She peered at me over red horn-rimmed glasses. “How long have you been married?”
“Ten years.”
“Then you’ll give him half of everything you own. Do you have savings?”
“Yes, a 401(k), a pension, a few hundred thousand dollars in savings and from investing in apartments,” I said. My own shoes were bought on closeout from a warehouse sale. I’d worked so hard to save. Now I was going to give away half of it. “And the house.”
“Do you both own the house?” Her female assistant, a young Asian lawyer dressed in a beautiful black suit, took notes as we talked.
“No, David didn’t believe in buying on credit. I bought it. It’s in my name.”
“Well, whatever you do, don’t leave the house,” she said flatly.
I sat back in my chair, floored. “What do you mean? I’m packed. I’ve signed a lease on an apartment. I’m halfway moved in.” My silk blouse was stained with sweat.
“Well, unpack, and get back in that house. If things get ugly, and you’ve abandoned your primary residence, that house will be his, along with half of everything else you own.” She started scribbling on a paper and then addressed her assistant. “Krista, get Sheila the papers for a no-fault divorce. Fill them out for her. We’ll have an asset sheet drawn up tomorrow.”
She turned to me. “Here’s how it’s going to go down. You’re going to buy him out of the house and offer him half of everything you own. He gets to keep the assets from his business.” She looked up, struck by her own curiosity, “He does have assets, doesn’t he?”
“I don’t know.”
“Are you an officer of his company?” She leaned back in her leather chair, which looked custom-made to fit her frame.
“No, I’ve never signed checks; I know nothing about how he runs his financials.”
“Try to find out in the next few days, would you?” She smiled. “On the one hand, your ignorance may have protected you from some nasty corporate debt. On the other hand, your ignorance could cost you mightily if he’s run up a bunch of personal debt. Does he have credit cards? A mistress? A secret place in Vegas? Is he a drug dealer, a drug user? You need to know these things.”
This was her territory. There wasn’t a scenario or scheme she didn’t already know forward and back.
“No, none of that,” I said quickly. I had long suspected his infidelity, but I didn’t know anything for certain about David’s private life.
Two more hours passed in her office as I laid out the entire story of our marriage and my worry about preserving what little mental health he still had. I was spent, as if the energy had been squeezed out of me in drops, question by question. At the end of the session, she handed me some chicken scratch on some paper.
“Okay, this is a rough guess, but based on what you’ve told me, here’s how you’d make the split.” She handed me the paper. The numbers looked completely devastating. My savings would be virtually wiped out. In my twenties, I’d worked two jobs, anchoring and reporting. In my thirties, I’d invested in apartments with an attorney friend of mine. All the missed nights from Sophie, all the weekends showing and renting apartments—it was all for nothing.
“What about custody?” she asked. “You want your daughter full-time?” I had never, ever considered taking Sophie from David. Ever.
“Absolutely not,” I said. “Sophie is all that David has left. I want her to be with him, at least half of the time.”
“And can he take care of her?” she asked.
My shoulders fell. “I don’t know. I really don’t know anymore.” As bad as David’s condition had become, he managed to hold it together around Sophie. He was his best self with her. It was an irrational assumption, but I believed he would never harm her intentionally.
Jody’s phone was lit up on all five ringers, people on hold, other divorces, other marriages crashing in around her, and yet she was perfectly composed, booming orders to her assistant like a four-star general in a theater of war. “Okay, that’s a good start,” she said, wrapping up. “Look, I do this all the time. You are in a better position than 98 percent of the women who come through here. You’re a smart cookie. You’ll earn it back. You’ve got your kid. We can keep you out of court. You can count on me. Now, go convince David to settle this quickly.”
I shook her hand, the firmest shake I’d encountered in weeks. I liked this woman; I didn’t care what people said about her. She really did pull out all the stops for her clients.
Before I left, she added, “We’ll help you file the divorce. The media doesn’t have to know.”
