Breaking the Heart Open E-Book

Tony Bates

• Herausgeber: Gill Books
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 392

Beschreibung

Bestselling author and psychologist Tony Bates has spent his whole career examining and seeking to understand the lives of others. Here, he turns his therapeutic eye on himself and describes the events and people in his own life that have made him the insightful thinker and teacher that he is today. Tony recalls traumatic events in his childhood that reverberated throughout his life for many years and describes how, with therapy and time, he was eventually able to heal those internal wounds. He recounts the stories of people in pain that affected him most deeply and informed both the direction of his work and his philosophy as a psychologist. By interweaving his own life story with reflections on how psychology and society treat people with mental health vulnerabilities, Tony invites us to reflect with compassion on the meaning of emotional struggles in all our lives. 'A searingly honest, lucid and inspiring account of a life, moving from deep childhood trauma to the hard-earned wisdom of a wounded healer. A compelling read and remarkable achievement.' Richard Kearney 'I was moved by Tony's honesty; humbled by his courage; fascinated by the way he used psychology to make sense of his personal suffering; and inspired by the place he has arrived at this point in his life. Beautifully written, poetic in parts, Tony's book is a treasure trove of wisdom. Everyone should read it.' Alan Carr, PHD 'What a generous gift, so typical of Tony, to those who need to know that in their loneliness or depression they are not alone' Dr Mary McAleese 'This is an emotional read in which the psychologist bears their own soul and highlights why they are so skilled at their work' Niall Breslin

Leseprobe

Breakingthe HeartOpen

The Shaping of a Psychologist

TONY BATES

Gill Books

To Ursula, Andrew, Philip and Rachel, with love.

Vulnerability is the very thing that permits us to connect with each other and recognise in others the same discomfort we have in ourselves. Vulnerability is the engine of compassion and can be a superpower, a special vision that allows us to see the quivering, wounded inner world that most of us possess.

NICK CAVE

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Introduction

Prologue: In the End is my Beginning

1: Home is where we start from

2: In search of self

3: Teenage dreams

4: Learning to Listen

5: The body never lies

6: Things fall apart

7: Let us not talk falsely now

8: Thoughts about therapy

9: Personal therapy

10: Dignity in madness

11: Thoughts of psychosis

12: Thoughts on depression

13: Somewhere to turn to, someone to talk to

14: Thoughts on psychiatric diagnosis

15: A year of living mindfully

16: Opening the heart

17: What it takes to heal

18: Towards a more humane mental health service

19: The heart’s calling

Epilogue: What I’ve learned about pain

Acknowledgements

References

Copyright

About the author

About Gill Books

INTRODUCTION

Our wounds and how we deal with them shape who we become. For most of my early life, I survived by hiding. I was a ‘good’ boy and did my best to fit in and be ‘normal’, but beneath this charade, I mostly felt terrified and alone. I experienced the world as a place where bad things could happen, even if I couldn’t explain what it was that frightened me. I was ashamed of how badly I felt and worried that if other people knew, they would be disappointed that I wasn’t the easy-going person I pretended to be.

Being quiet, compliant and slightly withdrawn made me a perfect target for bullies. I was terrified of conflict and surrendered immediately to their taunts, passively taking whatever was doled out. My friends always seemed more ‘together’ than I was; they knew stuff, they were confident and they had more fun than I did. I was always careful to hide my insecurities in case they might turn against me. I wasn’t much fun to be around.

I pushed denial and repression to their limits but always felt uneasy inside. Something wasn’t right. That ‘something’ was probably not one thing, but it felt like a basic wound in my psyche that kept reopening and pulling me under. As I grew up, this wound became inflamed in situations that should have been some of the happiest moments in my life. I longed to fall in love and be loved, but I found intimacy extremely painful. My demons were at their worst in the arms of someone I loved. My insecurities took the form of massive separation anxiety and irrational jealousy.

Life took me out of myself in my twenties. My focus shifted to finishing college, finding a job, getting married, acquiring a home and starting a family. I had ‘mini-breakdowns’ along the way, but I saved the big one until my thirties. Perhaps I needed to reach a point where I felt strong and safe enough to fall apart. Or perhaps the pain had to get stronger for me to recognise that I’d become a stranger to myself.

‘All our sorrows can be borne if you can put them into a story’, wrote the author Isak Dinesen. Mental health is a story that can be told, a story that is robust enough to hold our pain. We struggle to a greater or lesser extent with ‘unstoried’ experiences – body sensations, emotions and memory fragments – for which we haven’t yet found a way to express and come to terms with.

