by Joey Bush
To be honest, any emotional connection with someone wasn’t something I could do. I had no experience in it and that sort of relationship scared the hell out of me. A woman who thought she could have a real relationship with me quickly realized it would only cause her a broken heart. I didn’t have relationships. I had sex, and that was all it was. One-night stands that were fun in the bed and didn’t bother me afterwards – that was what I wanted.
“Look who decided to show up,” a woman’s voice said and was followed by clapping as I walked into the group session.
It was Kimber, and her clapping echoed throughout the room. It was sarcastic in nature, but some of the other patients followed suit and clapped, as well. Before I knew it, they were all clapping in appreciation for my attendance to group. There was an odd enjoyment in the moment. Even though it had started from sarcasm, the others had joined in to support my attending.
I playfully took a little bow and sat down in one of the chairs. Even though I felt awful, I was going to put on a good face and give the group thing a chance. If I didn’t like it, I wouldn’t go again; it seemed simple enough to me.
“Now that everyone’s here, I think we should use today’s session to talk about why we love ourselves,” Melanie said.
“Oh, I love myself every night under the covers,” I joked.
The room was quiet and I realized my joke had not landed well at all. Instead of laughing, people looked at me with pity. Damn, I hated that look in their eyes. Didn’t they understand I was joking? I grumbled a bit under my breath, but then sat quietly as Melanie continued the session.
“Let’s continue,” Melanie said without addressing my comment.
My sense of humor was just how I coped with things. I didn’t mean anything by it. I used my jokes to lighten the mood. Admittedly, it didn’t always work. But being uncomfortable didn’t work for me at all. I hated the idea of talking to the group about who I was or how I loved myself. I didn’t know. I didn’t even know if I could feel love anymore, but if I could, it probably wouldn’t be toward myself.
I didn’t think about things like that on a normal basis. Are we supposed to love ourselves? Really, was that what happy people do? I wondered. I had always thought people were just naturally happy or they weren’t. There was nothing I could think of that would constitute loving myself – except the playing I did under the sheets at night. I truly had no idea what she wanted us to say.
I sat quietly as the group talked and interacted. Partly because I was afraid of saying something stupid and partly because I didn’t have anything to add. There wasn’t anything good about me. Sure, I could pretend really well, but as I sat in the group of people that I didn’t know, I couldn’t even muster up the energy to pretend that I knew how to love myself.
“Erik, would you like to share with the group?” Melanie asked.
“No, thank you.”
I expected some sort of backlash for refusing to participate in the group session. Surely, it was supposed to be part of the treatment and I was being a giant asshole for not offering another word to the group session. Or maybe they would threaten to take away more points, or prevent me from getting a room with a door. I didn’t know what to expect as my punishment, but I was just going to have to take it because I didn’t have an answer.
“Okay,” Melanie responded before moving on to the next person in the circle.
As well as being our recreation therapist, Melanie was a licensed mental health therapist. The two things that wouldn’t seem to work well together, but to me, they were perfect. As our group wrapped up, she put the chairs in an obstacle course and said the first person to finish could decide what we did for recreation therapy later in the day.
I had been dying to swim, and I set my eyes on winning our little therapy session, but I was too sore to make a go at it. Instead, I snuck out the back of the room as they all started to vibrantly race for the control that we all yearned for since we had been in treatment. I wasn’t ready to get into a pool yet. There were too many fears that I had built up and I wasn’t going to expose those fears to all the strangers I was in treatment with.
I had done enough for the day. I showed up to group. I was sick as hell and I showed up to group. It didn’t seem that useful for me to have gone, but at least I didn’t lose any damn points that day.
Chapter 7
Cassidy
“It’s been a week since he attended a group. I’m surprised he hasn’t just up and left. He’s not doing anything but sleeping in his room,” Kaitlin said as I put Erik’s breakfast tray back on the cart.
“What happened? I mean, I thought he was making an effort.”
“Not sure, but the last few days I haven’t seen him at all. I tried telling him he was never going to get a room with a door on it if he didn’t go to groups, but he didn’t seem to care.”
“Is he doing anything?” I asked as concern for Erik pushed through in my voice.
“He’s been meeting with Jarrod. That’s something, I guess.”
“Well, I’m here today. So, I’ll get him to go to group,” I said confidently.
Surely, everyone else must just really suck at motivating people. Erik and I had talked a few times and certainly he wasn’t the easiest of patients, but he wasn’t the worst, either. He had come for a hike and even went to group with Melanie the last time I had worked. I was positive I would be able to motivate him and get him back into his treatment.
“I’ll take that bet,” Kaitlin joked.
“It wasn’t exactly a bet. I’m just saying I have a way with people and I can get him to go to group.”
“So what you’re saying is that everyone else that has worked this week wasn’t nearly as good as you. And now that you’re here, you will be able to magically motivate the man into getting up out of bed and stopping his self-pity party to attend group sessions?”
