Voluntary Madness Part 17

"Stay here. Look at me," she said.

Then she added, slowly and emphatically, "There is nothing wrong with you."

I guffawed.

"Uh, clearly there is. A lot."

"No. All of this," she swiped her hand across the board where we had written all my thoughts, feelings, and contemplated behaviors: hate, rape, f.u.c.k. "All of this is typical. A normal response to a very traumatic experience. Something very bad happened to you, and you reacted the way anyone would, the way most people have. That's all."

I shrugged my shoulders.

"Maybe."

"No. Really."

She clutched me by the upper arms this time and said the phrase again. I needed to hear it, and this time it got through.

"There's nothing wrong with you."

I heard the words and began to internalize their meaning. These were the words of the wellness model, not the accustomed disease model of so many psychiatrists I had known, the ones who were so eager to slap diagnoses and pathologies onto me in piles. Depressive, manic depressive, posttraumatic stress. These were all the things that were wrong with me. The troubles. But what if Carol was right? What if I was as healthy as the next person responding to an insult?

Kick me and I will bruise. Starve me and I will weaken and grow frail. Stab me and I will bleed. Are these not normal reactions to injury? A bruise, even a scar, is not a pathology. It is a sign of proper function, a sign of the healthy, normal normal body doing its job, coming to the rescue after the war. body doing its job, coming to the rescue after the war.

All of this began to penetrate as I sat there, Carol holding my hands again in hers.

There's nothing wrong with me? I thought. Really? I'm not broken? Unfit? Weird?

And that, dismissive as I had been, was when I broke. I started to cry. Suddenly, urgently, big, hot, fat drops rolling down my cheeks. Silently, against my will.

I wasn't crying about the "trauma." I didn't care about that. I could barely remember it. It had never mattered consciously. It had never made me cry. It was this that mattered. The stigma, the malfunction, and the shame. The taint. Was there really nothing wrong with me after all? Was I not broken?

I cried harder.

I couldn't explain this to Carol. Not then anyway. The session was up, for one thing. For another, the shame, like the hate, was just one piece. Part of a chain, or a spiral of linked emotions that had yet to uncoil, each in turn. This was just the beginning.

Carol could sense I didn't want her to hug me, so, wisely, she didn't. She waited for me to gather myself, watching carefully with large, sympathetic eyes.

"Time's up, right?" I said, wiping my cheeks.

"Yes," Carol said, turning up the corner of her mouth as if to say, "I'm sorry the timing's so poor."

But it wasn't really. I wanted to go. Needed to. I didn't want to feel her eyes searching my face anymore. I didn't want to have to respond externally to what we'd discussed. I hadn't even come to Mobius thinking that therapy would happen to me, and yet, boom, it had. What had started as a cra.s.s willingness to play along, and to take notes about the process of therapy, had penetrated into real memory, real emotional content, coiled and waiting to spring. It had taken only the slightest touch to explode.

I wanted to regain some composure. Some remove. I wanted to stare out a window and let this tearful dousing sink in, and then leach through, like rainwater in soil. And then I wanted to close my eyes on the day and forget. I wanted to go back to being a journalist just doing her job.

Tuesdays were rebirthing days. Rebirthing sounds hokier than it was, though, I admit, it did have its moments. It was another one of those Mobius trademark activities, like den chi bon, that required a suspension of disbelief, or at least scoffing laughter, if you were going to get anything out of it. And it was possible to get quite a lot out of it, even if you didn't have visions, or weep copiously, or transport yourself back to the womb. Rebirthing, like a lot of other things they did at Mobius, was designed to access your subconscious, to function like a back door to your brain so that you could sneak in while the rest of you wasn't looking and grab a few fresh clues to what was really going on in there. It was a way around your defenses. That's all. Not, as I had worried, some form of devil worship or half-baked yankified shamanism all decked out in fake blood and feathers. As it turned out, it was really just meditation with a lot of deep breathing thrown in-again, for the oxygenated high, and the hoped-for partial dream state that might ensue if you caught that high while you were supine under a blanket and your eyes were closed.