In his play Translations, Brian Friel, the Irish dramatist, captured this tension we can feel when the story we tell ourselves doesn’t do justice to the complexity of our lives. He wrote, ‘It can happen that a civilisation can be imprisoned in a linguistic contour which no longer matches the landscape of experience.’ The stories we tell ourselves about who we are can either stifle or free us. When they fit what we are experiencing, make sense of how we feel in terms of our past and present struggles, they help us to feel real and bear the unbearable. But when they are superficial or simplistic and don’t match our experience, we feel at odds with ourselves. We can’t make sense of what we feel. We wonder if there is something terribly wrong with us.

I lived inside a story that was too small for years. I tried to live up to an ideal image of myself – intelligent, socially aware – that never fitted with all I felt inside. Doubts, insecurities and spasms of fear swept through my inner world. My identity didn’t fit the shape of my soul. I needed a more robust story that matched the ‘landscape of my experience’. A story that allowed me to be more real and gave me room to grow.

This book is about what happened when I came out of hiding and allowed my mind and body to heal slowly. It is for everyone who carries deeper wounds that seem to shadow their every step and that become easily inflamed. It is the story of what I learned from my own pain and the pain of the people I served.

I spent most of my career working in a city centre psychiatric hospital. The people I worked with bore the scars of very difficult lives. Many had struggled to keep their wounds hidden until they reached a breaking point where they could no longer do so. Their vulnerability created an opportunity for honest conversations that didn’t routinely happen in the ‘normal’ world. Some had become embittered by their pain, but most struggled to find relief, to find themselves.

They accepted support despite believing for years that they had to go it alone. Together we faced their fear and bewilderment, sadness and rage. We gave what had been hidden or disowned room to breathe. We knitted fragments of emotions and memory into a coherent story. We learned to appreciate unusual ideas, intense feelings and behaviours that initially made no sense, but which were their best attempt to survive a difficult situation.

Recovery takes time. It always takes longer than the books say to recover a sense of Self. Some people find this tedious. It can be demoralising to circle back over old wounds that still become inflamed despite best efforts at acceptance and self-care. There are periods of painful uncertainty where a person might not know whether they are making progress or falling back. But working in psychology has taught me that pain is the door we walk through to find ourselves. We can try to repress, numb and project it onto others, but we will never be comfortable in our skin until we can recognise it, be with it and give it a place in the larger story of our lives.

Sometimes we haven’t been allowed to voice our vulnerabilities because to do so would risk rejection, exclusion or worse. Something can remain unsayable because it’s never been spoken about in this family, this community or this society. As we move out into the world, the pain that was unsayable lives on in our bodies. It breaks out in physical symptoms and harmful behaviour patterns. We find this confusing if we live with it or see it around us. In sheer desperation, a young person may choose to calm their body through drugs, drinking, self-harm and a host of other possibilities, seeking a way to stop what isn’t working in their body. Or they may choose to end their life.

It’s easy to make mental health sound like a completely personal issue; a matter for each of us, alone, to resolve. This is not an accurate or helpful way to look at our lives. Our relationships and social circumstances profoundly shape how we feel about ourselves and manage our lives.

We talk about our emotional struggles more openly today. ‘We all have mental health’ is our new mantra. It has replaced the fear and shame of my mother’s generation who lived by the creed, ‘Not a word’. The stigma surrounding mental health difficulties has been reduced, mainly due to service users speaking openly about their experiences. They have shown us that recovery is possible and told us what helps and what doesn’t help.

But one of the unintended consequences of our antistigma campaigns is that we are increasingly medicalising our problems by framing them in the language of diagnostic psychiatry. There is a growing tendency to see feelings of loneliness, self-doubt, sadness, anxiety and frustration as indicative of something ‘wrong’. The complexity and subtlety of our emotional problems may be reduced to a ‘chemical imbalance’, ‘brain anomaly’ or ‘faulty genes’. No conclusive evidence supports this way of thinking about human distress, but we continue to use labels as if they alone can explain our pain and confusion. We need more robust stories about our mental health that make sense of our wounds and scars and allow us to come to terms with them.

Just as physical pain draws attention to what is hurting in our bodies, our troubled emotions are also messengers. They point to something in our lives that needs our attention and care. Rather than dismiss emotional pain as a biological malfunction, or a disease, we need to respect that our symptoms may reflect some unresolved issues in our past or some oppressive life situation in our present.

Young people are accumulating psychiatric labels at an increasing rate. Access to vital resources may insist that a child first has a diagnosis. A school principal I spoke to recently told me about a student of 17 who announced to her with apparent relief: ‘I know what’s wrong with me, I have borderline personality disorder.’ It was true that she felt unstable, but it was also true that this girl was emotionally exhausted from trying to appease her parents, who were constantly fighting with each other.

