All That Is Bitter and Sweet (43 page)

I admit to walking rather slowly to that B&B, breathing in what I misconstrued as my last taste of “freedom” as long as I could. I noticed the painted scenes on the curbside Dumpsters again, the ones that had irritated me earlier in the week. Why they bothered me so much dawned on me: They could be a metaphor for my life. Painted up on the outside, looking good from a distance, and full of heaping piles of rotting stuff on the inside.

Once in the B&B, I wrestled again with the old rotary phone and how to place a long-distance call with a calling card without buttons to push, to share such strange news with my husband. It was both simple and difficult to explain. “I am staying for inpatient treatment.” There was not much else to say, because I didn’t know anything else. His questions were smart and concerned: “What does this look like? For how long? Do I see you? Talk to you?” I had no answers. Wait. I did have an answer.

Trust the process. Don’t quit before your miracle.

I think he was in shock, understandably. Dario being Dario, in spite of how it affected him, was supportive of me. Not only is that his nature, he had a powerful incentive. He would soon become the first and biggest beneficiary of my wonderful new way of life. In the meantime, he was on the first plane home to Scotland, literally that night, where he spent my time in treatment with his family, reading my letters and writing me back. (I did not have visitors on Sundays and Wednesdays like my friends, but I did receive a lot of mail.)

When we hung up, I felt deep fear and a chilling uncertainty. Not seeing my husband for that long suddenly seemed too dramatic, too drastic, and the bargaining bloomed in my head:
I can go home, this is all overstated
.
Ted is one of the greatest clinicians in the country. I can create a plan with him to tackle the things that have been revealed this week. I’ll sustain my good start and take it seriously. This inpatient business is over the top
.

I rang Ted, pretty much to tell him this. I did not get past “The treatment team just did, what do you call it? An intervention? On me, for adult child of dysfunctional family issues. They’ve invited me to stay for six weeks. I initially agreed but I have changed my mind and am coming home, and boy, Ted, we have work to do!”

Ted, the great communicator, the gentlest of souls, floored me with his response: “Ashley, I have wanted this for you since the first time I met you.”

I stood stock-still, speechless, and my bargaining, so convincing mere moments ago, vaporized.

He said a few other things, I imagine, but “I have wanted this for you since the first time I met you” reverberated in my ears, drowning out everything else. I must have been moving very slowly. We had said our goodbyes, but I was still standing, holding the receiver, mouth probably hanging open. And I heard Ted, as he was hanging up, crying with great joy in his voice to his wife, “Margie! Margie! You’ll never guess what happened!”

I was stunned once more. Overhearing that remark, not intended for me, but about me, and said with such glee, was like having read, “Pets are very important.” I did not understand why Ted believed this was fortuitous. I sure as heck did not understand why it was such a damn happy occasion. But it was clear others believed that it was, others who expressed nothing but great compassion and concern, who somehow, in spite of my scrambled confusion, were emerging as very safe and trustworthy. Comments like that, so brief and small, assimilated into my insides, and gave me a hook, the beginning of something to hang on to, a way to grasp that they believed, and to begin to suspect that if I did what they had done, I, too, could have what they had.

I zipped my case and wheeled my small bag down the tree-lined street, the center drawing closer, looming larger. I crossed the threshold and sat in Cam’s office, answering questions and doing paperwork. I remember being so grateful I had good insurance and the ability to pay for this treatment. I remember Cam saying she’d put me in a room with my sister. Cindy Henson, then head of the treatment team, was sprawled comfortably in a chair beside me. I had no idea that she was already deep into her assessment of me, formulating the basis for my first assignments she would direct my case manager to proctor.

The tech (treatment team assistants who are always present to support clients) on duty went through my things with me, taking from me items not allowed during treatment: cell phones, any type of music-playing device, books, anything with which one could harm oneself. I looked up phone numbers before turning in my phone and stood in the tech’s office letting certain folks know I would be out of commission for at least forty-two days. Kate Roberts was one such person. Without divulging much detail, I apologized deeply for the massive inconvenience. I stressed I was not canceling our complex trip to Central America, only delaying it. She received the news graciously and wished me great good luck. I shared my news with a few other souls, and all responded similarly. I found that strange, even as I was grateful for it. Soon I was holding the receiver in midair, trying to think of another person to call, one more chore to do, to delay what I had set into motion.

