Beauty Burden: “We’re the Broken Toys”

The Dark Side of Extraordinary Beauty

Disclaimer: Due to the mandated laws and ethical guidelines governing patient confidentiality, “Laura,” is not a specific real person. She is a composite formed from my experiences working with many patients throughout the years. Additional safeguards I have taken to protect confidentiality include but are not limited to changing names, dates, genders, ages, locations, and professions. The composite model I utilize has a longstanding precedent in academia and mainstream literature for mental health practitioners who write about the psychotherapy process such as Dr. Irvin Yalom and Dr. Paul Linde. This story is part of a larger unpublished collection titled, Beauty Burden, about the dark side of possessing extraordinary beauty.

“God help you if you are an ugly girl, 'course too pretty is also your doom…'cause everyone harbors a secret hatred for the prettiest girl in the room.”

- Ani DiFranco

Laura heard through a friend that I worked with beautiful women and came to see me. And she was truly breathtaking: electric blue sapphires posing as pupils coupled with long wavy blond hair framing her perfectly chiseled face. She was also very, very tall. As I stood in the wait area to greet her and she rose from her chair, I almost laughed. Petite at only five feet tall, it seemed to me that my entire stature ended where her torso began.

As a teen Laura commanded the runways of all the fashion capitals in the world, but by the time she arrived to Los Angeles at the age of twenty-two, Plan B was very much on her mind.

“Models come to L.A. to die,” she told me, now all of twenty-five years old.

And by that she meant that the epicenters for fashion and modeling were Milan, Paris and New York. When models ended up in L.A., they were considered old and had one shot to transition into acting, which very few successfully did. Laura was no exception to this rule. She had tried her hand at acting, auditioning for commercials and small television parts, but was unsuccessful. She ended up getting a real estate license and initially implied that she was doing very well as an agent.

When she first sat down on the sofa in my psychotherapy office, it felt to me as if a beautiful giant dressed in a fitted tweed coat with jockey pants headed to her afternoon riding lesson, had stumbled upon a doll’s house. The bland, gray office furniture that surrounded us seemed to shrink all around her.

“What brings you here?” I asked.

“Well, I’m fine, really. I just want to talk about some of the relationships in my life. I don’t see this being a long process for me,” she said flashing me her runway model smile.

A former mentor of mine taught me that whenever a new client speaks those words, it’s a cue to take out your calendar and book them for many months to come.

“What kind of relationships?” I said.

“I’m dating several men and they’re all wonderful, really. I just don’t know if any of them are the ONE.”

“What do you mean?”

She pointed to large diamond studs in her ears.

“Danny loves to buy me jewelry, and Adam hires a personal stylist at the beginning of each season to pick out my wardrobe. Evan never lets me get behind on rent. They’re all so kind,” and finished with an intense, studied smile.

“How old are they?”

“They’re in their 40’s, maybe early 50’s, at the most. But I’m very mature, and you know how it is with guys, they’re immature, so it works out in the end.”

Uh oh, this could be a tough one, I thought to myself. Laura seemed to have an answer and rationalization for what she was doing, but none of it seemed to be rooted in any truth.

“What I’m hearing you say is that they buy you things, and I guess what I’m wondering is apart from that, how do they actually treat you? Do you like them?”

“As my mom told me it’s just as easy to fall in love with a rich man as it is with a poor man, so why make my life harder than it needs to be?” she answered.

“But are you in love with any of them?” I asked.

She smiled, again, and remained silent while her body stayed frozen in place.

“May I ask how you met them?” I continued, in an attempt to dig a little deeper.

“My model friend Cindy knows a lot of people and she’s always trying to set me up. Last week I went out with a British millionaire who was just in town for the weekend. She only sets me up with successful guys, investment bankers, CEOs,” she answered.

It sounded to me like Laura was some kind of escort, whether she labeled herself that or not. I found out my hunch might be true when she disclosed that she had only rented out one studio apartment in the last twelve months, barely making any money as a real estate agent. It seemed to me that she supported herself through her relationships with these men.

“Last night Evan was leaving my apartment and Roberto was coming in and they saw each other. You should have seen Roberto’s face. He’s from Brazil and he was so pissed. I thought he was going to knock Evan out!” she said, excited.