Another consequence of framing children’s mental health problems purely as ‘mental illness’ is that psychotropic drug prescriptions have risen exponentially over the past 10 years. A pharmacist shared with me that what she found most ‘hurtful’ in her work is filling prescriptions of psychiatric medication for children as young as eight. She saw parents as having lost all confidence in themselves to handle their child’s distress and was frustrated by our collective refusal to admit how stressful family life has become (for everyone), and the limited latitude there is for children who don’t fit neatly into performance-oriented school regimes.

Wonderful front-line mental health workers and highly compassionate clinicians exist. And there are pockets of creative innovation that engage troubled people in dignified and effective ways. But a curious malaise hangs over our mental health service. Perhaps this is a result of our collective failure to give distressed people and their families the support they need. Despite sizeable annual increases in funding and ambitious mental health policies, something is not working. Mental health workers themselves lose heart as they watch familiar faces staying longer in services and taking increasing amounts of drugs for extended periods of time. Service users feel short-changed, workers feel frustrated, and accessing support grows increasingly difficult. The system tasked with supporting those of us who become depressed is, itself, depressed.

In her book, Strangers to Ourselves, Rachel Aviv, who was hospitalised at six years old and diagnosed with anorexia, wrote:

Mental illnesses are often seen as chronic and intractable forces that can take over our lives, but I wonder how much the stories we tell about them, especially in the beginning, can shape their course. People can feel freed by these stories, but they can also get stuck in them.1

My work has exposed me to writers and teachers whose insights into emotional suffering are full of humanity and wisdom. But nothing has shaped the psychologist I’ve become more than those who allowed me into the dark corners of their lives. They showed me the terror and the beauty of being human. Their recovery always brought them closer to their humanity. And they invited me, in turn, to deepen my own.

Relationships and language hold us together. We can help each other create stories that fit ‘the landscape of our experience’. Stories that are as rich and layered as our lives. Stories that are flexible enough to grow as we grow. This book is my story. It traces experiences that profoundly shaped the psychologist I became.

‘People can become trapped in history, and history becomes trapped in us’, wrote James Baldwin. But when we can face and understand our personal and collective uneasiness, we discover that history does not have to become our destiny.

PROLOGUE

IN THE END IS MY BEGINNING

When the nurse called to say they were moving her to the hospice, I knew something had changed. She had been diagnosed with a brain tumour a month after her 90th birthday but seemed fine. We’d been busy since putting the necessary supports in place to allow her to return home and live out whatever time she had as peacefully as possible.

But Mum’s sudden transfer from the general hospital suggested that mightn’t happen. I drove to the hospice and arrived as she was settling in. Her room was far more spacious than anything we had at home. No medical paraphernalia surrounded her bed, as there had been in the general hospital.

When I bent over to hug her, she was smiling. One of her eyes looked misshapen, and her speech was indistinct. I asked her if she knew where she was, and she did. I asked her whether she understood the implications of her transfer, and she nodded. She picked up on my uneasiness and reassured me with a smile that she was pleased to be exactly where she was.

She was peaceful. I was not. The staff nurse said there was no sign of imminent death and that I should not be worried. She said I should go home and sleep. At 8 p.m., I realised that I hadn’t eaten. I walked to a nearby restaurant and ordered pizza and a glass of wine. It made sense to go home, knowing she was comfortable. But something didn’t feel right about that. I returned to the hospice.

In the hour I’d been away, her condition had deteriorated. She had fallen into a deep sleep. Her breathing was steady but effortful. Over the next hour, her head fell back, and her mouth remained open as she breathed slowly and loudly. Nurses checked her regularly but said very little. I sat on the two-seater sofa beside her bed and was offered several blankets and pillows. But sleep was out of the question. Around midnight, the nurse confirmed she was dying.

I couldn’t do much, but I was happy to be with her and not have her make that journey alone. Letting her be, listening to her making wet crackling sounds, was all she seemed to ask of me.

Many things happened early in my life that fractured the trust between us. We had lots of catching up to do. Sitting by her bed in the hospice, I thought about what still hadn’t been said between us. This would be my last chance. I didn’t know if she could hear me, but I hoped she could.

I spoke out loud, sometimes through tears. Feelings welled up in me, but I didn’t push them away. I felt close to her, which wasn’t a feeling I’d often experienced. I accepted her for who she was and her willingness to step bravely into the unknown. She allowed me to open my heart and say what I needed to say.

