Walk a Mile

The wait for therapy was terrible. I felt like a punch-drunk boxer whose corner should have thrown the towel in three rounds ago. Instead, I continued slugging, head down. Keep on going. Keep … on … going. Like so many folk in the mental health system, I’d been left languishing on a year-long waiting list. I’d left the family home with the belief that my behaviour had become so erratic that it was harming the children.

I also felt that my non-relationship with Poppy was causing me irreparable damage. Her bland, ‘shit happens’ responses to my devastation at the death of another person I’d worked with, calling me a drama queen when I told her I felt I was on a precipice, the physical rejection – it was all taking its toll. I was too scared to live, but terrified of dying. The years of psychiatric drugs were having a negative effect on me. Weight gain is one of the most common side effects for many. Which would you rather be – fat or mad? Tough choice …

I can’t say I blame Poppy. On and off I’d given her a tricky life. Looking back though, I think I did my best, which may or may not have been good enough. But it was really all I had.

I have to laugh now when I think back to how furious she was with my family that they hadn’t told her the extent of my madness when she first started seeing me – as if I’d come with some kind of guarantee where I could be returned to the shop to have my factory settings restored. But back then it sickened me. We were utterly done.

I presented myself as homeless to the housing department in Edinburgh, at the same time as trying to present myself with a semblance of pride, self-esteem … self-worth? I’m not sure which, but I’m pretty sure I failed.

I left my home with the lingering image of Poppy cuddling the kids in my mind, all of them with their backs to me. I felt defeated and I loathed myself. I was isolated and wallowing in a deep pit of despair.

I popped back the following day in the car, because I just couldn’t stand the feeling of being away from my kids. I’d hoped that just being near them, in the car park next to the house, would somehow bring me some solace. I’ve no idea how long I sat there for. Poppy’s brother came out to the car to speak to me. He was kind but firm, telling me that my very presence was freaking everyone out.

I drove back to the homeless accommodation – that oxymoronic place – that I’d been provided with. Staying there the first night, I reflected on the fact that perhaps I hadn’t stressed the suicidal ideation I’d been experiencing sufficiently, since the windows of the flat opened wide enough for me to throw a cow through.

It was big, awful and empty. I was self-harming as if it was going out of fashion. I broke one of the knuckles of my right hand after one particularly unsuccessful fight with the kitchen wall. I cut myself with anything that was readily available. I had bruises all over my face from where I’d punched myself. These behaviours that had been previously been so secretive were now emerging wherever I went. I was punching myself in public – an almost Tourette’s-like compulsion – while screaming and shouting at some unseen assailant, traumatic memories cascading, unbidden, through my mind.

One such episode happened while I was sitting with Poppy in the car. Almost casually, she explained that the children had asked why I hadn’t left earlier. I’d felt – hoped – that leaving was the one thing I’d got right, and now here I was being told my children didn’t want me in their lives. No amount of face punching could make that better.

One of the things that comes with losing your job is uncontrollable debt. We live in a world where shiny things are made immediately accessible to us by the truckload, through why-wait-when-you-can have-it-yesterday credit. But these fine purveyors of instant finance are less friendly when one approaches them uttering the words, ‘I haven’t got a job anymore so I can’t pay you … er … anything just now.’

Combine that with a benefits system that sees claimants as shirkers, as malingerers – claiming money fraudulently because they can’t be arsed to work, and you get a perfect storm.

As an ex-social worker I had a perfect record of supporting folk with their claims for disability living allowance (DLA) or Personal Independence Payment (PIP) as it is now – money to which they were entitled. But when it came to claiming it for myself – well, that was an entirely different story. Even though I knew that the claims process was particularly treacherous for people with mental health problems, I was gobsmacked when I received the letter back explaining I was entitled to nothing.

I knew all about the review process – even though I had never needed it in the past – and very soon I found myself in a horrible situation, wearing my Ted Baker suit, crying and wailing at that small group of folk who were destined to award me the smallest amount of DLA possible.

I wore that suit to the meeting to give me confidence – to make me feel happy about myself. As the meeting went on, it became clear that it wasn’t quite working.

I’d failed to realise that the mere fact I’d been able to get into a suit – even though I’d put it on to make this process somehow manageable – would be used against me in the assessment process.

