The Secret History of Thoughts

50 years ago, Congress set out to protect coal miners from Black lung disease. Today, it's back at rates not seen in half a century. These guys are being treated like disposable widgets, not human beings. On the Sunday story, why coal miners and Appalachia are getting sicker, faster? Listen now to the Sunday story from the Up First podcast on the MPR app. So we're going to start with a very simple question. What were you just thinking? Who the hell are you? I mean, that's what I was just thinking. A cheeseburger? I wanted a cheeseburger. Go on out with my girlfriend. You have a girlfriend? Yeah. Really? Yeah. How old are you? 11. Whether or not this is a nice building, I'm looking to buy a condo here. Over the last couple of months, we've been asking this question of all kinds of people. You, you come over here. And who are we? Well, I am Elise Beagle and I am Lulu Miller. Can I possibly travel you for about 30 seconds? And I have to say on this little thought-finding mission, what were you just thinking about? We got just a shocking array of thoughts. We got big thoughts. What it would be like if there was no stars just the sun and no moon? We got small thoughts. How much I love this blackberry I'm typing on. Musical thoughts? I have a song in my head. Smile. Who in you are do they think? Smile. But also, sad thoughts. I'm not good enough. Worried thoughts. I was thinking about my sister. I was thinking how I could help her. Creepy thoughts. This very vivid image of me, hitting him, way to hammer on his head. So we got all kinds of thoughts. I'm thinking, why did you ask me what I was just thinking? What did that have to do with what you were putting on the radio? That's a great question, Elise. Yes. Yes it is. And the truth is that it's not just thoughts in general that were interested in. Really, it's this subset of thoughts that we want to focus on. Yeah, those last ones you just heard. The dark ones. I'll always be alone. No one will love me. You know these thoughts. I'm waiting for the train. And the train is coming. And there's this moment right when the subway train is coming out, the tunnel and the lights are coming. This flicker of an impulse to just throw myself down the tracks. They come into our heads at random moments. Sometimes they're kind of shocking. All of a sudden I had an image of myself strangling them. And the thing that we want to talk about today is how should we think about these dark thoughts? You know, do they tell us something deep about ourselves, about our desires and our wishes, or not? This is Invisibilia, Amalese Spiegel. And I'm Lulu Miller. And what we do on our show is we look at invisible things. Stuff like ideas and emotions and beliefs and assumptions. And try to understand how those invisible things are shaping our lives. And today thoughts are the invisible things we are looking at. We are a product of Mpure News and this is our very first show. And it is worth mentioning here that we know our voices kind of sound the same. Yeah. But keep on listening and you'll learn to differentiate us. And until then, enjoy the wash. Right, right. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway. To this question of what to think about our thoughts, we've got two stories of two men who, for different reasons, find themselves completely overrun by dark thoughts, desperate to know the answer to the question of what to make of them. All right, Elise. So you've got Guy #1, right? Yeah. Guy #1 is a surfer and to meet him, we're going to go out to the West Coast. But before we do, we should warn you that the story has some disturbing images in it. So it might not be appropriate for younger listeners. And also because some of the subject matter here is so sensitive, we're not going to use the man's real name. We're just going to use his first initial, which is "ass". Yeah, come on inside. I'm going to take you to the vet. The day I met "ass", he answered the door in these very colorful shorts. Very cheerful, very friendly. His house is just steps from the ocean. You can see the water's right here. Oh, it's so nice. Are you like a surfer? Yeah. And that was the kind of life that he led, sunny. Until one day he sat down, I think it was a Friday night. Friday or Saturday evening? To watch a movie with his wife. Relaxing, having a beer. They were newly married. And the movie that they decided to watch was this movie called "City of God". It's a Brazilian movie involving the drug trafficking of Rio de Janeiro. It's a very violent movie. The gangs would go and they'd fight amongst each other and kill each other. And there was a lot of pretty graphic violence. And about midway through the movie, I started getting just inundated with violent thoughts. What if I were to brutally stab someone or shoot someone or harm my wife? Now, "s" had never had violent thoughts like this before. And they were very disturbing. In particular, this thought about harming his new wife. But he couldn't get it out of his mind. Stabbing her? Cutting down her torso. Blood and guts all over. The thoughts became so overpowering that after the movie ended, he went into his bedroom and just curled up in a ball. Put my hands over my eyes and my head and was just trying to get rid of the thoughts. But no more, I try to get rid of them the more and more that come back. What if you were to murder your wife? Murder your wife. Murder your wife. Eventually his wife comes in, finds him, huddled there in this ball. And he didn't know what to say to her. How to put it exactly. So he just blurted out what was going through his mind. I just had an image of stabbing you in the back with the knife. As a new bride, it was the last thing that I really thought that I would be hearing from my husband. But here's the thing, his wife was completely