Don’t panic, stay in the moment, therapist counsels

Editor’s Note: This is the 38th in a series of stories researched during Don and Nancy Harrison’s 50th Wedding Anniversary cruise from Sydney, Australia, to San Diego.  Previous installments of the series, which runs every Thursday, may be found by tapping the number of the  installment: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7,8, 9, 10, 11, 12,13, 14,15, 16, 17, 18,19,20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37

By Donald H. Harrison

AT SEA, Aboard MS Maasdam –As retired therapist Adrienne (Nodelman) O’Hare, 79, reviewed her career, I could sense that she was seeing in her mind’s inner eye the face of one of her former patients in the psychiatric ward of a Tucson hospital.  On her first day as a student intern, a patient suddenly came up to O’Hare.  She had “bad teeth, bad breath, and bad skin, and starts talking to me in ‘word salad.’”

“Word salad?” I asked, across a table in the Lido Café where we were enjoying a coffee break.

“If you took a newspaper and cut up every single word, then threw it up in the air, and then picked up the words, that was her pattern of speech,” O’Hare explained.  “It sounds like gibberish.”

Today, O’Hare wears her hair blonde, but at various periods in her life, “whenever I wanted to do something powerful, I would dye my hair red,” she said.  That was its color during this unscheduled encounter with the psychiatric patient.  Five words among the patient’s many disconnected words caught O’Hare’s ear.  “Beautiful,” “red,”  “hair,” “teacher,” and Brooklyn.”

“Thank you,” O’Hare responded to the woman.  “You like my red hair.  I like it too.”   And, “You can tell from my accent that I am from Brooklyn, is that right?”

In response, the woman started to cry, not in frustration, but in relief.  Finally, someone had understood something that she was trying to say.  “It took my breath away,” O’Hare recalled.  “There was a woman trapped in there by a misfiring brain.”

Having worked with other patients who had brain injuries, O’Hare said she understood that the impact of injuries varies greatly.  “There was one guy in our brain injury group who was the sweetest guy.  He would say to me, ‘Hi, Red, how are you doing?’  But if you asked him three things in a row, he couldn’t function.  In a hospital, he could keep it together, but outside he couldn’t.”

Another patient “would meet me at the door and he would try to argue with me in word salad, the whole way to my office.  To get there, I had to go through a set of locked doors, so he couldn’t get in unless I took him in.  He would be jabbering the whole time.”

One day, when O’Hare was perusing the headlines on the front pages of the newspapers at the nurses’ station, she realized that the words in the headlines may have been ingredients in his word salad.   “So, each day I made sure to  look at the headlines of all the newspapers and when the man would mention a word from the headline—or perhaps a name—I could respond with a comment of her own. “He knew that I knew what he was saying, and he appreciated it.”

These chance meetings were apart from her regular job employing the techniques of both cognitive therapy and art therapy to help patients find solutions in life.

“I believe, how you speak to yourself creates how you feel,” O’Hare told me. “Feelings are not independent from how you think about things.  You are having  internal conversations with yourself even before you have feelings.”

Knowing this, she said, she departed from standard art therapy protocols, in which patients are encouraged to express their feelings by making art.  In an unstructured situation they can experience “free-wielding internal dialogue, tearing at old wounds, again and again, rather than managing their thinking,” she said.  “I wanted to help them learn the skills to manage their internal conversations, and be able to take action. So, I tried a more structured approach, viewing pictures, to introduce aspects of cognitive therapy techniques. I started by collecting three sets of pictures – one a set of animals, another a set of single people doing different things, and third, a set of people in groups.”

O’Hare distributed the pictures and asked the patients to tell stories about them.  Looking at a picture, someone in the group might decide that one of the people photographed seemed “very, very depressed.”   Such a comment would be a jumping off point for O’Hare.  “What would you tell this person?” she would ask.  “Soon the whole room would be talking about solutions to this story. Basically, I was training them, using pictures, to look at a situation and decide what kind of conversations you can have about that.  The idea was to train them to reach solutions.  Then we could have private sessions, in which we employed cognitive therapy.”

In those private sessions, O’Hare said, she would ask such questions as “if I had a magic wand that could make your life better, what would your life look like?”  The patient would respond with some desired goal, to which O’Hare then would ask “Okay, what can we do to help move that forward?  Our group work was about solutions for other people.  But what one step could you take?  What is a realistic step you could take now?”

O’Hare told me that question – “What is a realistic step you could take now?’ – has been a centerpiece of the way she conducts her own life.

For example, she said, suppose she was driving along a freeway and her tire blew out, and with difficulty she navigated to the side of the road.   “I would have to talk myself down, perhaps.  My first response might be to panic but then I stop, and I take deep breaths, and I try to focus just on the moment and on solutions.  I don’t catastrophize.  I ask myself ‘What can I do now?’  Getting into the moment, it is really important to be present.”

“Catastrophize?” I asked.

“My life as a kid was unpredictable and scary,” she said.  “I couldn’t tell what was going to happen next.  But somewhere I got to realize that the way I think is key.  You can’t change your circumstances, but you can change the way you think about them.  That’s been my practice, working to stay in the present moment.  When things get rough and I’m overwhelmed or frightened, I try to listen to the messages that I am telling myself. Staying in the present moment, telling myself that it’s going to be all right, or if it isn’t, that it is something that can be dealt with later, has gotten me through some traumatic events.”

