IF I HAD LEGS, I’D KICK YOU: Is Your Therapist Like This? Run!

If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You is a horror film. Run! If your therapist is like Linda’s therapist, or Linda herself. Therapists should never treat patients like the two of them do – yelling, demeaning, being cold, kicking you out of therapy. You should feel safe. Heard. Understood. And, never, ever, judged in any way. Dr. Spring isn’t any better. She’s icy. Abrupt. Rote. Keeps repeating “It isn’t your fault,” yet never tries to understand the mothers’ feelings. She and Linda’s therapist may feel triggered or helpless as Linda decompensates and acts out. But. And, this is a big but – it is their responsibility to sort out their own feelings so they don’t get in the way. Especially Linda’s therapist. Linda deserves that. She acts out because she’s struggling with her hunger. Expressing it towards him (the therapist). And, fighting it at the same time. It’s horrifying to watch a woman fall apart, as she’s misunderstood and mistreated by the very person who should be helping her. 

Trauma & Fighting Against Hunger

Traumatized children are left hungry. For love. For someone who hears them. Who sees and understands them. (It’s the least therapy should offer.)  When you don’t get your hunger met as a child, you fight it off and grow to hate it. That’s Linda (Rose Byrne), in If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You.

Linda wouldn’t have to be in a huge fight with her hunger If she felt it was ok to need someone. If her feelings weren’t floods. If she didn’t cave in like the ceiling and feel a big hole inside her whenever she gets anywhere near an emotional need. If she didn’t feel so scared, alone, and ashamed, she wouldn’t have to fight with her patients, because they are just as hungry.

We see one side of Linda’s hunger fight in her daughter’s refusal to eat. The other side, a ravenous and devouring hunger. On the sly, Linda gorges the pizza her daughter won’t eat. She piles donuts on her plate at a meeting with Dr. Spring (Mary Bronstein), who doesn’t emotionally “feed her.”

She tells the therapist (Conan O’Brien) that she tries “hard to be in control of [her daughter] and everything, but I may as well not even be there at all.” That’s another sign of trauma. Feeling you don’t matter. So, you keep your walls up. And, one way to do that is to be rude to everyone who tries to get near you. Linda is rude. She won’t let anyone in. Not her therapist. Not her patients. Barely her daughter. Because doing so means letting in her own needs. And that’s dangerous.

Tragically, when your therapist doesn’t “get” that, you close up even more. Linda’s therapist (with no name, because he’s emblematic of all bad therapists to run from) is repulsed by her sexualized dream about him. He doesn’t “get” that Linda doesn’t know how else to express her hunger.

Trauma Clues “The Therapist” Misses 

The first thing Linda tells the therapist is a clear clue to past trauma: “Nothing feels real. When I feel this way, nothing is familiar, ever. Time is a series of things to get through. Every time I feel this way, I get farther and farther away from being myself and, like, I can never get back.” This is a trauma response. It’s a way of saying she’s scared of feeling, like the cashier who says, “You trick your brain into thinking it’s dead.” That’s dissociation. Wake up and listen, Linda’s therapist ...

Dissociation means trauma. Dissociation means you have to go far, far away from your feelings. The flood breaking through the ceiling in Linda’s apartment is another clue: Her mind can’t hold all the feelings wrestling around inside her. Feelings that have probably never been heard. Feelings no one helped her with in childhood (We hear a child screaming, “Are we gonna die?!)

Feelings that are too much make you feel like you’re dying. Or going crazy.  If you have a therapist like the therapist who doesn’t help with your terror, you can even act “crazy” and out of control. Feelings that are too much make you do drugs to block things out, including your needs and the needs of your daughter. “Oh, she’s ok (alone) ...” which is what Linda tries to tell herself about herself. She’s not. It’s unlikely Linda would neglect her child if it hadn’t been done to her.

Yet the feelings you dissociate can still drive you crazy. They’re never really gone. They have triggers. That’s why Linda yells at everyone. The parking lot attendant. The man who rear-ends her in her car. The landlord, whose contractor went missing (AKA her therapist), left a big hole.

