Get Me Out of Here (7 page)

The phone clicked back to the receptionist, and I promptly slammed down the receiver, and the sound echoed through the foyer. He may as well have just plunged a knife through my heart. My head was spinning. Had I been too out of line, or had I not told him off nearly enough? Did I hate his guts and not care if he dropped off the face of the earth, or did I need him more than anyone I had ever known?

Dropping down to my hands and knees, I slowly gathered the contents of my purse, remaining frozen there for a while in uncontrollable tears, shrieking and shaking wildly like a rabid animal. The information desk clerk, clearly disturbed by this sight, got up and approached the double doors to further investigate. Humiliated, I pulled myself together and somehow, miraculously, managed to start driving myself home.

The hysterics and profane epithets of betrayal, the alternating pains of righteous indignation and acute embarrassment and shame nearly drove me over the edge. Goddamnit. I was crazy. Totally crazy. The hospital and Dr. Padgett had made me worse, cut me loose. I'd snapped.

At home Tim was on my side, listening to my account of the story. He, too, thought Weebles had engaged in outrageous character assassination. Yet that was small consolation. Dr. Padgett sided with her. Dr. Padgett was the one who counted. Already I was addicted to the man, and I hated myself for it.

Early the next morning, I called his office and sheepishly asked Regina to go ahead and schedule me the Thursday appointment, if it were still available. It was. Dr. Padgett had left it open.

The two days between Tuesday's turbulent phone call and Thursday's session seemed like an eternity. I was despondent at the contents of the report, whose labels were beginning to ring with an undeniable truth. Disgusted with myself for having reacted so vehemently, for having made a complete ass out of myself, I was ashamed. Yet I was overwhelmed by the aching need to see him again. I could barely tolerate the time until our next session, all the while despising myself for my growing dependency.

In the waiting room I buried my face behind
Newsweek
so the receptionist who had witnessed my raging lunacy wouldn't see me. On my very first day of therapy, I'd managed to shatter every rule and erupt with vicious emotion at a time and place that were out of bounds. I braced myself for the coming lecture, admonishment, terse retribution, or—the worst conceivable possibility—that Dr. Padgett would decide he no longer wanted me as a patient.

“You can come on in now.”

It was The Voice again. The soothing-tonic voice. Frozen for a moment, cowering behind
Newsweek
in burning shame, I finally looked up to see him. The trademark smile was there again, as if the telephone incident had never occurred.

Once seated in his office, my eyes cast downward to the floor, afraid and unwilling to meet his, I began to stammer through profuse apologies. In a darkened confessional of the soul, he was God and I was the sinner. The remorse and penance began.

“I'm sorry, oh my God, I'm
so
sorry. I lost control. So out of line. I don't know what to say. I'm such a horrible patient. The report—it's true. Every word of it. I showed it. I proved it. You must hate me. I'm disgusting. I understand if you don't want to go through with this anymore after all the shit I've pulled, all the horrible things I said.”

I continued with my tearful apology for a while longer before realizing that Dr. Padgett had no intention of scolding or criticizing me or of concurring with my scathing self-assessment.

“I'm not here to judge your behavior,” he said gently, as my eyes remained fixed on the floor. “I've committed to therapy with you, I want to help you, and I will honor that commitment. Maybe people have left you before or turned their backs when things got too rough. I won't do that. So long as you keep coming here, no matter what might happen, what you might say or do, it isn't going to drive me away. I'll be here. You can count on that. The only person that will leave this therapy is you; you will make that decision, not me. I'll be here for as long as it takes.”

Clearly this wasn't what I had anticipated. Looking up to see his face, I saw it filled with genuine concern, with sincerity. But how could he say such things without knowing what I might do? As much as I wanted his words to be true, I found them impossible to believe. It wasn't that I thought he was dishonest, just that he didn't know how crazy and awful I was inside.

“You probably find this hard to accept,” he continued, reading my thoughts once again. “But it's the truth. It's genuine. It's called unconditional acceptance, the kind of unconditional acceptance and love that every child deserves, that every child needs to make her whole. The kind you never got from your own parents.”

How does he know anything about my parents? I've never said anything about them. Why do they have to be an issue here? This isn't about them. I'm the screwup, not them. Dad was right; these guys all blame everything on the parents
.

“This makes it hard to trust. Trust is very, very hard for you. I know that. I don't expect you to believe me or trust me right now. And I don't expect you to take me on my word. Talk is cheap. I'm sure you've heard plenty of talk. No, trust can't be proven by anything I say, but by what I do. You should be skeptical—questioning me at every turn. That's part of the process.”

I was numb. It was almost too much to fathom, to absorb. I didn't want to be skeptical, didn't want to doubt him. How could I dare doubt him after he was kind enough to say these things, considering the horrible things I'd said to him? Yet I doubted him nonetheless. And he was telling me, much to my astonishment, that it was okay. I wasn't sure if he was a liar, a fool, or a masochist.

We then discussed my psychological profile and its revelations about the darkest side of my character. They were truths of which I was mortally ashamed, but truths nonetheless. The darkness of my soul revealed in all its ugly nakedness. Dr. Padgett surprised me once again.

“I don't place much stock in psychological profiles,” he said. He explained they served a limited purpose, perhaps, but they were just a series of oversimplified labels that could not come close to encompassing the complexities of an individual's character, including mine. By design, such profile tests sought to uncover the most unhealthy aspects of a person's nature, seeking to identify pathologies. He had wanted me to see it so that I would know just how serious the situation was, to know what we—the two of us—would be facing together. Still, the report had not touched on the many good qualities within me, the ones he saw in that very first meeting. The ones that prompted him to “choose” me as a patient.

