Trauma, the Body and Transformation: A Narrative Inquiry

Trauma, the Body and Transformation

of related interest

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Rehabilitation Counselling in Physical and Mental Health Edited by Kim Etherington ISBN 1 85302 938 6

A House Next Door to Trauma

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Trauma, the Body and Transformation A Narrative Inquiry

Edited by Kim Etherington

Jessica Kingsley Publishers London and New York

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any material form (including photocopying or storing it in any medium by electronic means and whether or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this publication) without the written permission of the copyright owner except in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 or under the terms of a licence issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency Ltd, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London, England W1P 9HE. Applications for the copyright owner’s written permission to reproduce any part of this publication should be addressed to the publisher. Warning: The doing of an unauthorised act in relation to a copyright work may result in both a civil claim for damages and criminal prosecution. The right of the authors to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published in the United Kingdom in 2003 by Jessica Kingsley Publishers Ltd 116 Pentonville Road London N1 9JB, England and 29 West 35th Street, 10th fl. New York, NY 10001-2299, USA www.jkp.com Copyright ©2003 Jessica Kingsley Publishers Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 1 84310 106 8 Printed and Bound in Great Britain by Athenaeum Press, Gateshead, Tyne and Wear

Contents

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

Dedication

7

Acknowledgements

8

Introduction Kim Etherington, University of Bristol

9

Trauma, the Body and Transformation

22

All That You Make

39

Angels Nesting in the Mind

52

Stars in a Midnight Sky

65

Journey of a Lifetime

77

Pretending To Be Me

94

Kim Etherington

Carole Mandeville, Counsellor and Writer Ruth L. Barnett, Psychotherapist

Indu Khurana, Personal Development Practitioner Ginny Mayhew, Counsellor

Heather Weston, Community Counselling Service, North Somerset

Pain in Paradise: Healing in the Tao

107

Around the Slices of Herself

121

Michael Wai Hin Len, Psychological-Pastoral Consultant Gillie Bolton, King’s College, London

9.

From the Ashes

Matt Valentine, Counsellor, Therapist and Healer

138

10. The Silence of Somatisation

152

11. Guardian Angel’s Story

165

12. The Weaver’s Tale: Yarns and Threads

179

Jackie Kneeshaw, Counsellor Kim Etherington Kim Etherington

The Contributors

198

Subject Index

200

Author Index

208

This book is dedicated with love and thanks to my dear friends Gillian and Mike Barry, who have always held my body, mind and spirit gently in their caring hands.

Acknowledgements The creation of this book has involved an enormous amount of dedication, hard work and commitment by all of the authors who have offered their stories. Research has shown that writing stories about childhood trauma is difficult as well as very healing and I believe it’s true to say that all the contributors to this book have experienced both the difficulty and healing. At times it has been hard for some people to continue and indeed some did not. I would like to thank all of the people involved in the creation of this book most sincerely for attempting to face that struggle, including those who did not continue to publication. Some authors were already very familiar with the art of writing, but telling their personal stories of trauma has taken most writers into new and unfamiliar parts of themselves and their histories. This takes courage. Allowing me to share those stories with the wider community takes even more courage. Many people have supported me in this project, through reading drafts, giving feedback, making suggestions including my fellow authors of this book. I would like to thank all of them especially Shirley Margerison, Michael Carroll, Janet May and members of our monthly narrative research group. My colleagues at the University of Bristol, especially Tim Bond, Carol Graham, Wendy Laughlin, Ali Leftwich, Jane Speedy and Sheila Trahar, have stimulated me through our conversations about narrative and stories and have suffered my agonising on the pros and cons of attempting this work at all. I have once again been fortunate to have had the support of the staff at Jessica Kingsley Publishers who have always been so encouraging of my ideas, especially Amy Lankester-Owen and Claudia Conway. As ever, my husband and soul mate has been by my side, quietly nurturing me as I have travelled through this part of my journey. I would like to acknowledge his generosity in giving time and energy to support my work, especially important whilst I have been so closely involved in other people’s trauma stories at the same time as revisiting my own.

8

Introduction Kim Etherington

The teller of chaos stories is, preeminently, the wounded storyteller, but those who are truly living the chaos cannot tell in words. Frank (1995, p.98)

Making a coherent narrative out of experiences of childhood trauma is perhaps one of the most difficult tasks we can set ourselves and this is exactly what I set out to do through the creation of this book. Childhood trauma creates chaos in many people’s lives and chaos can leave us speechless, voiceless and silenced. But the body, the physical foundation upon which our personhood is erected (Lowen 1967), and our spirit, the essence of our uniqueness and individuality, are rarely silenced, even by trauma. Without a voice our body finds other ways to speak for us; our spirit survives and transcends our physical body. This book is full of stories about survival and transformation. These stories are told by people who have discovered ways of relieving their bodies of the task of speaking for them; people who have found ways of honouring their chaos and accepting the reality of trauma in their lives. They have ‘met their suffering head on’ (Frank, p.115) and found a voice with which to narrate their stories now that they feel ready to stand back and reflect upon their lives.

Background

Back in 1996 I decided to try and discover how people understood the links between the experience of trauma and the body. My interest in this topic stemmed primarily from a growing understanding of my own complex relationship with my body and the illnesses I had suffered over

9

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many years, and a recognition of similar patterns in the lives of many of my clients. So at that time I made my first ever NHS funding research application. I believed then that if I was to be taken seriously as a researcher I needed to gather data by sending questionnaires to large numbers of patients and seek their permission to examine their medical records. A second stage of that study was to invite a few people to be interviewed in some depth. However, my funding application was not successful and for a few years I shelved the idea and went on learning from my clients and from reading the literature. Two years later I made a second attempt and sent off a new proposal to undertake a similar study that was still based on a belief that if I could find enough people to ask then I might find the ‘truth’ about these matters. Once again my proposal was turned down. In the meantime my beliefs about research were changing. I was moving more and more towards valuing experiential ways of knowing, working collaboratively with research participants, seeking out ‘local’ stories that would offer me opportunities to share in the ‘lived experiences’ of others that I could place alongside my own life experiences in ways that would inform myself and others. My interest in these methods led me in 1999 to write a book with two of my ex-clients about their experiences of childhood trauma, their recovery and my therapeutic relationship with them (Etherington 2000). That book also gave me an opportunity to explore my developing philosophy and role as a researcher and to experiment with heuristic and narrative ways of knowing. Through undertaking that project I realised that the knowledge gained through my clients’ stories was profoundly rich and multi-layered. Others, on reading the book, told me that they gained more from the personal, subjective, reflexive approach I used to represent those stories than from studies based on traditional research methodologies that they found hard to remember or link with practice (Martin 2001; Rennie, personal communication). So with renewed energy I once again submitted a research proposal on the topic of childhood trauma, its relationship with the body and transformation. This time I proposed to gather nine stories through conversational interviewing and to analyse them using narrative analysis. Once again my proposal was turned down. Now most people might have given up at this point and for a while I did try to forget about the idea. It seemed to me that ‘people in high places’ who held the purse strings did not think the study was worth funding. But the idea wouldn’t go away and I began to wonder if I could find a different way to gather these stories. At that time I had just produced two edited books (Etherington 2001, 2002a) in which counsellors and clients who were

INTRODUCTION / 11

involved in counselling in rehabilitation and health settings had written their own stories. Although I had decided ‘never again’ after struggling to produce those two books (2002b), with the passage of time the memory of the pain began to fade (much as it does after childbirth). Once more I began to play with the idea that I was not the one to tell these stories and that maybe I could find people who were prepared to write their own stories and for whom I might become a vehicle by which the stories could reach a wider audience. The more I thought about it, the more I liked it. So I advertised for people who could write well, who had experienced any form of childhood trauma that they had ‘lived out’ in their body, and who had found ways of transforming their symptoms. Implicit in this advertisement was an assumption that such people would already have made the links between whatever had occurred in childhood and their subsequent bodily experiences; and that having made those links, they had found ways of dealing with their symptoms, at least to some degree. These people would have already begun to process their childhood trauma and would probably be at a stage where they could stand back enough to have a reflective grasp on their lives, whilst also being able to relocate themselves back inside their stories in order to write them without becoming overwhelmed. These were ethical issues as well as literary ones. So I placed my advertisement for authors in Counselling and Psychotherapy Journal, believing that its readers would have undertaken therapy and therefore have an understanding of some of the theoretical underpinnings relating to trauma–mind–body, as well as the ability to assess the impact of their decision to contribute their stories on their health and well-being. Most though not all of the contributors to this book are therefore trained as counsellors in a range of different approaches. I also made contact with those involved in the world of therapeutic and creative writing, in the light of a growing body of knowledge and interest in the area of writing about trauma and its impact on health. I had come to recognise that trauma is experienced subjectively and will be related to a very wide range of childhood events and episodes – perhaps as a result of injury or accidents, war, loss of significant people, abuse, neglect or abandonment. I was also aware that trauma could be held in the body in a variety of ways, such as physical illness, disability, addiction and pain, and that there was a vast range of resources that people used to transform trauma. These might include counselling and would almost certainly include alternative healing resources, internal and external, that

12 / TRAUMA, THE BODY AND TRANSFORMATION

were not counselling. I also hoped that by presenting information within a storied format readers could become aware of the impact of gender, culture, history and the socio-political context on an individual’s experiences of trauma, their process of recovery and the meanings people ascribe to their experiences. As someone who sees herself primarily as a counselling practitioner, trainer and supervisor, I had previously been fairly contemptuous of ‘scientific’ knowledge, valuing instead tacit and intuitive knowledge, feelings and process. As I look back from where I am today I can see that this was almost certainly a reaction against my indoctrination into a masculine, patriarchal world that overvalued thinking, logic, rationality and facts, and severely undervalued my ways of experiencing and knowing. So somewhere along the way I threw out the baby with the bath water. In recent years I have come to rest in what seems like a more balanced place where I can appreciate many forms of knowing without necessarily discarding any. I am also aware that a great deal of my appreciation of science has come through my work with people who have suffered childhood trauma. I have watched with interest and read with amazement some of the work of scientists who have managed to build bridges and close the gaps in my understanding of how science can influence my practice in this field. I was powerfully influenced by Daniel Goleman’s accessible work Emotional Intelligence (1996). This book built on my previous knowledge of the anatomy and physiology of the brain acquired during my training as an occupational therapist between 1958 and 1961 and linked that with more up-to-date theories of trauma. In 1997 I found Candace Pert’s book, Molecules of Emotion, which clearly showed, in engaging and accessible language, how her pioneering research as a neuroscientist established a biomolecular basis for our emotions and made clear connections between our minds and bodies. Even my sceptical biochemist husband was impressed. All of these books led me backwards and forwards into other work by Deepak Chopra (1989), Damasio (1994) and van der Kolk (1994), all of whom had something to offer from different perspectives. Of course this reading dovetailed with my previous learning of psychoanalytical theories about ‘conversion syndrome’, humanistic and gestalt practices, focusing, body therapies, hypnotherapy and neuro-linguistic programming (NLP).

INTRODUCTION / 13

About the book

In Chapter 1 I have incorporated a range of complex theories and understanding that readers can hold in mind whilst reading the stories that follow. My intention in writing this chapter is to provide a container within which the personal stories can be held. As I wrote it I was aware that I had set myself a difficult task: to build conceptual links between existing understandings of trauma, mind–body connections and available healing resources. Each of these is a huge and separate subject. What I present in Chapter 1 is my current understanding, accumulated over several years of reading research reports and other literature, together with my own personal experience of trauma which was manifest through illness, disease and physical pain (as well as psychological distress) and my personal journey towards transformation. Another important source of learning has been my counselling clients, who have taught me a great deal about their individual and different routes towards healing. I also owe much of my learning to my research participants, supervisees and students who have opened my eyes to new ideas and taken the journey on beyond where I have rested for a while. However I would ask the reader to bear in mind that knowledge in this field is changing rapidly and new ideas are constantly being developed. What I write today may therefore be very different from what I might write tomorrow. Carole Mandeville developed the symptoms of multiple sclerosis (MS) when she was in her forties, having previously been healthy. In Chapter 2 she tells us how these symptoms drew her attention to her body and as a result hitherto repressed memories of a traumatic childhood began to unfold. As she began to reconnect with the forgotten aspects of her life, Carole experienced terrifying flashbacks of being raped and beaten by her father and memories of her mother’s threats of abandonment. Her body bore the scars of her father’s violence and body memories forced her muscles to jump and thrash about, remembering the rape: It was astonishing to me that my body could have stored the memory and recreated it as an actual bodily experience. And as incredible as it seems, not only was this recreated but also smells and sounds from the past too. Both were as real as if they were happening in the present.

Dreams and flashbacks began to dominate Carole’s everyday awareness. When powerful flashbacks like these intrude into a person’s life they often fear that they are going mad, but Carole knew she needed to understand what was happening to her so she searched the literature about post

14 / TRAUMA, THE BODY AND TRANSFORMATION

traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and began to make sense of her experiences. Carole’s therapist abandoned her, unable to cope with her client’s distress, which resulted in her retraumatisation. This story shows us the powerful need for therapists working with traumatised clients to have dealt with their own underlying trauma and to be well supported in the work. In Chapter 3 Ruth Barnett tells her powerful and moving story of how in 1939, at the age of four, she and her seven-year-old brother were brought to England from Germany to escape the Nazi regime. The loss of her home, parents, culture and, language and the subsequent experiences of being moved from foster home to foster home created trauma upon trauma in her young life. Ten years later her enforced repatriation to her homeland and loss of her new ‘parents’ and home recreated the original trauma and her body fought back. Ruth’s story shows us how defence mechanisms are protective and our negative self-beliefs can help us to make sense of our experiences in ways that may be destructive to our sense of self-worth whilst also protecting us from a reality that is much harder to bear. Ruth shows us how her body carried her rage and distress and how denial impacts on both individuals and society when faced with unspeakable atrocities. Indu Khurana also came to live in England at a young age, having spent the first seven years of her life in Delhi. In Chapter 4 Indu shows us how the development of her sense of identity was impacted by her socialisation within a culture that treats women as ‘third class citizens’. Her struggle to create a worthwhile identity for herself involved rejecting the negative aspects of her culture whilst still holding on to all that was precious within it. Her story of childhood trauma, which was re-enacted in her early twenties, shows us how she links those traumatic experiences to her development of a potentially life-threatening autoimmune disease, lupus. Indu shows us how she survived the trauma by separating her self from her body. She then describes the slow and painful process of reconnecting with her body in order to take care of her whole self and manage her illness. In Chapter 5 Ginny Mayhew writes a letter to her brother who shared her abusive upbringing, as did all of her siblings who were terrorised by their father’s violence and their mother’s inability to support them. Her story helps us to recognise how trauma can be created for those who are bystanders when others are violated. Ginny watched her brothers and mother being attacked by her father and describes how ‘his shouting and his threat of violence was worse than actually being hit’. Living in fear, constantly flooded with adrenaline that had no mechanism for discharge, she and her siblings suffered allergies and other psychosomatic illnesses:

INTRODUCTION / 15

asthma, migraine, stomach problems, hay fever, skin rashes, joint pain, back problems. Constant fear and tension held in the body during childhood result in what Flanders Dunbar described as: the delayed-action mines of childhood, planted either in shock of some single incident or in the steady friction of a conflict between mind and environment. Once these mines have been planted, they may become covered over with a thick, hard crust of oblivion, but they never cease to be dangerous unless the fuses can be drawn. (Dunbar 1947, p.45)

In her search to find ways to ‘draw the fuses’ Ginny tried a wide range of alternative medicines, some of which helped symptomatically. But it was only when she was advised to explore the mind–body–spirit connections that she really experienced transformation. Her story is a celebration of her current state of health and an offering to others who might gain from her journey. Heather Weston’s story in Chapter 6 begins poignantly with a poem that shows us the experience of her ‘inner child’. Her poem describes her experience as a little girl of six when she was involved in a car crash that resulted in her mother’s death and major injury to herself. She shows how trauma can be compounded by the experiences that surround it. As a seven-year-old child Heather lay injured for three months in an adult hospital ward, kept in the dark about her mother’s death, with no attention paid to her emotional distress. Further trauma was inflicted by events that occurred in these inappropriate surroundings and by decisions about her future care that were taken without any consultation with her. Her reluctant caretakers’ unreasonable attitudes towards her and their disregard for her unique individuality distorted her sense of self and resulted in her inability to express her distress about her life. Much later in life Heather’s immune system began to attack her body, resulting in mono-neuritis multiplex which created disability and forced her retirement from her job in a bank. This story shows us what happens when trauma is not spoken about. Illness becomes the body’s vehicle of communication of its wisdom, forcing us to stop and examine unprocessed trauma and change the way we live our lives. In Chapter 7 Michael Wai Hin Len’s story shows us how his body shape was determined by living in a state of ‘constant fear, disparagement, humiliation’. Escaping from his Hawaiian-Chinese home by enlisting in the army at the age of 17, Michael began to educate himself and seek ways of changing the stooped posture he had developed as he cowered from his parental tormentors. He describes how his life’s journey became one of

16 / TRAUMA, THE BODY AND TRANSFORMATION

seeking for ways to overcome his early shaming experiences, ways of learning to stand proud and tall. Through Taoism he found his pathway to healing. His story also shows us how early childhood trauma can impact negatively on our ability to form intimate and healthy relationships. How do we learn to relate to others intimately when our early and most important relationships have caused fear, shame and distress? Michael’s story ends with a moving picture of his eventual success with a loving and supportive relationship: made all the more poignant by its brevity. Gillie Bolton’s poetic story in Chapter 8 leads us through her experience of transforming her experience of incest by means of creative writing. When a child is betrayed by her parents, her development of trust is severely impacted. A child who is sexually abused by her father is rarely able to turn to her mother for support so there is no ‘secure base’ from which she can explore her world. In Gillie’s story we see how, nevertheless, she was able to form a close relationship whilst at university which then became her long-term secure base. Within this relationship she learned to trust enough to begin to tell her story through her writing: ‘The page is a silent, accepting recipient; it holds secrets trustworthily until I, as writer, could bear to become reader and develop the understanding of those secrets further.’ Gillie’s story shows us how incest can create ‘out of body’ experiences, sleepwalking and dissociation. She describes how she would ‘watch helplessly from somewhere up at the ceiling while my body collapsed and had to be carried to lie down; sometimes I was in bits in different parts of the ceiling’. Gillie shows us how, by trusting the images that form in our minds, even when we do not understand them, we might eventually recollect our truth and gather up our experiences so that we can make sense of them. Chapter 9 is powerfully written by Matt Valentine who was traumatised in childhood through neglect and emotional abuse inflicted by alcoholic and violent parents. This tragic story shows us the helplessness of the small child who finds himself living in deprived circumstances that created clouds of confusion. Matt’s body reacted by developing blocked glands and facial warts which were eventually healed by using homeopathy, meditation, flower remedies, kinesiology and psychic healing. However, his most powerful transformation seems to have been achieved by energy work which reconnected him with his essential life force blocked in childhood, and by revisiting his childhood through regression, allowing him to re-experience sights, sounds, touch and smells that connected him to his emotions: ‘I am fearful because that smell brings with it a sense of knowing.’ Matt’s story conveys graphically how, even when a child is so abused, he still