unfazed by all this. Unfazed because she felt like she knew her husband. He's the coolest person I know. They had dated for five years. Sensitive. Opened. So she knew what a good soul he was. He was a gentle man. She said just relax and go to sleep. And so he went to sleep. But in the morning when he woke up, the thoughts were still there. In fact, over the next weeks and months, they just grew. It was like the movie had somehow broken open something inside of him. So morning time I would wake up. And maybe the first thought in my mind was an image of stabbing an innocent person. From there, I would take a walk with my dog and boom. There pops the thought, what if I brutally kill or rape someone and their family when their lights are on at their home? Maybe he'd be making dinner. My wife is cutting carrots for our salad. Boom. What if I grabbed the knife and I were to stab her? And though he never actually acted on any of these thoughts that he was having, he was convinced that one day he might. So he started to avoid things. He wouldn't hold knives. He stopped going out with friends. But still the thoughts persisted. They were everywhere. You know, a chair there, inappropriately, humping a chair, a pencil, using that as a weapon to stab someone. Which meant he was having to split himself into. For example, he works in retail. So he has to work with people all day long. So he'd have these experiences where on one level he'd be smiling, chatting away with a customer. And on another level, he is cutting down her body with a carving knife. I have to go to the bathroom splash water on my face a lot. That's how you would deal with it? I was on the verge of just feigning. I'd go into the restroom and splash water on my face and just try to regroup. Standing there looking in the mirror, his only explanation is that he must be having some kind of psychological breakdown. Yeah, I mean, this was happening every single day. So he and his wife turned to the internet, searching for answers. But the things that they find there. Bipolar or schizophrenia. None of them seemed to fit. We were just so confused, so lost. Months passed. And physically, it took an incredible toll. His face changed. His shoulders weren't as broad anymore. Because of the stress. Because he worried that if he wasn't mentally ill, there was only one horrifying conclusion that on some level, he must want to do these things in his head. There were a series of nights where I had told my wife, maybe I'm just better off if you put me in like the psych ward. I mean, it was kind of like at least there is someone there to monitor me. And I wouldn't. There's no chance of me hurting anyone. It was around this point that I actually started thinking about killing himself. He was that scared of what he might do. He was thinking, "What if he was the next new town killer or the next Aurora killer?" And to know whether he was or he wasn't, the thing he had to understand was what is the relationship between these thoughts and me? So finally, he decides he has to go to a therapist. A psychologist or psychiatrist to get help. But Lulu, yeah. Here I want to put the breaks on S's story for a second because the world that S is about to encounter the world of therapists and how they think about thoughts, it is in the middle of a huge revolution. And it's one, I don't know if most people know about. I certainly did not until you told me. So now I need to explain the secret history of thoughts. We will return to S in good time, but I need you to come with me now on a brief tour of three phases in thought history. Okay? And for each of these phases, we're going to visit the office of a therapist. All right. So phase one, door one. Thoughts have meaning. So every thought is the tip of an iceberg. This is Jonathan Shedler. Shedler is a psychologist in Colorado who sees thoughts the same way that Freud proposed that we see thoughts. And because Freud was so influential, very likely the way that you see your own thoughts today, which is that your thoughts are very intimately related to who you are. And there can be tremendous value, profound value in understanding where they come from. To explain, Shedler gave me this example of this patient that he saw recently. A man who, like S, was overrun with violent thoughts, but his were all about water. These gruesome images of people being water-borted, choking and gasping for air and suffocating. And they seemed to come out of the blue. He had never had thoughts like this before. He couldn't get them out of his mind. He didn't know why they were there. So Shedler says to this man, "Tell me about your thoughts, describe them vividly. Let's explore why they are there." Let's see where your thoughts lead. So the guy starts talking. And eventually, it came up that his sister had recently died. What happened was that she was walking across a frozen lake across the ice and she had fallen through the ice and got trapped under the ice and drowned. And where his thoughts lead were to horrific images of what the last few minutes of her life must have been like, where she was trapped under water and gasping for air. And as he talked, it became obvious to both of us that what he was describing about his sister and these gruesome images of people being water-borted, we're almost identical, except he had never made the connection. And once he did, he's entirely changed because all of a sudden what had been this unpleasant, inexplicable, frightening symptom, all of a sudden made sense to him. So Shedler told the man to go home to talk to his friends and his family about his sister's death, that that would help him. And it did. The thoughts didn't come back again. So if I had told him that his thoughts had no meaning and could be ignored, I think it would have cost him down the road. All right, so