The Choice

e self-blame hurts others, too, not just ourselves. I remember a
former patient, a man and his family I treated brieĘy a year or so ago.
ey sat before me like abandoned pieces from different puzzles: the
intimidating colonel in his decorated uniform; the silent blonde wife,
her collarbones jutting out from her white blouse; their teenage
daughter, her dyed black hair ratted and sprayed into a wild nest, her
eyes ringed in black eyeliner; a quiet son, eight years old, studying a
comic book in his lap.
e colonel pointed at his daughter. “Look at her. She’s
promiscuous. She’s a drug addict. She won’t respect our rules. She
mouths off to her mother. She doesn’t come home when she’s told. It’s
becoming impossible to live with her.”
“We’ve heard your version,” I said. “Let’s hear from Leah.”
As if taunting him by reading from a script that would conĕrm
every one of her father’s claims, Leah launched into a story about her
weekend. She’d had sex with her boyfriend at a party, where there’d
been underage drinking and where she’d also dropped acid. She’d
stayed out all night. She seemed to take pleasure in listing the details.
Her mother blinked and picked at her manicured nails. Her father’s
face Ęushed red. He rose from his seat next to hers. He towered over
her, shaking his ĕst. “You see what I have to put up with?” he roared.
His daughter saw his anger, but I saw a man on his way to a heart
attack.
“You see what I have to put up with?” Leah said, rolling her eyes.
“He doesn’t even try to understand me. He never listens to me. He just
tells me what to do.”
Her brother stared harder at his comic book, as if force of will could
take him out of the war zone his family life had become and put him
in the fantasy world of his book, where the lines between good and
evil were clearly drawn, where the good guys would win, eventually.
He had said the least of anyone in the family, and yet I had a hunch