INTRODUCTION / 17

longs for a close and loving connection with his parents, even whilst recoiling from them – thus portraying how ambivalence about closeness in childhood can affect our later lives. He shows too how parents can manipulate, emotionally blackmail and threaten a child to meet their needs whilst leaving the child’s needs unmet – and how those unmet childhood longings can feel overwhelming even into adulthood. Jackie Kneeshaw’s story in Chapter 10 shows us the importance of trusting our instincts and accepting our feelings without judgement, even when we do not understand them. Jackie’s journey caused her to examine her own beliefs and remain open to new ideas. Her explorations led her to the work of Bert Hellinger (1998) which helped her to make sense of what had previously been inexplicable, connecting her with her family history and the realisation of how she had become trapped by her own and her ancestors’ unacknowledged trauma. The ‘blind love’ of a child for its parents and grandparents, which comes from our deepest wish to belong and be loyal, can cause us to take on past family problems that we cannot possibly solve. Hellinger’s work invites us to loosen these unconscious binds by creating ‘family constellations’ where we can see the entangled system into which we have been born and by which we have become anchored. Jackie’s story also illustrates how traumatic events can be replayed over and over until we learn the healing messages they might hold for us. Her new ideas challenge her to suspend disbelief, to stay with ‘not knowing’, to accept that there are many ways of knowing and remain open to her own experience. In Chapter 11 I tell my own stories through the voice of my ‘guardian angel’, an important aspect of myself that has helped me survive my experiences. As the ‘researcher’ I believe I need to be transparent to the reader so that you can inform yourself about my part in the co-construction of these stories and this book. In his article on the place of the unconscious in reflexive research, Walsh stated: ‘If human knowledge is co-constructed, then any research project must involve some degree of mutual exploration and discovery. The unmet challenge for qualitative researchers is to document this process in an open and honest way’ (1996, p.383). By including my own stories alongside the others in this book and my reflections on others’ stories in Chapter 12, I may have found a way. However, although the authors in this book were given the option of using a pseudonym I did not give myself the same option. By using a third person voice for the stories of the part of my life that has gone before me I have allowed myself to maintain a degree of ‘defence’ and distance. In Chapter 12 however I place

18 / TRAUMA, THE BODY AND TRANSFORMATION

myself at the centre of my continuing stories, parts that have been reawakened through this project and parts that have been created anew. I can only tell what is consciously known to me. As the reader you might discover some of what may remain unknown to me about my life through the language I use to tell my stories, just as the language used by other authors may have been revealing in ways they did not know. Language shapes and reveals our experience (Walsh 1996). It was only when I began to write my chapter, not knowing what would emerge on that particular day, that it became apparent to me that my spirituality and sense of God would be at the centre of the stories I would tell. This was a surprise to me and yet it was also no surprise, for my spirituality has been a constant in my life. Through writing my stories and the final chapter of this book I have become increasingly aware of a growing sense of peace within me. Even as I write those words I am remembering how my first counsellor said to me on one occasion when I was suffering a great deal of emotional and physical pain that she hoped one day I would find peace. I remember not really understanding what ‘peace’ was and thinking that I never would. My stories show how childhood trauma creates confusion about self and identity when parents use a child to meet their own needs; how repressed memories can be acted out unconsciously through pain and illness; how repeated surgery can become like a re-enactment of the original abuse; how patterns of somatisation can be laid down within a family and societal culture; and the part gender role assignment plays in maintaining those patterns. I have used the final chapter to reflect on those that have gone before and on what has been evoked in me through reading other people’s stories. Ellis and Bochner say: Evocative stories activate subjectivity and compel emotional responses. They long to be used rather than analyzed; to be told and retold rather than theorized and settled; to offer lessons for further conversation rather than undebatable conclusions; and to substitute the companionship of intimate detail for the loneliness of abstracted facts. (Ellis and Bochner 2000, p.744)

By using the stories in this way I hope to avoid treating them as objects of scrutiny and to honour the relationships I have developed with those who have collaborated with me in the making of this narrative.

INTRODUCTION / 19

Conclusion

As I reached the final chapter of this book and thought back over its creation I had an image of the Bayeux tapestry. Many years ago on our travels through France my husband and I took our boys to see the tapestry, a work of art that told an overarching narrative of war, containing eight separate pieces of linen connected by the stories within each panel. Each story was made up of thousands of different coloured, individual threads. I marvelled at how, by collating painstakingly those individual threads, a powerful narrative had been depicted. It is believed that seven or eight metres of the tapestry are missing – just as there are many stories missing from this book – but nevertheless there is enough remaining to show some important aspects of an important piece of history. Each chapter in this book has been painstakingly created, individually ‘stitched’ and brought together to create the whole as we have drawn together the threads of our lives to form this narrative study. In this retelling we have created new meanings. As you read these stories, you will no doubt create further meanings that are influenced by the stories which you yourself bring to the reading, your personal and cultural stories and stories others have told you that have become part of your own. The meanings you create and their significance to the topic of trauma, the body and transformation will create new knowledge to add to your previous understandings. Clandinin and Connelly (2002) state that: ‘narrative threads coalesce out of a past and emerge in the specific three-dimensional space we call our inquiry field’ (p.70). The three-dimensional inquiry field they refer to is created by viewing stories as evolving over time, within their locations, whilst also remaining aware of the involvement of the researcher and those who offer their stories. The focus of narrative inquiry has been described as: inward and outward, backward and forward. By inward, we mean toward the internal conditions such as feelings, hopes, aesthetic reactions, and moral dispositions. By outward, we mean toward the existential conditions, that is, the environment. By backward and forward, we refer to temporality – past, present and future. (Clandinin and Connelly 2002, p.50, original emphasis)

These stories, therefore, are offered in the hope that you can imagine ways to use them in your life or work. By entering into the narratives you may find new questions and hypotheses that lead you to further enquiries of your own. I seek to draw your attention to how these stories are contextualised within cultures and eras and how they might have changed over time.

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The stories in this book are told from the position of looking back over a lifetime, reflections that can only occur when we have managed to position ourselves at some distance from the ‘chaos story’ that they might once have been (Frank 1995). Perhaps, as Nietzsche said, although we can live life forwards it can only be understood backwards. Viv Martin, in writing her own autobiography, said she sees her writing ‘as the very beginning of the process, not of reconstructing a fixed sense of self, but as a conscious engagement in the evolutionary process of becoming’ (2000, p.24). As an academic I feel privileged by the access to publishing this provides me with. I can use this privilege to amplify the voices of those who have suffered trauma, offering the possibility of making previously unrecognised connections, a sense of community and an opportunity to recognise stories not yet told. By writing our stories we become agents in our own lives. We claim a voice that previously may have been silenced by potentially marginalising traumatic experiences which are culturally denied.

References

Chopra, D. (1989) Quantum Healing: Exploring the Frontiers of Mind/Body Medicine. New York: Bantam. Clandinin, D.J. and Connelly, F.M. (2002) Narrative Inquiry: Experience and Story in Qualitative Research. San Fransisco: Jossey-Bass. Damasio, A.R. (1994) Descartes’ Error. New York: Putnam. Ellis, C. and Bochner A. (2000) ‘Autoethnography, personal narrative, reflexivity: researcher as subject.’ In N. K. Denzin and Y. S. Lincoln (eds) Handbook of nd Qualitative Research, 2 edn. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Etherington, K. (2000) Narrative Approaches to Working with Adult Male Survivors of Sexual Abuse: The Clients’, the Counsellor’s and the Researcher’s Story. London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers. Etherington, K. (ed) (2001) Counsellors in Health Settings. London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers. Etherington, K. (ed) (2002a) Rehabilitation Counselling in Physical and Mental Health. London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers. Etherington, K. (ed) (2002b) ‘Working together: Editing a book as narrative methodology.’ Journal of Psychotherapy Research 2, 3, 167–176. Flanders Dunbar, H. (1947) Mind and Body: Psychosomatic Medicine. New York: Random House. Frank, A. (1995) The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness and Ethics. London: University of Chicago Press. Goleman, D. (1996) Emotional Intelligence. London: Bloomsbury. LeDoux, J. (1992) ‘Emotion and the limbic system concept.’ Concepts in Neuroscience 2.

INTRODUCTION / 21

Lowen, A. (1967) The Betrayal of the Body. New York: Macmillan. Mair, M. (1989) Between Psychology and Psychotherapy: A Poetics of Experience. London: Routledge. Martin, P. (2001) ‘It takes two to tango: research and practice as an amazing dance.’ Counselling and Psychotherapy Research 1, 3, 163–166. Martin, V. (2000) ‘A person-centred perspective on the marginalising effects of illness and hospitalisation.’ Auto/Biography 8, 1 and 2, 19–26. Pennebaker, J.W. (1993) ‘Putting stress into words: health, linguistic and therapeutic implications.’ Behaviour Research and Therapy 31, 539–548. Pert, C.B. (1998) Molecules of Emotion: Why You Feel the Way You Feel. London: Simon and Schuster. van der Kolk, B.A. (1994) ‘The body keeps the score.’ Harvard Review of Psychiatry 1, 253–265. Walsh, R.A. (1996) ‘The problem of unconsciousness in qualitative research.’ British Journal of Guidance and Counselling 24, 3, 377–384.

Further Reading

Frank, A. (2001) ‘Can we research suffering?’ Qualitative Health Research 11, 3, 353–362. Pennebaker, J. W. (1988) ‘Confiding traumatic experiences and health.’ In S. Fisher and J. Reason (eds) Handbook of Life Stress, Cognition and Health. Chichester: Wiley. Rothschild, B. (2000) The Body Remembers: The Psychophysiology of Trauma and Trauma Treatment. London: Norton.

1

Trauma, the Body and Transformation Kim Etherington

What do we mean by trauma? Trauma: a wound: an injury: an emotional shock that may be the origin of neurosis: the state or condition caused by a physical or emotional shock. (Chambers English Dictionary 1988)

There are many ways of explaining trauma, all of which are culturally and socially constructed and therefore limited by the socially defined stocks of knowledge available at the time. Alongside those ‘stories’ is a growing recognition and acceptance of the idea that ‘what constitutes trauma is subjectively determined’ (Miliora 1998). People who have suffered trauma have been studied to enable neuroscientists to develop an understanding of the biological impact of uncontrollable stress on human beings. Goleman states that the operative word is ‘uncontrollable’: If people feel there is something they can do in a catastrophic situation, some control they can exert, no matter how minor, they fare far better emotionally than do those who feel utterly helpless. The element of helplessness is what makes a given event subjectively overwhelming. (Goleman 1996, p.204)

Trauma has been explained and defined in terms of neurology, pathology, psychophysiology, psychology and ‘events’ that cause it (Griffith and Griffith 1994). Over the last decade or so there has been a rapid growth in available literature that has enhanced our understanding about the longterm and multiple effects of trauma (Foa, Keane and Friedman 2000;

22

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Friedrich 1995; Gold 2000; Goleman 1996; Herman 1992; Meares 2000; Pert 1998; Rothschild 2000; Terr 1988, 1993; van der Kolk 1988,1994, 1996; Whitfield 1995). This understanding was built upon studies of the impact of war on men who developed psychological and physical symptoms during and after World Wars I and II (Kardiner and Spiegel 1947; Rivers 1918) and was later greatly expanded by studies of veterans of the Vietnam and Falklands wars. It now seems unbelievable that during World War I traumatised men were labelled of ‘low moral fibre’ and ‘weak’ and that some of them, in attempting to escape from any repetition of trauma, were shot as ‘deserters’. Nowadays we recognise this behaviour as ‘avoidance’, something that has been listed as a symptom of post traumatic stress and a normal and useful response in the face of insurmountable fear and uncontrollable threat. There is indeed great wisdom in escaping from the threat of death in the trenches, whether caused by injury or disease. War is one of many traumatic experiences that create ‘traumatic stress’ in some people. When this stress persists after the source of threat has been removed, it becomes known as post traumatic stress, which may progress over time to produce symptoms that interfere with a person’s life and become post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Novels and poems written about the experiences of men who lived through World War I have opened our eyes to what it is like to live with the experience and aftermath of trauma. These glimpses into lived experiences bring home to us the devastation that trauma creates in people’s lives and challenge us to develop new attitudes, thus creating the potential for new healing practices (Barker 1991). Maybe it is a sign of the times we live in that the people who came forward to offer their stories for this book identified themselves as having experienced some form of childhood trauma. I did not define the term in my search for contributors: their definition is based upon their subjective experiences. Perhaps that is because nowadays we can value local and individual stories and thus we are able to hear and tell our own stories about childhood trauma, how we perceive its effects on our bodies and how we can transform them.

Different types of trauma

Trauma that occurs in childhood can be a response to many different experiences. In a world that is becoming more like a global village it is harder for us to avoid or ignore vividly portrayed images of natural disasters or calami-

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ties that are frequently brought before our eyes through our television screens. We see children clinging to rooftops as swollen rivers sweep away their homes; we hear of road or rail accidents that injure children or kill their parents; earthquakes that demolish buildings where children are buried beneath the rubble. Trauma can result from catastrophes like these, which are outside our human control and leave a trail of devastation in their wake, particularly when the traumatic experience is minimised, denied and therefore left unprocessed and unhealed. Other traumas are deliberately inflicted and can betray a child’s trust in humanity: shootings in school classrooms or playgrounds; bombs exploding in hitherto peaceful shopping centres; physical, sexual and emotional abuse, abandonment, neglect and starvation. When those who inflict injury are the people whom the children depend upon for their very existence, the children’s development of trust is severely damaged by the betrayal. We know that the closer the relationship between betrayer and betrayed, the greater the rupture in our ‘basic personal and societal assumptions about human bonding’ (Cameron 2000, p.4). So trauma that occurs in childhood can disrupt a child’s formation of secure attachments, which are important for survival and contribute to the development of meaningful, trusting relationships in adulthood (Bowlby 1969, 1973; Etherington 2000). Single traumatic events that occur within an otherwise safe environment may have little impact on a child’s overall development. However, even these occurrences can produce longer term and devastating effects if the events surrounding the traumatic incident create additional trauma. A child involved in a road accident, for instance, may experience a greater trauma through hospitalisation, medical treatment and separation from loved ones. Without any way of making sense of what is happening, the child’s subjective experience might be of uncontrollable threat. Sometimes trauma can be subtle and seem, at first sight, as less serious, but when it accumulates over a prolonged period of time this can lead to the creation of ‘a passively traumatic environment’ (Meares 2000, p.122). When children are ignored, chastised or dismissed, or trained to meet the parents’ needs and ignore their own, when adults are overly controlling and critical, constantly overriding the child’s opinions, this will probably have long-term and profound impact on the child’s sense of self and identity. These kinds of trauma are often more difficult to recognise, acknowledge and therefore heal, seeming to be less dramatic or obviously traumatic. Additionally, children who are exposed to chronic emotional abuse or

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neglect often become prey to those who inflict further abuse. As they seek for someone to give them comfort and attention, children can become the target of adults who recognise their neediness and groom them to satisfy their own desires (Etherington 1995).

Recognising trauma

Back in 1980 the medical world officially recognised post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) for the first time. PTSD was officially classified in the third edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III). Twelve symptoms were listed providing diagnostic criteria for acute, chronic and delayed manifestations of this response to extreme stress. Later, limitations of this definition were identified, particularly by recognising that this classification ignored the idea that the impact of trauma depended on a person’s individual perception and history. An updated version, DSM-IV (1994), reflected an increasingly sophisticated understanding of the complexity of the condition, particularly in relation to its occurrence as part of the aftermath of childhood trauma related to abuse. Currently DSM-IV recognises that PTSD can develop in response to: •

incidents that are, or are perceived as, life-threatening to oneself or others

•

witnessing acts of violence to others

•

hearing about violence towards or unexpected death of others.

This ‘medical story’ expands our understanding of how children are impacted upon by observing domestic violence, abuse of siblings, war, or illness. Post traumatic stress exists along a continuum and people who have shared the same traumatic experiences do not necessarily develop the same response (Terr 1991). Prolonged, repeated trauma may lead to denial (amnesia or minimisation), psychic numbing (passivity or lack of spontaneity), depression, lack of concentration, self-hypnosis (fugues, trance-like states or addictions) and dissociation (a splitting of awareness), flashbacks (experiencing past traumatic events with their full force), nightmares, chronic avoidance of any situation that might remind the person of the trauma, panic attacks, and mood swings between extreme passivity and rage.

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Additional manifestations such as feelings of guilt for having survived when others have not, difficulty with intimate relationships and a sense of alienation, a heightened sense of powerlessness and ineffectiveness, and an inability to regulate appropriate emotional responses were also recognised (Friedrich 1995). These responses to trauma can often make the sufferer feel ‘crazy’ or out of control. Although the DSM-IV story defines and describes trauma from a medical model perspective, when I have offered it to people as one way of making sense of their experience it has enabled them to gain a sense of self-understanding and thereby feel more in control (Etherington 2000).

Coping with childhood trauma

Trauma can overwhelm children and leave them feeling powerless, but most children find ways of surviving by adapting to the environment in which they find themselves or by accommodating to the needs of others. Young children depend not only on their own resources but also on those of their caregivers, but when the very people upon whom children depend for safety inflict harm, children are left without dependable support and their experience of trauma is compounded. When a child is sexually abused, for example, any attempt to reveal the abuse would threaten the entire family structure upon which the child depends. To a small child this represents a threat to his or her very existence. Van der Kolk (1987) sees this loss of the ‘secure base’ normally provided by the parents as ‘the earliest and possibly most damaging psychological trauma’ (p.32). Children may view any adult who fails to protect them as guilty of primary betrayal, along with the person who inflicts the trauma (Freyd 1996). Each repeated failure by the caregivers can be separately experienced as traumatic and a fresh blow to the child’s experience of self, which might impede development as a self-directed individual (Meares 2000). As a result the child can come to believe that being dependent on an adult usually results in pain and disappointment and this belief might create a situation where the child avoids depending upon others and becomes overly selfreliant. Winnicott (1960) describes this as the child developing a ‘caretaker self ’, adopting an appearance of independence and an ability to look after others – notably the parents – a means by which they can vicariously experience nurture. It is interesting to note that several studies of traumatised people have shown a high prevalence of helping professionals in their ranks (Elliot and Guy 1993; Follette, Polusny and Millbeck 1994; Middleton and Butler 1998). In my own study of 25 adult male survivors of childhood

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sexual abuse, more than half the men had become carers (Etherington 1995). When the child tries to hold on to his ability to depend upon his caregivers, he may cope by ignoring what is happening or forgetting about it. This may result in partial or full amnesia for the unbearable experiences – this way of coping has been called ‘repression’. The child learns to ‘get on with it’ and because nobody speaks of what is happening the child’s behaviour is reinforced and no cognitive memory is laid down. However, Candace Pert (1998) has described how our ‘bodymind’ can repress or retrieve emotions and behaviours and sees this knowledge as ‘important for appreciating how memories are stored, not only in the brain, but in a psychosomatic network extending into the body’ (p.143). Children may also cope by accommodating to their environment by splitting off aspects of their experience through ‘dissociation’. This concept is related to Pierre Janet’s work as far back as 1887 (cited in Rothschild 2000) and has been built upon in more recent years. However, even now, dissociation has not yet been fully explained but is generally thought to be a mechanism that creates a split in conscious awareness that allows the traumatised person to disconnect from parts of their experience in order to reduce the impact and thereby survive (Whitfield 1995). Dissociation may occur at the time of the trauma. People often speak of ‘leaving my body’, ‘floating’, ‘feeling dead’, whilst attempting to survive a current traumatic event. This may become an automatic response to stimuli that trigger connection with the original trauma. A man who came to me for counselling noticed that he felt himself ‘floating’ and unable to listen every time he turned on the ten o’ clock news. Later, during therapy he realised that there had been a clock with Big Ben chimes in his abuser’s home where the abuse occurred (Etherington 2000). For some people these ‘absences’ may become frequent or prolonged and thus cause disturbance in memory that creates a discontinuity and fragmentation of existence (Meares 2000). A dissociated person might remember the trauma factually and in detail but not feel any emotions about it, relating horrific events in a flat, unemotional voice. They may have no way of making sense of them. However, they may be greatly disturbed by what seem like unrelated feelings, becoming enraged or fearful, experiencing bodily sensations such as shivering, hair standing on end or a racing heart, in circumstances that seem unconnected to the trauma. Or they may seem numb, lack vitality and present as passive, ‘dull’ or ‘heavy’.

