Seeing Through the Cracks

Chapter 17

Jake is adjusting well, being away from university and now home again. He is taking daily walks and has started participating in my fitness classes, working with my personal trainer. He finds this is really helping to lift him out of the fog he's been in and to adjust back to a daytime schedule.

A week later Jake meets for the first time with his counsellor, a local social worker, and with whom Jake immediately feels comfortable. We are fortunate that we could skip the waiting list and that Jake now has the help of a therapist. Jake had many concerns about counselling before entering into it, and he is quite nervous. He mentioned to me earlier that he didn't know how he would talk or what kinds of things he should discuss. I explained that the therapist would know how to prompt Jake with questions to get a discussion started. I had also had an opportunity to speak with the counsellor, on the phone and made him aware of the events that led up to Jake needing to see him, before the first session began. After we spoke, I felt confident that Jake would open up under the counsellor's guidance.

But I have another concern, and I will have to learn to let it go and trust in the process. As Jake is an adult I will not be privy to what is discussed during their time together, unless he is willing to share it. I don't want him to feel that he has to share; I want to give him the space to work it out independently. However, I also know that Jake has been lying to himself and to me for the past many months, and I do have concerns about how honest he will be with the counsellor. Until he recognizes just how deeply serious this ordeal is, he may have a tendency to downplay it. This will be the first litmus test, a testament to Jake's desire to get better, to get truly healthier at an emotional level. I am comforted that Jake has someone objective to share his feelings with, and I am relieved when Jake comes out of the first hour saying that it was good to see someone and easy to talk to his new therapist. He said that once he got started, he talked and talked and talked until time was up. He tells me that he has also been given an exercise by the counsellor to do before his next session in a week's time.

Jake and I start spending a lot of time together, which allows us to talk a lot about what had transpired for us in the last several months. We have many discussions about the details of Jake's living environment while he was at university, how he managed to remain holed up in his dorm room and under the radar for so long, and about his unrelenting draw to video gaming, which was spending all of his waking hours. It becomes quite apparent that he hadn't stopped the video gaming habit since he'd been home. Although I had worked to put him back on a daytime schedule at home, at the end of August, once he got back to university and had the freedom to make his own choices, he was powerfully drawn back to gaming. He felt afraid and alone, back at school. He immediately got back on line and started pulling all-nighters, explaining that being alone with himself and his overactive brain was almost painful, from which gaming was an easy escape. He didn't have to think about anything but the game and getting to the next level. He felt this gave him purpose, but what it was giving him was an escape from reality. It was a virtual world that didn't in any way help him meet his goals in life. The more we talk, the more Jake recognizes that gaming provides a chemical high and an escape that he can't seem to get anywhere else. And he's also built what he considers some very meaningful friendships in the online world. It has been his nocturnal, virtual social life. I feel so sad knowing Jake has been living in such a sad, isolated environment, cut off from the day to day activities and routine of university life. It pains me to know that he was suffering, and he felt the only way to cope was to hide out, in the middle of the night, in a virtual world. To know that he wasn't taking care of his basic needs, not grooming and barely eating, just breaks my heart. But I also understand why he felt the need to escape, and it's apparent that he wanted to find a way that worked for him, at the time. He needed to go to this low, dark period, to check out of what seemed like a time filled with too much pressure. It was providing him with temporary relief, and that's about all that he could manage at the time.