“Roberto? Who’s Roberto? How many guys are there?” I wondered.

She told me this wasn’t a one-off incident and that these men often fought over her. She said she liked it because it made her feel cared for, something she had been completely deprived of as a little girl.

Laura was raised in Tempe, Arizona by two parents who were drug addicts. She, her younger brother, Jon, and older sister, Susan, went days without proper meals and regularly scoured their neighbors’ garbage cans for food. Their house was impossible to walk through, as there was trash piled a foot high, covering every inch of bare floor.

“I never let my fingernails grow because when I did they’d end up with dirt underneath and all the kids made fun of me, so I bit them down to their nubs,” she said. I looked down at her hands and noticed she still did.

When they were as young as toddlers, Laura’s parents dropped all of them off at the park, where they were left for hours and sometimes even entire days without any adult supervision. Strangers often took them to their own houses for dinner and returned them home well after dark. It was truly a miracle that all of them survived childhood without being abducted, raped or killed.

“My parents taught us to lie about their drug use. Mom said we’d be split up if anyone knew so I could never have any friends over, but I didn’t want anyone over.

“I was too embarrassed,” she said.

“Nobody at school noticed that you were being severely neglected?” I asked her.

“No, not for years. I still don’t get how nobody picked up on it, not one of our teachers, not one parent. I remember being six and eating pencils to make myself sick so I’d get sent to the school nurse, hoping that she’d notice something and help me, help us,” she answered.

What finally blew the cover off her parents’ neglect was an incident involving her younger brother who at the age of eight broke his arm and didn’t receive any medical attention, until his teacher noticed a bone protruding through his skin. He was immediately brought to the hospital and in the emergency room doctors discovered he had been walking around with a broken arm for over a week. None of the medical professionals could understand how he had withstood the pain for so long to which he replied, “I just didn’t move it.”

The doctors called the authorities and within twenty-four hours social services were sent to the family’s home to investigate further. Upon discovering the drug addicted parents and the dire living conditions, the children were promptly removed and placed into various foster homes. Laura was ten years old at the time and was told to pack a garbage bag of things to bring with her. She grabbed a blanket and a teddy bear and was shipped to her next home, one of five she would live in before she turned eighteen.

Initially when Laura told me about the horrifying experiences she had endured she spoke about it like they had happened to someone else, or as though she had read about them in a newspaper article or seen them on TV. This is common when someone has undergone severe trauma because of a natural, protective disassociation that occurs.

“How is crying about it going to help me?” she once asked me.

“Many times when we endure trauma as children, we don’t have the chance to process it, because we’re just kids trying to survive. But it still lives inside of us on some level,” I began to answer.

“So how is crying going to help me?” she interrupted me, looking down as she picked at her fingernails.

“If we get a chance to safely express it and move through it, it can be very freeing and we aren’t as weighed down by our past experiences,” I replied.

She took in what I said, but her face appeared doubtful, her eyebrows raised.

“So how long before I feel better? I mean, there’s a part of me that thinks I should be able to get over it without being here. I was neglected as a child and I ate toast for breakfast this morning. Life goes on. I can’t get stuck in the past.”

“I understand.”

And I really did. Therapy is hard and can be grueling. Revisiting traumatic events is not fun, even if the rewards are potentially great. There was no point in me pushing this further. Laura was going to have to be ready to do this work on her own terms, whenever that might be. One thing, among many, that I’ve learned over time is to be forever respectful of people’s psyches. Only the individual knows how much they can tolerate and when.

Laura left the session telling me that she’d call me. I wasn’t sure I’d ever hear from her again, so the following week when she did call to schedule another appointment, I was a little surprised. But I was even more surprised when she showed up with a man.

“I thought it would be good for you to meet Evan,” she said as they stood up from the chairs in the wait area. Evan was about a foot shorter than Laura, and at least twenty years old than her. His balding head was strategically covered with a Yankees baseball cap, but you could still tell he had very little to no hair because his hat limped on his head.

“I didn’t realize you were planning to bring someone,” I said surprised.

“Oh sorry, I didn’t know I was supposed to let you know,” she responded.

“It’s no problem,” I told her but made a mental note to discuss it with her at another time, preferably when we were alone.