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A child may appear to forget the trauma whilst at the same time using behaviours that symbolically re-enact it, perhaps playing over and over the same game of murder, violence or mayhem or developing obsessive behaviours. Lenore Terr, in writing about traumatised children (1988), describes how ‘when a trauma or series of extreme stresses strikes well before the age of 28 to 36 months, the child ‘burns-in’ a visual memory of it’. The event is imprinted via the senses and whilst no conscious memory of the trauma exists they may experience bodily sensations or behaviours in response to triggered sensory memories of the trauma. A man in my study told me how at times when he attempted to remember his childhood he experienced pain and pressure in his rectum and a choking sensation in his throat; his arms and legs would flail about uncontrollably as though fighting off an attacker (Etherington 1995). Traumatic memories may also be conveyed through smells, visual images, sounds, or touch: Memories of trauma tend, at least initially, to be experienced as fragments of the sensory component of the event: as visual images, olfactory, auditory, or kinaesthetic sensations; or intense waves of feelings that patients usually claim to be representations of element of the original traumatic event. (van der Kolk 1996, p.287)

Children and adults might live out experiences in repeated dreams or nightmares that symbolically represent some aspect of the original trauma, or the child might be described as ‘vague’ or ‘a daydreamer’ who lives in a world of make believe (Davies and Frawley 1994).

Somatisation: the body speaks

Repression and dissociation have been closely linked with somatisation, a word that describes how the body (soma) can express trauma that is otherwise inexpressible. This link between bodily symptoms and psychic trauma was made by Freud who saw what he called ‘hysterical conversion symptoms’ as the outcome of people’s attempts to defend themselves by repressing or dissociating stressful childhood experiences, although he admitted that his understanding of the mechanisms were unclear (1905). In attempting to make sense of these links Freud believed that the connection depended upon the meaning of the symptoms as a fragment of a partly or fully repressed story of a patient’s lived experience – ‘what we might now call an incoherent narrative of that experience’ (Waitzkin and Magana 1997, p.814). Freud suggested that recovery from these physical symptoms depended upon gradually enabling the patient to make unconscious

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meanings conscious through the creation of a more coherent narrative using free association. However, creating a coherent narrative may not always be possible. When a child’s mind becomes overwhelmed as a result of trauma the ‘physical self ’ can split from the ‘mental self ’; the mind has little or no awareness of the body as a physical reality and emotions are not expressed directly. However the body ‘continues to respond to the emotion, even though the mind refuses to acknowledge it’ (Dubovsky 1997, p.47, cited in Miliora 1998). When a person cannot directly express or speak of their trauma, either because they were too young to have a language or frame of reference for their experience or because repression, threats or an adult’s refusal to ‘hear’ has silenced them, no verbal link can exist between dissociated parts. Without any way of verbally representing the trauma, they might find other ways of communicating the separate experiences of these split-off parts in order for all parts to survive. So the body may speak a language of its own, perhaps through illness, pain, compulsion or addiction. These patterns of coping, necessary for survival during childhood, may be automatically carried into adulthood. The very mechanisms that have helped the child survive may then become the problem. Emotions that are split off from awareness may control the adult’s ability to create intimacy in relationships, resulting in feelings of alienation, isolation and loneliness. Unconscious or repressed fear can create anxiety when adults attempt to form a close relationship with another and they may withdraw from the very intimacy they long for. Repressed fear or anger may seep out as unwanted and uncontrolled behaviour in the workplace when issues of power and authority are triggered. Inability to deal with conflict or accept criticism may affect working relationships or cause depression and suicidal thoughts. The body might react unconsciously to the emotions connected to unprocessed trauma by developing stress-related illness. These might be in the form of panic attacks; chronic or acute breathing problems, such as asthma, frequent colds, sore throats; addictions such as drug or alcohol misuse, or sexual compulsivity; skin disorders such as eczema; gastrointestinal problems such as gastric or duodenal ulcers; musculo-skeletal problems such as neck and back pain; gynaecological disorders such as premenstrual tension and miscarriage; a whole range of auto-immune diseases such as arthritis and heart disease; and certain endocrine problems such as thyroid dysfunction (Cameron 2000; Gold 2000; Levine 1997; Northrup 1998; Williams 1984). Children who are neglected fail to thrive,

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bodily and emotionally, neither gaining weight nor achieving the tasks that indicate when milestones have been reached in their development. The family, social and cultural context might also play an important part for those who have been traumatised. Physical symptoms might be related to culturally sanctioned ways of knowing and of processing trauma (Waitzkin and Magana 1997, p.818). Patterns of behaviour might be passed on from one generation to the next as a child observes an ill parent, dealing perhaps with their own unprocessed trauma. A mother who displaces her emotional distress onto physical pain teaches her child an important lesson about how to elicit care; the child might learn that attention given to an illness or physical pain will not be forthcoming in response to a heartache or sadness. Even today in comparatively enlightened times, the stigma of ‘weakness’ attached to mental or emotional distress creates a situation in which physical illness is a more socially acceptable way of asking for care and rest. Male socialisation teaches boys that ‘proper’ men do not acknowledge fear, that to be male means to be responsible and in control (Etherington 1995, 2000). So a traumatised male who may not be able to acknowledge, even to himself, feeling powerless or helpless might develop ulcers, heart disease or irritable bowel syndrome as his body seeks expression of his disallowed emotions. Cultural taboos and practices arising from societal narratives about gender, race, age, economic status, ethnicity, sexual orientation or political directives might create a double bind in which the person recognises that their story holds destructive potential consequences for self or others if it should be told (Griffith and Griffith 1994). Trapped in this silencing double bind, the person’s body seeks its expression in ‘the underground theater’ of the body and its illness (p.58). Studies have shown that people who have experienced childhood trauma are more at risk of developing life-threatening and disabling illness and disease. A study of 9000 people in USA (Felitti et al. 1998) found that those who had been exposed to four or more episodes of childhood trauma had a four- to twelve-fold increased health risk for alcoholism, drug abuse, depression and suicide attempts. They were also between twice and four times more likely to smoke, to be generally ill, to have more than 50 sex partners and thus to have sexually transmitted diseases, and up to 1.6 times more likely to be obese. A study of women who had been raped during childhood (Arnold, Rogers and Cook 1990) noted that they had undergone an average of eight

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surgical operations with a high rate (66 to 70%) of normal findings. History of childhood sexual abuse was recognised only after the use of medical and surgical interventions. It is clear from this that the cost of recognising and healing trauma at an early stage could possibly save the NHS a great deal of time and money – as well as a lot of unnecessary suffering for people who have usually endured enough already. The first port of call for many trauma survivors is often their doctor’s surgery. Without an understanding of how trauma might impact upon the body, some GPs do not recognise the ways that survivors present within the practice. Judith Herman says: All too commonly chronically traumatised people suffer in silence, but if they complain at all, their complaints are not well understood. They may collect a virtual pharmacopoeia of remedies: one for headaches, another for insomnia, another for anxiety, another for depression. None of these tend to work very well, since the underlying issues of trauma are not addressed. As caregivers tire of these chronically unhappy people who do not seem to improve, the temptations to apply pejorative diagnostic labels becomes overwhelming. (Herman 1992, p.119)

These patients are frequently referred to as ‘heartsinks’ (Butler and Evans 1999) and may have spent years undergoing medical and surgical interventions as doctors attempt to satisfy themselves that no organic cause is underlying. The GP’s response can mirror the feelings of helplessness, rage and confusion of the traumatised child that may be trapped within the adult who has not yet found a direct way of telling the story (Etherington 2000). Doctors might feel powerless to help the patient and unable to make sense of the physical symptoms they are being asked to treat. Feeling frustrated and impotent, they may then blame the patient for their failure to heal and eventually withdraw in defeat.

Transformation

Transformation is a word that implies more than recovery or healing; it implies a fundamental shift at the core of our being. Transforming trauma requires a willingness to challenge our basic beliefs about ourselves and the world around us and enough faith to accept and trust what we cannot fully understand. Transformation also requires us to have the courage to accept the flow and harmony of primitive, natural laws that can take over our experience of ourselves and balance our emotions, thoughts, felt senses, sensations and behaviours (Levine 1997).

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In transforming trauma we need to recognise the role of memory. Memory is not necessarily a factual, coherent or linear record of something that actually happened. Rather it is a process of bringing together parts of our experience to create a coherent and organised whole (Whitfield 1995). Trauma can lead to repression and dissociation which impacts upon our memory and our sense of continuous existence. Memory of trauma may be accessible or it may not. Transformation does not depend upon memories, even if remembering is possible, because this is not necessarily what will transform our trauma. On the contrary, by attempting to chase memories as if they were concrete truths we might place ourselves in danger of becoming sucked back into the ‘trauma vortex’ again, causing further distress and reinforcing our sense of powerlessness and our inability to take control (Levine 1997, p.204). When we accept that memory is not necessarily something concrete that needs to be ‘unearthed’, but rather a ‘gathering together’ of different kinds of information, images, metaphors and responses, we become free to explore creatively, flexibly and spontaneously and begin from a place of ‘tacit knowing’ (Polanyi 1974) or ‘felt sense’ (Gendlin 1978, 1996). We might then be able to reconnect with our normal capacity to organise information in ways that help us to create new stories about our lives and new meanings. When we displace traumatic experience into the body in the form of somatic, psychosomatic illness or disease, we may try to ignore thoughts about or memories of earlier trauma. Using the body as a way of avoiding direct connection with the pain of repressed or dissociated trauma, we provide ourselves with the ‘credentials’ to acknowledge distress and seek relief through painkillers, medical or surgical interventions. The physical disorder can take over and develop a life of its own that consumes our attention and distracts from underlying material that feels too unsafe (Sansone, Wiederman and Sansone 2001). At this stage no transformation is possible. Transformation can begin once we have a strong enough desire to heal and we are able to create or find a safe enough environment in which to begin to pay attention to the messages carried by the body that tell of our past hurts and traumas. As stated previously, dissociation may cause us to fragment our experiences in order to lessen their impact and help us to survive. These fragments of traumatic emotional or sensory experiences may therefore be accurate recollections of experience and each can be examined separately in order to reduce its hold on us. Emotional and sensory details and images bring the remembered fragments more under the control of the neocortex, the

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thinking brain, where reactions and behaviours can be made more understandable and therefore more manageable: [the neocortex] contains the centres that put together and comprehend what the senses perceive. It adds to a feeling what we think about it – and allows us to have feelings about ideas, art, symbols and imaginings. (Goleman 1996, p.11)

Connecting sensation, feeling and thinking allows the brain to relearn that such events can be remembered without the extreme fear response that has held us captive in the past. Herman (1992) suggests that memories can be transformed, both in emotional meaning and in the effects in the emotional brain if we can: •

create a safe environment in the present

•

gain some control over life

•

tell our stories in the harbour of a safe relationship

•

mourn the losses created by the trauma.

The timing and pacing of telling and retelling our stories can be important. If we go too quickly we might release a flood of adrenalin and become retraumatised (Goleman 1996). However, most of us have the inner wisdom to know the pace that suits us and, providing we are not pushed back into facing memories before we are ready, we can recover in our own time. When we acknowledge our inner and bodily wisdom we can then recognise our inherent capacity for healing. We have been conditioned by society to seek a cure from doctors when we are ill. This is based on a belief in the dominance and wisdom of medicine, a patriarchal institution, rather than accepting our own resources as equally valuable or the idea that we know our bodies more intimately than anyone else ever can. We tend to listen to medical opinions and diagnoses before asking ourselves, ‘What is my body telling me about my life and what I need?’ Yet many of us are also ambivalent in our attitudes to medicine – sometimes seeking medical help and opinion whilst also rejecting it and feeling dismissed when we are offered unsatisfying solutions to our ills. When we listen to the messages carried by our bodies – messages about just how bad we feel – and accept those feelings without judgement, we can free up the energy trapped in denial or in endlessly searching for external cures and use it to move us towards what we really want (Northrup 1998). By deconstructing or reinterpreting our bodily pain we might be able to name our emotional distress and begin to explore our relationship to it and

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its meaning: ‘What is it that I need to know about myself that my fear (or anger) is trying to tell me through my body?’ ‘What does this illness give me that my body knows I need?’ Many of us are not consciously aware of the beliefs we hold that undermine our healing and well-being, beliefs laid down in our past and ‘lodged and buried in the cell tissue’ (Northrup 1998, p.35). Our attitudes about illness are often formed in response to events that occurred a long time ago, but the choices and decisions we currently make may still be in response to those beliefs. A woman whose mother treated every minor illness as though it was a major catastrophe might still respond in the same way today, even though her intellect tells her that the current situation is not serious. Intellect alone is not enough to shift these unhelpful beliefs. We need to acknowledge another source of wisdom, our ‘spiritual’ wisdom, acknowledging a greater power than intellect alone that will guide us towards achieving peace. This leap of faith creates a connection with a source of inner guidance that can accompany us throughout the most difficult times in our lives. Those of us who have been brought up within a religion might already be aware of a core of faith within, even when our belief in the religion upon which it was based has long since been modified or rejected. Others might seek new sources of wisdom as adults perhaps through Eastern or Western philosophies, alternative healing methods, connecting with the natural world, creativity, the arts, or by undertaking a unique spiritual journey. Transforming trauma involves us in recognising that our identity is not fixed but constantly reconstructed as we gather together aspects of our past and present stories that will help us to meet the future head-on. As we begin to tell our stories we might find out things about ourselves that we didn’t know before; discover strengths and resources within that we did not know existed; enjoy feelings that we no longer have to deny or feel controlled by; acknowledge and welcome thoughts we might previously have feared; and behave in ways we now understand and can put to good use. We can experience new strength through our connections with our body, mind and spirit and find a voice to tell our stories, sharing our experiences and newly discovered self-knowledge. We now know that putting stories of traumatic experience into words can itself become another step towards healing and transformation and can produce physiological changes that contribute to gains in health and feelings of well-being, (Harber and Pennebaker 1992; Herman 1992; Pennebaker 1988, 1993). Writing stimulates and facilitates the motor and sensory regions of the brain and might

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help us recover additional fragments of the former trauma (Penn 2001). Half-known aspects of our experiences can be accessed through the metaphors we use in our writing as we ‘reach intuitively into some part of ourselves that is outside our notice – still unnamed but there’ (Penn 2001, p.45). When we give testimony to experience through writing our stories, we bear witness to the past and challenge the idea that terrible experiences are too awful to be told (Frank 1995). We also create a possibility for change and a better future. In telling our stories we are also reaffirming and re-educating ourselves, our experiences and our lives as well as creating new stories. The stories we tell or write today will inevitably be different from those we tell tomorrow because life is being lived continuously. The stories that follow this chapter have been offered by some of us who have begun to recognise and listen to our bodily and spiritual wisdom and use it as a resource to help us move towards health. We are all at different stages on our unique journeys that will probably continue as long as life itself. We do not offer these stories because we believe there is a right way but rather as an acceptance that there are many ways and each person has to find his or her own. We offer these stories in the hope that others may resonate with some of our experiences and learn something from them, whether as one who is on their own journey towards transforming trauma or as one who guides and supports others on their way. These stories are a kind of recollection, which is more than remembering, it is: ‘remembering from the viewpoint of a fresh perspective… It is an opportunity to rewrite the family history by giving a different outcome, to recapture the original self (the acorn) and to reinvent the mature self and its culture’ (Zohar and Marshall 2000, p.186).

References

American Psychiatric Association (1980) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental rd Disorders, 3 edn (DSM-111). Washington, DC: APA. American Psychiatric Association (1994) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental th Disorders, 4 edn (DSM-1V). Washington, DC: APA. Arnold, R.P. Rogers, D. and Cook, D.A.G. (1990) ‘Medical problems of adults who th were sexually abused in childhood.’ British Medical Journal 300, 17 March, 705–708. Barker, P. (1991) Regeneration. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Bowlby, J. (1969) Attachment and Loss: Vol. 1. Attachment. New York: Basic Books. Bowlby, J. (1973) Attachment and Loss: Vol. 2. Separation. New York: Basic Books.

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Butler, C.C. and Evans, M. (1999) ‘The “heartsink” patient revisited.’ British Journal of General Practice 49, 230–233. Cameron, C. (2000) Resolving Childhood Trauma: A Long Term Study of Abuse Survivors. London: Sage. Davies, J.M. And Frawley, M.G. (1994) Treating the adult survivor of childhood sexual abuse: A psychoanalytical perspective. New York: Basic Books. Dubovsky, S.L. (1997) Mind–body Deceptions: The Psychosomatics of Every Day Life. New York: Norton. Eliot, T.S. (1994) Four Quartets. London: Faber & Faber. Elliot, D.M. and Guy, J.D. (1993) ‘Mental health professionals versus non-mental health professionals: childhood trauma and adult functioning.’ Professional Psychology: Research and Practice 24, 1, 83–90. Etherington, K. (1995) Adult Male Survivors of Childhood Sexual Abuse. Brighton: Pavilion. Etherington, K. (2000) Narrative Approaches to Working with Adult Male Survivors of Sexual Abuse: The Clients’, the Counsellor’s and the Researcher’s Story. London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers. Felitti, V.J., Anda, R.F., Nordenberg, D., Williamson, D.F., Spitz, A.M., Edwards, V., Koss, M.P. and Marks, J.S. (1998) ‘Relationship of childhood abuse and household dysfunction to many of the leading causes of death in adults.’ American Journal of Preventative Medicine 14, 245–258. Foa, E.B., Keane, T.M. and Friedman, M.J. (eds) (2000) Effective Treatments for PTSD. New York: Guilford Press. Follette, V.M., Polusny, M.M. and Millbeck, K. (1994) ‘Mental health and law enforcement professionals: trauma history, psychological symptoms, and impact of providing services to child sexual abuse survivors.’ Professional Psychology: Research and Practice 25, 3, 275–282. Frank, A. (1995) The wounded storyteller: Body, Illness and Ethics. London: The University of Chicago Press. Freud, S. (1905) ‘Fragment of an analysis of a case of hysteria.’ In The Complete Psychological Works: Standard Edition, (ed.) J. Strachey. London: Hogarth. Freyd, J.J. (1996) Betrayal Trauma: The Logic of Forgetting Childhood Abuse. London: Harvard University Press. Friedrich, W.N. (1995) Psychotherapy with Sexually Abused Boys: An Integrated Approach. London: Sage. Gendlin, E. (1978) Focusing. New York: Everest House. Gendlin, E. (1996) Focusing-oriented Psychotherapy. A Manual of the Experiential Method. New York: Guildford Press. Goleman, D. (1996) Emotional intelligence. London: Bloomsbury. Gold, S.N. (2000) Not Trauma Alone: Therapy for Child Abuse Survivors in Family and Social Context. London: Brunner-Routledge. Griffith, J.L. and Griffith, M.E. (1994) The Body Speaks: Therapeutic Dialogues for Mind–body Problems. New York: Basic Books.