The tech, seeing this, said, “Ashley, I need you to finish up.”

Fear closed in my chest like a fist. I replaced the receiver, stepped out of the office, and became a patient.

My case manager, Kristen, a kind and very young-seeming clinician, was introduced to me, and I was provided a Shades of Hope tote bag with the tools I would need to commence the work she gave me. A large three-ring binder, a fat ream of paper, pens and pencils, and most important, my own copy of the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous. I had seen other clients with their binders, written work spilling out of it, inspirational notes slid under the clear plastic cover, family photos taped in collages. I wondered what I would do with mine.

She gave me “first step prep” to write on codependence, instructed me how to write my own autobiography (before we can straighten out our present, we need to have straightened out the stories of our past as best we can), and asked me to write a history of depression, self-harm, and suicidal ideation. I felt baffled, as I had
no idea
where she had come up with that very personal information, why she took it so seriously, why me hitting myself from time to time was anything anyone would want to talk about. I remembered Cindy in Cam’s office, so relaxed in that chair, and I realized that in this place, what you say in front of anyone is shared with everyone. I was bummed. I would have really preferred to keep that tidbit to myself.

I don’t much recall a lot of what I did next, but boy, oh boy, do I remember supper and snack, filling out my “feeling sheet,” and going to bed. During the meals, I was sitting precisely where all week I had rather longed to be: at the round tables filled with clients. I had heard something about affirmations and different assignments clients had with respect to meals. And now, I knew. My meal plan was written on a board, and I went through the buffet trying to measure and plate my food as described. (This would begin one of my many attempts to control my experience; not having an eating disorder, I wondered why I had to eat the way eating disorder clients did, and depending on my opinion of the menu, I would want to under- or overserve my portions. And the lemon ration with water? Well, it was a full five weeks before I quit conniving how to obtain more than allowed.) I watched fascinated as an anorexic put a kerchief on her eyes and was fed by a bulimic. The assignment was to help the anorexic give up control of what and how she ate and for the bulimic to learn how not to despise food put into the body for nourishment and sustenance. After the meal, everyone stood up in turns and said five affirmations about her- or himself, with the peers reflecting back to that person the positive statements. (“I love my stomach.” “I am loved, loving, and lovable.” “Just for today, I will do the next good, right, honest thing.”) I am not sure what I said, but I know I was scared to death, trying mightily to pretend I was not while I choked back tears and sputtered through it. I would later lie awake in bed trying to think of good things to say about myself that would convince the others I really felt that way.

On the screened-in back porch, I met Jake, a wonderfully furry gray-and-black tomcat who would become my dearest friend and closest companion. I stood at a painted wooden box, looking into the dark back garden that sloped toward a creek, and paused, unsure what to write about what I felt.

My sister walked me to my room. To my forlorn dismay, I had not been put in a room with her (it turned out Cam was the campus softie). And because of the number of clients at the moment, I ended up in a four-person room, totally alone. We stood in the large, plain room, adorned only with two sets of bunk beds and a few chests of drawers, and my big sister gave me “the hug”: the wonderful, nurturing, motherly, all-embracing hug she gives so very, very well. I was cracking, I was coming undone. She said as she held me, “Let it all go.” I didn’t know what “it” was, but I had come far enough in one week to know that I had a lot of “it.” She put me in bed, tucked me in, and walked out the door.

I had chosen the top bunk, and my eyes looked around wildly as I struggled to find purchase, a way to reason things out, to make sense of the cauldron of emotion and the baffling new setting. I saw the only decoration in the room, a paper plate hanging on the wall with a cross made out of glitter stuck to glue.

Lord have mercy, I was in the loony bin.

I stared at it. I wondered about the woman who had made it, if she, like me, had been in pain, and if in this strange place she had found peace. I wondered if someday I might look back on it in my mind’s eye, recalling it with fondness. In retrospect, I identify those thoughts as part of my strong will to survive, my earnest yearning to heal, and my nascent
hope
, despite how bad I felt.