that's the traditional view of thoughts, probably how you think about your own thoughts. Yeah, I believe they do have some significance. But now my friend, it is time to mosey our way down to door number two. Okay? Because the tides have changed and there's now a new way of thinking about thoughts that started to become popular around 1980, largely because of this man, Aaron Beck. Yeah. All right, all right, I just need to check your levels. In 2004, when I was new to MPR, just a baby reporter, I think I can hear your big dails shut up. One of my first assignments was to go to Pennsylvania to talk to Dr. Beck. First tell me what you had for breakfast. When I met him, Beck, I think, was around 80. It's kind of white-haired old man in an oracle red and bockered bow tie, who, like everyone else in his generation, had started his career practicing Freud's therapy, psychoanalysis. I then had a couple of experiences which made me shift gears. You see, one day in the late '60s, Beck was in a session with a patient, a woman who was explaining to him that several days earlier, she'd been at a party where she'd been having a difficult time connecting to people and had found herself overcome by these thoughts. Nobody cares for me. I'm just a social outcast. Nobody will ever care for me. And she became quite sad and she went home. And for some reason that day, Beck did not go down the traditional path. He didn't ask the woman to follow her thought. He turned to the woman and he asked, "How do you know that those thoughts are true?" Just realistically, try to assess for me whether or not those thoughts bear any relationship to reality. Explore the evidence for nobody cares for me. And she then could list a dozen people who obviously did care for her. Then asked her about her being socially inept and she was able to come up with the idea that she had been very successful socially. Which made Beck think something which in his world was revolutionary. Maybe people shouldn't always take their thoughts so seriously. Particularly a certain subset of their thoughts. No one will love me. You remember these thoughts, right? You're stupid. I'm stupid. They're going to dislike you. I'm a failure. And so on. Beck had a special name for them. Automatic negative thoughts. What's interesting about the automatic thought, and this is true of everybody, is that people tend to accept them at their face value and they don't look for alternative explanations or for whatever the evidence is behind them. So Beck was trying this with all of his patients. Don't trust the thought. Challenge the thought. To test out to see whether they're really true. And what he found was that when his patients contradicted their negative thoughts. The patients started to get better sooner. Instead of it taking years as it often did with Freudian therapy, they were getting better in a couple of months. Well, Dr. Beck, you've helped me a lot and I don't think I need more therapy. And thus began what is now called cognitive behavioral therapy or CBT, a new system of therapy that does not believe that the thoughts in your head are necessarily indicative of anything deep about you. And over the last 30 years, this kind of therapy has slowly but surely been displacing Freudian based therapies. Like Lulu, if you walk into a therapist's office today, statistically speaking, you are likely walking through door number two into the office of someone who does not think that your thoughts are all that important. So it's that popular? Not, in part because a series of studies showed that CBT therapy is more effective and leads more people more quickly to mental health. But we are not done yet. Because remember, I said that there were three phases. So now allow me to open for you door number three. This is the sound that greets patients in the waiting room of Miranda Morris, a therapist who practices outside Washington DC. And Morris practices a kind of therapy that is quietly beginning to displace CBT. It's often called third wave therapy, but it goes by other names too, like mindfulness therapy. The premise of the therapy is that when you think about a thought as something that needs to be countered or contradicted as CBT does, you are taking that thought way too seriously. Because Morris believes that dark thoughts often have absolutely nothing to do with us. Our thoughts, she believes, often have no meaning at all. So instead of contradicting negative thoughts so that they will go away, she teaches her patients essentially how to ignore them. We're going to work not on getting rid of it, but on changing your relationship with it. So how do you change your relationship with your thoughts? I'll start by asking you to bring your attention to the ticking of my clocks. Basically Morris teaches her patients a stripped down form of meditation. See if you can bring your attention to the thoughts going through your mind right now. We actually did this together in her office so that I could learn a little bit about how it works. I sat with my hands in my lap and Morris told me to bring my attention to my thoughts, simply watch them come and go. I noticed the sound of her clocks and I noticed an itch on my left hand and then I noticed the sound of her clocks again. Her clocks are really, really loud. Okay, so how long would I have to do that before I started watching my - You are watching, I was watching your thoughts. - That's you watching your thoughts. - And how does that help me? - Ah, well, I got a metaphor. (laughing) - Morris pulled a book from herself and passed it to me. - Right, so this book, right? - This book she told me represented all of the painful thoughts that I had all day long. You remember those thoughts that you were not thin enough, that you were not smart enough, that you were too old or too young. The thoughts