CHAPTER 13

HOW THERAPY HELPED ME

The Narrative

Over the years, I’d got into the habit of neatly packaging up bits of my life into self-contained stories – each with a beginning, middle and end. Although each tale would be delivered in a friendly, often humorous way, very often there would be no way in for the listener. The humour – again, at first glance, a friendly, come-on-in-and-have a-cup-of-tea kind of behaviour – acted like an insurmountable wall, a learned defence just in case there was a danger that someone could reach the soft flesh within.

I’d thought that writing the first part of this book would prepare me for the process of psychotherapy, and to an extent, it did. Memories of stuff would generate more memories, re-establishing old neurological pathways like an explorer hacking back the undergrowth with a machete. For much of it, it felt like I was a ghost writer for someone close to me, like I was telling someone else’s story – often with little or no emotional connection.

This was reflected in my desire to tell Mark Algacs that my mum was dead, but it was okay, we’d be getting free school dinners now. It’s the reason that, throughout my formative years, I’d protect people when they made the heinous faux pas of asking what my mum did for a living, only for me to say, ‘She’s dead, but don’t feel bad. It’s all okay. I’m over that now.’ I did exactly the same when Dad died. ‘No, really, don’t feel bad … it’s fine … IT’S FINE!’

Maybe it started after Mum’s funeral, when I was met with a long queue of folk telling me that I had to be strong for my dad? Or perhaps it started long before then, when I was born into a country that had a ‘Keep Calm and Carry on’ attitude towards everything?

The thing was, just like trying to squash an unburstable balloon with your hands, the emotions never went away. The more I’d try to suppress my feelings, the more likely they were to pop up unexpectedly between my fingers. They would then manifest themselves in the shape of violence against my loved ones – Derek, my cat Ginger, my brother, and whole mixture of sundry folk at school and beyond. That then spilled over into violence against myself, physically and internally through depression, vivid thoughts of self-harm and suicidal ideation, and those long periods of dissociation.

The process of change probably started with a conversation with my psychiatrist, when she told me (somewhat tetchily because I’d pulled her into my world) that I was incongruous. What was going on inside didn’t match my outside. Yes, what happened was awful, but look at me – I’m hilarious!

Connecting my emotions to those events – and to new events – was, and still is, a long and gradual process. I now take time to look at things, not just as a story, but as something I was, and am, immersed in. Often, I have to retrace my steps and look at things again and again. Have I storified something? Or have I experienced it more fully? Often, it’s a bit of both, but I’m getting there.

Anger is an Act of Violence

Well, no, obviously it isn’t. But for me, this is a core belief that I developed over many years, that has had a profound effect on how I interact with the world.

Prior to therapy, I despised any form of anger in myself. Anger in other people is fine, but often I’d find myself bending into all kinds of contortions to make it stop. I’d do anything to find that common ground – occasionally finding myself in the bizarre position of completely agreeing with two people’s standpoints when they were arguing with each other.

This, I believe, was born out of the horror of beating my brother up while dissociating when I was seventeen or eighteen. Somehow though, I’d bundled up violence in the same package as anger, shouting and any kind of disagreement – severe or mild.

I remember Ella seeing a manifestation of this early on in our relationship. We were going out for a meal, and she asked me if I would like to go for Indian or Chinese. I shocked her by going into some form of mental paralysis as I tried to come up with what I perceived to be the right answer. I was unable to tolerate the thought of getting it wrong. My BPD superpowers were on overdrive as I searched for some facial cue, intonation in her voice, or any kind of clue as to what she preferred, just so I could make everything emotionally quiet and okay.

Somewhat weirdly, as a social worker, I was usually able to short circuit those feelings in order to be appropriately assertive on behalf of my clients.

This hasn’t gone away overnight. I still frequently wrestle with making my needs completely known, even to myself, let alone the people who don’t live inside my head. For me, this was one of those key issues where it was / still is essential to dovetail what was happening in psychotherapy with the real, outside world. For me, having people around me who love me and who are keen to support me – especially Ella – helps so much.

