Voluntary Madness

by Norah Vincent

  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 → Alienation → 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 → Alienation → Shame → Guilt → 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 balls 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 balls, and the ball at the far right end pops out in response to the blow. Conservation of momentum.

  Molestation to self-harm, and the depression in between. All linked. All ingrained. A very old way of responding to an insult. A pattern always leading to the same place. A normal reaction, as normal, common, and predictable as a physical law.

  This was a map of my depression and its source, as well as its propensity to repeat itself over and over again in response to a variety of stimuli, from work stress, to relationship stress, to any perceived violation or threat, all of which could set the process in motion in its accustomed way and dump me out at the far end in a heap.

  This was my diagram of distress, or one of them anyway. There would be others. Other patterns. Other habits and modes. My depression is not one-dimensional. The molestation does not explain it wholly any more than drawing the map of its effects can heal all my ills going forward. It goes without saying that there are plenty of depressed and suicidal people in the world who were not molested as kids. They have their own triggering traumas, their own consequent patterns of emotion and thought, and the power of those patterns and traumas will not be magically expunged by this kind of charted uncovering.

  As Carol would say, the diagrams and maps are coping skills, and they would not be drawn just once. They would be drawn again and again in different ways on different days when the feelings ran too high and were crippling. I would take apart my house brick by brick, and it would build itself up again when I was not looking. I would draw my maps and diagrams, and then I would promptly forget them in the storm of experience. And I would draw them again, and remind myself again to see that the feelings were not real, that they were just ghosts rattling their chains. And then, for a time, the feelings would seem less frightening, and I would move past them and go on. I would repocket the map or throw it out, thinking that I knew what it said and that I didn’t need it anymore. And as I picked up my pace, and began even to walk with a little swagger in my step, I would succumb to the illusion that I was healed. And that comfortable, believable illusion would last for quite a while. Until the next time.

  The days at Mobius ran according to a schedule. Each day was very much like the next, one floating into the other, blurring and passing by. But I never minded this. Time didn’t drag me down and subdue me the way the empty days at Meriwether had, and it didn’t feel stale and tedious like the well-meant, but mostly futile structured days at St. Luke’s. My two weeks at Mobius were slow and pleasant.

  We were spoiled. Everything worrisome was taken away, everything necessary provided or planned, such that you didn’t really have to think about anything except the state of your soul or your liver, whatever the case might have been. And if you chose not to examine your life, which many of my fellow clients stubbornly did, then you just walked the short distance between sitting places, or rode the ten minutes in the van and then plopped yourself down again to zone out in another venue.

  I liked the life there. It was easy and comfortable, and in certain ways it even helped me to practice for real life with training wheels on, which may sound infantile, but is not something to be overlooked when you’ve been depressed and found yourself in the humbling position of being unable to get out of bed.

  So, for example, it was good for me to go to the supermarket and plan meals for the week and then cook each of those meals in the evening, or assemble and take the allotted lunch and snack provisions to the Mobius offices in the morning. It was good for me to do my dishes and my laundry, all in the safe confines of the playhouse.

  I got used to the routines and found them comforting and stabilizing. In the mornings I grew accustomed to waking immediately to the familiar sucking sound of the apartment’s front door opening. I knew this meant that the night tech was there to give us our meds before he went off his shift.

  Usually it was Roger. Roger was a father of two who worked part-time in construction when he wasn’t working at Mobius, and he was one of the most polite people I have ever met. I hated the idea of putting the poor man in the awkward position of having to wake me in my room, where I was likely to be half out of the covers in my underwear or in some other unsightly state of disarray. So I had programmed myself to leap out of bed at the sound of the door, make myself vaguely presentable, then meet him in the kitchen, where he had taken to setting up his meds box on the table and waiting patiently for me to show. I didn’t like to keep him waiting. Besid
es, he was a big fan of my coffee, which I always make very strong, and I liked to be able to offer him some before he had to go.

  We usually sat there for twenty minutes or so over our cups, talking about some wounding lesson in manhood that he’d had to guide his son through that week or the progress of his latest construction project. He would often ask me how I was doing at Mobius, if I was getting something out of it, and what my plans were for getting back into my life. I always enjoyed those conversations. They were a homey segue into the day, and they kept me from doing the kind of unhealthy brooding that I tend to do when I first wake in the morning and lie there wishing I didn’t have to get up.

