinking. He called me and hired me to start meeting Max at restaurants and coffee shops to attempt to restore him to some acceptable level of functioning.
Max agreed to meet with me, in part because I agreed to pay for lunch.
When I first saw Max I was taken aback by his appearance. I had naively thought he would look like a university professor with a hangover, maybe with a badly wrinkled shirt and a hole in the knee of one pant leg. But he looked like a bum. He had a three-day growth of beard, wild hair, a deep gash across the bridge of his nose, and bloodshot eyes that looked through me. He had had at least a few drinks and smelled like it. But he had shown up for our meeting, which told me he hadn't completely given up.
Max initially rejected the idea there could be any connection between anything he had lived through as a child and what he was living through on the streets. He insisted that engineering was an objective discipline while psychiatry was a subjective one, closer to an art than a science.
He was surprisingly easy to be with. In fact, Max was such a good conversationalist that I began to wonder how uncomfortable he was with silence. On a few occasions, I intentionally answered one of his questions with just a word or two. He was always right there to fill in the blanks and keep things moving.
For our first three lunches I let our intellectual debates fill our time together. But during our fourth meeting, I nodded toward two little boys sitting with their parents at a booth nearby and asked Max why he had never had any children himself. The question had come naturally to me because I was in my mid-thirties at the time, Max was twenty-five years older, and something about the way he had listened patiently to my positions before debating them felt almost fatherly to me.
"I never liked kids," he said. "That's what ended it with my wife. She wanted a baby. I didn't."
"What bothers you about them?"
He shrugged. "They need too much," he said.
"Such as?" I asked.
"Food," he joked.
I smiled. "No, really," I said.
He shrugged. "Food is pretty important. Trust me, I know."
Max may have wanted me to think he was being funny, but it's become pretty clear to me that when someone repeats a joke after you ask him to be serious, assume he wasn't joking to begin with.
"Did you grow up without enough to eat?" I asked.
He tried to look as though he were more interested in getting the waiter to refill his coffee than the question on the table, but the effort was obvious. "My father made sure we never went hungry," he said, waving the waiter down.
"Was that hard for him at times?"
"You're working now," he said. He winked at me.
The waiter arrived with coffee and refilled our cups.
"Was it, though?" I persisted. "Was it hard for him to keep food on the table?"
"With five kids, trying to make money as a writer? Nah. It was a breeze."
I just kept looking at him.
"I think it was hard for him to do anything other than write," he said, finally. "But he did what he had to do and never complained about it a single day in his life. He was too good for that." He looked away as his eyes filled up. "He was too good for any of us."
What Max's father had had to do, it turned out, was to give up writing fiction--his passion--and go to work in a factory to support the family. He died just shy of retirement age, just before he could go back to doing what he loved to do in the world.
Max's life story--and the story of his drinking--suddenly made sense to me. Max had turned his life into an answer to his father's problem, deciding not to have a family and to devote himself exclusively to the work he loved.
The trouble was that when Max's work came to an end, he had nothing else in his life--other than alcohol.
What's more, after a few more lunches, I realized the work had never truly been enough for Max, even though he'd been spending overnights in his lab. That's why he needed to drink four or five beers a day. He felt isolated and alone.
He also felt guilty. He saw himself as one of the reasons his father had never been able to fully pursue what he loved in the world. He saw himself as a burden.
"If he never told you that you stood between him and his writing," I asked, "how did you get the idea that you did?"
"He didn't have to tell me. I saw him get up plenty of mornings and try to get something down on paper before the sun even came up."
"He loved it," I said.
Max nodded.
I waited. "But he loved you more."
"Doesn't compute, Doctor," Max said. "He did what he had to do. He did the right thing. That's who he was."
"You don't give him enough credit," I said.
"I give him all the credit in the world."
"No one forced him to have a big family. He wanted one. He chose to put his work second. Just like you chose to put yours first."
For the first time, Max didn't have a quick response. He looked directly at me.
"Creating you was more important to him than creating fiction."
"Some creation," Max said. He shook his head.