Well, I could hear them thinking. If he’s able to attend an interview smartly dressed, then he’s obviously able to look after himself.

I was crying uncontrollably – contorting my face to get even the simplest words out. The panel of a doctor, a lawyer, a disability expert, and an official recorder, all women, all looked incredibly uncomfortable at my internal angst. I didn’t care though. These bastards – these representatives of a benefits system that just isn’t fit for purpose – were going to endure just a flavour of my mental turmoil.

I felt ridiculous, pilloried. I imagined myself in the stocks with people laughing and mocking and jeering, throwing whatever shite they had to hand. I felt like my mum had dressed me that morning, and now I was gradually sinking – a little boy in a man’s suit.

I knew the system. I reluctantly accepted that my word, and those of my GP and my psychiatrist, were insufficient for the Department of Work and Pensions to award me anything other than a pittance. And so I bit the bullet, swallowed my pride, and accepted that the application would have more validity if I got a social worker to support me through the process.

This was uncomfortable to say the least. I’d been a social worker in Edinburgh and, as such, I was reasonably well known among my colleagues across the city. The thought of sharing my crumbling world with someone I knew was intolerable.

Thankfully there was a system within the department to seal my records, so that they could only be read by the people who worked with me directly, or their managers. In no time at all I was back at the good old Royal Edinburgh Hospital, chatting with a mental health officer (a social worker who was long experienced in working with people with mental health problems) in a brightly lit, sparsely furnished interview room.

I remember pressing my mouth to my right forearm – a precursor to biting it – as this bright, middle-aged woman guided me once again through the form I knew so well. Looking back, I can’t help but wonder how difficult it must be for people who are stepping into this shadowy world of benefit claiming without any knowledge or experience.

‘It’s okay for you to bite your arm if you want,’ said the MHO. With that one statement, I felt somehow accepted – that I wasn’t being judged for all my whacky behaviours. Throughout that interview I bit by arm with different levels of severity, although I never drew any blood. The pain somehow made the process more tolerable. That single act of empathy helped me more than I can put into words.

Needless to say, within a few months I was getting the benefits to which I was entitled – something that made the rest of the process a bit more bearable.

The guy who was employed by the City of Edinburgh Council to support people who got into difficulties with debt was, in my case, out of his depth and overworked. He reminded me of me when I was a social worker. He would promise the earth, then he’d offer significantly less, each time coming up short.

My creditors were getting more and more arsey, and I just didn’t have an answer for them. Eventually, against my misplaced loyalty for a council service, I turned to the Dark Side and went to the Citizen’s Advice Bureau. And I never looked back. The guy who helped me ensured I kept all my creditors plates spinning in a way that was manageable for me and acceptable for them.

The whole process, though, had been exhausting and demoralising – queuing up for hours on end with other social work clients, all of us unable to acknowledge each other, avoiding eye contact because of the horrible, churning, internalised feeling of abject failure in the pits of our stomachs.

With my financial ducks in a row, I was able to reflect on how I’d ended up where I was. It was a process that provided the tiniest chink of light, a process that asked the question, ‘What now?’

Dr Brown, my psychiatrist, told me the drugs I’d been taking for depression were less than useless, and, as such, I should stop taking them immediately. With all my knowledge, life and professional experience, I can be a bit of an arse at times. This was one of those times. Taking her at her word, I instantly stopped taking my Venlafaxine.

There was no tapering off for me – oh no. I’d be fine, I told myself. The sooner I was off the pills, the sooner I’d be able to take … Good god!

I’d like to state here and now, that if anyone reading this wants to come off Venlafaxine – otherwise known as Effexor – you must do it slowly. You must gradually reduce the dose over weeks, if not months. Otherwise … well, otherwise you might enter into the bizarre world of pain I experienced for nearly a month.

I’m sure antidepressants have wide ranging effects – and side effects – for millions of people. As mentioned earlier, my libido (specifically my ability to er, reach fruition) had been hugely subdued. The sudden removal of the chemical castration meant that … er … how can I put this? It was like I was suddenly a teenager again, and that I was having to deal with the head of steam that had built up over the years. In short, my parts worked.