This kind of thing often happened with patients who didn’t have good relationship boundaries. They’d show up unannounced with a husband, or mother or some person in their life they were having issues with without any warning. They didn’t realize that the therapist was actually preparing for each session, putting thought into it beforehand and not just “winging it.”

After they sat down, I immediately began to observe a dynamic that was in direct contrast to the picture Laura had painted in our first meeting. She had made it seem like the men in her life were falling and fighting over her, but what I saw play out in our session looked very different.

“I really like Evan but he’s always talking to his ex-girlfriend, and I don’t understand why,” she said.

“I’m really good friends with her, that’s why. Who cares, anyway?” Evan said with a New York accent.

“Why do you think you’re here, Evan?” I asked.

“I’m not really sure. I like Laura, but I’m not going to stop talking to my ex for her,” he said.

I was totally confused. Did he know about her other relationships? Did those other relationships even exist?

“I think it’s disrespectful. I love Evan and I’d stop dating other guys if he stopped talking to his ex,” she said.

I now understood. Evan was the special one of the group of guys she was seeing, the one she hoped she could become exclusive with.

“I’m not going to,” he replied. He was defiant.

Laura began to cry.

“I thought if we came to see you we could find some kind of compromise,” Laura said now sobbing uncontrollably.

“I’m done. I can’t stand when you get hysterical.”

Evan got up and abruptly left the room, leaving the door wide open. I stood up to close it while Laura stayed seated and continued to cry for a long while. It was obvious to me that Evan cared little about her.

“Do you think we have a chance at making things work?” she asked me.

“Two people have to want to work on things in order to do so,” I answered.

She left the session with mascara raining down her cheeks. I thought there was a good chance I’d never hear from her again, that I might get the blame for what had unfolded in the session, but she soon called for another session.

“I’ve decided to focus on the other men in my life. If I have less time for Evan, I think he’ll appreciate me more and stop talking to his ex,” she said as she cat walked into the office and sat down on the couch.

“Laura, from what I could tell in the last session it didn’t seem like you were that that happy with how he was treating you—”

“What am I supposed to do? He pays for my rent!” she raised her voice.

“Let’s talk about that then. You believe that because he pays for your rent that you need to tolerate certain behaviors, even if you feel you’re being disrespected?”

“Yes.”

“Well, you don’t.”

“But then how will I survive?

And this, in my mind, was the real issue at hand. She was suffering from a desire to be rescued. Laura had been deprived of the most fundamental parental support growing up— food, shelter, safety and love. She was creating in her personal life a dynamic to be rescued and cared for, in a way she hadn’t been during her childhood.

The problem was twofold. On the most fundamental level, nobody could rescue Laura but herself. Ultimately she would have to be the one to take charge of her own healing and changing her life.

The other problem was that the templates she used to choose men were based on the dysfunctional ones she had observed as a kid. None of these men were going to be able to be there for her in any kind of meaningful way because she was drawn to unavailable, absent figures similar to her biological parents who had neglected her. This was not a conscious process on her part, but rather a subconscious hope that one of these men would turn out to be her knight in shining armor, somehow making right everything that had gone terribly wrong in her childhood.

Compounding the problem was that the one thing that she had relied on to support herself—her looks—were in her mind rapidly slipping away due to the inevitable aging process. She was desperate to land a man before she ran out of her currency.

After Laura graduated high school, her mother, Anne, contacted her wanting to reconnect. She told her that her father, Steve, was still using and that they had broken up because she was now sober. Laura had spent the previous ten years of her life being shuttled in and out of foster homes. Sometimes she would end up in the same district as her brother and sister and they’d see each other at a local school, and other times she didn’t know anyone. She couldn’t wait to turn eighteen years old and for the state to release her from their “care.” When Anne called her, Laura took it as a chance for new beginnings.

Anne, who was a classic beauty with Audrey Hepburn features, had been taught early on to use her good looks to land a man. That man was Laura’s father, who although he appeared to have it all on the outside — wealth, success, and charm was secretly and then not-so-secretly a drug addict who lost it all. Laura shared her mother’s good looks, the high cheek bones, electric blue eyes and wide forehead.