Keeping my three siblings appraised of Mum’s progress wore down my phone battery through the night. As morning broke, I borrowed a charger from the nurses’ station and plugged it into the socket at the head of the bed. Later, as I bent down to retrieve it, my face inches from hers, she took her last breath. It was over. She was at peace. And to my surprise, I was too.

We had come full circle. A relationship that had begun and ended with just the two of us, alone and at ease in each other’s company. It hadn’t ever been easy, but the things that most needed to be said had been said. Her final gift was perhaps the greatest she had ever given me. She showed me how to die. I had watched her for 18 hours walk fearlessly into the night with courage and grace. Never, for a moment, did I get a sense that she looked back. She died well; someday, I hope to honour her by doing the same.

1

HOME IS WHERE WE START FROM

Our childhood memories are often fragments, brief moments or encounters, which together form the scrapbook of our life. They are all we have left to understand the story we have come to tell ourselves about who we are.1

EDITH EGER

Sometimes it’s not what we remember that hurts us; it’s what we have forgotten. Those painful experiences we’ve disowned because they were too hard to deal with. We hope that time, even if it doesn’t always heal, will eventually give us a safe distance from the past. Whatever hurt us will surely lose its hold on us. Until something happens, and we realise that we haven’t outgrown our pain; we’ve been carrying it with us for years.

I was my parents’ first child and the first grandchild in both their families. I was welcomed and loved. My father was in the army, stationed at the time in Cork. My mother was a telephonist until they married. In 1950s Ireland, marriage for a woman meant giving up one’s career to stay home and look after the children.

I was born on St Patrick’s Hill. We lived in my mother’s childhood home in Cork City until my father was reassigned to Dublin nine months later. The army provided him with a three-bedroom house in Villa Park Gardens off the Navan Road. Within a year my brother Jim had arrived, a curly-haired blonde boy with big blue eyes. By all accounts, the four of us were happy in that little house. But in my second year, everything changed.

Jim contracted measles when he was only 16 months old. Measles is a highly contagious infectious viral disease. A tiny percentage of children who develop measles suffer complications, which may be lethal. Jim was one of those unlucky ones. He developed meningitis with secondary encephalitis. He was admitted to Temple Street Children’s Hospital early on Sunday morning, 16 May 1955, and died that evening at 10 p.m.

This happened in the 1950s when people didn’t talk about the death of a child. In later years, my mother would describe how Jim’s death made her a marked woman among young parents on our street. ‘They kept their distance,’ she said, ‘as though whatever I had done to cause Jim to die might be contagious.’

My mother told me much later in my life that she and Dad never talked to each other about their loss. Love, for each of them, meant not hurting the other. They each kept their grief to themselves, believing that to give sorrow words would only have added to the other’s distress. When my stoical father returned late from Temple Street Hospital that Sunday night, he said, ‘He died, but it was for the best. If he’d lived, he’d have been a vegetable.’ They barely referred to Jim again until 1985.

The following day my father left our home alone and asked our next-door neighbour Sean Diffley – the only car owner on our street – to drive him to Temple Street to collect Jim’s remains. They parked outside the hospital entrance. Sean waited in the car as my father went in to look for his son. He found a tiny white coffin with the name ‘James Bates’ handwritten on the lid, beside 16 May 1955. Without even a brief prayer, a religious sister accompanied him as he carried the tiny casket out the front entrance and placed it on the car’s back seat.

Neither he nor Sean had any plan for what to do next. They agreed that the only cemetery they were both familiar with was Mount Jerome, near Harold’s Cross Bridge, and headed there. When they arrived, they found the place deserted. Without anyone to advise them on what they should do or how they might go about burying a child, they left the coffin under a tree and drove away.

The day Jim died I was a month off my third birthday. I can’t remember what I felt about his sudden absence. I’ve always felt that his death took something from all our lives. Without permission to speak about him in the family, we could not mourn or grieve his loss. The emptiness of his absence seemed to hang in the air as our collective grief became frozen in time. And then, five days after Jim died, I came close to joining him.

My father returned to work after leaving his coffin at Mount Jerome cemetery. For the remainder of that week, he was confined to barracks. The army didn’t do compassionate leave in those years. He’d buried his son on Monday and reported for duty that same afternoon.

Finding herself alone with me in an empty house, shattered by the loss of Jim, my mother decided to travel to her family home in Cork. She needed help with looking after me. A few days after we arrived, I came down with rubella and was admitted to the Cork Fever Hospital.

