by M. Billiter
“You know, Branson, I’ve seen a lot worse cases than what you’ve had. Plus, you’re doing all the right things.” He paused, and I glanced at the crack in the wall. Why doesn’t he patch that shit?
“You’re still active in the fraternity’s executive council, right?”
“Yeah, I just got reelected.”
“Which position are you now?”
“Secretary.” It was one of the few things that didn’t suck about college.
“That’s positive. Sometimes with the diagnosis of schizoaffective, people are kind of more socially isolated. Or rather social isolation occurs, but you don’t really fit that piece. You’re interactive. You’re busy with school and the fraternity and work. Those are all very positive. You’re still working for the parking patrol?”
“Yup, I’m still the sad-ticket issuer.”
Again, he obliged my lame humor with a chuckle.
“Still, those are all real positive things. And then if we were to look at your mental health history, where you’ve had these episodes, and if we really went back and looked at every time you had an episode, I would assume they were all more related to some sort of stress response.”
“Yeah, it’s usually stress related,” I said.
“Certainly the last two,” he said. “It’s why we’ve talked about you and your mom having some kind of awareness to the stressors. Or maybe you have somebody who you create a relationship with, like a counselor or a psychotherapist, somebody who’s skilled, who you meet with every week or every other week. It’s about having someone who could be there for you and provide one more outlet.”
“Yeah, I don’t have a therapist.” And my tone clearly indicated I didn’t want one either.
“Well, you may want to consider that. A counselor could give you a little more to help offset those periods of stress.”
I shrugged. I knew he was right, but fuck, it felt like I’d always be in some office talking about the same shit—my fucked-up mind.
“You’ll still have your mom and your twin and your other siblings, but you may need a little more to try and combat the stress before, you know, you get to that point where that agitation comes out,” he said.
I knew what he was referring to, and I instinctively pulled the sleeves down on my jacket. My right wrist still carried the scars from last summer.
“You know, like that reaction you had to your dad where it wasn’t so much a self-injurious activity, but you did irritate your skin. That’s how I think you explained it. It’s a lot different than cutting or doing something like that, but it was a way for you to relieve stress, right? It was a reaction that you didn’t think through,” he said.
If I had thought it through, I would’ve brought a knife and I would’ve used it on the old man, not myself. Instead, when my dad and his girlfriend kept riding my ass about every single thing I did, I snapped. I went into the woods behind their house in Jackson, sharpened a stick as best as I could with a rock, and tried to end my life. There was no cutting for stress relief, there was only ending it all. The thought of lying on the valley floor surrounded by unending pine trees while I surrendered the fight calmed me.
Then Aaron found me and freaked out, and I blew it off as a bad high and skipping a dose of medication. But I wasn’t stoned, and I hadn’t even missed the hour I took my meds. The pressure was too great. The demands of my dad to be normal, to fit in, to be more like Aaron, was too much. I knew my dad loved me and wanted the best for me, but I would always be a disappointment to him. He’d miss me, maybe even mourn me, but then I would no longer be an embarrassment to him.
“It was a way for you to relieve that high stress when you lived with your dad over the summer,” Blaze said, bringing me back to the here and now. “So, you want to try to do all those things to offset that. And it seems to me like you really are doing a good majority of those things. You look at all those key things, like the diet, the exercise, your job, staying active socially, interacting with your family. You have good relationships. You’re successful at school.”
Somehow the guy always knew how to help me see the best in a bad situation.
“Successful at school? That’s a joke, right?”
“No. Now, I consider success because, really, you’re doing as well as you chose to do at school. So that’s considered a success. And we just talked about the job and fraternity. You’re in a good environment. You’re not living in the fraternity house or with your dad, you’re in an apartment, so you’re not in a crazy situation. You’re really doing all the right things,” he said.
The way Blaze summed it up, my life didn’t seem so pathetic.
“And when you’re doing all this, it’s going to help you manage what’s happening. The last time you were here, we put you on a new medication to help keep your sleep schedule more consistent. I was a little worried about your sleep pattern and the excessive amount of sleep you needed,” he said, which I knew was my cue to speak.
“It’s gotten better.”
His entire body seemed to nod. “Okay.”
He crossed his legs and interlaced his fingers. I half expected some yoga chant to follow.
“During our last session, you mentioned that your sleep schedule was interfering with school. You need to go to class, because that’s kind of your job. I mean, if you think about it, school is sort of your job right now. It’s not like you don’t have other jobs with the fraternity and the parking department, but school, that’s your main one.”
I nodded. “Yeah, same lecture I get from my mom.”
To anyone else, my comment would have sounded like a dick move, but with Blaze, I put as much as I could out there. I knew it didn’t help me or anyone if I bullshitted my way through this and gave the expected answer. But there were still some truths I just wasn’t ready to face, let alone voice.
“Lecture.” Again he nodded. “I can see that. But since school is your main job, that’s why we switched your medication. I don’t want you to go to school all day and then go to bed at seven o’clock because you’re tired. Social interaction is part of living, man.”
