The Quiet Room

by Lori Schiller

  I often spent time in the Quiet Room after their visits. When the rage had finally abated and my sick frenzy had subsided, a new awful emotion would emerge in its place. I would be consumed by guilt and terror. I had killed them. My rage had killed them. They had been killed in a car crash on their way home. Their house was really going to burn down and I would have caused it. I felt terrible, all evil inside, like I was going to crack or break or fall apart and come undone from my own badness.

  I wanted to see them. I wanted to hug them. I wanted them to come back. What if they believed me? What if they never came again? What if they really did die?

  Whenever I felt myself about to explode, the only thing to do was to hit something, to break something, to punch my hands against the safety screen until they bled, to stab myself with whatever I could find, to strike out: in uncontainable rage, fear and pain.

  For years, I had felt such rage was beyond my control. But as time went by, I found allies not only in Dr. Fischer and Dr. Doller, but in the nurses and mental health workers too. During my previous hospitalization, I felt the people stationed outside the door of the Quiet Room were hostile jailers. This time, they became more like buddies. During my calm periods I'd stand near the doorway and rap with my keeper about anything that came into my head: Lucky Charms cereal, the weather, clothes, Chinese restaurants. It was just ordinary day-to-day talk, but it helped keep the terrors in check.

  Slowly I found myself feeling friendly toward the staff. Debbie was funny. Margo brought me milk and cookies and showed me pictures of her pet ferret. Cathy was my coach. Barbara was somewhere between mother and grandmother. Rose was like an old friend: She had been with me on all three hospitalizations. I talked “girl talk” with all of them. We discussed men's bodies, blind dates and hockey players. Even that simple talk helped to put some order on the chaos of my inner world.

  I knew that even this little bit of closeness was helping to keep me from retreating into the world of the Voices. The Voices must have realized it too. They leaped between me and the staff, trying to sow fear and distrust.

  “Strangle her!” the Voices shouted about one volunteer who had been particularly kind. “Pick up that towel and strangle her.” I tried to warn her of what was going to happen, but all I could manage was an impersonal warning.

  “Your life is in danger, Fran,” I whispered in a tiny voice.

  Still, they didn't seem afraid, and they didn't seem put off. Instead, they kept on working hard to reinforce the doctors’ message: that I was not helpless before the onslaught of my Voices. We can't make the Voices go away, they told me. We can't ease the maelstrom of your feelings. But we can teach you ways to feel less out of control when the storm hits. We can even teach you ways to feel the storm before it arrives, and prepare yourself to weather it better.

  There was one nurse in particular, an Israeli man named Sorin, who seemed to work especially hard to help me get the upper hand against my Voices and fears. Sorin worked hard at everything. Although he was always putting in sixteen-hour double shifts, I never saw him enough to suit me. He always seemed especially creative in helping me deal with my ugly impulses.

  He arranged to have a professional punching bag brought into the unit. When I felt like punching windows and walls or the trees in the courtyard, he encouraged me to do battle with the punching bag instead. I'd pummel the bag until I was hot and perspiring. I boxed the Voices, the sounds. I punched the invisible airwaves that carried the torturers to me. I punched my family. I punched the staff and I punched myself. I punched everything that hurt me, everything that enraged me. I punched until I was exhausted and ready to crawl.

  I was also prescribed a once-a-week racquetball game. A staffer from therapeutic activities was assigned to be my partner. She brought me rulebooks, and tried to teach me a kind of yoga to cool back down from the exercise.

  Sometimes I really felt I had to destroy things. The staff tried to teach me to channel even those impulses. When the Voices were especially disturbing, the staff would put me in the Quiet Room with a stack of magazines. I'd rip those suckers to bits, venting the violence of my emotions on every page. Then I kicked the piles of shreds like autumn leaves. When I was calmed down, I'd wad them up and play basketball with them, into the garbage can with the remains of the mangled magazines.

  The score: Voices 0. Lori 1.

