by Jeff Bell
“Okay, I’ll call Jackie,” I finally concede. I say it as if I’m doing her a favor, when in fact I know it’s the other way around.
Jackie and I talk for an hour the following morning. Like a home-cooked meal after weeks on the road, our conversation reminds me of what it is I’ve been missing. The firm coaching. The frank talk. The familiarity of it all. We cover the old freeway incident and my new obsession with making amends. We talk about coping strategies. By the time our session is over, I’m ready to get things back on track, to talk on the phone on a regular basis. But Jackie tells me we’ve exhausted that route, that what I really need now is someone I can see in person. She knows a guy in Sacramento.
His name is Dr. Z, and I surprise myself by making and keeping an appointment with him. Nice man. Great credentials. Knows his stuff inside and out. But by the time we wrap up our first session, I know I can’t do this again. Can’t start all over with yet another shrink. My head’s just not in it, which I suppose is the crux of the problem.
A week later, I am implementing my original plan. I win. Sam loses. And she loses big, since she is the one driving me down Highway 280, once each direction past my point of concern, as the two of us negotiated after another drawn-out debate over what I need as a matter of survival.
“That’s all you get,” Sam says, just before looking over at me and nearly gasping when she sees what I’m doing.
“What?” I say, trying to downplay the fact that I have a video camera in my hand and am taping the freeway and everything around it. I need to get all this on tape, so I can play on my VCR what I’m already playing endlessly in my head.
It turns out my taping skills were atrocious. The video I managed to capture at 65 miles per hour is hardly helpful. Blurry, bouncy shots, mostly obscured by objects in the car and my own two hands. Still I play, rewind, and replay the Super-8 tape again and again, searching for any clues I might have missed before, much as I continue to do with my virtual tapes in the middle of the night.
Life is growing darker around the edges with each passing day. More fear. More guilt. More shame. And more bitterness. “Why me?” I catch myself whispering night after night. Why do I have to spend my life checking and rechecking, reviewing and re-creating? Why do I have to run around in the shadows hiding from kids and the homeless and potholes and germs? Why do I have to drive in circles and scrub my hands and call my wife every ten minutes? No one else I know seems to have these burdens. What have I done to deserve this living hell?
Shall we review? Doubt is right there, as always, with an editorial reply.
“How ’bout you call this Dr. Schwartz?” Samantha asks me one afternoon in mid-August, nearly two full months after my old freeway obsessions began.
Sam is referring to Dr. Jeffrey Schwartz, a UCLA psychiatrist and author of the most recent OCD book the two of us have read. It’s called Brain Lock, and it offers what’s billed as a four-step self-treatment program for struggling OCs.
Schwartz’s approach is similar to traditional cognitive behavioral therapy, with a couple of key distinctions. First, he introduces the concept of mindful awareness, encouraging OCs to make use of their own internal “Impartial Spectator,” to step back and see that their intrusive thoughts and irrational urges are simply obsessions and compulsions caused by a biochemical imbalance. And second, Schwartz advocates that OCs actively refocus their attention on something more constructive while trying to work around their persistent thoughts—play a game, prune plants in the garden, those kinds of things.
I like these tactics because they strike me as especially consistent with Jerry Jampolsky’s dueling directors model that I’ve been trying to use. Director Doubt is nothing more than my OCD, with a biological basis to boot. And as for the refocusing, isn’t that what Jampolsky’s young cancer patients have so successfully learned to do with their thoughts and attention?
“I’m serious. I think you should call him,” Samantha repeats.
“Dr. Schwartz?”
“Yeah.”
“Right. The guy’s been on Oprah, Leeza, and Extra. He’s really gonna have time to chat with me on the phone?”
“And you’ve got something to lose in trying?” Sam says. Or read between the lines: With Jackie and Wayne and that local guy out of the mix, who else are you going to turn to as you fall apart a little more every day?
I make the call, just to prove to Samantha that I’m right, that a guy in Schwartz’s league is inaccessible to someone like me.