that quietly tell you that the path between here and there is insurmountable, and you are weak and small and not good enough. Those are the thoughts Morris told me that this book represented. - Take this and hold it on either side. Right, and I want you to hold it up to your face so that it's just about touching your nose. - And so I took the book and I pressed it to my face, right in front of my eyes. And Morris explained that most of us walk around the world with these thoughts right in front of our eyes in this way. - And how is that for you to have your painful thoughts and feelings be the primary focus of your attention? - Not so good. I mean, the view isn't great. When you practice meditation, Morris tells me, you learn to control where you place your attention. And when a disturbing thought comes into your brain, you learn how to just let it float by without ever engaging it. She then takes the book and gently pushes it into my lap. - It's still right there, but now it's not the focus of your attention. That's the new way of thinking about thoughts, which in a way is a very old way of thinking about thoughts. The idea is you don't engage the bad ones. They don't matter that much. Just find the thoughts that are helpful that help you to live the life that you wanna live. Keep those thoughts in front of you. And the rest, just let it float away. They're not you. There's no good reason to focus on them. (gentle music) - Which finally brings us back to S and the problem he had with his thoughts. - What if I hurt someone or kill someone? Maybe I'm just better off if you put me in the psych ward. - Now when S set off to find himself a therapist, he obviously knew nothing about this strange evolution and thinking about thinking that's gripped the world of psychotherapy. Few people do. He just made an appointment with a therapist he found online and walked through her door. - That first psychologist was a very bad experience. - Turned out that he had walked through door number one into the office of a Freudian type therapist who believed that S's thoughts were connected to something very real inside of him. - I think in a way she was kind of scared what I was seeing, you know, the images that I was having of, you know, the killing, the raping, the maming. And I kind of got that she may think that I would be a danger. - Which of course made S even more scared and more anxious and more determined to understand what was behind his horrible thoughts so that he could resolve whatever was causing them. But he really never got the opportunity to test the Freudian process properly. - After seeing her four or five times, I had requested another visit and I'd never got a call back. - And what did that make you think? - That my condition was really serious and that, you know, if a therapist didn't want to see me, but, you know, where do I go now? (soft music) - S took a nose dive. Retreated from the world more and more. Until finally he decided he didn't have a choice. He had to find another therapist to help him. So he turned to a man he found online. - Who was his name? - Tom, Tom Corboi. - We actually went to visit Tom Corboi. (crickets chirping) - Hi. - He works out of a sunny corner office in a modern glass high rise, full of clean lines. - Make yourselves comfortable. - All right. - And Corboi explained to me that when someone like S walks through his door, he has a very specific therapy that he uses with them. On the third or fourth session, he hands them a knife. That's right, you heard me, hands them a knife. - That's like the psycho knife. - It is like the psycho knife. - And he tells them to hold it to his throat. - Are you kidding me? - Not in the slightest. - You see, Corboi is a third wave kind of guy. He runs the practice where S found a therapist. And that practice has a very strong position on thoughts, which is that most of our thoughts aren't that important. Most thoughts we have are just nonsense. They're just synapses popping off in our head and we don't need to take them all so seriously. - And according to Tom, the problem with people like S is not that they have these dark thoughts. We all have them. - You know, you stick me on the 405 or Russia, or it's just a matter of time before I start thinking of killing somebody. - It's S's reaction to his dark thoughts. That's the problem. So according to Corboi, S has a subset of obsessive compulsive disorder, OCD with harming obsession. - The harmo CD. - Obsessive compulsive disorder is a thinking problem. You focus obsessively on the things that most disgust you. If you hate germs, you think continuously about germs, how they're crawling all over you. If you fear fire, you think about burning down your own house day and night. - It's really just a question of what they're afraid of. - So really, the real problem with S, and many of the people like him, and there are plenty of them, isn't that they are less moral than the rest of us? Corboi says their problem actually is that they're more moral. - Their sense of moral identity is a strong part of it. - See, when most of us have these thoughts, we are unfazed by them. - The average person just goes, "Huh, silly thought gets on with their day." But a person with OCD has these thoughts and they become extremely distressed. - It disgusts them that these thoughts are even in their brain. - So when a thought like that comes into their head, they try as hard as they can to push it away. But that, it just makes the thoughts grow stronger. - Murder your wife, murder your wife, murder your wife. - That's the terrible irony of this condition. It's exactly a person's conscientiousness that makes the horrible thoughts return again and again and again. That's where the knife comes in. Slowly over time, Corboi encourages patients like us to take the knife, hold it