Sam and Carol stood over us, guiding us into the trance, encouraging us to breathe deeply and energetically, and instructing us to say aloud a quick punctuated "Ahh" on the exhale, almost as if you were dropping the breath like a heavy bag.

Heeeeww. Ah. Heeeeww. Ah.

I had just come out of my therapy session with Carol, full of charted s.e.xual rage, which then disgorged itself inside of me silently, splattering against the walls of my mind as I lay there huffing as instructed.

Hate, too. Hate was there in force, not just a word abstracted and splayed, written on the board in caps, but a bellyful, a meal of it rotting its way through me to s.h.i.t.

Digestion. A metaphor. Yes. I considered this. Lying there. Breathing.

Emotion like a meal, always to the same end. I went with this train of thought. How marvelous to take every tasted morsel, from the lowly comfort food to the most refined and perfected dish, all of it made into s.h.i.t. The same s.h.i.t. Or different? Does the s.h.i.t of a gourmet meal taste better to the dog that eats it than the leavings of a greasy spoon? And if so, is his palate more refined? It would seem so. To taste the chef's art or the fry cook's lowly labor in ordure, to suss out the progenitor in a potato, tell the coddled fingerling from the frozen shoestring, the Yukon from the Idaho.

Breathe. Heeeeww. Ah. Heeeeww Ah.

That is the psychologist's skill, to find the meal that made the s.h.i.t you're sitting in. It being always s.h.i.t in the end, one must work backward to differentiate the source, to know the ingredients of this particular pile.

Hate. What made the hate?

I knew what had made the hate. s.e.x had made the hate. And then hate had made the s.e.x. And now there was just a whole h.e.l.l of a lot of it going around in the bowels of my head.

I wondered what Carol and Sam would do if I c.r.a.pped my pants right there or, better yet, stood up, dropped trou, and curled one out on the floor. Would that challenge their boundaries? Would it count as release?

"Let go," they kept saying.

Yeah, I'll let go. Here. Take that. A nice Cleveland steamer for show-and-tell. We could all gather around it and hold hands and talk about how it "speaks to us."

They say that smell is the sense most tied to memory.

I was gritting my teeth, breathing in hisses and cold whistles that made my fillings ache. The others were lying around me doing the same, watching their own show inside their heads, or maybe just checking out as usual. Everyone was breathing loudly, everyone except Bobby, who had again fallen asleep.

As the exercise drew to a close, Carol and Sam talked us down, but I was still rigid. When the lights came up I lay there unmoving, rude. I wasn't going to look at anybody and smile or exchange some glancing relief at the shared experience.

They shuttled us all into the art room next door and sat us around a large gla.s.s table. They brought out various crayons and markers and pastels and gave us each a piece of paper to draw on. The idea was to have an artistic reaction to the rebirthing experience.

I drew an unsurprisingly histrionic picture of an extreme close-up of my face, one enormous green eye in each top corner of the page, with a glaring black pupil at the center, as dark as I could make it. The whites of my eyes were bloodshot, and a trickle of blue X X's fell down each cheek, the symbolic tears. I drew two rows of brown boxes in the two bottom corners of the page, my gritted teeth. Where my lips should have been I wrote in large black letters the word "No."

A little over the top, admittedly, but at least I hadn't shat on the floor.

When everyone had finished drawing we gathered back in the main room, sat in a circle, placed our drawings on the floor in front of us, and talked about what the drawings had meant to us and how they reflected both our rebirthing experience and our therapeutic progress to date.

When it was my turn I talked about the rage, or tried to. I wasn't going to really get into it in the circle, not then anyway, that was for later. But I did say that I thought that the rage was huge, insurmountable, standing between me and compa.s.sion for myself, a boulder that had formed itself around a liquid center, and the only way to get at the healing liquor was to melt or split the rock. I didn't see how that was possible.

