by Ashley Judd
He said a few other things, I imagine, but “I have wanted this for you since the first time I met you” reverberated in my ears, drowning out everything else. I must have been moving very slowly. We had said our goodbyes, but I was still standing, holding the receiver, mouth probably hanging open. And I heard Ted, as he was hanging up, crying with great joy in his voice to his wife, “Margie! Margie! You’ll never guess what happened!”
I was stunned once more. Overhearing that remark, not intended for me, but about me, and said with such glee, was like having read, “Pets are very important.” I did not understand why Ted believed this was fortuitous. I sure as heck did not understand why it was such a damn happy occasion. But it was clear others believed that it was, others who expressed nothing but great compassion and concern, who somehow, in spite of my scrambled confusion, were emerging as very safe and trustworthy. Comments like that, so brief and small, assimilated into my insides, and gave me a hook, the beginning of something to hang on to, a way to grasp that they believed, and to begin to suspect that if I did what they had done, I, too, could have what they had.
I zipped my case and wheeled my small bag down the tree-lined street, the center drawing closer, looming larger. I crossed the threshold and sat in Cam’s office, answering questions and doing paperwork. I remember being so grateful I had good insurance and the ability to pay for this treatment. I remember Cam saying she’d put me in a room with my sister. Cindy Henson, then head of the treatment team, was sprawled comfortably in a chair beside me. I had no idea that she was already deep into her assessment of me, formulating the basis for my first assignments she would direct my case manager to proctor.
The tech (treatment team assistants who are always present to support clients) on duty went through my things with me, taking from me items not allowed during treatment: cell phones, any type of music-playing device, books, anything with which one could harm oneself. I looked up phone numbers before turning in my phone and stood in the tech’s office letting certain folks know I would be out of commission for at least forty-two days. Kate Roberts was one such person. Without divulging much detail, I apologized deeply for the massive inconvenience. I stressed I was not canceling our complex trip to Central America, only delaying it. She received the news graciously and wished me great good luck. I shared my news with a few other souls, and all responded similarly. I found that strange, even as I was grateful for it. Soon I was holding the receiver in midair, trying to think of another person to call, one more chore to do, to delay what I had set into motion.
The tech, seeing this, said, “Ashley, I need you to finish up.”
Fear closed in my chest like a fist. I replaced the receiver, stepped out of the office, and became a patient.
My case manager, Kristen, a kind and very young-seeming clinician, was introduced to me, and I was provided a Shades of Hope tote bag with the tools I would need to commence the work she gave me. A large three-ring binder, a fat ream of paper, pens and pencils, and most important, my own copy of the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous. I had seen other clients with their binders, written work spilling out of it, inspirational notes slid under the clear plastic cover, family photos taped in collages. I wondered what I would do with mine.
She gave me “first step prep” to write on codependence, instructed me how to write my own autobiography (before we can straighten out our present, we need to have straightened out the stories of our past as best we can), and asked me to write a history of depression, self-harm, and suicidal ideation. I felt baffled, as I had no idea where she had come up with that very personal information, why she took it so seriously, why me hitting myself from time to time was anything anyone would want to talk about. I remembered Cindy in Cam’s office, so relaxed in that chair, and I realized that in this place, what you say in front of anyone is shared with everyone. I was bummed. I would have really preferred to keep that tidbit to myself.