to his throat. Together they'll sit there for 10 minutes, for 15. Basically, it's a form of evidence, really compelling evidence that even though S has the opportunity to kill, he's not gonna do it. And therefore, he's forced to confront the reality that his thoughts should not be taken seriously. - They are not in any way, shape or form, reflection of that person's character. - This kind of therapy is called exposure therapy. You progressively expose people to exactly the thing that they fear most. And it's shown to be incredibly effective for OCD. That's why Corboi doesn't just have knives in his office. He has a whole cabinet devoted to different implements of destruction. - If somebody's afraid of hammering someone to death, we can give them this. They'll nail it. - There's a screwdriver, a razor, hypodermic needles. - Are these like poisons here? And then he asks them to hold these things in their hands to touch them and use them over and over again right there with him. - We had him sharpened recently, if you'd like to feel the edge. - Okay. - And then, right now, right now, right now, they're not going to be able to do it. - So, you can feel it. - Now, Corboi actually had me do this myself, hold a knife, to his throat in his office. - Okay. - So, I just take this knife and I, where do you want me to put it? - Right in my neck, where do you can find my jugular? - I took the blade right up to the skin on his throat. Is this okay? - Yeah, you were fine the other way. - And even for me, someone who doesn't actually struggle with his stuff, it was frightening. To be so close to someone's jugular. - Am I hurting you? - No. - Are you sure? - I can feel it, but it's not hurting. - Okay. - The skin there is so thin. S, at first, couldn't even hold a knife. He had to work up to it slowly. First, he was told to just conjure up the worst images he could think of. - A face that was mutilated, harming a child, killing a dog. - And he was told to just sit there, thinking about them. I would try to hold that in my mind, that image, harming a child, until it lost its meaning. And I wasn't scared of doing that. - Then he was told to step it up a notch. - Put my hands around the dog's neck. - He was told to go sit with his dog, with his hands around his dog's neck. - And bring up the image of strangling my dog to death. He said at first it was scary. You know that slim chance what if my hands clenched up and I did strangle my dog. But over time? A couple minutes. I realized that even with my hands around his neck I wouldn't do it and so after that that thought just if it popped in my mind I was able to laugh it off. And finally the biggie. My wife. He had to take a knife to his wife. Yeah. We were standing there in the kitchen. It was a desk. It was you know summertime and I was about to prepare dinner. And he took out a knife from a butcher block. Yeah it was a big long bladed knife. Yeah. You know it took him a while to actually hold it and you know pick it up and hold it near me. But eventually he came up close to her. He held the knife in my hand, brought on the image of stabbing her. I could tell he was nervous. He had the knife near my arm. And he's trying as best he can to hold on to that thought. And just face it. He had on. And after a few minutes he noticed his heart wasn't beating so fast. Realize that I was not capable or was not going to do it. That was it. He said in time. Four months. The more he sat with the thoughts. Thousands and thousands of different disturbing thoughts. The more they began to ease up. To where I felt a significant improvement and could actually could actually live again I would say. And like when was the moment that you knew that you were free? I'll never be free. Do you want to get a get it? Sure. He says he still has the thoughts. I still have the thoughts. I still have the thoughts you know about my wife. You? Even my daughter. What you doing? And as much as he hates them. Now he trusts really trusts that he doesn't have to listen to them. Thank you for watching Rela. I just let it be there. And then you know eventually just dissipates and goes away. Did he see him go back in the room? Okay. Sound good? Okay. He said there was a moment when he knew that things were going to be okay. But it didn't look anything like what he thought peace might look like. He's never been returned to that evening from before the thoughts broke out. Yeah. I remember my wife and I go into the beach with our dog. And we're watching the sunset sitting on the dunes looking out on the water in the sunset. And boom. A stabbing thought popped through my mind. Wow. But then he noticed something strange. The thought floated away. Mm-hmm. It was just another thought. Ah. No one will love me. I'm thinking about colors. Throwing myself off things. I'm stupid. There's going to be a phone call in the night. In Visibility, we'll return in a moment. This week on Sources and Methods is a run trying to hack U.S. water systems. What is it that you can do to potentially quote unquote scare the American people? Well water is one of those things that's a necessity of light. We unpack the week's biggest national security news on Sources and Methods. Listen on the NPR app or wherever you get podcasts. French fries, tater tots, Colombian ahiaco. Potatoes are beloved everywhere. And yet, they're always kind of denigrated. There's a long history of racializing potatoes. Have a potato became an insult around the world. Listen to NPR's code switch podcast in the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. Attention, a PSA from Shore Wave, NPR Science podcast. You need to be paying more attention to your poop. I really do think that this deep stigma we have about talking about pooping is tied to these early onset colorectal cancer cases. What to watch out for and how