The Beginnings of Wisdom, Part 2

Second Sight
by Judith Orloff, M.D.

(Page 2 of 3)

When my parents dropped me off at the Malibu beach house, a dense fog was beginning to burn off as the sun lit up the coast. Disgruntled and moody, I settled in as best I could. Refusing to talk to anyone, I installed myself on the living room sofa and turned on the TV. There I lay, in a pink tie-dyed tank top and bell-bottom jeans with flowers embroidered on the pockets, mindlessly watching a Star Trek episode. Soon, however, my parents' friends barged in and introduced me to a neighbor. Viewing any interruption as an intrusion, I was hostile when I looked up at him, but I quickly did a double-take.

Jim was a tall, lean man in his midforties, with full, curly white hair and a white beard. He also happened to be standing in front of a backdrop of golden rays being reflected off the ocean, creating a halo effect. He looked like a storybook version of God. I wanted to burst out laughing, but I stopped myself. On sheer principle, I refused to cooperate, and laughing might be misconstrued as my “coming around.” But in the celestial light of Jim's' presence, this whole mess suddenly took on a comic twist. Here I was, exiled in Malibu, very much alive for no apparent reason, and now a man who looked like God was towering over me.

Almost before I knew it, Jim was sitting on the couch beside me and gently asking me questions about myself. Annoyed by how forward he was, I wondered, Who is this man anyway? I wanted to dislike him, but somehow I couldn't. His large brown eyes and kind, unassuming manner soothed me. His presence gave me a feeling of acceptance, something I seldom experienced around adults. The quality of his voice and the tender way he looked at me seemed familiar, as if we'd sat together a thousand times before, though in fact no one in my life remotely resembled him.

I instantly connected with Jim, felt some sort of magical alliance between us. But there was no way in the world I was going to admit that to anybody. I'd programmed myself to be miserable, and nothing would change my stance. Adamant about refusing to give in to my parents' demands, I hardly spoke to him that first day. Eventually he said good-bye, got up, and left. I made a point of not watching him, kept my gaze fixed on the television.

The next morning my parents issued me an ultimatum. As usual, my mother did most of the talking while my father quietly sat back, giving her his silent but strong support. Either I had to agree to go into psychotherapy now, or they'd send me to live with relatives on the East Coast. My only exposure to psychotherapy had been the few instances when my parents dragged me to family counseling sessions that always ended up in yelling matches, after which we all went home in frustration. As a result, I viewed therapy as a farce, punishment for the inept who couldn't work out their own problems. But since I wanted to stay in Los Angeles at any cost, I reluctantly consented.

Late that August afternoon in 1968, two months after my high-school graduation, the three of us headed for Beverly Hills in the family Lincoln. I sat in the backseat, watching my father's somber but kind face in the rearview mirror. My mother's eyes were unflinching, but whenever she glanced at me, they were sad. To stay numb and pretend I didn't care, I kept silently repeating the words to “Purple Haze,” a Jimi Hendrix song.

Our destination was a modest, four-story office building with two cramped elevators and long, windowless halls. While sitting in the waiting room before the appointment, our tension mounted. It was all I could do to keep my mouth shut and not fly out the door.

Not a moment too soon, a familiar figure greeted us: Jim, our friend's neighbor in Malibu, the man I'd met the day before. He was the psychiatrist we were scheduled to see. I was furious; I felt I'd been tricked and set up. At the same time, I was strangely attracted to him, intrigued by my sense of our intangible rapport. Against my will, it seemed I shared an unspoken camaraderie with him, almost a kinship. Whirling with feelings, I nodded at Jim and grumbled a guarded hello. Then my parents and I followed him into his office.

For the first session, Jim met with us all together. He sat in a black leather swivel chair and motioned for me to sit beside him on an oversized rust-colored ottoman. My parents stiffly sat opposite us on a green-and-beige-striped couch. Soon my mother started sobbing and told Jim how worried she was about me. I pulled my knees up to my chest and rolled into a tight ball. I felt suffocated by the intensity of my mother's love. Her attention always seemed to be on me. I knew how much she cared, but was afraid that if I let her in too close I'd be devoured. She was so dominant a personality that the only way I could be real, I felt, was to oppose her. Given her intensity and persistence, to do so took every ounce of strength I possessed.

Jim listened patiently to both my parents. Then he listened to me. I felt unusually timid around him, paying attention to his opinions, sneaking looks at his clothes, noticing his wedding ring, how he held his hands. I never once intentionally provoked him or cut him off, as I did so often with other adults, particularly authority figures. At the end of the hour, I surprised myself by agreeing to come back again, to try whatever “therapy” was supposed to be.

Relieved that I was at last cooperating with them, my parents allowed me to move back into their home. But after a few months, Jim suggested that I stay in what he called a “halfway house.” He knew of two therapists, Pat and Ray, who rented rooms to people like me, people who were in transition and needed support. They lived on the premises with their two young daughters, a cat, and two dogs. Jim thought the move would give me a chance to grow up and begin to separate from my mother and father. I was all for it; I couldn't wait to be on my own. My parents were wary but they'd made a decision to trust Jim and so reluctantly agreed.

I fell in love with the house the moment I saw it. It was a two-story, weathered pink Victorian A-frame on the comer of Park Avenue and the Speedway, an alley that runs along the entire stretch of Venice Beach. The boardwalk and the sand, separated from us by an empty dirt lot, were less than a half block away. At night, I could hear waves breaking on the shore as I fell asleep. I quickly became fast friends with Pat and Ray, good-hearted hippies in their midthirties with degrees in social work who now devoted their lives to helping others. They welcomed me into their home.