O’Hare confided that when she was a child, her mother would beat her with a strap.  She remembers cringing in a corner, trying to ward off the blows.  When she was a student at Brooklyn College, but still a minor, she wanted to participate in group counseling.  That required a permission slip from her mother.  “So, she comes into this waiting room and started screaming, ‘What are you doing to me?’  She sounded like a Banshee, unbelievable, and I hid because if she would start beating me in public, that was a humiliation I couldn’t take.  After that scene, they gave me free counseling after that; they didn’t ask for permission.”

O’Hare obtained a bachelor’s degree in psychology and an elementary school teaching credential from Brooklyn College.  At her first student teaching job in Brooklyn, she was in front of the classroom when her mother burst in, waving O’Hare’s diary, in which O’Hare had written about a young man who had kissed her after helping her to fix her bicycle chain.  Her mother  “was screaming and literally dragged me out.”  School authorities decided to have O’Hare transferred to another elementary school, this one in a predominantly Puerto Rican section of Brooklyn, known as Bedford Stuyvesant.  “Few of my students spoke English and they were so eager to learn.  They were wonderful,” she recalled. “I was drawing little pictures, basically making Hispanic Dick and Jane type books for them.”  So rewarding was the experience, she said, “that I started to get that I had to create a life of purpose and that I always had to listen for where I was needed.”

After marrying her first husband, David Margules, and moving to Ann Arbor, Michigan, she had two daughters, one right after the other, named Stacey and Shawn.  The family moved on to Philadelphia, where David served as a faculty member at Temple University, and O’Hare earned a master’s degree in educational psychology.  The marriage was volatile and after 17 ½ years it ended.  Suddenly a single mother, with two children, O’Hare had to go on welfare.

During this time, O’Hare said, she became more self-sufficient.  “I had never written a check prior to this; he did all the household expenses.  I had an allowance; remember, this was almost 50 years ago.”

She was able to move to Boston, where a temporary employment agency placed her with a company that sold educational testing materials.  She became a salesperson, dealing with school districts across Massachusetts.  Before buying the testing materials from her, small districts often would check with the Boards of Education in Boston and Worcester.  This happened so often, that her name become quite well known.  At one point she successfully applied for a school district job in Worcester, becoming part of a team implementing educational opportunities for students with disabilities.  “I would find people in the community with handicaps who were success stories and publicize them” to show the importance of such programming, she said. “A neighbor alerted us, after reading one of my articles, to a teenager who never attended school and taught herself English by listening to the television.  She learned to read Braille, and by the age of 21 was able to enroll in college.

Next, O’Hare took a job with the Massachusetts Department of Education in Boston, a half-time position that enabled her to continue working in Worcester.  However, the Massachusetts Legislature voted to abolish the Department of Education, leaving O’Hare with just the half job in Worcester.   “At the same time,” she said, “my parents who had retired to Tucson, were urging Stacey and Shawn to consider transferring to college there because the last two winters of 1978 and 1979 in the Northeast had terrible blizzards.  Shawn, who today is a PhD in rhetoric and composition, agreed. Stacey, who later would become a medical doctor, said “if Shawn goes, I will go,” and then O’Hare said, “Okay, we will all go.”  The family moved to Arizona in 1980. In Tucson, O’Hare went to work as a therapist in an incest group for child protective services. She also earned a Post Master’s in Art Therapy from the University of Arizona.

Adrienne initially met Larry O’Hare at a self-development program sponsored by Landmark Worldwide, later seeing him again at a wedding.  She describes their interaction at the wedding in fairy tale terms.  “We talked, and somewhere in the talking, I realized that this was the guy, and he must have realized that this was the girl.  He asked me to dance …. If you have ever seen a pas de deux; the whole dance floor empties and there is no one else for miles; it was really amazing.”

Ceremonies involving the bride and groom intervened, and “we got separated.  Then he comes over to say goodbye to me, asks for my number, and says he will call me, and I say ‘When?’  And he said ‘Monday before 5 p.m.’  I waited for that phone call all day, and he called a few moments before 5.  Until then I was really having conniptions.”

They went to the movies, she deciding to take him, an Irish Catholic, to see The Chosen, a movie based on the Chaim Potok book about the friendship of two Orthodox Jewish boys, one the son of a professor, the other the son of a rebbe.  “We were holding hands in the movie,” she recalled.  Before the evening was done, they knew they were a couple.  A week later, at the next meeting of Landmark Worldwide, “I walked in with him.   That was that.”

In the 33 years since their marriage, Larry, a realtor, has learned a lot about Judaism.  At our dinner table aboard the MS Maasdam, he would listen quietly as the conversation turned to Jewish subjects, sometimes asking for a clarification, always expressing interest and delight in learning more about Adrienne’s world.

As a couple, the O’Hares are involved in art.  They serve as docents at the Tucson Museum of Art, and are co-leaders in an art program for seniors, in which Adrienne models a technique, and the students follow.

As a Jew, she says, she believes her purpose is to help heal the world, tikkun olam.  Given the way her life developed, she said, with incidents that might have been bad leading to good (being transferred from her teaching job in Brooklyn, for example), she expressed the belief that there is a “real force” guiding her life. She said she believes that some things, no matter how they seem, are bashert, intended.  “I think there is a positive power in life.”

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Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World.  He may be contacted via donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com