Such a small word for such a powerful thing.
We live in hope. Hope lives within us. No matter who we are, it’s there somewhere, deep within each and every one of us. Don’t believe me? Read on.
This isn’t going to be some dull epistle, I promise. I’ve thought a lot about the nature of hope in the last four years, because it has played an increasingly important part of my life in that time.
What happened four years ago? The start of the most intense period of therapy I’ve undergone in my long journey of mental health recovery. It kicked off with three months of cognitive behavioural therapy with my local community mental health team. Clinical depression had me by the throat once again and I needed to loosen its grip, to catch my breath and regroup. I was planning to face down my biggest demons and it was going to be a helluva fight. No holds barred. No Marquis of Queensberry rules. A fight to the death and I’m not afraid to fight dirty.
Once I regained my footing, I started two simultaneous courses of therapy, which ended up both lasting roughly a year. One course of therapy lasting that long would be gruelling enough, but two?! Was I stoopid?! Most probably, but I did it anyway.
The first type of therapy I underwent was something called Eye Movement, Desensitisation and Recovery therapy (EMDR). It’s a relatively new therapy, which helps victims of trauma who are suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) to “process” memories of the traumatic events they have experienced. The majority of people who undergo this therapy are processing the memories of a single traumatic incident, so most EMDR, the literature & websites for the treatment and the therapists who deliver it are geared up to “single event” treatment. I was there to learn to process the memories of an entire childhood of trauma, neglect, extreme physical violence, torture, sexual abuse, psychological abuse, degradation and poverty. Thankfully, I had a very experienced therapist, used to dealing with more extreme cases of Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (CPTSD).
Up until recently, I used to say, “My mother wasn’t a monster, she just did monstrous things”. I was wrong. She was a monster. A monster who did monstrous things. Yes, she most likely had monstrous things done to her at some point and yes, she did suffer from unmedicated paranoid schizophrenia, but that doesn’t absolve her from guilt for the evil things she did. Diminished responsibility might be an acceptable plea in a court of law, but for the most part, out in the real world, even mentally Ill people can be assholes or evil, and it has damn all to do with their mental illness. The shitty, real world reality in my mother’s case was that she enjoyed inflicting mental and physical pain on people. She gained a sense of power in what she did.
EMDR is a very powerful type of therapy. It enables you to recall in incredible, excruciating detail events which may have happened decades before. Some of these things may have been buried deep, like the broken tip of a thorn, still there, irritating, painful, but invisible. I’m talking about real memories, not false ones. Not embellished, not exaggerated, but raw, bloody and true. It achieves this in a ludicrous way. When I first was told the method that EMDR uses, I thought someone was playing a practical joke on me. The therapist holds up their index finger and waves it back and forth, while the patient recalls a traumatic memory, describes it out loud and watches the therapist’s metronome finger. It sounds totally daft, doesn’t it? Like an April Fool’s Day prank or some new-age mumbo jumbo fad. But it isn’t.
EMDR works. It works by helping the conscious brain to mimic the actions of the unconscious brain during REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep. During REM, the brain processes memories of the day’s events. The problem with traumatic memories is that the brain can’t always process them during REM and some of these memories become “stuck” in the waiting room, near the surface, instead of being filed away safely in the brain’s filing cabinets, with life’s other memories, both good and bad. The therapist’s comically oscillating finger tricks the brain into processing the memories which are recalled during EMDR therapy, as if it was processing a memory during REM sleep.
There is a saying, “The Devil is in the detail”. In my mother’s case, the detail was my recollection of her conscious, deliberate actions to cause harm to me and the lucidity in which she enjoyed watching me suffer. She was evil. She did evil things. She knew what she was doing and she did those things for her own enjoyment. It was about six months into the course of EMDR that my therapist said to me, “You’ve just described a torture technique used by war criminals”.
I had described how my mother had “crucified” me, with me standing with my arms straight out to the sides, as I was beaten, abused, and humiliated. If my arms dropped, I was beaten harder. When I started to bleed, the familiar taunt of, “That’s the badness coming out of you”, accompanied the other verbal obscenities hurled at me. On one occasion, she tied me to hang in the cruciform position from a bookshelf.
Fucking Hell this is heavy! Where the fuck does hope fit into this horror picture?