The big surprise was the other residents: Pete, a schizophrenic in his early twenties who mostly kept to himself, and Dolly, a wired manic-depressive woman. My God, I thought, Jim put me here with the mentally ill! Pat and Ray agreed: That was exactly what Jim had done. And yet, somehow, it didn't matter to me. What mattered was that I felt free. Still, the first time I opened the medicine cabinet and placed my toothbrush beside Pete's Thorazine and Dolly's lithium, it did give me the creeps. But besides the times when Pete was hearing voices or Dolly had her bouts of insomnia, we all got along just fine and life was pretty uneventful.

I continued my therapy with Jim. Yet despite the bond I felt I had with him, I didn't open up immediately. Nor did my initial timidity last: I was a hard case, fighting him at every turn, testing and probing to see how far I could go. For several months I missed appointments, challenged him, threatened never to come back again.

Then, one day, after being in therapy about a year, I told Jim about a troubling dream I'd had when I was nine years old. The dream was similar to a wakeful state, vivid, not at all like a regular dream. I'd never discussed it before with anyone except my parents. In fact, I'd purposely kept it a secret. Recalling it now as part of my therapy, I described it in my journal:

My nightgown is drenched in sweat as I bolt awake, knowing that my grandfather, who lives three thousand miles away, had just died. I can hear his voice saying good-bye to me over and over again as I struggle to get my bearings. It's the middle of the night. My bedroom is pitch black. I can't tell if I'm dreaming or if this is really happening. Almost too frightened to move, I drag myself from bed and run as fast as I can into my parents' room to give them this message.

Instead of being upset by my announcement, my mother smiles and assures me, “You were having a nightmare. Grandpop's fine.” The absolute certainty in her voice makes me doubt myself. Of course Grandpop's all right. I've simply overreacted, I'm told. So I head back to my own room again, comforted by the notion that my panic was unfounded, and drift off to sleep.

A few hours later, my aunt calls from Philadelphia, to tell us that my grandfather has died of a heart attack.

As I recounted the dream to Jim, he listened intently without flinching or recoiling as I expected he would. Instead, showing genuine interest, he asked me to speak more about it. I first told him my mother's reaction to the dream, which had confused me. She'd been intrigued and quite tender, yet at the same time seemed to be holding something back, as if she was purposely trying not to make too much of it. Even after she learned of my grandfather's death, she seemed to write off my dream as coincidence. But something in her eyes said she didn't fully believe what she was telling me. And neither did I. I was certain my grandfather had come to say good-bye. The way he looked and the sound of his voice had been too alive, too real, to be mere imagination. Unable to resolve this puzzle, I'd wondered if somehow I was to blame for my grandfather's death.

Grandpop and I had always been close. Years before, he would hoist me up on his shoulders and promise that even after he died we'd never be apart. All I'd have to do was look up at the brightest star in the sky to find him. Our love ran deep, and it was unbearable that I might have hurt my grandfather.

My capacity to bring up these feelings was enhanced by a growing romantic relationship I was developing with Terry, an artist I eventually moved in with for two years. He lived across the street from the halfway house in an old two-story converted brick Laundromat with enormous clear glass pyramidal sky-lights in practically every room, including the bathroom. As the sun shone through them, the light was pristine. Terry also used the space as his studio. A few inches taller than I, twenty-five, Terry had a short, blond ponytail and piercing blue eyes. He habitually wore a pair of paint-splattered jeans that mimicked the colorful brush strokes of a Sam Francis canvas.

Terry was one of a four-member group of male muralists, who were futurists of a sort. They painted visionary disaster scenes such as earthquakes, snowstorms, and floods. Their murals so closely resembled some of my own premonitions that it seemed they'd been painting my inner life. The group called themselves the Los Angeles Fine Arts Squad and did their artwork on huge bare walls of commercial and residential buildings all over the city. A first of their kind, they were a central part of the Venice art scene.

Terry and I related to each other through the world of images and dreams. I used to speak a lot to him about the dreams that I'd written down for years. I dreamed voraciously, and relished waking up in the morning and retrieving my dreams. On the days when I couldn't hold on to them, I felt empty and vacant, as if I'd missed out on something important. When the images lingered, their richness filled me up like the finest food. They were sacred to me.

Terry and I used to take long walks at night in front of the deserted amusement park-Pacific Ocean Park-where he shared his artistic visions and I shared my dreams. With our faces eerily lit up by the blue mercury lights lining the boardwalk, Terry said that sometimes he could see the images shining right through me. He believed that my ability to generate them indirectly influenced the quality of his art.

Terry's only desire since he was a little boy was to be an artist, to create. As I watched him, so calm and directed, sketching at his rough-hewn pine drawing table late into the nights, lost in the world of art, I prayed I too might find a calling that could give me so much joy.

When at the last minute I decided to forgo college in favor of living with a struggling, long-haired artist eight years my senior who wasn't even Jewish, my parents were exasperated. Having already paid thousands of dollars for my tuition at Pitzer College in Claremont, where I was supposed to begin the following semester, they forfeited the money and refused ever to meet Terry. Convinced that at seventeen I was throwing away my future, they couldn't support that. Not knowing what else to do, my parents decided to withdraw all financial help except the fees for my therapy sessions.

Copyright © 1996 by Judith Orloff, MD

About the Author

Judith Orloff, M.D., is a board-certified psychiatrist, an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at UCLA, and a staff member at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. She is also the author of Second Sight, a memoir about coming to terms with her intuitive abilities. Dr. Orloff is an international lecturer and workshop leader on the interrelationships of medicine, intuition, and spirituality. Her work has been featured on CNN, PBS, Lifetime, A&E, and NPR and has appeared in New Age, Self, and USA Today. She lives by the ocean in Los Angeles, California.