It turns out though that I’m wrong about this. Not only does Dr. Jeffrey Schwartz return my call, he also agrees to set up a time when the two of us can discuss my challenges. We make plans to chat on August 26at 7:30 p.m.
At 7:29:30 on the designated evening I pick up the phone and call Dr. Schwartz’s L.A. number. Our conversation starts out just fine. I run though the basics of my particular obsessions and compulsions, and Schwartz assures me that my OCD patterns are rather typical. We talk for a while about his Four Step approach and how I’m trying to apply it, and then I decide to go for broke: What the hell, I’m going to get my money’s worth here and have this international authority put an end, once and for all, to my freeway incident. All I need is some comment like “Oh, that’s just your OCD” or “You do realize, don’t you, that this whole thing is all a bunch of garbage?” and chances are Doubt’s spell will be broken. I know I managed to sandbag Jackie a time or two with similar reassurance ploys—that is, until she called me on the carpet for what I was doing.
But Schwartz doesn’t bite when I launch into my story. Occasional questions are all he offers along the way. Maybe he too is onto my little checking game.
Or maybe he’s thinking that I’ve done something truly horrible!
Time runs out before I know it, and we arrange to pick things up one week from tonight. The phone receiver is shaking in my hand as I put it back in its cradle. My anxiety level is through the roof. It’s as if my brain is a cross-wired capacitor with no circuitry in place to discharge its current; any minute now the whole thing’s going to fry.
For almost an hour I hole up in the living room, replaying tonight’s phone conversation in my head again and again. Samantha checks in on me, hoping to hear that her latest suggestion has proved to be a good one. Instead she finds me rocking back and forth on the couch, keeping time with my body to Schwartz’s looping voice in my head.
“I take it your chat didn’t go so well?” Sam’s disappointment is written all over her face.
“I don’t know. All I can think about is how I presented the freeway incident and whether Schwartz thinks I am guilty.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Sam says. “Ludicrous. Jeff—”
“I dunno. It’s all so boggled in my head. I just wish we’d had more time.”
Sam checks her watch. “Call him back and see if he can talk for a few more minutes.” My wife wants so badly for this to work. For something to work.
I twist her comment around. I take it to mean that she too feels I need to convince Schwartz that there never was any real issue with the whole incident. That I am innocent.
Samantha goes to put the girls to bed. I pick up the phone.
“Dr. Schwartz? It’s Jeff Bell again. I know it’s late, but can I have just a little more of your time?”
Thirty minutes later I hang up the receiver a second time and again begin reviewing the call in my head. I am feeling much better about the whole guilt-or-innocence thing. That’s no longer an issue. But now there is something else: a clearly sarcastic crack Schwartz made about some argument I was using as being “the kind that leads patients to a hospital stay,” or something like that.
A hospital stay?!
He was just being sarcastic, I remind myself. He was just trying to make a point about illogical reasoning. I try to focus on all the positive, constructive suggestions Schwartz had offered.
But it’s too late. The words hospital stay have begun bouncing around my head, electronic pings like t
hose of the old Pong video games.
Hospital-stay. Hospital-stay. Hospital-stay.
Soon I am in our master bathroom, rifling through all the drawers in the vanity, scrambling to find my old bottle of pills. Nearly nine months have passed since I stashed my remaining blue tablets somewhere in this room, promising myself that I’d never again become a slave to their power.
But what choice do I have? I need to whip myself into shape in a hurry. Before the men in white suits show up at my doorstep and haul me away for a hospital stay. I know OCs aren’t supposed to take medication without supervision. But I can’t wait for Dr. Schwartz or Jackie or any other professional to put me on some official drug program. The clock is ticking. Where are my damn pills?
“Sam?”
She is in bed, half awake if even that.
“I need to find my pills,” I whisper. “I’m going back on meds.”
No sound from the bed. I’m not sure the news has even registered. But I wonder, because on Samantha’s sleeping face there’s now a hint of a smile.