Within 24 hours, I developed secondary encephalitis, just like Jim, and was considered terminal. The doctor meant well when he said to my mother, ‘You’ve already lost one son this week; you don’t need to go through the agony of seeing your only other child die. Why don’t you go back to Dublin? You can check how he’s doing if you can get to a phone. Otherwise, be sure to pick up a daily newspaper. When Tony dies, we’ll publish the details in the Cork Examiner.’

My mother was a compliant woman. She listened to this doctor and did precisely what he had advised. In her mid-twenties, completely alone, she boarded a train for Dublin. She had lost one child and was about to lose another. That train journey was one of the lowest moments of her life.

Both my parents travelled to Cork to see me the following weekend. To everyone’s surprise, I’d beaten the medic’s four-day prognosis. When they came to see me on the ward, I was in a small cot with tall glass on every side. Physical contact was prohibited. I was barely moving in my bed and did not appear interested in communicating with them.

But appearances can be deceptive. When they left the ward, I was inconsolable. So much so that the next day, the staff nurse strongly suggested to my parents that it would be easier on me if they stayed away altogether. There were no more visits until I was discharged four weeks later.

My mother came to take me home on 21 June, my third birthday. Again, I seemed indifferent to her presence. I pushed her away when she tried to hug me. She was hurt that I wasn’t happy to see her.

But whatever we lacked in terms of an emotional connection, I was utterly dependent on her physically. I’d regressed in terms of toilet training and speech. My calf muscles had deteriorated. Both my feet and ankles had developed secondary deformities due to my infection. I had to be carried everywhere. I was given to aggressive outbursts and found it impossible to calm myself down.

This was more than my mother could bear. She was a bereaved, depressed, isolated woman with very low self-confidence. The neighbours kept their distance. Her army husband coped with whatever grief he felt by saying nothing. She was pregnant again. It was all too much. She decided I’d be a lot happier back with her family in Cork. I’d always been a hit with her younger siblings; maybe I might open up to them.

She took me to Cork and left me with her parents and siblings for the next six months. I cannot remember how I felt being separated from my mother for such a long time, but I suspect it left me with a feeling of not being wanted – a feeling which was to become a steady companion to me for most of my life. I never talked about my feelings to anyone as a child – probably because no one ever asked – but my behaviour at times suggested that behind my placid mask lived an angry little boy.

In the years following my discharge from the fever hospital, I developed what I can now see were odd behaviours. Around age five, back in Dublin, I took to getting up in the middle of the night and leaving the house without making a sound. I went on a walkabout in the local neighbourhood before dawn, only returning home when the rattle of crates and bottles announced the milkman making his deliveries.

My first school was St. John Bosco’s on the Navan Road, which in the late 1950s was a temporary building behind the church. I dreaded having to go there. It was about a half mile from our house in Villa Park Gardens, and I could walk the distance myself. Those were safer times.

My terror was worse on some days than others. When it was particularly bad, I would stand still on the side of the Navan Road across from the school. Usually, I would cross over and pass through the big church gates to get to the school, but on those bad days, I would turn around and make as if to go back home. Of course, I couldn’t go home, so I settled on hiding in the warren of lanes that snaked behind the houses lining the main road. Fearful of some adult confronting me, I hid in the shadows and kept out of sight. I remember getting soaked in the rain and taking shelter under trees. As the day progressed, I wandered for about a mile through the building sites and open fields that bordered our neighbourhood.

What made these adventures preferable to being at school is hard to understand. The days were long and unpleasant. My school lunch was my only comfort, and I would typically have it eaten by 10 a.m. In the early days of my mitching, I had no way to get anything else to eat. That changed when I stole some loose change from home to buy sweets from a shop where I wasn’t known.

One day stands out for me still. I can see myself walking home at the correct time, having had an accident. I remember vividly turning onto our cul de sac in my short pants, excrement flowing down both legs. I was filled with shame when I arrived home. The litany of lies I told my mother only made me feel worse. When I asked her in later years, she said she had no idea I’d ever missed school.

I look back at photos of myself as a child and see a happy-looking boy. This is confusing as my memories of those years are mostly unhappy. I had too many secrets, and with each year of my childhood, they grew in number.

My feelings for my mother were all mixed up. I knew in some part of my child’s brain that I was holding back from her. Maybe I was furious with her for all the times she’d left me and wanted her to feel the pain that I was feeling. But I couldn’t admit my anger; that was much too frightening. I wanted her to smash down the walls between us and comfort me. Probably fearing that my ‘bad’ feelings would hurt her somehow, I always tried to be a ‘good boy’ and help her as much as possible. I tidied up after meals, tried to keep my younger siblings in line and emptied ashtrays. I listened as she made the rounds of our bedrooms at night to say good night, longing for her to tuck me in and kiss me. But instead of allowing that to happen, I would turn away from the door, pull the blankets around me and pretend to be asleep. She would open the door, assume I was already asleep, softly close the door and leave.