In discussing the picture I suggested another way of looking at it. I had drawn my face. But I, like everyone else, was on the outside looking in, and the sign on the door said "No." I had not drawn my face at all, but a mask that was meant to scare the natives.

It was very like my dream of the house by the sea. I was outside looking through the windows of my own dwelling. The rage, which had grown up in me as a form of protection against invasion, specifically the invasion of unwanted adult hands and tongues and other organs, had done its job too well. I was locked out, too. My self-protection had been taken to such an extreme that it had become self-alienation. I didn't trust anyone, not even myself, and the result was that I had made myself a vagrant. I did not, could not, live in my own house. I was, in fact, afraid to live there, and so I spent all of my time looking for shelter elsewhere. Having affairs.

This was the very question of ident.i.ty, again. How does one exist as a self, as a discrete person in the world, and yet not inhabit one's own self? This was my puzzle. I could not feel myself. I knew that I was standing there, or sitting there, or talking. I could hear my voice. Other people could hear my voice and had judged me to be a person. Why not? The hologram looked real enough. I moved from place to place and had ideas and bodily functions, and a past, and relatives, and a handful of friends who knew me, had known me over time and could identify my body if it came to that.

But the center was empty. I did not live there. I cannot emphasize this enough, nor can I adequately express the strangeness of this state. How can one not feel oneself? And then, having discovered that particular numbness, that confusing absence, how can one begin to remedy it? It is like trying to get to the North Pole when you are standing on it. Every direction is south.

After rebirthing I went away still full of the rage and the feeling of being locked out of myself. I sat there silently in the white van with Katie and Bobby, Cook, Gary, and Petunia, and as we drove and I stared out the window, watching the drably repet.i.tive suburban landscape pa.s.s by, I became aware of a shift beginning. The rage was becoming something else, a close cousin but distinctly different. A loud song came on the radio, a song by a band I didn't know, an awful banging screaming song that made me feel old for hating it. Bobby asked Diggs to turn it up and he did. Way up. Bobby and Katie sang along and the van filled with young, careless energy. The inane lyrics and childishly simple rhythms of the song, sung and beat out so enthusiastically by the listeners, seemed to mirror, while ineffectually covering, the empty aimlessness of people in their twenties who were already disillusioned enough with life to have drunk themselves into jail.

I began to feel horribly alien sitting there, not knowing the song, hating everything it stood for, feeling touched by the terrible void we were all trying to fill or escape from. I had that feeling for the whole drive. I sat in it. Sank into it. By the time we got to the apartments it was all I could do to walk into my room and shut the door. I lay on the bed staring at the ceiling fan, slowly tilling, and I sank deeper into the alienation, watching it slide into the familiar feeling of isolation that the company of others can so often elicit.

I thought of the day's session with Carol. I thought of the taint. The feeling, for so long harbored in me, that I was abnormal, that there was something terribly wrong with me. This was the same feeling. Alienation, isolation. You are not like the others. You do not like or sing or know the same songs. You are not normal. Carol is wrong. You were sitting in the van and you did not know the song or like it, and you were surrounded by people and scenery that is all of a piece, all part of the same kit, the ground laid for the houses they build on it, the houses built all alike for the people, all alike, who live in them, the people who like the same songs and sing them loudly and feel familiar in their familiar world that is made for them.

You are not part of it. You are the touched other. Touched by damage, by madness, disease. For shame.

I began to cry again. I curled up on the bed, as in the tub, fetally, and sobbed.

In therapy with Carol the next morning I knew I would be able to map out the previous night's mood. I wasn't scheduled to see Carol that day, but this was one of the great luxuries of Mobius. You could walk in first thing in the morning, go to your therapist, and say, "I had a really rough night. I need to talk," and she'd make time for you right then and there while it was fresh. In fact, Carol had made it clear that I could call her anytime during my stay. The previous night I hadn't made use of the phone number she'd given me, because it had felt too intrusive to do so, and I suppose I'd felt too unworthy to deserve help. But after a night's sleep, I felt ready to talk, and I burst through Carol's open office door asking if she had time for me.