Alongside that, there was the weird pain / pleasure thing that seems to be known across the internet as ‘brain zaps’. They’re like little bolts of lightning that start in the middle of the brain and feel like they fly out the end of one’s nose. They aren’t entirely unpleasant. They hurt – I’m not entirely sure if this was to do with my attraction to pain – but I rather looked forward to them. Initially they were frequent (they occurred 10 –15 times a day) but over the months they gradually ebbed away to nothing.

I would have benefitted from knowing about both of these symptoms before I started experiencing them.

With the isolation and time on my hands, my headspace returned to a place it had been in my teens. When I closed my eyes – though often I didn’t need to close my eyes – I was met with the images of people I’d known well who’d died. They were all being thrown onto a huge heap by some unseen giant using a massive pitchfork, their bodies lifeless, my vision of their faces vivid. Mum, Dad, my cats, my goldfish, my tortoise, my nana, Paul, a friend from school who’d died in a car accident – they were all on the pile. There was another athlete who’d died in his early twenties from sudden death syndrome, my friend who’d taken her own life, my student who’d died of cancer … countless clients in an endless, unforgiving cascade.

Mark Speight, the children’s TV presenter, hanged himself on the 7th April 2007. I became obsessed with the events surrounding it. I wanted – needed – to know everything there was to know about it. Again, it felt like the door had been left slightly ajar for me.

I’m not entirely sure of the circumstances that brought me there, but I found myself in the horses’ field next to where I’d once lived. It was a fairly sunny day, with white fluffy clouds bobbing about. The children were elsewhere. I’m not entirely sure where they were, but they don’t feature at all in this memory.

I zoned out, dissociated. I have no recollection of where I went or what I did in that short period of time. Maybe it was 20 minutes, maybe an hour. When the world came back, I was lying on the ground near a holiday chalet that had been put up in the field – and I was eating mud. My mouth was full of it and both hands were covered.

Perhaps this was all it took to get me out of the dissociative fugue, or maybe I’d already come out of it. At any rate, I jumped to my feet, shouted back something like, ‘Yeah, I’m fine’ and wandered off towards the stables.

Just like all those years before in the hospital, I was relaxed, calm and disconnected. I walked into one of the stables and closed over the lower door so I could still see out. I took one of the horse’s lead ropes, threw it over a beam in the roof and fashioned a functioning noose. I stood on one of the horse’s buckets – a pink one – while I checked that the beam was strong enough to take my weight. I swung on it without even a creak. I put the noose around my neck, looking at the lovely sky and listening to the wind as it gently washed through the trees.

It was a perfect day to die. The air felt clean in my nose as I put the noose over my head, feeling the rope against my neck. Possibly the same sabotaging voice as before spoke out – again, quietly …

With that, the spell was broken. I was suddenly shocked, exposed to the terror that such a close encounter with death can bring. I took the noose down from the beam – and stepped off the bucket. I left the stable, looking back incredulously at what had so nearly happened.

This was one of the key comments that made me fall in love with Ella. She is irreverent, hilarious, lovely, and beautiful. It was 2008 and we’d originally met online, where she’d openly mocked the photos on my life coaching website. To be fair, I thought they were pretty good, having been taken by a guy who was a self-proclaimed member of the paparazzi. Ella, however, had been a bit more scathing.

She’d expressed an interest in life coaching and how it was done, what was meant by it, and the like. She told me that in exchange for some words of wisdom on this hybrid of counselling, mentoring, cognitive behavioural therapy and management skills, she, being a photographer and all, would take some altogether more impressive pictures for my website.

This all turned out to be so much stuff and fluff. An easy friendship gradually moved into so much more. In among all my mental chaos, Ella went out of her way to take her time to understand me, listen to me, and work out that I was so much more than my illness. She went out of her way to learn more and more about this crazy condition I’d been lumbered with. She did her research and found a variety of books, from memoirs to academic tomes, that helped both me and her to understand what might be going on for me.

She was there when I started writing again – something I’d stopped doing, except in a professional capacity, for years. Living hundreds of miles away, she patiently listened to me on the phone as I took my faltering, Bambi-like steps back into the world of storytelling. I’d always loved writing science fiction and making up stories I felt hadn’t been told yet. I liked crafting the kind of swashbuckling tales that I’d like to read myself.