Living with confusion and turmoil is exhausting and I needed ways to shut down those feelings. Lying, stealing and mitching school didn’t make me feel good about myself, but they relieved me momentarily. I built walls to hide ‘despicable me’ from the world. But I often woke in the middle of the night and felt terrified by something I couldn’t put my finger on. Lying awake in the dark, I would listen to distant fog horns. I imagined that sound was made by a little boy, lost at sea and utterly alone in the dark. It never struck me for a moment that the lost boy was myself.

Daydreaming became another refuge from inner chaos. I created worlds full of dangers and threats, which I overcame with exceptional bravery and talent. When I entered primary school, my stories began to centre on some distressed maiden. By age seven or eight, the gallant-knight-rescues-beautiful-young-girl motif had become my favourite bedtime story.

Eilis, a dark-haired girl in my first year of primary school, stole my heart. She needed lots of rescuing, as, unfortunately for her, she was beset nightly by bullies in the lane beside our house as I tried to lull myself to sleep. Naturally, I always recognised her cry for help. I leapt through my bedroom window onto our flat-roofed kitchen; from there, I jumped into the lane alongside our house and imposed myself between her and her predators. My presence alone made them think twice about continuing to threaten her. She never recognised me as the boy from her class, but I hoped that someday we would become best friends.

That same fairy tale had many iterations throughout my life, with different faces stepping in to play the leading lady. Its ability to soothe and comfort could always be counted on.

Learning to read extended the landscape of my imagination. The lady in our local library introduced me to endless characters and adventures. Enid Blyton gave me friends with whom I could spend time. I relished their company and revelled in their adventures. In my mind, they were real people.

Richmal Crompton wrote 39 books in her ‘Just William’ series, and I read every one. William made me laugh out loud. I lived his every adventure. I marvelled at his total disregard for social convention. He risked social disapproval, which I tried so hard to avoid. He refused to be ashamed when his exploits were exposed as reckless, whereas I knew I would collapse in shame if that happened to me. William was precisely the role model I needed.

Fantasy was a big part of my life. I constantly made up stories where I overcame impossible challenges that earned me admiration and a sense of belonging. I was reassured to read later in my life that children in concentration camps survived by escaping into idealised worlds of their creation:

When the real world is terrifying, daydreams can give rise to wild hopes that make it bearable. When pain is too great, we can’t perceive anything else. We are just in pain. But as soon as we get some distance from it, though stepping into daydreams, imagining a place where everything that has been taken from us or denied is available in abundance. Once we have some distance from our pain, we can transform it into a story or a play. As soon as we can turn our experience into a play or story that makes them bearable.2

If the world became too hard to handle, I simply invented another one and spent time there. My imagination became a place where I could plot, plan, and re-invent myself as gifted, powerful, and lovable. The problem with fantasy, however, is that when we rely on it too much, we can become less and less able to deal with reality. We can also lose touch with ourselves. I remember being confused about what was real and what I had made up about myself. As the gap between my ideal and my real self widened, I grew increasingly unable to cope with social situations. I dreaded anyone looking at me and seeing how messed up I was. I imagined if they found out, they would be appalled or, even worse, disappointed.

My childhood wasn’t all bad. There were also moments when the company of friends and our various adventures made life not only bearable but wonderful. But most of the time, I hurt inside. My efforts at ‘self-soothing’ and ‘pain management’ evolved. I engaged in stranger and more self-destructive behaviours, such as stripping down to my underpants at night and circling my bedroom frantically whilst compulsively biting my knees and elbows. This ritual had ceased by the time I was 10 years old, but for a couple of years, it happened on a regular basis. No one seemed to have any idea what I was doing. Except on one occasion, when I came close to being exposed.

When I was eight years old, I was invited by some of our old neighbours on the Navan Road for an overnight stay. Rita and Paddy had no children, but they’d always been fond of me. Their home seemed plush compared to ours. They had carpets and heavy curtains and delicate-looking ornaments on shelves. I was treated like a prince, and when it was time for bed, I was shown to a very spacious bedroom. We said our good nights and they closed the door. I heard them go back downstairs and, in the distance, I could still hear the TV. Theirs was the first house in my childhood to have a television.

I started to experience feelings I wished I didn’t have. My stomach felt hollow; my body was tense. I felt lost, and I didn’t know what to do. But then I remembered that ‘thing’ I would sometimes do. I stripped off my clothes, ran wildly around the bed and when I completed each circuit, I bit and sucked my arms, knees and elbows in a particular order. I did this for nearly an hour, increasing my pace around the bed and biting harder as I worked myself into a compulsive frenzy.