“You’re done with high school and it’s time to make something of yourself. You’re prettier than your sister. You can model; she can’t. I have a friend who’s a scout in Phoenix and she’s willing to meet with you,” Anne told Laura when they met in person.

Laura was thrilled that for the first time in her life, her mother was expressing care and concern about her future. She was giving her advice and had even set up a meeting for her!

Hungry for love and approval from a woman who had never given it to her, Laura followed Anne’s instructions and met with the scout who quickly shipped her off to a modeling agency in New York City. She lived in what some of the other aspiring models considered to be subhuman conditions, eight of them sleeping in a sixth floor walk-up apartment in Chinatown.

“The other girls complained that we were all on top of each other, but it didn’t bother me. I was so used to different living situations,” she told me.

She struggled at first to book work and nearly got sent back to Tempe by her modeling agency. They had given her a couple of months to land a gig before they’d stop footing her bills, in which case she’d be forced to return to her hometown. Laura knew the clock was ticking and managed to book a national campaign for a clothing line, which propelled her career into a different stratosphere. She was now getting calls for all kinds of jobs, and jet setting all over the world to exotic locations that included the French Riviera and the Canary Islands. It was the first time in her life that she didn’t have to worry about food and clothes. But what she still didn’t have was the unconditional love and support of a parent, which she so desperately desired.

“I kept sending my mom postcards, telling her about all the jobs I got. I thought she’d be proud of me, but I never heard back from her. And I kept making excuses why.

“I’m always moving, I’m out of town on jobs, that’s why she can’t reach me,” she told me.

She began to cry.

“Why do you think you did that?” I asked.

“Because I just wanted someone to be proud of me, for once in my life,” she cried.

I understood her feelings of wanting someone to feel proud of her. Even though I had lost my own mom when I was twenty-two years old and was now well into my 30’s, I still desperately missed having this kind of support. I wanted to be able to provide it for Laura on some level.

“I’m proud of you for sharing this. I know it’s not easy,” I said.

“Thanks.”

Six months after Laura moved to New York City to pursue modeling, she decided to return to Arizona for Christmas. She was eighteen years old and was to stay with her older sister, Susan, who was now a twenty-year-old high school dropout raising a two-year-old toddler. Their younger brother, Jon, now seventeen, had also dropped out of high school, and moved out of state after being offered a construction job.

Upon arriving in Arizona, Laura learned that her mother was using again and was nowhere to be found. She contacted the model scout in Phoenix, her mother’s friend, to see if she knew her whereabouts.

“The last time I saw her was after you worked the Milan shows and I gave her the payment,” she said.

“The payment? For what?” Laura asked, confused.

“For your work, part of the finder’s fee,” she answered.

Laura’s heart sank. She now understood what had happened. Her mother didn’t really care about her. She had only set up the meeting with the model scout to secure a monetary arrangement whereby she got a cut of any work Laura did as part of a finder’s fee. This way she had a steady stream of money coming in to fund her drug addiction.

“I feel so embarrassed and ashamed,” she told me.

“Why?” I asked.

“That I believed her. And that this person is my mother. What does that say about me?”

I remembered asking the exact same question to my own therapist about my biological father whom I had been estranged from for many years. It was a complex process for me making sense of sharing a genetic line with a parent who had abandoned me.

“Nothing. It says nothing about you,” I answered her.

She raised her eyebrows, looking doubtful.

“Your mother is the one who should feel ashamed for having used and neglected you. Her shame got transferred to you, but it was never yours to begin with. It’s borrowed shame. Let’s hand it back to the person it belongs to,” I said.

“How do I do that?”

“Why don’t you pretend your mom is sitting next to you and tell her what comes to your mind.”

Laura turned her head and looked at the empty space on the couch next to her.

She sat still for a moment.

“I’m really angry at you. It’s bad enough that you abandoned us as kids but now I have to live a life hating myself for it, for what YOU did. I wasn’t the one who had children and left them for dead, YOU were! And I’m sick and tired of feeling ashamed for it! You’re the one who should be ashamed, you sick animal!” she shouted and burst into tears.

After Laura discovered her mother had used her, she left Tempe heartbroken, and more lost than ever. She returned to New York City to continue modeling because this was the only way she knew how to financially survive. As the months and years went by her workload began to diminish as the younger models were introduced on the scene, she knew that she had to come up with a different game plan, which over the years had transformed into her current reality of supplicating wealthy men’s desires.