I don’t much recall a lot of what I did next, but boy, oh boy, do I remember supper and snack, filling out my “feeling sheet,” and going to bed. During the meals, I was sitting precisely where all week I had rather longed to be: at the round tables filled with clients. I had heard something about affirmations and different assignments clients had with respect to meals. And now, I knew. My meal plan was written on a board, and I went through the buffet trying to measure and plate my food as described. (This would begin one of my many attempts to control my experience; not having an eating disorder, I wondered why I had to eat the way eating disorder clients did, and depending on my opinion of the menu, I would want to under- or overserve my portions. And the lemon ration with water? Well, it was a full five weeks before I quit conniving how to obtain more than allowed.) I watched fascinated as an anorexic put a kerchief on her eyes and was fed by a bulimic. The assignment was to help the anorexic give up control of what and how she ate and for the bulimic to learn how not to despise food put into the body for nourishment and sustenance. After the meal, everyone stood up in turns and said five affirmations about her- or himself, with the peers reflecting back to that person the positive statements. (“I love my stomach.” “I am loved, loving, and lovable.” “Just for today, I will do the next good, right, honest thing.”) I am not sure what I said, but I know I was scared to death, trying mightily to pretend I was not while I choked back tears and sputtered through it. I would later lie awake in bed trying to think of good things to say about myself that would convince the others I really felt that way.
On the screened-in back porch, I met Jake, a wonderfully furry gray-and-black tomcat who would become my dearest friend and closest companion. I stood at a painted wooden box, looking into the dark back garden that sloped toward a creek, and paused, unsure what to write about what I felt.
My sister walked me to my room. To my forlorn dismay, I had not been put in a room with her (it turned out Cam was the campus softie). And because of the number of clients at the moment, I ended up in a four-person room, totally alone. We stood in the large, plain room, adorned only with two sets of bunk beds and a few chests of drawers, and my big sister gave me “the hug”: the wonderful, nurturing, motherly, all-embracing hug she gives so very, very well. I was cracking, I was coming undone. She said as she held me, “Let it all go.” I didn’t know what “it” was, but I had come far enough in one week to know that I had a lot of “it.” She put me in bed, tucked me in, and walked out the door.
I had chosen the top bunk, and my eyes looked around wildly as I struggled to find purchase, a way to reason things out, to make sense of the cauldron of emotion and the baffling new setting. I saw the only decoration in the room, a paper plate hanging on the wall with a cross made out of glitter stuck to glue.
Lord have mercy, I was in the loony bin.
I stared at it. I wondered about the woman who had made it, if she, like me, had been in pain, and if in this strange place she had found peace. I wondered if someday I might look back on it in my mind’s eye, recalling it with fondness. In retrospect, I identify those thoughts as part of my strong will to survive, my earnest yearning to heal, and my nascent hope, despite how bad I felt.
Thus began the loneliest walk of my life. The first nights in treatment are excruciating, and clients often declare they’ve had miraculous spiritual experiences and spontaneous healing transformations that send them right out the door and back into their lives before completing a full week. This, I understand. Boy, do I understand. In spite of being unconditionally loved and accepted, and supported by a talented treatment team who often worked around the clock, I was in the most acute emotional pain of my life, at a baseline of deeply grieved loneliness with surges of near panic and wretched anxiety.
I didn’t sleep much. The techs would check on us at intervals throughout the night, for a variety of reasons. My sleep was so tortured that every time one entered the room, it sent adrenaline rippling through my system. A tech rises early at Shades: Blood pressure is taken, on certain days of the week clients are weighed, meds are
dispensed. (In the beginning, they detox clients off all but the most essential meds, to see, often for the first time in a client’s life, what they are really dealing with, what their actual baseline mood is. So many folks are misdiagnosed, meds misprescribed, meds dosed improperly. Many of the medical conditions codependents deal with are induced by emotional stress, and substance abusers often withhold so much information from health care providers that one can’t always blame them for putting patients on stuff that they either don’t need or is actually dangerous for them.) I found the routine exhausting and was relieved that I was initially on “no exercise,” which is standard for a client’s first ten days.