I can see now that finding myself alone in unfamiliar surroundings triggered familiar feelings and sensations that I’d never been able to manage. I made no conscious connection with my past, but my body relived it. Climbing into that large adult bed and turning off the light risked allowing these painful feelings to surface and overwhelm me. This mindless compulsive ritual peppered with self-harm was a preferable alternative. It put distance between me and my distress. Perhaps it was also a way to vent my anger and confusion at finding myself, yet again, far from home and trapped.

Many years later, I discovered that the technical term for how we behave when traumatic sensations are triggered is ‘dissociation’. This is one of the ways nature has equipped humans to deal with fear.

The dissociative response is used when there is inescapable, unavoidable distress and pain. Your mind and body protect you. Because you cannot physically flee, and fighting is futile, you psychologically flee to your inner world … a whole set of neurophysiological changes helps you do that, including releasing your body’s own opiates.3

My frenzy finally exhausted me. I bit myself until I was bruised and bloody, releasing endorphins that soothed me, until I eventually gave up and fell asleep. What I hadn’t realised was that my performance had an audience. When I arrived down to breakfast the following day, Paddy and Rita looked at me. Rita enquired tentatively, ‘Did you find it hard to get to sleep, love?’

I realised with a feeling of embarrassment that my bedroom was directly above the TV room. They’d had to endure my feet pounding the ceiling for however long it took me to wear myself out. I imagined them looking at each other, unused to the quiet of their nightly TV time being broken in such an unsettling manner.

I don’t remember whether I managed to eat breakfast or not. All I know is that I never stayed in their house again.

Another incident that comes to mind occurred the summer I turned nine. As the school year ended, my mother brought me to my grandparent’s home, what we called ‘the big house’ in Cork, intending to leave me there until the end of July. I was put in my grandmother’s bedroom the night we arrived. It had a big double bed. There was a box of matches on the bedside table. I took a match from the box, lit it and tossed the lighted match on the bed covers. I did this repeatedly until the sheets caught fire. I felt some strange catharsis as I watched flames rise all around me. They rose higher and higher until they began to lick the wallpaper behind me.

My mother burst into the room. She started screaming. I heard other voices. She grabbed me from the bed and carried me to safety. People rushed in to douse the flames.

That was the first time I saw my mother angry. She was furious. When a crisis had been averted, and control had been restored, she took me to another room in the house, pulled down my pants and gave me a beating. I didn’t mind the pain; at that moment, I was getting the best attention I’d had in years. And I loved the assertive, furious, passionate woman she had become. Gone was the overly-apologetic ‘nice’ lady she’d been in social situations. My self-effacing mother had suddenly become real. Sadly, we soon returned to hiding our pain behind smiles and good manners. Back home in Dublin, she never complained, always looked out for our family, and despite 40 cigarettes a day, enjoyed good physical health. But I was aware of another side of her personality. I noticed how she kept apologising for herself. I heard her crying in her room. I always felt responsible in some way for her distress. I pretended not to notice, but I would try harder to be helpful. I would wash dishes, tidy up, and on one occasion I took out a tin of white paint and painted over stains on the kitchen wall. In our family, it was all about covering over the cracks and keeping up appearances.

In my adolescence, I progressed from stealing loose change from my parents to becoming a small-time thief. It turned out I had a natural flair for shoplifting. Chocolate bars, toffee sweets and biros were among my spoils. I would share them with my classmates to win their friendship. Whoever said ‘money can’t buy you love’ had never met the boys in my school.

My ‘funny feet’ – secondary deformities from rubella – followed me through primary school into secondary school. From wearing steel braces locked into my shoes until I was four years old, I graduated to ‘special’ orthopaedic shoes, which I wore until I was fourteen. I attended the Dublin Orthopaedic Hospital throughout my childhood. I crossed the city by bus three times weekly, alone, from age eight. That hospital was on Merrion Square in the building that is now the Merrion Hotel. The clinic I attended was a prefabricated building at the end of the back garden. I still remember the smell of feet as I opened the door. My sessions involved a routine of painful exercises. Afterwards, I caught the number 20 bus home from Stephen’s Green. Sitting upstairs in smoke-filled buses on dark evenings, I used my sleeve to clear fogged-up windows so I could see where we were and not miss my stop.

This regime did nothing for my reputation at school. I couldn’t participate in mandatory sports activities and was the target of serious schoolboy resentment when I left school early, three days every week, to attend rehab. I think I was tolerated because I was a reliable source of chocolate and biros.

