Small Acts of Disappearance (14 page)

Berryman's
Recovery
is most powerful in the terrible, charged moments that deal directly with being in Group, in the interactions and confrontations between members, or between therapists and patients. These scenes are short and there's a lot of dialogue, which gives them an immediacy that's sometimes horrifying, and that tips, at times, to violence. In these scenes the novel captures that strange space between delusion and recovery, the raw emotion and confusion of people desperately trying to help each other and themselves, and the strange dynamics, the strange language, of people thrown together in a space deliberately removed from the external world and their regular (if less than functional) lives.

Severance's Group, according to the psychiatric principles of the time, works by confrontation, by trying to shock people into a forced recognition of their delusions, temperaments and the patterns of thinking and behaving that contribute to their problems. Each member of the group is encouraged to critique the others' behaviour, and the answers they give to the questions of the therapists. ‘You've got to help each other, and you
can,
though all of you are crippled,' one of the doctors says.

I was fascinated by these exchanges because they're so different from the gentle coaxing, the quiet but continual insistence, with which the therapist in my group interacted with us, the way we were encouraged to give advice, but not step on each others' toes, to congratulate each other for the things we had achieved, ignoring whatever else we may have done that was unhelpful, unhealthy, or downright stupid.
I'm aware that the difference may well be one of diagnosis – our delusions are different from those of alcoholics, far more self-critical and harsh. Eating disorder patients are, almost without exception, hypersensitive to the opinions of others, punishingly judgemental of themselves, and easily wounded because of the fragility of their sense of self. So gentleness itself, arguably, is therapeutic, because it's something that we never grant ourselves. At criticism, cruelty and violence, however, we're old hands.

But following Severance across his group interactions has been equally fascinating and confronting for me, because he too has difficulty placing himself within the Group, at times feeling unavoidably and inexorably different from the others, at times feeling that he utterly belongs. The problem, for Severance, in his own words, is that his ‘highly developed and strong
will',
his intelligence, his creativity, make it that much harder for him to negotiate the Group, because he can't help but watch on, can't help but be fascinated by the Group and its constant transformations. He struggles, at times, even to be aware that he is having difficulty completely engaging in Group and its peculiar kind of treatment, that he can't just ‘swallow the Group-mystique' as he puts it.

He often describes himself as going ‘into doubleconsciousness', a state that I recognise well, and have often spoken about with other writers: a strange state of participating in the world, but simultaneously observing and analysing it.
It's not quite detachment – more a sense of both living, and filing away, the same events at the same time. A psychologist once told me that I had ‘excellent meta-cognition' and my first reaction was to add the new and beautifully peculiar word to the list in the back of my notebook.

I know that double-consciousness is problematic in group therapy, that it's prevented me, at times, from being able to give myself over to it completely. On my very first day in the clinic, we were taken to the facility's art room, directly after our supervised morning tea, for a session of art therapy with an occupational therapist. She had unpacked several bundles of construction paper, thick crayons, pots of acrylic paint and glitter (but had not unlocked the high cupboard where the scissors were kept) and as we sat down explained to us that we were going to spend the next hour drawing our eating disorders as trees. I remember thinking, right away, how excellent a detail this would be, even before I reached for the purple paint.

But this double-consciousness is also difficult because it often means that I can't help but be enthralled by the other patients, to be drawn in by their stories, when I am supposed to be making an inventory, as it were, of my own.

I've struggled with this in every Group I've attended, often walking away in the afternoon distraught by what I've heard from people whom I've so quickly come to care about, furious at the people who've hurt them and thinking up lists of small kindnesses – playlists, recipes, loaned books – that I can give them. I often leave mulling over the unexpected
reactions of others, the strangely logical irrationality of the beliefs and fears they've spoken about, the points where they stop themselves from talking, shrink back into the room. It's easier, somehow, to get involved in other peoples' stories so as not to touch my own.