  But still the Voices did not want to let me go. The closer I got to confiding in Dr. Fischer, the more the Voices tormented me. The more I trusted her, the more the Voices conspired to drive me away.

  I kept on struggling to meet Dr. Fischer, and she kept struggling to get inside my head. From time to time, when the Voices cleared, she tried to coax me to talk about my experiences.

  “How's it been going for you?” she said.

  “Not so hot,” I said.

  “What's been happening? ”

  “I was in a peer group meeting and I found out that they all hate me.”

  “So everyone hates you? When did you start thinking that? ”

  “Since yesterday.”

  “What happened yesterday? ”

  “I was bringing up a point about the party that we were planning, and no one responded to me, and then the Voices told me to strangle Claire.”

  Dr. Fischer looked concerned. “It seems like a lot has been happening to you since we last met. Let's try to figure out what's been happening. At the very least it seems like you feel very criticized ...”

  “Yeah, but it was only because Claire was staring in a way that made me realize that she was going to kill me and so I had to strangle her first.”

  Little by little, bit by bit, she probed my mind, gently climbing deeper and deeper in. The closer in she got to me, the stranger I began to feel.

  Meeting with her on the unit had the advantage of the male staff I could count on to protect both of us. But it had disadvantages too. For one thing, there was no privacy. I was easily distracted by the other patients’ wandering by. Some of them didn't wander. They hovered. One guy in particular gravitated toward us. He hung out behind Dr. Fischer so that I could see him and Dr. Fischer could not. I got terribly upset at him. I broke off what I was saying to thrust him away.

  “These are private conversations!” I shouted at him and, agitated, dragged Dr. Fischer further down the hall where we could be alone. He'd leave us for a while, but then the next day he'd be right back.

  I thought about punching him in the face. But finally I decided to confront him instead.

  “What are you doing listening in when I'm talking with my therapist?” I demanded.

  He wasn't listening to anything, he said. It was Dr. Fischer's feet he was interested in. He was just sitting there watching them. They were so tiny and pretty in her high heels he couldn't help himself. He just had to stare at them.

  His revelation didn't make me feel better. It made me feel worse. The guy was a pervert. I didn't like anyone thinking about Dr. Fischer like that. But the truth was, his behavior rang all kinds of uncomfortable bells for me. I was beginning to like Dr. Fischer. I was beginning to find her attractive myself. From being frightened of her, I had begun to obsess about her. I found myself thinking about her a lot. What was wrong with me? If he was a pervert what did that make me?

  The strange feelings I was having for Dr. Fischer frightened and revolted me. I had been locked up inside my own crazy world for so long, I didn't know what it felt like to come out. All my feelings of affection and closeness blew up to gigantic proportions. From hating and fearing her, I grew to think I was in love with her.

  I tried to tell my journal about the thoughts that were haunting me:

  June 18, 5:40 P.M. — I'm still having thoughts about Dr. Fischer. They scare and upset me …

  The first time such thoughts popped into my head, I was shocked. I tried to drive the thoughts from my mind, but completely unbidden they kept forcing themselves back.

  The Voices jeered at my discomfort.

  “You wa
nt to touch her, don't you?” they shouted at me while I was trying to stay calm in session. I couldn't look at her face. Sometimes I couldn't look at her at all. I looked at my sneakers, or at the ground, or stared off into space. Sometimes the combination of my own strange thoughts and the Voices’ taunting was too much to bear and I would suddenly cut off the session and flee to the safety of my room.

  In the mornings I filled my journals with my lovesick yearnings for her, and counted the hours until I could see her again. By afternoon I refused to see her. I couldn't face her with these perverted thoughts circling through my brain. And then I was consumed with guilt and pain. She would hate me. She would leave me. What could I tell her? What could I say to her?

  June 20, 11:00 P.M. — You know what's the worst part about sitting alone in my room all day? It's sitting alone with my crazy, confused thoughts. I don't write them all down because I can't write when I'm feeling so bizarre and because I'm afraid and paranoid that people will know what kind of world I retreat to.