She seemed pretty annoyed at my insinuation that I could motivate patients better than others. I didn’t mean for it to sound like I was putting Kaitlin or anyone else down, but I did feel like I had a way with patients. Maybe it was because I had also gone through treatment, or perhaps it was because I was honest with them. But for whatever reason, patients listened to me more often than not.
“I’ll go wake him up again. I didn’t know he had been sleeping in all morning or I would have been tougher on him.”
“So what’s the bet?” Kaitlin said with a grin.
“What do you want it to be?”
“If he refuses to go to group, you’ll come out to the jazz club with me this weekend. If you can get him up, I’ll go out with you to the jazz club,” she laughed.
“That seems like a lose-lose situation for me.”
“No, it’s a win-win situation. In both options, I win.”
Kaitlin laughed loudly and everyone in the dining area turned to look at her. It didn’t faze her, though, as she continued to laugh.
“How about you give me a hundred dollars if I get him out of his room and to group?” I asked.
“Well, then you have to give me a hundred dollars if he doesn’t go to group.”
“Deal,” I said with a victorious smile. “You better get your money ready.”
Kaitlin didn’t seem very scared at all as I walked toward Erik’s room. I had been there once already that morning when I had tried to get him up for breakfast. But when he said he wasn’t hungry, I didn’t argue and instead, just returned to the nurses’ station.
Anytime I had been away from work for a few days, I had to get reoriented to the patients and what was going on. I didn’t want to push Erik if he was still having panic attacks like he had had the last time I was there. But if he wasn’t having panic attacks and he was just hiding out in his room hoping that treatment would magically fix him, then he had another thing coming to him.
I might not have looked like I was all that tough, but I could be if I wanted to. I had been through treatment; these patients couldn’t pull anything over on me. I knew
what it was like to be depressed. I knew what it was like to not want to get out of bed or even what it was like to feel like treatment was useless. The thing about it was, I also knew that if you just stuck it out, treatment really did work.
Treatment took a lot of hard work. I knew that firsthand and it really annoyed me when people thought they could just sleep through a couple months at a treatment facilities and they would be all better when it was done. Sure, they would be over their physical withdrawals, but addiction was about so much more than physical addiction to a substance. The mental process of addiction was where the true treatment came in.
“Let’s go; it’s time to get up,” I said as I marched into Erik’s room.
“I’m sleeping.”
He turned toward the wall in an effort to ignore me. But I wasn’t going to lose a bet because he wanted to be lazy. Sometimes, I had to act more like a drill sergeant than their friend and that was just fine by me. Whatever I needed to do to make Erik get moving, I was going to do it.
“Let’s go,” I said as I reached for his comforter.
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” he laughed and flipped onto his back.
“You aren’t me,” I responded and pulled his blanket off. “I’ll pull this blanket off and you won’t be comfortable and then maybe you’ll get up and go to your groups. Now let’s…” I stopped dead in my tracks as the comforter left his bed.
“Told you so,” he laughed as his raging hard-on pressed his boxer shorts up into the air.
“Oh, come on! Let’s go; I don’t care what you’ve got going on under there. You’ve been here more than a week. You know the rules. You’re a big boy. Get up.”
I expected him to make some sort of comment about his penis in relation to the big boy comment I had just said. So I was surprised when he simply grabbed the comforter, pulled it back up over him, and rolled toward the wall again.
“I’m sleeping,” he said.
“So, you are seriously fine with spending thousands of dollars a day for a treatment facility just so you can sleep? Wow, you must have a pretty privileged life to waste that much money on sleeping.”
“I don’t have a privileged life,” he said without rolling over onto his side and away from me again.
“You know, when I went to treatment, it was in a disgusting state facility with rapists, meth addicts, and prostitutes. I didn’t have my own private room with a shower, and I certainly didn’t have nice nurses and techs who worried about me like you have.”
I felt myself getting angry, and as much as I knew it wasn’t professional, Erik was really starting to piss me off. Did he understand how good he had it? I would have died to have the opportunity to do treatment in a swanky place like Paradise Peak. Everyone was nice, even the people who weren’t as nice as I was were one hundred times nicer than what I had put up with at the state hospital.
“Go away,” Erik said without giving me the satisfaction of feeding into my angry spew.
“Fine, but I was going to lead group today. So, you’re going to miss out. But hey, just wallow in your own self-pity. I’m sure you will magically start to feel better sooner or later.”
I stormed out of the room and back to the nurses’ station. It killed me that he didn’t listen to me. It bugged me that he hadn’t participated in my little word fight with him. Something was different with Erik than when he had arrived. There had been a small glimpse of his boyish charm when I had pulled the covers off of him, but it quickly disappeared as he rolled back over.
“I told you he wouldn’t move,” Kaitlin said. “I think he needs to be kicked out of this place. There’s dozens of people waiting for a bed, and he’s just wasting it.”
To hear her speak poorly of Erik had my defenses on alert. I didn’t think he was a bad guy. I didn’t know what was going on with him, though, and it was obvious he wasn’t getting much out of his stay with us. But I would never condone kicking someone out unless they were putting others in danger. And even then, I would recommend sending them to the state hospital where they had quiet rooms and better security for dangerous patients. I just wasn’t the type of person who gave up on people.
