I hate having to use disabled parking,” she said. “I see how people look at me, and I know what they’re thinking. ‘What makes that weirdo think she can park there?’ Sometimes they ask me what I’m doing parked in one of those spaces.”
“What do you tell them?” I asked.
“I just walk away,” she said.
“Why don’t you tell them the truth?” I asked. “Why don’t you look them in the eye and say, ‘I’ve had to park in handicapped spaces since I got back from Iraq, because now I can’t walk past a row of cars without thinking that one of them is going to blow up in my face.”
Douglas Faneuil is the founder of Living Proof Productions, a not-for-profit devoted to suicide prevention based in New York City. He also designs database solutions for companies throughout the Northeast.
I’ve been preoccupied with the wording of this declaration, “Maybe People Need to See Scars.” In the radio profile, a patient who was nearly killed by a car bomb now has a debilitating fear of parked cars. She finally settles into a kind of détente with her condition, admitting that perhaps her shame undermines a reason for her phobia; hence the titular quote. Here’s what tickles me: the sentence can be heard, “Maybe people need to seize cars.” On its surface, the patient’s declaration reads as a sophisticated analysis of her unconscious desire to acknowledge her pain in public; read another way (not misread), her statement sounds like a petulant, selfish and utterly irrational solution. We call this a Freudian slip and not a coincidence because both meanings deserve to be considered; both reveal a truth.
I love this about our unconscious, that it makes us more meaningful than we intend. Recognizing the unexpected depths of our expression is one of the great pleasures of psychotherapy – as long as we’re not judgmental about what we over-hear.