I continue to fumble in the drawers. Come on. Come on. Before I change my mind.
Finally. At the far back of the second drawer down, I feel a plastic bottle and pull it out where I can read the label.
Zoloft. Fifty milligrams. Take only as directed.
I know it’s Doubt directing me next as I close my eyes, open my mouth, and take this all too powerful pill that I’m certain is either going to save my life or end it right here.
eighteen
fast-forward 3O minutes
Of all the tape segments in my archives, the handful spanning the next twenty-four hours have a unique distinction: they’re the only ones with their own movie score. Pianos. Violins. Loud, resonant organ chords. Overblown music to punctuate the string of soap opera sequences that make up these classics.
Time has messed with my recordings of these crucial hours, quite possibly giving them more significance than they ought to have. And yet to this day I can think of no more dramatic scenes from my life than the ones that begin here, with me curled up in a ball on the living room couch, knees tucked to my chest, arms wrapped tightly around them …
Numb me, damn it, numb me. For God’s sake, please, I beg of you, numb me.
At least a half-hour now I have spent balled up and waiting. Nothing. No effects whatsoever from the little blue pill I have swallowed. Not even with all of my pleading. I know the benefits of Zoloft can take up to six weeks to kick in, but I haven’t got that long; I need relief now. I also know that Zoloft is not a “numbing” drug—like the ones the serious nutcases take in the movies—but it’s the only drug I’ve got at my disposal, and I’m certain that numbing is what I need at this moment, so numbing is what I beg for as I slowly come to accept the real reason I have dug out my dusty bottle of pills.
Still nothing.
I pass the time the way I always do, playing and replaying the OCD horror films that Doubt demands I review. There are so many tapes to cue up tonight, and ultimately, I fast-forward each to the same bitter end, to that familiar final scene at the virtual madhouse I’ve been visiting ever since Jackie first led me there nearly three years ago.
With the words hospital stay still pinging back and forth between my ears, I imagine myself in a small, blinding white cell on a generic psych ward, waiting for Samantha and the girls to arrive for their weekly visit, and pleading with my hospital medication to further numb me from the pain of my plight and all the tapes I continue to loop in my head. The images grow ever more vivid and disturbing as I slip into and out of the fantasy time and again, always embellishing on the basic scene I’d first conjured up for Jackie in her little exposure-therapy exercise.
Jackie. I think about her now and all the years we spent together. So many breakthroughs and successes and triumphs big and small. So much genuine progress earned over so many hours of gut-wrenching therapy. And yet in the end, this is where it all got me: a fetal-position breakdown on my living room couch. Damn you, Jackie, for failing to fix me.
Dr. X.
Dr. Y.
Dr. Z.
Dr. Smith.
Dr. Schwartz.
Reverend Manning.
Damn all of you, too, for coming up short.
But most of all, damn you, you lousy piece-of-shit pill, for failing to numb me.
The night wears on and an ugly reality sinks in: as terrifying as my nuthouse fantasy might be, it is also somehow perversely alluring to me. That’s why Schwartz’s sarcastic quip about hospitalization is still ringing in my ears—because some part of me wants to hear it. Because the cruel truth of the matter is I want to be in the hospital cell I can see in my mind, sheltered safely from society and all my friends and relatives and colleagues and listeners who just assume I am normal. And this, I now understand, is why I swallowed the pill—because in my black-and-white obsessive-compulsive world, choosing to take my little Zoloft tablet is tantamount to checking myself into a mental institution, retreating to the one place in the world where I can finally put an end to my elaborate charade of normalcy and accept my lot in life as a rank-and-file member of the mentally ill.
Five years. Six therapists. Two medications. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of OCD episodes. Countless hours of excruciating tape reviews. I have had enough. I want out. And so, at long last, I allow myself to finally quit the fight, to let all the exhaustion shut me down, right here on the couch.