Therapy on demand wasn't really just a luxury of Mobius, though it's true that Dr. Franklin had fostered the creation of a flexible responsive atmosphere and had chosen to hire staff whose therapeutic styles could accommodate these needs. But each therapist formed his or her own relationship with each client.

Carol brought a tremendous amount of dedication and self-sacrifice to her work, and if you opened yourself to her, she would open herself to you in matching style. She was the ant.i.thesis of clinically detached. When you did therapy with her, you felt as though you were talking to a very insightful and selfless old friend, and while this might not have been an approach that worked for everyone, it was exactly what I needed. I'd had my share of intellectualized, rubber-gloved sessions with doctors, and I found them sorely lacking when it came to plunging deep into the muck of my emotional catastrophe. Even the best psychiatrists I've seen have always been too categorical for my taste, too trained in scientific method to follow the twisted routes of the battered human heart.

In my experience, going to a psychiatrist to get at your feelings had always been a bit like going to a gynecologist expecting to make love, and always with the same unsatisfying result. It wasn't that nothing useful could ever be gained from the encounter, but you were far more likely to be talking pathology than anything else. A quick poke and your anatomy would check out fine, but your culture would read abnormal, and you'd leave with a prescription in hand. If you talked, you talked abstractly, with the doc standing back making notes, or umm-humming while you fought off the devil on the floor.

Mobius's staff psychiatrist and I had had a joke about this very thing, in fact. He came in once a week, and I'd seen him for maybe fifteen minutes the previous day, per Mobius intake procedure. He'd asked me all the usual doctorly questions about psychiatric history, family medical history, which medications I was taking, and which ones I might be inclined to need while at Mobius.

"You know," I'd said, "I could be dying right now, riddled with disease, and you'd never know it. I could keel over right here and you wouldn't even notice."

"I know," he laughed. "I'd be too busy taking notes."

I respected him for that. He appreciated both the absurdity and the necessity of his position. Pharmaceutical gatekeeper.

The business of real therapy was for Carol and Sam and Josie. Josie was the third therapist on staff, a social worker who came in two days a week.

For them it was a form of art, especially for Josie, who was the most intuitively gifted of the three, and the best at removing her ego from the therapeutic encounter. She was alive with expectation, but only in the sense of wanting very much to know you, and for you to know yourself, as the person that you were. She had no categories. Guiding principles, yes. A practiced way of being in the world, certainly. But she was more interested in following your lead than imposing her vision. She listened more actively than anyone I have ever met, not straining to show interest (which is always so obvious in professionals), but rather genuinely wanting to know what you were going to say next. She was in the business of emotional suffering. She saw it every day and faced it anew in each person. In her healing, she observed no precedent, consulted no patented manual that told her what your symptoms meant, or junked you in with like and likely minds that were not like you at all.

There was no one like you. That was the point. Of course this didn't mean that we weren't all human, all facing similar fears and pains, joys and temptations, all processing experience with similar equipment, and therefore all likely to benefit from the application of a few tried-and-true coping skills that had helped many people of various const.i.tutions and experience along the way.

Josie taught me one especially important skill for dealing with what often felt like the overwhelming intensity of my emotional life. She taught all of us this same skill, emphasizing it and reemphasizing it in subtly different ways until we began to take it in, each in our own time and apply it to our experience as it was happening.

The idea was this: emotional experience tends to feel repet.i.tive and c.u.mulative. This had certainly often been my experience with depression. My bouts of despondency had usually felt huge and insurmountable and vastly out of proportion to whatever was happening in my life at the time, and that is what had made them so puzzling and seemingly unconquerable. It was as if my brain didn't see what was happening as an isolated incident, but rather as an incident very like something it had seen before, in fact, many times before, and so it rolled the new experience in with all the others not just in kind but in quant.i.ty.

