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IN
CRISIS
(the strained world of therapy for a drug user)
I
I go into a room. Dark. Purposely dark. Artificial light infiltrates the
space between them and me. A nondescript picture hangs on the wall. A
couch, four chairs, two people and myself. It's difficult to think in
the dark. I watch the picture. I focus so hard that it becomes nothing.
They watch me. My every movement. Each flinch, each shudder. They ply
me with empathy. Speak my dark thoughts from their constipated textbooks.
Totem and taboo - explains everything… I turn towards the picture
and the colours drain onto the carpet.
I attempt to move - they corner me. Hung up like a crumpled dress, a torn dress, a dress you wouldn't be seen dead in. A dress that's familiar and old. Their words penetrate my skull. They tell me they will iron me out, stitch me up and wash me. I get the nauseating feeling that I am familiar to them. I imagine all the others who have sat in this chair, the deviant and possessed. They promise me redemption. They tell me how cold it must be in my world. They tell me I am separate from them - that I do not feel. I tell them I cannot feel in the context of words, my words are pale and insignificant. They tell me this is resistance. I am becoming the picture.
Their words gradually
erode the colours until just the frame is left. Carnivorously, more words
carve into the frame, smoothing down edges, chiseling holes and forming
elaborate patterns.
Then, quite suddenly they paint me in a frenzied whitewash. Bland, passive,
empty and transformed. White can be painted over with any colour. They
paint me black, shining a search light into me. Nowthey can see everything
they wanted to see yet I am
blind. Paralysed by their unnatural colours. Colour formations that are
alien to me. My purpose
bleeds away, my silence becoming a tourniquet. My thought process disbands
and I am taken away from myself.
I can leave the room at any time. How can I leave? I can't leave. I am in pieces on the floor. Every emotion, every facet of myself is explained, displayed, deplored. They pick up the pieces, severed skin, rotting marrow, torn sinew. They wear their neutrality like surgical gloves. A protection against infection. I am put into a box, repressed and neatly compressed. Somewhere within me I hear a scream, kicked inside by fear. I have been deconstructed by toxic words. I reconstruct myself with anger.
It's not like the whack of a belt or the penetration of dirty fingers. The bruising and blood disappear. Psychoanalysis is the purist form of violence. It is covert, quiet and sinister. It gets right up inside you and it's always right. From every angle, every time. It's the only language I know that is always right. Humanity is explained in the terms of the oral, anal and genital. Oedipus comes along, revisits you a few years later and if it doesn't work out, you end up in the dark room. The infected and the disinfected. A culture of germs to be identified examined and annihilated. Textbooks are their bible and it's written in your blood. They promise redemption. Redemption from what? They may as well call in a priest. It's more cost effective and less archaic.
I spent 3 months at
that 'Crisis Centre' and was subjected to what I can only describe as
brainwashing. I now vomit, metaphorically of course, at the mention of
the word 'relate', 'emotional nourishment', 'growth', and THAT CLINIC.
Anon
