A Variation Of Tea Ceremony

State Specific Learning

For the bulk of my life, starting at the age of twenty-four, I have practiced an archaic Japanese martial tradition. It was created in an era known in Japan as the Sengoku Jidai, the ‘Warring States Period, where rival warlords fought each other, pivoted and allied with their enemies and fought someone else. Contrary to the movie images of honorable samurai, it was an era rife with betrayal. Therefore, it was quite fitting that the introductory pattern drills in this martial system concerned offering another human being something to drink in a formal manner, concealing one’s intentions and instead, training to engender trust, and at the perfect moment, throw the cup and tray in their face and assassinate them. By this training alone, I should have been as ready for such an event as anyone alive, having repeated these pattern drills thousands of times.

Irwin

It wasn’t his name, but it will suffice.

Having returned to American after thirteen years in Japan, I soon began interning in mental health crisis intervention, where my responsibilities were the assessment of risk and clinical interventions to help people in suicidal states, psychotic episodes, profound disability or even aggressive or homicidal ideation. Aside from a year’s academic work in a very philosophically oriented program and a six month volunteer stint on a local crisis line, I knew absolutely nothing. As an intern, I started out being mentored by the other members of the team, four in number. One was expected to learn on the job.

I’d been there a couple days, working the phone, when the front desk transferred a call back, and a bright voice chirped, “I’vereallybeenstressedItookfiveof myLithiumisthatbad?” I didn’t know, Jane, my mentor for the day didn’t know, so she called poison control and they said if he didn’t currently have x, y, or z symptoms (he didn’t), it wasn’t necessary to send an ambulance, but we should get him to the ER, because the reaction to that mild-to-moderate overdose could be delayed, but still problematic. I told Irwin we’d be over shortly - it was a small town, he was no more than ten minutes from the clinic - and off we went. At our knock, he answered in pajamas, with wispy hair standing up on his head and a quizzical expression, looking like a baby bird that fell out of the nest too soon. He was talking in a non-stop stream—that, along with the prescribed medication, made it clear that he had bipolar disorder, currently in a manic state, and as he got a bathrobe and slippers—whygetdressedthey’llmakemegetinagownanywayandshowmyasstotheworld—he proudly pointed around the room, “Lookatthisoneandthisonetherearemoreinthenextroomthebathroomtoo!” Every projecting surface, every arm and back of a chair, every bit of moulding on the walls, was lined with matchbox cars, seven thousand, three hundred and fourteen, to be exact, and NONE of them glued, each balanced, many on two wheels. I thought if I sneezed, even stirred the air, the work of months would cascade to the floor.

So, we drove to the ER with Irwin in the back, safely buckled in, and walked him in, and the ER nurse said, “Hi Jane, whaddya got?” And Jane goes, “Irwin here OD’d on his lithium. Took five pills - 3000 mg, I think.” And Nurse Ratched (petty, I know, but revenge is still sweet) looks at the disheveled little man in pajama’s and bathrobe, with only one slipper (he’d lost one in the parking lot), and then she looked me up and down, and said with exasperation, “Well, which one is it?”

Once that was straightened out—I first thought she was joking, but she wasn’t—we went back to a treatment room, and sure enough, got Irwin in an open-backed gown, seated him on a table, his skinny legs dangling, and they got a mixture of emetic & activated charcoal down his throat and a vomit pan in his hands, and there we were in the room: me, Jane and Nurse Ratched, and he had not stopped talking the entire time, “Whydotheygivemethisstuffifitsbadforme? AndhereIamagainasstothewindandballshanginginthebreeze” At which point a wave of black vomit arched from his mouth into the vomit pan. He’d obviously done this before, didn’t spill a drop, except for the threads of black hanging from the corners of his mouth. “WhynotgivemeSkittles? Chasetherainbow!!! And as another coal black rainbow of vomit arched through the air, the nurse got the giggles. And Irwin popped up his head like a goshawk that just remembered his true nature, and yelled, “Funny? Something’s funny? Nothing’s funny about this at all!” And frisbee’d that pan across the room at her head, black vomit pinwheeling to all corners of the room.

The moment he’d started yelling, Jane was out the door. She had a talent, unique for an emergency service worker that at the very moment an emergency would happen, she’d disappear. Every time!

Me? I was prepared. Remember - I’d trained for this moment for over a decade. All I did, though, was cringe down and hold up my new cell phone (this was 1989, it was the size of a brick) upwards in self-defense, and a deluge of liquid charcoal smelling like hell’s maw splashed all over the keys.

Security rushed in, calmed Irwin, the nurse went somewhere to change her clothes and wash her hair and scrub out her mouth, (a wretched Ratched retching down the hallway) and they decided to keep Irwin for observation. I wiped down my phone with alcohol as well as my right arm, went outside to find Jane hanging out by the car, examining her nails, asking me, asking me incuriously, “What happened after I left?”

The smell would not leave the phone. I asked my supervisor for a new one, and she suggested a toothpick to clean out the keys, and maybe a different strategy for next time.

Lessons To Be Learned

A lesson is not learned until it can be generalized. I was very skilled at the kata I’d learned in the dojo in Japan. But the most important part of the kata was not the response to the tray being thrown in one’s face—though there were surely better options than interposing a cell phone against liquid hell—the real lesson that this pattern drill taught was to remain graceful and prepared, without displaying such readiness in the least. In other words, someone you trust could throw something disgusting in your face at any time. In that sense, at least, Jane truly was a master.

And another lesson. Both in police work and social services, one is enjoined to not lose one’s temper: don’t get mad when someone says something insulting; don’t get emotionally overwhelmed at the pathos of other’s lives; don’t display boredom or impatience when someone is taking time to get stable, instead of pulling themselves together right away. Stay professional.

That includes laughter as well. Just because a person in manic states can sound like Bobcat Goldthwait after sneaking into their kid’s adderall supply, it doesn’t mean they are trying to be funny. But there you are thinking you are in sync with them because they sure sound funny and look like they’re having a good time. But the thing about humor is that it almost always is accompanied by a startle. Laughter usually starts with a small gasp. People in manic states often do not get past that <startle>, and when you joke around or break out in laughter at what they are saying or doing, they can perceive you as either dangerous or demeaning.

It’s a good idea to be aware of such things, or you may be holding your phone well away from your face for the next six months until Nokia comes out with their next upgrade, which your agency only buys because they got a bargain on a cheaper service plan.

This substack is currently free. As a professional writer, I do hope to have my work supported, so for those who want to do so, here’s a far less expensive way than a paid substack subscription, one that will truly be welcome. Please buy one of my books. For more of my work in this time period, and some of the philosophical underpinnings behind it, see my Body and Soul: Toward a Radical Intersubjectivity in Psychotherapy. [I’ve some signed copies left - give me a shout through the linked page.]