It’s Just Aphasia Going Through

A Talented TFT VT Practitioner Shares Humor, Compassion and TFT

Dr. Mark Steinberg is a long time TFT VT practitioner in northern California.  He is a brilliant writer as well as psychologist and has shared these talents with us many times.  He wrote the TFT song and rap that Roger so enjoyed many years ago.

I want to share his recent post with our TFT community as we all can enjoy a bit of humor, compassion and love as we help others with TFT.  It is a heart warming read and I hope you all enjoy it.

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My mother was a powerhouse. A forceful, passionate, and talented woman, Pearl was highly accomplished and devoted to her family and community. She was a veteran teacher and Vice Principal in New York City until she retired. Upon retirement, she took up painting, and soon was exhibiting in galleries and selling her paintings.

In 2000, my mom had a series of devastating strokes that left her physically and cognitively disabled. Ironically, the blunting of her faculties accompanied a change in personality that evoked a sweetness and patience previously hidden. What she lost in agility, energy, and articulate expression, she gained in a demeanor that was humble, even more loving, and attractive to be around.

Despite my “intact” family and my parents’ provision and attention, growing up was, for me, a constant series of traumas. The tremendous pain and unrelenting anguish in my family could not be relieved by medication, therapy, or cultural cohesion. Rather than opiates, we overindulged in the intoxicating and numbing habits of humor and sarcasm. Family and community were stages on which we took it out on each other. My upbringing was a mosaic of opportunity, ambition, imagination, craziness, dysfunction, tragedy, and farce. I emerged from the Bronx as a classic “unemployable Jewish comedian.”

Much of what good I’ve been able to do results from the magnitude and constancy of my mother’s love and the ways in which she enabled me to love.

My parents lived together and fought each other for fifty years until my father passed away in 2002 (followed by my mother’s passing in 2010). I wrote the following story in 2003 upon my father’s unveiling, a year after his death. I published it in 2014 in Confessions of a Maverick Mind.

It’s Just Aphasia Going Through

Some Life Passages Cannot Find Words

Recovering from her strokes and the death of my father, Mom is doing rather well. She has gradually adjusted to certain life limitations in her eighth decade, and is finding her way around obstacles and through the help of friends, gadgets, and her own ingenuity and perseverance. She is the center of attention amongst our family and group-of-friends connections, and she invokes Dad’s presence through her memories, conversations, and consultations with him, past and present.

“Daniel, why did you have to leave me?” she complains in front of the portrait of him she painted. “We were having such a good argument!” My father’s smile shimmers unwaveringly from the canvas, frozen in time, yet iridescent with the climate of expressions we knew from weathered experience with him.

“There’s so much to do,” Mom continues, “you hardly helped me then, and now you’re not here to help at all.” After a poignant pause, Mom looks toward me and, with moist sclera, says wistfully, “Dad would have like that movie we saw. He was always complaining about the lack of good movies. Hmm…”

She speaks of Dad in the past and in the present, the former appropriate and the latter understandable. There is no future for my father, and this reality is so bruisingly tangible as we sit in her kitchen the day before the “unveiling”, a religious ceremony we will hold at the cemetery, six months after his death. It is the occasion of my visit. Mom’s transition to a life without him is gradual, and I notice her upswing when she talks about things in the future — plans for a visit, buying something for the house, selling her paintings, and, of late, her project to bring hot coffee to the senior center.

She looks forward to her time at the senior center and appreciates the services provided and the opportunities for interchange with people. Abashedly, she confides in me her “fussy” desire for hot coffee, thus far absent at the senior center. Mom decided to take action on her own to remedy the situation. She called local stores to locate an item featured in a newspaper ad she clipped. An ideal solution for her need, this item was called the “Vacuum Flask” thermos, offered by the Signatures Company, out of Perris, CA.

Unfortunately, several strokes have left my mother with more than her share of senior challenges in word recall. This came into play when she called the local Walgreen’s and asked if they had vacuums on sale. She had forgotten the word, thermos.

“Vacuums?” intoned the clerk. “I don’t think we sell vacuums. You lookin’ for a big vacuum or a small one?”

“A small one,” said my mom, “for coffee.”

“Coffee?”

“Yeah, you know, to keep coffee warm.”

“Ma’am, I don’t know whatchu want, but we don’t have anything like that.”

Undaunted, my mother called the Target store.

“Hello, I’m looking for a vacuum, a small one.”

“How small, Ma’am?”

“One I can sit with in my lap.”

“In your LAP?”

“Yes,” my mother continued, “to hold in my lap.”

“Why you want to hold a vacuum in your lap?”

Frustration lapped at her patience, as my mother answered this doltish inquiry:

“So I can drink from it.”