There was a problem though. After so much time, whenever I tried to write fiction, it kept on coming out as an autobiography. The main character wasn’t just like me, he was me. I know it’s important to write about what you know, but this was taking it to the extreme. She gently coaxed me to write that autobiography – to clear the way for future fiction. Gentle hands.

In a world where I’d failed spectacularly, here was someone telling me I had some worth – that I was valued and, after some time, something to be cherished. I was open and honest with her. This wasn’t going to be an easy ride. I was fucking crazy. Unpredictable. Suicidal.

Using a diary, she helped me to chart the course of my dissociation, something that I was only just beginning to get some kind of handle on. Together we looked for the triggers and patterns, anything that would help us get an idea of what this was about.

I fell for her, hook line and sinker. I was constantly questioning the validity of my feelings and that made it astonishingly hard for her – but she held on tight. One minute I’d love her dearly – hugging her as if my life depended on it – the next, I was unable to feel anything. The very act of touching her was so alien to me, to the extent that it felt that I was handling a piece of meat. I’m reliably informed that women don’t like that type of disconnection.

She took the time to monitor me as I dipped in and out of reality. My periods of dissociation would last for anything between three days and three weeks. Each time I’d reliably emerge, still loving her, still ready for that life-depends-upon-it hug.

Which takes us to that day in a Corby cemetery, where I’d finally decided she should meet my parents. Mum had been gone for 31 years, Dad for nearly 18. Ella stood with me in silence – I thought introductions would have been, at best, weird – respectfully absorbing the atmosphere.

She waited until we were walking away to hit me with what I still believe is one of the greatest one-liners ever: ‘Well, they seemed really laid back … ’

When Chris dissociates it feels like he has gone away and I know he will be home at some point. It is like a very thick block of ice between us. I can just about see him, but he is distorted. Every now and again he seems clearer for just a few seconds, and then he is gone again.

My instinct is to hug and love Chris, but it is just not what he needs when he can hardly recognise me. When he dissociates he suddenly goes white in the face and looks like he might throw up. I used to take it all personally, thinking I’d done or said something to trigger this. We diarised his moods and it does, unfortunately, seem quite random. I carry on with my world while he is gone; as long as he is safe and warm and fed it is very simple. I just wait it out and it is always lovely to have him back. He is either fun, intelligent, with a massive thirst for life, or he is absent, distant, unwell. It is like living with two different people.

Luckily when Chris is back in the world we have a deep love for each other and we make each other laugh every day. I feel blessed to have such a wonderful relationship with him and the difficult times are far outweighed by the loving times.

‘The Second Rule of Fight Club Is That You Do Not Talk About Fight Club’

I was still mad. My emotions were still swinging out of my control. I still found it difficult to see any kind of a future. Although I loved it – love it – I still saw writing as a hobby, not something I’d ever make any kind of living out of. After being sent on my way in social work, I struggled to see anywhere where my particular skillset could nestle down and make itself at home.

I had a discussion with my psychiatrist that went something a little like this …

‘I’ve found a group of people with borderline personality disorder who meet up regularly in Edinburgh. I was thinking about—’

It’ll come as a surprise to nobody that the people who attended this group – which met up in a variety of funky cafes around Edinburgh while calling themselves ‘The Meadows Book Group’ – were fabulous. They weren’t ‘borderlines’, they weren’t aggressive or manipulative, they were people like me who were trying to make some sense of this bizarre condition. Membership of this group was incredibly validating. Surely if these people, with the same condition as me, were lovely, then that might mean that, at a push, I might have the potential to be …

Naomi, who ran the group (at the same time insisting she didn’t – although we all knew it would all fall to bits without her), worked for a collective advocacy organisation in Edinburgh called CAPS. Their aim was to bring people together so their voices were louder and their impact was stronger. She was – still is – wonderful. She helped me to see skills and talents that I thought had died with my career in social work. She liked the way I was able to talk clearly about what it’s like to live with BPD and what the practicalities are around it. In no time at all she had me speaking at conferences, helping with projects, and helping her speak openly and candidly with other folk with the condition, social and health care professionals and friends and families.

I found myself playing a voice part in a short film about dissociation, called Submerged. Johanna, the filmmaker, enjoyed my input so much that she later asked me to be the subject of a full-length documentary.