I still self-harm, although I do it more rarely now. My main issue is dissociation. I still lose roughly a third of my life to being in that outof-body / fugue state. It’s still almost impossible to find any obvious triggers to it – the mind is an astonishingly complex thing. And some of the roots of a dissociative episode are so convoluted, most of the time we can’t fathom what they are. I know if I’m very busy I’m more likely to zone out – but other than that, I’m pretty clueless.

Pants on Fire

One of the symptoms of my particular brand of BPD, was the propensity to tell lies. These lies were, by and large, spur of the moment and ill-thought through. I think, if we were to label them, we could call them really shit lies. This, for me, wasn’t born out of a desire to be duplicitous, to lure people into my dark world of deceit. It was an almost reflexive response for me, used in order to avoid any manner of conflict – including any potential discomfort I’d anticipate in others. This has included anything from ‘Of course I love you,’ right down to, ‘Yes, I did the dishes’ and everything in between.

It was chaotic. I believe that this is why some professionals still hang on to that belief that people with BPD are manipulative. To me, manipulation implies a complex web of skilled behaviours that lead to a desired outcome – world domination and the like. My experience – and I’m only speaking about myself here – is that I’m dazzlingly shit at using lies to get what I want out of another person. All my lies ever did (and I’m not suggesting that chaos didn’t ensue around them) was allow me to avoid emotional pain. Not exactly your arch Bond villain.

This was one hell of a battle. When I say ‘almost reflexive’ I mean, at times, reflexive. For a long time with Ella I found myself backtracking on things I’d said. ‘Er … what I really meant was …’

It was incredibly difficult – but over the years and especially through my therapy, I gradually learned that nothing devastating would happen when I allowed disagreements to take their natural course.

‘All the World’s a Stage … ’

I was the youngest in our nuclear family when Mum died. When Dad was unable to fulfil the parental role, and I was unable to step into his shoes, it was Jim who stepped up to that mark. Jim, a boy who’d just turned 13 and was exactly one year, one month and one day older than me. He became his version – a version I accepted at the time – of a Mum and Dad combo.

He did his best in the chaos of our lives – but he was 13! Any anger and vitriol I spilled out earlier in this story must be taken in the context of this elaborate roleplay. A roleplay where I remained ‘the youngest’ with all the lack of responsibility that goes with it.

As I grew up, I was always amazed at my friends who rebelled against their parents during their teenage years and early adulthood. It was a rite of passage to take the first faltering steps at assertiveness, essential for leaving home or becoming independent. Not having any parents to speak of, I had nothing to rebel against. Or so I thought.

But I had rebelled against Jim, who I’d seen as this strange Mum / Dad hybrid for all these years – even up until my mid-forties. I was astonished when I made this realisation in psychotherapy. I’d rebelled against Jim, got angry with him, blamed him, loved him and kept on pining for his respect. I had a gut-wrenching desire for him to be proud of me. I always knew if things turned to shit, he’d rescue me. Even when he didn’t, I still believed he would. I was his youngest child after all.

One of the regrets I have is never knowing my parents as real people – and not just some fantasy characters fulfilling the role of what a perfect mum or dad should be.

Psychotherapy allowed me to begin to change that mindset. It allowed me to explore what it must have been like for my dad – the oldest brother of 12 kids, a boxer, a Glasgow hard man, a soldier who saw the most bloody and horrible battles of the second world war – to get everything he ever wanted and then have his dream life torn from his grasp when the woman he loved died so young from bastard cancer. He’d been in love, with children, a job, a lovely house, and frequent holidays in Butlins, and it had been taken away from him. It kept me mindful of how he lost his way, self-medicating with whisky, setting himself the task of being around me and Jim until we finally flew the coop. He wasn’t just a dad. He was a man, with all that entails.

In my mind, I’d made Stuart into a generic adult. He was a grown-up. For years I never considered the fact that he’d lost his mum at a ridiculously early age, and that he’d somehow managed to beg, steal, and borrow the money to come back from South Africa to see her for one last time. On the flight back, he’d known he’d never see Mum alive again, and that he wouldn’t be able to afford to come back for her funeral.

As the youngest, I’d expected him to do something to rescue the family, simply because he was an adult. And I never really lost that way of looking at the world. I had an egotism that ignored the fact that Stuart had this own family, a job, a life, and was suffering from the pain of losing his mum in his mid-twenties.