My first full day in the center was a Saturday, and my free fall into aching loneliness accelerated. With reduced staff and less structure, I felt the quiet around the facility as nothing less than a vacancy in my own soul. The clients went on an outing, which both my sister and I did not attend, as the center took extra measures to protect and preserve our confidentiality and anonymity. Being left behind meant there were just three people having lunch in the large lunchroom (the third was a client too ill to go out). I sat facing the door, looking at the crossroads on which the campus is situated. I could a see long ways down the country road, its slight undulations from the giant live oak trees’ roots that wove and bulged underneath. In my mind’s eye, I imagined standing up, walking to the door, placing my hand on the knob, and walking out. Just walking out. That simple. I had no car, no phone, no money, but I could walk, and I imagined doing so. I have walked many miles on country roads in my life, and I could just … walk out of there and see where the road would take me. I had the vague sense that doing so would be none too smart, that the pain I was in would accompany me wherever I went. Those thoughts were vague, and I am not sure what prevented me from leaving. After lunch, when I crossed the street back to the center, I did look down the road once. A dim, fuzzy thought formed that I could indeed walk out of here someday, and maybe—just maybe—I would do so as a changed woman.
The weekend activities included a lot of quiet time for written work, Big Book study, Twelve Step meetings, an occasional movie with recovery themes, and process groups in which clients could share in depth about something going on with them, facilitated by a member of the treatment team. I felt ashamed as I struggled to learn the language of recovery: what to say in my “feelings check,” when to give peers feedback, and when such feedback was considered “cross-talk,” offering comments about another person’s sharing that is not appropriate in Twelve Step meetings. I began to use the dreaded “confrontation” format, as required, at the beginning of each group. People who wind up in treatment generally have trouble expressing their feelings and their needs moderately; often they’ve not been taught how to, having never seen healthy communication modeled. Using a standardized script with fill-in-the-blank sentences, I practiced owning my reality with simple statements devoid of under- or overdescribing and ultimately taking responsibility for how I was going to respond to another person’s behavior and take care of myself. (Mind the final statement: “To____. When you rage at the staff after lunch, I think you are doing the anger you have toward your dad. I feel fear and pain. I need and would like you to do anger work with Tennie and Kim. And, I intend to remember ‘if I spot it, I got it,’ do my own work, focus on my own recovery.”) People with healthy internal and external boundaries can listen with detachment and know the exchange is not just about them (even though it seems directed at them), but is a reflection of what is happening inside the person who is sharing. It took me a while to arrive at that place of loving detachment. When one of our peers gave my sister and me a confrontation for perhaps not considering how our closeness might be painful to watch for clients who missed their families terribly, I took it personally and totally shut down. I felt that no matter what I did, I was doing it all wrong.
That Sunday, I was up most of the night, wild with irrational fears and anxiety that felt like worms in my chest. I felt I needed to tell the tech what I was experiencing, yet as I lay in bed, I imagined I was locked in my room, which increased my anxiety. When it finally drove me out of bed, I was so surprised and relieved when the knob turned smoothly in my hand. It never occurred to me that a) this was not a lockdown unit; and b) locking clients in was an illegal fire hazard. I stumbled across the garden, found the tech, and in gulps of air punctuated with heaving sobs managed to say something about how no one has ever believed me before when I said I was in trouble emotionally, that I had been in bed really coming unglued. The tech soothed and consoled me, validated me, reminded me she was not trained to do much more than that, and offered to call in other staff. I was blind with emotion, but calling staff was too much of a brouhaha, I thought. God knew what assignment they’d give me if they heard about my meltdown. I went back to bed and rode out the spell.
By morning, I was utterly worn out. I decided this was unsustainable. I could not live without adequate sleep. I marched to the foyer and, seeing Erica there, said, “Hi, look, yeah, I am just gonna go to a nearby hotel, grab some sleep. I am sure a few hours will make a big difference. I don’t need my whole suitcase, I’ll just take a day bag, and I’ll be back later. Thanks.”
She stared me down.
“A.J., it does not work that way. If you walk out that door, you are taking your stuff with you, and you aren’t coming back.”
Silence.
“Come in here,” Erica said.
I was led into the treatment team’s staff room, where their long morning meeting was well under way. The entire gang, or what felt like a coven, was assembled around a paper-strewn table, with client cases opened, charts on the wall. It was like walking into a genius’s laboratory, where obvious creativity and skill kinetically charged the air.