I decided it was time to take a firm stand. "Then do better," I said. "Because I'll tell you one thing: He wouldn't be happy at all to see how one of the stories he started to write--which happens to be your story--is turning out. I don't think it does much to honor the sacrifice he made."
Max looked at me for several seconds. He glanced at the children at the table nearby. Then he looked back at me. "You're saying I owe him something?"
"No," I told him. "That's what you're saying."
Max arrived at our next lunch shaking, in a suit that needed pressing and a white shirt soaked through with sweat.
"What's wrong?" I asked him.
He could barely hold his coffee cup without dropping it. He managed to take a sip. "I'm going cold turkey," he said. "I'm all done. What we talked about last time . . . It sunk in."
"If you really want to be done," I said, "then you should do it the right way. Let me get you into detox again. If you're out on the streets and start feeling worse and worse, you're more likely to start drinking."
He shook his head. "I don't want to go in again."
"You mean," I said, "You want to drink again."
He thought about that. He struggled to take another sip of coffee and spilled some on his shirt. He looked down at the stain, then back at me. "You don't believe I can beat this on my own," he said.
"I don't believe there's any reason you should have to," I told him.
Max admitted himself later that day for yet another detox. He only stayed sober a few weeks after he was discharged. But this time, rather than spending months on the streets, he went right back into the hospital. When he got out he managed to put together ninety days of sobriety. After a few more admissions, he stayed sober six months. He rented a small studio apartment, started Alcoholic's Anonymous, and even started to talk about going back to work.
"I'm not saying I'm cured," he told me over lunch one day, "but things are definitely different now. I'm thinking differently."
"In what way?" I asked him.
"It's not just about me, anymore. I don't want to let myself down, but I don't want to let you down, either. And I sure as hell don't want to let my father down."
I really couldn't find anything to say that would add to those powerful words, so I said nothing.
"I'm also having really crazy thoughts," he said.
That sounded worrisome. "Such as?" I asked.
He laughed. "I'm thinking about going out on a date."
"A date." It felt strange even saying that word around Max. He had been so singularly focused on his work for so many years, then sick for so long, that I had never thought of him doing anything as commonplace as asking someone out to dinner or a movie. "Great idea," I said. "What made you think of it?"
He grew very serious. "I've been thinking about how much I miss my father and my mother," he said. "For the first time, I feel really, really lonely. And all of a sudden, I'm scared I could be alone forever."
Max was feeling lonely and scared, and that was good. Because he was finally able to put down his shields and start feeling, instead of working himself to the point of exhaustion or drinking himself into oblivion. Reopening the early chapters of his life history had unlocked the possibility of wonderful new chapters in the future. "Being scared of being alone," I said, "might be a decent insurance policy against it happening."
Two years later, Max was teaching engineering part-time at the university and living with a woman he met in the university library.
When Max stopped anesthetizing himself with work and then with alcohol he started to feel, and that was critical to finding himself.
Confronting your pain will not paralyze you. It will allow new parts of you to be born.
It is no different for those who use other pathological behaviors to anesthetize themselves. Compulsive gambling, sexual addictions, addiction to nicotine, and addiction to food are all behavioral ways that people avoid the pain that could ultimately be their path to new, healthier chapters of their lives. Back to top
Linda's Story
Living the Truth can help defeat psychological disorders, including major depression and panic disorder. Linda's story makes that plain.
Linda was a slight, redheaded, 42-year-old woman who came to see me with symptoms of major depression, including low mood, insomnia, difficulty concentrating, and decreased self-esteem. She had tolerated emotional abuse from her husband for several years and said she felt like she had "nothing left to give." She had three sons—4, 7, and 10—whom she was always trying to protect from her husband, literally standing between him and the boys, trying to deflect or absorb his scathing criticisms of them.
"He calls them every name in the book, even in front of people," she said. "He says horrible things like, 'You should never have been born.' And it doesn't have to be for anything major. Even little things set him off, like not taking their plates to the sink, not being friendly when we have people over the house, not wearing the 'right' clothes. But, the thing is, I know he doesn't mean it."
"Why do you say that?" I asked.
"He's just burnt out a lot of the time. He works so hard. He's under a lot of pressure. And now, I'm out of commission, crying all the time. And that just makes it even harder for him--and the kids."