He’d certainly had a shot at coming to my rescue as I’ve discussed, when he took me in as a 17-year-old. But to be fair on him and his family, I must admit it was already too late at that point. The craziness was upon me.

Over the years, I’d made Mum into some bizarre caricature of what a mother should be. Never wavering from my 12-year-old perspective, I was unable to see her as anything other than perfect, loving, caring and nurturing; a perfect mix of Little House on the Prairie and The Waltons. In later years, as we were separating, Poppy made the suggestion that no woman ever stood a chance with me because I had this fantasy figure as a backdrop. I think she may have had a point, – but I don’t think she was entirely right. By this time she’d fallen into the trap of blaming me for every difficulty in our marriage, right down to global warming. I did have a label, after all …

Me, bitter? Maybe a little.

What Was Love?

Although my relationship with Ella was developing beautifully, there were times where I’d steer into mental cul-de-sacs, dead ends that declared that this relationship was flawed.

I imagined my head was made of Lego – that psychotherapy had taken it apart, piece by piece, only to throw all the bits up in the air. I knew my mind would come down in some form or other, with all the pieces still there – but I had no idea how that was going to turn out.

It was with this in mind that I wasn’t entirely sure what love was. What kind of love was valid in a relationship? Was I allowed to experience motherly love, sisterly love, friendly love, all bundled up in my new relationship with Ella? Louise had once told me that, long ago, she’d mixed up physical love with emotional love. I questioned the validity of my love with Ella. Was it a function of my madness that I saw all these different types of love in our relationship? What did it all mean?

It was in the midst of all this that I placed a big question mark over my sexuality. I didn’t know if I was straight, gay or anything in between. I was struck by a short mental video I played over and over again in my minds’ eye. I was around 13, and a friend of mine (we’ll call him Brian) was standing in front of me. We were chatting about some youthful something or other, and he was undoing and retying my school tie. I remember being mesmerised, watching as I developed a year-long, never-to-be-spoken-about, crush on him.

Psychotherapy took me back there. Once again, my mind began swimming with these thoughts, these doubts, these speculative meanderings. What if I was gay and I was just taking Ella up some garden path, only to abandon her later, dragging yet another person into my bizarre life?

At the same time, I was pulled into a religious whirlwind. I was taken back to a conversation the young Christopher had had with a young girlfriend at infant school. I would have been about seven when I told her that God was my friend. And he was! I knew exactly what he looked like – huge black oval eyes, a short, skinny frame with long, elegant fingers.

I remembered the conversations I’d had with a locum GP. They told me I should turn to God, and Poppy had suggested that a lot of my mental health problems were due to my lack of faith. Even my GP told me he’d pray for me.

Had I turned my back on God when mum died? I remember laughing at Gradscope, an all-new singing and dancing piece of software that I’d found when I graduated. It was meant to point you in the right career direction. I’d eagerly punched all my data in, with the hope that it would tell me to apply to become an astronaut or something equally exciting. But no, each time I punched my details in – and I did this three times in the hope that it would offer up something else – ‘Church of England Minister’ came out at the top of the list. This had me intrigued since not once did it ask me if I believed in a god. Maybe it was time for me to re-establish my faith?

I found myself walking past trees, dogs and cats – anything living – and feeling the rage of envy as I looked at them. A tree knows how to tree, a dog knows how to dog, and yet I had no idea how to human. With my lies I could be whatever I thought people wanted – perhaps needed me to be – with my thoughts of love, sexuality, relationships, I found myself paralysed when I tried to even consider what it was like to be Chris. I had no idea who I was … and yet … gradually, almost imperceptibly, those Lego pieces started cascading down …

I Fucking Hate You!

Forgiveness doesn’t feel like a powerful weapon in the battle against – well, anything really. Imagine if we went around forgiving folk all over the world for the pain they, or the groups they affiliate with, have caused you in the past?

