The Schopenhauer Cure(75)
“If I were to ratchet up a notch or two,” Gill replied without hesitation, “I’d tell the group I was an alcoholic and that I drink myself to unconsciousness every night.”
The group was stunned, Julius no less than the others. Before he had brought Gill into the group, he had seen him in individual therapy for two years and never, not once, had Gill mentioned an alcohol problem. How could this be? Julius was congenitally trusting of his patients. He was one of those optimistic souls who was greatly destabilized by duplicity; he felt wobbly and needed time to formulate a new vision of Gill. As he mused silently about his own na?veté and the tenuousness of reality, the mood of the group darkened and progressed from incredulousness to stridency.
“What, you’re joking!”
“I can’t believe it. How could you have come here week after week and withhold this?”
“You never took a drink with me, not even a beer. What was that all about?”
“Goddamn it! When I think of all the wild-goose chases you led us on, all the time we wasted.”
“What kind of game were you playing?—everything a lie—I mean that stuff about Rose’s problems—her bitchiness, her refusing sex, her refusal to have a child, and not a word about the real issue—your drinking.”
Once Julius got his bearings, he understood what to do. A basic axiom that he taught to his group therapy students was: Members should never be punished for self-disclosure. On the contrary, risk taking must always be supported and reinforced.
With that in mind, he said to the group: “I understand your dismay that Gill never told us this before. But let’s not forget one important thing: today Gill did open up, he did trust us.” As he spoke, he glanced, only for a moment, at Philip, hoping that Philip would learn something about therapy from this transaction. Then to Gill: “What I’m wondering about is what made it possible for you to take this kind of chance today?”
Gill, too ashamed to face the others, concentrated his attention on Julius and replied in a chastened tone. “I guess it was the risky revealing in the last couple of meetings—beginning with Pam and Philip and then Rebecca and Stuart—I’m pretty sure that was why I could say—”
“How long?” interrupted Rebecca. “How long have you been an alcoholic?”
“Creeps up on you, you know, so I’m not sure. I always liked the booze, but I guess I started meeting all the criteria about five years ago.”
“You’re what kind of an alcoholic?” asked Tony.
“My favorite poison is Scotch, cabernet, and black Russians. But I don’t turn down anything—vodka, gin—totally ambidextrous.”
“What I meant was ‘when’ and ‘how much,’” said Tony.
Gill showed no defensiveness and seemed prepared to answer any question. “Mostly after hours. I start with Scotches as soon as I get home (or before I get home if Rose is giving me a hard time), and then I work my way through good wine the rest of the evening—at least a bottle, sometimes two, until I pass out in front of the TV.”
“Where’s Rose on this?” asked Pam.
“Well, we used to be big wine buffs together, built a two-thousand-bottle cellar, went to auctions. But she’s not encouraging my drinking now—now she rarely has a glass at dinner and wants no part of any wine-related activities, except for some of her big social wine-tasting events.”
Julius tried again to buck the current and bring the group back to the here-and-now. “I’m trying to imagine how you must have felt coming to meeting after meeting here and not talking about this.”
“It wasn’t easy,” Gill admitted, shaking his head.
Julius always taught students the difference between vertical and horizontal self-disclosure. The group was pressing, as expected, for vertical disclosure—details about the past, including such queries as the scope and duration of his drinking—whereas horizontal disclosure, that is, disclosure about the disclosure, was always far more productive.
This meeting was vintage stuff for teaching, Julius mused, and he reminded himself to remember the sequence of events for future lectures and writing. And then, with a thud, he recalled that the future had no relevance for him. Though the poisonous black wart had been carved out of his shoulder, he knew that somewhere in his body lethal colonies of melanoma remained, voracious cells that craved life more than his own fatigued cells. They were there, pulsating, gulping oxygen and nutrients, growing and gathering strength. And his dark thoughts were always there also, percolating under the membrane of consciousness. Thank God for his one method of stilling his terror: entering into life as forcefully as possible. The extraordinarily intense life being lived in this group was very good medicine for him.
He pressed Gill, “Say more about what passed through your mind during all those months of group meetings.”
“What do you mean?” said Gill.
“Well, you said, ‘It wasn’t easy.’ Say more about that, about those meetings and why it wasn’t easy.”
“I’d come here all primed but never could unload; something always stopped me.”
“Dig into that—the something that stopped you.” Julius rarely was so directive in the group, but he was convinced that he knew how to move the discussion in a beneficial direction that the group might not take on its own.