This continual interaction with other unwell people and their all-too-visible sadness and confusion often leaves me exhausted, distraught, yet perhaps this is exactly how Group is supposed to work. It's so much easier, too, to recognise delusion and distress in others rather than in ourselves, to see solutions for them where we ourselves feel trapped. One member of Severance's group describes it as confronting ‘the imposing and uniform and entirely unacceptable world' presented by his fellow patients, and realising that ‘threequarters, at least, of every story was my story. Mirrors on every side.' These mirrors may be that much more powerful for the people in my Group: with our illnesses so closely tied to a need to be seen, or a fear of how we may be reflected back to ourselves by others.

This experience is also startlingly similar to the one I had in my very first admission, three years before this one, when I still thought that I wasn't
like that,
that my physical condition was the totality of my disease. I used to be amazed by the completeness of this delusion, that someone as intelligent as I have always thought myself to be could think so stupidly, could participate so completely in what I know now was blatant denial. But I realise now that delusion is a creative act, albeit a perverse one, and this was the only
way that I could apprehend my unacceptable illness, that violence without.

It is also Severance's strong will that makes it difficult for him simply to give himself over, and submit to the regime, as much as he believes he wants to do this, as much as he wants to ‘find out what the
hell
[is] wrong and fix it'. Severance knows the rationale behind the manoeuvres of his therapists, and so he's often cognitively recognising their strategy rather than engaging with it – like me, he's read far too many books on the subject of his illness and so he often knows what they are trying to do, and is able to defend himself against it before he even realises what he is doing. Severance is, after all, used to rationally, meticulously looking for solutions; he calls it ‘rigorous honest private mental work'. But rational, rigorous mental work cannot unpick delusion (‘if you could do it by yourself, you would have already done it'). And Severance is accused, repeatedly, of hiding behind his brain so as not to have to touch his heart.

I can't help but wonder, at times, about what happened to Berryman as he tried to write
Recovery,
what it cost him, what he gained.

But even though Severance's will is scientific and mine is not, I know that my will too was problematic in Group, that I still had difficulty suspending my disbelief, and in not rejecting wholesale the activities and concepts we were given,
if I'd read about them or the psychological methodology beforehand. It didn't help, in my Group, that the therapist wore shellac nails, meticulously straightened, waist-long hair and towering heels, and was several years younger than me – a fellow patient had hunted her down on Facebook – or that the language of these methodologies, riddled with threeletter acronyms, never failed to make me cringe.

There's a whole language to recovery, of course, with ‘recovery' itself as its principal proper noun (and ‘meal plan' coming a close second). We talk of choice points, emotional regulation, compensation, compliance, and weight-andshape, as if that were one word. Mechanical eating, social eating, flexible eating, normal eating, refeeding, safe food, fear food, challenge food, trigger food, fun food. Taking responsibility, checking back into life. Self compassion, self care, self talk, coping strategies, coping mechanisms, crisis management, urge surfing, down arrowing, thought challenging, distracting, dissociating, dissembling, dissonance, defusion, diffusion, ambivalence, acceptance, making space. Writing is called ‘journalling' – though I refused to use the term.

This language is useful, of course, and even felt radical to me at first, because I'd never before had a way to talk about my illness and its manifestations as something separate from my self. But now it feels like swearing: use the words often enough and they lose any power to shock.

In Berryman's
Recovery,
a therapist makes a list of common Group behaviours on a chalkboard, and these
buzzwords I am all-too-familiar with: ‘minimising, denial, silence, projection…attacking, explaining, humour… intellectualising, agreeing, complying (playing Group), smugness, hostility, shifting'. Severance's Group, like my Group, is constantly told to ‘stay
real'
(‘Once you're
real,
you don't have to be consistent.') or to ‘be authentic' (but also to ‘fake it 'til you make it'), to ‘level', to ‘let go'. But more interestingly, Severence's Group distinguishes between being ‘dry drunk' – being on the wagon, but still wanting to drink – and being ‘sober', neither drinking nor wanting to. Group has its own inside language for its initiates, and I know it's just for us, on the inside, that it's normalised. Only last night I did a double take when a friend-of-a-friend (holding an empty soup pot at the time) said she'd just been ‘on a
Game of Thrones
binge' at her boyfriend's house.