This was the news I welcomed most. I’d read other local personalities’ divorces unfold on the pages of local gossip sites. None of them had Jody as a lawyer.
“Thanks, Jody,” I said, the bones of my knees knocking. Standing next to her I felt pathetic, incompetent, tiny.
She softened. “Remember to breathe, would you?”
HEALING THE MIND
Brian Goff is a gifted therapist in Portland, Oregon, whose specialty is suicide. He’s seen more than 500 significantly suicidal patients. Goff says, “A large percentage of survivors I work with say they regret the choice of attempting suicide. Rarely have people actually wanted to die. They just didn’t want to live the way they were living.”
Goff has worked at the forefront of several therapies that offer promise for the most deeply troubled patients. Intensive therapies, such as dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) and cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), have reduced rates of repetition of deliberate self-harm. Goff cofounded a DBT clinic and has used that technique successfully with hundreds and hundreds of patients. Now, he’s combined what he sees as the best elements of both in a treatment that uses mindfulness blended with cognitive behavioral psychotherapies.
Goff begins with this premise: people want to live a life worth living. And if they can be given the tools to help them ease the struggle of their present condition, they can begin building a life worth living. The new hybrid therapy developed by Goff, acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), focuses on modifying the functions rather than the forms of symptoms, using acceptance and mindfulness strategies.
“Western medicine moves the locus of control so that the solution is no longer inside of us,” Goff says. “Someone else will take care of it. ACT puts the construction of one’s life and the reorientation of one’s experience back in the hands of the individual.
“We teach people to experience their thoughts as thoughts. When they think, ‘I’m going crazy,’ we teach them to change the thought to “I’m having the thought I’m going crazy.” Thus participants develop a different relationship with the thoughts, feelings, and bodily sensations that would normally form a toxic spiral, deepening hopelessness and the sense of entrapment and opening the way to another suicidal crisis.”
With ACT, people learn to move beyond the thought that “my situation is hopeless” by changing it to this: “I notice a thought that my situation is hopeless.” “ACT therapists are giving people tools to put these thoughts in context,” says Goff. “So much of traditional CBT focuses on symptom reduction. So often, people are doing the things they do to avoid unwanted internal experiences (i.e., thoughts and feelings) rather than doing things that are important and meaningful to them.”
In ACT, there is something more worthy of one’s time than reducing discomfort (which often backfires like trying to get out of quicksand): that is, learning to be flexible enough psychologically so that you can do the things that feel meaningful, vital, and important to you. It is often said, “Living well is better than feeling good.”
Goff asks his patients a theoretical question that provides insight into the behavioral component of suicidal ideation: “If I had a magic wand and I could do something, anything, for you, would you say, ‘Please kill me’? In all the years I’ve asked it, I’ve never heard ‘Yes, please kill me,’” Goff says. “The answer is, ‘Cure my Parkinson’s.’ ‘End my depression.’ ‘Save my marriage.’ �
��Prevent my bankruptcy.’”
“Most people who suffer from mental illness begin with a host of vulnerabilities: environmental, genetic predisposition, early trauma, nutritional deficiencies etc.,” says Goff. “You inherit certain qualities of your internal world, among them sensitivity, reactivity, the ability to return to a normal mood.”
Goff says with the right mix of circumstances that are toxic—physical or sexual abuse, neglect or a detached parent, early childhood trauma, environmental toxins—you are much more vulnerable to mental disorders. In an ACT approach, the focus is not on reducing the frequency or changing the content of inner experiences, but rather on changing the patient’s relationship to the behavior. ACT is successful in the psychological treatment of a wide range of problems, including drug dependence, chronic pain, epilepsy, depression, social phobia, work stress, and borderline personality disorder.