It’s a terrible thing that Linda’s therapist knows nothing about trauma. And, he doesn’t give her a safe place for her feelings. Instead, he makes her feel bad for having them and for her confused needs, leaving her alone and terrified, haunted by her flashbacks, in If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You.

Flashbacks to Trauma She Can’t Know

Linda flashes back to confused and jumbled scenes throughout If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You. People frantic. Desperate yelling. Voices overlapping. A child’s shrill screaming: “I’m so mad at you.” A little girl screams. “Mommy! Mommy!” There’s a horror film. A mother is eating a baby. Another flashback: “What? Mom? Hello? Wake up, Mom. Mom. Mom. Do you hear us? Come on, Mom. Snap out of it ...” “Leave me alone!” A girl screams, “Don’t touch me. Don’t touch me ...”

Linda’s trauma eats her up, with no help. She doesn’t know where she ends and her daughter begins. Is she the daughter or the mother? It’s all mixed up and terrifying. No, no one can get near Linda. And, she can’t help anyone either. Not James (A$AP Rocky) when he falls and breaks his leg, bone sticking out, trying to help her. Not Caroline, her patient. Not her daughter.

Something happened to Linda when she was a child. A mother trauma she can’t face. Now she has a troubled daughter. An incompetent therapist. And she tries to “fix” herself.  The voice on the relaxation/trauma tape says: “Don’t avoid anything within. Don’t abandon yourself.” That’s impossible for someone so traumatized. Avoidance is a major coping mechanism for severe trauma and PTSD. James says: “What? You need guidance. You can’t mess around with that [tape] alone.” True. But the therapist failed her. She was abandoned early in her life. Clearly. And, she’s abandoned now by everyone she turns to. The therapist. Husband. Dr. Spring. The cycle of neglect repeats itself. But that’s what therapy is for. To stop such repetitions. Not to trigger them.

Guilt. Shame. Self-Hate. That No One Sees. 

You can tell someone (like Dr. Spring does): “It’s not your fault,” until you’re blue in the face. It doesn’t work with traumatized people who believe it is. Traumatized children are blamed. Shamed. Criticized. Helpless. They are made to feel it is their fault. That’s how they see the world.

The only thing that can change that is a therapy that connects the past to your present feelings. Not therapy that blames you. Shames you. And makes you feel worse than you already feel. Bad feelings about yourself, old shame - those are etched into your being so deeply, they won’t let up.

Especially if you’re caught in a trap. Can’t extract yourself from repeating your own trauma. Or putting into effect mechanisms like drugs and anger and running away, that give you reasons to feel guilty. “It’s not your fault” can’t take that away. Linda loses it with her pile of donuts at Dr. Spring’s group mother meeting: “It is our fault. Whose else is it? You keep telling us it’s not our fault, but if it’s not our fault, we’re super-fucked. We’re walking around pretending we have the power to change something we don’t understand because it’s not our fault ...”

It’s complicated. And, Linda is complicit. Her behavior isn’t making her daughter feel safe. It’s fueling the fires of whatever is wrong. Yet, blaming herself doesn’t solve anything either. She can’t help what she’s doing in her desperation. And, if no one puts the pieces together for what’s going on inside Linda, and why she feels and is forced to behave this way, nothing will change.

Here’s What Is Never, Ever, Good Therapy 

Yes, we could say that Linda is “difficult.” It’s because she’s so traumatized. That’s what she needs help with. She doesn’t trust the therapist, which makes her accusatory: “Don’t you write things down? It’s your fucking job to remember the boring details of my life... You didn’t give me a 10-minute warning, now I’m out of time, and I needed to tell you the dream I emailed about.” There’s a lot of pressure in Linda. So, when she says, “I want to lie here without talking, I pay for your time,” she needs him to try to understand what is going on inside. Not: “You didn’t need to come here for that. Go lie on your own fucking couch.” That’s egregious. NOT therapy. That’s abuse. Plain and simple. There are many examples of such abuse in If I had Legs, I’d Kick You.

Linda gets no empathy from the therapist at all. She’s left with no option but to scream: “Why won’t you help me? Why don’t you like me?” To which he responds, irritated, “Why don’t I like you? That’s incredibly unfair.” She’s crying. But the therapist continues to yell, taking her anxiety personally. What Linda needs is someone interested in figuring out what’s driving her distress.