  When our twenty minutes were up, Roger would get up to go, thank me, wish me a good day, and I the same to him, and then I’d stand for a minute longer in the kitchen finishing my coffee and thinking over what we’d said. Then I’d wander over to Katie’s door and give it a soft knock to let her know that we had about fifteen minutes before the van came. Usually she’d been up until four or so, still struggling with the Xanax withdrawal.

  Cook, being a bit of a lady’s man, always called in the mornings from his cell phone to say when the van was on its way. We’d chat for a minute, and give each other needless shit. He would flirt with me, even though he knew it would lead nowhere, and I would deflect his attempts sarcastically. Then we’d go on to other things. He’d been there in group process therapy, so he knew my private information. It was customary between us to rib each other on this score. He’d ask me if he was going to be my next affair, and I’d ask him if he liked it in the ass, because that was my thing. That usually ate up the couple of minutes until the van pulled into the parking area downstairs, and I’d throw my lunch and notebook into a bag in time to go.

  Diggs would show up at the door and we’d take our seats in the van. On the drive to the office Cook and Gary, who both had houses on or very near the beach, would talk about power boats or deep-sea diving, or Cook and Katie, both of whom had been in jail, would advise Bobby on her upcoming incarceration and debate whether or not it was easier doing your time in the prison infirmary.

  Petunia and I usually sat in the back row listening and looking sleepily out the windows. We always exchanged hearty greetings, but after that there wasn’t much to say, which was fine with both of us. He was the kind of person who could hold a long silence well, and who had clearly come to the conclusion long ago that there was really very little that anyone needed to say to anyone else. I admired this economy of words, and thought it would behoove me to practice it.

  When we got to the Mobius offices, we’d all put our packed lunches in the fridge and maybe grab a cup of the coffee that Sam or Carol had put on. Den chi bon didn’t usually start until nine thirty, so we had forty-five minutes of loaf time when people who hadn’t brought laptops and weren’t availing themselves of the wireless service at the apartments could use one of the office computers and surf the net or check their e-mail.

  The communal computer was on a desk in a sitting area across from the kitchen. There were also some armchairs, a large well-stocked bookshelf, and a table with a chessboard on top of it. The carved wooden chess pieces were usually positioned in various midgame arrays, but I never saw anyone playing. Katie usually commandeered the oversize leather armchair with ottoman and went back to sleep, impervious to all noise. I usually made notes in my notebook or read a bit over my third cup of coffee, unless it was a bad morning, in which case I’d sneak in to see Carol while she was trying to eat her bagel.

  She was always welcoming. She wasn’t the kind of therapist who didn’t want you to know that she was human, so she didn’t mind eating in front of you. In fact, she purposely asked me to stay in her office one morning while she made a phone call to Starbucks customer service in order to complain about rude treatment she’d received at a store that morning.

  “I want you to hear this,” she said.

  She meant that she wanted me to know that she could be as petty as anybody else, and that the traditional transference process of falling in love with her, or making her into my spit-and-polish guru didn’t have therapeutic value in her eyes.

  And she was right. It didn’t. She was a person as warty as anyone else and, as she reminded me, as defined by her past as I was, even at the age of fifty-one.

  “This stuff doesn’t go away, you know,” she said. “I’m still doing all kinds of irrational things because of other things that happened to me when I was a kid. The number one characteristic of trauma is that it repeats itself.”

  She told me a story from her childhood about some freaked-out kid in grade school who had leapt on her from behind and tried to strangle her. It had taken four people to pull him off, and she still has a scar on her neck from the experience.

  “Now whenever I go to the movies,” she said, “I have to sit in the last row. I have to have my back to the wall. That’s trauma. Old trauma repeating itself in my thoughts and actions even now, forty-some years later.”

  I’d never had a therapist who’d told me stories about herself, and our relationships had always, in my opinion, suffered as a result. I connected with Carol because she let me see that she was a person and that she was fighting the same fight, continually. She was an object lesson in perseverance and the sometimes bitter truth that no amount of mindfulness was going to renew you, or erase you, or make you into someone else. You were you. Stuck with you and, in a sense, stuck with your past, even if you could learn to navigate around it, or avoid falling entirely back into it. Patterns would repeat themselves, and the most you could do was be aware of and manage them. But you weren’t ever going to be free, and there was no use in fooling yourself about it or, as Carol believed, fooling your clients about it either, catering to their dysfunction disinterestedly and impersonally like some kind of pie-eyed genie farted out of a jar.

