13 April 06

Psychotherapy with Dr O (Part 2)

Dr O was listening to Beethoven and reading Synaptic Self by Joseph LeDoux. He read my homework: a thought journal detailing my recent nightmares about being chased and shot, and a description of the anxiety I experienced when asked to speak at a Smart Recovery class. I was expecting him to begin by stating how I'd scored on the personality test.
“Why do you do yoga?”
“Because I’m trying to achieve some balance in my life.”
“Yoga means union. In the context of universal energy, you need to increase your awareness of the universality of your life.”
“How does that relate to my problems?”
“What do you want to do with your problems?”
“Get rid of them.”
“All energy is constant through the universe, psychic energy or whatever. If you get rid of your problems, then you must consider what you are going to put in their locations. You must clarify your thinking, and consider multiple solutions to your problems. Do you have hermit fantasies?”
“It’s funny you should ask that because a friend recently called me the quintessential hermit. I certainly don’t come out of my cell very often.”
“Using phrases, you can redefine yourself, and challenge your own assumptions. You can redefine your language using yoga, by changing your thinking, and thinking comfortably.”
“How did I do on the personality test?”
“Primarily, you showed an anxiety disorder, and also social detachment – which is an inability to socialize, not antisocial. In the sub categories, physiological stress shows, and anxious thinking, inability to relate to others, your need for attention is high, sense of importance is quite high.”
“High enough for delusions of grandeur?”
“No. Just high. Take the quite off. Your level of looking for cheap thrills is high. You have polysubstance abuse, anxiety, and borderline tendencies. You have a fear of being abandoned.”
“How high?”
“High enough.”
“If I have a polysubstance-abuse problem, yet drugs are readily available in prison, then how come I’m not doing drugs?”
“Your problem is in remission due to prison. Getting arrested was a slap upside your head. You realised, ‘Holy shit. What have I been doing?’ If you hadn’t been arrested would you still be doing rave parties?”
“I honestly don’t know. I was tapering that activity off, but who’s to say whether I’d get stressed out and go wild again. I see how vulnerable I can be.”
"You obtained a definition of who you were through partying. On drugs, your anxiety went away. You surrounded yourself with folks in similar situations, and there’s generally no true bonding in those environments. The club drugs you did caused a cascade of neurotransmitters. With huge amounts of drugs in the system, the brain operates at another level. Studies of substance abuse have shown volumetric reductions in the limbic system and short-term memory areas. You also show a sense of lack of social skills.”
“When I was asked to read at the Smart Recovery class, I felt I was drowning. All that existed was me and the booklet I was reading from. I ended up gasping for air, and my nose started running. I’ve only got like that in recent years. After I was arrested, at the Towers jail, I volunteered to read a passage from the Bible in a packed room. I did it easily and coherently, and I was praised by the priest afterwards. Ask me to read in front of people now, and I become a basket case.”
“Are you familiar with the fight or flight response?”
“Yes. When you feel threatened the chemicals in your body prepare you to either fight or run for it.”
“What about the third response: freeze?”
“Like the deer in the headlights?”
“Yes. This happens with most primates. During freeze, all that exists in the world are themselves and the thing they are looking at.”
“Like the pages I was struggling to read.”
“Yes. The situation seemed worse than it was. You needed to step back and breath. You weren’t breathing effectively.
“But it was pages long, and I was trying to get through it as quickly as possible to end my discomfort.”
“Then you should have stopped, and took a deep breath at the end of each paragraph. Your discomfort was a state of mind. Your classmates were not going to beat you up because of the way you were reading. The situation was in control, and you were not. You must learn to be able to say to yourself, ‘I’m going to do what I can do today, no matter who is in front of me.'”
“OK, I’ll try,” I said. “From looking at my test results, can you tell me where my mental-health problems sit in comparison to an average person?”
“If I told you that, I fear you would use it as an excuse to say that’s who I am.”
“But I’m trying to learn about these problems, including doing a psychology correspondence course, to help understand myself, and to get better.
“Do you think a medical student doing a correspondence course could successfully perform an appendectomy?”
“No, of course not. But at least I’m making an effort.”
“I don’t want you to beat yourself up with labels. I want you to be able to say to yourself. ‘I am perfect’,”
“But isn’t that egotistical?”
“No. I would like you to consider that in the context of your yoga. Read about your connection to the universal. And for your homework, I’d like you to observe, and to write down positive and negative thoughts – but don’t do another nightmare journal. I’m trying to raise your awareness of your thinking.”
“You’ve begun to do that already, by making light of my panic in the classroom. I appreciate your help."

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