To Mr. Stewart

Mr. Stewart,

I’ve read your letter through now a couple of times. A copy is enclosed and I would like you to keep it with you.

It is a moment you’ve taken to speak truly – from the shiny bit that hides under the fear and rage. It speaks – you speak- from the part of you that is good and has value. You need to keep it for when you feel desperate and bad; when you need to find your way back to your essential humanity.

As I thought about what you said, your need to hit somebody and be hit; that this was the culmination of your self-hate from your flop, I suspect I know what happened. You let yourself get wrapped up in believing you were worthless. Believing you were trash and nothing you could do would change this reality. Perhaps you had begun to hope. And this would make it all the more scary and desperate. So you set out to prove to yourself what everybody thought of you. And you blew up your life again.

I’m sorry it took me too long to figure this out. I know intellectually how violent you can be. Emotionally I rejected that knowledge and refused to hear what you were telling me.

Next time you get to that point, and I daresay there will be a next time. Please feel free to say loudly and clearly that you could do with a couple of days in Seg. It’s called a Mental Health Emergency. It is done without the suicide precautions. Take that that time to read your letter to me again. I would also suggest you take that time to do some crying – it can be a great release for pain and grief and fear. It also heals instead of continuing to increase the burden of hurt you keep piling on yourself.

My greatest fear is that you will be ridden out and just give up. All the work you’ve done in the past months will get wadded up and thrown into the back of your mind. You got your flop in October (that was the time you began to actually work on issues). The date the flop began was totally arbitrary and unconnected to the changes you had begun.

The depressed, anxious, angry person of September was losing his grip… I’m not being very clear now, am I.

THE PERSON YOU WERE IN FEBRUARY WAS NOT THE PERSON WHO WAS FLOPPED. It was a trick of the calendar. It did not reflect some failure in therapy or your work with me.

You can sink into the morass of the choice you made, or figure out how to make a different one next time. I would prefer the later.

Mr. Stewart was released back onto the unit against the better judgment of custody, but because I asked.