‘What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?’ Ella asked, pretty much out of the blue one day.

Quick as a flash, I replied I’d shagged Louise, a woman 17 years my elder, so close that she was like a mother to me, a woman who had welcomed me into her home – fed me, watered me, nurtured me, provided me with a surrogate family. And I’d repaid them by having a sordid affair.

‘I … er … I was 15.’ I was remembering the conversation I’d had with Jim all those years ago. I’d been so keen for him not to think of what had happened between me and Louise as abuse. On top of that, I hadn’t wanted to appear a victim in his eyes.

Ella changed tack ever so slightly. ‘If you’d had a social work client who’d approached you with this story, what would you think?’

Cognitively I knew the answer to this. It was really that clear cut, that black and white. I wanted to be honest and open but emotionally it was far more complicated. I loved Louise. She’d been such a massive part of my life. Yes, she’d been a mother to me. And it had all turned upside down.

‘It’s abuse,’ I eventually conceded. The words felt almost hollow. I thought again of a conversation I’d had with Jim. If you were personally responsible for your behaviour at 18, what was so different about 17, 16, or 15? I was stuck. I remembered my son when he was 15. He seemed so young, so naïve. Perhaps it would have been different for him. He’d been exposed to less. Well no, maybe not less. But he’d been exposed to a different world, perhaps one where he’d not been asked to grow up so quickly.

Had I grown up quickly? Sure, I could hoover and make mince soup and put up Christmas decorations from an early age, but somewhere my development had halted.

But how could it be abuse when I was more than big enough to look after myself, when I was able to physically push her away?

The shame and guilt I’d been carrying around all these years engulfed me like an old, familiar blanket. Male childhood sexual abuse was something that was so rarely talked about. Culturally there were undercurrents of, ‘You lucky bastard – getting your end away to an older woman.’ It was a physical act, after all.

Women just didn’t fit the template, the stereotype of what an abuser looked like: the Child Catcher out of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, the slimy stranger that calls over to little girls with a promise of sweeties if she gets in his car. Think of Stranger Danger! Think of gangs of marauding paedophiles congregating on the internet, preying on our innocent children …

I felt sick. I’d been brought up in that culture, that world where a woman in her thirties with a husband and a family just didn’t fit …

And anyway, she’d been abused herself. She’d told me. We know that, statistically, people who have been abused are more likely to go on and abuse themselves. Louise herself had told me that it had been difficult for her to separate physical and emotional love. So she was a victim in all this too. And yet I knew that those statistics still represented a tiny minority of people who’d been abused.

Somehow, I was able to see myself as different from my social work clients, the people who present as vulnerable in situations such as these. Vulnerable and innocent victims of abuse. If that stood for them, why not me? What was so different about me?

Ella chummed me down to visit Louise and her family. She had no idea what to expect, so she came armed with a casserole. The best form of defence, and all that.

She’d been surprised that on meeting Louise she’d found her to be friendly, hospitable, intelligent, witty, well-read and kind – all the things I remembered. We had the casserole and spent some time chatting about the old days, carefully navigating around those nasty abuse rocks. At one point, it felt that Louise was interviewing Ella as my future partner – much in the way a mother would. Did she love me? Was she kind? What about her own family? What about Chris’s mental health?

Finally, Louise and I were left alone in a small room. After some light chit chat around the loveliness of Ella, I raised the question of abuse once again.

Fair point. What did I want? What could she do to make everything better? I was stumped. I guess in retrospect it would have been great if she hadn’t told everyone her version of what had happened – that I’d been in my mid-twenties and, as such, had been a consenting adult knowingly entering into a relationship. It had been our secret, after all. Seemingly, there was no answer. It was clear she couldn’t give me what I needed, whatever it was.

We played some sixties music, returning to that same old comfortable relationship we’d had, on and off, for years. Ella must have been thinking something along the lines of, What the fuck just happened there?

Jim came to visit me. For years I’d wanted his approval. I so wanted him to be proud of me and to approve of me. And yet here I was, crazy, having lost my job and left my family, now having a long-distance relationship with a photographer who lived 300 miles away. I felt sick with shame. I was prepared to say anything to Jim to make this all better … to make him feel better about me.

