by Restin Wells
Chapter Four
"That's the trouble with you." Dr. Pash pounded, "you've read all the books, and you think you know a lot. You may even know more than some doctors know. But you are out of control. And that's because your thinking isn't connected up with something enormous going on inside of you. And you, young lady, are about half a step away from the State Hospital, and I won't be able to stop them from sending you. Unfortunately, your thinking is protecting you from knowing what you feel. It's a defense. You're afraid that if you find out what's really bothering you, you won't be able to deal with it. But the fear comes from experiences that happened before you had the coping skills you now have as an adult, or now have the smarts to learn. Through the trick of repression, or selective amnesia, the directing center of your mind sold you on pretending important events never mattered -- with some good temporary success. As you say, you did okay until you were almost thirty. But you have learned many ways to solve problems in all those years and can use them on your old fears too, if you can only allow those into consciousness again. But you don't know what they are; so, all you have is the raw fear. But whatever you might dig up certainly can't be any worse than the hell you're in now."
As I left my session with Dr. Pash, I wandered through the random tables and chairs of the day room, on my way to the coffee station. I resisted the urge to look back and see what the elderly lady at one of the tables was gazing at so intently, over in the far corner. She was catatonic, I had learned previously in one of my occasional conversations with two other ladies in the TV room. She would be sent on to the State facilities, most likely, because the local psych wards are just routing stations or for temporary problems that respond to therapy. Young people get to stay here longer, along with folks like myself, who will talk and work on their problems.
I pulled myself a paper cup and prompted myself just a bit smugly to put the cream and sweetener in first before I drew the water, in case there are no plastic utensils around. Having done that, and holding it in hand, too hot to drink, I zigzagged back through the day room and down the hall toward my room.
I reeled inside at Dr. Pash's hint of the state hospital for me too. Was it merely a threat to get with it, or did he really mean it? I knew he couldn't send me there all by himself. I could even argue it in court. But I also knew I didn't feel strong enough, couldn't get free from the freezing fear enough, to fight it very hard. I didn't know for sure how "insane" or "chronic" they thought I was. And it mainly mattered what they thought, not so much what I thought, when it came to those kind of administrative decisions.
Furthermore, I couldn't spare the time to dwell on it much, even if it were important, for I had the even more urgent demand of my immediate feelings to think of. I knew I was losing out fast, and felt helpless in the face of it. I was sinking into the miry depths of despair and exhaustion over a feeling I couldn't ignore and couldn't stop. If I had not been a spunky girl, or tried hard in school, or practiced self -discipline, and tried to be a good Christian, I'd have cause to suspect I just hadn't tried hard enough. I did try, though.
Tried for all I was worth, over and over, to stop the waves of fear as they swelled over me. I tried every time, for it hurt worse not to try, just as it's worse to accept the taste of milk-of-magnesia sliding like mashed bugs down your throat. You brace your mind against it even though you know it won't help much, just because you owe it to yourself as a living being. I'll never forget the doctor who advised to just to let the pain be there. "Just relax and go with the flow. Did anxiety ever kill anybody?" he reasoned. I recall looking back at him in stiff-jawed dismay. I could hardly believe the man before me had gone through medical school, or even life on planet Earth. I was quite sure he had never experienced any fear that was any worse than seeing a ghost movie.
As I went past the nurse's station, two doors before my room, I turned my head automatically, to glance inside for any sign of intelligent life there, as almost all the patients do, just as automatically. For there were occasional caring and intelligent people in that business. I knew there were a lot of good books written on the subject of mental illness. They had to have been written by somebody. After I had been a patient for some years, if often seemed, in a facetious way, that good books were written by superior beings on other planets, then dropped upon Earth for humans to find. I share this bit of whimsy because most of the real-life professionals I encountered didn't seem especially fascinated by my particular problem. It was even hard to find someone who could listen well, and that is often the only thing a patient really needs to get himself together again. Anyway, I went on by their offices there, and turned into my doorway.
I sat down on my neatly made bed, made by me, more or less to their specks. I ran my hand over the much-laundered, seafoam-colored bedspread. Then I sipped my coffee, which had cooled off sufficiently. I started thinking about what Dr. Pash had said in my session that morning. I began to realize, with full clarity, that I couldn't cope with life at all anymore. I was afraid to go out on pass. I had promised myself, some years ago, that I would never think of suicide again, as that just added fear upon fear already there. I had stayed by it religiously, but that was breaking down. Yet, I was panicky about suicide too, for I couldn't bear the thought of hurting Ben by my death, besides being just plain afraid to die. And I wasn't sure God would save me if I did that to myself. And I didn't know what I really believed about God anymore, which didn't help the anxiety situation, either. So, I just put that on a shelf.
