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Key points
- Lesbian relationships often stir profound emotions concerning an individual’s sense of self.
- A therapist who sees the uniqueness of a lesbian relationship can provide valuable guidance for exploring deep connections.
“Hello, I’m glad to meet you,” Eva said in a rich voice as welcoming and open and other-concerned as a person’s voice could be. I liked her immediately. She was formal but not too formal. She was a real person interested in helping us, a woman who seemed comfortable with a broad range of human emotions, not limited to any one doctrine, but who thought for herself after having her own varied experiences in life. She was also a lesbian, making me feel she was kindred to us. I felt grateful for her graciousness and direct style.
I remember that room. I remember the chairs. I remember Hannah sitting not far from me in one of them. I see Eva sitting across from us, nodding, receptive. I felt a slight tension between Hannah and me and uncertainty about what would occur.
“See you next week,” Eva said when we left. We walked out of that small building, stepped down the front stairs onto the sidewalk, and I felt ready to cry. Would it work out? Would Eva be able to help us? Would Hannah still love me? Would we stay together, or would we have to split up?
I doubt that Hannah felt the same way. I don’t know if she had the prospect of our breaking up very much in her mind. I think the experience was different for each of us. But I know she took my hand. “I love you,” she said as we walked down the street toward my car. “We’re in this together,” she said a few moments later. She did this every single time we left Eva’s tucked-away office over the years, warming me with her confidence.
We saw Eva weekly for five months during that period. Her gentle way of having us engage with each other—by first speaking our minds, then listening, then responding thoughtfully to each other—helped settle things between us. Then we did not see her again until 12 years later when I had begun losing my eyesight, which affected me. I could no longer drive. Hannah would now have to do all the driving, which raised some difficulties between us because it threw us together more and made us more interdependent. We had to choose routes together, plan our schedules more in concert, and overcome our differences in how we might do things. That was when I suggested we see Eva again.
When I think of that second period when we met with Eva, what comes to mind immediately is the fact that I cried. I do not usually cry. I have cried when I feel hurt by Hannah or occasionally when a trying external event happens. I cry in frustration at those times. But with Eva, in that little room with the tall windows and the three of us, I cried in a different way. I cried because I wanted to be understood and because I did not want to be hurting Hannah.
In our sessions, Hannah told me that in addition to the pressures she felt from her job and my increasing blindness, she put great effort into trying to please me. She very much needed to feel she was good enough, not constantly to feel she was being told she was lacking in relation to me. She needed me to truly see her, to understand the pressures she was under. She felt upset when I did not.
I felt hurt. I did not want to look bad in Eva’s eyes. I did not want to hurt Hannah. I struggled to tell “my side of the story.” In telling of that, I cried; I was dredging up deep emotions, and my words came out with much feeling.
Our sessions soon covered far more than my blindness. I often worried when listening to what Hannah had to say about a problem, wondering if our repeated airings of difficulties were worth it. But I knew Hannah believed in the rational approach of the therapy, that we should not let things go wrong. We should understand them. I might have been more willing just to let things explode sometimes. But I also shared Hannah’s desires to have our relationship be good, not a simmering broth of unmet needs—her sense that we should not indirectly act out when we got hurt but go somewhere to talk about how we felt.
Those sessions every two weeks when we met with Eva were a safety valve for Hannah and me. They helped us talk to each other and fix what was going wrong between us. They helped me to stop and show Hannah that I saw her, cared for her, that she was important, and that I could let her go as well as go places with her. They helped me correct some of my thoughtless behaviors concerning Hannah so she would not feel slighted or hurt. And they helped her, I think, understand me better and accept me, possibly, in part, because Eva did.
When I think of how Eva helped us, I hear again, in my mind, things she said to us over the years. “When that happens, you are each going back to an old place,” she would often say to us when Hannah spoke painfully of something I had done that hurt her feelings, and I, in turn, would go back to my hurts—to feeling that Hannah did not understand me or see my efforts in a positive light.
“Don’t go there,” Eva would say. “Stop. Take a breath. You have hit a snag.”
“You love each other, remember that,” she would say.
“You are very close. What one of you does affects the other.”
I thought of our closeness often as we left the sessions, how intertwined, how other-oriented we each were because we were women, how hard it felt when rifts came between us, how much Hannah and I wanted to heal those rifts, and how grateful I was that Eva was helping us.
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