"Changes" they called it. One week out of the five where you are essentially locked in a basement with 3 or 4 other people to live out their worst fears and horrific memories and most colourful neuroses. You must speak only to those people, eat at a special table with those people each day and meet with those people alone at night for a check in and prayer. It is intense. Why the f*ck it has to be held in a basement is anyone's guess but I think it was a subliminal message about where you are supposed to go during Changes. Oh yeah, and there is no god damn coffee, its all decaf.
You do "family constellations" where each person arranges you around the room in different positions, as their inner child, their wounded 8 year old and their higher power. You then go into a psychodrama (yes, thats what it is called, not just a name I made up for it) where you all act out how you feel based on where you have been placed. The wounded 8 year old might be curled up in a corner or have utter supremacy over the inner child. They might all be standing up facing into different corners. The sky is the limit with madness.
It was a pretty special week, mostly for how out of control WEIRD it was. I played Ronnie's sexually abusive aunt in a role play. Margaret cried because she was on so many drugs she had not felt emotion for years and the therapist told her she was boring. Marni wrote a story about food that somehow led to a revelation that her mother had sexually abused her for years. And Bec, beautiful gentle Bec. When she was on wake up duty for a week she would wake me each morning by whispering in my ear "morning darling. Wake up sweetie. Its morning. Are you coming on the beach walk?" As opposed to the chick who had been in the army and sort of barked into the ward "Its 0h-six hundred. All those participating in the beach walk must rise now."
Bec was in for bulemia. I never heard much of what got her there or why she had decided to get help. But one day in Changes it emerged that she had spent 7 years of her childhood being raped by her brother. When she finally told a doctor in a hospital, which she was made to attend due to 'unnatural injuries' for a 14 year old, her parents called her a liar and made her apologise to her brother in front of the whole family, for bringing shame on the family and slandering their star athlete. I was of the view that would send anyone mental. She decided to eat heaps so no one would do those things to her again. She had some boyfriend waiting for her on the outside who didn't sound like a great guy. I always wondered what happened to Bec.
There was Adelphi, the aboriginal girl with a picture of herself in a hospital bed the day she had an abortion. She sang like an angel, in the stairwells at night, and we would all go and sit in there and listen to her. Her favourite song to sing was "Me and a Gun" by Tori Amos. She was so beautiful to look at. She cried when she saw pictures of babies. I think she was 15.
There was Caroline from the army who I took an instant dislike to. She wrote me heaps of warped hate mail, which I considered rather unnecessary seeing as we were patients in a hospital with a whole 40 residents at the time. I engineered some bizarre plan to have her thrown out by provoking her to violence, the only real deal breaker, besides having contraband. It worked. My cheek hurt, she was pretty strong. I always wondered what happened to her. I don't think she even needed to be there but maybe went for attention, although it clearly was not my call. I made moral judgements about everyone in there and took their moral inventories for them. I was still in the thick of it.
I didn't get better.
"Thanks you so much for all of your love and support" I wrote in an impassioned and emo letter to my girls at the end.
"Hahahaha" wrote Anna. "You know you'll probably be back there one day. But we love you for who you are."
"No. I'm never going back."
They are putting me back in on Monday or Tuesday. I love him and want to keep him but he deserves better than the sick and confusing business he has been going through. I don't want to be locked up. I don't want to be a failure. I don't want the f*cking River Phoenix award or have that expression "if you can't be a good example, at least be a horrible warning" apply to me. I currently feel that it does. My old convent school would love this sinner/fallen angel sh*t. I believe they would link it to straying from God. Perhaps not incorrectly.
I want to get better.