Linda was actually blaming herself for her husband being abusive. "What does he do for work?" I asked her.
"He's an EMT. He has to deal with horrible things. Car accidents. Heart attacks. You name it."
Among my friends are surgeons, emergency room doctors, combat veterans, and police officers. They have to deal with plenty of ugliness, too. But I've never seen them lash out at their kids in any serious or sustained way. "He says his job makes it impossible to control himself at home and in public?" I asked.
She shook her head. "He doesn't make excuses for himself. I can just tell that's what's going on for him."
Linda's husband didn't have to make excuses for himself. Linda was doing it for him. "You can tell by the fact that he loses his temper?" I asked her.
"That and other stuff. He gets to a point where he just shuts down. I know he's thinking about everything he's seen. And he drinks a lot more than he should."
We weren't fifteen minutes into our time together, and Linda had already mentioned a second reason her husband might be losing his temper--his drinking. The fact that she was letting him off the hook by blaming his stressful job made me wonder whether she was predisposed to do so by her earlier life experience. "You're very understanding," I said.
She shrugged. "My dad was a firefighter," she said. "He retired five years ago."
"He was under a lot of stress while you were growing up?" I led.
"To say the least."
"How did he deal with it?"
"Not so well."
"Meaning?"
"Let's just say he makes my husband look tame, by comparison," she said.
Whenever people use that phrase--let's just say --they always have much more to say. It just isn't easy to find the words, or the courage. "Your father's temper was even worse?" I asked Linda.
She nodded.
"He yelled at you? Hit you?"
She smiled for the first time since arriving at the office. "He didn't mean it. He did the best he could. He loved all of us so much."
He (or she) did the best he could is another shield of denial people routinely raise. Just because our parents did the best they could, that doesn't mean they did well enough to keep us from harm. And until we're willing to admit we suffered and didn't deserve to, we can't learn from the painful dynamics we lived through. Nor can we avoid reproducing those dynamics in the future.
I wasn't surprised Linda had somehow summoned the energy to smile as she raised her shield of denial. "Did he drink, too?" I asked.
"Only to get to sleep," she said. "He had nightmares. That's what my mom said. We all tried to make it relaxing for him when he got home, but . . ."
"But . . ."
"There's only so much you can do to settle someone down who's been running into burning buildings all day, or waiting to."
We were at the heart of the family fiction that had set the stage for Linda selecting another angry man to marry, and then forgiving his abuse of her and her children. Her mother had suggested that a man who verbally and physically abuses his family isn't to blame, that the family has the responsibility to comfort and coddle such a man, rather than confront him or flee from him, that he can have true love in his heart for his wife and children while attacking them emotionally and physically. Even the theme of alcohol abuse being a defensible way to medicate stress had been written into her life story (and that of her future family) while Linda was still a girl.
Is it any surprise that the home Linda had created was a replica of the one she had come from, where she had been valued for absorbing the rage of a man, forgiving his abuse, and trying to heal him? After all, her father supposedly really loved her, despite screaming at her and hitting her.
"Was your father an angry person before becoming a firefighter?" I asked.
She looked confused. "I have no idea."
"Did he drink before that?"
She shook her head. "I don't know. Why do you ask?"
I wanted to be forceful enough with Linda to begin to take down the shield of denial that was her birthright. "You're letting him off the hook for assaulting you and being drunk every night, because he was out all day saving lives. So I just wanted to know if he was a violent alcoholic before he started fighting fires."
"He wasn't alcoholic. He . . ."
"He drank every night."
She didn't respond.
"He screamed at you and hit you."
"But . . . "
I pushed harder. "But he was running into burning buildings. Right. I get it. Just like your husband is scraping people off the pavement, so that supposedly gives him a free pass to level you and the kids with emotional abuse. But guess what? There's no excuse for hurting your wife and kids. So why don't you go and gather some facts."
"Like what?"
"Does your father have any sisters or brothers who are still alive?" I asked.
"A sister."
"Then ask her if he had trouble with alcohol or his temper before he became a firefighter."
"What if he did?"
