Do you think she is rejecting his help in particular, or all help? Does he experience the rejection as personal, or does his ego allow him to attribute it to something in her personality? She asks him a lot of questions, mainly, it seems, to validate her own assumptions about who he is: relatively well-to-do easterner with a privileged background who probably has experienced very little pain in his life, let alone unspeakable tragedy. Is she doing this to gauge whether he has anything to offer her? What does he hope to "talk" her out of? Or into? Or over? For all his training and "empathy," is this woman's pain really "soothable" by him? By anyone? (Erin noted that the benefit of talking is largely his).
As I was reading this story, I kept thinking of an Ani DiFranco song. It's about racial injustice, particulary the way centuries of abuse have informed the modern ghetto:
Why don't you just go ahead and turn off the sun?
'Cause we'll never live long enough to undo everything they've done
to you
The song is strangely uplifting despite its tone of irredeemable loss. It doesn't foreclose the possibility of a better life; it just frankly acknowledges the scope of the tragedy.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
I think she is rejecting all help (except for the sedatives). I doubt she would want therapy from anyone, regardless what that person's background was.
He experiences the rejection as personal because he is completely self-centered.
And I don't know whether she would benefit from talking to him. Psychotherapy seems pretty standard for PTSD, but I wonder whether it really makes things better. Perhaps a support group of other people with PTSD would help more than talk therapy with this guy who has nothing to offer except boundless empathy.
I could see her being helped by the right person.
I don't think his empathy is boundless, which is why I put it in quotation marks when I referred to it. Empathy has more to do with feeling someone's experience, with really focusing yourself on what it must be like to be that person, insofar as that is possible. I don't think he does that. If he did, he would have been more understanding at the end instead of letting his desperation to keep her show. I think she senses that his brand of empathy — which is just really gawking at the train wreck of her life, as Erin put it — is not something that she has any use for.
She takes her pills. She mostly manages. She takes her child to music lessons (that connotes some hope, doesn't it?). She lives her life and she knows what she knows.
I think he would have to have a sufficient level of self-awareness to take the rejection personally, that is, he would have to know why she is rejecting him, and I'm not sure he does.
Post a Comment