“Agreed.”
Blaze was such a trip, but he seemed to get me.
“So.” He uncrossed his legs, and his interwoven hands followed suit. “How are the visual and auditory alterations?”
Blaze called them alterations. Dr. Cordova and Clive called them hallucinations. Semantics. It didn’t matter what they were called, because if the medication did what every shrink I’d seen claimed, I’d never have to answer that question again. But my life was a series of medication medleys to find the “right balance.” And I still wasn’t sure they had.
“A couple of weeks ago, I was at home. My mom was clearing off the dinner table, and she leaned across me to get my silverware, but she had this knife in her hand, and it was aimed right at me.” My palms started to sweat, so I wiped them on my thighs, which darkened the faded denim. “Anyway, I yelled at her because seeing that knife come at my throat is what the shadow people used to do and shit like that. So when it happens, and it hasn’t happened in such a long time, it freaks me out.”
Blaze rarely leaned forward in his chair, but he did at that point. “Okay. I want to make sure I understand this. When you saw your mom with the knife, it was something that had happened historically to you where you actually saw a visual presence of someone coming at you with something, like a knife.”
“The knife, it’s just characteristic of what the shadow people would do when I saw them. And it’s usually stuff that’s violent; they use knives, so it freaks me out when that stuff happens. It kind of throws me off. It’s not like… I mean, I know I’m not seeing something, but it freaks me out, just the thought of that happening again.” I never want the shadow people or Trevor to return.
“You haven’t had those thoughts in a while, have you?” he asked.
“No. God, no.” As far as I knew, Trevor was gone.
“Your reaction at the dinner table, that’s
more of a different kind of reaction. Let’s just call it hypervigilance. Since you’ve experienced those episodes previously, you’re more vigilant and more aware. So when you see something like that, it’s a trigger, and you kind of react.”
“And that’s normal?” I asked when my real question was buried much deeper. I’m not losing my mind again, am I?
“Branson, what happened is not a reaction related to schizoaffective. It’s really more of a response to seeing the knife and what it’s represented in the past for you, which isn’t unusual. Again, it’s more hypervigilance on your part because you’ve had these episodes where the shadow people appear with knives, so you’re very keen to those situations and respond,” he said.
“So it’s kind of like PTSD,” I surmised.
“PTSD is anxiety—extreme anxiety. What’s happening with you is just part of where you’re at now and how you react. When you become more conscious of the things that occur and realize it wasn’t a hallucination, you’ll see it as the reaction it was. And when you’re more aware of these reactions, then you can control them.” He leaned back against his chair.
“For instance,” he continued, “if that were to ever happen again, you may be able to think back to that situation with your mom and be able to recognize that and not yell, jump, or startle. So you just add that to another experience you’ve had where you learn more and are able to control it better. It’s sort of that top tier, where consciousness leads to control. The more conscious you are, the more you’re able to control.”
“Okay, I get that in theory, but….”
“Okay, so think of it like you’re at a party and you’re drinking too much. You have this conscious realization that you’re drinking too much and no one else is drinking as heavily as you are, so you switch to water. That’s where you want to get. It’ll help you have better control. Your mind is very powerful and it reacts, so when these events occur, you want to be conscious of them so you have a better chance of control over them.”
“Consciousness leads to control.” It was the one thing that made sense.
“It takes practice. Day to day, month to month, year to year, it takes practice. Remember you’ve had these historical events that your mind can’t control.”
“When Trevor was in control,” I said.
“Trevor was a symptom. So if you think of it like that, as a symptom, you’ll regain the power of your mind. Your mind is doing things that you can’t control when you’ve had these historical events with visual and auditory alterations. But with medication you will continue to have better control over them,” he explained.
Neither Trevor nor the shadow people had surfaced in a really long time, so clearly something was working. At least I had that going for me.
“But like I said, Branson, I think you’re doing a really good job. The things you’re doing now, with school, the fraternity, living in your own apartment, and your continued social interactions, if you keep all those in your repertoire, it’ll help during the difficult periods in your life.”
“Okay, before you give me a gold star, I did come close to losing my shit on this girl today. She was talking some shit about me, or actually what I did in the past.” I thought about the sorority girl and her comments. “I didn’t key off, but there was a part of me that wanted to snap her head off.”
That’d shut her down.
I shook my head. “Anyway, the only reason I didn’t was because I needed something from her.” Maybe I’m not making progress. I slunk farther into the couch. “So basically, I manipulated her to get what I wanted.” I rolled my eyes. “I sank to her level.”
“Branson, remember that guilt will tell you you’ve done something wrong while shame tells you you are wrong. You’re shaming yourself, and shame has no place in your recovery.”
I was expecting a “man” to follow that statement and was a little shocked that it didn’t. The guy was a trip, but he really seemed to care, at least.
