Wednesday, November 9, 2016

The Guardian Angels within: A Memoir of my time with art therapist Ben Ploger



The Guardian Angels Within
By Patricia F. "Patty" McGehee
As a small child I sat many days along side my mother as she painted many works of art. She always included me in her activities allowing me to paint my childish paintings to keep me busy and out of her way. She was a wonderful painter.

As an abused wife, most of Mother's  works were destroyed by my abusive father in rages he threw at her in the apartment. My mother's safe place was the Delgado Museum of Art in New Orleans. When I was very small and not in  school as of yet, she would walk with me  to City Park to heal emotionally and spiritually.  There in the cool, serene atmosphere, (yes, there was air condition!) Mother would dream about becoming a great artist.  Delgado calmed her nerves and distracted her from the terrible life she had. 

It was on one of those visits to the Delgado Museum of Art that I discovered Dorothea Tanning's Guardian Angels (1946), with the beds covered in crinkled linen, and with the horrific but also beautiful angels above. I was mesmerized by it. I was both afraid and comforted that the Angels existed.

Back home, night time brought terror to our home as my father's demons possessed him. I would think about the Guardian Angels in the painting. I knew they existed, even though  no one had ever admitted to seeing one, because Dorothea   had painted them. She  was the visionary proof in my life that I was protected.

My parents stayed together their entire lives. Daddy had to work out  issues that had affected him as a result of being an abandoned child. At the age of 16, he had run away from Milne' Boys home in New Orleans, changed his age on his birth certificate, and joined the United States Army.  He became  a One Hundred and  First Airborne Paratrooper serving  over Occupied Japan.

As the years went on Daddy and I  became close. He had a huge influence on me by exercising my intellectual side. He made me read and discuss current events and National Geographic articles. He suggested  books to read  and he selected some for me. Fortunately, I enjoyed reading and I cherished our time discussing these things. 

Mother! Oh Mother. I wish she were still here, for we were bonded. I miss her every day and treasure the time we had as mother and daughter. She still talks sense to me within  my own sensibilities.  I hear her voice though me when addressing my daughter with motherly advice.

During the 20th year of my life (1974) I was having difficulty managing my life's plan. I had spent one year at Southeastern Louisiana University. I spent  another year waiting tables and  sewing in a sailboat sail loft living by the beach in California. I had also endured  two, back to back, terrible relationships with men. The second relationship left be in a state of bewilderment.  I was living in fear with the unrealistic belief that if I formed a relationship with a partner, it would be a violent hell just like what Mother endured during the early years of her marriage. I had struck out twice and was keeping everyone at arm's length.

Then one day while riding the City Park Avenue Bus in New Orleans I met Van Seibert. Under his arm was an extraordinary oil painting. I asked him where he had learned to paint so well. He said he was working with the art  therapist Ben Ploger.  Henry "Van" Seibert was painting daily under  Ploger's eye  at Delgado Junior College  hoping to  heal from PTSD. He had become an amazing painter under Ben and had been featured in a local magazine called The Dixie Roto.  In New Orleans everybody knew who Van was, but all he really was interested in was fighting  his PTSD in a personal war  armed with a paint brush.

I visited  Ploger, and discussed the possibility of becoming his student. He insisted that I always call him by his first name, Ben. Ben Ploger (1908-1993) was the first Art Therapy Association's Professional Standards Chair and he  was from New Orleans. At the time Ploger was the Chair of the Art department and a  professor at Delgado Junior College.

At the suggestion of Ploger,  I signed up to be in  his Art Therapy group class at Delgado. He suggested that I give a go at spending a school year working with him. I agreed.  I enrolled and padded my schedule with a few other courses. I wanted to make it a worthwhile year. Mornings would be spent in the Art painting studio with him..

I would get up every morning and go paint in the studio, after setting up my easel  next to Van. There were others in the group, all of them have names that I can't recall these days. There were beautiful, but  deaf, twin girls, two other vets, a battered divorcee, and a man whose face was terribly burned in a car fire. In the late afternoon, I worked part time at a department store.

Ben hovered around us like a busy  bee pointing out this and that, things that had nothing to do with the quality of the work but of the symbolic  associations he was able to pick up on. He would tell me. "Go ahead! Push the paint into the canvas!!! Feel It!" Then at other times, ask about the nature of the all brown painting I was painting and why I chose such terrible colors. And he asked, "Why do you paint the same landscape with a huge crack in the ground over and over?"  Or,   "Why are you painting skeletons of dead animals? " I had no idea why. I had selected a cow's skull off a shelf at random and painted it. He insisted it was a symbol of  the  death of something hidden in my inner psyche. Ben was sure of it. I did not think so.

