Voluntary Madness Part 15

"Did you just take a picture of yourself?" Carol asked, whipping around.

"Yeah," Katie croaked. "Accident. Sorry."

Katie had been arrested seven times in the previous year. She, like Bobby, was at Mobius for DUIs. She'd done time in jail for them. She'd also had run-ins with the cops several times over domestic abuse. Giving, not receiving. She looked like the kind of blond b.u.t.tercup whose primary task in life was working on her nails and her tan, so you can imagine my surprise when, sitting on the couch in our living room one night, she said of a recent a.s.sault: "Yeah, Jamie [her boyfriend] said something stupid, so I punched him in the face. He's a p.u.s.s.y, so he called the cops on me."

With an audience peopled by the likes of Bobby and Katie, you could see why Carol must have developed a bit of a complex about her students. Were we there? Were we getting this at all?

Outright snoring and cell phone diversions abounded among the sling-backs.

Then there were the blank stares and the rude whispers, the skeptical blinks, the knowing sighs, and the more desperate harumphers who fooled Carol a bit as they leaned closer, not attentively, I'm sure, but hoping to catch a high off the fumes from her marker.

But Carol kept right on, shoveling learned optimism in our direction, watching it fall over sloping shoulders and acc.u.mulate in a heap. Maybe she thought of it as confetti. Most of it would sprinkle down and be trampled underfoot, but one or two pieces would stick on a few stubborn heads and somnolent lids, maybe on a shrugging scapula, unseen, and so undisdainfully swiped away.

Of course Carol probably miscalculated, because in order to "think positive," as the T-shirt might say, you first have to be thinking at all, and there wasn't a whole lot of thinking going on in that room. That was the whole point of the drugs. To shut out thought.

People who pop Xanax-and I can say this from experience, it being a close relative of Klonopin-do it for the blank. Blank check. Blank out. Blank slate.

So, actually, the confetti idea wasn't even close. When it came to reaching most of us, Carol was clawing with quick-chewed fingernails on obsidian, smooth black volcanic gla.s.s, fired hard and unmarkable in the mora.s.s of mindless souls. She wasn't making a scratch.

But that's not entirely fair. There were, after all, a few night-lighters like me who, though we had popped our share of benzos in our time, were actually trying to learn and change.

I was even taking notes, and not just for the book.

Despite all the apathy and distractions, Carol launched into the therapy anyway, full of gusto and design.

She drew three columns on the board, the leftmost labeled Behavior, the middle one labeled Thought, and on the right Perception.

"Okay," she turned to face us, marker poised. "What's the behavior?"

The idea behind process therapy, a technique formulated by Dr. Franklin but akin to traditional cognitive behavioral therapy, was that most of us act before we think. The problem is the behavior, the undesirable behavior. That's what sends people into rehab or the bin. In the addict's case, it's pill popping, drinking, snorting, what have you. In the depressive's case it might be the same, drugging or drinking, or it might be self-abuse, cutting, burning, binging, or curling up in the bathtub and refusing to come out.

The fundamental idea of process therapy is that so-called disorders of the mind are not just inert conditions that exist; instead, they are patterns. They have behaviors that go along with them, behaviors that are attached to thoughts and feelings, all of which can be changed and redirected. Traditionally, the approach has been similar with addicts, which is part of the reason why addicts and mental cases so often end up in the same facilities, blurring the line between substance abuse and mental distress.

The treatment for both conditions generally operates according to a disease model. For example, the alcoholic, like the depressive, suffers from a disease, or so the common wisdom has it. It is not his fault. It is inherited, exacerbated by the chemistry he was born with, and accelerated by a fault in his system, some tic in his brain-body function, that doesn't seem to know when enough is enough. Now, once again, this is good news for the drug companies, who have marketed drugs like Antabuse that interfere with the body's ability to metabolize alcohol. Other drugs to come will target and block the cravings, and thereby thousands of drunks will be saved from oblivion by the newest miracle substance without ever having to do the hard work of changing their lives. The drug will do it for them.

Of course, no one operating within this disease model questions how it is that a drunk can stop drinking-and many have-without the use of inhibitory drugs. Yet, currently, abstinence is the cure. Pure and simple. Decide to stop drinking, and you do.