I put the coffee down on the nightstand beside me and lay down to see if I could do something with the advice Dr. Pash gave me...the advice to go somewhere quiet and listen for a NEED. But then, and somehow not before then, I realized my roommate was sitting up in bed filing her fingernails while her radio was wailing out some rock n' roll beat. I recall wondering why she was there. She was young, almost voluptuous, and dressed as well as anybody walking through one of the shopping malls around. She didn't look worried; didn't look crazy. Some of the patients are like that. You can't tell from how they look or act, why they're there. But you just know it has to be something, or they wouldn't have been admitted. They can be there for weeks, and you never get a clue, except sometimes at group therapy, if you're listening.
Anyway, the radio was extremely irritating, and I wondered how such things as radios and TV's, and the public phones ringing just down the hall, and the horrendous noise of the commercial toilets, could be of no matter at all to the people who run places for sick people. But, of course, hardly anybody believes mental patients are really sick, but that mostly we're just trying to cop out; which, I suspect, is why they try to make us all get up at the crack of dawn just like working people do.
With that thought, I got up and took my coffee, and went down to one of the little conference rooms, which probably would be empty until next morning. I sat down on the floor, cross-legged, in a corner. I took a slow sip of my drink, and tried to tune in to myself for--something.
Gradually, just below the sound of a whisper, I sensed an impression that might be called a "need." It seemed to waver up toward my recognition, yet cringe just out of focus. I presumed this need I was looking for was not one of my usual that I knew of, but one that was in the unconscious. Suspending all my surface thinking, I quietly "listened" for whatever would come forth, no matter how tenuously. And something began to make itself clear--but did I squelch it? Did I stop it because it seemed too trivial--or because it was too disturbing? In some strange way, it was both of those at once. But, continuing, I held on to the reluctant emergence, and it finally focused itself as....I will have to confess... the familiar but impossible need to keep Dr. Tilden from taking the next vacation time off, so I wouldn't have to endure the separation anxiety which was difficult even it were stupid. No way! It could be anything but that! I knew about that, anyway. It had to be something else Bigger, to be worthy of the bigness of my illness!
But, another strange "sensing" was coming forth also. That was the idea that it couldn't be me who would be so concerned about this stuff. I, as an adult, didn't care a hoot when or where Dr. Tilden went on vacation! I felt something clearly, frightfully "other" about the concern I was asked to face up to.. It felt foreign, like it came from somewhere else than me. This stupid "need" seemed so important that it could make me seriously ill, ruin my life, keep me from my precious horses and doing art, and put me in the hospital over and over, was certainly not the me I thought I was, for I would never be so upset about such "silly" things. In fact, the childishness of it is what made me always assume that such "little" needs could not be the cause of such terrible anxiety as I had to endure. I steadfastly refused to allow that such weakness, such an infantile dependency on anyone, could ever be any problem of mine! I felt contempt of it in other people, too, in those days.
But there it was. I had exercised the courage to tune into my deepest, most unconscious feeling, and that is what came, like it or not. So, if I could not endure that this was a genuinely NEED, and it felt so untrue of who I thought I was, there must be "someone", or some "situation" that is down there too. It needed things entirely different from what I needed. And it couldn't be a "thing" or a "unit" , for it had "thoughts" and it "feels fear." And only a "person" or "being" or "intelligence" of some kind can do that. It was then that I first allowed that there could be more than me that was living within myself. And I remembered what Dr. Pash had said: The Adult in you thinks, the Parent in you judges, and The Child can't even get out a whimper!"
So new was this concept to my thinking, that I didn't even relate it to the idea of Dissociative Disorders, or Multiple Personality. Of course, I had read about those in school. But I didn't see a connection with my situation. Then, I realized that a main reason I was so resistant to that conclusion was that I felt totally helpless to do anything to help it. I knew for a fact that I couldn't make Dr. Tilden stay. Furthermore, I could never get past my dignity as an adult, nor my fear of rejection, to even suggest to the doctor that I needed her to change her plans for me. And, most of all, I certainly was not going to beg! It seemed to be the one great, hopeless, unfixable problem in the universe!
A problem with myself, maybe I could fix, but I could never make another human being do what I wanted, especially if they got wise to me. I didn't realize it, yet, how much of those absolutist assumptions came from my early history with my first series of caregivers.
Copyright ©
Restin Wells