The Call That Changed Everything and Led Him to Discover the Real Treasure Within
- Brainz Magazine
- 5 hours ago
- 9 min read
For nearly 14 years, I've helped individuals navigate the complex landscape of addiction in order to achieve recovery. Nicknamed "The Casual Counselor", my approach is unconventional but undeniably effective.
For the better part of 6 weeks, it was all he talked about. 'The Call'. It was an important phone call. It wasn’t one he could just ignore or blow off, for if he did, there were going to be significant financial penalties. He had known about this call for several months, but the deadline was getting ever-nearer. If he didn’t make this call, and soon, he was going to pay for it. Literally.
I can’t even remember who the hell he had to call. It was some sort of state agency, or an insurance company, or the RMV, or the courthouse, or some such “important official agency.” It’s irrelevant, really. The important part of the story is that he had to make this call, and he had to do it right soon. It was all he talked about.
For weeks and weeks, during every group therapy session, when he raised his hand to share, we all knew what was coming. 'The Call'. It didn’t matter what the topic of the group was, to hell with the theme being discussed by everyone else. He was perseverating in an impressively epic fashion about making this call, and he was completely bewildered, anxious, angry, confused, and self-loathing about not being able to just pick up the damn receiver to do it. “Why?!?,” he’d finish every share with, “Why can’t I just make this frigging call?”
The answer wasn’t a complicated one. If you’ve ever met someone with anxiety, and you were to rate their baseline anxiety on a 1-10 scale, with 10 being the highest of the high, he’d typically idle at about a 12. His baseline anxiety was the Mt. Everest of angst, to the point where he actually received disability benefits from the state, as he was unable to work due to his symptom profile, and it was what compelled him to self-medicate with dangerous substances. That’s what brought him to the clinic.
The group, to their credit, though sick and tired after about the first week of hearing about 'The Call' over and over and over again, were incredibly kind and supportive of their brother-in-arms. They would give him such loving and rallying feedback: “You can do this!” “I know what it feels like, but it’s so much worse in your head than it’s going to be in real life!” They embraced him with patient fellowship and friendship as he, like a broken record, continued his diatribe of how he had to make this call, the clock ticking fast, but how he just couldn’t do it.
He hated himself for it. It was visceral. You could feel the energy of a young man who was quite literally suffering and worrying if this was going to be the truth of his story for the rest of his life: that whenever he came up against something difficult, even something as simple as making a phone call, that he would just be in a state of perpetual paralysis, unable to act, unable to function, and essentially unable to live in this world in a way that would be even barely subsistent.
Hell, even I got tired of hearing about 'The Call' after just a few times of hearing him go on & on about it. I was the professional helper in the room, the man charged with supporting all of these clients with whatever it was they were having a hard time with on any given day during our open process group. I didn’t even want to call on him when I saw his hand shoot up. His hand was always the first one raised, and I would always have to remind him, very gently, that ‘part of sharing is sharing time’, softly and warmly telling him that it was time to stop talking about 'The Call', and the suffering it brought.
He was receptive to allowing space for his teammates to share their own shit, but if you were a fly on the wall, you’d easily be able to see that he wasn’t listening to them when they spoke. He was listening to his own internal dialogue, centered on 'The Call', his eyes intensely focused on a fixed point somewhere in the group room, ruminating, obsessing, and nailing himself to a proverbial and hypothetical cross for not having the efficacy or ability to do something that seemed so… so simple. Poor guy.
Now, I know a lot of therapists who would have intervened about a few days into this chronic self-flagellation. They would have invited him into their offices after the group ended, with an offer to “help him make this call together,” and I’m sure he would have graciously accepted their invitation. It would, after all, be the path of least resistance, and it would have gotten this damn call finished and done once and forever. Under the guise of “support,” they would not have been doing him any favors by doing this, and they would have been sending him the wrong message.
The message would sound something like this: “You clearly cannot make this call on your own, so I’m going to step in to rescue you and help you fix this problem.” However well-intended, they would have reinforced his belief that he, alone, was incapable and unable to do this task on his own, despite having a positive outcome in the end. Not good. Truly helping someone is not stepping into rescue or fix them, it’s helping them learn how to help themselves, on their own timeline, in their own way, draped in their own fears and anxieties, to ultimately find out that they are capable of doing just about anything that’s causing them distress.
So, I, his primary therapist, let him suffer. For the better part of a month and a half, not only was he talking about 'The Call' in group sessions, but it was all he was talking about in our individual sessions together. There were times I wanted to shake him & strangle him after hearing hour after hour about this damn phone call, and there were times when I had to actually bite my tongue to stifle the laughter that was building up inside of me at the absurdity of his state.
That might sound cruel, but it isn’t intended to be, as I truly loved this client. I felt for him, I empathized with his anxiety, feeling so badly for him that his brain was wired in such a way that he was essentially disabled by his fight/flight/freeze center, and that no medication, save for risky illicit ones, provided him with any significant modicum of relief. I cannot imagine what it felt like to live in his head. He was a total sweetheart. He was brilliant. He was interesting. He had a great sense of humor. Yet, still, his baseline anxiety had him living in state housing and receiving checks from SSI just so he could have a roof over his head and food in the fridge.