As part of this plan, I explained at length how I was a lying, duplicitous bastard who couldn’t be trusted. It was like I couldn’t tell the difference between fact and fiction – that my whole life had been a façade. Looking back, I was presenting him with one of those eternal puzzles – if a liar tells you that they’re a liar, then, by the simple fact that they’ve told you, they must be telling the truth … there lies infinity.

I don’t remember too much about his visit. I recall he had an angry outburst when I explained that I’d told his ex-girlfriend about me and Louise.

He also delivered a shiny new X-Box, complete with Halo – a mindless shoot ’em up kind of a game – I could argue that playing computer games is not entirely unlike embarking on guided mindfulness, but I think that would be a little frivolous.

During one particularly bad episode, I was screaming, biting and punching myself. Ella told me she had Derek on the other line, and that he was going to talk to me. I was devastated. I couldn’t not talk to him though – it was Derek! Even through my madness I heard myself apologising again and again as I paused to scream and bite and punch … all the while he was gently telling me it was okay. It would be okay.

Derek came up. It was so great to see him. In the maelstrom of what had been going on he was, probably completely unintentionally, a guiding light. He knew I had the craziness about me, but over the years I’d somehow hidden some of the more unsavoury parts from him.

He’d always been my best friend – we’d been through so much together. Even after huge gaps in seeing each other – of which there were more than I’d have liked – we somehow always manage to pick up as if we were half way through a sentence. Over the past few years, though, the distance between get-togethers had grown; I’d become so absorbed in all things family and work that I’d only see him once every one or two years.

So there he was. It was like we’d never been apart. Before I knew it, he was off buying me a sound system so that I could get more X-Box bangs for my bucks and to ensure I could annoy the neighbours with my poor taste in music.

I’d bought a projector to do presentations when I was a life coach. This fine piece of technology came in very handy for showing films and playing Halo. The new sound system made the whole experience immersive. We set it up in the spare bedroom, a room that had weird hooks attached to two of the walls, with no real windows to mention. We tactfully christened it the ‘Gimp Room’ as we imagined the horrors and weird perversions that may have gone on in there. It turns out the large hooks on the wall, that wouldn’t look out of place in a slaughterhouse, were for putting up a washing line … That said, it remains the Gimp Room to this day.

We spent hours watching The Deer Hunter and shooting aliens over the few days of his visit.

I don’t think I’d fully registered it, but Derek had timed his visit around my birthday. We’ve always made a point of trying to talk to each other on our birthdays – and only very rarely would we exchange gifts or cards. That’s just the way we’d kind of evolved.

Imagine my gobsmacked joy then, when I watched him, this manly fireman sort of a guy, walking down the stairs of my apartment, carrying a Thornton’s chocolate fudge cake with a lit candle sticking out the top, singing, ‘Happy birthday … ’

Only Derek could deliver a ‘Jesus loves you, but I think you’re a cunt!’ card to compliment this most sensitive of moments.

Naomi had told me about some research into borderline personality disorder that she felt I might be interested in taking part in. Given the apparent paucity of clinical knowledge in the area, I was keen to help in any way I could.

In no time at all I was meeting up with the consultant psychiatrist who was heading up the study. We’d chosen a fine café, supplier of all things cakey and sweet next to the Royal Edinburgh Hospital that had the wonderful name Loopy Lorna’s!

After some friendly chit chat and banter, I felt that it was time to get to the root of this clinician’s experience, skills and knowledge – and perhaps find out a little about his motivations. ‘What training have you had in the area of BPD?’ I asked.

He went on to tell me that this was essentially why he was doing this research. It was his attempt to further the clinical knowledge – of which I think we’d established there was very little – around borderline personality disorder, or emotionally unstable personality disorder as many clinicians in the UK were beginning to call it. (That was how it was described in the NICE guidelines.)

There were a number of different parts to the study: questionnaires, open interviews and the like. The two parts that stood out most for me were the following.

I sat in front of a computer screen with a switch that I would click one way for ‘Yes’ and the other way for ‘No’. I was told that I was going to be shown the faces of a hundred different folk, of different ages and genders. I had to decide whether or not I’d trust that person given the limited information of what their face looked like.

Simple.

