I suppose I should have seen this coming, should have anticipated the inevitable backlash. Doubt doesn’t like me conjuring up hopeful images of the future, not even for just a few minutes as I somehow managed to do in Wayne Manning’s office. Now there is hell to pay, and Doubt is collecting from high atop a director’s chair, barking Take that! through a megaphone, plotting new and twisted ways to cast me as a villain, and stealing script ideas from the very news stories I read day after day. It’s the same little trick that led me from that news item about hepatitis C to countless hours of hand-scrubbing ever since.
The pattern soon becomes all too familiar. One afternoon, Kitty and I do a story about a house burning down because of dead batteries in a smoke detector, and that night, I lie awake reviewing tapes of every house and apartment in which I ever lived. Did I leave any of their smoke detectors inoperable or without fully charged batteries? Another afternoon we cover an embezzlement story, and hours later in bed, I toss and turn my way through tape after tape spanning years’ worth of jobs. Did I ever fail to return company property—binders, reference books, rulers, anything?
And so it goes day after day, week after week, until Doubt grinds me down and leaves me defenseless. I have no fight left in me, none, when yet another freeway episode from my distant past grabs hold of me, so I start looking for relief at any cost.
I come up with a plan. If I can just have a peek at this stretch of Highway 280 (more than a hundred miles from home), then I can figure things out and be done for good with this entire mess.
“That’s a trap, and you know it,” Samantha tells me, when I run the idea by her. “We’ve been through this before. So many times!”
“This one’s different,” I protest.
“You say that about all of them.”
“I just don’t know what else to do.”
“Go back and see Wayne.”
“No. We had closure,” I say. “We wrapped up our sessions on such a positive note. I don’t want to go messing with that.”
Samantha can’t understand this. “Okay,” she says, “then give Jackie a call.”
“Too awkward. I pretty much sent her packing the last time we talked.”
“Fine. Then you come up with a plan.”
“I did,” I remind her. “That’s why I want to call in sick tomorrow and go to the Bay Area.”
Sam is running out of patience with me. As of late, her pity and compassion are turning to frustration and anger. I know she’s feeling helpless. Or worse yet, ignored.
“Okay, I’ll call Jackie,” I finally concede. I say it as if I’m doing her a favor, when in fact I know it’s the other way around.
Jackie and I talk for an hour the following morning. Like a home-cooked meal after weeks on the road, our conversation reminds me of what it is I’ve been missing. The firm coaching. The frank talk. The familiarity of it all. We cover the old freeway incident and my new obsession with making amends. We talk about coping strategies. By the time our session is over, I’m ready to get things back on track, to talk on the phone on a regular basis. But Jackie tells me we’ve exhausted that route, that what I really need now is someone I can see in person. She knows a guy in Sacramento.
His name is Dr. Z, and I surprise myself by making and keeping an appointment with him. Nice man. Great credentials. Knows his stuff inside and out. But by the time we wrap up our first session, I know I can’t do this again. Can’t start all over with yet another shrink. My head’s just not in it, which I suppose is the crux of the problem.
A week later, I am implementing my original plan. I win. Sam loses. And she loses big, since she is the one driving me down Highway 280, once each direction past my point of concern, as the two of us negotiated after another drawn-out debate over what I need as a matter of survival.
“That’s all you get,” Sam says, just before looking over at me and nearly gasping when she sees what I’m doing.
“What?” I say, trying to downplay the fact that I have a video camera in my hand and am taping the freeway and everything around it. I need to get all this on tape, so I can play on my VCR what I’m already playing endlessly in my head.
It turns out my taping skills were atrocious. The video I managed to capture at 65 miles per hour is hardly helpful. Blurry, bouncy shots, mostly obscured by objects in the car and my own two hands. Still I play, rewind, and replay the Super-8 tape again and again, searching for any clues I might have missed before, much as I continue to do with my virtual tapes in the middle of the night.
Life is growing darker around the edges with each passing day. More fear. More guilt. More shame. And more bitterness. “Why me?” I catch myself whispering night after night. Why do I have to spend my life checking and rechecking, reviewing and re-creating? Why do I have to run around in the shadows hiding from kids and the homeless and potholes and germs? Why do I have to drive in circles and scrub my hands and call my wife every ten minutes? No one else I know seems to have these burdens. What have I done to deserve this living hell?
Shall we review? Doubt is right there, as always, with an editorial reply.
“How ’bout you call this Dr. Schwartz?” Samantha asks me one afternoon in mid-August, nearly two full months after my old freeway obsessions began.
Sam is referring to Dr. Jeffrey Schwartz, a UCLA psychiatrist and author of the most recent OCD book the two of us have read. It’s called Brain Lock, and it offers what’s billed as a four-step self-treatment program for struggling OCs.
Schwartz’s approach is similar to traditional cognitive behavioral therapy, with a couple of key distinctions. First, he introduces the concept of mindful awareness, encouraging OCs to make use of their own internal “Impartial Spectator,” to step back and see that their intrusive thoughts and irrational urges are simply obsessions and compulsions caused by a biochemical imbalance. And second, Schwartz advocates that OCs actively refocus their attention on something more constructive while trying to work around their persistent thoughts—play a game, prune plants in the garden, those kinds of things.