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Harber, K.D. and Pennebaker, J.W. (1992) ‘Overcoming traumatic memories.’ In S. Christianson (ed) The Handbook of Emotion and Memory: Research and Theory. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Herman, J. (1992) Trauma and Recovery. New York: Basic Books. Kardiner, A. and Spiegel, H. (1947) War, Stress and Neurotic Illness (rev. ed. The Traumatic Neuroses of War). New York: Hoeber. Levine, P. (1997) Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books. Kohar, D. and Marshall, I. (2000) Connecting with our Spiritual Intelligence. London: Bloomsbury. Meares, R. (2000) Intimacy and Alienation: Memory, Trauma and Personal Being. London: Routledge. Middleton, W. and Butler, J. (1998) ‘Dissociative identity disorder.’ Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry 32, 794–804. Miliora, M.T. (1998) ‘Trauma, dissociation, and somatization: a self-psychological perspective.’ Journal of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis 26, 2, 273–293. Mullen, P.E., Martin, J.L., Anderson, J.C., Romans, S.E. and Herbison, G.P. (1996) ‘The long term impact of the physical. emotional, and sexual abuse of children: a community study.’ Child Abuse and Neglect 20, 7–21. Northrup, C. (1998) Women’s Bodies, Women’s Wisdom: The Complete Guide to Women’s Health and Well-being. London: Piatkus. Penn, P. (2001) ‘Chronic illness: trauma, language and writing: breaking the silence.’ Family Process 40, 1, 33–52. Pennebaker, J.W. (1988) ‘Confiding traumatic experiences and health.’ In S. Fisher and J. Reason (eds) Handbook of Life Stress, Cognition and Health. Chichester: Wiley. Pennebaker, J.W. (1993) ‘Putting stress into words: health, linguistic and therapeutic implications.’ Behaviour Research and Therapy 31, 539–548. Pert, C. (1998) Molecules of Emotion. London: Simon and Schuster. Polanyi, M. (1974) Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-critical Philosophy. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Rivers, W.H.R. (1918) ‘The repression of war experience.’ The Lancet, 2 February. Rothschild, B. (2000) The Body Remembers. New York: Norton. Sansone, R.A., Wiederman, M.W. and Sansone, L.A. (2001) ‘Adult somatic preoccupation and its relationship to childhood trauma.’ Victims and Violence 16, 1, 39–47. Terr, L. (1988) ‘What happens to early memories of trauma?’ Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 1, 96–104. Terr, L.C. (1991) ‘Childhood traumas: an outline and overview.’ American Journal of Psychiatry 148, 10–20. Terr, L. (1993) Unclaimed Memories. New York: Basic Books. van der Kolk, B.A. (1987) Psychological Trauma. Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Press.

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van der Kolk, B.A. (1988) ‘The trauma spectrum: the interaction of biological and social events in the genesis of the trauma response.’ Journal of Traumatic Stress 1, 273–290. van der Kolk, B.A. (1994) ‘The body keeps the score.’ Harvard Review of Psychiatry 1, 253–265. van der Kolk, B.A. (1996) ‘Trauma and memory.’ In B. van der Kolk, A. MacFarlane and L. Weisaeth (eds) Traumatic Stress. New York: Guilford Press. Waitzkin, H. and Magena, H. (1997) ‘The black box in somatisation: unexplained physical symptoms, culture and narratives of trauma.’ Social Sciences and Medicine 45, 6, 811–825. Whitfield, C.L. (1995) Memory and Abuse: Remembering and Healing the Effects of Trauma. Deerfield Beach, CA: Health Communications. Williams, G. (1984) ‘The genesis of chronic illness: narrative re-construction.’ Sociology of Health and Illness 6, 2, 175–200. Winnicott, D. (1960) Ego distinction in terms of true and false self in The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment. New York: International Universities Press.

Further reading

Chopra, D. (1989) Quantum Healing: Exploring the Frontiers of Mind/Body Medicine. New York: Bantam. Damasio, A.R. (1994) Descartes’ Error. New York: Putnam. Goodman, B. (1994) When the Body Speaks its Mind. New York: Putnam. LeDoux, J. (1992) ‘Emotion and the limbic system concept.’ Concepts in Neuroscience 2. nd Miller, A. (1990) Thou Shalt not be Aware: Society’s Betrayal of the Child, 2 edn. London: Pluto. Wind, T.W. and Silvern, L. (1992) ‘Type and extent of child abuse as predictors of adult functioning.’ Journal of Family Violence 7, 261–281. Zohar, D. and Marshall, I. (2000) Connecting with our spiritual intelligence. London and New York: Bloomsbury.

2

All That You Make Carole Mandeville

It’s hard to compress into a chapter the numerous pieces of my childhood story which each seem important in explaining how I became ill with MS as an adult. Looking back it seems to me that initially my responses to the trauma of my childhood helped to protect me when I was young and enabled me to survive, so that I took into adult life the gifts of forgetting and of make-believe, the gift of being able to feel very limited feelings, and the gift of an energy that rarely let me be still. But if anyone had enquired too closely who I was, I shouldn’t have been able to answer because that was hidden from me, and when someone called me by my name it was as though they were speaking to a person who was somehow standing behind me but who wasn’t me. I was merely a façade, living on in someone who thought she was alive. Some nights though, when I couldn’t sleep, despair and depression would come that were so black I wanted to die but I had no real sense of why. If I had been able to name the feeling that was constant in my life then I think I would have called it emptiness. Before I became ill in 1989 my life would have seemed as conventional as anyone else’s. I was in my forties and came from a middle-class home at a time when moderately educated women (I’d left school with two GCEs) were expected to become something along the lines of a secretary or nurse. I’d become a shorthand typist but eventually went to university when I was 23, using correspondence courses to get the qualifications to do a degree in English. I’d graduated from Newcastle university, married when I was 29 and now had two teenage children. I’d chosen to be at home with my children and at that time had no career, just doing whatever temporary work fitted around that. I was creative, energetic and practical. I’d written poetry all my life, had a play performed locally, and I was a Samaritan. I played badminton with passion, did lots of DIY, had recently run the London marathon, and I read voraciously. I was busy. 39

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My illness began quite suddenly and seemed to come from nowhere and for no reason. It began as I was driving to work one morning. It was a July day, full of sunshine and summer. As I drove into Ashford I started to feel that I couldn’t drive any further because I thought I might faint – something that I’d never done. I managed to get the car into a small lay-by and felt myself fall sideways onto the passenger seat. I closed my eyes and wondered if I was losing consciousness. I tried to touch my face but my fingers and arm felt numb and my cheek as if I’d tried to touch thin air. Outside, the noise of the traffic grew duller, my sense of hearing muffling the sounds. From time to time I opened my eyes and tried to focus my sight on the accumulated rubbish in the passenger shelf but it slipped beyond control. I tried pulling myself upright, but the floating sensation in my head forced me to lie down again. I tried to imagine what was wrong with me but couldn’t think of an answer. I thought of Keith, my husband, and my children. Yesterday we’d picnicked with some friends from London. It didn’t seem possible that today I thought I might be dying. I don’t know how long I lay there. Maybe it was an hour or perhaps only ten minutes, but after a while I forced myself to sit up, holding onto the steering wheel. I started the engine and tried to drive back home. My feet seemed to have lost all sensation and, as the car crept along, I realised that my eyes couldn’t keep up with the filtered sunlight as it flickered through the trees along the roadside. I stopped and rubbed my eyes, willing them to stay focused. When I saw the next signpost I realised it had taken me two hours to drive three miles. I couldn’t go on. I stopped the car and began to walk. Panic kept me moving forward, though I had almost no sensation of walking – it was as if I was treading on cotton wool. I crossed a bridge and looked down at the river. I felt as if I was going to fall and had to look away. I walked to a village and phoned Keith. As Keith drove me home my eyes became fixated by the brake lights of the cars ahead and I had to force them away. Being driven uphill made me feel as if I was floating and downhill as if I was going to be sick or fall forward. I began to dread the next hill and the next expanse of sky, and the smear on the windscreen that I couldn’t somehow drag my eyes away from, and the sunlight and shadows that moved too fast for my eyes to keep up with. That night I lay in bed trying to read, seeking reassurance in what my GP had told me – that she couldn’t find anything wrong with me but would arrange for further tests. I began to think that maybe I’d just fainted and that

ALL THAT YOU MAKE / 41

was all there was to it. I shut my book and looked across at the curtains, trying to catch and hold with my eyes the pattern of flowers. They merged into each other and then separated. Then I could pick out each stem, following it up to the pink and orange flowers. They didn’t move or blur at the edges. I closed my eyes with relief and then opened them again. I could see the flowers still but that was all that I could see – the rest of the room was in darkness. I looked for the walls and there weren’t any, I looked for my chest of drawers and couldn’t see it. I thought I was losing my sight. My heart raced, then stopped and then thudded into life like a train starting up in my chest and thumping into my head. By the morning my sight seemed normal again but the vertigo was just as severe. I felt light-headed walking downstairs or down any kind of slope. But I went back to work and it took all my energy and concentration. I didn’t want to let anyone down. After some months and a number of tests which proved nothing, some of my symptoms had disappeared but others had come in their place: an excruciating version of pins and needles in my arms and legs, muscle cramps in my limbs and numbness in my face. At night too my legs and arms would suddenly jerk outwards, uncontrollably. Sleeplessness had come within a few weeks of the first day when I began to jump awake just as I was falling asleep. Sometimes the jumps would go on for hours and I began counting them. With each jump I saw a picture in my head of myself in a car which was just about to crash, running off the road into a crowd of people. Not knowing what was wrong with me was made worse by imagining what it might be. I started to research my symptoms and after eliminating other illnesses I began to think that maybe I had multiple sclerosis. I talked to my GP about it and she agreed to refer me to a specialist research unit attached to a London hospital. But they couldn’t tell me what was wrong either. The neurologist I saw there took months to arrange some tests and further months to give me inconclusive results, putting me into a daily cycle of expectation and then panic each time his letter didn’t come. I began to feel as if I was falling into a hole, grasping at the sides of it as I tried to reach for help, but my hold crumbled away each time and I slipped further down, helpless to stop myself. By the middle of March in the following year the numbness in my face turned into what my GP told me was trigeminal neuralgia. Pain throbbed into the nerves of my teeth as if they were being drilled to the roots without anaesthetic. Within a few weeks I began having allergic reactions to different painkillers, my body swelling up with fluid and my face distorting into a grotesque swollen mask. One by one my body rejected all painkillers

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and when the neuralgia came again the pain was so bad I couldn’t talk or eat while it lasted. When July came round I finally gave up any attempt at playing sport because by then my knees were collapsing as I tried to run and I began to wonder if one day I wouldn’t be able to walk at all. As the summer days became a blazing heat I spent hours sitting in the shade of my garden unable to do anything except read – I was so tired. My garden went wild because I couldn’t look after it. I tried on the cooler days to keep it tidy, shuffling along on a camping stool to pull out the weeds, but it was hopeless. I hated seeing it overgrown because I loved it and had made it from a wilderness of rubble and weeds. ‘Have you ever been rendered unconscious? The deep brain scan shows that you have at some point in the past.’ I shook my head. ‘No? Do you know that you have a small bony lump on the bridge of your nose, here? Why is that?’ ‘It’s always been like that.’ She was an otoneurologist at a hospital in London where I’d finally been sent by the research unit for more tests. She looked into my face and touched the side of my nose and my top lip, then straightened and looked at me thoughtfully in a moment of what felt like compassion. I looked away, wanting to cry. Most days I felt like that now, but the feeling never got further than a stabbing ache behind my eyes. ‘Has anyone ever told you that you have a squint and that you have hearing loss in your right ear?’ No one had. I looked in the mirror at home and realised for the first time that the bump on the side of my nose was covered over with scar tissue. My lip had faint scars above it too, but I couldn’t explain them. Unconscious? No, I couldn’t remember anything like that. Maybe people just forgot that sort of thing. I put it out of my mind. A little child began to talk to me in my sleep. Her small voice rose with desperation in a stream of pleading nonsense words that often grew so loud they would wake me up. I told Keith about it and he said I’d talked like that in my sleep on and off all our married life. I began to sleep downstairs, using the excuse that I thought the talking and jumping was keeping him awake. Ours had been a companionable but not close marriage and the strain of my illness had begun to expose deep cracks between us.

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Piece by piece I felt as if I was falling off the edge of my life and didn’t know how to save myself. Every day I could feel myself pressing down harder and harder at a panic that was rising with the inevitability of bread dough, encasing me in its stickiness, threatening to overwhelm me. I didn’t know then that I was lonely or that there might have been much for me to say. In desperation I contacted the research unit again and they suggested that I see a counsellor. In the summer of 1990 I began to see a counsellor called Clare, who specialised in clients with MS. I didn’t know how I was going to tell her that I often felt as if I was drifting somewhere and that it was harder each time to get back, or that sometimes I seemed to be watching me from somewhere else outside myself, or that often I felt as if I was living at a level of reality that was the outermost skin of being, no thicker than tissue paper. I sat on the edge of her settee, my eyes fixed on a vase of late summer flowers on a glass table. When I finally said something it sounded like nonsense. I looked at her. I couldn’t tell if she believed me or not, or if she knew what I was talking about. Silence and panic arrived arm in arm like a bride and groom walking into the room. I can’t remember what I said the next time or the few times after that, but bit by bit Clare peeled some of me away, making me talk, sending my mouth into motion and my tongue round strange words connecting with sentences beginning with ‘I’. ‘I am…’ Who knows who I am? ‘I feel…’ What do I feel? The deceit of a dead heart cheated my mouth and the words trickled out past my waiting brain which, if it had belonged to someone else, would have laughed to hear the many repetitions of ‘I feel’, as if I really knew what feeling was. If I’d remembered what the nearness of death felt like I could have said that I felt rather like that. If chance had enabled me to see the formula for loneliness I would have known the words and claimed the feeling and wept at an image of myself. One day, after a week or two, Clare asked me for a family history and sat waiting with pad and pen to hand ready to write it down. I faltered towards a door that was almost shut and fell into a familiar anxiety that wanted to please. I told her what I knew: my father had died 14 years ago just before my son was born. He was a self-made man, a lecturer in a technical college. My mother was a housewife. She hadn’t gone out to work. She looked after us, me and my sister and two brothers. She was a good cook. ‘She had a stroke two years ago and is very handicapped. She’s in a nursing home.’ ‘Tell me about your childhood, what was it like?’

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I felt her gaze pinning me down like a butterfly fluttering about on the end of a needle. I looked up. Something was expected of me and I looked away. ‘I remember my father hitting me sometimes,’ I said at last. I couldn’t remember when and I couldn’t remember anything else about him. ‘Must be something wrong with my brain,’ I joked. I looked out of the window and stared at the blue sky and the small clouds rushing across. How little there was. Years of my life tucked like a handkerchief deep into the pocket of a coat I’d worn once and stuffed into the back of my wardrobe. I’d forgotten not only the memory of my father, but almost all of my memory of being a child and an adolescent and my early twenties until I’d left home to go to university. I did remember the names of the schools I’d been to and the names of one or two children and of my house and village as well as one other thing which I’d never told anyone: I knew that I’d cut and burnt my hand because I still had the scars. I touched them, fingering a white line on my hand that is too straight to be an accident and the marks that anyone would know if they looked closely enough were cigarette burns, though they’d faded over the years. I knew too that I’d tried to kill myself when I was about 15. I’d always know that, but why I didn’t know. There were no other clues to myself anywhere. I went home and dreamt the same dream I’d always had about my father since he’d died. I dreamt that he was buried alive and I was digging him up. When my spade hit his neck he burst out of the ground with a face like a devil. I started to run, falling over lumps of earth, tripping in terror over thick clumps of grass, his shadow near mine, his roar in my ears, his mad eyes burning into my brain, chasing me through trees until I’m smaller and smaller. Clare suggested that maybe I should ask for a referral to see a neurologist at a local NHS hospital. The neurologist told me there was no definitive test for MS, which was why some doctors were reluctant to tell anyone they had it, but he thought that was what I had. There was no cure but I could do things to help myself. Diet was one and avoiding some situations another. He was patient and caring and told me which supplements might also help my immune system. He gave me some hope, though it was hard to hear that he didn’t think my allergy to painkillers would change. I told my family and some of my friends about my illness and for a week or two I felt happier than I had for a long time because I was armed with a label which I could show to anyone. The world would understand and be able to sympathise now that I had permission to be sick, though when I told my mother she turned her head away from me not wanting to hear. I’d never thought of her as

ALL THAT YOU MAKE / 45

uncaring and couldn’t now let in any thought that might tell me she didn’t love me because I had adored her all my life. I concentrated still on the veneer of my life, clinging to its leaking little boat. I turn the light out in my room and close my eyes. Within a few seconds the pictures come, clear and coloured, precise, like a video running I can’t stop. I see myself as a small child, my right arm being gripped and pulled up by my father, his right hand hitting my head. I see him hit me again and again. My body jumps, stopping the picture. I open my eyes, my heart thumping. Straight away another picture comes and although my eyes are open I can’t stop it. A child of about seven is hiding in the dark behind a tree looking at a tall house, into the kitchen window where there’s a light on. There’s a lawn and another tree and a long swing hanging down. As suddenly as it comes it is gone. I sink back onto the bed; my neck stiffens, throwing my head backwards. My throat closes, there’s something in my mouth – I can’t breath, my hips start jerking up and back and up and back, faster and faster. My spine arches and drops down, then arches again. I fight for breath and my lungs suck at the air. I feel as if I’m going to suffocate, to die. I turn on the light and lie still. My heart says nothing, excommunicated years ago from my head, wandering still lost to loss, to tears, to tenderness towards myself. I get up, walk around, fetch a book and open it. I slot the first sentence in place but it slips out. I pull it back. The second sentence jumps about while I try to tame a meaning from it. In the back of my mind my memory is starting to come into being. I remember then that my father had hit me for playing on the piano. I remember the terror at the sound of his feet coming through the house towards me. I remember hoping desperately that the piano’s echo would stop before he came into the room. I remember my mother coming in whilst he was hitting me and begging him not to hit me round the head, but he didn’t stop. Three days later I remembered that the child hiding behind a tree in the dark was me. I’d been banned for good from the house of my best friend, Elizabeth and marched home by her mother. We’d been playing doctors and nurses. After that I used to climb out of my bedroom window at night, walk to Elizabeth’s house to catch sight of her in her kitchen as I hid behind the tree to watch. After I’d remembered it was to be almost a year before I could feel the loss of her and I cried every time I thought about her for months after that.

