🎧You Think You Can Do It Alone | Chapter 7

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Group therapy has to go. That’s the first mistake I make on the wrong path to mental health recovery. Stopping therapy seems to make sense. If someone is mentally healthy, she isn’t in a group program that’s part of the partial hospitalization program she was once in. Having been in a hospitalization program means something was terribly, irrevocably wrong with me.

It’s embarrassing to recall how on Thanksgiving at ten in the morning, the other patients and I sat in the facility’s test kitchen making mini apple pies. We weren’t allowed near the ovens. Or the knives. The assumption wasn’t necessarily that we were potentially dangerous, but the program couldn’t open itself to lawsuits. Still, not being allowed near knives and an oven at forty-six was humiliating.

There’s no reason it should have been. The program was a lifeline. Having been in an acute psychiatric crisis (which usually means someone has ended up suicidal, psychotic, volatile, or manic), I needed its stability and routine.

We watched as one counselor cut a cored, peeled apple in half, then quarters, then eighths. His knife skills were poor, and I worried he’d cut himself.

The other counselor, a no-nonsense woman with red hair that reached her waist, walked over to help him. She nimbly took an apple from the bowl and brought the knife down on them with a whack!

A third counselor handed out mini disposable pie pans. She placed one in front of each of us, almost rhythmically in sync with the whacks! coming from the cutting board area.

The petiteness of the pies was infantilizing. Or maybe the fact that it was mid-morning and way too early for pie.

Of course, the point isn’t the pie. It wasn’t about making a delicious dessert to savor. The pie represented a manageable goal people like us could be proud of—something within our grasp to achieve, albeit without access to sharp objects.

I did as I was told but with an attitude. Reluctantly, I put the sugar- and butter-coated apple slices in the tin and covered them with strips of dough.

If there’d been talk of healing in the program, if I’d thought making a lilliputian pie was going to lead me closer to recovery, I would have gladly done it. Instead, we were given “skills” (CBT, DBT, ACT, mindfulness, etc., etc.) and invited to cry and vent in group therapy and individual therapy sessions and required to express ourselves in art therapy in what felt like a vacuum. Goals beyond the management of our symptoms weren’t for us to contemplate.

So I think getting away from that—far away—is the answer.

*

My sister lifts the orchid off her countertop and places it in the sink. My niece and nephew are at school, and my brother-in-law is at work. The house somehow still feels full of people. It’s a home belonging to a family, a clan all their own.

I’ve told her I want to stop going to group therapy, which I’ve been attending weekly.

Carefully, my sister turns on the tap—just a bit—giving the orchid precisely the right amount of water. “Are you sure you’ll be okay without it?”

My sister is thin and strong. I think of her as wearing glasses, which she did for much of our childhood and throughout her teens, but she had laser surgery decades ago, and her vision has been twenty-twenty ever since. She’s let her dark hair gray and is one of those women who looks even more beautiful—and formidable—for doing so.

Before I can answer, she says, “Maybe right now isn’t the best time.” She places the orchid on a paper towel to let the excess water seep from the soil. It will be perfectly hydrated and won’t succumb to root rot. “Just wait a while. Maybe until you’re—”  The paper towel is already soaked with excess water. She switches it out with a dry one. “Until you’re sure.”

“I might try it,” I say. “See how it goes.”

If I’d googled the words mental health recovery, I would have discovered that recovery and therapy—or any other kind of treatment—aren’t mutually exclusive. Healing doesn’t necessarily mean leaving the mental health system.

*

At my next appointment, Dr. R’s pants shimmer in the sunlight from the window. I sip the lukewarm cappuccino I bought on the way to his office.

“How’s it going?” he asks, bobbing his head affirmatively.

The withdrawal effects haven’t improved. I want to ask him about the Google executive he mentioned, the one who healed completely, and find out if she’s the exception. Did she go to therapy? How did she heal?

But I don’t want to ask him because what if he says the Google executive is, in fact, a unicorn? What if Google-executive types have some other-worldly power to heal, something I don’t have? Like many people, I still don’t believe mental health recovery happens.

Dr. R leans back in his chair.

I tell him I’ve stopped going to group.

His eyebrows raise, but he continues to nod affirmatively. “Why?”

I shrug and say I just don’t need to go to group anymore.

Really, it’s because there’s no guide to recovery. He’s all I have, and I’m not using him or group or a therapist as a resource. I should. Of course, I should.

I pick up my cup of coffee and pause before bringing it to my lips. “I wanted to ask you about—”

He nods, encouragingly.

I shake my head. “Nothing.”

“You sure?” he asks.

I nod, uncertain, still believing I have to go this alone.

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