Now, as everyone knows, the recidivism rate for drunks is disturbingly high. This fuels the argument that alcoholism is a disease that cannot be cured by willpower alone. But again, few people seriously consider the idea that if the undesirable behavior, drinking, has a cause in your mind, comes about as the result of certain established patterns of thought and feeling, then you are far less likely to quit drinking over the long haul if you don't address and redirect those causative thoughts and feelings.

It isn't just a question of stopping the behavior-that is, quitting drinking, cold turkey-it's a question of finding out what motivated the behavior and addressing that source of distress so that the behavior will no longer seem necessary or, when the process works best, the behavior will no longer even seem appealing.

This, anyway, was the theory behind Dr. Franklin's approach. Change the perception, deal with the undesirable feelings in a different way, and a change in behavior will follow.

It was all a question of drawing maps, and the maps began with the behaviors and moved backward. Carol wanted to know what my problematic behavior was. She turned to me abruptly.

"Norah, what's the behavior?"

I was game for this. I was there to be real, to put it all out there for and as myself. I didn't hesitate. I said the first thing that came into my head.

"Affairs," I blurted.

"Affairs?"

"Yeah. I'd say s.e.x, but I usually tend to convince myself that I'm in love, so let's just put it under affairs, short for affairs of the heart and loins."

n.o.body blinked or even looked over to see the expression on my face. I couldn't tell whether this meant they weren't surprised, or they just weren't paying attention. Either way, it was good. I could work in that empty s.p.a.ce.

"Okay," Carol said, and wrote it in the left-hand column. Affairs. "Now, what's the thought that goes with that?"

"I'm usually not thinking. That's the problem."

"Yes, but think about it now. Take it apart."

I thought about it. Then, again, I said the first thing that came to me.

"If I connect with someone I won't be alone."

Carol repeated this and wrote it in the middle column under Thought. "Now," she said, "what's the perception?"

"How is that different from the thought?"

"Take it a step further. How do you take that thought and convince yourself that having an affair is the right idea?"

"You mean how do I rationalize the behavior?"

"Yes."

"I tell myself I'm growing emotionally, sharing, fulfilling my emotional potential."

That got a response. Bobby peered over at me sideways, as if to say, "Wow. What a crock. Do you really buy that s.h.i.t you're selling yourself?"

I looked back, turning down one side of my mouth and raising my eyebrows as if to say, "Yep. There it is. Pretty sad."

She smiled as if to reply, "We're all in the same stew, each one more full of s.h.i.t than the next. Don't sweat it."

I looked back up at the board, where Carol had written out everything I'd said.

There it was all laid out.

Behavior: Affairs.

Thought: I won't be alone.

Perception: This is growth.

Yep. A crock for sure.

That's why they wrote it down. There's nothing like seeing your c.r.a.p writ large in blue and white in front of a group of other top-shelf s.h.i.t-crockers.

That'll wake you up.

"Now," said Carol, "what's the attachment? What's the thing you're holding on to that makes all of this come about?"

I screwed up my lips and sighed. This was going to take a minute.

The attachment. Hmm. What was I really trying to get out of the lovefest/f.u.c.kfest?

"Escape," I said, finally.

"Okay. Escape from what?" said Carol, right on my heels.

"Isolation, I guess."

"And . . . ?" Carol added leadingly.

No answer.

"Isolation is?" she said.

I thought again and the answer came.

"Myself."

"So, escape from yourself?"

"Yeah. Escape from myself."

She wrote this down under my three columns and underlined it.

There it was. The seed.

Carol moved to another part of the board and drew a stick figure.

"Okay. Let's take this now and turn it around."

She drew a thought bubble above the stick figure's head and wrote inside it, "I want to escape myself."

"That's your thought. Your real thought. Right?"

"Right."

"Good. Now," she drew a large heart shape over the stick figure's chest, "what's the feeling underneath that?"

"Loneliness."

"What else?"

"Terror."

"What else?"

"Inadequacy. Hurt. Pain."

She wrote each of these words in the heart. Loneliness. Terror. Inadequacy. Hurt. Pain. I thought of myself curled in the bathtub. Those feelings everywhere. And the thought. Escape. And the behavior. What is the behavior? Self-harm.

Carol drew an arrow pointing out from the stick figure.