I’ll never forget the day of that group, the one he walked into with an almost visible dark cloud of negativity hovering over him, looking like his puppy had just died. Before he even had a chance to raise his hand when I opened the group up for discussion, I asked him, “Dude, what is going on with you? Are you okay?”
He told us the story: “Yesterday. I psyched myself up for like an hour. I picked up the phone to make 'The Call'. I dialed the numbers. The phone rang two or three times, and then a woman answered, and I just freaked out. I hung up the phone. I didn’t say anything. Then I threw that goddamn phone across the fucking room.” His voice was level, steady, and measured, but his skin tone was approaching a purplish color. He was steaming mad beyond mad. He was disappointed with himself on a level that’s hard to describe.
My turn.
“I want you to listen to me. Almost two months have passed, and all you have been talking about is making this phone call. It’s the only thing you’ve been talking about, this call. You haven’t been sharing anything else about anything else. It’s only been about 'The Call.' You’ve probably talked about it like 100 times, at least. Now, I heard that you picked up the phone yesterday, dialed the number, and came really close to having this important conversation, and then the panic hit, and the phone went flying. Do I have that right?”
“Uh-huh”.
“I’ve got good news and bad news for you,” I went on, “Which do you want to hear first?” “Gimme the bad news,” he replied.
“The bad news is: you still didn’t accomplish your mission. You’ve still gotta make this call.” He responded, “Yeah, and?!? I’m right back where I started. I still can’t make this frigging call.” “Do you want to hear the good news yet?” I asked him.
“Whatever. I guess,” he responded in his cloud of doom and gloom.
“Well, whether you like it or not, you took a big step yesterday. You made serious progress. For weeks and weeks and weeks, it’s been nothing but talk about 'The Call.' Yesterday? You actually picked up the phone, dialed it, and came close to accomplishing your mission. My friend, you took a step in the direction of your goal. A little less conversation, a little more action, like Elvis Presley used to sing. Dude, you took an action step. I’m sorry you didn't complete your task, but you came damn close.”
The lightbulb moment. The breakthrough. Suddenly, the dark cloud hanging over him began to dissipate, and then it disappeared. He looked befuddled for a minute or so, but then he looked at me, with tears welling up in his eyes, and said, “Holy shit. You’re right.”
The next day, he made the call. The whole event took about five minutes. The woman walked him through the steps he had to take to fix whatever the issue was, and he won the day. Mission accomplished. He came bouncing into the clinic to share the good news with the other clients, with me, with everyone, and he was met with so much love and support and hi-fives and hugs, and I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a person who was so happy and proud of himself.
The moral of the story is this: he had to suffer for a while to find his way to the road of courage in order to make 'The Call' Did it suck for him? You bet it did. Did it help his anxiety? Not a chance. In fact, it made it worse, but only temporarily. Was he scared and full of self-doubt? His fear was beyond what you could even conjure in your mind. Was it hard to watch? Not only was it hard, it was annoying and irritating beyond belief.
But did he finally get there? To that place that frightened him so, hearing that voice of self-doubt that kept telling him that he “couldn’t do it”, “wouldn’t do it”, and that he would just have to suffer the consequences for his inability and inaction in making 'The Call', and conquer it finally?
He sure did.
He was at war with himself. It had nothing to do with 'The Call,' really. 'The Call' was incidental, and it could have been anything, any barrier that had him convinced that he wasn’t strong enough or capable enough of accomplishing growth, progress, and change. He won that war, that internal battle where victory replenished him with a ‘level-up’ in his self-esteem, self-efficacy, self-worth, and self-belief. It was a beautiful story in the end. In the weeks leading up to accomplishing his mission, it was exhausting for all of us, him most of all.
He did it, on his own timeline, in his own way, based on his own preferences, and with complete autonomy and independence, as ugly as the process was. He won the war and survived it without needing a fixer or a rescuer to parachute in to save him from himself and from his profound anxiety. Within that internal battle, he learned that he was capable, and he proved an important truth to all of us.
The truth is this: Change is not an event, it’s a process. Growth is not an event; it’s a journey. We need to honor the fact that there are always going to be important tasks that we are responsible for on this ride through life and that the process and journey of accomplishing these tasks can be a really difficult one. Picture yourself chopping your way through a jungle with a machete to try to find the clearing up ahead. It is exhausting work. It often requires helpers rallying to remind us that “we can do this,” but at points along the way, we are going to need to take it slow, rest and recuperate, and then get back to the hard work of chopping.
He kept chopping. He never gave up on himself. He didn’t quit or throw in the towel, and though it took a little while to blaze the path, he eventually found the clearing. And in that clearing, he found strength, he found resilience, he found perseverance. He found himself, and he inspired us all, myself included. We, his tribe, though we didn’t do the hard work of chopping the path for him, showed him love and belief and encouragement through this difficult journey, and most importantly, we “let him”.
We let him do it for himself.
In that clearing, he found out that he was stronger than he ever realized and discovered a powerful thing: belief in himself.
Read more from Joshua Bennett-Johnson
Joshua Bennett-Johnson, Licensed Addictions Therapist
After working for 7 years in an amazing clinic, I launched into private practice in 2018. I love my job. I can say that without reservation. Watching people rebuild their lives is something that is worth more than any dollar amount.
