What Should I Do with the Rest of My Life_ - Bruce Frankel [40]
After all, he added, “I know who I am. I know why I am. And when you get right down to it, that’s what I try to teach my patients to learn about themselves. If they don’t know themselves, they can’t respect themselves. If they don’t respect themselves, they can’t care for themselves. I build a tool kit with them, and one of the tools I use is teaching them that if you believe it will happen, it will. By the same token, if you believe it won’t happen, it won’t.”
It is little understood, he explained, that therapeutic talk and learning stimulates important changes in brain chemistry. “It’s not just functional. New synapses are being created. When someone walks out of here, their brain won’t be the same brain as when they walked in. They call it talk therapy. So someone might say, ‘Why do I have to talk with you? I can go talk with my grandmother.’ Well, sometimes that may be good. On the other hand, when you go to a professionally trained therapist, he or she may know what to say and when to say it, and how to say it as well as when not to say it. In the tone of your voice, a therapist may have latched on to things about you, and in the process, he is changing your brain exactly as a medicine changes your brain. There’s no difference. New neurotransmitters hit receptors. But in the case of medication, there’s a side effect.”
Those in the community who have used Robby as a therapist are legion. A number of community figures I interviewed offered spontaneously to testify to the ways Robby had helped them in therapy with addictions of one kind or another. A couple of years ago, a former client was moved to reveal her own story publicly. Some time after she had stopped seeing him, she ran into Robby on a bus transporting contestants to the starting line for the annual Fodderstack 10K, a point-to-point runners’ race that begins in Flint Hill, a community just east of the Shenandoah National Park. Robby was already eighty-four, and she was concerned. On the bus ride, he confessed to her that he had decided to participate in the race on a whim and had not trained for it at all. He just figured that if he walked two miles every day, he should be able to walk the six miles to the finish line in the town of Little Washington. “About an hour and forty-five minutes later, Dr. Iadeluca comes strolling into Washington, walking strong beside a thirty-something-year-old, talking and having a great time. Of course, I had worried for naught,” Ginny Hughes wrote in the Fauquier Times-Union. Her commentary ended in a celebration of Robby as an example of living life to its fullest. Summing up, she offered an even more compelling salute: “Twelve years ago, he saved my life from alcohol addiction. If it weren’t for him, I would not be running the Fodderstack 10K. He is an inspiration.”
Liliana Anaya, a twenty-eight-year-old who worked for a local restorative justice program, met Robby when he applied as a volunteer to help work with addict offenders and their victims. She saw his credentials and was impressed. A couple of months later she sought his help when she was suffering from a bout of depression. As a young Colombian woman, with a couple of graduate degrees, she was struggling with feeling culturally isolated in the homogenous Virginia suburb. While in college in Florida, she had converted to Islam and began dressing according to the religion’s code. In rural Virginia, her decision tested her. But where other therapists in her experience got stuck on religious issues, Robby cut through them. “He learned about my culture and the way I practiced my religion so that he could understand my personal patterns and treat me from that perspective, not from his perspective. The first thing he asks is, ‘How can I help you?’ He asked questions to understand where I was coming from. That is what makes him a great therapist.”
Indeed, there is nothing