But what happens, instead? As she gets increasingly agitated and desperate, the therapist unceremoniously kicks her out of therapy: “This isn’t working. We can’t see each other anymore.” No acknowledgement that it’s he who isn’t cut out to help her and that she needs someone more skilled in trauma. No referral to someone else, with care to get her the help she obviously needs.

Just. Blame. And. Abject abandonment. Linda’s face becomes dark and stricken. She’s really alone (if she didn’t feel it before). She has no one now. She walks like a zombie down the hall. Her very put-together patient jumps up and brightly says, “I got here early!” And, a re-traumatized Linda, as cold as the therapist who just kicked her out of therapy, says: “You’ll have to wait outside.”

Repetitions of Feeling Unwanted 

Linda feels unwanted. That’s part of childhood trauma. And, it gets repeated. The therapist doesn’t want her. Her husband is absent. He’s also tone deaf to her feelings. So, Linda makes others feel the same. Caroline (Danielle Macdonald), her patient, receives the brunt of this, the one who is constantly terrified and overwhelmed about her baby, Riley, and his safety. This is too close to home for Linda. She’s panicked about her daughter, triggered by Caroline, who makes her needs known.  Scared. Hungry. Like Linda. Linda can’t listen. Can’t get to the roots of Caroline’s feelings, any more than the therapist gets to hers. All she can say are practical things: “You need to keep moving. You can’t sit inside the fear and doubt and scariness.” That’s what she constantly forces herself to do. That’s the purpose of Linda’s dissociation. She can’t stand her feelings any more than she can tolerate Caroline’s. She fails Caroline, no differently than the therapist fails her.

And, Linda’s just as cruel to Caroline. Caroline calls about a success with Riley, she thought Linda would be worried if she didn’t call. (She needed Linda to care). But Linda is cold. Scolds her about using her emergency number and says, “I wasn’t worried.” Caroline’s humiliated: “You weren’t thinking about me?” She’s devastated. Another traumatized soul: “I’m sorry. I misunderstood. I’m so dumb” (for thinking someone might care.) This is trauma.  Linda leaves Caroline feeling all too alone and ashamed of her needs. Neither has anyone to turn to. That leads to rash behaviors.

A Troubling End. If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You

Linda pulls out her daughter’s feeding tube. Telling us that she will not try to get any more help. Why should she trust it? The therapist categorically failed her. Someone did in her childhood. Her husband (Christian Slater) left her on her own. Now he’s home. Taking charge. Still unattuned.

“Daddy, no tube! But I still don’t want to eat food. It’s too squishy.” A daughter who doesn’t feel emotional “food” is any safer than her Mommy does. Daddy screams at Linda: “What did you do? What did you do?” Linda runs. Straight for the ocean’s waves. She dives in. Waves crash around her. Flashback: “Don’t touch me.” People aren’t safe. They blame you. Suicide seems much better.

On the sand. Washed onto shore. “Mommy! Mommy! I’m here. Mommy. Please. Please.” Another daughter who has to be strong. Who has no help from the person she needs. The cycle repeats: “I’ll be better. I’ll be better. I promise.” Linda or her daughter? But how can Linda “be better” with no help? Because the only way she knows to deal with her sadness and pain is with the trauma response she sings about in her rendition of Harry Nilsson’s song, “Think About Your Troubles.”

Sit beside the breakfast table

Think about your troubles

Pour yourself a cup of tea

Then think about the bubbles

You can take your teardrops

And drop them in a teacup

Take them down to the riverside

And throw them over the side...”

As if the only way to deal with your troubles is to distract yourself and avoid them. Thinking you can throw them away. You can’t. Good therapy offers you a place where you don’t have to avoid. Dissociate. Or repeat your trauma. Good therapy should be a safe place. A place to say anything you need to say. Even to let out your angry feelings and thoughts. A place for empathy and care.

So, if you have a therapist like the therapist or Linda, in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, RUN! You deserve someone who does everything possible to understand you. And, who sincerely wants to help you heal. Then, you won’t feel lost. Helpless. Without legs to stand on. You’ll have the power to “kick back.”