Chapter Thirteen
The night of the party, October 8. The temperature inside the car had dropped. Colin and I were still parked outside the party, in the same parking place in northwest Portland, but the world and my view of it had made a cataclysmic shift. I had begun the evening of October 8 thinking that maybe David was stabilizing. The divorce papers were drawn up, tucked away in a drawer until he appeared well enough to make decisions for himself.
I’d begun the evening thinking that Colin and I might be right together. We’d seen one another several times since our first date, and with every coffee or quiet dinner, I’d come to realize Colin was one of the “good guys.” I would have preferred a carefree romance and to have been more settled when we met, but I also felt instinctively that I should not pass up the best thing that had happened to me in years. It was as if I’d been drowning, and Colin had revived me.
Now, according to the officer on the telephone, David had broken into a home and stolen a gun. It was completely clear now that David was psychotic. I could no longer deny how seriously ill he really was or believe that he would somehow, magically, get better. The party inside the restaurant was still rocking. I could see dancers bobbing through the windows, but it seemed like a world I’d never be able to rejoin. Not now.
Colin hadn’t moved during the entire retelling of the story. I half expected him to drop me off in front of my home and wish me luck with my problems. Instead, he cradled me in his arms. “Sweetheart, you’ve been through so much,” he said. “Let me help you.”
I wiped the tears from my eyes and imagined what I must have looked like to him, with my mascara-smudged mug-shot face and my legs shivering with cold. Those girls inside the restaurant party were unburdened, many of them daughters of Portland’s most wealthy philanthropists. I’d needed to escape the party immediately to go to David. But now, I realized, Colin deserved this time, this retelling of such an important part of what I’d been holding inside. Given the seriousness of the story, I expected him to call the date our last.
“What are you doing with me?” I said. “Go, have fun.”
“I don’t have a say in whom my heart chooses,” Colin said. “And it’s crazy for you. It was from the very moment I laid eyes on you.” He smiled and put his thumb on my chin.
I stopped talking. The tension in my throat broke, and I cried, “I’ve never been so scared in my life.” I had never shared this level of intimacy about my marriage with anyone in my family, or with any of my friends. I had been too ashamed to tell those closest to me what my life was really like, how difficult it had become. Somehow, I knew instinctively that Colin was safe territory.
“It will be okay. You’ll be okay. So will Sophie. I promise you.”
Colin started the car. “I have the girls all weekend. If you’d like to drop Sophie by while you deal with things, I will entertain her like the so-called Disneyland dad that I am.” He squeezed my leg. “Okay?”
“Okay,” I said. “Thank you.”
“Now, let’s get you to the police station,” he said, pulling carefully into traffic.
“No,” I said. “I’ve got to go home. David’s mother should know.”
MINDFULNESS
Mindfulness helps people cope with mental illness. The origins of mindfulness meditation lie in a Buddhist tradition dating back more than 2,500 years, but many therapists are now seeing it used successfully to treat patients with a wide variety of problems, including chronic pain, depression, and suicidal ideation.
Mindfulness has been described as “a particular way of paying attention: on purpose, moment-by-moment, and without judgment.”
Early sessions of mindfulness therapy concentrate on learning to focus on sensations, such as the breath. Later, patients extend mindfulness to thoughts and emotions, especially as they are experienced in the body.
In group mindfulness therapy sessions, participants learn to tune in to small experiences and aspects of their surroundings that would usually pass unnoticed and to work toward increasing the presence of nourishing activities in their daily lives (activities that lift mood and increase energy). An important aim of the therapy is to improve positive well-being, not simply to reduce negative emotions. Finally, participants learn to identify patterns of emotional response and negative thinking that act as warning signals for potential relapse and to help one another develop crisis plans, incorporating actions to take in the event of future depression, hopelessness, and thoughts of suicide.
For patients with suicidal ideation, riding the wave of their thoughts can be liberating. “What’s going on here? What is this? Do I recognize this? Is an old tape playing? Do I need to engage with it?”
