by Jeff Bell
The gap at issue here doesn’t belong to my 1995 tapes, but rather to one recorded fourteen years earlier that will forever be linked to them. I am sitting at my bedroom desk in this well-worn tape, a seventeen-year-old kid with a pencil and paper in hand and no idea what to do with either of them. It’s late at night, a week or two before my high school graduation, and I am struggling to write the valedictory address I’m expected to give—a speech that was supposed to be my shining moment of glory after four years of busting my hump to get into the U.S. Naval Academy. Just weeks before, Congressman Tom Lantos had made that lifelong dream a reality with his official “appointment.” But then came the physical. And the series of failed color identification tests. And the call from my recruiter saying how sorry he was to inform me that the U.S. Navy has no need for colorblind sailors.
So now on this night back in ’81, I am wishing like hell that I didn’t have to get up in front of my classmates. I am still reeling from the biggest blow that life has ever dealt me. Still feeling sorry for myself, incapable of understanding that my failed physical will later save me from years worth of uniformed embarrassment dealing with a handicap much greater than colorblindness.
The theme of our graduation is “This Is It,” a message borrowed from one of the year’s biggest pop hits. I’m supposed to somehow incorporate this theme in my speech, and my first attempts have failed miserably. And still I have no ideas, only a blank piece of paper and a pencil with teeth marks all around it. Soon it’s nine o’clock. And then ten. And then eleven. I am starting to panic.
But then, poof, it’s the middle of the night, and I am staring at a speech I can’t remember writing:
“There have been times in my life I’ve been wondering why. Still somehow I believed we’d always survive…” Songwriter and vocalist Kenny Loggins recently gave us those words of encouragement in his hit song “This Is It.” I hope tonight to make his message my own.
Belief: It’s a true wonder to me that in just six letters so much could be expressed and implied. One word, so vague, and yet so significant in all of our lives. Belief, as I see it, can be broken down into three distinct concepts: Belief in ourselves; belief in others; and belief in life …
My sappy little speech—later preserved for eternity on my parents’ IBM Selectric—went on to offer an elaborate trifurcated explanation of the workings of belief and its ability to help us do anything—“Yes, anything”—including overcome incredible challenges. After a handful of bad clichés and random thoughts on such matters as integrity and strength and faith and possibility, my sermon-like essay wrapped up with an admonishment to my classmates that now is the time to believe, because, well … This Is It.
I remember my confusion and the sense of wonder that came with it as I first read through my penciled scribbles that early morning back in ’81. Not only was I at a loss to explain how the words had gotten there, I was also in awe of how much they instantly meant to me. Belief in myself, in others, and in life—all working toward some greater good. Yeah, that’s what it’s all about, isn’t it? At seventeen, profound thinking is finding meaning in a Stones song, or getting more out of a movie than just a few laughs. Yet there I was that morning, with my whole life in front of me and no plans to speak of—save for the ones that had just been pulled out from under me—and what was I doing? Contemplating the meaning of life. Weird.
A few days after my grad speech experience, I decided what I really needed was to go discover America, and perhaps myself along the way. So I purchased a thirty-day Greyhound Ameripass, a backpack, a stack of books, and a cheap silver-plated dog tag onto which I paid a mall engraver to etch the word Believer. If I wasn’t going to be a Naval officer as I’d always planned, I knew I needed a new image of myself to hold. I also knew that whatever else I might someday decide to be, I wanted first and foremost to be a guy who lived by that graduation speech.
The month that followed was unlike any before it. After years of battling to control my own destiny and everything around me, I somehow managed to let it all go. Reaching for my dog tag again and again, I toured cities by day and talked with fellow backpackers by night. Read Plato on the bus and wrote poetry in meadows. Laughed off a close call with would-be muggers in D.C. and drank moonshine with a sweet old man in the South. Never before had I felt so in tune with life and all its offerings. Never again, I now realize all these years later, would I ever feel so free.
I can’t remember just when after the bus trip I stopped wearing the dog tag. What I do know is when and why I put it back on: it was shortly after my brief nuthouse visit with Jackie, and it was because of the identity meltdown I found myself battling in the early weeks of ’95. Doubt, I was learning, consumes from the inside out, and with each passing day, it gnawed away that much more of my core. The guy in the mirror still looked about the same, but no longer could I recognize much beyond his reflection.
Night after night, the nagging questions haunted me: Whatever happened to that carefree kid on the Greyhound? What would he, the great aspiring believer, think of me, the pathological doubter? How devastated would he feel, watching me try to walk away from my parked car, checking and rechecking the doors and parking brake, incapable of believing even my own physical senses? Our only common link, it would strike me in moments of bone-chilling reality, was this weathered dog tag I’d catch myself sliding back and forth on its chain, begging it to remind me of what I once fancied myself to be, and how to get there again.
I can’t help thinking today that, somehow, some way, my pleading must have worked.
On a brisk morning in February I shake off the cold, along with my skepticism, and enter a rustic office building marked “Center for Attitudinal Healing.”
A receptionist looks up from her desk and asks if she can help me find anyone or anything in particular.