I realise too that this normalisation is not just linguistic – in Group, we quickly lost the ability to be startled by, to even bat an eyelid at, the awful and often insane ways that others behave. I've watched women in their thirties and forties suck on the corners of blankets or the ends of their hair and a young man inspect every single egg in six different cartons, trying to select the best dozen. Most recently, an hour before we were due to meet for a drink, a friend from Group sent me a text cancelling our plans because she'd taken too many laxatives and couldn't leave her bathroom. It was only later that I realised these events would be unthinkable for anybody on the outside. But illness is a foreign country, as it were; we do things differently here.

The worst problem with strong will and its delusions, for Severance at least, is that they mean he's never able to understand how he is progressing, because he can never escape the confines that his will and delusions impose upon his thinking. He can never come to understand precisely what is turning or changing within him and his mind, however furiously he writes in his journal, and he feels entirely and utterly lost because he cannot make it, or will it, otherwise. At one point, a doctor congratulates him on his progress, and Severance is rattled to his core, he writes: ‘I felt witless to hear that in his opinion I'm going strong. So much for my opinion about
anything.'
It's terrifying – for Severance, as it is for me – to not know your own mind, when your mind and its work are the only things that have seemed to hold solid throughout the slow erosions of chronic illness.

My psychiatrist first told me I was doing well after a week when I'd sat in my shower after eating dinner on my couch each night, crying under the hot water, having kept myself constantly busy through the day, as if momentum alone could stop me from collapsing. I was constantly aware that this didn't feel much different from the period when I was physically at my sickest. After a week when I'd felt skinless and spilling as I walked beneath the ancient fig trees in my suburb, squashing the fallen, seedy fruit beneath my sandals; when I'd been always ‘aware of the action of my heart, in the absence of physical exertion', to use the strangely haunting language of a basic diagnostic tool. This brokenness, this damage,
this
was doing well, perhaps precisely because it was
a breaking down of will. But even if we can't trust our own wills and we cannot know our own minds, it's still difficult to operate around them, to try to understand that this is not a process we can think through perfectly, that we can ever understand, pin down, or control.

And yet reading Berryman's novel offered another kind of recognition to me, as if I had been in Group, a much smaller, more interior kind of Group, with Severance and Berryman too, or at least the figure of Berryman as I imagine him. An imaginative alliance with the two men, all of us confused, and all of us equally bewitched and betrayed by our own minds. And all of us, most importantly, in a place that is unfinished. Severance, of course, must remain here indefinitely, interrupted by Berryman's death. Between
Recovery
and
Delusions,
in the edition that I have, are transcriptions of Berryman's fragmented notes for the rest of the novel, but they're not a satisfying substitute for an ending: the novel simply stops, in a suspension (I'm tempted to write: a falling) between the two states. Part of me thinks this is exactly as it should be: an unintentional but radical inconclusiveness, a denial of the three-act structure that biography is often made to fit, even though life itself is never so simply and tightly contained. Another part of me thinks that if the striving for logical and fixed conclusions in our own thinking is a catalysing force that allows the stories that we tell ourselves to harden into delusion, then Severance, suspended and un-ended as he is, is finally freed from both. It's still difficult to try to imagine our own stories in this way, unfixed and uncontainable, difficult
to abandon definition for our selves and lives. But the idea appeals to me because it means that any delusion must always be transient, short-lived, and so no more dangerous than a bad decision: a thing that is imperfect and regrettable, perhaps, but which was, and always is, the best thing that the mind could do to manage at the time.