I was always asking myself why. Why am I feeling this? Thinking that if I knew the cause I could find the cure. But of course there was no reasonable why, at least not in the present. I was awash in an acc.u.mulation of past feelings and future dreads, all similar, at least as far as my brain was concerned, and so, lumped together as one. But n.o.body can handle a lifetime of experience in one moment. That's why depression crushes you.

So Josie taught me, and all of us, to stop trying to figure it out or account for it, to stop letting it seep into the past and the future. She taught us not to get lost in our brain's deceptive shorthand, in the acc.u.mulation. She taught us to stop asking the question why, and instead to ask what. "What am I feeling?" The idea was to stay with the feeling as it was happening, not to a.n.a.lyze it, but to experience it, to look at its contours, the way you would look at the contours of a landscape, to take it in with your senses, not your critical mind.

She would say, "Put a light around it, and separate it from the past and the future. From cause and effect. Just let it be what it is now, which is all that it really is anyway-the rest is an illusion."

Naturally, because all of us were experts at avoidance, none of us had actually tried this before. We'd always seen this seemingly huge tidal wave of feeling coming at us, and we'd run for the nearest distraction as soon as possible. But if you tried doing what Josie said, putting a light around it, or, if that was too airy-fairy a formulation for your taste, putting a fence around it, or a moat, or whatever worked, then you'd find that the feeling was more than likely manageable after all. Not only that, but rather than soaking you in misery for hours on end, it was likely to resolve itself quickly and drain away. Again, this was the idea that turning toward the thing that frightens you often diminishes it, the real and concrete being far less frightening than the imagined.

Sam explained this phenomenon in another way. His idea was that emotional discomfort was a kind of messenger. It was trying to tell you something, and if you turned away and didn't listen, it would just keep trying to get your attention in more and more inventive ways, intruding on your distractions, or your highs, so that it would take higher and higher doses to shut out the sound of the messenger's incessant knocking. Whereas, if you turned and listened, the way you might to an insistent child, the ruckus would die down quite quickly, and the message would come through in a manageable way. Of course this meant that you had to really listen, or as Josie had advised, pay attention to the what, to what was happening. But if you did, you often found that it was not nearly so bad, or huge, or terrifying as you had feared.

Carol and I did this in a less theoretical way in our one-on-one therapy together. The idea was the same. Break the emotion into its component parts, not just because it was s...o...b..lling and becoming far larger than it needed to be, but, per Dr. Franklin's theory in process therapy, because it was part of a chain reaction. If you could break the chain, you could stop the reaction, stop the undesirable end result.

As I began to pull apart my emotional responses with Carol, I began to see in practice why Dr. Franklin's method emphasized thought as well as feeling and behavior. The feeling and behavior parts made sense immediately, of course. The link between feelings and actions was clear. I feel bad, therefore I drink or I shoot up, or I cut myself, or I try to kill myself. But what hadn't been so clear was the idea that thoughts lie behind feelings. Thoughts give rise to feelings or, in a sense, feelings are made up of thoughts. In fact, there can be no emotion without thought. So to get at the feeling, you must first get at the thought. To break the reaction you must start farther up the chain.

Most of us tend to think that emotions and thoughts are separate ent.i.ties running on separate tracks. It often feels this way in life. For example, you may know in your mind, your thoughts may be telling you, that your boyfriend is a jerk who treats you badly, and therefore you should dump him. But your heart just doesn't seem to get the message. You love him, and no amount of surety in your mind can seem to convince your heart that it's mistaken. Why, in this case, doesn't knowing something intellectually translate into feeling and then action? The thought is: My boyfriend is a jerk. Therefore the feeling should be; I hate him. And the behavior should be: I break up with him. Yet that's not usually how it works.