“Just looking for some background information,” I tell her, imagining for a second how lost I must seem.
“Are you interested in taking part in one of our support groups, or in volunteering?” she asks.
“Actually, neither at this point,” I say, knowing I’ve come here today for an entirely different reason.
I am here, truth be told, to see for myself that this place and the man who founded it back in 1975 are real. I have spent days reading about Dr. Gerald Jampolsky, his original vision of providing support for children battling cancer and other terminal illnesses, and the subsequent expansion of his practice to people of all ages facing a variety of life crises. I know that his “power to choose” counseling approach, based loosely on the teachings of A Course in Miracles, has proven so successful that nearly a hundred independent centers in more than a dozen countries have taken root from it.
I also know that Dr. Jampolsky’s remarkable accomplishments have drawn the attention of media programs from 60 Minutes to Phil Donahue and the Today show, and that his Center Advisory Board has attracted such luminaries as Dr. Linus Pauling, Fred Rogers, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and singer John Denver. But as always, I am skeptical, and I need to see with my own eyes that this work exists.
Not since The Boy Who Couldn’t Stop Washing has any book given me as much hope as Jampolsky’s Change Your Mind, Change Your Life— this despite the fact that it has nothing to do with overcoming OCD, per se. The book simply affirms the human spirit’s power to triumph over incredible physical and emotional challenges. At its root is this basic premise: that our thoughts and attitudes determine how we see the world, and that we ourselves choose those very thoughts and attitudes.
Freedom of choice is not something I’m exercising much of these days. Doubt feeds me one horrific what-if thought after another. And I, without question, give these thoughts all my attention. Time after time after time. But what if I didn’t have to? What if I could willfully choose to do otherwise?
Jampolsky says I can—much as any of the young cancer patients he works with can choose to see beyond the nagging, fearful thoughts of their futures. No, they can’t choose to be rid of their
disease, but they can decide not to focus their attention on their sick bodies and their fears about death. Instead, they can choose to see their shared predicament as an opportunity to give of themselves for a greater good—to help others with cancer, for example. Through support groups, pen-pal networks, writing projects, and the like, these brave young souls are willfully shifting their attention, and in so doing, finding peace and comfort in service to others.
It’s all about the “movies” we choose to make and to watch, says Jampolsky, referring now to the big picture that even those of us without catastrophic illnesses must sort out for ourselves. (For obvious reasons, this particular analogy piques my interest.) Imagine that in your mind is everything necessary to make a movie, he suggests in Love Is Letting Go of Fear. What we experience in our daily lives then is simply our own state of mind projected onto a screen of the world. The thing is, Jampolsky warns, we each have two internal directors vying to control our movies: a love-based one that recognizes our inherent good in this very moment; and a fear- or ego-based one that thrives on keeping us from knowing who we really are, largely by miring us in the past and future. We choose which of these dueling directors is in charge—and thereby what we see of the world—simply by choosing which of the two we invest in with our own innate free will.
Just how all this relates to me and my particular challenges, I’m not entirely sure. What I do know though is that I invest my everything in fear and its twin called Doubt, and I sure as hell watch a lot of fear-and-doubt-based movies—literally, in my head, and figuratively, on the screen of the world, as Jampolsky puts it. My “ego director,” it would seem, is this internal voice I’ve dubbed Doubt. As for the other director, I can’t help thinking that perhaps this role belongs to whatever it was that the old dog tag–wearing Believer in me had once taken its cues from.
I’d love to run this whole theory by the receptionist, who is now handing me a schedule of upcoming Center events, but I wouldn’t know where to start. Fortunately, our brief conversation, together with my quick look around this place, has provided me with all the evidence I need to feel comfortable that Jampolsky’s work is not just some façade to sell books, that his principles are really being employed in a real-life setting. I leave here knowing that I’m safe to peek at the vast world behind the curtain at which Jampolsky stands.
fourteen
fast-forward 1 week
Situation: Ambiguous intersection.
Obsession: I may have caused an accident by not having handled the turn lane properly.
Compulsions: Go back to look at the intersection. Re-create the turn repeatedly in my head. Listen to traffic reports for word of trouble.
Jackie and I are working our way through one of her so-called “Thought Record” worksheets, as we’ve done a hundred times before with a hundred other episodes. But this time, Jackie suggests I attempt to indulge my new interest in spiritual arguments as we tackle the worksheet’s all-important Responses section.
“I have to be honest, though,” she apologizes. “I know nothing about spiritual reasoning.”
“That’s okay,” I tell her. “Neither do I.”
A couple of heathens, we give it a shot.
Responses to Ambiguous Intersection Obsessions:
Perhaps I still can’t trust myself, but I’ve given this job to God. If he’s not showing a clear sign, I’m going to trust him and move on.
I could go back to the intersection and check, but this doesn’t serve my greater function.
God judges us on intentions, not actions, and my intention was good.
God doesn’t want me to suffer, obsess, and worry. I can serve him best if I just move on.
I need to work on letting this go.