Erica may have said something to explain why she’d brought me to nerve center. I think I feebly built my case for sleep. But what happened next was what really mattered and was another of those life-changing moments.
“Ashley, what are you so afraid of?”
I was amazed to hear the confession, the incredibly vulnerable truth, come out of my mouth.
“I am afraid I am going to lose my mind.”
There. I said it.
The energy in the room changed. The very air became gentle. There was a palpable softness.
An array of eyes looked knowingly at me. People who had been where I was, who were now somewhere much further down the recovering road, nodded their understanding.
“We will never let your mind go somewhere we cannot bring you back from,” Erica said.
Although my chest clamped and I had no idea what they were saying would look like, I accepted their promise. I walked out the door, rejoined my peers, and proceeded to work very, very hard on my treatment plan for forty days and forty nights, sleep or no sleep.
I took ownership of a middle chair on the glassed-in porch, facing the garden and the creek. I spread out my paper, pens, and other tools. I wrote during every free minute, answering the questions of my now numerous first step preps (if step one is to admit I am powerless over something and my life is unmanageable, a “first step prep” is informally known as step zero: “This shit has to stop”), my auto, and all the subsequent assignments I would receive. I attended, and actually enjoyed, every group: process, Twelve Step, cognitive, behavioral, spirituality, experiential, and art, among others. I found the work fascinating, in spite of being painful, and found that when I was deeply engaged, either by listening to my increasingly loved and valued peers or by doing my own work, I didn’t feel tired. I gave my all to the work.
One night in art group, we were asked to draw the body part that gives us the most hassle and then process out loud why we dislike or feel shame about that part of ourselves. Clearly an exercise designed for disordered eaters, I nonetheless had no trouble identifying the body part that grieved me most: my brain. I drew one, and in a creative, messy-but-still-somehow-makes-sense series of designs and statements, I shared
that I knew my brain was my greatest asset (especially when used in conjunction with my good and tender heart) and that among other things it was a smart one that allowed me to experience great beauty, joy, and pathos. But too often at this stage of my life, my brain was racked with difficulties, consumed nonstop with trying to manage anxiety and emotional pain, sorting out multiple channels of static like a radio knob being spun back and forth across the dial, never tuning in one strong, clear channel. I knew there was plenty of hope for my brain, but this wonderfully strange thing I drew visually reflected the chaos and darkness too often in it. I also related my brain to my body, the low-grade, chronic lower back pain, the deep wound I felt in my actual, literal heart during my worst depressions, a pain so harsh and unbearable that I could think only of killing myself to make it stop.
I also began to benefit as much from my friends’ work as from my own. In experiential group, held in a cozy, small, womblike room, a recovering drug addict who in her previous inpatient treatment practiced her eating disorder the entire time (a sadly common occurrence, it was soon clear to me) began to do deep work on the core pain that set up her addictions in the first place, triggered by abandonment and neglect of an alcoholic mother she loved “like a drug.” She read aloud a letter she wrote to her now deceased mother, and by the time she was on line three, I was the one in a heap crying. Our stories were quite different, but that did not matter. I identified. A grief I could not contain swelled up in me, and by now I was willing to let it do so. As I had been encouraged to do on my first night, I began to let it all go.
My friend, unsurprisingly, vomited after she read her letter. Purging was how she had been handling her feelings for years; by now it was an automatic response. While she was being attended to, the treatment team focused on me. “Lord almighty, what was going on with you?” they asked in their inimitable West Texas accents. It was wonderful to say I didn’t know, to just be, to feel, to cry, to be paid attention to in this way while I grieved, to be accepted and validated without being minimized or told I had the story wrong and facts mixed up, and to begin to see for the first time that with enough of the right kind of work, “this, too, shall pass.” My deepest fear had always been that I could not heal. In spite of how agonizing the work was, it seemed I was not terminally unique, as it says in the Big Book of Co-Dependents Anonymous, and that it would finally be “possible for me to mend.”