Laura had been in treatment with me for a few months when I decided it was time to broach the subject of her relationships with the men in her life in a candid and truthful manner.

“I think it’s important that we speak honestly about what these relationships are,” I said.

“What do you mean? They’re really nice guys.”

“Let’s try and go a little deeper today. I’ll tell you my impression. I get the feeling that you wouldn’t be with these guys, if money weren’t an issue for you,” I said.

“I still think they’re genuinely nice guys trying to help a girl out.”

“I’m actually less interested in them. How do you perceive your role in these relationships?” I asked.

“I’m giving them companionship,” she said.

“And sex,” I said.

I was unsure if this was the right moment to hit her with this level of gravity and truth, but it did come out of me. And I think it did out of a deep concern that her prostituting herself in this way was eroding her psyche even more, further boxing her into a corner of perceived worthlessness and helplessness. But I also knew that if I had intervened prematurely, it would not work, and if I had done it in a way that made her feel shamed or judged, I’d never see her again.

“I’m not sure if I made you feel judged or not, so I want to be very clear that there’s truly no judgment coming from me. I really get that you’re just trying to survive,” I continued.

She remained quiet.

“But I also think that you’re worth more than these relationships and that you can make something of your life, if you want to.”

“What makes you think that?” she asked with tears in her eyes.

“Because you’ve already survived unfathomable circumstances and you only have yourself to thank for it. You are clearly a very capable person,” I answered.

“Thanks,” she answered with a quivering smile, one very different than the assured, runway smile I had gotten used to.

This conversation with Laura seemed to be a turning point in her treatment. The following week when she came to session, she told me that had ended it with all the men in her life, except for Evan, who was still paying her rent. She was determined to make it on her own. If she had done it once before, she could do it again. She was going to look for a day job as she began to actively try and build her real estate business. She also knew that it was going to be a long slog for her to be able to be financially independent.

“I have something to ask you,” she said.

“Sure, go ahead.”

“Do you think you can lower my fee, just for now?” she asked.

“Yes. I can, and I will,” I answered.

I could have referred her out to a low-fee counseling center, which I had done on occasions when clients could no longer afford my fee due to extenuating circumstances. But I also reserved a percentage of my practice for pro bono cases or low fee cases.

Laura worked hard in the subsequent months, both in treatment and in her life. She found a job as a part-time hostess in an upscale restaurant but was making very little money. She tried to get a second job in retail but had no prior experience and was rejected multiple times. She walked dogs, house sat, and basically did any odd job that she could find while trying to get real estate clients.

She went hungry sometimes, but was determined not to ask Evan for a penny more than she needed for rent. This hunger was bringing back many painful childhood memories of the famine and neglect she had endured with her drug-addicted parents.

“How could they let their own children feel this way?” she asked me one day of her parents.

“I don’t know. I’m so sorry,” I told her.

Her process triggered memories of my own life that I had not thought about for years, when my mom was raising me as single parent without the help of any child support, and food was scarce in our refrigerator. I felt a kinship to Laura, despite our obvious, physical differences.

During this time I referred her to local food banks, which proved to be incredibly humbling. Her life had entailed such extreme peaks and valleys. She had gone from having no food to eat as a child and scouring neighbors’ garbage cans, to being a successful international model without a financial care in the world, to nothing again.

She began selling the designer clothes she had accumulated during her runway days as well as the expensive items that had been given to her by various men. It was a humanizing process to watch the person who was beginning to emerge as she was literally stripped of her material possessions.

She kept Evan around for a few months, but her eyes had been opened, and she didn’t like the way he treated her. He wouldn’t call her for two weeks at time and then he’d show up at her apartment wanting sex. He’d talk to other girls on his cell phone in front of her, and he regularly told her that she looked ugly without make-up. She feared that if she let him go, she would have no place to live. But as her self-worth grew, it became harder and harder for her to tolerate being disrespected and emotionally abused in this way.

“I can’t pretend it’s OK how he treats me anymore. I don’t know how I’m going to survive, I may end up in a shelter, but I just can’t do this anymore. It’s killing me. I’m ending it with Evan,” she announced one day.