Thus began the loneliest walk of my life. The first nights in treatment are excruciating, and clients often declare they’ve had miraculous spiritual experiences and spontaneous healing transformations that send them right out the door and back into their lives before completing a full week. This, I understand. Boy, do I understand. In spite of being unconditionally loved and accepted, and supported by a talented treatment team who often worked around the clock, I was in the most acute emotional pain of my life, at a baseline of deeply grieved loneliness with surges of near panic and wretched anxiety.

I didn’t sleep much. The techs would check on us at intervals throughout the night, for a variety of reasons. My sleep was so tortured that every time one entered the room, it sent adrenaline rippling through my system. A tech rises early at Shades: Blood pressure is taken, on certain days of the week clients are weighed, meds are dispensed. (In the beginning, they detox clients off all but the most essential meds, to see, often for the first time in a client’s life, what they are really dealing with, what their actual baseline mood is. So many folks are misdiagnosed, meds misprescribed, meds dosed improperly. Many of the medical conditions codependents deal with are induced by emotional stress, and substance abusers often withhold so much information from health care providers that one can’t always blame them for putting patients on stuff that they either don’t need or is actually dangerous for them.) I found the routine exhausting and was relieved that I was initially on “no exercise,” which is standard for a client’s first ten days.

My first full day in the center was a Saturday, and my free fall into aching loneliness accelerated. With reduced staff and less structure, I felt the quiet around the facility as nothing less than a vacancy in my own soul. The clients went on an outing, which both my sister and I did not attend, as the center took extra measures to protect and preserve our confidentiality and anonymity. Being left behind meant there were just three people having lunch in the large lunchroom (the third was a client too ill to go out). I sat facing the door, looking at the crossroads on which the campus is situated. I could a see long ways down the country road, its slight undulations from the giant live oak trees’ roots that wove and bulged underneath. In my mind’s eye, I imagined standing up, walking to the door, placing my hand on the knob, and walking out. Just walking out. That simple. I had no car, no phone, no money, but I could walk, and I imagined doing so. I have walked many miles on country roads in my life, and I could just … walk out of there and see where the road would take me. I had the vague sense that doing so would be none too smart, that the pain I was in would accompany me wherever I went. Those thoughts were vague, and I am not sure what prevented me from leaving. After lunch, when I crossed the street back to the center, I did look down the road once. A dim, fuzzy thought formed that I could indeed walk out of here someday, and maybe—just maybe—I would do so as a changed woman.

The weekend activities included a lot of quiet time for written work, Big Book study, Twelve Step meetings, an occasional movie with recovery themes, and process groups in which clients could share in depth about something going on with them, facilitated by a member of the treatment team. I felt ashamed as I struggled to learn the language of recovery: what to say in my “feelings check,” when to give peers feedback, and when such feedback was considered “cross-talk,” offering comments about another person’s sharing that is not appropriate in Twelve Step meetings. I began to use the dreaded “confrontation” format, as required, at the beginning of each group. People who wind up in treatment generally have trouble expressing their feelings and their needs moderately; often they’ve not been taught how to, having never seen healthy communication modeled. Using a standardized script with fill-in-the-blank sentences, I practiced owning my reality with simple statements devoid of under- or overdescribing and ultimately taking responsibility for how I was going to respond to another person’s behavior and take care of myself. (Mind the final statement: “To____. When you rage at the staff after lunch, I think you are doing the anger you have toward your dad. I feel fear and pain. I need and would like you to do anger work with Tennie and Kim. And, I intend to remember ‘if I spot it, I got it,’ do my own work, focus on my own recovery.”) People with healthy internal and external boundaries can listen with detachment and know the exchange is not just about
them
(even though it seems directed at them), but is a reflection of what is happening inside the person who is sharing. It took me a while to arrive at that place of loving detachment. When one of our peers gave my sister and me a confrontation for perhaps not considering how our closeness might be painful to watch for clients who missed their families terribly, I took it personally and totally shut down. I felt that no matter what I did, I was doing it all wrong.