to decode the secret messages hidden in your poop on Shore Wave. Listen on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. From NPR news, this is Invisibilia. I am Lulu Miller. And I am Louis Spiegel. And today we are discussing thoughts. How to think about your thoughts, what we should think about our thoughts that we think. What do you think about your thoughts these days? I think that the new way of thinking about thoughts is deeply helpful to how I think about thoughts. The new way of being that you can just let them all go. The idea that I don't have to take my thoughts seriously, I find deeply liberating and slightly disturbing when I think about all of the many, many hours that I and millions of people all over the country have spent trying to understand our thoughts and where they came from. Like all that's just time wasted. Yeah. How do you feel about it? Well, I'm not sure if it's always time wasted. Like I wonder if you can get a deeper piece. If you really dig in, dig in. Yeah. And to show you a pretty profound example of this, I want to tell you the story of Martin. Okay. So Martin Pistorius in the late 70s was a little boy growing up in South Africa. To tell the story, we're going to have to leave the question of thoughts for two or three minutes, but it will circle right on back. Okay. But it all begins when he was three years old and he marches into his parents bedroom and tells them that when he grows up, he wants to be what he calls an electric man. He used to insist that we buy him all sorts of electronic equipment. Resistors and transistors and unimate. These are his parents, Joan and Rodney Pistorius. And he would build us things. Things like a flashing star for their Christmas tree. An alarm system to keep his little brother out of his legos. We had a broken plug. I thought nothing of it. I just said Martin, please just fix plug for me. You know, me here's live electricity in the house. And I'm asking a child younger than he lived and to fix it. And he did. Oh, where do you think he picked this up? I have no idea. He was always going to be an electric man who's he told me when he grew up. And then Martin's life took an unexpected turn. He had just turned 12. He came home one day saying he was feeling very sick. And said, "My think I'm getting flu." But this wasn't a normal sickness. Martin began to sleep and sleep and sleep. Like a baby, nearly all day. And when he woke up, he'd refuse food. Rod used to sit there and force his mouth open and I used to put the food in. He began getting nosebleeds. So they tasted him for everything under the sun from TB, Parkinson's disease, Wilson's disease, deficiency and copper, measles. And everything was negative. Still, he got worse and worse. As the months wore on, everything about him slowly closed down. His ability to move by himself, his ability to make eye contact, and finally, his ability to speak. And the last thing he ever said, because he was still in hospital, was "when home." All he wanted to know was when is he coming home. And, um. Sorry. Hi. Hi. He progressively got worse, probably in the second year. Of his illness, he was sleeping whenever we didn't wake him up. He was permanently lying down in a fetal position. And a test finally came back positive. Cryptococcalm and gytus. The doctors told Joan and Rodney that Martin was beyond hope. As good as not they, you know, he's a vegetable, he has zero intelligence. They were told to take him home. Time keep him comfortable until he died. But one year passed, and two years passed. Martin just kept going. Just kept going. So, Joan, and their two kids did their best to care for Martin's body. I'd get up at five o'clock in the morning, get him dressed, load him in the car, take him to the special case, and to where I'd leave him eight hours later, pick him up, bath him, feed him, put him in bed, set my alarm for two hours so that I'd wake up to turn him so that he didn't get bedsaws. I'll throw out the night. Yeah, every two hours I'd get up and turn him over and then get a little bit of sleep and at five o'clock in the next morning I'd start the same cycle. That was their lives. Load him in the car, drop him off, pick him up. Three years turned to four. Bath him, feed him, put him in bed. Four years turned to five. Five o'clock in the next morning I'd start the same cycle. Six years, seven years. Eight. Nine, ten. I think it was so horrific. Joan remembers vividly going up to him one time and saying, "I hope you die." No, that's horrible thing to say. I just wanted some sort of relief, 11 years, 12. Was there any life inside? I was not certain. It was impossible to know. I'm up mine to decide that he died. Yes, I was there, not from the very beginning, but about two years into my vegetative state, I began to wake up. This is Martin. Yes. Using the grid to speak. The grid is just a computer keyboard that allows him to quickly choose words and then have the computer read them out loud. Now I will get to how he regained consciousness and developed the ability to operate a keyboard and the wheelchair that he uses to get around. But what you'd need to know is that for about eight years, all the world thought that Martin was gone, he was wide awake. I was aware of everything, just like any normal person. He thinks he woke up about four years after he first fell ill, so when he was about 16 years old. I suppose a good way to describe it is like an out-of-focus image. At first you have no idea what it is, but slowly it comes into focus until you can see it in crystal clarity. And somewhere in this reawakening to the world, Martin realized to his horror that he couldn't move his body. He couldn't even speak. I stared at my arm, willing it to move. Every bit of me condenses into this moment. Martin would later write a book about this called