A good question. I thought it didn’t. I was wrong. I’ve written before about my penchant for staring at sticks. Not just any stick though. I’m not some weirdo twig frotter. I stare at sticks that I’ve plonked into the ground in the hope that they’ll grow. There’s that little word. Hope. You’ve just read it in that sentence without it jumping out at you. But it’s there.
I’m a sucker for a fellow waif or stray, mostly of the canine variety – I currently have two rescue dogs as permanent family members – but also of the plant variety. If I come across an uprooted plant or a torn off twig, I’ll bring it home and try to save it. Such seemingly forlorn actions require hope.
The way EMDR is applied to many multiples of very similar traumatic memories is by taking the most traumatic instance of that memory and processing it. The brain is then able to recognise lesser iterations of the memory and place them in the same filing cabinet. This was one of those “worst of” memories. One of the things which made it the worst of its kind was that this time my mother had the curtains wide open as I stood cruciform, bleeding, naked from the waist down, humiliated, for all the world to see, in the middle of the living room. And several passers by did see me. I recall one teenage girl, walking with her younger brother by the hand, doing a double take as if she was seeing things, stopping without realising she had done so, then hurrying on as if to escape what she had just witnessed.
OK, humiliating, but if people could see in, then I could see out. I didn’t look straight ahead, I looked downwards, as I nearly always did as a child, downwards into the small front garden. I didn’t want to make eye contact with anyone as they witnessed my torture. That would only have added to my shame and humiliation. In the EMDR session, I remembered what I had stared at as I endured. I stared at a stick. My first ever stick. A little piece of variegated privet twig that someone had broken off someone’s hedge. A little piece of hope. Even in the darkest depths there was hope within me. A tiny, fierce spark of hope.
At the time it seemed that it was hope for other things, like twigs. I wanted to show something else that, although damaged and discarded, all hope wasn’t lost. I showed care and empathy, when I hadn’t experienced them myself. They are innate in the human makeup. That little stick grew, eventually becoming the first bush in a planted hedgerow.
The second course of therapy I was doing was called Sensorimotor Psychotherapy. Try saying that with a fruit pastille in your mouth. This is also a relatively new form of therapy. It works on the basis of looking inwards at the fragmented pieces of your broken self; the fight or flight bit, the bit that feels shame, the bit that feels anger, the bit that submits, the bit that… Lets face it, the mind of a trauma victim can resemble a smashed Lego set.
Once you’ve found the damaged parts of yourself, you then start a dialogue with them. The cynical, wary voice in my mind grumbled, “this sounds like hippy-drippy bullshit” at first. It didn’t want to engage.
My mind realllllllllly didn’t want to have a conversation with my “getting on with everyday life” self. It didn’t want to show vulnerability, even to itself. And intially, it also felt bloody silly, sitting with a bloke who was trying to help me talk to myself. Wasn’t pschology designed to stop mentally ill people talking to themselves?
Exposed to constant trauma for years, both inside and outside the home, my fight or flight mechanism had become damaged. The switch became jammed in the on position and the fight part became dominant. It defended any form of attack. It viewed this conversation warily, in case it was a Trojan horse entering the fortifications of my mind. It took some persuading that it could trust the “Me” who was at the surface. Eventually it did. Once I was on talking terms with The Gatekeeper, I was able to start talking to all those broken, stuck-in-the-past parts of me, to begin the process of healing, showing compassion to myself for the first time and reintegrating the “Parts” within me. Self compassion doesn’t come easily to me. I had to trust in hope to make it work, but it did. Slowly and warily at first, but gradually more naturally.
When all else seems gone and it’s just us against the darkness, hope remains. Deep within us, tiny, shielded from view. Sometimes we forget that it’s there. We lose sight of it, because it is buried so deep. But it’s there all the same. It helped you get through yesterday. It’s helping you get through today. You are strong. The hope sustaining you may be small, but it is mighty. Look for that hope within yourself. Getting out of bed takes hope. Brushing your teeth takes hope. Simply being here today and tomorrow takes hope.
Every little thing you do to exist, endure or recover nurtures hope. It grows and you grow with it. It becomes easier to find and it starts to flourish. And if you talk about your hopes and listen to other people’s hopes for the future, they become more real. They gain shape and solidity.
If I was able to see that spark of hope aged nine, in the midst of horror, you can too. Look for it now. It’s there within you. Use it, nourish it, share it. We live in hope.
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