"If he did, you can stop giving him a free pass on hurting you just because he was helping others. Because he was just using that as an excuse. And you can start wondering whether you chose a husband a lot like him because you don't feel valuable unless you're absorbing a man's violence."
After a lot more encouragement, Linda took me up on my offer. Her aunt told her that her dad hadn't been destroyed emotionally by fighting fires. He'd been troubled as far back as his teenage years. And here's the stunning, but not surprising part (at least to me): His own father--Linda's grandfather--had been alcoholic and violent, too. And his wife had stayed by his side.
Three generations of women in Linda's family had defined their roles as wives and mothers in the same toxic way. Seeing that fact was the beginning of Linda questioning the fiction she had been taught and starting to see her reality, however painful: Neither her father nor her husband ever loved her the way she deserved to be loved--purely, without her having to volunteer for abuse as part of the bargain.
Only once Linda realized this was she able to start standing up for herself and her kids. She didn't begin to hate her husband or suddenly want to leave him, but she did get angry. She gradually made it plain to him that she wasn't going to be his doormat or let him abuse her kids any longer. She told him she would indeed have to leave if he couldn't change, starting with getting help for his alcoholism. And the most wonderful part of the story is that when he did get help, he gave her some real evidence that he actually did value her. She learned that she had the power to insist on a better life for her and her children. Back to top
Nadine's Story
Nadine was 27 years old, 5 feet, four inches tall, and 90 pounds when she first came to see me. Her prior psychiatrist had moved out of state.
Since her teenage years, Nadine had stayed slim by making herself vomit after eating, a symptom of bulimia widely known as purging. But for about two years, she had also dramatically restricted her caloric intake, experienced almost no appetite (anorexia), and her weight had plummeted. She had become dehydrated again and again, requiring IVs to keep her electrolytes balanced and her blood pressure from bottoming out. Her tenuous medical status had made her quit her job and move back home with her mother and father.
Nadine didn't arrive at my office alone; she came with her parents. They had devoted themselves to helping her overcome her eating disorder from the time it became obvious--when she left for college at eighteen. Now, they monitored everything she ate. They kept a chart of her daily weights. They gave her Zoloft and Xanax. They made certain she kept her doctor's appointments. They even listened outside the bathroom whenever she used it after a meal, to discourage her from purging. More than once, her father had to 'jimmy" the bathroom door and physically restrain her to prevent her from making herself vomit.
When I greeted Nadine and her parents in the waiting area, she was seated between them, looking so slight as to be nearly invisible.
Nadine's father immediately stood up and shook my hand. Her mother did the same. Nadine stayed seated. The way she glanced at me, then resisted any further eye contact, reminded me of the way some of the adolescents I had treated initially checked me out.
I intentionally held back from saying whether Nadine's parents should join us for any part of our meeting together. I wanted to see whether they would suggest I take time with her alone before getting additional history from them. But the reverse happened. Her father asked whether he and his wife could spend a few minutes alone with me before Nadine joined us.
It wasn't hard to see that Nadine was behaving and being treated like a child. I decided to make it plain that I wasn't going to treat her that way. "It's up to Nadine," I said. "It's her appointment."
Nadine glanced at me again, a slight glimmer in her eye, then shrugged and looked away.
Her mother couldn't take my hint. "Why don't we just take a few minutes of you're . . . " she started.
If Nadine wasn't going to take any control back from her parents, I decided the next best thing was for her to watch me do it. "Let's see if that makes sense after I talk to Nadine," I said.
Her parents reluctantly sat back down.
Nadine followed me to my office. For our first few minutes together she made no eye contact, twirling her hair nervously while she checked out the art on my walls.
I decided not to start a struggle with her by asking her questions designed to "make" her talk to me. I wanted her to know I meant what I had said to her parents. It was her appointment. She could do as much or as little with it as she wanted.
"They don't know when to back off," she said, finally. "But they're just doing what they think is best for me."
Nadine sounded like she was parroting what her parents might have told her when she was five or six or seven and being punished for bad behavior. We're just doing what's best for you.
"Are you certain they know what's best for you?" I asked.