Two controlled clinical trials have now demonstrated that mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT) can reduce the likelihood of relapse by about 40 to 50 percent in people who have suffered three or more previous episodes of depression. In the book The Mindful Way Through Depression, authors Mark Williams, John Teasdale, Zindel Segal, and Jon Kabat-Zinn outline why mindfulness can be so helpful for people with depression and reveal that, by cultivating the awareness-of-being mode, we can:
•get out of our heads and learn to experience the world directly, experientially, without the relentless commentary of our thoughts.
•see our thoughts as mental events that come and go in the mind rather than taking them literally.
•start living here, in each present moment.
•disengage the autopilot in our heads.
•sidestep the cascade of mental events that draws us down into depression.
•stop trying to force life to be a certain way because we’re uncomfortable right now.
Unfortunately, many people attempt to learn the skill of mindfulness while they are in the middle of a full-blown mental health crisis. That is why the most successful programs involve early intervention and treatment.
Chapter Fourteen
Alice seemed discombobulated when I woke her. She looked around the basement bedroom, trying to familiarize herself with the objects in the room.
“Alice, he’s missing,” I said.
She sat up, suddenly alert and on duty again. “Who, David?” Her face was ashen, drawn. She shook her head, trying to assimilate everything happening around her.
“He has a gun.” I told her the story of the phone call, the police officer. “You’ll have to get dressed. We need to drive to the Columbia Gorge, where they are looking for him. It’s near Multnomah Falls. A forty-minute drive.”
“Of course, I know where that is.” She rose in a flannel nightgown. My heart ached for her—an old woman, terrified from losing her husband, and now, possibly her son.
“I’m sorry, Alice.” I handed her a robe. “I’m sorry it turned out this way.” She still didn’t seem to quite realize where she was. She wobbled and then sat back down on the bed. The death of her husband had been a terrible blow.
“Well, we’ll just, we’ll just find him, then.” Something tripped in her voice, and the brisk, efficient Englishwoman was gone, replaced with hurt and vulnerability. “Won’t we? Find him? I’m sorry,
I had a glass of wine with dinner.” She sat on the side of the bed, her hands on either side of her temples. “I must not have heard him go out.”
I calculated how much time we had left to deal with this crisis before I would need to pick Sophie up from her sleepover the next morning. She usually liked to stay for a big breakfast. No need to tell her anything yet.
We were halfway to the sheriff’s office when my cell phone rang. I answered it, hoping for a miracle.
It was the same officer who’d called before. He sounded tired. “Ms. Hamilton,” he said, “don’t come to the sheriff’s office. Go directly to the Mt. Hood Medical Center.” My hand clutched the steering wheel; this was it—they would tell me that David was dead, or that he shot someone. I braced myself for the worst.
“Is David okay?”
“For now. He went back to the house where he stole the gun. He turned on the gas and tried to kill himself there. Then he went to an abandoned house up the road, where he tried to cut himself. Somewhere during the night, he fired off two shots; maybe as a test, who knows? It appears he’s taken a bunch of pills, too.”
He was talking fast; too many images were jumbling in my mind. David trying to light a stranger’s stove? Firing shots into the sky? This wasn’t making sense.
“How did you find him?”
“He went back to the original house again, and the owner brought him to the hospital. Apparently he knew the woman whose gun he stole.”
The officer had no idea how confusing the information was, how much of a mystery I’d found myself in. I stammered something nonsensical.
“She called the police. She’s the one who took him to the hospital. Do you know where the hospital is, Ms. Hamilton?”
My reporting career had prepared me for this disaster in ways I never imagined. I’d been to the Mt. Hood hospital twice before: once to report on three climbers who had been plucked from a crevasse on Mt. Hood, and the second time to report on a young snowboarder who had been rescued after getting caught in an avalanche. “Yes,” I told him, “we’re almost at the exit.” I held the phone inches away from my ear, as if dampening the volume might help me avoid this reality. Alice’s eyes were wide as she waited for me to fill her in.
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