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Three weeks after these two flashbacks I had another of being raped by my father in my aunt’s house when I was about seven or eight years old. It was as though it were happening in reality it was so horribly vivid – I could even smell the scent of the soap my mother used to wash our family’s clothes. My mind desperately tried to push the memory away. I tried to put all my effort into the everyday things but they began to take on a frightening unreality. I seemed to be watching myself cooking and washing, seeing to my children’s needs, my feet feeling as if they were moving through tar as I tried to care but all the time a blackness seemed to be coming from somewhere just behind me and I felt as heavy as lead as I tried to escape. Night times became a nightmare because I felt after this I didn’t know what else the night might make me see and feel, and I spent long tracts of the night jumping into wakefulness. ‘Seven times six?’ He waits. ‘Come on dummy, a baby could do it.’ The silence ticks away while the answer muddles into the place of fear in my head. ‘Sev-en.TIMES… Six.’ His patient derision spells out the simplicity of the puzzle, the obviousness of the answer, but I can’t find it and look desperately through my brain. ‘Look at me!’ His voice makes me jump. Always I couldn’t look when he was looking at me. ‘My lips, what are my lips saying? I’m GIVING it to you!’ He hits my knuckles with the ruler. ‘You MUST know it, a child of five would know it! We did it YESTERDAY, dimwit! LOOK AT ME WHEN I’M TALKING TO YOU!’ I try not to jump but I do. He grabs my hair and pulls my head back, his clenched fist under my chin. My eyes are being sucked upwards to meet his mad eyes which have the answer in them to a secret I don’t know. I smell his cigarette breath and feel bits of his spit on my lips and eyes, his face so close to mine as I blink the spit away. ‘You make me sick. You make me want to give up, d’you know that? Seven… Sixes… Are… Forty… Two!’ He puts each piece of the answer into me by banging my head on the kitchen table with every number. Some days now I felt so tired that if I sat down in an armchair the jumping began straight away. I felt as fragile as a moth’s wing and had no energy left for my marriage and no wish to repair it. I tried to hide that from my children but they soon knew because I could see it in their sad and worried faces and in their loving concern. After this I started crying whenever I went to see Clare. I hadn’t cried for more than 30 years, though

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it was to be some time still before I could cry alone because I think it reminded me unbearably of the loneliness of crying alone as a young child. At about this time I remembered being in hospital as a child of about six because I’d had constant ear infections which presumably had left me with some hearing loss. I was in hospital for three weeks, one of the few times when I felt safe and looked after. Within a few months of beginning to remember I was having flashbacks every night and during the day too. The most mundane of everyday objects triggered my memory, household things like jars of jam, a rolling pin, the smell of cakes baking, a newspaper being turned – all would come trailing memories, pictures, scenes in their wake. I couldn’t listen to the radio now because it was often on in my childhood home. Looking out of my windows at the countryside brought with it many memories of great loneliness, of a child who had wandered the lanes and fields, hop gardens and orchards. The sense of being somewhere between two worlds, the past and the present, was a feeling that I hated. For the same reason I couldn’t go into a swimming pool or library, read newspapers or novels because the sense of being alone was unbearable. Nor could I watch any violence on TV because looking at it gave me what I can only describe as an ‘electric shock’ sensation in my head. Worst of all was the experience of the memory of being raped which repeated over and over often seven or eight times a night, as did the memory of being hit. It was astonishing to me that my body could have stored the memory and recreated it as an actual bodily experience. As incredible as it seems, not only was this recreated but also smells and sounds from the past too. They were as real as if they were happening in the present. As more of my memory came back it held things that even now, 12 years later, I find it difficult to write about. I remembered many more incidences of physical abuse and sexual abuse by my father and sexual abuse by my father’s mother as well as physical torture by her. I remembered twice trying to kill myself – once when I was eight when I tried to throw myself out of my father’s car and the other time when as a teenager I tried to overdose. The first attempt had resulted in my father hitting me across my face, which explained the scarring the otoneurologist had noticed. I recalled being knocked unconscious by my father after he’d hit me on Christmas Day when I was six for opening a present by mistake. Another piece of the jigsaw was remembering how I’d been ill with similar but milder symptoms to those of the MS I had now when I was about 16. For some reason my mother couldn’t acknowledge illness so if any of us was ill a doctor was

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rarely called. My younger brother David had nearly died of pneumonia because of this. As a consequence of regaining my memory, David later regained his memory of physical and sexual abuse by my father and grandmother. My sister, who is nine years younger than me, later told me that she’d left home when she was 16 because my father had tried to sexually abuse her then. My older brother had been very badly abused physically by my father, but not sexually. Neither of them had lost their memories as David and I had. Counselling with Clare came to an abrupt end after a year. Looking back I can see that this was for the best because I think she was probably feeling overwhelmed, but she gave me no explanation. I doubt whether seeing me once a week for an hour could ever have been enough for what I was going through, particularly when the feelings which I had never felt as a child, but which nonetheless seemed to have been stored somewhere in my psyche, rushed into my consciousness with overwhelming force – the accumulation of grief and rage and loss. She told me that I must find someone else and gave me a month’s notice. At first I couldn’t believe it and thought she was saying I had to work harder in the sessions and I told her that I would, but she didn’t mean that. She didn’t suggest anyone else for me to see. When I asked her she said she knew no one but would make a few phone calls yet nothing came of it. I asked her for more time to find someone but she refused. My mother sometimes tried to run away from our house. I’d hear her running out of the kitchen and into her bedroom to pack her suitcase. She wouldn’t talk to me or look at me and I’d think that I’d done something to make her want to leave us. I watched her pack her nightie and her underwear, the little things that were full of her sadness, the jumpers that smelt of her, her sickly smell, and I couldn’t think what to do. She’d go out of the front door and slam it, running down the lane to the bus stop, like a child running away from home. Then I’d run as fast as I could to bring her back before a bus came, my brain on fire, praying to Jesus as I ran, for the bus not to come, ‘Mummy, Mummy, Mummy,’ throbbing through my chest. ‘I don’t want to come back,’ she’d say, pushing me away. Then she’d cry and we’d walk back and sometimes she let me hold her hand. I listened for the sounds of her leaving and lived with the daily expectation of it, as tight as a wire for years waiting for the sound of doors slamming through roaring humiliation from my father, and then her feet running away. Every afternoon when I walked up the lane from school I

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never knew if she’d be there or not. At other times she ran away into silence, saying nothing, refusing to speak to any of us, often for days at a time. Her withdrawal felt as though I would die, as if any love there was to be had had simply evaporated and any sense I had of myself with it. I saw Clare once more after I’d realised what she really meant and begged her not to make me leave, but she wouldn’t change her mind. I drove to London afterwards and walked along the Thames, wanting so much to die. I never went back to see her because every time the day of my appointment came round I was physically sick. My mind felt as if it was splitting into pieces. The flashbacks worsened and came now with hallucinations of my father in my house. The rate of remembering accelerated. My MS symptoms worsened too and I also began to hear voices which plagued my mind at night. There were many – voices from my childhood, from books I’d read as a child, from radio and TV programmes, from people I’d imagined, from conversations I’d imagined they’d had, from people in my present life, even my children. It seemed to me that I had no unconscious or subconscious left and I felt as though the whole of my mind was as known to me as consciousness. It was responsible for many incredible effects in perception and experience, which even today I’m not fully able to explain. Some of them I found terrifying, but others gave me spiritual experiences, which I value still. For a while too I was able to see in a way I’d never seen before. Colour became wonderfully intense and I could see intricate detail in everything I looked at, as though I was seeing the beauty of the world for the first time. In the same way that I’d wanted to know about my illness, I was desperate to understand what was happening to my mind. I began to research the causes of my experiences at a nearby university and eventually came across the condition known as post traumatic stress disorder. I found this initially in American psychiatric journals, mostly in relation to Vietnam War veterans and then later found a reference to it as a possible consequence of severe child abuse. I began to see that this was what was happening to me. Some of the literature also highlighted the risks of retraumatisation and I think this is what had happened when Clare told me to find another counsellor. When I saw the neurologist again he suggested that I come into hospital for a course of steroids. I wanted to avoid this if I could and refused. He was so kind and gentle that I felt able to tell him about my memories of abuse and what was happening to my marriage. He listened intently and when I’d finished he said that he thought I had MS because of my severe abuse as a

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child. ‘The pain of that had to go somewhere and it went into your body. The abscesses in your teeth too, they’re probably related to that. I think that as you deal with the memories your body will recover.’ I couldn’t take in what he was saying. It wasn’t until I had nearly reached home that I suddenly felt the whole impact of what he’d said. My abuse, he meant my abuse, he meant what had happened to me, the MS and the pain of it all. This was why I was ill. This was why I’d been through all the agony. I stopped the car and screamed and cried until my voice was hoarse and my throat thick with rage. That my body could recover seemed like a dream beyond anything that was possible. Later I remembered the callers with MS I’d listened to over the years as a Samaritan; each one had been either sexually or physically abused as a child. My feeling now is that it isn’t just MS and child abuse, it’s other illnesses too. It’s something to do with the way many of us treat our children – often with so little respect, doing things to them and saying things to them we would not dare to say or do to an adult or wish to have said and done to ourselves. I think we do it from the depths of our own treatment as children, hating the child in ourselves as we were taught to do and our children get sick because of it. I came to understand my parents in this way too and saw that both had been victims of their childhood. My hands touch my dying mother. Her white skin is new to my fingers, shiny and paper thin. Her belly is swollen; her arms and legs thinned out like a starving child’s. Her breasts are little on the sides of her chest, emptied out by children. I see her eyes which are almost closed, a waxy rheum collecting in a pool on her lower lids. My hope wants them to open. At this moment perhaps she will put away her silence and touch me, tell me the words of her sadness and why she could never love me. I tell her about the sunshine and the flowers outside her window. I tell her I understand, not really knowing if I do. It’s the only real gift I have to give her and there’s no time left in her to wait for my certainties. Her breath quickens. Child-mother so small, I see that your hands don’t bleed now that it’s years since they were always in washing-up water and soap and cold air. Your knees are smooth when they were always rough from kneeling and scrubbing floors. ‘I know why you did what you did,’ I say. Your eyes flicker and I wonder if you can hear me. I know that in your emptiness there was nothing more you could have given.

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Eventually I found an American psychotherapist called Sara who was courageous enough to offer to help me. She saw me for two hours twice a week for two and a half years. She was generous and funny but more than anything she showed me that the most healing thing one human being can give to another is a strong, staunch and vibrant love. She never pretended to know more than me, or hide behind ambivalent answers. She told me that one day I would feel a sense of peace and that my suffering would come to an end. Her faith in my recovery helped me to believe it too. With her I went to the beach and threw stones and shouted my rage at the sea. She taped stories for me for when she was away and took good care of my child needs. I truly felt I was being mothered for the first time. Through working with her the neurologist’s prediction about my MS which I’d found so hard to believe gradually came true. When I had been seeing Sara for a year I could run again and play sport. One by one my symptoms went away and they have not returned.

3

Angels Nesting in the Mind

1

Ruth L. Barnett

Books make a difference in people’s lives – even those by the unremembered dead: words are the angels nesting in the mind; in that sense something of me may survive and centuries from now someone may find my words as fledgling angels in his head. Karen Gershon (2001)

I was moved to tears when I first read Karen Gershon’s poem. I re-read it so often that I learnt it by heart and now, each time I say it to myself, myriad thoughts come jostling into my mind, like ‘fledgling angels’ that have been nesting out of reach in the ‘dead’ corners of my mind, waiting to be brought to life as words. Waiting to be thought about. Waiting to be allowed to be. Wanting to be established in a book that my grandchildren’s children may read long after I have left their world. Many poems and stories have moved me before and set off thoughts crowding into my mind, as if from ‘nowhere’. On reading Karen Gershon’s poem I recognised them as ‘fledgling angels’ urging me to write a book about them. Sadly, the thoughts usually evaporated; the ‘fledgling angels’ flew off and I lost them again. Some of them come back from time to time, urging me to bring them to life. I like hearing or reading other people’s stories, as most people do. Life can be very difficult to bear at times and it helps to know how other people faced and overcame their problems. Over the last ten years or so many former refugee children like me have written books about their experiences. They fill me with admiration, but it seems to me more and more daunting. Can I bear to sort out my untidy heaps of thoughts? Apart from being in a muddle, they are private and 52

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mine. Do I want my ‘fledgling angels’ to leave their nest in my mind and go out into the world? Would they be taken into the minds of kind readers and nurtured? Would they be seen as bedraggled and worthless? Or even worse, will my readers think badly of me? As I begin to write this chapter about my own traumatic childhood as a refugee, a critical voice inside my head chastises me: ‘Nothing happened to you – it might have done if you had stayed in Germany but you were rescued. You have nothing to complain about. Nothing to write about. Think of all those who didn’t escape and were murdered!’ I think of them a lot. Always at the back of my mind is the thought that one of those children, murdered in Hitler’s annihilation camps, who didn’t get the chance that I did, would have made much better use of the chance than I have. Those children cannot tell their stories. Only we who survive can tell ours and dedicate our memories to those who didn’t. So I must tell my story to anyone who will listen – even though my internal critic sometimes makes it very heavy going! I was four years old in 1939 when I came to England on the Kindertransport with my brother Karl who was seven. Our mother brought us to our first foster family, a childless country rector and his wife, the Steadleys. She told us to be good and disappeared. How could I know that she had only temporary permission to come to England and had to return to Germany? I wanted to go back with her. She had often left me for long periods with her mother and sister, my granny and Aunt Ella, when we all lived in Berlin. I quite liked it at Granny’s because they made a fuss of me. They also made me do things I didn’t like. Aunt Ella put me to bed after lunch when I wasn’t even tired because Granny had a sleep too. I have a vivid picture in my mind of standing up in my cot and watching Granny snore with her teeth in a glass beside her bed. But always my mother fetched me back quite soon. This time she didn’t. Had she forgotten me? Or was I so bad she didn’t want me any more? I decided I would be very good so that she would take me back. Only it didn’t work out that way. At first, I didn’t know any English and so I couldn’t understand what my foster parents wanted from me. But I quickly got the message that they didn’t want me to cry. So I asked my self, ‘What is there to cry about? Crying is naughty and will make it worse.’ Crying for my mother did not bring her back. My father visited us at the Steadleys on his way to China. I told him I wanted to go with him. He said there was going to be a war but it would be a very short one and then Mutti would come and take us back to Germany. I saw soldiers everywhere and my

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brother told me that England was at war with Germany. He said the English soldiers would shoot anyone speaking German so I must speak only English. He was my big brother and I believed everything he said. Learning English wasn’t a problem. In fact, when I went to boarding school two years later I was the youngest in the class and the only one who could read and write. Although I spoke English as well or even better than many English children, I could not be English because I was born in Germany. I had been sent to England for being a Jew, a ‘bad’ German. When the children at school found out I had come from Germany, they set on me in the playground, calling me a German Nazi. I defended myself by screaming that I was Jewish and Jews could not be Nazis. This school had capable understanding teachers who quickly put a stop to this. But through this incident I ‘fixed’ my identity as Jewish without having any idea what it meant. I learned later that I was half Jewish and that my Jewish father had had my brother and I baptised as Christians before we left for England. That was why we were placed with three Christian families. The Steadleys had a young woman living with them and it was mostly Miss White who looked after Karl and me. She didn’t like us and was cruel. I was terrified of her and always in trouble. My worst memory was of bath time when she scrubbed me with something scratchy and choked me with the sponge in my face. Karl told me that on one occasion I would have drowned if he hadn’t pushed Miss White away and pulled me out. I don’t remember that. Our minds often protect us from remembering the worst bits. I also don’t remember being beaten with a leather belt for wetting my bed, but I do remember having to sleep on my tummy because of the raw welts on my back. I knew it was naughty to pee in my bed. However hard I tried I couldn’t stop it. That proved I was bad beyond redemption! I despaired of being good. My mother didn’t come because I was so bad. I couldn’t bear it that she chose to be somewhere else and not with me, so I told myself that she was dead; that there was a war on and she had been killed, otherwise she would have come. At first I knew it was a ‘story’ but soon I was convinced. I started to tell everyone that my mother was dead. No one, not even Karl, denied it so I felt it must be true. That made things a bit easier for me to bear. I still had a father who would come back for me one day – if I was good. We had occasional letters from him through the Red Cross in Switzerland. He had passed his exams so that he could be a lawyer in Shanghai. Lawyers seemed big and grand to me so I was proud and even more determined to ‘be good’.

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Boarding school was a haven. The teachers were kind and understanding. I made friends at school and had fun. My bedwetting stopped when no one made a fuss about it. I was good at schoolwork, games and swimming. I was the quietest and best behaved in the Quaker prayer meetings. But still my mother didn’t come. It seemed she really was dead. Then, in 1943, the Steadleys would not have us back from school for the summer holiday. The rector was ill and they couldn’t have two noisy children in the rectory. We spent the summer in a hostel in Richmond. It was chaos! There were lots of tiny children and very few adults. Aged eight and eleven, Karl and I were nearly the oldest and we were left to feed ourselves in the kitchen and run off to swim in the Thames. Karl became very ill with hepatitis, but nobody noticed, no one called a doctor. He was so ill I was afraid he would die. Now Karl was convinced that ‘an apple a day keeps the doctor away’. He said he needed apples, so I sold the one little rag doll I had to a lady in the street for her baby and with the few pennies I bought a big bag of apples for Karl. I put cold flannels on his forehead and read stories to him till he fell asleep. He said later that I saved his life just as he saved me from drowning in the bath. The important thing was that we each felt protected by the other and that we would be able to keep each other alive. And we did keep each other alive psychologically. Karl became my substitute ‘mother’ whose every word I could depend on. For Karl, I was his raison d’être. Our parents’ last words to him were, ‘Look after your little sister.’ After summer in the hostel we were collected by the Goodmans and taken to live with them and their five children in a little country cottage in Kent. Mr Goodman had gone to prison when the war started because he refused to fight. As a conscientious objector, he had to do farm work instead. He was very strict and I was terrified of him, but Mrs Goodman was kind and gentle. She took a lot of trouble to explain things to me when I got into trouble. The world at last began to make sense. I made friends with the Goodman children, especially the youngest two who were nearest my age. The second youngest, Jane, became my best friend. We even kept up a correspondence after the war when the whole Goodman family emigrated to Tasmania. At the Goodmans it was Karl who got into trouble all the time. He did not mix with the rest of us. He preferred to withdraw into a corner and read science books. He made chemical ‘bombs’ which he exploded in the garden and once he filled the house with black smoke. Karl was trying to work something out. He built a crystal set out of bits and pieces and listened in to German programmes at night when he couldn’t sleep. I think now that he

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was searching for his mother’s voice. The Goodmans thought that although he was only 11 he might be involved in a spy ring. We were both taken to a police station for interrogation. I couldn’t help Karl. The other children teased him and I am ashamed to admit that I joined in the teasing sometimes. Then the doodlebugs came. Doodlebugs were flying bombs without pilots and only enough fuel to reach London where they were intended to explode. Gary and I thought they were huge fun. They usually came at night. First a siren would sound. We would go and sit on the window sill. Red flares burst in the sky like fireworks. We could hear the drone of a doodlebug from far off. Then the anti-aircraft guns fired as it came over and if hit the doodlebug would burst into flames and nosedive to earth like a comet with a tail. Karl was petrified and became ill, which was why we had to leave the Goodman family. Karl was sent to a school that specialised in helping boys who had become disturbed by the war. Our third foster family, the Hopkins and their four children, lived on a farm close enough for Karl to cycle to his school. Mr and Mrs Hopkins were not willing to split up two siblings with no parents. They would only take Karl if I came too. It wasn’t till much later that I realised how remarkably thoughtful and sensitive of them this was. I was excited and delighted to be on a farm with lots of animals. I was allowed to have a rabbit of my own and later pigs and a pony of my own. I didn’t allow myself to miss the Goodmans or even think about them. It was yet another loss, another rejection. People whom I thought loved me had again sent me away. All the children had chores. The boys’ chores were outside on the farm – I longed to be a boy. My chores were in the house: dusting and cleaning, peeling mountains of potatoes, washing up, ironing. Although I loathed doing these chores, I pretended to like it and asked for more. You see, this time I was determined not be sent away again. I wanted to make myself so useful, indispensable even, that they really couldn’t send me away. I felt very happy on the farm. I joined in everything with the other children and I loved the animals. But it wasn’t easy. I found the teasing and jostling hard to bear sometimes and jokes and innuendo about sex frightened me. I got the general idea that sex was something ‘dirty’ that ‘good girls’ didn’t get involved with. But the boys and the farmer himself frequently caught me unawares and ‘touched me up’. I tried to avoid it and then convinced myself it never happened. However, it added to my feeling of being ‘bad’ and I feared I would never become ‘good’. I only allowed myself to cry with the animals. It felt safe to bury my face in a horse’s mane and cry because a horse