"They have no idea," she said. "They spend all this time trying to get me to eat, which is ridiculous. I eat when I need to."
That was clearly untrue, as evidenced by the fact that Nadine's medical records included blood tests showing abnormal electrolyte levels and EKGs with dangerous heart arrhythmias. Her assertion was another invitation for me to struggle with her, mimicking the tug-of-war she was engaged in with her parents and her internist and her nutritionist. I didn't take her up on it. "I'm not interested in your eating," I said.
"Oh, really?" she asked, doubtfully. "What are you interested in?"
"Everything else."
"Such as ..."
"Such as how and why you've gotten your parents to treat you like you're a child."
She smiled. "It comes naturally to them." She paused. "Three weeks from now, they'll be my legal guardians. They're going to court to have me declared incompetent."
That was something I hadn't been told by Nadine's parents. And it was a dramatic example of Nadine's regression to a childlike state. Soon, in the eyes of the law, she would be a child. "Will you fight it?" I asked her.
"Why fight?" she asked. "It'll make things easier. This way, if they want me to have a feeding tube, they can have me admitted to a hospital and force fed."
"So you won't have to decide whether to eat anymore," I said. "They'll just decide for you."
"It's simpler."
If Nadine's psychiatric disorders and their treatment were metaphors for the painful chapters of her life story, the four themes of those chapters would include resisting things entering her body; purging to get rid of what did enter her; struggling with others over the intrusion; and giving up and just letting it happen.
It's hard to miss how perfectly those themes reflect the drama of sexual abuse.
"I don't think having all your rights taken away from you and being force-fed is easy at all," I told her. "I think it's dehumanizing and terrifying."
Nadine looked at me in a way that seemed much more genuine, without her previous veneer of boredom or bitterness.
I went further out on a limb. "I wonder whether the reason you don't feel dehumanized or terrified," I said, "is that you've felt those things at some other time in your life and decided you were powerless to stop them."
"So you think you already know my whole story," she said.
"I don't know your whole story," I said. "Not even close. It would take time before you could trust me and trust yourself enough to talk about what you've lived through, instead of what you eat or don't eat. Maybe you'll never talk to me about it. But I'm here to help you whenever you want the help--on one condition."
"There's always a catch," she said, seemingly still intent on engaging me in a tug-of-war. "Tell me the rules. It's your office."
"It's my office, but it's your life," I said, "So the rules are simple: If you decide you want to work together you have to call and book the appointment yourself. You have to come here by yourself. And you have to pay for the sessions yourself, even if that means that I have to charge next to nothing, at the beginning. Later on, if we can get you back to work, you pay full freight."
She smiled a more honest and relaxed smile. It was a smile that acknowledged that we were talking about getting to the heart of something meaningful together, not agreeing to distract one another with power plays. Whenever a person becomes convinced that another human being is committed to listening to his or her real story, an instant and genuine interpersonal bond is possible. The foundation for empathy is built. She laughed. "What if I don't like your rates?" she asked.
"Then you tell me to take a hike."
"I have to tell you all my secrets?"
"You don't have to tell me anything."
She studied me for a few seconds. "I guess I'll give it a try," she said. "At least while it's free."
Five minutes later I walked Nadine back to the lobby.
Her father and mother stood up immediately.
"That was quick," her dad said, looking as though he expected a report from me on the spot. "What's your take?"
"Not out here, Honey," Nadine's mother said to him. She looked at me. "Did you want all of us now, or should Nadine wait out here?" she asked.
I had an opportunity to demonstrate that I really meant what I had told Nadine in my office: This was her therapy, and hers alone. "I don't think we need to meet right now," I told her mother. "Nadine and I decided that we'll meet one-on-one, whenever she wants to make her next appointment--if she chooses to."
"I'm not sure I understand," her father said.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Nadine watching me intently. I wanted to show her that her father could be resisted by a competent adult--something she could become, too. "Which part do you not understand?" I asked her father. "The part about my not needing to meet with the two of you, or the part about meeting with Nadine privately in the future?"
Her father seemed too angry to respond.
"I guess we just had it in mind," her mother said, "that we'd be involved."