I like these tactics because they strike me as especially consistent with Jerry Jampolsky’s dueling directors model that I’ve been trying to use. Director Doubt is nothing more than my OCD, with a biological basis to boot. And as for the refocusing, isn’t that what Jampolsky’s young cancer patients have so successfully learned to do with their thoughts and attention?
“I’m serious. I think you should call him,” Samantha repeats.
“Dr. Schwartz?”
“Yeah.”
“Right. The guy’s been on Oprah, Leeza, and Extra. He’s really gonna have time to chat with me on the phone?”
“And you’ve got something to lose in trying?” Sam says. Or read between the lines: With Jackie and Wayne and that local guy out of the mix, who else are you going to turn to as you fall apart a little more every day?
I make the call, just to prove to Samantha that I’m right, that a guy in Schwartz’s league is inaccessible to someone like me.
It turns out though that I’m wrong about this. Not only does Dr. Jeffrey Schwartz return my call, he also agrees to set up a time when the two of us can discuss my challenges. We make plans to chat on August 26at 7:30 p.m.
At 7:29:30 on the designated evening I pick up the phone and call Dr. Schwartz’s L.A. number. Our conversation starts out just fine. I run though the basics of my particular obsessions and compulsions, and Schwartz assures me that my OCD patterns are rather typical. We talk for a while about his Four Step approach and how I’m trying to apply it, and then I decide to go for broke: What the hell, I’m going to get my money’s worth here and have this international authority put an end, once and for all, to my freeway incident. All I need is some comment like “Oh, that’s just your OCD” or “You do realize, don’t you, that this whole thing is all a bunch of garbage?” and chances are Doubt’s spell will be broken. I know I managed to sandbag Jackie a time or two with similar reassurance ploys—that is, until she called me on the carpet for what I was doing.
But Schwartz doesn’t bite when I launch into my story. Occasional questions are all he offers along the way. Maybe he too is onto my little checking game.
Or maybe he’s thinking that I’ve done something truly horrible!
Time runs out before I know it, and we arrange to pick things up one week from tonight. The phone receiver is shaking in my hand as I put it back in its cradle. My anxiety level is through the roof. It’s as if my brain is a cross-wired capacitor with no circuitry in place to discharge its current; any minute now the whole thing’s going to fry.
For almost an hour I hole up in the living room, replaying tonight’s phone conversation in my head again and again. Samantha checks in on me, hoping to hear that her latest suggestion has proved to be a good one. Instead she finds me rocking back and forth on the couch, keeping time with my body to Schwartz’s looping voice in my head.
“I take it your chat didn’t go so well?” Sam’s disappointment is written all over her face.
“I don’t know. All I can think about is how I presented the freeway incident and whether Schwartz thinks I am guilty.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Sam says. “Ludicrous. Jeff—”
“I dunno. It’s all so boggled in my head. I just wish we’d had more time.”
Sam checks her watch. “Call him back and see if he can talk for a few more minutes.” My wife wants so badly for this to work. For something to work.
I twist her comment around. I take it to mean that she too feels I need to convince Schwartz that there never was any real issue with the whole incident. That I am innocent.
Samantha goes to put the girls to bed. I pick up the phone.
“Dr. Schwartz? It’s Jeff Bell again. I know it’s late, but can I have just a little more of your time?”
Thirty minutes later I hang up the receiver a second time and again begin reviewing the call in my head. I am feeling much better about the whole guilt-or-innocence thing. That’s no longer an issue. But now there is something else: a clearly sarcastic crack Schwartz made about some argument I was using as being “the kind that leads patients to a hospital stay,” or something like that.
A hospital stay?!
He was just being sarcastic, I remind myself. He was just trying to make a point about illogical reasoning. I try to focus on all the positive, constructive suggestions Schwartz had offered.
But it’s too late. The words hospital stay have begun bouncing around my head, electronic pings like those of the old Pong video games.
Hospital-stay. Hospital-stay. Hospital-stay.
Soon I am in our master bathroom, rifling through all the drawers in the vanity, scrambling to find my old bottle of pills. Nearly nine months have passed since I stashed my remaining blue tablets somewhere in this room, promising myself that I’d never again become a slave to their power.
But what choice do I have? I need to whip myself into shape in a hurry. Before the men in white suits show up at my doorstep and haul me away for a hospital stay. I know OCs aren’t supposed to take medication without supervision. But I can’t wait for Dr. Schwartz or Jackie or any other professional to put me on some official drug program. The clock is ticking. Where are my damn pills?
“Sam?”
She is in bed, half awake if even that.
“I need to find my pills,” I whisper. “I’m going back on meds.”
No sound from the bed. I’m not sure the news has even registered. But I wonder, because on Samantha’s sleeping face there’s now a hint of a smile.
I continue to fumble in the drawers. Come on. Come on. Before I change my mind.
Finally. At the far back of the second drawer down, I feel a plastic bottle and pull it out where I can read the label.
Zoloft. Fifty milligrams. Take only as directed.
I know it’s Doubt directing me next as I close my eyes, open my mouth, and take this all too powerful pill that I’m certain is either going to save my life or end it right here.