by Restin Wells
Chapter Two
My anxiety attack in the nurses' station simmered down eventually. The orderly let me out into the open ward with the rest of the patients, as I had regained some self-control. I didn't feel like socializing... couldn't watch TV either, or read. I would pace as long as I could tolerate pacing, then go to my room and lie down as long as I could endure that. If I tried to escape into sleep, the anxiety-pain would peak just as I drifted off, like being zapped with a cattle prod.
I always dismissed having childhood or marital problems of any kind. They were both mentioned enough, but there were so many layers of armor over them that therapy couldn't even get started.
I was released from the hospital in two weeks, without feeling better. I tried several therapists, for short durations. Two years went by. I had about a dozen brief hospitalizations. I found a female psychiatrist I respected, that I saw weekly for the next three years after that. I continued to believe my childhood was perfectly fine, and insisted I never had any problems about my relatives who raised me after my mother's death when I was a one year old. I lived in half a dozen relative's homes until 19, but felt it a waste of time to talk about it. The doctor wanted to so I answered perfunctorily. We talked incessantly about current things.
The doc tried to talk about my husband, Ben, who started having sex with me when I was twelve, and who was twenty years older than I. But I didn't care about that either. I cared about horses and art. And I cared about my sexual fantasy world, which had perfect Tarzan-type men in each encounter. I was smug in my idea of recreational sex that wasn't complicated with sentiment. I wasn't actually promiscuous in real life, but mostly because I was too backward, and never socialized much as a teenager. As a kid, I was a tomboy of all tomboys. I thought I was really tough. I didn't have any use for "mushy stuff." I only got sexual, or feminine, because Ben came along and pulled me into it. I experienced that as a sort of parallel dimension, as I couldn't say no to an adult, and I did like his attention otherwise.
I was living with my grandparents on their poultry farm then, and managed to talk my dad into buying me a real live horse when I was eleven. We didn't have a lot of money and I rode bareback for a long time. Then we got another horse; a nag a distant neighbor unloaded on us. I loved horses more than anything else in the world. I went straight to the barn after school each day. And it was through horses that Ben and I met and started riding in the orange groves together. Nobody seemed to care about my doing that. But we didn't get married until I was out of high school. Then I moved the horses to a few acres of land Ben had bought for us.
My breakdown happened six years after that, out of the blue, over nothing, it seemed, while I was busy being a housewife, training horses, and painting pictures of horses. I also felt lucky not to have maternal feelings, and didn't mind it a bit that I never got pregnant.
The therapist and I went over a lot of stuff, but never seemed to get to what was causing my anxiety. I began to feel that just being able to talk about myself to someone who seemed interested is what was most important. But therapy began to bog down with this therapist, and she eventually gave up on it and turned me over to the hospital daycare program. I was initially resentful over this "rejection", but the daycare was a godsend. So, I dealt with my disappointment in the new setting.
I went into a remission, of sorts, and began to go to school, too, at The University of Central Florida, UCF. I majored in Clinical Psychology, as you might guess. Yet, my internal world remained fragile, and I knew the college work was possible only because I could get into it in a defensive, manic way.
Several more years went by, during which my disability gradually dragged my life down into a limbo of used-to-be’s. Ben and I both tried for a long time to preserve our country-modern lifestyle together. We had built the place up into a small ranch. We also didn't have a lot of money, but Ben had an office job in town, and my fierce obsession for horses seemed to make a lot of good things happen. We had friends from his work who came out for the weekends to enjoy the country and horses. We used to have trail rides and cook outs. I had become a professional artist, often on the road doing portraits of famous horses, or at a sidewalk art show.
But that had all fallen aside gradually, insidiously. The grinding anxiety made it agony to saddle up a horse, or do the housework. I couldn't even do my beloved artwork and hadn't painted a thing for ten years. Ben was able somehow to carry on with his administrative position in the city, but more and more withdrew from me. He didn't leave, but each of us seemed to drift on separate rafts down long, diverging rivers of hazy dismay.
It was while I was in the hospital, during one of my anxiety attacks (I hated calling it an "attack" and didn't like the word "panic" either) that I was talking with the head nurse. I was complaining that my "behaviorist" shrink who admitted me was highly irritating the way he talked down to me. I already was doing the best I could to control my "behavior", which he apparently was not able to perceive. The nurse, a great human being I had been around for years, suggested another doctor, a woman psychiatrist I had never met. Though rather disillusioned, I decided to look her up in the phone book, when I was discharged. And I insisted on speaking to her directly to see what she sounded like. I was determined to find someone who could speak to me with some depth. I had been through three years of college by then, with quite a few 400 level psychology courses under my belt, plus as much stuff as I could read from the library, despite the ongoing pain.
By then, I could understand a good bit of Freud, Adler, and Jung, plus the solid works of such philosophers as Carl Sagan and Joseph Campbell--- and this time it would be different.
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Restin Wells