Ghost Boy, my escape from a life locked inside my own body. And this is him reading a passage about one night when he tried as hard as he could to get his father's attention. I am sitting in my bed. My heart is beating as my father addresses me. I want him to know, to understand that I've returned to him. But nothing in his body would obey. My father doesn't recognize me. It went like this again and again, attempt. Dad, can't you see? And failure. Attempt. And failure. Everyone was so used to me not being there that they didn't notice when I began to be present again. Though he could see and understand everything, it didn't matter. The stark reality hit me that I was going to spend the rest of my life like that. Totally alone. And when he finally accepts this, he truly is trapped. He said it was like something broke open in his mind. And it unleashed a fury of thoughts. I am totally alone. You are possessing totally alone. You are powerless. You will be alone forever. You're alone forever. He said the thoughts literally battered him. He humiliated him. Your family doesn't see you anymore. You will never get out. So here is another man overrun by thoughts. You are possessing powerless. Totally alone. But unlike the rest of us, he can't call a friend to talk about it. He can't go on a run to clear his head. He can't even move his position in his chair. He is trapped in his head. And so what does he do? But one day, he just intuitively invents the very therapeutic technique that so helped the man in our last story, S. Martin just starts detaching from his thoughts. No one will ever show me any doubts. I will never get out. He refuses to engage them and lets them all just float by. And he says he got really good at it. You don't really think about anything. You simply exist. Can you describe what that feels like? I wonder if it's peaceful or. Hmm. Sometimes the nurses were careless with him. They'd pour scalding hot tea down his throat or leave him in cold baths, sitting all alone. One of the nurses even began to intentionally abuse him. You are powerless. But instead of allowing himself to feel the sting of these thoughts. I sit for hours each day staring blankly into space. Though there was one thought it'll allow himself to engage and savor. I prayed and wished with all my might to die. So that, my friend, was his experience of letting thoughts go. Though occasionally there were these things. You can always count on having a fun day. These things that provided a kind of motivation. Like, Barney. I cannot even express to you how much I hated Barney. See, since all the world thought that Martin was basically a vegetable, they would leave him propped up in front of the TV watching Barney reruns. Hour after hour. Episode after episode. Day after day. And one day he decided he'd had enough. He needed to know what time it was. Because if he could know what time it was, he could know when it would end. And specifically how much closer he was to his favorite moment in the day. Simply to make it to when I was taken out of my wheelchair. And that for a brief moment the aches and pains in my body could subside. Now the problem was that Martin was rarely seated near a clock. So he calls upon these old allies, these thoughts, to help him carefully study the lengths of the shadows. I would watch how the sun moved across the room. Or how the shadow moved throughout the day. And he begins to match what he sees with little bits of information he's able to collect. What he hears on the television, a radio report, a nurse mentioning the time. It was a puzzle to solve. And he did it. Within a few months he could read the shadows like a clock. Yes, Garkin still tells the time of day by the shadows. It was his first semblance of control. Simply knowing where he was in the day gave him the sense of being able to climb through it. Yes. And this experience ultimately led him to start thinking about his thoughts differently. I think your thoughts are integrally connected to and part of you. He realized that they could help him. And so he starts listening to them again. I'd have conversations with myself and other people in my head. And if a particularly dark thought came up, you are pathetic, powerless. He tried to contend with it. Like one time shortly after having the drool wiped from his chin by a nurse. You are pathetic. He happened to notice a song playing on the radio. Whitney Houston was singing the greatest love of all. In the song she says, no matter what they take from me, they can't take away my dignity. I sat there and thought you want a bit. No. The point is re-engaging with his thoughts transformed his world. Life began to have purpose. Oh, absolutely. I would literally live in my imagination. Sometimes, this such an extent that I became oblivious to my surroundings. Would you know? No, even the car, prop you off, pick him up. Could be rough. I hope you die. He was conscious when his mom told him that. Oh, no, that's horrific. When I think about it now, he was staring right back at her. The rest of the world felt so far away when she said those words. But this time when the dark thought came up, No one will ever show me anything. He leaned into it and began to wrestle with it. Why would a mother say that? Why would my mother say that? As time passed, I gradually learned to understand my mother's desperation. He realized that it came from profound love for him. Every time she looked at me, she could see only a cruel parody of the once healthy child she had loved so much. Which actually made him feel closer to her. And so onward, he went, trying now to understand his dark thoughts instead of just ignoring them all. Which brings me to the last act of his story. The way in which Martin is able to climb out. This is a long story involving inexplicable neurological developments, a