Choose me
. A part of me was slightly stuck by the arguably arrogant implications of such a statement. After all, I was paying
him
—$120 a session to be exact.
I
was the one doing the choosing. Yet the notion of being chosen because of what he saw in me was too comforting a thought to dismiss. Why did everything have to be so confusing?

“You are like a diamond,” he said to me. “A rough diamond. Only covered in dirt so you can't see it for yourself. And I am like the one who discovered you. My role is to help you slowly scrape away the caked-on dirt until we get to the diamond itself. If you know anything about diamonds, though, you know that they don't have much value in rough form. Diamonds gain their value according to how skillfully they're cut.

“Your parents never recognized the possible value. You were never finely cut, and you never got the chance to see the value and the beauty you possessed. So you covered yourself in mud and buried and hid yourself there because that is what you thought you were. Dirt.

“Well, once we remove the soil, we will work together to cut that diamond and give it more value, beauty, and shining brilliance than you ever could have believed. You don't see the potential yet. You don't see the inherent value and beauty you have. But I do. And that's why I chose you. Someday you'll see it too, and believe it, just as much as I do.”

There he goes again, the “choosing me” thing. He's bringing my parents into it again. What is this obsession with my parents? What do they have to do with anything? He doesn't even know them. And yet … a diamond, not just any stone, but a diamond
.

Once again Dr. Padgett had somehow burrowed through my massive fortress of walls and gently touched me. There was an inherent poetry in the man, words and feelings that lured and lulled me. Only he could find a way to turn “dirt” into poetry. Only he could find a way, for however brief a moment, to make me feel good about myself.

Soon we'd agreed to increase the frequency of sessions to three times a week, which still did not seem like enough. Much of our discussion focused on the issues of trust, my fear of abandonment, and the therapy relationship. I would delve into some of the painful events of my life, nearly all of them from adolescence and early adulthood.

Dr. Padgett tried to bring the focus to my early childhood. I would respond with vehement resistance and terse reminders to Dr. Padgett that
I
was the one who screwed up. These were
my
problems,
my
character flaws. My parents had been good ones and should be left out of it. Discussing my early childhood was an invasion of my family's privacy. It was tantamount to a betrayal that I felt, in all of their generosity, my parents did not deserve.

Often the mere mention of this issue would provoke me into a tirade of profanity as vehement as any I'd displayed in the hospital. It would prove to be a contentious issue for the next several months. I thought my vehemence was justified; Dr. Padgett saw it as a sign that there was, indeed, something disturbing enough to elicit such reactions. It was an interpretation we argued over nearly every single session—or, more aptly, over which
I
argued. It was difficult to arouse much passion in Dr. Padgett, yet another phenomenon of therapy that gave me fits.

Another contentious issue was the severity of my illness and the extent of my need for therapy. At $120 per hour, I felt at times that therapy was an indulgence. The fact that financial support from my parents—who simply pretended my problems weren't happening—made such a luxury possible simply increased my guilt over being there at all. Yet I couldn't bring myself to stop going, which at times made me feel both like an addict and an emotional hypochondriac.

Dr. Padgett, however, saw it differently. To him, it was a grave situation. I was a time bomb of sorts, he thought, and as such, intensive therapy was not a matter of luxury, but life or death. I couldn't decide whether his assessment was correct or just his attempt to soothe my guilt over the time and expense and keep collecting his fees. I was reluctant to bring this up, but when I did, Dr. Padgett would calmly say that I needed to sort out this skepticism myself and reach my own conclusions. The proverbial ball, as always, was back on my side of the court.

Life at home was unpredictable. Occasionally I felt periods of numbed calm, as if everything was back to normal and I didn't need therapy. But more frequently, particularly after intense sessions marked by one-sided combat, I could lose control completely. Screaming. Swearing. Crying. Impulsively bursting out of the house for midnight runs. I had never experienced such acute anxiety. For the first time, I began to have hyperventilating panic attacks and episodes of agoraphobia, a paralyzing fear of being in public places.

One day I'd broken into hysterical tears and hyperventilated as the four of us drove to McDonald's. I pled with Tim to take me home and go by himself with the kids. I then called Dr. Padgett, asking him if I could take a stronger anti-anxiety medication. As it was late Friday afternoon, he prescribed one over the phone. I remember him telling me that Mellaril had a 1-in-100,000 chance of causing seizurelike convulsions. But I didn't think much of it. Besides, with as many illegal drugs as I'd used in my day, I wasn't too concerned about one that was actually legal, pharmaceutical, and prescribed.

“Come on, Rachel.
Count!
Ten, nine, eight, seven … Please, please, do this.
Please!
Ten, nine, eight …”

I was lying on the bed, Tim's face just inches above mine. He was frantic. I wished he'd quit bothering me and just let me sleep. I closed my eyes. “No. No.” Tim was now shaking me vigorously. “Don't sleep! Come on, let's count. Ten, nine, eight …”

“Okay, okay,” I relented, anything to appease him so he'd leave me alone. “Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one. I did it, all right? Now will you let me sleep?”

“Rachel,” he said, noticeably relieved I had responded. “You have to stay awake. You had a seizure. Dr. Padgett told me to keep you awake for at least an hour or two.”