I took my participation in this study very seriously, so I wanted to answer as authentically as I could to expand the world’s knowledge of my stinky condition. I had a preconceived notion that I, being a carey-sharey socialworkery type, would have a very positive outlook on my fellow folk and, as such, I’d trust everyone.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I scrutinised face after face, that I trusted nobody. Not one. I might have fudged the results a little when my internal dialogue finally persuaded me to respond positively to the face of an older lady … I didn’t want to appear to be a complete crackpot.

Another part of the study involved a functional MRI scan – my head was read by the big clunking machine while I completed a number of simple tasks. I explained to the consultant that I’d been “bottled” in my youth and that I was intrigued to find out if there had been any permanent damage caused by this enthusiastic beating. After the readings, we popped into the little side room where the MRI dudes sat and pored over the resulting images.

The first shock for me – and this was as huge as it was unexpected – was that the inside of my head, by and large, looked pretty much like the inside of anyone else’s head. To this day I’ve no idea what I thought I was going to see – possibly some confirmation that, although I walk among you, I’m not quite like you? Who knows?

As the image passed by on the screen though, there it was, for all the world to see, a dent on my skull with ancient scar tissue to match. Confirmation that my skull had been fractured all those years ago. The consultant shouted, ‘Look, right there is where your skull was fractured,’ or something very similar.

Hard evidence that I could take back to my own psychiatrist to enable her to utter that now famous line regarding the effect of the fracture on my future mental health, ‘Well, it wouldn’t have helped … ’

Ella and I were in Nottingham to see Mumford and Sons. I was driving around the intriguing one-way system they have there when I started to become agitated. I rapidly pulled the car over into a lay-by and, with that (from Ella’s perspective anyway), I was gone.

From what she could see, I’d changed from being a fortysomething-year-old man to a young child – possibly around four. Apparently, I was very obedient, which, on reflection, doesn’t really sound like me. This was a fine thing, since I can’t imagine what would have happened had I continued to drive. This was alarming. She knew my mental health problem was multifaceted, but this was something new entirely.

She phoned around a number of friends (she knows a psychiatrist, a psychologist and a social worker). It was like she was having a multidisciplinary meeting in the car. What should she do? Where should she take me?

Thankfully, the consensus was, since I appeared relatively quiet and calm, that I should go back to hers, which was about a two-hour drive away. At one point she had to go to the loo. She pulled in next to a pub and then thought, ‘What on earth do I do?’ It was like leaving a child in a car in an unfamiliar area, only this child was the size of a man and, for all she knew, was liable to wander off. She locked me in the car, rushed off and rushed back, and was delighted to find I was still there.

I seemed to be lost in an inner world until we arrived at the gate to her garden. I re-emerged momentarily. ‘Oh, hello …’ I think I smiled, before vanishing off again.

While she was watching this child in a man’s body, I was enjoying the experience of feeling like a boy in a boy’s body. I was lost in the world of my childhood, at the square round the back of my house where me and my friends used to play a variety of games like hide and seek, kick the can, kerby, and football. In my mind we were catching butterflies in jam jars near Calum McKay’s house, and all my friends were there – Michael Murray, George Taylor, Paul Rigby and his sister Cheryl, Calum …

The sky was a vibrant blue and the bricks of the garages that had served as goals for our football matches were a crisp yellow. All the while I was playing I knew my mum was there, looking after me, looking out for me. I never saw her throughout this entire episode, but she was just there, and all was well in the world. My world.

I loved it. I bathed in it. The whole wonderful experience began to break down, though, when memories of the real world began encroaching. The clincher was when I remembered I had an eighteenyear-old son. There was absolutely no coming back from that – no matter how much my mind twisted and turned to hang onto my childhood world, I was completely unable to consolidate parenthood with being a 4-year-old child.

In total, this episode, this period of dissociation, lasted for about 3 weeks. Ella put me in a darkened room with loud American cop shows blaring in the background, feeding me crisps and high carb food.

We often joke that with the TV shows I’m getting two for the price of one. Although I seem to be absorbed in the dramas in my dissociative state, there’s very little I can remember about them when I resurface.

Frivolity aside though, we were both on a steep learning curve and Ella, bless her cotton socks, was demonstrating loud and clear that she was in it for the long haul.