  July 1, 8:00 P.M. — I feel like spattering myself on the [highway] after jumping off the bridge … I really feel like having a violent death. Maybe I could use gasoline, pour it over myself, light myself on fire and jump off the bridge onto the highway. I think these thoughts when I'm very angry.

  July 2, 2:50 P.M. — Do you know I have to fight to keep from going crazy every day? Who says I don't work at getting better. What should I do, listen to every voice? Act out every impulse? What about my fantasies? Should I make those sick thoughts a reality? I'm working hard, damn hard.

  Whenever I was feeling really bad, I turned to Dr. Doller. Because I somehow trusted her, I felt safe telling her my worst fears. With Dr. Fischer I was experimenting with trust. But instead of feeling better, I felt worse than before. I felt invaded, taken over. I felt I didn't know who I was and I didn't know who she was. I swung back and forth with passionate intensity between feelings of love and caring and feelings of fear and hate. All these feelings I brought to Dr. Doller.

  Actually, she came to me. It was late in the evening of one day when I had had a troubling session with Dr. Fischer. I was sitting on the unit and I was shaking. Dr. Doller must have seen something on my face, for she stopped and sat down beside me. There was no shrink talk, no therapeutic silences. Just a plain, straightforward blunt question.

  “C'mon Lori, what's up? ”

  She didn't need to prompt me. It all came pouring out. All my fear and pain and self-loathing for the strange, inexplicable feelings I was having for Dr. Fischer.

  Dr. Doller spoke very carefully. What I was feeling wasn't unusual at all, she said. Nor was it wrong or bad. I wasn't sick for feeling that way, and I shouldn't berate myself for it. In fact, my feelings were probably helpful, she said. If I wanted to, I could learn from them. Therapy is like that she said. In the course of therapy, a therapist takes on many different roles to the patient. She can be mother, father, teacher, sister, brother, friend—even lover. The feelings I was feeling were good. They gave me a chance to explore. I should use them, and not feel ashamed of them.

  Tension poured out of my body. It was as if she had punctured a terrible boil. Dr. Doller had taken all the badness in me and turned it into good. I was grateful to her, and at the same time pleased with myself for having confided in her.

  Sometimes I got angry with Dr. Doller. I found the times she went on vacation especially difficult. While she was gone I would shred money—dollar bills, ten-dollar bills, twenty-dollar bills if I could get my hands on them—using the pun in her name to vent my hostility symbolically.

  But sometimes—unlike Dr. Fischer, who kept a therapist's professional detachment—Dr. Doller got mad at me too. Once when I refused to take my medications she lost her cool and hollered at me. She threatened to take away my weekend pass unless I took the medicine the way I was supposed to. Later on she calmed down and apologized. I took the medicine.

  The Voices reacted differently to Dr. Doller than to anyone else. They challenged me to destroy her the same way they ordered me to kill Dr. Fischer. They threatened that if I continued to see Dr. Doller, they would put both her and me in hell. But somehow it was different. Somehow I could feel in the Voices a fear that I had never felt in them before.

  While I was sitting with Dr. Doller, I'd be in constant fights with the Voices. There were two of them in particular who were my enemies and hers. There they were, the two of them, howling warnings to me about her. But where the Voices usually yelled at me to kill someone before that person killed me, this time even though they said Dr. Doller was going to hurt me, I could tell that the Voices were yelling at me to protect them.

  VOICE NO. 1: This asshole floods you with lies.

  VOICE No. 2: Eat shit, you excuse for a doctor. Eat shit. Eat shit.

  VOICE No. 1: You fuckin’ asshole. She's going to hurt you for life, shithead.

  VOICE No. 2: She's worth manure, so spit on her goddamn brain.

  VOICE No. 1: Give her a good punch and rip open her skull, that piece of shit.

  VOICE No. 2: We will not be extinguished by power of M.D.

  BOTH VOICES: By power of M.D. By power of M.D. By power of M.D.

  They were frightened. The Voices were actually frightened. She was the doctor with power to destroy them.

