He would smile, perhaps relieved by my unaffectedness. Sometimes Yasmeen cried. I thought two crying daughters would be too much for him, so I trained myself to wait until I was alone, in my closet or in the bath. My father would wipe Yasmeen’s face, hug us both, ask us if we wanted chocolate milk.

“Good girl,” he’d whisper in my ear. I was good because I was restrained. My father, I believe, carried a lot of hurt from his relationship with my mother. He did not like to see the related pain radiating from his daughters’ eyes.

Those letters taught me about longing. Reading them in front of my father taught me to hide it, often even from myself. I know now what a dangerous kind of denial that is. It leaves you ravenous. It makes your seismometer vibrate when the phone call you are shocked to discover you have been waiting for your whole life offers you precisely what you are terrified to want: Hello, Nadia. This is your mama.

The mention of Kuan Yin was spontaneous; I did not know whether Jack was familiar with her, and, when he was not, I needed to explain her to him. This took some time and threatened to overwhelm the session, taking him away from his feelings and into his intellect. But I wanted to turn around Jack’s long-standing sentiments of never having been enough. If he could imagine himself, even for a moment, as the healer, I hoped this would begin to offset his unquestioning identity as someone who needed to be healed. His slightly off-balance reaction to our interchange suggested some degree of success. Instability is sometimes a sign of new possibilities.

Winnicott, my psychoanalytic hero, had something to say about this kind of situation. He was writing about parents’ concerns about children’s lies, but his insights go well beyond lying.

If development proceeds well the individual becomes able to

deceive, to lie, to compromise, to accept conflict as a fact and to

abandon the extreme ideas of perfection and an opposite to

perfection that make existence intolerable. Capacity for compromise

is not a characteristic of the insane. The mature human being is

neither so nice nor so nasty as the immature. The water in the glass

is muddy, but is not mud.

I was pleased with this session because I managed to get David to feel behind all of his accrued self-doubt and into his heart. For an instant, when his tears began to flow, I knew he was connecting to a neglected but super-important part of himself. We had gotten to this place through a discussion of mindfulness, but our conversation did not stop at the intellectual level. David’s memory had led us deeper into his personal history and straight to the defenses he had built around his mother’s unavailability. By allowing himself to follow his affect rather than dwelling in his story, David was able to discover something true: the love he had always doubted was alive inside him.

Rather than clearly seeing what was wrong, and laying the responsibility on her parents, she had remained vague, telegraphing her pain to those around her while simultaneously taking the burden upon herself. “You had to shut yourself off,” I tell her. “To protect yourself, but also to protect your parents. You loved your father,” I reminded her. “His behavior didn’t make sense. You took it on yourself instead.