I’d waited over a year for the confirmation that therapy was to start on such and such a date. The letter, when it came, was disappointing. I hadn’t been invited to start therapy – this was a letter telling me that, after a year, I was going to be assessed for my suitability for psychotherapy. After all this time – after raising all my hopes – I was struck by the stark realisation I could come away with nothing. And then what? To say I was desperate was putting it mildly.

The assessment took place at the psychotherapy department at the Royal Edinburgh Hospital. Already I was replaying my last failed exposure to the sacred art almost 20 years ago. The guy who’d told me that my dreams about my teeth breaking and falling out of my mouth had been a reflection of my fear of dealing with what was going on inside my head – the same guy who tried to flog me an extra session a week at whatever price … What if it was the same guy all these years later? Would he recognise me? Would I recognise him? Would it be the same old sitting-in-silence-until-I-started-to-babble experience? Was I up for that?

With my mind still spinning, I was escorted into a large, comfortable office to meet a guy who was the spitting image of Benny from ABBA. It felt like an interview. He stopped short of asking me what I would be bringing to psychotherapy, but it didn’t feel far off. I wanted to be open and honest, at the same time hoping against hope that my answers would be the right ones to get me that golden ticket. I knew from people I’d spoken to before that I had to be just the right level of crazy. Too mad, and they couldn’t deal with me – too sane and I didn’t need them.

I told him about my self-harming and was completely knocked off my stride when he said, ‘Well, that’s not very intelligent, is it?’

I stifled my urge to break my chair across his teeth, and answered meekly, ‘No, no … I suppose it isn’t.’

I would have said anything at this stage to get in the door. I would have dressed in a chicken suit and danced down the Royal Mile if he’d told me that was the way in. I’m not sure he knew the level of the power he was wielding.

He told me he thought I’d be suitable for group psychotherapy. No! Fuck no! I wanted a psychotherapist of my very own! Someone who would be mine, someone who would cure me of this fucking bastard, whatever it was, condition …

I gave him a greatly diluted version of my concerns, to which he replied, ‘In one-to-one psychotherapy, you have one mirror reflecting back at you. In group psychotherapy you have a number of mirrors.’

I was sold. It actually sounded like exactly what I needed. Only I had to meet his colleague who ran the group, just to ensure I was right for the group and the group was right for me. Another assessment, just what I fucking needed.

Over the next week or so, I tried to persuade myself that that this would be the final hurdle. Surely he wouldn’t waste everyone’s time with this unless he thought it would work out.

Really I had no idea. Time and time again, I’d torture myself with his ‘well that’s not very intelligent’ statement. Over and over again I wondered if I shouldn’t have told him about my self-harming. But what should I have said? I was such a fucking idiot!

I had an altogether gentler interview with his colleague. Very early on she told me I’d be starting soon – it would be for an hour and a half, twice a week, in the same room with up to eight people. The therapy would be open ended – I would leave when I felt it was time to leave – and no, there wouldn’t be individual psychotherapy sessions where we would assess my progress.

The rules were simple: attend the meetings and do your best to be on time – but remember that hour and a half is your time, so some lateness, as long as it wasn’t disruptive for the others, is perfectly acceptable.

The next rule was fresh out of Fight Club. ‘The second rule of Fight Club is you do not talk about Fight Club.’

We were strongly advised not to discuss what goes on in the sessions with anyone outside the four walls of the group – whether they were members of the group, friends or family. That way everything that happened within the group was directly observable.

The open-ended nature of the therapy beautifully reflected the amount of time it had taken for my messed-up head to get to where it was today. So obviously it was going to take significant time for me to get it to a … er … better place. And no, we never talked in terms of me being cured.

And that’s all I can tell you, specifically, about what went on in psychotherapy. Sorry. What the fuck did you expect? Haven’t you seen – better still, read Fight Club? Well, don’t judge me until you do … Seriously though, I felt that group psychotherapy was – still is – sacred. It’s that trust that, for me, makes it so incredibly powerful.

No, of course I’m not going to leave you hanging like that … I can still tell you how I feel this wonderful experience went some way to changing me – and how that change enabled me to take my next faltering steps in life. The following chapter describes how therapy has helped me change certain behaviours typical of my BPD.