The Fantasy

So here’s the fantasy.

I’m in my car, parked near a cliff. I’ve been crying and crying and crying. I call Craig, my therapist and ask him to please come and talk to me as I’m “on the edge.” I tell him I’m going to kill myself and need him.

Pause to examine feelings. Powerful, intense feelings flood me. I don’t know how to deal with these feelings I have for my therapist. Yeah, yeah, I understand transference a little. I’ve gone through a number of transference experiences with him. But this feeling, it’s akin to the love I have for Wendi and Luke. I know that it’s impossible to have that kind of love – it’s not the same kind of relationship. He sits over there and I sit over here. But he does know me, he knows me by now better than anyone. Still, it’s a kind of love I feel and I don’t know what to do with it. Back to fantasy.

Craig comes to my car and sits in the passenger seat. He asks me what’s going on and I cry some more. I can’t stop crying and his presence is reassuring and safe. I tell him how much he means to me, how much he has helped me, and how I’ve come to the end of my ability to manage the feelings – all the feelings – from the past and the present. I reach under my car seat and pull out Luke’s 9 mm and quickly get out of the car, as I know Craig has called the police and they will shortly arrive.

The timing is impeccable. As soon as I step out of the car the police step out of the surrounding brush and point their guns at me as I point mine at them. Craig warned them I might try suicide by cop, so they don’t shoot right away. One tries to reason with me, but through my tears and shaking and palatable stress shaking my body I can’t hear anything, I can only wish one of them would pull the trigger and be done with it.

Craig comes over to me, putting his hands on the gun, lowering it, and looking into my eyes. He says “You don’t want to die. This isn’t what you want.” And I know he’s right so I let him take the gun from me while I collapse in my intensity and sobbing. Quickly the cops come and handcuff me, which is my cue to fight. All that pent up grief that has been trickling out in tears and shaking instantaneously turns to rage and I scream and kick. The cops hobble me, restrain me, and that forces the fight out of me even more. The scene fades away with me writhing and screaming and bleeding and hurting and feeling a sense of relief in the exhaustion.

Relief. What do I seek relief from?

Craig, obviously, is the rescuer in the fantasy. And really, he has saved my life both in individual encounters and in general. But this fantasy exists because he can’t be the savior I want him to be in real life. He can’t, from that chair, pull me back from the edge and take the gun out of my hands. He wouldn’t join me out there so near the edge, because that place is unreachable from his chair. Everyone wants a savior, but no savior, not even God, gets off their cross at the beck and call of the lost. One of the criminals sacrificed with Jesus demanded that Jesus save him, and himself, if He was really God. But that’s not what happened. They all had to die.

Craig is no god, I know. But he is trying to show me the path to saving myself – to healing. I know there is no way out, only a way through. I’m not going to get off the cross until the job is done. He seems to think that on the other side is a better life.

How can I experience relief without all the danger? Crucifixion is painful, but in the fantasy, Craig is right. It’s not death that I want. I want relief and I’ve developed this pathway to relief where I can feel it in the face of death. It’s only recently that Craig has appeared in this fantasy, I suppose because I’m becoming aware that I need to put the gun down…I’m hearing him from his chair way off in reality telling me that’s not what I want. In here, in the fantasy, he’s a savior out there on the edge with me, right in the line of fire of my gun and the guns of all the cops.

The cops – are they the overwhelming feelings I have? I taunt them with my gun, daring them to kill me as they could. They are lethal in the fantasy. They also are the tools that ultimately provide the relief I’m seeking – they restrain me and I struggle with them, sobbing and screaming and fighting to exhaustion. It’s one way to feel, but I hear Craig over there in his chair telling me there is another way. I don’t have to get in the car and drive to the edge, armed with my lethal rage. It’s the same message Carli taught me in the hospital when we threw clay balls at a wall, making statements about our anger, but interrupting the process when the anger began to turn to rage. I need a visual representation of the anger. If I am to put the gun down, I want something else to pick up. In the fantasy, once I put the gun down, the cops rush me and I am overwhelmed and it’s violent. I greatly, intensely desire it and yet it’s not quite right in its violence, because I’m not in control. I can envision the process of throwing clay balls at the wall, in control, feeling anger without being consumed by rage. But that’s not internal yet. It’s Carli and Craig off there in reality while I’m in here still holding the gun, still having a face -off with the cops. Only now Craig is in here too, telling me to put down the gun, telling me it’s not what I want.

What do I want? Relief. And how do I get it when there is no savior to jump off his cross or even out of his chair, no savior except the one over there – hanging on his own cross and sitting in his own chair while I hang on mine and sit in mine, having to get through?