  Slowly, gradually, I began to be able to confide in her more and more, and through her to be able to open up more to Dr. Fischer. After speaking with Dr. Doller, I wrote to Dr. Fischer telling her how I felt about her. We talked about it, and about how my fantasies about killing her might really have more to do with my wanting to kill all those bad feelings.

  Meanwhile, I was becoming more and more comfortable telling Dr. Doller what was really going on inside my head. It was strange. I told her some of the most disgusting, nauseating, horrendous, humiliating and private thoughts and feelings and she didn't seem repulsed. In fact, she always seemed to like me. She was never judgmental, even when I confided my worst secrets and fantasies.

  In fact, it was her very matter-of-factness that I found so comforting. Once, after much inner turmoil, I finally confided to her a grisly fantasy that had been torturing me in which I killed and mutilated my father. The fantasy nearly overpowered me with its gruesome detail. But when I poured it all out to Dr. Doller, she didn't seem a bit shocked.

  “I'd give that about a seven, Lori,” she said. “You can do better than that.”

  Nor did she shrink from giving me hard messages. Once when I was talking to her of my hopes of being cured, she looked at me soberly. “Lori,” she said, “we are going to try to get you better. But you're never going to be able to go all the way back. You're never going to be the girl you were in high school, or even college. You are going to have to learn to work with the person you are now. You're going to have to learn to live with the voices.”

  When I was feeling up, she taught me to recognize the feeling and savor it. “Remember how good you feel now,” she said. “There will be times later on when everything will seem bleak. I don't want to minimize the grim and harsh times. I know how bad you feel then. But they won't last forever. Capture the good moments,” she said.

  24

  Lori New York Hospital, White Plains, New York, January 1989

  As the new year dawned I tried hard to hold on to those good moments, and on to my hope of a new life.

  I tried to understand about the Voices. For years in therapy, Dr. Rockland had told me that the Voices were a part of me, stuff buried deep inside coming out in another, strange way. I had learned to say that when I was asked, but I never really believed it. This time around, I tried hard to understand what my doctors meant when they said the Voices weren't real.

  When I heard Voices shouting at me to castrate a male staff member, Dr. Fischer and Dr. Doller explained, there weren't really voices that other people could hear. It was just my own hostile thoughts getting blown up out of proportion inside my brain.

  I listened. I thought about it. No way, I thought
at first. I don't have horrible thoughts like that. Those thoughts aren't me. It's those Voices who are the crazy demons, not me. Besides, the Voices were so clear, so real, and so vivid. It seemed impossible to me that they were simply figments of my own imagination.

  But gradually, with Dr. Fischer and Dr. Doller leading the way, I slowly began to test the waters. If I was hearing Voices cursing me out loud, I'd say nothing, and wait. I'd look around. I'd turn in the direction the Voices were coming from. No one seemed to be disturbed. No one even seemed upset by their vehement words. It was as if they were deaf. I wanted to shake the people around me. You idiots! I thought. Do you think by simply ignoring them they'll go away?

  At first I thought I was being tricked. Everyone was simply pretending not to hear the Voices. I didn't know why they were pretending like that but it made me paranoid and suspicious of them. What other things were they plotting against me?

  Then the Voices would creep up again. Still no reaction from those around me. I felt a little stirring. Maybe they really couldn't hear them. Quickly I retracted the thought. Of course they were there. I heard them as clearly as “the Star-Spangled Banner” at a baseball game.

  Then I started asking Dr. Doller and Dr. Fischer if they heard what I was hearing.

  “Do you hear that laughing?” I asked Dr. Fischer in session.

  “No,” she said.

  “Do you hear those people yelling ’To Die!’?” I asked Dr. Doller when I met her on the hall.

  “No,” she said.

  Over and over Dr. Fischer and Dr. Doller told me the same things that Dr. Rockland had said: The Voices were only my own thoughts. The difference was that now I was more ready to hear them. I trusted Dr. Fischer and Dr. Doller. Why would they fool me? Of course I never quite believed them completely. The Voices were too real. But at least I became willing to consider the possibility-