"Now," she said, "you feel hurt, lonely, afraid. That's what's driving you to act. But the act, the affairs, don't make this go away. Don't get at it, right? At least not long-term. Short-term. And then it's just worse, right?"

"Right."

"So what can you do instead of having an affair? What's the new behavior?"

I had all kinds of seemingly good answers for this. Go to the gym. Clean the house. Call a friend. But the real answer, as the staff at Mobius would try to teach me, was to face it. Face yourself. Face the pain, the loneliness, the fear. Sit with it. Don't run. It was basic applied Buddhism. Be present and mindful. Focus.

My way of conceiving it was more pedestrian. Think of what's scary in a horror movie, I told myself. The unseen, the imagined, is always more frightening than what's graphically portrayed. The same holds true in your head. Face your fear, step into it, look at it head-on and it will diminish in stature, lose its hold on your imagination. But run, and it'll grow wings, breathe fire, and fly after you.

"So what can you do instead of having an affair?" Carol repeated.

"Stay with the discomfort," I said. "Face it."

"Good."

She wrote the word "STAY" on the board in caps. I said it to myself thoughtfully. Stay. It was a good word, especially when you weren't saying it pleadingly to someone else.

The thought is: I want to escape myself.

The feeling is: loneliness, hurt, fear.

The new behavior is: stay.

It made a somewhat confusing sort of sense. If I was lonely, if I was afraid of being alone, then why abandon myself? Why run to someone else looking to give myself the thing that only I could give? I wanted to escape myself because I felt empty, and the emptiness frightened me. But obviously, I was empty because I was always running out, running away. The only way to fill the emptiness was to remain, to take up residence in myself.

I wrote the word "STAY" in my notebook, also in caps, and underlined it. Carol was looking at me intently with her eyebrows raised inquisitively, as if to say, "You got all that?"

"Okay?" she said, her hand poised to erase the board.

I nodded.

That, in a nutsh.e.l.l, was process therapy. Stop, map, redirect. Learning the mechanism wasn't hard. I did that the first day. But putting it into practice in real life in the face of temptation, that was something else altogether. That would take time. Time and a lot of energy.

We went around the room, all six of us doing our charts and stick figures. Aside from Katie and Bobby there was Petunia, a twenty-five-year-old imposing stack of man meat who looked like he'd completed Navy SEAL training. He had been shaving himself bald since the age of twelve, and had a diamond-embedded gold hoop in each ear, which only added to the menacing effect he had on you at first sight. He wore thick black rubber Michael Jordan ID bands on each wrist: one said "Baller," and the other said, "I own the guy guarding me." He smoked Black & Mild cigars, the kind you can buy in the drugstore, and often sported them, white plastic filter and all, perched behind one of his ears. He was at Mobius because he'd tried to kill himself by taking an overdose of Seroquel and alcohol. He'd nearly succeeded and had spent a week in intensive care. This last detail didn't surprise me in the least because, despite his appearance, Petunia was a tender reed, sensitive, and, like his cigars, mild. Hence the nickname.

Then there was Cook, a thirty-nine-year-old former c.o.ke and pot dealer, who'd been in the business deep enough to fly the stuff himself from the Caribbean. He had just done a ten-month stint in prison. Not for drug trafficking, of course. If he'd been caught for that he'd have been away a lot longer. They got him for pa.s.sing a bad check or something, but it was generally understood to be in lieu of the real crimes that they couldn't quite catch him for.

Finally, there was Gary, another c.o.ke and pot aficionado, forty years old. He owned and operated a computer gaming Web site. He was a perfect mix between a high-strung secular Jewish computer nerd and a burned-out California surfer dude. He wore board shorts and brightly colored T-shirts and walked around barefoot, but he could argue G.o.d with you like a Yeshiva student.

He'd been at Mobius three times in the last four months, always of his own accord, taking, as he said, many steps forward but also a few too many back. He was even more into den chi bon than I was. He made these loud moaning and hissing sounds when he breathed in and out, and you were always guaranteed to get a good sweaty fire circle going when he was in it. Gary was a person you could be weird with and he wasn't threatened by it, but you could also be serious and tell him your problems. Like me, he was there to learn, and he didn't have any trouble letting go of his rational inhibitions.