“He’s going to group,” I said, not even believing my own words as they came out of my mouth.
I took a couple deep breaths and walked back to Erik’s door. I had to take a different approach. There had to be a way to earn his trust and get him out of his room and working on his recovery. Part of what I had said was true, there was no way he would ever get better if he just stayed laying in his bed the whole time he was with us.
“I’m sorry for yelling,” I said as I stood in the doorway. “Is there anything I can do for you? Is there something you need so you can feel better? What do you need to be successful?”
There was no answer.
I waited another moment before I started to talk again.
“Come to group this morning. I’m going to help Jarrod with some activities. It’s not going to be fun, at all. It’s going to make you uncomfortable. You’ll probably hate it here even more than you do now. But come anyways.”
“That’s the worst sales pitch I’ve ever heard,” Erik said as I heard him moving in his bed.
“So, is that a yes?”
“Hell, no. I’m not coming, but thanks for the effort.”
“Fine. Just fine. You want to rot away in this room all alone, then go ahead and do it. I don’t care!” I yelled as I left and went back to the nurses’ station again.
But I couldn’t stand to look at Kaitlin and the smug look on her face, so I went into the back room and hid for a moment. Why did this man drive me so crazy? Plenty of other patients had refused to go to group before and I had never raised my voice to a single one of them.
Brad constantly argued with me about his food and what was in it, yet I didn’t yell at him. Kimber could hardly walk half the time because she was so drugged up on psych meds and refused to let the doctor lower them, but I didn’t yell at her, either. In fact, I couldn’t remember the last time I had yelled at anyone in our facility. But there I was, yelling and berating Erik like it was going to help motivate him.
I knew better! I wasn’t a counselor and I wasn’t a nurse, but I had been a patient before and I knew that yelling at someone wasn’t going to motivate them. I knew that trying to make them feel bad about their decision was the worst thing I could have done. It put a divide between us and assured that Erik would stick his heels in deeper, just to avoid looking like I had forced him into doing something he didn’t want to do.
I knew all of those things, yet I had still yelled at a patient to try and get them to a group session. I felt like the worst mental health technician in the world. How was I ever going to be a nurse if I couldn’t even handle my own frustrations when all I had to do was get people to groups and feed them?
My stomach was in knots as I sat in the back room and tried to pull myself back together. It wasn’t like me to act like I had been and I really needed to knock it off. This place wasn’t about me or my feelings – it was about people getting better. I took a couple deep breaths and decided to still go and help Jarrod with group for the day.
Showing up late to a group session was worse than not going at all, at least as a patient it had been. So as I walked into the group room, I kept my head down and went right to the empty seat in the back of the room by the supplies we were going to be using for the project that day.
No one even seemed to notice I had arrived, which was a relief. It was sometimes a hard transition for me from patient to staff member. I was probably the youngest person at Paradise Peak who had a history of addiction. Plus, my addiction and treatment weren’t all that long ago, so everything felt fresh for me still.
“Erik, it’s nice to have you with us again today. Why don’t you start by telling us what you hope to get out of this exercise?”
My ears perked up as I heard his name and I couldn’t help but smile that he had actually showed up. Although, it didn’t fe
el as much like a victory as I thought it would.
Whatever he decided to do with himself after he left the facility was all his business, but while he was in our care, I really wanted to push him to make the most of it. There was no reason for a patient to spend thousands of dollars if they weren’t going to participate in the program. It was a waste.
“I’m going to make a collage of things my mother loved. Thinking of her makes me happy and sad, so I’m not sure what all I’ll put on there.”
“Great, I look forward to seeing it.”
“Kimber, what will your collage be about?”
“My boyfriend, Rob, and our relationship. My parents don’t like him. They think he’s just using me for my money. But I know our love is pure.”
“Why do your parents think he’s using you?” Jarrod asked.
“Because he’s unemployed and old. They don’t understand what I see in him. But I see love. He loves me. It wouldn’t matter if I was poor, I know he loves me.”
Even Kimber didn’t sound convinced by her own words. I know I wasn’t convinced the guy was a stand up, decent fella. He sounded like a douche bag to me. What kind of middle aged guy didn’t have a job and was still able to land a rich twenty-one-year-old woman? I imagined he must have been pretty easy on the eyes, at least.
“Okay, I look forward to seeing it,” Jarrod said.
I could see that Jarrod was visibly trying to hold back his own opinion on Kimber’s relationship. Jarrod was a damn good counselor. He didn’t tell people what to do, instead he guided them to finding their own solutions to the questions they had in their minds. Sometimes watching Jarrod work made me think that I wanted to be a counselor instead of a nurse, but Kaitlin always talked me out of that option because of the pay difference.
Nurses made close to thirty dollars per hour, while the therapists only made much less. I certainly wasn’t interested in the job because of the salary alone, but both nurses and therapists were positions I wanted to explore.
