The Truth

Roger

The average patient stayed six to eight weeks. After two weeks I was already panicked about how soon it would be over. In the end I stayed for twelve weeks, but I didn't anticipate that until it became clear in the eighth week that I wasn't ready.

"I still have no idea what I'm going to do once I leave," I said to Roger, my therapist.

"You don't know what or you don't know how?"

"Both, I suppose. Everything that I can think of is out of bounds for me. University is too expensive - and it's too much of a risk to take a student loan when chances are I'll be doing the wrong degree. I don't want a job unless it's a sinecure. I don't think I could handle anything difficult."

"What makes you so certain that you can't?"

"Um, I'm crap. I've never learned how to do anything."

"You believe you're incapable. Do you have evidence to back this up?"

"Two decades worth."

"Do you have any evidence to the contrary?"

"I did well in school. I was always the editor of the school newsletters."

"I've seen a lot of assurance of your intellectual and linguistic capabilities."

"I could be a journalist," I said, always the imagined go-to. "But I don't know enough about anything to write articles on."

"You think that you have to know everything first," he said. He always managed to manipulate my words. As coherent as I was, he saw every flaw in my assumptions.

"I'm too scared of failure not to."

"And that fear of failure. Why does failure terrify you?"

We never came to practical conclusions in those sessions. I'd sometimes leave feeling empowered, but that would quickly revert back to what I knew to be the truth.

In my third week at Tara, I started the DBT programme that is standard at all South African institutions. Dialectic Behavioural Therapy combines Cognitive Behavioural Therapy with Eastern mindfulness. I'm a skeptic. I sat quietly in sessions, questioning everything the psychologists told us.

While Roger had nothing to say to convince me otherwise, Josh initially had plenty to heighten my cynicism. This was before he was brought down a level by Sam. He did not realise how counterproductive he was being. When the staff told him they felt he wasn't taking the course seriously, he did not understand why. He had been in another institution earlier in the year, and it had not helped. He could not afford another failure.

"I am taking it seriously," he told us. "I know this is my last chance. If I leave here without a solution, I'm fucked."

But he had spent every session thus far constantly challenging, trying to get a clear answer why DBT would help him. We all could see that he wasn't willing to trust them. I totally commiserated. How could I trust something so very unscientific?

Not long after, I lost my ally. His nurse-therapist, Delray, convinced him to take the plunge.

"Has intellectualising worked for you up to now?" she asked him. It was not her words that had the necessary impact. Delray had a strength of character that made her a favourite amongst those who got close to her. The rest of us resented the iron fist with which she enforced the rules. I sometimes wonder how different things would have been if I'd been paired with Delray. Maybe I would have recovered. Probably not.

DBT drifted past me like everything else in my life, and by the time I should have been discharged I still felt like I had learnt nothing. The staff agreed. They made me stay.