Now I am numb, inside and out, as I advance my very worst horror film to its final few frames: Sam and the girls are in the hallway just outside my hospital cell, mere inches away from their first sight of me as a pathetic drugged-up lunatic. Brianna is crying as they step up to the doorway …
“No! Stop the tape!” I scream the words silently at the brink of my last waking moment, a single heartbeat before something deep inside of me gently begins to whisper:
This isn’t the way. This can’t be the way.
I open my eyes and it’s morning now. I am still curled up on the living room couch, but the very walls that had morphed themselves into an asylum cell around me last night are now open canvases for silhouettes of flowers and birds shaped by the slants of sunshine beaming through our sliding glass window. Sam and the girls are nowhere in sight, and the house is so quiet it’s eerie. Stranger still is the rare silence inside my head, the distinct absence of Doubt’s thundering presence. And oddest of all is the timing of my newfound peace. I’m certain it’s not the result of six hours of sleep, and I refuse to accept that it’s the byproduct of a mere fifty milligrams of Zoloft.
The utter stillness unnerves me at first. I imagine Doubt hiding at its edges, waiting to ambush me at just the right moment, as it’s done so many times before during the hush of a pitch black night or the sacred silence of prayer. For some reason though, I find myself feeling especially bold. I decide to go for it, to climb inside the silence, to see where it takes me.
Breathe in. Let God. Breathe out. Let go. Breathe in. Let God. Breathe out. Let go.
This is the way all my books say to do it.
Breathe in. Let God. Breathe out. Let go.
A deep blue spot takes form in the center of my mind’s eye. It grows and grows in pulsating waves. I try to focus my attention on it and block out everything else.
Breathe in. Let God. Breathe out. Let go.
Soon there is just blue and the sound of my breaths. No what-if’s to ponder. No tapes to play. No OCD monsters of any kind to feed. No words to describe the bliss of this freedom.
Seconds pass, or are they hours?
And then I get it: This is the now. The present. That infinite slice of time wedged between the past and the future.
It is the place of unlimited, unfathomable possibility, and because of this, it is the one place Doubt cannot exist.
Suddenly everything begins to make sense. For five interminable years from hell, my nemesis has steered me clear of each and every precious moment of my present, feeding me one compelling cause aft
er another to obsess about my future while compulsively reviewing tapes of my past.
Rewind. Play. Fast-forward. Rewind. Play. Fast-forward. Day after day, I’ve been locked in this cycle, entirely incapable of ever getting out.
I’ve read enough to know the power of free will exists only in the present. Choices simply cannot be made in the past or future. And this, I decide, is precisely why Doubt loves to lead me right from yesterday’s mistakes to tomorrow’s catastrophes, leaving me no time at all to take control of my life.
It’s a vicious cycle.
And yet there was that profound quiet voice last night that was trying to …
“Hello. Thanks for calling. We’re not home right now. If you’d like to leave a message ….” The moment is gone, disappearing along with the pulsating blue spot at the Beeep of our answering machine.
I open my eyes, almost relieved to be back in the mundane world of telephones and voice mail. I have again pushed the borders of my fledgling spirituality way beyond my personal comfort zone.
But the notion of free will haunts me as I sit on the couch and stare out the window at nothing in particular. I think about a diagram I once saw in a Stephen Covey book that was meant to show the key distinction between humans and other species. There were two boxes, one marked “Stimulus” on the left, one labeled “Response” to its right, and in between them the words “Freedom to Choose.” I think about the diagram now, and I think about Jerry Jampolsky’s “dueling directors” model, and I think about Dr. Schwartz’s “impartial spectators” and refocusing techniques.
There’s an obvious theme here, and it’s anything but lost on me as my mind moves next to the parade of therapists who tried to help me. How many times did I catch myself waiting for one of them to wave a magic wand and make me all better? How many dire reminders did Jackie offer that my progress would only come when I was willing to do the hard work, to make the tough choices? How many pills did I take for all the wrong reasons—to numb myself, instead of to help make me stronger?