But when you spend enough time dismantling your thoughts and feelings, you begin to see that they are not separate. It seems that way merely because the links between the thoughts and the feelings are very old and very buried. As Josie had reminded us, thoughts are really thought patterns, a way that your brain has learned to process your experience. Breaking those links, and rerouting a thought pattern takes a lot of effort and concentration. It's a bit like learning a foreign language as an adult. Children pick up new languages effortlessly, organically, almost by osmosis, whereas adults have to do it the hard way, learning the grammar, memorizing the vocabulary, putting the sentences together word by word, or, as in my dream scenario, putting the house together brick by brick.

And that is what I did with Carol. I tore down my house brick by brick and rebuilt it again the same way. Or tried to. I can't say that my house is entirely rebuilt even now, but let's just say that I'm a lot more cognizant of the blueprints, so I know where the danger zones are. I know which walls are weak and likely to collapse, and I know which floorboards are loose and creaky.

I learned this by anatomizing my experience.

After spending the previous night curled up in a ball crying and contemplating hurting myself with one of the sharp knives in the kitchen, I went into Carol's office that next morning and drew a map of my mood, a record of the chain of thoughts, feelings, and intended behaviors that had conglomerated the night before.

In the previous day's therapy session I had reconnected with a familiar source, but in a more immediate way. The molestation. The fact of having been molested wasn't news to me, of course. Nor, really, was the idea that it had profoundly affected my emotional life and the way that I process experience. But I had never before seen so clearly exactly how the molestation, as the source, could set a chain reaction in motion, how it led me, if I let it, inexorably down a self-abusive and destructive path. I hadn't yet mapped the cycle on paper so that I could really see the process at work.

In the remote past, the molestation had triggered a sense of violation, unjust intrusion, and then, quite understandably and predictably, rage. That rage had persisted over the intervening years, and still lived very close to the surface, such that just speaking with Carol in one therapy session, having Carol ask the right open-ended questions and target the links between thought and feeling, had brought it up and out with a vengeance.

I had then carried that rage into rebirthing, and in the process of breathing and letting the emotional urgency come to the fore unfettered by my defenses, I had allowed myself to be consumed by it. I had visualized it as I had felt it coursing through me in the meditation. I had drawn the picture of it in the art room, the extreme close-up of my face, with the gritted teeth and bloodshot eyes, and the word "No" in place of a mouth. And finally, I had taken that feeling with me into the van.

Now, as I read back over my description of the ride home in the van, I can underline the words that serve as mile markers for the downward spiral of the mood from rage to self-harm. The word "rage" appears in the first sentence. "I went away full of the rage." By the next paragraph the rage has become alienation. "I began to feel horribly alien sitting there." By the end of the paragraph alienation becomes isolation. Then very quickly isolation becomes shame-the "taint." Finally, as I had done in Carol's office, in the face of the shame, I dissolve into a puddle and the description ends.

So the diagram looks like this:

Molestation Rage Rage Alienation Alienation Shame Shame

Once the shame has taken hold, it's a short step from there to self-blame. Shame is essentially self-blame. From self-blame it's another short step to self-harm. You feel shame. You are, therefore, guilty. If you are guilty, then you must be punished. You must punish yourself. You must inflict pain, or perhaps even death. Obliterate the shame. Obliterate the self.

Now the full diagram looks like this:

Molestation Rage Rage Alienation Alienation Shame Shame Guilt Guilt Self-harm Self-harm Suicide

And that is how the chain of thoughts becomes feelings becomes behavior. When you look at the whole diagram you can almost see the laws of physics applying themselves. For each act, in this case the act of molestation, there is an equal and opposite reaction, in this case rage. The rage then carries its momentum all the way through the chain until it emerges again on the other side as another act, self-harm.

It's very much like the toy on the executive's desk. The row of small metal b.a.l.l.s all hanging next to each other on separate V-shaped strings. You pull back the ball at the far left and let it fly. It smashes into the row of other b.a.l.l.s, and the ball at the far right end pops out in response to the blow. Conservation of momentum.