This is a test of my faith and trust. I can come out of this stronger.
This is new territory for Jackie and me. I sense that she’s a bit uncomfortable with the whole notion of introducing spirituality into our traditional cognitive behavior therapy. But Jackie is the quintessential pragmatist. If something seems to be working for one of her patients, then she’ll do everything possible to encourage its continued use. For whatever reasons, spiritual reasoning seems to help me get some perspective on the whole intersection incident and a handful of other episodes in the weeks that follow. So we go with it, dancing around the many differences one might point to between a spiritual and a scientific approach to treatment, focusing instead on the surprising number of similarities.
As I’m sure you can appreciate, the real-world laboratory in which Jackie and I worked was anything but a controlled environment. So to say that my new commitment to spiritual principles quickly made a huge difference in my OCD battles would be to connect dots no good scientist would ever venture to link. My inner believer would love to claim the credit. But for all I know, my quantum-leap progress could have been due to my meds, which Dr. Smith had recently changed from Prozac to Zoloft. Or a sudden breakthrough in my understanding and application of behavior therapy. Or some harmonic convergence or planetary alignment. Who really knows? All I can tell you for sure is that I was soon able to cut in half my time spent checking, and perhaps more importantly, that I also managed to reclaim at least some semblance of my once healthy sense of humor.
From day one, Jackie had coached me to look for the humor in my ludicrous OCD thinking and checking patterns, often taking the task upon herself when so moved. Laughter is powerful medicine, as the old saying goes, but it can also be a tough pill to swallow. Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on my frame of mind), Sam shared Jackie’s sense of humor. Sam, at Jackie’s urging, had been relentless in trying to drive home the droll nature of my illness, resorting even to verse to help me hear myself talk:
I killed a man in Frisco,
One in Oakland too.
Dead bodies, they surround me.
Oh, what am I to do?
They jump off towering bridges,
Litter highways too.
Dead bodies, they surround me.
Oh, what am I to do?
I force cars off the roadways,
Cause strokes all over too.
Dead bodies, they surround me.
Oh, what am I to do?
I have a slight disorder;
It’s known as O-C-D.
With Jackie there to help me,
No more bodies will I see.
Jackie couldn’t have been more delighted when I brought in my wife’s “charming” prose. “You sure were lucky to find a woman like Sam,” she’d said, all smiles. From then on, the two of them would share more than a few good laughs at my expense—perhaps none more relished than the ones spawned by the Ben Gay episode.
As I recall, it had all begun when I got home from the library one night and realized that the heating ointment I’d put on my shoulder for a sore muscle had left a mark on my shirt. This was not good. I bet it also got on the library’s couch! Within seconds Doubt had me convinced that others who sat on that couch might get the ointment on them, perhaps putting their health at risk. What about pregnant women? Is the product safe for them? I had to know. Had to read the warnings on the label.
The tube of Ben Gay I’d used was still at the gym, so I had to go out to the drugstore that night and peruse the shelves. No serious warnings, as I remember, but that didn’t stop me from returning to the library, where I spent a good ten minutes sniffing the couch—yes, nose to the cushions, sniffing the couch. Imagine the notation on my sacred permanent record had some authority figure caught me in the act!
Unlike my wife and therapist, I was far from amused by my actions that night. It was only at this juncture, months later, that I began to see anything even remotely funny about the whole incident. But the point is I did, and that point was not lost on Jackie.
“You’re really laughing now about the Ben Gay episode?”
“Yeah.”
“You really understand now what all that nonsense was about?”
“Yeah.”
“I
guess we really are making progress.”
Another bookstore. More research. But this time I am scouring not bookshelves, but bulletin boards, looking for some kind of human support system I can tap into. Mentors. Coaches. Maybe just a group of people who understand suffering. Ever since learning about the groundbreaking group work at Jampolsky’s Center for Attitudinal Healing, I’ve become fascinated by the power of shared determination. But I am not facing a catastrophic illness, nor am I grieving for a lost one, so the Center is out. I don’t know where I’m supposed to be. There are OCD support groups out there. I’ve heard of a few. But who’d want to sit around in a room with a bunch of freaks like me?
Today, though, I have stumbled across word of a “New Thought” discussion group that meets on Tuesday nights not too far from our house. At first, I dismiss the idea outright, imagining what kind of namby-pamby, touchy-feely types would choose to be a part of something like this. But then I remind myself that I can get up and walk out at any time. Nobody needs to know who I am. I can be a fly on the wall. Besides, when it comes right down to it, what on earth have I got to lose?
The following Tuesday, I fight a rainstorm and two nasty driving episodes as I make my way to the meeting. Dripping wet and ten minutes late, I attempt to sneak in the door marked with the address I’ve scrawled on a notepad along with directions. But a surreptitious entry is not to be. One step through the doorway and I am staring right into an oversized living room. Right at some thirty men and woman seated in a circle of folding chairs. They too are staring at me, alerted to my arrival by a door hinge in desperate need of some WD-40.
A soft-spoken man with graying hair and kind, tired eyes is standing at the far end of the room. He motions me in.