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will never criticise, tease or tick you off. A horse will bend his head round and nudge you comfortingly. I became very skilled with the animals and no one could nurse a sick animal back to health like I could. Then the crash came! In April 1949, when I was 14, a letter came from my mother: my father had returned from China and they were coming to take me back to Germany. My mother was not dead after all. I was filled with apprehension. I had killed her off in my mind and tried to forget her. It was ten years since I last saw her. With mixed feelings of shame and dread, I realised I didn’t even know what she looked like. My father had sent one or two photos of himself with some strange looking people in China so I had a very clear picture of him in my mind. But my mother? There was only an ominous hole, a nothingness. I was scared. Five times I had been shunted around, passed on, rejected: from Berlin to the Steadleys, to the Quaker boarding school, to the hostel, to the Goodmans and finally to the Hopkins. Each time I had picked up the pieces and painfully restored my shattered life and identity. I was in a precarious and vulnerable state. I didn’t want a dead mother coming alive to shatter it all yet again. And Germany? I certainly didn’t want to go there! Everyone had been saying for ten years what an evil place that was. And then she was there! Karl and I had gone to the station to meet her off a train. She tried to hug me and I shrank away. I didn’t recognise this big fat woman who didn’t speak English as my mother. She couldn’t be my MOTHER! Later I had to grapple with intense shame about my thoughts and feelings at that meeting, but at the time I just didn’t want to be with her. I wanted everything to be as it was before her letter came. My whole world had folded like a house of cards. The Hopkins said I could remain with them – they didn’t want me to be upset. I learnt later that the Red Cross had not been able to locate my mother after the war and the Hopkins had started proceedings to adopt me. But all that changed when my mother came. I refused to go near her and she went back to Germany alone. I didn’t realise at the time how awful that must have been for her, how terribly rejected she must have felt. I was overwhelmed with frightening, unmanageable feelings. I was filled with hate for a world that kept kicking my life to pieces like a sandcastle every time I built it up. My father served a court order on the Hopkins who then had to take me to Germany. Karl didn’t have to go. He was studying for a scholarship to Cambridge university. Then I had to face the separation trauma in reverse and this time without my big brother to look after me and make sense of a

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world that had suddenly gone mad. Again I lost everything overnight – home, language, foster parents, friends and everything familiar. Mainz was a terrifying place. The station where we arrived was a bombed out shell. Outside was a wilderness of rubble with wooden planks to walk over it. Here and there were jagged bits of masonry reaching 20 feet high or more that I was convinced concealed ‘Nasty Nazis’ in jackboots with guns behind them – just like in the Beano and Dandy comics. At 14 you don’t admit you are scared. I became aggressive instead. After Mrs Hopkins had gone back to England I rebelled. I refused to learn German. My father spoke excellent English but my mother spoke only German. I used that as an excuse to avoid speaking to her and deliberately misunderstood when she tried to talk to me. I refused to talk at all most of the time. Several times I ran off and didn’t come back till after dark. There was no family housing available in Mainz where my father had a job, so I lived with my mother on a farm near the Lake of Constance and he came there at weekends. My parents had huge rows every weekend and, of course, I thought it was my all fault. I knew I was behaving badly. My inner critic admonished me, ‘See what you’re doing! They have been through all sorts of dreadful things in the war and now you are making it worse!’ I was in an impossible turmoil. I was torn between wanting to be good and tempestuous feelings of rage – the rage of a cornered animal. Karl came to stay with us for his Christmas holiday. He told me that I was behaving badly. ‘Honour your parents,’ he quoted from the Bible. That did it! The one person I had relied upon ever since I lost my real mother ten years ago (the one I was living with was an alien from another planet!) was now betraying me like everyone else. He was ‘the good son’. He wasn’t exiled in this terrible alien place. He could go back to England and Cambridge. I was furious with him and of course I missed him miserably when he went back to England. I became depressed and ill. I refused to eat or even get out of bed most days. I came out in angry skin rashes and a nasty boil developed on one eyelid. My mother thought I had eaten a poisoned mushroom and got the doctor to come and wash my stomach out – a nasty procedure! When I had been running wild in the woods, I had brought back some mushrooms and made soup as I had often done on the Hopkins’ farm. She wouldn’t touch it, even when I had eaten two bowls of it. Looking back, I think she feared I was trying to poison her. But I never thought of killing her – I just wished she would disappear out of my life.

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This went on for about nine months and then my parents, who were actually thoughtful sensitive people, allowed me to return to England, back to the Hopkins and back to my school and the animals. But it was never the same as before. My parents and the Hopkins had terrible rows, largely because I didn’t reply to my parents’ letters. I had lost my trust in everyone. I tried simply to block that terrible nine months out of my mind. The compromise was that I had to go to Germany every school holiday with my brother. This stirred it all up again for me every time. My parents were allocated a very nice newly built council house in Mainz and they tried hard to arrange fun outings and friends for us. But each ‘holiday’ I became ill with swellings, rashes and digestion problems. During the final summer holiday after my higher school certificate, my parents asked me to stay a whole year and then go to university. By that time I had regained some confidence and actually wanted to get to know these strangers who were supposed to be my parents, so I agreed. However, my body did not agree. As soon as Karl went back to England I became ill. I fainted and became delirious. The doctor said it was scarlet fever and that it was mandatory to send me to hospital. It wasn’t scarlet fever and my temperature went down within 24 hours. I wanted to leave but my blood test result was abnormal so they had to keep me in hospital. My mother took away all my clothes, even my pyjamas, because I threatened to run away. Then I had a relapse, another 24-hour fever, and I realised I needed to stay in the hospital. I couldn’t eat the food and lost weight alarmingly. I was bored and depressed. The six weeks in that hospital seemed like six years. I pleaded to go back to England and eventually my parents agreed. My blood tests still showed infection and the consultant wrote a letter for me to take to the GP in England. Within two months my blood tests were normal. What I hadn’t known at the time was that my parents were having great difficulty picking up their relationship ten years on. But how could I know all this at 14? Not until after the 1989 reunion of the Kindertransport did I begin to look for the ‘pieces’ and begin to put together what I had worked so hard for years to keep myself from knowing about. Also in 1989 the Berlin Wall came down. That meant I could visit my cousin Hans who lives in what was East Berlin. Not being Jewish, Hans didn’t have to flee the country but his family had been bombed out twice. I learnt a lot from him and his mother Irma. She told me that my mother had been in hiding during the war and afterwards she had flatly refused to go back to Berlin. My father had had difficulty getting a passage back to Europe. He could have gone to America but his health was too broken to start learning a new legal system

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with more exams. He arrived in Hamburg in 1947 and then went to Berlin. My aunt told me he looked dreadful and that he had a breakdown. He had never talked about that to me. Although she was in her eighties, Irma remembered me as a baby before Karl and I came to England and she had a lot of stories to tell me about that time. I was ‘all ears’. By then I was 54, the mother of three children and an experienced teacher, and in a very different state of mind. A very supportive husband had helped me regain trust and confidence. I had been reasonably successful at raising three children. As deputy head of a comprehensive school I had chosen to work with the most disturbed and disturbing teenagers. Through working with and helping them, I had been healing myself. I no longer had a battle raging inside me that could only be expressed through illness. I was strong enough to hear and know the truth. My life was no longer a house of cards that could be blown over and shattered by unwelcome truths. From time to time uncomfortable and unwelcome thoughts kept coming into my mind: why did they send me away instead of letting me hide with Mutti or go to China with Pappi? Part of me knew they did it to save my life and that I should be grateful, but I wasn’t. Of course the chances of Karl and I surviving in Germany or China were slim. Cousin Hans remained with his parents and was nearly killed several times by bombs. But many children did survive in hiding. Most of these children had very bad experiences. I know their stories because I currently belong to a group of Holocaust survivors who go into schools to talk about their experiences because the national curriculum requires all 12- and 13-year-olds to have lessons about the Holocaust. The point is not really whether I would have been better off in Germany with my parents than in England without them. War disrupts normal life whether families stick together or split up for safety. Almost 10,000 children aged between a few months and 16 years came to England on the Kindertransport in the nine months between Kristallnacht, ‘the night of broken glass’ on 9 November 1938 when Jewish shops were smashed and synagogues torched all over Germany, and 1 September when World War II broke out. My brother and I were two of these children. Karen Gershon was another. Nearly two million Jewish children did not get this chance and were murdered in the Nazi concentration camps. Here are two simple facts: 10,000 children rescued; nearly two million perished. I wasn’t ready to bear knowing those facts for 50 years. We Kindertransport children were abruptly uprooted, separated from parents, home, language and everything familiar. We were forced to adjust

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as best we could to a totally strange and bewildering world with, for most children, neither time nor help in mourning our losses and making meaning out of the new situation. Some children were shunted on to America, Palestine and Australia. Many were put straight to work as housemaids or farm workers. We all suffered a protracted trauma that some were better able to deal with than others. Most had to face another trauma when they received the news about their murdered parents and/or other relatives. I was not aware of any of this. My parents were not murdered. I never went hungry. I can hear my inner critic even now as I type these words saying: ‘So there you are! You were very well off. You had opportunities that many children didn’t have. How could a bad girl, a Jew-girl, expect anything more?’ Of course it was many years and a hard long emotional journey before I realised that nothing ever does go back to how it was before. Life can only go forwards not backwards. So simple, yet we so often have irrational wishes, even strong desires, to turn back the clock. It took even longer for me to begin to understand and allow myself to know what had actually happened and what I had gone through emotionally. For a good 50 years after World War II ended in 1945 many people in both England and Germany – including me – avoided talking about and knowing the horrors of Hitler’s infamous Third Reich. There were hushed whispers: ‘We had no idea.’ ‘We weren’t there.’ ‘We couldn’t have done anything.’ People had to protect themselves. They needed all their energy and resources to rebuild their lives in the chaos left behind after the war ended. But the depression and the loss it masks have to be tackled sometime. My work with traumatised people has shown me that if the first generation cannot begin this task, something is transmitted to their children. The second generation then has another chance to tackle the work of knowing, mourning and working through. In the 1980s there was a series of fiftieth anniversaries: 50 years after Hitler came to power through to 1995, the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the war. The big one for me was in 1989 when Bertha Leverton organised a two-day conference for everyone who came to England as a child without parents in the 1930s. She called it The Fiftieth Reunion of Kindertransport. It was a shocking awakening for me. Until then, I had not even taken the word Kindertransport into my vocabulary. I had no idea that any other children apart from my brother and I had been sent to England for safety. But 10,000? That was incredible! But there they were, about 1000 of them in the Harrow leisure centre. The stories they were telling were amazing,

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some horrendous and all unbearably moving. That reunion was mainly a joyful event, a celebration of survival. We were no longer victims of Hitler’s evil racism but survivors of his ‘final solution’ for the Jews. People showed cherished photos of those who had not survived and we prayed for them. At the time of that reunion I had been a psychotherapist for nine years and a marriage counsellor for four years before that. Now suddenly my clients started telling me about what they or their parents had gone through during the war. Was this because the world outside my consulting room was beginning to talk about the war, or was it that my eyes and ears had been ‘closed’ for 50 years to anything that might overwhelm me? Had my clients previously sensed that certain things were not to be talked about – things I would not want to hear? Did they now sense a change in me and dare to talk about formerly ‘unthinkable’ things? My inner critic gave me a hard time: ‘Look at the opportunities for helping people you shut off ! What are you going to do to make up for this? You must work harder!’ This attack on me from inside released a flood of ideas and memories. Ever since we married in 1958, my husband had been telling me I was a workaholic. Why had I always been so driven to work hard? Every time something didn’t work out, I simply worked even harder. To become a ‘good girl’ and be accepted back? No, to keep out knowledge that I feared I couldn’t cope with. But I knew it did not mean that I was a bad therapist: it meant that I would become a better one, and I think I did. Colleagues heard of my work and referred people with Holocaust backgrounds to me. Evacuation, separation from parents, absence of fathers in the armed services, fathers killed in battle, fathers coming home unable to talk about the horrors they had been through, all these events effect children deeply and can lead to trauma. But to make it safe for my clients to open up their sealed off traumas, I had first to go there myself. A disturbing fact was that I had had nine years of personal therapy with two experienced senior analysts and yet the Holocaust had hardly been mentioned. I had escaped to England – end of story. Of course I had all the usual developmental problems and emotions to relive and work through. My analyses had helped a lot with my current issues, strengthened my precarious ego and laid the necessary foundation for me to work on myself and go further when I became ready. The latter, in my opinion, is the mark of a ‘good-enough therapy’. My inner critic had been suspicious of my therapists and had not allowed me to release the jigsaw pieces of my childhood trauma from the attic of my mind. Did my

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therapists fail to pick up clues? Were they no match for my inner critic and defences? Or was I simply ‘not yet ready’? Words became very important to me on my arrival in England at the age of four when I lost my first language. My intellect provided me with a way of surviving. I became intellectually precocious at the expense of emotional development. In my childhood I did not consider myself a sufferer, a victim or even a survivor. I simply suppressed, repressed and denied the feelings I couldn’t cope with. My inner critic was a powerful ally in this. She protected me from falling apart by constantly reminding me that all the difficulties I encountered were because I was ‘bad’. That gave me a sense of being in control because if I was bad there was some hope of becoming ‘good’, if only I worked hard enough at it. Sometimes my body expressed in illness what I could neither put into words nor totally deny. I had tremendous difficulty with feelings of murderous rage that appalled me. When they did not dissipate through energetic activity, my body came to the rescue with angry rashes, boils, headaches, fevers and chilblains. The immediate advantage of expressing anger and anguish this way was twofold: people could see my symptoms and I got attention and sympathy and my outer body took the stress and gave me respite from the inner battles. As a university student I won two cups for rowing; my body was not so bad after all, it could achieve as well as my mind. More important than the degree I left with was that I had found a serious boyfriend and we married a year later. The trauma I had survived had prompted me to develop a Jewish identity and so I think it was no accident that I found a Jewish boyfriend who would initiate me into Judaism. Having had no Jewish education himself because of the disruption of life in London during the war, we learned together so that I could convert to Judaism and we could have a Jewish wedding. Sadly, my parents were so upset at my conversion, which they tried to prevent, that they did not come to England for our wedding. They did accept my husband warmly once we were married and we were able to give them pleasure with three grandchildren to add to my brother’s three children in Germany. My brother’s story is very different from mine. He maintained his identity as a German in exile, met a German au pair girl when he was at Cambridge university and later settled permanently in Germany. He was not repatriated after the war against his will as I was. He chose to complete his studies in England and he chose to return to Germany. He did not go through the sudden loss of everything a second time in reverse as I did.

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Living in Germany meant that he could not afford to ‘know emotionally’ his experiences in the decade between 1939 and 1949. The prevailing myth in Germany was that we didn’t know anything about what happened to the Jews; we didn’t take part in any of it; you can’t blame us – it was all done by that little group of Nazi thugs. He had to keep his emotional eyes and ears tightly shut and his nose to the grindstone to make a living. He remains a Christian. His current story is that England rescued him as a child; he had a lot of good opportunities in England and so he escaped being affected to any extent worth bothering about. He thinks his career was affected by the chaos in Germany after the war but not much by his ten years in England. His motto is, ‘The past is past so why waste energy on it? Save your energy for now and the future.’ Mine is, ‘People who dwell in the past may be blind in one eye, but people who refuse to see the past are blind in both eyes.’

Endnote 1.

‘Angels Nesting in the Mind’ is taken from the poem My Books by Karen Gershon and used with kind permission of Val Tripp.

Reference

Gershon, K. (1966) We Came As Children. London: Gollanz.

Further reading

David, K. (1989) A Child’s War: World War II Through the Eyes of Children. New York: Avon. Hoffman, E. (1995) Lost in Translation. London: Minerva. Leverton, B. and Lowensohn, S. (eds) (1990) I Came Alone: The Stories of the Kindertransports. Lewes: Book Guild. Levi, T. (1995) A Cat Called Adolf. Ilford: Vallentine Mitchell. Robertson, J. and Robertson J. (1952) Young Children in Brief Separation and A Two Year Old Goes to Hospital. Film and guide book. London: Tavistock. Vegh, C. (1979) ‘I Didn’t Say Goodbye.’ France: Gillmard. English translation by Ros Schwartz (1984). London: Caliban.

4

Stars in a Midnight Sky Indu Khurana

Delhi, India, 1968: I’m five years old. I’m scared and I’ve got to get away. I run across the dusty dirty parkland. As I scramble through the barbed wire fence around the park, my dress catches and rips. I run home and tell mum about the man undressing me and how scared I am. She tells me, ‘Don’t be silly, nothing will happen, there is no one outside.’ I am scared but stay quiet. My grandmother cleans the blood on my back from where the barbed wire caught me.

You may be wondering why I chose to write this chapter. For various reasons, I guess. One reason is that I really enjoy writing and really wanted to see something of mine in print. So this might be a way of achieving one of my dreams. Another reason is that over the last few years I have learnt a lot about the links between mind and body and recognise much of that in relation to my own mind and body, so when this opportunity arose for me to share some of my learning, I grabbed it. So here I am sitting in front of the keyboard writing a chapter on how I perceive a mind–body link between my illness, systemic lupus erythematosus (Lupus) and the trauma I experienced in early life. Lupus is a disorder of the immune system known as an autoimmune disease. In autoimmune diseases, the body harms its own healthy cells and tissues. This leads to inflammation and damage to various body tissues. Lupus can affect many parts of the body, including the joints, skin, kidneys, heart, lungs, blood vessels and brain. Although people with the disease may have many different symptoms, some of the most common ones include extreme fatigue, painful or swollen joints (arthritis), unexplained fever, skin rashes and kidney problems. I am a young Asian woman, in my late thirties, who has strong opinions about certain subjects. I am a feminist in terms of wanting harmony and equality rather than one-upmanship in the world. I am a 65

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woman who has only just learnt to call herself a woman and to feel OK with that word. I am a person who is determined to protect children, teach adults to be kinder, to have a good comfortable life, and always to keep learning and growing. I have had two careers up to now (information technology and counselling) and I am currently making a start on my third (a personal development business). I have dreams and I am chasing them. I am not a quitter. All in all, quite a few Western attitudes for an Eastern woman! This is surprising even for me because I spent my first and most formative years in New Delhi. I came to live in England at the age of seven, unable to speak a word of English. My father had moved to England five years earlier ‘for a better life’ and my mother followed in 1970 with my younger brother and me. My first and only memory of that early time in England is of learning to communicate, initially through unofficial sign language and pictures, and by getting help from the only other Asian boy in my class at school. I suspect that I felt pretty lonely and isolated, especially as I had left the two people dearest to me (my aunt and grandmother) with whom I lived in India. So my formative influences were very Asian, but I feel hugely grateful to life events that led me to England. Had I not left India I might never have developed a mind of my own, opinions and philosophical thoughts. I might have been just another subservient wife trained to be passive and to stay in the background. Instead I was given this opportunity to be the fuller version of myself. I always have a strong sense of destiny when I think about coming to England. My gratitude is probably in total opposition to how my father feels because he is hugely disappointed about the way I’ve embraced Western culture. Asian females are not allowed to speak their minds so I had grown up finding other indirect ways of saying what I wanted to. My father did not listen to me as I was growing up, being a child and a female. More recently I have begun to say what I want more directly because now I have learnt how to and I have overcome the fear of doing so that was instilled into me as a child. However, at certain philosophical moments I believe that everything that has happened in my life so far has an important part to play in my destiny or plan. The combination of Eastern-Western cultures made life more difficult for me as I was growing up. I had to make choices that most Asian women did not even think about. I have recently met others who have also chosen different lifestyles from their Asian culture. I therefore discovered that I was one of a small band of pioneers in our community that broke some of the

