In Session: Zamora's Quest

Disclaimer: this is a fictionalized account based on dynamics that have come up across a number of clients. This does not reflect confidential information about any particular psychotherapy client.

From the first time I met Zamora, I knew that she left me wanting. I wanted to know her more, I wanted her to speak, and I wanted to be her therapist.

Is desire to get to know one’s patient forbidden? Yes or no, it did not matter.

What was harder to figure out was what Zamora wanted from me. Most patients come because they want something. It might be to feel better, to be understood, or perhaps to learn a new habit. Whatever it is, there is something that is sought.

Zamora spoke about the other, for the other, through the other. She looked to me for guidance about how to begin. She often asked me what I wanted her to talk about. And she told me all about what and who her husband wanted her to be.

I was often in a state of intrigue with Zamora as she managed to constantly leave me hanging; both hanging onto her words, and hanging with unanswered questions, unfinished stories, and unformulated impressions.

At times there was an urgency to Zamora’s demand; a desperate plea for me to provide her with an answer, a solution, a fix. The immediacy of this demand left me feeling inadequate, empty, and hungry to understand. What was this about, and why was the question always directed towards me?

I would reply to her, “What is it that you want, that you need?”

But Zamora always turned the question back to me.

Zamora was a tease. She would start a story and then stop in the middle. She was here one minute, gone the next. She would pull me in for a moment with presence, connectedness, and a vivid sense of emotional realness, only to slip away the moment I spotted her availability. Each session was a game of hide and seek; a world in which every answer awakened another question.

Unlike many of my patients, Zamora seemed to speak to me not to tell a story, nor to be understood, nor to hand over some knowledge about herself. Rather, the act of speaking seemed motivated by the need to arouse - and keep - my interest and curiosity.

“I’m afraid to bore you,” Zamora explained. “I want to make sure that I hold your interest so you won’t tell me to go.” She seemed to believe that our relationship was one of captivated audience and enchanting performer; our connection bound to the workings of such an arrangement.

Zamora had been raised by her father, after losing her mother at a young age to mental illness and institutionalization. Zamora’s father was present at times but preoccupied at others, often leaving Zamora with family members for months at a time. He would appear to be absent when he was actually present, or he would actually disappear, only to show up at some unexpected later time with gifts, apologies, and attentiveness.

“Those moments were like a drug,” Zamora explained to me. “I could not break free from his spell even though I knew that’s what it was - and a dangerous spell at that. It was dangerous to get caught up in it because it could be over in a second, and I never could know when that second would be. Those times were the most tantalizing, alluring, and devastating times imaginable. Yes, they were all of those things all at once.”

It was no wonder that Zamora seemed obsessed with figuring out the key to capturing others in a similar hold. This would be her promise against future disappointment, a way of turning the tables; she would be the one to hold the control and the other’s desire in her hand, like a drug to be offered and then pulled away at will.

“My husband complains that he never knows what will make me happy; he always tries but just when he thinks he’s figured it out, I find something to complain about. I’m a prisoner to this dynamic; a prisoner to my need to always keep wanting and to keep him constantly wanting as well.”

Was I her prisoner too? Or was she mine?

At times I wanted to change the rules. Zamora would speak and I would respond. Then she would catch me off guard. So the next time I would meet her words with silence instead. There was a feeling of always being set up, manipulated, needing to stay a step ahead.

But a step ahead of what? I asked myself.

What was it that I wanted Zamora to do, to be, for me? I tried to articulate the question for myself.

I wanted to know what she wanted, and I wanted to know more of her. Her story was never complete, never a straight line. I wanted to solve the mystery and I wanted to know if I was enough, if our work was enough, to hold her interest. Or would she leave suddenly?

In fact, Zamora did leave at times. She left not once, not twice, but three times. She left me hanging. I never knew in advance that she was going to go; I don’t think she knew either. It just happened. I also never knew why or when she would come back.

Later we understood that the times she left were those times when she felt the most loved. To be loved was to be seduced- seduced into inevitable disappointment. The lure of my love had to be avoided at all costs. It didn’t matter that I was not in fact a father beckoning with gifts, apologies, and attentiveness; a father who was just one step away from turning her dream into a nightmare by leaving her alone with longing, desire, humiliation, and pain.

“What is it you are looking for?” I often tried to ask. “Is there something we must repeat?”

“I want a guarantee.” Zamora would say plaintively. “I want a guarantee that you’ll never lose interest in me, turn away from me, or move beyond my reach.”

I thought about my own wish for a guarantee that she would not leave, about the painful suspense in each session, about never knowing if Zamora was in or out, present or absent, committed to our work or on her way out the door.

“What is out of reach?” I asked. “What does that phrase bring up for you?”

Zamora began to cry.

“Whatever it is that’s out of reach, that is the thing I want. I always want what I cannot have. Not just my father when he would leave, but anything off limits for me- that is what I’ve always wanted and that is what I still want now. I have always wanted to be someone I’m not, to have what I can’t have, to be the one who has instead of the one without.”

This struggle also manifested itself in Zamora’s relationship with food. Some days she would eat too much, some days too little. Feelings of deprivation, longing, frustration, and greed would hold her attention for hours. On some days food was satisfying, but there wasn’t enough. On other days, there was enough but it wasn’t what she wanted. There was always something to complain about and always something to hold her hostage with desire.

In Zamora’s world, the only thing that ever made her feel safe was awareness of desire in the other. In this safety also hid her greatest danger, the loss of her connection to her own desire. Could my desire meet hers in a way that wouldn’t leave us both at risk?

“You know, sometimes I think I come to see you only to torture, tease, and excite you. I tell you a dream, or a memory, or a story, but I never let you respond or talk to me about it. I look for signs that you’re interested, hooked - that I got you. And as soon as I think I have you, I move us somewhere else.”

“Is there a connection between your father and somewhere else?” I asked.

Zamora remained silent for some time.

“My father never took me with him whenever he would go. I always knew he was leaving me behind and going somewhere else, to some unknown mysterious place that I could only guess about, imagine, wonder about - and wonder what I was missing, and what was there that pulled him away from wanting to be with me. And I always believed that if I could only find that somewhere else where he was, then I could get him back.”

There was a deep sadness in Zamora’s words; a deep pain at the memory of the elusiveness of those times when she wished she knew where to find that which she was longing for. This was a pain that Zamora had seldom let me see; a pain locked away in the somewhere else that had always seemed so out of reach in our sessions.

But sometimes the answer to the repetition lies in the time when it was different.

Zamora’s next words surprised us both.

“You know, now that I think back to it, there was one time that my father stayed until I was actually ready for him to go. It was the one and only time that I can remember that I actually let him know that I didn’t want him to leave. I asked him not to leave!”

Zamora continued, “I don’t know why, but somehow that one time, I was 10 or 11, I can remember it like it was yesterday. And for some reason that time when he was about to leave, I let myself show him what I wanted, that I wanted him. And he listened. He stayed for a while until I said it was okay for him to go. Maybe that was what he wanted all along, to know that I wanted him, but he never could say it in words. Maybe leaving me behind and going somewhere else was really a way of asking me to show him that he was wanted. Maybe he wanted something from me and I just couldn’t really tell.”

Zamora turned to me now and said, “And you can go now too. Because now I know that if I want to talk with you, I can find you right here. I only need to ask.”

And as she walked out from her session with a calmness I had never seen before, I understood Zamora to be letting me know that she had finally found what she was looking for.