I’ve both loved and hated Louise, on and off, over the past 30 or so years. I’ve felt a hate so pervasive that it would leap to the front of my mind, seemingly apropos of nothing. There were times where I’d have killed her for this thing she’d done to me. But weirdly there were other times where I’d hear a piece of sixties music that would light up some lovely memories with her, motivating me to phone her with a cheery, ‘Do you remember that time when we … ’

I’m not entirely sure what guided me to it, but one day I found myself reading The Forgiveness Project, a book where a number of individuals explore the notion of forgiveness in the context of something horrible that had happened to them. Its wonderfully unpreachy words guide the reader to consider what forgiveness might mean for them. At no point does it say, ‘You must forgive!’ Clearly, forgiveness works for some, and not for others.

I decided I’d try this mindset on for size, to see if it would fit with Louise. Someone had commented that if you let yourself hate someone, you are effectively allowing them to live, rent-free, in your mind forever.

Almost immediately, I felt a huge pressure on my shoulders lift. This was a radically different way of looking at things for me and, somehow, the world felt a little clearer. I decided I would give myself some time for this way of thinking to bed down, so I could fully explore what it meant for me.

Before I’d really discussed this with anyone, I got a phone call from Louise. I was walking across the Meadows in Edinburgh, on my way to psychotherapy. We chatted a bit before she told me she was very ill and that we needed to talk. I listened and told her that I’d come down to visit her as soon as I could, to talk about the things that I’d been trying to work through. I didn’t mention forgiveness …

The next few days raced by alarmingly quickly. I received a phone call from Louise’s daughter telling me that she had widespread cancer leading to kidney failure, and that she was slipping in and out of a coma. I immediately sent a card to the hospital, to tell Louise how I’d forgiven her. I asked her daughter to read it to her when it arrived.

I contacted Ella and explained everything. I told her I had to get down to the south of England to see Louise as soon as possible. Ella arrived in what seemed like no time, ensuring that her boys were looked after and all things work-related were catered for. I drove down from Edinburgh as fast as I could. Arriving at the hospital, I got to the ward and found a roomful of folk sitting around Louise’s bed. The atmosphere was upbeat and friendly, but Louise was in a coma from which she never recovered.

The naively hoped for happy ending was never realised. Her daughter told me she’d read the card to her, but it was unclear whether she’d heard or understood.

Had I forgiven her?

Well, yes and no. For me, forgiveness isn’t a tangible thing, nor is it an absolute, black or white, on or off thing. It’s a process, a journey … with a whole bunch of pitfalls and detours along the path.

That’s a journey I’m still on today.

I’m Cured … CURED, I Tell You …

Over the two years or so of psychotherapy, my Lego bricks gradually fell into a Chris-shaped form. One that was the same but radically different from the guy who’d met Benny from ABBA that short time ago.

I was well on my way to being me, but at the same time I recognised that I wasn’t cured, whatever that meant. I was still dissociating roughly a third of the time, although my self-harming had reduced significantly.

I’d figured out who I was as a person through looking back, further and further, to a time where things hadn’t turned to shit, where I still had the wide-eyed optimism of childhood. I was going to be a writer, a public speaker, or maybe even a stand-up comedian. I’d recognised that going back to social work – even if they’d have me – would be destructive for me at this stage. My unrealistic desire to save the world – to save the younger me – through this most noble of professions, would never be realised.

I’d learned to accept myself – I knew a cure was a fantasy, but management was infinitely possible. I could, and would, live a rich and fulfilling life because of the point psychotherapy had delivered me to.

This hadn’t happened in isolation though. The microworld of therapy – where I was learning to be a different version of myself – dovetailed with the changes in my ‘real’, wider world.

I knew I had value. I knew that, despite all the stuff that had gone on before, I wasn’t inherently bad or poisonous. Neither was I all things good. I’m simply a man, with all that entails.

I knew I had skills, such as those that had delivered me to a career in social work and, fleetingly, in life coaching. I had skills and values that had been galvanised through training. I hoped that one day soon I’d be able to re-enter society in a way that was both meaningful to me and it. Naomi had assured me I could.

Most of all, though, I’d learned that me, Chris, was both able to love and be worthy of love. The Chris that I’d tried to hide all these years could be adored by others. This charge was led by my darling Ella, like Joan of Arc galloping on a magnificent horse, sword held aloft, armour glinting in the summer sun, screaming, ‘This man is loveable. I adore him. I dare you to challenge me!’

And Derek. Always, always Derek …