“I get what you’re saying, but I just didn’t fit in. I knew it, she knew it, and she made sure everyone else knew it, and it was pretty sucky. I felt like the third monkey fighting to get on Noah’s ark.”
His laughter wasn’t like Clive’s or Dr. Cordova’s, but it had its own flair that made me smile.
“Branson, everyone has those days. I have to attend annual medical conferences, and I walk in feeling like an imposter. That’s just life, man.”
With all his degrees mounted on the wall, it was hard for me to imagine that Blaze wouldn’t fit in anywhere. But I also doubted that he’d lie just to make me feel better about myself. Shrinks just didn’t do that. They were painfully honest.
“That’s why you want to keep going down the path with school, the fraternity, and your social interactions. Your stress doesn’t get any less, so when those things build, like what happened at your dad’s house or with this girl, it’s called stress responses. Your body’s built you up to it. You were so keyed off and frustrated, your body was leading you down this natural path. And on top of it, you have other things you have to deal with,” he said.
“Yeah, she was horrible,” I chimed in.
“Horrible is an extreme. That’s one of those extremes. And your body will react to your mind, like at your dad’s.” Again he leaned forward, but this time he made direct eye contact with me. “Branson, I know from our sessions that what you did at your dad’s wasn’t the path you want to go down. And you won’t have to have that response again where you take the hurt out on yourself. You have more control today.”
Hurt. There were too many hurts to consider.
“There are people in this world who do things that you don’t appreciate, like this girl—and who wouldn’t be irritated by that? But by framing it as horrible, what happens is that your body starts to react to that event as being horrible, so if it happens again, your body gears up for that eventuality.”
“So just one word, like ‘horrible,’ can trigger a reaction?” I asked.
“Horrible is an extreme. What you want to do is ask yourself what you can do to look at this situation factually. The only control you have is yourself. You can’t control your mom, your brother, your dad, his girlfriend, or this girl. By looking at situations factually, you won’t have these events that take you to this level that you regret, don’t feel right about, or aren’t able to come out of.”
“Okay.” I let go of the breath I was holding. “But when these things happen, they’re just happening.”
“Agreed. But anger and agitation are the same thing physiologically and cause the same reaction. So when you get out of whack, the stress responses come out, and eventually, if you don’t manage that stress to help you cope with it, your body starts to break down, and then you can’t handle other things that happen. Suddenly, you’re not effective in school, in your social life, and all those other areas you’re involved in. But if you did have someone in your life, someone you can talk to on a regular basis, it would help you become more conscious of your responses and reactions.”
“Okay, let me see if I get this. We’re all conditioned to have responses, right? But for me, it’s how I process it that keeps Trevor and the shadow people at bay? And just by talking to someone, I’ll have a better way to handle these stress reactors. I mean….” My shoulders tensed. “If controlling my response was all I had to do, then what’s with all the meds?”
“Look at this situation factually, not emotionally. All of these events in life, if you think about them in the extremes—the girl was horrible, your dad is awful, his girlfriend is terrible—then your thought processes have the ability to impact you physically and psychologically. But if you look at these events factually, like ‘I have schizoaffective disorder; I have this issue and ways to control it with medication and therapy,’ then it doesn’t have control over you,” he said.
My hands flew out by my sides, speaking for me before I could form words. “I can’t control anything—you just said that—so how the hell am I going
to control this?”
“You’re right. You don’t know what’s going to transpire over your lifetime, but it’s how you want to think of things and where you want to be headed in life. Branson, how you frame what happens has tremendous impact over how your body responds. You do have the power to frame what happens by framing it factually and not emotionally. Remember, consciousness leads to control.”
My shoulders surrendered into a shrug. “Okay.”
“It’s like how we factually know that diet and nutrition are key to healthy living. So when you eat well and exercise, your body responds. With your other issues, you take medication. And with the medicine, we factually know that you continue to get better control over your schizoaffective,” he said.
I took a slow, steady breath. “I do factually know that life without medication sucks.” I grinned. “Listen, there’s no better way to frame it than ‘sucks.’ Life with meds isn’t great, but it’s better than how horrible it gets. And, Doc, we both know it gets horrible.”
“Progress, that’s all I’m suggesting. How you frame things sets your body up to respond.”
Suddenly, I thought of my mom, and my throat practically closed. I swallowed, but the stronghold remained. When I finally spoke, my voice sounded rough. “My mom said she was tired of letting cancer win, so she started fighting and—” The thought made me smile. “—her body responded. She’s now had two clean screens in a year.”
His grin said it all. “That’s great news. The power of how you frame events in your life does make a difference. So, how are your little sister and brother?”
“They’re good. I’m taking them all out to dinner tonight.”
His face crinkled with a smile. “That’s beautiful.”
I laughed. “Yeah, it is.”
“Okay, we won’t make any new adjustments to your medications because it sounds like your sleep is balancing out. What about your depression?”
“It hasn’t been an issue,” I said, which was true.