"Not a great idea," I said. "This has to be Nadine's time. She has to want to be here for her own reasons. You can't force-feed anyone psychotherapy. It doesn't work."
Nadine's mom nodded and glanced nervously at her husband.
"We'll see how it goes," he said, rolling his eyes. "It's certainly not what we expected." He held his hand out for me to shake.
I took it.
"Good luck," he said, with a chuckle. "You'll need it."
While Nadine's dad's sarcasm didn't help the therapeutic process, it was a tribute to him that he didn't short-circuit the process entirely, which he probably could have done. Deep down, I believe he wanted the truth to come out, too.
It took Nadine more than a week to call me for her next appointment. Maybe she was trying to find out if I would violate the terms of our deal and try to convince her to come back. Maybe when I kept my distance she was satisfied she really could trust me. Because from that second meeting on, she began revealing herself, slowly at first, then at a faster and faster pace, as though the dam holding back her truth had started to leak, then given way completely.
The heart of Nadine's story revolved around her older brother Patrick. When Nadine was ten and Patrick was fifteen he began touching her sexually. It was tremendously confusing to Nadine: On the one hand she knew that what she was doing with her brother was "wrong" and needed to be kept secret (as he warned her); on the other hand, she liked the attention her brother paid her and liked some of the physical sensations she experienced when he touched her. The touching--and Nadine's struggle with her own feelings--went on for over two years. That meant that during a critical development stage, Nadine was truly involved in a tug-of-war with her own feelings--wanting and not wanting, passively allowing her brother to "satisfy" her emerging needs for physical excitement and then feeling guilty about letting him do it.
It isn't a stretch to think of Nadine's battle with food as paralleling those conflicted sexual feelings--her oscillating between starvation, then having her fill, then feeling guilty and purging. And it isn't hard to imagine that her parents would be coaxed to join the battle, partly because it is hard to see the scope of it as it begins and partly because it turns out they were intent on not seeing.
When Nadine was eleven, her father had walked into her brother's room while he was fondling her. Her father had pulled her out of his room then gone back and screamed at her brother that he would be sent away if anything like that ever happened again. But nothing was done to monitor the situation. In fact, according to Nadine, it seemed that her parents were careful not to look for, or even stumble upon, evidence that the abuse was continuing.
Nadine's brother stopped abusing her for a few months, then started again, becoming more and more brazen as time went on, even using his fingers to penetrate her.
"How did you feel during the months your brother kept his distance?" I asked Nadine.
She shrugged.
I was careful not to show any emotion, not wanting to influence her response in any way.
"It's fucked up," she said.
I stayed silent, waiting.
She took a deep breath, let it out, then looked at me as timidly as any ten-year-old girl possibly could. "Part of me was relieved," she said. "Part of me missed it."
There was the truth, the tug-of-war in its starkest form, the struggle between appetite and disgust. There were the roots of the moment that was approaching, when Nadine would cede all her rights and all control to her parents, revert to the status of a child and "just let it happen." In some terrible way, she might even have found yielding to her parents' decision to force-feed her oddly exciting, or at least strangely comforting. Because the dynamic unfolding in her hospital room would be at least a little bit like the one that had unfolded in her brother's bedroom.
As it turned out, that force-feeding never happened. Neither did an appearance in court. Because when I presented my thoughts to Nadine's parents, they struggled with them only for a little while, then accepted the fact that they seemed to explain what was happening to their daughter. They agreed to drop their guardianship petition and to completely drop out of monitoring Nadine's weight, giving those responsibilities to a nurse skilled in treating eating disordered patients.
When Nadine's parents surrendered control and listened to what had happened under their roof, they demonstrated something much more powerful than all the efforts they had made to keep Nadine's weight normal. They showed that they loved her enough to face the truth, however threatening, however unsettling, however painful. They agreed to partner with her in unearthing her buried treasure--the conflicted, tortuous emotions with which she had been silently struggling for more than a decade.
Over the course of the next several months, as Nadine expressed more of her feelings about her older brother preying upon her, she slowly gained weight. It was as though opening the dark chapters of her life story had made her life real to her and much too valuable to trade for a tug-of-war over whether she would live at all. Back to top