  Most mornings I left Carol’s office and went right into den chi bon with Sam, which lasted for the next hour and fifteen minutes. Invariably I was calmer when we finished. Every day I got better at letting go and letting Sam lend me some of the immense positive creative energy he brought to work each morning. Every day I let the Indian man’s liquid caramel voice penetrate a little deeper into my sour skepticism, and I let the strange thrusting motions of the exercises carry me away, until I was doing most of the session with my eyes closed, holding hands with Gary and Sam, and swaying to the sickly sweet swells of a Céline Dion song, with that same stupid contented smile plastered on my face.

  What can I say? It worked for me. Hell, it was better than peeling oranges in the bathroom or playing board games with people depressed enough to make me look like Suzie Sparkle by comparison.

  Anyway, it did more for me than coffee, and that’s saying something.

  After den chi bon, at eleven, it was back into perception therapy, where the rest of the clients weren’t nearly as overeager and forthcoming about their twisted inner lives as I was, and usually mumbled whatever they thought they had to or could get away with in order to at least minimally satisfy Carol and get through the exercise.

  And Carol wasn’t forcing anything. She knew better, even if she was, at times, maybe a little too overly optimistic about the fact that she was often preaching to the deaf. But at bottom, she knew that the people who were there merely because they were court-mandated to be in some form of rehab, and had chosen Mobius as the lesser evil, weren’t going to make much effort to get something out of the experience. And making an effort was the one and only way to actually get something out of it.

  That was the crux. You. Only you could work on you. Nobody could force you, and if you weren’t ready, then you weren’t ready, and no amount of open-armed encouragement was going to change that.

  Gary made an effort. He was on his way, trying to kick the coke and stay focused. His heart and mind were open to change. Cook made the occasional pull, but for the most part he was too busy making a play for the girls to really get down to his own business. Katie, more ofte
n than not, was texting her boyfriend that she was going to kick his ass when she got home. And Bobby? Well, Bobby was just not there at all. She didn’t even try to disguise the lazy annoyance in her voice when she answered Carol’s questions. She didn’t seem in the least bothered by the fact that she’d taken other people’s lives in her hands repeatedly while driving in the kind of condition that landed her upside down in ditches and trees. She only had a few days left to do at Mobius, and all she could talk about was how she was going to get drunk at the airport before she even got on the plane.

  And that, in fact, is exactly what she did. The day she left, she had Diggs drive her to the airport in the morning a few extra hours before her flight was due to leave, so that she could spend that time in the bar. She sent Cook a message later that morning on his phone. There was no text attached. It was just a picture of a gargantuan Long Island iced tea.

  So much for her process.

  At noon, after process therapy, we ate our bagged lunches seated around the long table in the kitchen. Afterward, between one and two, we either met privately with our assigned therapist, or we met with Josie, who had her own paperwork to fill out for each of us, or, if it was Wednesday and we so desired, we could meet with the psychiatrist and get meds.

  At two we had another group meditation session with Josie, Sam, or Carol, and sometimes all three, or we had rebirthing group, or we listened to a lecture on mindful living delivered by a Sri Lankan Buddhist monk who came in every other week to lend us his serenity. One day a week at this time we met with a nutritionist, who gave us information on caloric intake, body mass index, vitamin regimens, dietary supplements, carbs, fats, proteins, sweeteners, and so on.

  This was all part of the mind, body, spirit aspect of the program, and whether, in the end, it changed your life or not (I found the monk pretty mindless rather than mindful, for example), I appreciated the effort that Dr. Franklin had made to offer us a variety of ways to approach our health. It was there for us to take advantage of or not, to incorporate or dismiss as we wished, and it wasn’t usually very hard to skip out on these sessions if you really found them excruciating. You could, as I sometimes did, sneak into the meditation room, just off the main hall next to the art room, and ohm yourself into a state, or you could make yourself look busy over one of the self-help books on the shelves in the main seating area.