Quiet Room - Lori Schiller [100]
“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-
And as I became willing to consider the possibility, I began to be able to see—faintly at first—that the Voices had real emotions behind them. Once I began to be able to tell my doctors what the Voices were saying about them, they began to help me look more closely at what the Voices were saying and why. I would tell Dr. Fischer that the Voices were telling