Quiet Room - Lori Schiller [46]
So week after week, for a fifty-minute hour three days a week, I put all my energy into combating any help he might have to offer. He tried to get me to talk about my thoughts and feelings. I tried to keep away from just those topics. We shared jokes we had heard over the week, and laughed together as if this was therapy. We spoke about medication and the human body. We discussed the difference between the way tricyclic antidepressents and MAO inhibitor antidepressants worked. We discussed the dystonic reaction and the anticholinergic effect. He must have explained to me a hundred times how certain medications caused certain side effects, like a dry mouth. I always felt these were safe topics. When we talked about medicine, I didn't have to verbalize my feelings, my thoughts, my symptoms, or why the hell I was even seeing this man.
Sometimes we talked about my day-to-day life. Once when I admitted to him that I didn't know much about sex, and that I wasn't even sure exactly how it worked, he was very comforting. Once more he reached for his textbooks—only this time, they were anatomy and physiology textbooks. He sat down next to me on his couch adjacent to my chair, and explained everything to me in a low-key and comforting way. I found this session interesting, and was grateful for his help.
But mostly, I just stonewalled him.
“I don't know what to say, Doc,” I would say over and over again.
“Just say whatever comes to your mind,” he would encourage me.
“I have nothing on my mind.”
“Is your head empty?”
“No, in fact, exactly the opposite.”
“What do you mean?”
“You know. The stuff I always have on my mind.”
“You mean the voices?”
Silence.
“What do they say?” He tried to coax it out of me.
Silence.
“You know, Lori, if you give me a chance, maybe I can help you. If you don't open up, though, I won't be able to help you.”
“Leave me alone, Doc.”
“Lori, just talk to me, work with me, and together we can at least try to overcome these horrible symptoms. They're obviously so painful to you.”
Silence. A long, long silence. And then I tried, a little bit.
“The Voices are telling me not to trust you, and that you'll make me die.”
“Do you believe that?”
What a jerk! “Of course I do, or I wouldn't have said it. What kind of games are you playing with my brain?”
“I know the voices seem real to you, but they are actually a part of you deep down inside coming out in the form of hallucinations. Do you understand that?”
How could someone like that help me? He was supposed to be a professional, the best. But my Voices knew more than he did. He didn't know anything.
He didn't even know enough to be concerned when there was danger. Once sitting in his office, I became aware that the room was filling up with floating paisley shapes that were out to murder both of us. They were sucking up all the oxygen in the room, and he and I were both going to suffocate. It was terrifying. I felt like a murderer. I had to warn him. But when I told him of the danger we both were in, he didn't seem concerned at all. He just sat there as if nothing was happening.
What could I learn from a guy like that?
So mostly I just sat there. Hour after fifty-minute hour, week after week, I sat there, silent. There he was, sitting in his chair, puffing on his cigar as if he were Freud himself. I sat adjacent to him in a big woolly chair, session after session, smoking cigarette after cigarette in silence. I wouldn't talk, and he wouldn't prompt me. So often we spent the entire session in silence. All I would do was pick the arm of my chair to shreds. It seemed like my project to destroy the chair before sitting in it