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major rules: about having a career; about moving away from home and having an independent life; about having an English boyfriend; about not getting married by the age of 25; and about living with my boyfriend. For several years I rejected my original culture and some of the main reasons for doing so were entwined with my childhood trauma. In trying to distance myself from the trauma, I distanced myself from my family and culture. I rejected my abusers; my parents and an aunt who all rejected me in their own ways. I also rejected a culture that treats women as third-class citizens. Now I have emerged from a tunnel of bitterness and feel ready to embrace parts of my original culture that make sense to me, in tandem with my beliefs about equality. I am glad that I do not just accept things because that’s what I’ve been taught to do or because that is what is expected of me. Instead, I think things through for myself and embrace them if they suit me. That does not mean that I hold society in disdain. It means that I weigh things up and examine them against the solid and ‘good’ morals ingrained in me. If these fit with the way I want to live my life, then I take them on board. So, for example, I see Bollywood films as hypocritical and very poorly made technically. They glorify romantic love, feeding young girls’ fantasies that such love is readily available and should be fought for. Yet in reality Asian culture dictates that love is not OK and love marriages are generally frowned upon except in the most forward-thinking families. But that does not stop me from enjoying the British acceptance and newfound pleasure in these films. For me, this indicates another step forward in the journey of integration, acceptance and hence harmony – everything I want from my life and work. I believe that my culture also played a part in my inability to express emotions. My experience of the majority of Indian culture and my particular family encouraged the withholding of emotions. This is particularly true for men. I am the eldest child in my family and, for various reasons, I grew up thinking like a male and taking on the responsibilities of a male. Perhaps one of the main reasons for this was that I felt (and still feel) that men get a better deal out of life. Of course now I can see why – because the roots of society are patriarchal and so it is inevitable that men will get the better deal since they crafted society into its current mould. Asian society is even more patriarchal than Western society. Females are brought up not knowing about anything and with a very narrow view of life. I recognised this early on in my life when I told my mother about my first traumatic experience and expressed my fears. She brushed them away quite brusquely. I never spoke to her of this event again until I was in therapy

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when I was about 30 years old. At this point my mother could not remember the incident. It seems now that she was unable to cope with hearing about sexual violation and therefore ignored it, whilst also ignoring my fears. I think she then blocked it so completely that she couldn’t remember anything about it. I guess she was doing the best she could with the resources she had at the time. So by now you may be wondering what Lupus is. Lupus is a progressive and potentially serious autoimmune disease that can affect nearly every organ in the body. It is more common amongst women, difficult to diagnose because it mimics other illnesses, and can be fatal – but is more often disabling these days. On a biological level Lupus occurs when the immune system starts attacking the body. It gets confused and thinks the body is the enemy. This makes sense to me when I consider how much of my life I’ve spent hating myself and effectively attacking myself. Sounds like my body finally got the message too! My current theories about why I contracted Lupus are multi-layered. I believe that Lupus is my body’s way of calling attention to my whole being. I also believe it is a manifestation of various childhood traumas. Initially it served the purpose of gaining other people’s attention (I am a great non-teller), but most of all Lupus ensured that I paid attention to myself. I think Lupus has taught me a lot about myself, about spirituality and about looking after myself (and therefore others) with deep-down, caring warmth. It may even have played a part in helping me to heal my emotional traumas. Over the last few years since I was diagnosed with Lupus I have had to focus on my health. The symptoms began quite a while before I was actually diagnosed. The very first sign that something was wrong was on my thirty-first birthday when I was out for the evening with friends. In the middle of the evening, I became aware of a strange tingling in my hands, like pins and needles in my fingers, that wouldn’t go away. My GP referred me to a specialist who eventually diagnosed Raynaud’s disease. When I first heard the word disease I was very frightened. The reading material I came across told tales of doom and gloom which did not help. But as I read more about it I realised that Raynaud’s was more a syndrome (a collection of symptoms) than a disease and very manageable most of the time. As I investigated further I realised that my symptoms were not typical of Raynaud’s and I began to doubt that I had been correctly diagnosed. To this day I don’t know if my doubts were because I have an inherent anathema to

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labels and their pigeon-holing effect or whether I was simply in denial. These days my fingers only seem to tingle when I’m excessively tired – acting like a warning bell. Anyway, the tingling in the fingers was the only symptom I had for a few years. I underwent a number of tests and over time the doctors noticed that I was losing my normal level of strength in my hands and arms. I then began to notice that the ball joints of my feet were becoming more painful to walk on, but this was gradual and over a few years. Eventually I reached a point of complete exhaustion. By this time I was working during the day and studying for a counselling diploma at the weekends because I wanted to change my career, plus working part-time at Childline in order to gain counselling experience. For over ten years I had put up with a career that I had not enjoyed and now I’d finally found something which I felt was calling me so I’d made the move. One day I realised that I was feeling ragged and wretched, as I’d never felt before. I had no strength, not even enough nervous energy to keep pushing myself through. I also started to feel an irritation in my left eye. I ignored both of these signs thinking as always that they would soon pass, but towards the end of that day, each time I passed close to a normal wattage light I felt a sharp pain in my left eye as though I had a shard of glass in it. The next day it was still there and I had sharp shooting pains in the left side of my head. I went through most of that day putting up with it until my manager sent me home from work. I was still trying to carry on and had to be sent home like a naughty child. My manager advised that I should be checked out at the eye hospital. I was reluctant but felt wretched and, I must admit, a bit worried, so I decided to go to the hospital. I was due to meet my sister that evening so I called her and she agreed to come with me to the hospital – both of us thinking we could continue with our social evening afterwards. This is how I used to think in those days. At eight o’clock we were still at the hospital so I called my partner and he arrived just as I was seen. The doctor couldn’t work out what was wrong but gave me some tablets and told me to go and see my consultant at the hospital the next day. When I told the consultant my symptoms he visibly panicked, went to consult his colleague and returned with a prescription for steroids: 12 tablets or 60 mg, every day. I was horrified as I had problems swallowing any medicine, especially tablets. Little did I know what effects these tablets would have on me. Up to that point, I had taken my health very much for granted. In fact I had very little awareness of my body or my health. I did not really think of my body other than as something ugly to be hidden away

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and now it was being forced into my awareness. This led me to read and learn about the mind–body link, a concept which until then I had not heard of. The high dose of steroids had amazingly long-lasting effects. The main effect was that I became noticeably round in appearance. My body became fat, but not in the usual sense. My skin felt inflated with water and was quite shiny in appearance and plastic to the touch. This was unbearable. I already hated my body and now it repulsed me. Again, as before I wanted to leave my body or ‘trade it in for a better model’ but I knew that this was out of my control. The issue of control became just one of many learning points. Since then I have made conscious efforts to recognise that some things are beyond my control and that becoming stressed about what I could not change did not help me. It was at this stage, having been prescribed steroids, that I was diagnosed with Lupus. An MRI scan to check my vital organs showed a few lesions on the surface of my brain, making sense of the sharp shooting pains I had been experiencing in my head. I was very frightened and wondered if I might end up with a brain haemorrhage. As a result of the steroid bloating I decided that I would not pump any more chemicals into my body but I would find other ways of helping myself to ‘cure’ my Lupus. The medical profession were very unhelpful. They did not appreciate the mental anguish I was experiencing. They certainly seemed disinclined to allow me to stop taking the steroids and because of the huge dosage I had to reduce them slowly. So it actually took over a year to come off them completely and would have taken longer had I not pushed the doctors to speed up the rate of reduction. Of course at that time it didn’t occur to me to be alarmed by the fact that the doctors themselves were admitting it was a huge dose, or to question it. I then noticed other side effects that took even longer to disappear. For example, the texture of my hair was coarser, so it became more wavy. I knew that my body changes might be due to normal ageing. I am always open to other possibilities and that there might be a combination of reasons for changes. Looking back from where I am today I can see that my attitudes changed at that time and I became more protective and positive towards my body. At the time I made my decision to stay away from chemicals and become more open to seeking other ways of healing, I was introduced to the world of complementary medicine and alternative therapies through offering to help a reflexology student by becoming her case study. I hoped that

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reflexology would help ease the pain in the ball joints of my feet. When the trainee reflexologist reached the end of her studies she referred me to the Immune Deficiency Trust (IDT) which at that time provided various alternative therapies for sufferers of Lupus, multiple sclerosis, cancer and HIV (all autoimmune diseases). After a further course of reflexology provided by the trust (details at end of chapter), I used a variety of therapies they offered such as shiatsu, spiritual healing and massage. When I discovered that my reflexologist also offered full body massage I decided that I trusted this woman enough to try that too. I was feeling weary and exhausted a lot of the time so the thought of a massage was very appealing, even though I was not hugely comfortable with being touched. My discomfort about being touched was something I’d been mulling over for some time because I was involved in a relationship and wanted to sort it out. I was feeling much more comfortable with touch than ever before and could even enjoy touch if I really trusted someone, but that was still not happening very often. The massage was glorious and became another step towards my becoming more comfortable with my body. After the massage I tried spiritual healing – something I knew little about. A friend recommended it very highly. The changes and realisations that she experienced through spiritual healing sounded pretty amazing, and I am always on the lookout for amazing things. I was not touched very much during this therapy and the healer suggested that I needed to do some further work in relation to my body. I too had a growing sense that I needed to increase my knowledge and awareness of my body. At this time I was much more focused on healing myself so I couldn’t understand why I wasn’t getting better. I really wanted to be healthier. I was paying more attention to my body and trying to implement other changes in my lifestyle such as eating a healthier diet. So why did the Lupus not leave my body? I grew miserable because even though I was trying really hard the illness did not seem to want to leave. I wondered what had I done to deserve this. The healer told me about a book called The Journey written by an American woman, Brandon Bays (1999), who had cured herself of cancer in six-and-a-half weeks without any medical treatment. I was intrigued and amazed. I read the book and wanted desperately to learn more about how she managed this. I really wanted to get rid of the illness that was interfering with my life. Once again I had a very strong sense of destiny. It seemed as if the ‘right’ thing (the resource I needed) had found me at the appropriate

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time. I have experienced many such moments since my awareness of my body has increased. After reading The Journey I booked myself into Brandon’s weekend workshop. I was able to pay what I could afford rather than the full price, which felt like a signal that I was headed in the right direction (whilst still not knowing the final destination). During the workshop Brandon taught us the techniques she had developed and used during her own lifethreatening illness and we tried them out over the weekend. The exercises were based on visualisation techniques, being in touch with our intuition, and forgiveness. During the first exercise I visualised my internal body as a charred black mass, an empty and desolate place. This was quite shocking as I’d never imagined my body like this before. After I’d completed other techniques, confronting my innermost hurts and the pain I held in my body, and gone through a process of forgiveness of the people I held responsible for those hurts, I began to visualise my body as pink, living, vibrant flesh. This also seemed amazing because I had never imagined my body like this either. In fact I’d never thought about my body or my illness in any way other than as an appendage, a tiresome physical part of me that I wanted to trade in if I could. That weekend I learnt about the power of visualisation and recently I have come across further citations of how people have achieved huge transformations through visualisation. That weekend I also began to understand how we hold memories in our body cells, although I wasn’t fully able to grasp the whole concept straight away. Eventually, and quite some time after this workshop, I began to notice that my moods and emotions did indeed affect my body. A seed had been sown in my mind by reading The Journey and by attending the workshop. I felt as if I saw a sign and followed my intuition. My body began to feel less separate and I began to notice patterns that helped me to recognise the connections between my mind and body at a very basic level. Previously, I had thought that I could switch off the Lupus simply by mind control. Now I realised that the illness may not leave my body in a diagnosable way, but if I really understood the mind–body link I had to accept that I needed to change my lifestyle, my outlook and my attitudes to life even more than I had managed up until then. It was only when I read Ageless Body Timeless Mind by Deepak Chopra (1993) that I was able to understand fully how our body cells hold on to memories. He teaches that although our cells are renewed periodically, the memories held in them will be transferred to the new cells as information to be passed on. It is only when we put the memory in its rightful place, let go

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of the bitterness attached to it or forgive that the cells cease to pass it on to the next generation of cells. Cells are ultimately the same structure throughout the body. They may have a different function and so their foreground information may be different, but the background information will be the same in every cell. Deepak Chopra explains that at the really basic level our cells are just energy packets arranged in particular ways. He sees everything on the planet as packets of energy that are linked, thus forming different shapes, textures and sizes. So if we feed certain thoughts (energy) into a certain part of the packets, all other energy packets will ultimately pick up that information. He sees energy as free flowing, not contained; it exists everywhere and nowhere. This sounds very New Age and spiritual, even to my own ears, but I can feel the ageless truth of it. I believe this knowledge to be part of the intuition that I was out of touch with for a very long time. In what seems like quite a short space of time, I have come very gradually from having no awareness to a place of having quite a deep level of awareness. At first the concept of the mind–body link appalled me because it meant that somehow I was making myself ill. For quite a long time I rejected this way of thinking. But as time has passed and as I increase my understanding of what the mind–body link actually means, I begin to realise that it makes sense to me. I now realise that it is not about blame (self-blame) but more about the fact that our minds and bodies are interconnected. If one part of me is hurt, the other will also respond or react to the hurt – just as a bruise spreads outwards from the point of impact. This is because both my mind and my body are parts that make up the whole of me. Of course I hadn’t been able to understand this whilst I saw my body as separate. I am still implementing changes in my lifestyle. I am looking after myself better. I have been a vegetarian for a year and feel better for it; I feel lighter in my body for not eating meat. I intend to cut down on my fat intake by minimising my dairy intake. I am considering giving up wheat products. I take a rest every day. I take a lunch break every day. My frame of mind has shifted from being constantly negative and pessimistic to being mainly positive and motivated. My doctors don’t give my experiments and findings much credibility, but the result is that I feel healthier generally. I am more awake in myself and have more energy, which lasts longer. I feel alive and well and very sure that I have many things to achieve and that I will achieve them. On top of all this, I now feel able to trust my own body and instincts and to implement the messages they send me.

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Now I do not feel angry and bitter with the medical world for not knowing. I do not need external validation anymore. I feel in control of my health and believe that I know best about my body and my case of Lupus. I do feel frustrated that the medical profession, generally speaking, will not acknowledge that they are sometimes stumbling about in the dark. I’ve struggled long and hard with my response to stress. I used to worry about every little thing. I wanted to control events and people very tightly. So I would fret when things didn’t go my way. I had a constant frown on my face and my expression was always miserable. Even my tone of voice was depressed and monotonous. My body slouched and I was too thin. Initially, I was completely unaware of these things, but as my awareness has grown, so too has my perception and knowledge about how I portrayed myself to the rest of the world. I now feel convinced that my reactions to stress have contributed hugely to my illness. I have come to realise that in the past, because I hated the world and put all my hate out into it, so the world reciprocated and fed hate back into me. It showed through my every pore, every stance and every facial expression. Why did I hate the world? I felt hugely wronged by the world, by my father, by men generally. Because of one traumatic incident that stands out in my childhood memory, I hid myself away. I didn’t exist as a person because I’d actually locked myself away somewhere – perhaps for safety’s sake – so that I couldn’t be harmed again. As a result, I completely lost touch with myself, with my world and with my life. Of course, locking myself away didn’t stop further harm coming to me – but I wasn’t to know that. So as one act of sexual violation in India before I turned seven locked me away, so another act of violation in my mid-twenties in India woke me up. The first incident feels very far away and quite vague. I don’t remember much about it except having my body exposed in a public place and managing to run away from the stranger. The second incident is clearer in my memory and still fills me with revulsion. It has had a long-term effect on my relationships and I still struggle with that. However I have learnt to forgive and to see it in the context of the perpetrator doing the best in life according to the resources available. I also have to allow for the fact that by locking myself away for all those years I was naive like a child, saw only innocence in the world and didn’t interpret danger signals. Externally, I had continued to grow and I looked like a fully grown woman, but I was unable to save myself from the second traumatic sexual violation.

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I have focused on these traumas at this point in the chapter because I feel strongly about the natural order of things. This is the point where it came out onto the paper and so it should really stay here. Although those two traumatic incidents have been an integral part of the learning I was meant to experience, they occurred some time ago and have held prominence in my awareness and in my pain, but now I don’t see them with the same prominence. I believe they have joined the ranks of the many stars in the midnight sky. They served a purpose or function as part of the whole, but of themselves are now of little consequence. Does that make sense? I’m not sure and I know I’m struggling to put it into words on paper because this is dawning on me for the first time as I am writing. Anyway, to continue … To go back to the beginning of my journey of intense pain that began when I was in my mid-twenties, I believe I was still trapped inside myself at the age at which I experienced the first trauma. So all the pain, all the questions of ‘why me?’ came from that child who then began to grow up – very painfully – during my late twenties. Once I began that journey of waking up to the world, I came face to face with something called feelings. I hadn’t experienced them before and becoming familiar with different kinds of feelings was a revelation and a time-consuming and lengthy process. It hurt like hell. Of course I realise that these traumatic incidents in my childhood may not be linked to my illness – many experiences feed into such things – but I firmly believe they played a large part in creating my illness. Maybe once I began to connect with the child part of myself that was trapped inside, the release of certain emotions and the forgiveness that took place activated something in my body that manifested in Lupus. It might also be that the Lupus has been around for most of my life and I just didn’t notice it until it hit me in the face in tune with my coming into awareness. I suspect this last theory to be true. For many years I denied – no, I can’t honestly say denied because there was just a complete not knowing – feelings of bitterness and hatred. The last ten years have been an incredible voyage of discovery, much of it painful. In very recent times my life has become more positive. I find it difficult to say joyous because it’s still a word I’m not fully comfortable with, but along with positive feeling have come openness, clarity, a liveliness and wisdom. It has taken me years of counselling, trying alternative therapies, becoming seriously ill and reading according to my instincts. All this has brought me to this place of knowing that I find myself in today. Now I have

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an identity where before I was nothing. I truly felt that ‘I’ didn’t exist; this has been a journey of finding ‘me’. All of this may be why I’ve started my own business to empower women of minority ethnicity, as well as others, so that I can help them claim their identity where before I was nothing. I truly felt that ‘I’ didn’t exist; this has been a journey of finding ‘me’. All of this may be why I’ve started my own business to empower women of minority ethnicity, as well as others, so that I can help them claim their identity. I call my business ‘Sunai’ which means ‘to listen’ in Punjabi and Hindi, only now realising that I myself never felt heard. My work is about inclusion and acceptance and I am realising as I write it that only recently have I started to know acceptance for myself. This too is part of my destiny.

References

Brandon, B. (1999) The Journey. London: Thorsons. Chopra, D. (1993) Ageless Body Timeless Mind. London: Rider.