“You want to drink from a vacuum?”

“Yes, haven’t you ever used a vacuum to keep coffee warm?”

“I-I-I don’t think I can help you. Maybe you should call Sears.” Click.

Next…

“Hello, I’m interested in a vacuum.”

Silence. “Appliances, may I help you?”

“Yes, I need a vacuum, please.”

“An upright or one with attachments?”

“Well, I’m not sure,” Mom faltered, “what kind of attachments?”

“Suction hoses, wide hard bristles,” came the reply.

“I don’t think so. That might hurt my dentures.”

“Excuse me?”

Confusion engulfed Mom, as the salesman questioned impetuously. She was not used to such obstacles in purchasing an ordinary item. Mom was always an excellent communicator, a savvy consumer, and competent at getting things done.

“What do you want to use this vacuum for?”

“For liquids.”

“Ah, so you want a wet vac?”

“Look, mister, I don’t know what’s so complicated. I just want a vacuum for hot or cold liquids, like coffee or iced tea,” declared Mom.

“How much liquid?”

“A cup, maybe two.”

“Ma’am, couldn’t you just use a sponge?”

Mom hadn’t thought of this — wouldn’t think of this — sponges, suction hoses… What had this world come to? It was bad enough that she sometimes became confused and forgot what she meant to say. Now, the personnel at stores were unable to help her with simple commodities!

She quit haggling with store personnel, and chose instead to wait for her mail-order “Vacuum Flask” to arrive from Perris, CA. In the meantime, she would tolerate the tepid and insipid coffee offered at the senior center along with their generous human services. More pressing at the moment were her plans for my father’s unveiling and her increasing anxiety about the event.

This Sunday would bring far-flung family members and some close friends together in a temporary ad-hoc support group in honor of my father — kind of like an all-star squad or an Olympic “Dream Team” of personal relations. Only with relatives, you never know: “Dream Team” sometimes is more like “Bad Dream Team”. As my father used to say, “Relatives are like fish: after a few days, they begin to smell.” This was a ceremony to honor my father; yet, all in the family were ambivalently fond and fearful of him. When people die, they still exert power and influence. This is scary for what it says about them and us. It was hard to think of my Dad without entertaining his probable sarcastic contribution to any topic at hand. His memory lives in quotes, italicized comments, double entendres, and put-downs. He is available to those who knew him at almost any moment in the merry-go-round of daily life. Now, he would again take center stage, briefly, smelling perhaps, the relatives standing above him, praying and catching a fragrance of his wit and devotion in the humid Florida air.

When I asked, Mom confided in me her worry about proceedings at the unveiling. She fretted obsessively about preparations at the restaurant where we would head from the cemetery. Would they have enough tables? What if fewer people showed up than she had planned? Aunt Lu called to say she might be able to get to the cemetery, but certainly not the restaurant, because Uncle Hy (my mother’s brother) was close to death, tethered to an oxygen tank. And, how many people could John David transport in his car? Did everyone know directions?

Though I suspected that Mom had troubling emotions beyond the logistics anxieties, she was open to getting rid of the ones she mentioned. I treated her with TFT, (Thought Field Therapy) and her nervous fretting disappeared. When I subsequently asked her how she felt, she replied, “Well I’m not thinking about the situation, so I guess I must be better and rid of the problem.”… Proving, once again, that logic is developmentally more evolved than the apex problem! My mother has been through several TFT treatments, and she gets it — not only about the treatment efficacy, but about our human preoccupation with having a “story line” that fits our mold of reality (and our place in it) and our tendency to fester in distress and helplessness because of problems due to perceived external circumstances.

My mother is easy to treat and even easier to love. Whenever I complete a treatment with her, it ends with the following:

Me: “How do you feel now?”

Mom: “Fine, I feel fine.”

Me: “Is anything bothering you right at this moment?”

Mom: “No, I feel good.”

Me: “Are you still Jewish?”

Moments of such poignancy could not be staged without the backdrop of our character quirks and history; even then, they are usually unrehearsed. These moments arrive in the garb of good-natured ridicule and proverbial punch lines, and we learn to cherish their sweet punctuation upon the striving and suffering sentences of our lives. Words give them voice, yet their timing and impact is ineffable. A good time, a memorable moment — how long does it last?

Thermos. Mom chuckled as she repeated the word. As if drumming it into the humor lobes will pre-empt future casualties of memory. She had called my brother in the midst of her purchasing debacle, and he had gently supplied her with the lost word. Thermos, Mom, you want a thermos. Oh, that’s right, and thank you.