Pornography was added to the list of hidden behaviours that formed my secret life. Forbidden copies of Parade and Playboy passed around by friends were soothing, addictive and also deeply troubling – something else to tighten the grip of shame. A more open, candid sex education programme might have helped, but pornography seemed to meet a need that I didn’t understand and that I doubt anybody else could have understood at the time. It simulated intimacy of a kind of which I was starved.

In my later years of primary school, there were occasions when my mother and I would be home alone. Sometimes she would look at me with a strained expression and tell me how bitterly she regretted some things that happened when I was little. She never said what they were, but she feared those memories would return to me someday, and I would hate her. I had no idea what she was talking about.

Until one day, many years later, when something triggered my body’s memories and brought me face to face with a ‘me’ I didn’t know and didn’t want to know.

2

IN SEARCH OF SELF

It’s hard to remember adolescence. The worry, havoc, and pure joy of breaking out into the world.1

ANNIE ROGERS

My adolescence began with a mysterious illness. There was probably an underlying medical reason for my condition, but our family GP, Paddy Smith, was always puzzled by my symptoms. The explanation that he finally agreed upon with my parents was that it had been triggered by a severe chill I’d experienced a few weeks before.

On a windy Saturday afternoon in January of my first year of secondary school, I was cycling along the Clontarf seafront when I noticed a group of adults staring out over the low sea wall. I parked and joined them out of curiosity. I was struck by how high the tide was on the far side of the waterfront. White spray stung my eyes as the wind churned up waves and splashed water onto the path where we stood.

As I adjusted my slit eyes to the squalls, I understood what had stopped this little community on their afternoon stroll. Their gaze was fixed on an object bobbing up and down in the frenzied water. It wasn’t a person, as I instinctively assumed it must be. It was a large grey and white Alsatian dog, a particular breed I immediately recognised as I had always been terrified of them. It was struggling to stay afloat 20 to 30 feet beyond our reach.

Somebody should do something, I thought. Despite his best efforts at swimming, the dog was being carried further out to sea. The innocent animal was going to drown. Somebody should do something.

I was a less-than-mediocre swimmer but had completed some school-sponsored life-saving classes in Tara Street Baths. Without much deliberation, I took off the precious army coat – dyed brown and fitted with bronze buttons – that had passed down from my grandfather. It functioned as both an identity statement and a security blanket. Entrusting my coat, scarf and shoes to some anonymous bystander, I lowered myself down a rusty steel ladder fixed to the outer wall, holding a life ring under one of my arms.

The cold was numbing. I fought against fierce waves that seemed intent on keeping me pinned to the wall. I swam in the direction of the dog with immense effort. My progress was slow, and the dog’s distress was rising. I sensed it was exhausted when I reached it and needed some buoyancy assistance. If I could secure the life ring around its body, I knew it had a rope held at the other end by someone on shore.

The dog was having none of it. It didn’t seem the least happy to see me. He or she fought me every step of the way as I tried to guide it to shore. I don’t know how we made it. I remember the crowd hauling the sodden dog out of the water up and over the wall and hands reaching down to pull me out also.

People said nice things to me, but everyone left after a very short time. One man promised to alert the Gardaí to what had happened and to tell them where they could find the dog and me. We both sat on the green beside the footpath and waited. The rain had stopped. It was getting dark. We were both shivering, the dog looking worse than I did. So, I wrapped my coat around its drenched body.

By five o’clock, I had started to worry. Then I saw a Garda motorcycle driving towards us. He pulled up beside us and took down my details. We were within a mile of the nearest Garda station, and he assured me that either a car or van would come and take us there within the hour. All seemed right with the world. Sometimes the good guys do show up to save the day.

We waited. The sky grew dark, and the wind cut through me. I wanted to retrieve my coat but was more concerned with the dog’s welfare than my own. I heard the Angelus bell ring in the local Catholic church. It was six o’clock, and I was expected home for dinner.

We continued to wait. Nobody came, despite my telling myself they would. After sitting there for another hour, I finally admitted that help wasn’t coming for either of us. I started walking towards the Garda station through the dark. When we arrived, I recognised the interior décor as I’d been there once before, after breaking a neighbour’s front window with a rock. At the time I had tried to plead my innocence, saying it had been a long front garden, and I seriously did not believe I could throw a rock of that size that far (even though I had put my best into taking that shot and felt some pride in my achievement). The Garda looking at the soaking, shivering pair standing in his reception that day didn’t seem any more friendly than the one who greeted me on my previous visit.