Hope

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.

I got 99 problems…

…but the beach ain’t one. Sorry for that awful pun. I couldn’t resist. This post was originally titled “In a good place or not?”. The new, awful title will explain itself shortly. 

It is a common thing for people to say, “I’m in a bad place at the moment”. I’ve said it myself many times. One day I saw someone else tweet it and I asked, “what place?”. They seemed bemused. “…You know… the place I always feel at my worst”. I elaborated, “Where are you right now? Where are you sitting, lying or standing?” “Sitting on my TV chair in the living room”. “And is that where you often sit when you feel worst?” “Yes, always there”. “Well, stand up now! Sit in a different chair, walk around the block. Do something different”. They did. 

It was a moment of clarity and lucidity. I am so wise, like Mr Miyagi in The Karate Kid. But, hold on a minute… where was I tweeting from? The left end of the big red sofa in the living room. My spot. My very own bad place. I stood up. I felt hypocritical. I felt embarrassed. I went and walked a couple of times round our tiny garden. I walked the talk. 

Me, when I was in a bad place

 
Why did I just type “my spot”? Now I have an earworm of that annoying bastard from Big Bang Theory repeatedly saying, “You’re in my spot. You’re in my spot…” ARGHHHHHH!!!!

But I had hit on something. Perhaps sometimes people are literally in a bad place. A place of stasis and evil inaction. I don’t mean my sofa was built on the site of a Native American burial ground and is possessed by angry spirits. I mean that we get into bad habits of thought and behaviour in certain places, which we then begin to subconsciously associate with the bad thoughts and behaviour. If I was feeling low, I’d go and sit in my spot and feel low. But eventually, if I sat in my spot to drink a coffee or watch TV, the association started to work the other way. I’d start to feel low BECAUSE I was sitting in my spot. Damn!

And it wasn’t even as simple as that. My house, which had been a haven, a place of safety, a clean place, a non-contaminated place had eventually become a place of house arrest. A self made prison. So I was rooted to the spot. My spot. In my place of safety and incarceration. 
I was “in a bad place”. Literally. 

So, if there’s such a thing as literally “being in a bad place”, is there literally such a thing as “being in a good place”? I believe that there is. When things have been bad for me I’ve always found solace in nature. I used to describe it as where the demons went quiet. When things have been the best for me, I have often been in nature too. 

My early childhood was in South Africa. I was never happier than when I was in the bush on my own, watching buffalo, weaver birds, baboons, ants, dragonflies and snakes. When we moved to Belfast I was out in the fields all day long, or on my bike, or climbing trees, rockfaces, electricity pylons, safe from my mother until I slunk home in the dark. Home was a very bad place indeed then. 

In my teens and early adulthood, as my main OCD focus switched from checking to contamination, being in nature took on a different significance. Nature didn’t have many, if any, humans in it. Therefore there was little or no human contamination. My mind went quiet (well, the volume went from a Spinal Tap 11 down to a 3 or 4). That was quiet enough for some temporary respite. 

I was on the school triathlon team and the school ski team. For a dirt-poor kid, who had to borrow skis, poles & boots, I was a pretty good competitive slalom skier. Training and competing gave me the opportunity to be outdoors and in nature quite a lot. 

Sometimes, if my dad was sober, he and I would go for a walk in the woods, by a lake, on the beach or along the river. We would birdwatch as we went. My dad was enthusiastic, if not very expert. This and a shared love of music were the things which brought me closest to my dad. I attribute, in part, my love of nature to his. Maybe he found some peace in nature too. 

Into adulthood, I continued to do triathlons, I skied, snowboarded, rock climbed, mountain biked, hillwalked, gill scrambled and beachcombed. My first wife lied about being the outdoor type until after we were married, so then it was just me & our daughter out doing things together. 

In recent years, my outdoor focus has changed slightly. I ride motorbikes these days, more so than mountain biking. My second wife thankfully is the outdoor type. We met while both volunteering on an outdoor pursuits holiday for kids with diabetes. She’s a better technical skier than me, but lacks the plain dumb macho stupidity which enables me to do stoopid jumps and dropoffs. I love being in the mountains with her. I love feeling small and insignificant surrounded by nature’s majesty. 

We walk a lot with our kids on the beach near our home, we walk on the English South Downs. When it’s raining, we walk in the woods. We also do birdwatching as we walk. In the last year we added a dog to the family, so I now also feel comfortable walking alone in these places, without worrying that someone will think I’m some random weirdo. 

   

     

 

These have been my “in a good place” places. In the last couple of years they have offered me temporary sanctuary from my mind during the darkest of times. I have been OK with this. It wasn’t retreating; it was regrouping. In the last year, as I’ve started recovery proper, these places have played a significant role in getting me back into the world in a gentle way. I had become emotionally brittle. Nature is helping me to bend in the breeze once more. They are places to DO, to BE, not DO NOTHING, just EXISTING. They are places to stimulate the senses, stimulate the mind, trigger happy memories, create new ones. 

Hence the horrible pun title of this post. I may indeed have 99 problems, but the beach certainly ain’t one. 

I have also started to change my mindset at home. I sit in different chairs. I sometimes try to sit in the “bad place” while thinking happy thoughts and do happy things. I sit in my garden a lot more. As part of my OCD exposure therapy treatment, I have ritually “contaminated” the house, so it is no longer a pristine prison for my OCD suffering self, just a house and home. Not easy, but I did it. The bad place is becoming a good place again. Slowly. 

So, those are my bad place and good places. What are your’s? Isn’t it time you stood up, went outside and wriggled your toes in the grass?