Thank you, not only for the missing word and closure, but for another family legacy, destined for the intrigues of the Steinberg Survival Guide. There are words for the containers that hold hot and cold liquids and words for those that whisk away the dusty dirt we wish to hide, but there are no adequate words to describe the containers that hold the delicious meta-morsels of ironic experience.

Listening to my mother’s story had left me speechless. I could hardly contain myself. My pride in Mom swelled, as did my gratefulness that her recovery had regained faculties of mind and humor enough that she could recount the thermos/vacuum story. I looked at the newspaper clipping of the “Vacuum Flask” thermos and marveled at this story my mother told as I drank my good cup of coffee. This was better than Abbott and Costello.

The next day we headed to the cemetery. I secretly prayed that it would go well for my Mom. In a fleeting moment, a thought surprised me: This occasion was for me, too. It would likely be an emotional rendezvous with my father. He always had to have the last word in life, and he prepared us for his death by regular admonitions about how it would be too late posthumously to enjoy the times we weren’t enjoying with him while he was alive. The words and logic are peculiar, but that epitomized my father. He was right, too, for a scant few months after his departure, we regard him ambivalently, honoring him as though he were here, yet reiterating his absence. We reminisce about his marked idiosyncrasies and speak of how he would react to situations as if he were present — yet, we privately bask in the security that he is not here to dominate and chastise us. He’s not around to hear all the things I want to tell him that I couldn’t tell him when he was alive because he wouldn’t listen. Dad was always right, even about this – a reflection that made my head swim, as we headed for the gravesite. What would I say to my father in summary? Do he and eternity listen?

The plot thickened — at the cemetery. First of all, my father’s grave looked different. The last time I’d seen it, we were lowering his casket into the ground. Now, there was a headstone, a marker for him differentiated only by his engraving. In Steinberg tradition, a story secretes behind this plump groundswell with the fabric waiting to be unveiled with prayer. My father, we recall, was always fussy about salutation. Once a doctor, always a doctor, he decreed. An easy way to incense him was to address him as “Mister” Steinberg. It was Dr. Steinberg, or you invited him to pull out your teeth (and, remember, that a retired dentist was under no obligation!). The headstone engravers had foolishly omitted his middle initial. So, the stone had to be replaced with one bearing the middle initial “J”, for it is Daniel Jacob Steinberg, in truth, who lies beneath this ground.

We stood gathered in prayer and remembrance. I felt moved and quite uncomfortable. A tear streamed in quiet lonely slalom down my cheek, and I couldn’t wipe it or tap it away. I escaped into my schizoid internal poetry:

A casket, a flask it

Is just a body basket,

Contains a body dead to hold

The liquids once warm, now grown cold

Vacuum in which life grows old,

We all fall down.

The rabbi finished, arcing his arm and complaining about an injury that might curtail his racquetball side career. Back to life and the mundane concerns of protocol. For we, above ground, have stomachs that need to hold hot and cold liquids. And, my mother had prepared for this occasion by placing reservations at a restaurant.

The Florida sun framed portraits of antiquity, as the aging character of my family came into view. The relatives I hadn’t seen in a quarter century looked much as I would expect, had I been able to conjure up their images. They had more wrinkles, as did the development of our individual lives. It seemed odd to notice how they had aged, because, around them, I could never outgrow feeling like a child.

Time flies like an arrow. New York flies like a Florida brunch. So, we gathered at the deli. Cousin Melvin, whom my mother hadn’t seen since she helped him out when he was in high school, was a garrulous and vibrant man. Trying earnestly to catch up on family ties and ingratiate himself with the clan, Melvin wasn’t too clear on the rosters, and the faces of our heritage were not etched finely in his memory. He mistook me for Uncle Hy’s son.

“So, how is your Dad?” he intoned solicitously in a gratuitous attempt to express concern for my uncle who wavered absently near death with his oxygen tank. This social faux pas was irrevocable, as my family members watched in horror to witness my reaction. Poor Melvin had dug himself a relative grave of misplaced identity.

“He’s… resting.” I responded with sober sensitivity, hiding my disbelief at how well Melvin exemplified the brazen social calumny that qualified him as true member of my family.

The muffled snickers yielded to the familiar and familial revelry of a loud and ethnic delicatessen brunch. Amid much chit-chat, there was hardly anything left to say. My mother conducted herself with aplomb, gratitude, and elegance. My father’s honor was preserved. Dignity prevailed all the way around, as family members kept grievances, complaints, and kvetching tendencies to themselves.

Aging brings an unmistakable mixture of pride and humility. We’re proud that we are still around; yet, we exist with the incipient scars and lurking awareness that, sooner or later, we are next. And, we have nothing much to say about it. After all, it’s just aphasia going through.

Mark Steinberg, PhD
www.marksteinberg.com
mark@marksteinberg.com