Elephants in the Living Room and Other Mysteries - Part One
It is my plan to let the flow of these articles be guided in part by the responses I receive from people reading them. Many of the discussion postings and the private emails I have received are raising the issue of the relationship between agoraphobics and other people, so that’s what I want to begin to look at today. It will probably take more than one column to explore this.
Among the questions I have gotten from friends and family members of agorapahobics are:
“How is my (brother, friend, mother, aunt, wife) to be dealt with?”
“How does one read the signs of agoraphobia or pending agoraphobia?”
“What’s helpful and what’s pressure?
I’m not sure whether or not I know how to answer those questions, whether there even are any precise answers, but in any event, I’m going to take kind of a round-about path to addressing them, because I want to look first at some of the ways in which agoraphobics make it more difficult for people to reach out to them.
I like to think of myself as a pretty honest person. I believe that truth is always better than lies, that truth is sacred, and that on the whole truth heals. I mention this because my niece’s husband (aka my nephew, Rick) read my first four articles last week and in the course of talking about them, shared with me how disconcerting it was to be around me back in New York on those rare occasions when someone talked me into going outside, or when my desire to make them happy overrode my unwillingness to face the terror of stepping out the front door. He said I became weird and it seemed almost like I was a crazy person, like I wasn’t there. I can’t remember his exact words but they were nauseatingly accurate. I wasn’t there. I was off somewhere trying not to die and also – this is the important part in terms of today’s topic – trying not to let anyone know I was in such terrible difficulty. I was trying to be brave and pretend I was fine. Talk about delusional thinking! It seems I didn’t really fool anyone, except maybe myself.
Which brings me to the subject of elephants in the living room. Everyone in an alcoholic family is profoundly effected by the family drunk but by and large, they pretend that they have never even heard of drunkenness. It really is like having an elephant in the living room. It trumpets and stomps around, it breaks things; family members walk around it, feed it, and clean up it’s shit without anyone ever MENTIONING the bizarre fact that there’s an elephant in the living room. And should some brave soul try, he or she is more than likely to get a blank stare and be asked “what elephant?” It’s no wonder those of us who come out of dysfunctional families feel crazy! It’s no wonder we have difficulty trusting our perceptions of reality! It’s no wonder we so often override our best instincts and our common sense! It’s no wonder we are not inclined to share our anxieties.
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