painstaking battle to prove his existence in the face of doubt and. Anyway, the short version. The short version is that over time, Martin slowly regained some control of his body. By the time he was in his mid-twenties, he could squeeze your hand on occasion, and he was getting better and better at holding himself upright in his chair. Now the doctors told his parents that he still had the intelligence level of a three-month-old baby. But one nurse. One nurse named Verna was convinced that there was something there. And so she eventually convinced his parents to get Martin reassessed at another medical center, where he was given a test where he had to identify different objects by pointing at them with his eyes. And he passed, not with flying colors, but he passed. I then gave up my job. That's his mom again, Joan, who came home to care for Martin, helping with his physical therapy, and most important, purchased this kind of joystick for the computer. And then he came home, approximately, switch, which was just something that you knocked. And though it took him about a year to get the hang of it, we had like school, if you want to call it, four hours in the morning, every single day. Once he did everything changed, because suddenly he had a way to select the words he wanted to say. I am cold. I am hungry. I want toast. And as words came back, gradually, so did other things. Moving his eyes and moving his head, and almost nodding, asking for coffee by stirring his hands around and things like that. They couldn't really explain it, but when he gets the tools to communicate, he folds just a head. Okay. So wherever you are standing in your life, prepare to be lapped. Within two years of passing that assessment test, Martin gets a job, filing papers at a local government office. I wanted to prove that I could do more than just speak words via a laptop. Around this time, his nurse saved your verna, mentioned she's having trouble with her computer. And Martin, who is not tinkered with electronics since he was 12 years old, fixes it. Repairing a computer is a bit like going into a maze. You might go down their dens, but eventually you find your way through. It was absolutely clever, Gossing. I couldn't understand. Wow. After that, he's grabbed the government job, start a web design company, get into college and computer science. He writes a book. He's learning to drive. He always wanted to drive. Yes. Wow. So Martin achieves everything he wants to do. So how is it that Martin has been able to achieve all this? Now, I don't want to oversimplify it because it was many things. Martin's naturally strong will. Flux of electricity in the brain, a really dedicated family. But I do think that his decision to lean back into those thoughts way back when instead of just spending his life detaching in some way helped him. In part, because it probably kept his mind occupied and allowed him to emerge this kind of well-oiled machine of mental ability. But also, because I think his leaning into those dark thoughts in particular gave him a kind of self-understanding and humor about the human condition that allowed him to snag the very best thing in his life. But it's just saying he's just typing. My wife. This is Martin's wife. Jonah. When Martin talks about me, what time's about me? What's not smiling? Jonah was a friend of Martin's sister and two of them first met over Skype. I was a manager for the social work team and for hospital social work team. Jonah says the thing that drew her to Martin. I turned around and it was this guy with this big smile and it's such a world personality. It was the way he began to interact with her. I'm Flux and one of those people I say something and then I'm more often need to say sorry I said it. But not with Martin when she asked him how things work in the bathroom or what people do around you when they think you are not there. If I ask him anything, he'll give me an honest answer. And that pricked her ears. There was no proteins. That first night they talked for hours. She would speak and I would take my response. The sister and the other friends drifted away and Jonah just stayed there in front of the screen. I just really liked him. After that, she just kept wanting Skype with him. Yeah. Okay, well, he's in real cheer. He doesn't speak. But I love this guy. He's amazing. We just so quickly didn't into love. As for Martin, after over a decade convinced that he would be alone forever, he was pretty happy. My face would hurt from smiling so much. They were married in 2009. Martin was 33 years old. So Lulu, yeah, one story about this poor man trapped in his own body for 13 years. Another about someone who is bombarded by horribly violent images. Do you think maybe our first show is a little bit heavy? This was a heavy show. Yeah. Let's hit the dance music. This is Invisibility. Party, everybody. Invisibility from NPR News is me, Elise Spiegel, and Meal Lulumiller. The show is edited by In Good and Cough, Best Editor in the World, with help from Eric Newsom, Matt Martinez, Portia Robertson, Magas, and Madalika Sica. Production helped today by Brent Fockman and Brendan Baker. Special thanks to David Gould for his help with the music in this episode. And now, for our moment of nonsense. I'm not reading it. I was totally not reading it. Because I'm okay. But I want to take it away. Just try it. I can't do it without you. I wasn't even looking at it. Join us next week for more Invisibility. We'll a historically unpopular president navigate a midterm election season that may leave him with a lot less power. Stay caught up on the latest news with Trump's Terms, the podcast where we curate NPR's coverage of President Trump, in short episodes focused on a single story. Follow Trump's Terms on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.