She was not making enough money yet to pay for her own rent so she gave up her apartment and began sleeping on various friends’ couches. After a few months she had exhausted her welcome. She tried out different shelters but found that she didn’t sleep well in the mix of many homeless people in active psychosis, deep in the throes of schizophrenia screaming throughout the night.

This led her to her car. Each night after finishing her hostessing duties at the restaurant, she drove herself to a well-lit street in the flats of Beverly Hills that didn’t require an overnight parking pass. She hung sheets on the windows and locked the doors. She feared for her life or that someone would discover her and call the cops. She never slept well and her body always felt banged up, but she endured it.

I was really worried about her safety during this time and always thought about her, wishing I could bring her home and take care of her myself, which I obviously couldn’t.

But it was more than that. Her lack of safety was triggering all kinds of memories for me. I experienced flashbacks of myself as an eight-year-old latch key kid, who took a city bus home to a dangerous neighborhood in Chicago and ran up the block being chased by teenagers. I remembered my hands trembling as I tried to find the key in my backpack to get me through the front door. Once I located it, I’d quickly turn the lock and let myself in, trying to close the door as quickly as possible with the gusty Chicago winds making it difficult. When the door finally shut, I breathed a sigh of relief, but only for a moment:

Now all I have to worry about are the people in the building who might hurt me. I hope nobody scary is in the elevator. Once inside our one bedroom apartment, I’d call my mom every afternoon at work to let her know that I was safe.

I wanted to rescue Laura, but I also wanted to rescue the eight-year-old girl who had suddenly come alive inside of me. I’m a grown woman, I thought to myself. Why was I suddenly feeling unsafe again? The past no longer haunted me on a daily basis, but I was beginning to realize that it had left permanent residue in my life, traces of trauma circulating in my bloodstream.

Laura had been sleeping in her car for about two months and coming to our weekly appointments. One day she came to session, exhausted from a night of broken up sleep, clutching a teddy bear that was missing most of the fur on its body and part of its face. Its head was tilted forward because the thread around its neck was coming undone.

“I moved with him to my first foster home and he’s the only thing I have left from my childhood. He’s seen better days, but I love him like this,” she said, giving the teddy bear a squeeze.

“We’re the broken toys.”

“We’re all broken toys, Laura.” I said.

We both chuckled.

Three months later Laura made her first substantial real estate sale. Her former hairdresser (since she was now cutting her own hair) had referred a client to her who had a house in the Beverly/Grove section of Los Angeles that they wanted to put up for sale. She sold it and made a sizable commission, enough to sublet a room for six months in a three-bedroom apartment with two other young women. She had a place, at least temporarily, and was beyond relieved not to have to sleep in her car anymore.

Her first sale led to another sale and within a year she was able to comfortably make rent on her sublet. She was not earning a lot of money and was still living extremely modestly. During this time she decided that she needed to set up her real estate business properly and went to a local bank to open up a business account. The male banker who helped her asked for her number. She thought he seemed nice but really didn’t know what to make of him.

“He’s a regular guy with a regular salary. He’s from Kansas. I’ve never dated anyone like him before,” she told me.

“You’ve done a lot of things in the last year that you’ve never done before,” I responded.

They began dating and she insisted on paying for half of every activity that they did together. If she couldn’t afford what he suggested, they’d take a stroll in the park together or go to a museum when the admission was free. She never, ever wanted to be in a position where a man was paying her way again. He found her to be very down to earth, compared to other women he had encountered in Los Angeles and liked this about her.

We were coming up on a year and a half of working together, when Laura came to session and told me she wanted to take a break from therapy.

“I want to put all of my energy into building my business right now. I know I can always come back if I need to, which means a lot. Thanks for helping me get here,” she said.

I understood where she was coming from. At a certain point in therapy you just want to get out there and live your life instead of talking about it and reflecting on it. I was proud of the work we had done together and saw a woman in front of me who was now self-assured and had her feet firmly planted in reality.

About a year after my last session with Laura, I was getting my car washed.

While I was waiting I found myself standing next to a glass console filled with advertisements. I spotted a flyer with a picture of Laura and it read:

LCS Realty: Where Clients Come to Find a Home.

Nobody I knew had worked harder to earn one than Laura.