Across campus, my Psychology professor (whose name escapes these days)  hired me to interview Viet Nam Vets by asking them 50 questions and recording their answers for  research on a book he was writing. He wanted to know how well they were  assimilating back into civilian life after their war experiences. He paid me two dollars per interview. At the time, nearly half of the men at school at Delgado were veterans going to school on the G. I. Bill. 
I was set up at a table in the cafeteria and at the end of the first day there were more than fifty Vets wanting to talk. I was overwhelmed by it all. I started making appointments to do the interviews and that made the job more manageable. I needed the money.

It became problematic interviewing the Vets because someone told one loudmouth where I lived. Suddenly, Vets started showing up at my apartment just to talk about what had happened to them. It was not hard to find me. They were all polite and came just to talk about the horrendous things they had experienced. I found it emotionally impossible to turn them away. I would bring out glasses of ice water and make them sit with me on the stoop while I listened to their stories. I would offer verbal comfort, insist that some of the awful things they had to do were what one calls duty. That it was O.K. Some of the things they admitted to were horrible. What they endured was horrific. At the apartment, I was not able to ask the questions since the professor that hired me insisted that I work in the cafeteria at a table. Instead, it became a time of  just being there for the about 25 or so  men who needed someone to talk to.

It became too hard on me. Somehow, I had become The Talk Lady of Delgado and everyone knew who I was. Van insisted that I go look for a new apartment and move for my own peace of mind. Instead, I made a sign and posted it on the door warning people not to disturb me when I was too overwhelmed to deal with it all. That was the creation of my first healthy boundary. What a milestone! I decided to move away in May at the end of the school year. My time listening and talking to  the Vets was coming come to an end.

Working with Ben had been amazing and I had made great emotional progress. We delved into to the family dynamic that shaped the ways I perceived how relationships should be. I  decided to discuss Dorothea Tanning's painting The Guardian Angels  with Ben. Ben was a devout Catholic.  I told him what the painting meant to me. Ben insisted that the guardian angels are within  us and we must protect ourselves. The angels are only there to lead  the way during our internal turmoil of deciding where our healthy boundaries lie. This was Existentialism at work. Ben was so pleased with me.   

Ben was all wrapped up in Sigmund Freud's  ideas and Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche's book Beyond Good and Evil (1886.) I sincerely tried to read it. Over and over I tried. I would bog down every time I felt Nietzsche  did not understand women. One day I got to a part that said something like this: A woman should be taken as a possession and if she did not  have sex  frequently she will become mentally ill!  I had reached an epiphany.  I chunked Nietzsche's book into the nearest trash can with force and vowed to NEVER let a man treat me any other way than  with respect. In the anger that grew, I coincidentally lost my fear. I thought, what could a man from the 1880's know about a modern woman anyway?  Ultimately, Ben was right. I had to be led to the right way to protect myself. The missing key was, most men will treat a woman terribly if they can get away with it.  Don't let them. There within me grew the healthy boundaries that had been missing.

Ben and I discussed over and over the issues I needed to work on and I was able to finally work out a life plan that was my own and I felt I could be successful carrying it out. He also taught me how to make sure the boundaries I was erecting were the ones emotionally healthy for me. At the close of the school year in May of 1974 I knew my time working with Ben Ploger had run its' course.

On May 28th, 1975, I quit my job working at the department store. I packed up my entire belongings and fit them in my car, leaving my mattress behind in the apartment. It did not fit. I left the key on the counter for the landlord. I went to the The New Orleans Jazz and festival for the day  with all my meager belongings stored in the car. That evening I drove out of New Orleans to stay with a friend in Hammond, Louisiana.

One day a man I knew casually drove by the house where I was staying in Hammond, Louisiana. I  was sitting on a porch. He turned his car around at the corner and came back and stopped to visit a while. He was a different sort of man. He showed me respect and seemed to have my best interests at heart. Today, forty one years later,  I can't imagine my life without him, for he  is my husband. I have never had to put up boundaries towards him.

And what of Nietzsche, Dorothea's Angels,  and Ben Ploger?  I have fond memories of Ben.  He still talks to me in my dreams, too, just like Mother, with his white hair and steel grey eyes, piercing my sensibilities. And the Angels?  Metaphorically, they are  still inside me just as Ben had explained. And the Angels? I visit Dorothea's image of them at NOMA frequently.

Nietzsche? Well Nietzsche, as far as I am concerned, he can rot in hell.