Organisations Immune Deficiency Trust (IDT) PO Box 32879 London N1 3QX 020 7704 1777

5

Journey of a Lifetime Ginny Mayhew

In times of personal crisis we have two fundamental alternatives. We can passively accept whatever happens to us as our fate or we can actively take on the circumstances as a challenge trying to make what we can of the situation. By consciously choosing to pursue the solitary journeys these crises encourage, we transform an impersonal fate into our own personal destiny. Author unknown

A letter to my brother 1 November 2002 Dear Alan I lay in bed this morning having a really good stretch. You know what I mean! It’s such a simple thing and so enjoyable. There was a time when I couldn’t do that! And I thought of you, Meg and Freda all in hospitals at the moment and Pat only just out. I’m sorry you’ve had to return to the psychiatric hospital again. I want so much to offer you something. Perhaps if I tell you what I have done to regain my health it might help. You’ll remember how all seven of us suffered as children with stomach pains, indigestion, headaches, hay fever, aching joints and muscles and back pain. My own memories are of being continually ill with sickness and diarrhoea and buckets being placed round the house. I know I missed a lot of schooling because Miss Enid gave me a threepenny bit when I managed a whole week at primary school. The back pain came 77

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later when I was at grammar school. I seemed to spend so much time in bed. Well, by the time I was 40 I couldn’t stretch, turn over or get out of bed without pain. When I did get up I encased myself in a steel corset. I just lived with pain. It seemed normal to me and really it was a case of deciding on the severity as to what I would be able to do each day after taking my painkillers. As the years passed the pains got worse and I developed more symptoms: sick headaches, hay fever, asthma, skin rashes. On top of all that I had periods of depression and extreme fatigue. I wonder now how I managed to cope in my work, marry and have three children. Why have we all suffered so many diseases as we have grown older? Having now had three children myself I wonder how Mamma coped having seven children in 13 years. Dad’s building work came to a stop with the outbreak of war so I guess money was short. There was of course no NHS. Remember Steedman’s powders, gripe water and Milk of Magnesia? Mother’s favourite remedies now banned. Only as a last resort was Dr Towey called. I remember Mamma telling me that he warned her she wouldn’t rear me because I couldn’t keep food down. We have all suffered further similar problems over the years and you have suffered worst of all. I think everyone would agree that our childhood was traumatic. Dad’s drunken episodes frightened us all and he seemed to pick on you in particular. It was almost as if he resented you being such a gentle, sensitive boy. I remember him thrashing you and throwing you across the room when you were about eight or nine just because you wouldn’t eat your dinner. We girls always gave in but you tried to stand up to him. Remember that time when he chased you up to our bedroom and I bolted the door? He heaved against it. You were terrified and jumped out of the window onto the sand heap and ran away. As the door gave way and he stormed into the room I thought he would go for Freda and me but he just shouted. I think his shouting was almost worse than being hit. Of course there was another side to him. I’m thinking of the meetings he held in our house during the war when he was an air raid warden. He was sober then. I used to wish he was like that all the time. You won’t remember him then because you were just a baby when the war broke out, weren’t you. I was 11 by the time the war ended so I have

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clearer memories of him during that time than you. He was obviously respected by the other wardens, a strong leader, and you could see why later he was elected as chairman of the parish council. I used to feel sorry for Mamma when he beat her but when she began to join him in drinking it was difficult to sympathise. She left home so many times but always returned when she reckoned he had sobered up and there would be a reconciliation. She had little choice in those days. She had no money of her own, just housekeeping which often ran out. I know I was sometimes sent to Billy’s bakehouse for bread ‘on tick’ to be paid for later. She probably made some money from her animal husbandry despite the restrictions of wartime when most of the eggs and half the pigs she raised had to be sold to the government. Of course there was also the black market when Freda and I would be despatched in the dark with shrouded torch to deliver a cockerel to a neighbour, no questions asked. I don’t know about you but I never knew how mother was going to be. She was so unpredictable, so difficult to please. If ever we were in trouble she seemed to think we had done it deliberately to upset her. And let’s face it, she often antagonised Dad deliberately. We were always trying to make peace. But sooner or later we would be wakened as a row reached higher volumes and Dad began to throw his weight about. Do you remember that time when you and Freda and I sat on the top of the stairs whilst the older girls tried to calm things down between Mamma and Dad? We couldn’t bear the suspense so I went down and opened the door to see what was happening. Dad had pushed Milly and Pat into the larder and as I watched Milly’s hand came round the door with the rolling pin and hit him on the head. Not hard enough though as he snatched the rolling pin and swiped it across the sideboard, smashing his favourite clock. That’s a picture that has haunted me for years. Mamma was lying on the floor prostrate with staring eyes and Meg was shaking her. I thought she was dead and rushed back upstairs to tell you two. I always felt that somehow it was my fault that things were as they were. I used to pray and pray to God to make things all right. I tried so hard to be good. At that time, like you, I was taught at Sunday School that God was a punishing God who could see everything, even my bad thoughts about wanting Dad dead. ‘Honour thy father and thy mother’

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was the commandment, but it didn’t stop me having such thoughts so I reasoned I must be bad. You know at one time just thinking about those times would be enough to make me feel ill. Now I can look back without feeling haunted by them. I just wish it could be the same for you. I loved being at school and in particular I liked sport because I could stay on after school and avoid going home as long as possible. But I could never be really good at sport because of the pain in my back. Somehow I felt the pain was my fault. I felt guilty about having it and tried to hide it. Rachel, the family hypochodriac, got such a lot of stick and I didn’t want to be treated the same way. Poor Rachel. If only I had known what I know now she might have been helped and not died of cancer at the age of 32 leaving two little girls. I didn’t want to leave school and by now we were better off as there was a boom in house building after the war. Poor Milly had been taken away from grammar school and put to work when money had been short. She had so wanted to be a teacher. She persuaded Dad to let me go, which took some doing as he always said it was no use educating women. By keeping us all financially dependent on him he believed we would be under his control. So I went to teacher training college in 1952. I thought once I got away I would be all right. But no: the stomach, back and joint pain then became part of my life. Some days I could hardly walk and took more and more paracetamol. I began to get hay fever and a sun rash. Every inch of my skin that was exposed to the sun would be covered in an itching, painful rash. Antihistamines helped. Our doctor said it was probably due to stress worrying about my exams. I was certainly stressed. I had no confidence, little self-esteem and felt anxious all the time. I couldn’t stop the voices in my head telling me how bad I was. I thought my troubles would be over when I married Keith. He was so gentle and kind. But I never felt safe with him. With Dad as a role model I expected men to be strong and Keith wasn’t. When we were confronted by a drunk I was the one who handled the situation. Our marriage was doomed from that point. I began an affair with David. He was a strong, worldly and yet gentle man. He seemed the perfect combination. He wanted me to follow him to Australia. I couldn’t. It didn’t feel right. I ended the affair. Mother came hotfoot to London to

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tell me yet again what a bad girl I was, crying as usual, ‘What have I done to deserve this?’ She always managed to make me feel responsible for her unhappiness. When she left I felt really bad. Now I’ve never told you this. I went back to where I was staying and decided to end it all. I thought whisky and a bottle of paracetamol would do the trick. But as I began to slip into unconsciousness a little voice deep inside told me I was wrong. I didn’t know it then, but that little voice was a part of me that loved me so much it wanted me to live. And I could only hear it when the other voices in my head were obliterated by the alcohol and pills. I managed to get up and crawl downstairs. It was quite an effort. I was found on the pavement by a neighbour and taken to hospital. Keith and I tried a reconciliation. We would emigrate, start all over again. It didn’t work. Keith returned to Rhodesia. I was pregnant. I fell in love with my baby son Ralph the moment I held him in my arms. Here was someone I could love and who would love me. But I was afraid of the intensity of my feelings. I didn’t trust myself. I’d always managed to mess things up before. Did I really think I wouldn’t mess his life up too? I knew he needed a father. I wanted a proper family. In 1965, when Ralph was four, I met and married Mark. Mark was tall with a strong deep voice and a temper. Shades of Dad? He liked alcohol but didn’t drink to excess and though he could get angry he was never violent. He believed women were strong and capable as his mother had been and I wanted to be like that for him. Having failed in one marriage I vowed to make this one a success. I thought all I had to do was make Mark happy and then I would be happy too. Of course it wasn’t possible to make him happy all the time. Whenever Mark was unhappy I blamed myself. I must try harder. But still I failed. I felt I was letting Mark down by failing to be strong. Mark’s new job meant we had to move to Yorkshire. Again I consulted the local hospital. Again I was given another drug. And now something occurred which at the time was inexplicable. Mark began to suffer back pain. It eventually became so bad he couldn’t get out of bed. The doctor came promptly and ordered hospital tests. Within a relatively short time Mark was in hospital for an operation to remove a bulge on a spinal disc. I was devastated. Here was Mark being given fast diagnosis and treatment by the very same consultant who had dismissed me with more painkillers. At this point I turned to alcohol. Each night whilst Mark

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was in hospital and the children were in bed I consumed enough to blot out my feelings. On the day of Mark’s operation I locked myself in our bedroom with a tin of purple paint. I turned up the tape playing The Planets by Holst as loud as possible to drown any noise. I screamed and howled as I slapped paint all over the wall for what seemed like hours. I couldn’t bear to visit Mark in hospital and sent Ralph instead. When I did force myself to go I couldn’t touch Mark. The nurse at the hospital told him I was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Now as a counsellor I look back on that and think that by painting that wall I was trying to get rid of unbearable feelings. Later I read in Matthew Manning’s book how he had observed certain patterns with different illnesses: ‘A common one [pattern] is a link with anger, often suppressed, and multiple allergies’ (1989, p.18). Well, I didn’t know it at the time but I reckon now I was very angry. As you know I’m a perfectionist and so I smiled when Mark remarked on the mess I had made painting the wall. That wall and I shared a secret. I was saved from a nervous breakdown by Margaret Rukin, a newly qualified acupuncturist. She did more than stick needles in me. She held my hand and listened to me for hours beyond my allotted time. She told me later she feared for my safety. Mark came out of hospital and slowly recovered and I jumped back into my old shoes. I had no choice. Over the years I visited many doctors and hospitals. I did of course have recognisable diseases such as asthma, arthritis, iritis and labrynthitis but no connection was ever made between these and my other symptoms. I saw a consultant in Harley Street. I had my back, head, chest and stomach X-rayed. I ate barium meals. I had spinal injections. One doctor suggested I had a slipped disc and prescribed manipulations under anaesthetic. Another doctor told me to rest, another to exercise, another to sleep with a board in my bed. No recognisable organic cause could be found. I was prescribed anti-inflammatory drugs, muscle relaxants, painkillers of increasing strength and many other drugs. Finally I was fitted with a steel corset. In the end the doctors just didn’t believe I could be suffering from so many things. They thought I was a hypochondriac. One of them suggested it was all in my mind. By the time I was 50 I had reached a point where it all seemed downhill from now on. I was exhausted. I wanted to sleep all the time. I would get the family off in the morning

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and go back to bed. Just before they were due home I would get up and busy myself. I felt so guilty. By this time I had had my other two children, Evelyn and Grant. Grant, aged 14, was causing us concern. He had suffered from migraine headaches, rhinitis and allergic asthma since a baby. I took him to an allergy clinic in a nearby town. A sample of his hair was sent to be dowsed; a bit odd I thought, but worth a try. He was diagnosed as allergic to milk. Felicity who ran the clinic prescribed a diet in which foods were rotated so that no food was repeated for four days. He was to exclude all milk and milk products. To help Grant cope with this change I agreed to join him on the diet. We would do it together. Within 48 hours I had a migraine headache to end all headaches. I was banging my head on the floor because it was less painful. When I phoned the clinic Felicity told me that it seemed that I too was allergic to milk. She said if I stayed on the diet, and made sure I did not eat anything containing milk the headache would clear after five days. Sure enough on the fifth day I woke to find the headache gone. I had been suffering withdrawal – just like a drug addict coming off drugs. It would be nice to say that that was the end of my story, but after the initial feeling of well-being I realised my symptoms were still present and actually becoming worse. Yes worse. More and more foods caused reactions. Sometimes my eyes would swell up until they were virtually closed. Sometimes I would get another sick headache. Sometimes I would be crippled with pain in my back and joints. My knees would swell, my wrists hurt and all the time I had the stomach problems. But I was convinced I was on the right track. If leaving milk out of my diet could have such a dramatic effect I wondered about other foods. I went to the library to look for books on allergies. Not much there so I ventured into the local health food shop. I felt very self-conscious. This was a shop where vegetarians went and other odd people, I thought. I wasn’t sure how to behave. Here I found Not All In The Mind by Dr Richard MacKarness (1976). He described all the symptoms I was suffering not as hypochondria but as allergy. Here was official recognition by a doctor that my symptoms were real, that it was not all in my mind. He confirmed the symptoms were caused by the food I was eating. Wow! This was really something. As a teacher of home economics I thought I knew about diet. I cooked for my family, avoided

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junk foods, grew my own vegetables, balanced my diet and avoided excess. I’d always believed that a little of everything was good for you. Then I recalled an old saying, ‘One man’s food is another man’s poison’. Maybe this was literally true. So began my battle with allergies. It would take me a long time to relate how I managed to control them. If you are interested I suggest you read some of the books I’ll recommend at the end of this letter. Suffice it to say that it took me a number of years to build up my immune system and for my body to sort out what was food and what was ‘poison’ for me. In order to find out more I decided to train as a nutritional therapist in 1987. I learned exactly what happens to the food we eat; how important nutrients are needed if we are to function well and what happens when one of the nutrients is missing. Importantly I discovered how the brain can be affected when we eat foods to which we are allergic causing many psychological effects. This makes me wonder about Dad’s reaction to alcohol. Was he allergic to an ingredient in whiskey or did he just drink too much of it? I became obsessed with food and its possible effects on my symptoms. I cut out a great many foods as I began to react badly to more and more of what I was eating. Finally I decided to fast. After four days the pain in my back and joints disappeared. So food was the problem! What I didn’t realise at this point was that my immune system was malfunctioning. Mark thought I was killing myself as my weight plummeted. He thought I might listen to the family and sent for Meg and Harry in the hope that they would persuade me to abandon my diet. My marriage was now pretty rocky and family life was far from smooth. I was beginning to feel desperate but I wouldn’t let go. I began to read avidly all the books I could find about alternative healing. From Leon Chaitow’s book (1985) I learned of a yeast, candida albicans. This yeast is a parasite which takes up residence in our digestive systems soon after birth and is usually kept under control by the antibodies and other useful bacteria that exist in our intestines. However, if the conditions in the intestine become unbalanced, this parasite proliferates and can turn into a different, more dangerous, fungal form, which makes holes in the gut wall so that large proteins and toxins pass into the body unmodified. A deficient immune system, past use of steroids or antibiotics may cause

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this to happen. Treatment involves a strict diet for three months. All sweet foods (including fruit) and refined carbohydrates were to be excluded as they would feed the candida yeast. I also had to take a lot of supplements: vitamins, minerals, olive oil and a substance called lactobacillus acidophilus. My stomach problem cleared completely. This was major breakthrough. For the first time since I could remember my stomach began to behave itself; no more bloating, indigestion, constipation or diarrhoea. But I still suffered other symptoms and still had bouts of depression and fatigue. I continued to attend the allergy clinic but was feeling depressed and frustrated as I made no further progress. At one particular session I was in pain again and expressed my despair to Felicity. She suggested that when diet wasn’t working it was necessary to look at some other aspect of oneself. Perhaps I should try a workshop where a group of people came together and learned about other aspects of life such as the connection between mind, body and spirit. I was interested. It sounded like something described in the book I was reading at that time, Holistic Living by Patrick Petrioni (1986). When the literature arrived I had some doubts. The organisation was called The Fellowship of the Inner Light. It sounded like one of those cults I had read about where people get taken over and are controlled by some guru. I put the literature aside and decided to forget it. I also knew that if I mentioned it to Mark he wouldn’t approve at all. Yet I was curious. I didn’t forget it. The workshop was to be held over a weekend in Northampton. A headmaster’s wife offered me accommodation. Well surely that gave it some credibility I thought so I decided to go. I would take a look and find out for myself just what was involved. I didn’t tell anyone where I was going. I went, very sceptical and a little scared I can tell you. I decided I would look for telltale signs which might indicate that this was a cult, such as a leader, a uniform, a set of rules, money or goods given or demanded. Would I recognise brainwashing? The leader of the workshop was John Christian. He seemed very friendly and relaxed, dispensing hugs to men and women alike; a bit over the top I thought but harmless. That first night we did a meditation. Everyone closed their eyes and so as not to feel silly I did the same. However I had no intention of relaxing my vigil. I would

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keep my wits about me. The pain in my back from the long drive kept me alert. The next morning everyone turned up in jogging suits. Is this the uniform I wondered? What on earth were we going to do? We did a few breathing and stretching exercises. Then we were given paper and pencil and asked to write down ten things we liked about ourselves and ten things we didn’t. This seemed safe enough. There were plenty of things I didn’t like about myself but not many I did. John was able to show us how we fix on the negative and how the negative could be transformed into the positive. Then he took out a guitar and sang some songs. Now I associated the guitar with hippies – definitely suspect. After a vegetarian lunch (memories of my health food shop visit) we had a lecture/exercise on managing emotions. A young girl volunteered to help John demonstrate how the exercise worked. I became angry as the exercise progressed. He seemed to be upsetting her unnecessarily. He asked me whether I would like to take her place, which I did, only to find myself becoming equally involved and realising at the end I had learned something – that I could actually choose how I felt. I had always thought that feelings were something that happened to me. The possibility that I might actually choose to feel them had never occurred to me, and yet it made sense. After another song and more exercises I began to relax a little and almost began to enjoy myself. As I travelled home I examined my thoughts. None of the list of things I had set out to discover about a cult had materialised. It all seemed safe. But I asked myself: is this how these things begin? I was so distrusting. As anticipated, Mark did think I had taken leave of my senses when I told him where I had been. He said, ‘I never thought you would be taken in by something like that.’ I put aside the experience and life went on. Some weeks later I received details of another workshop. I decided to go this time with Mark’s full knowledge. I then began to learn how to relax fully, to meditate and to use visualisations. I’m sure this would help you, Alan. Just listen to what Hans Selye says in Stress without Distress (1975): ‘When fully relaxed the heart rate, metabolism, oxygen consumption and respiration slow down, blood pressure and muscle tension are lowered and brain activity slows down.’ I can vouch for it. It helped me to shut off the voices in my head so that I could hear that inner voice.

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By this time I had bought and listened to more of the tapes made by the fellowship. Paul Solomon, an American, had set up the fellowship in 1972. It claimed to be: a non profit, interfaith and spiritual organisation which reached beyond the confines of traditional religions to embrace their universal truths. The Fellowship provides a forum for the teaching of effective tools for living life as we hoped we might. One purpose of the Fellowship is to provide emotional, mental, spiritual and moral support to those who have discovered and are discovering, a new and effective manner of living and relating through the insights we have to give. I had renounced Christianity when I was 20, which was quite something for me. Like you I had become very involved during my teens with the Church. I did consider other religions but found them all wanting. So it had been with considerable scepticism that I decided to investigate this one. The workshops, tapes and books all contributed to my understanding of how I could change my negative attitudes; handle my feelings and my relationships; communicate effectively; examine my beliefs; in short how to change myself so that I was living in a world that was wonderful. To bring this about, all that had changed was me. I learned it was OK to make mistakes. I’d spent my life feeling guilty about all the mistakes I made. I tried to bury them inside but they just kept coming back as something for which I would continually be punished. Once I started taking these skeletons out of the cupboard at workshops I felt supported by the group and they didn’t seem as dreadful as they had been. No one judged me. I was helped to look at things from different angles and release feelings I had harboured for so long. I did quite a lot of crying. I now realise these workshops were group therapy sessions that helped me to let go of guilty feelings and forgive myself for my mistakes. I now had a new diet, one to suit me and me alone. I was also learning to love myself. That was particularly hard. I had always believed that you loved others first and yourself last, if at all. Surely it was up to others to tell me I was loved. Only if others told me could I believe that I was lovable. But relying on others loving me meant I was constantly looking for reassurance. Paradoxically, when I didn’t get that reassurance I felt unloved and believed myself to be unlovable. I thought that loving

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myself was egotistical and selfish until I remembered that little voice inside me saying ‘Love your neighbour as yourself.’ So I reasoned that if I didn’t love myself how could I set out to love others? But how do you love yourself? I asked myself what I wanted and believe it or not I couldn’t answer that question. I had been so busy looking after everyone else’s needs that I was no longer able to recognise my own. On one particular morning I was getting breakfast for the family. My back was painful and I felt very tired. I was having great difficulty just coping and Mark and the children were arguing. Nobody it seemed was taking any notice of me. Indeed why should they? This morning was no different from any other morning. I started to cry. The arguing stopped. They left the house without another word. I was devastated. Did none of them care? I felt so alone. I thought I might as well be dead. Suddenly as my sobs subsided I heard that little voice inside me again say, ‘Nobody can take care of you but you.’ I dried my eyes. ‘That’s it,’ I thought, ‘I must stop looking for someone else to care for me.’ I knew that if I were to take care of me I would have to give more time to myself. This meant giving up some of the time I spent caring for the family. But how? I decided to be practical about it. I went to the supermarket and chose foods I wanted for myself without feeling guilty about the price. A lot of the foods I could eat were expensive at this time. If melon was on my list for the day I would eat as much of it as I liked without feeling selfish. Well, OK, I did feel a bit guilty. I ignored the jokes made by the family. ‘Millet!’ Mark said, ‘I thought that was birdseed: you’ll start to whistle soon.’ Mind you, it wasn’t long before they began to take an interest in some of the dishes I was preparing for myself. They were put out when I said they couldn’t have any. When I found they raided the fruit bowl I hid a store for myself. I now neglected my self-imposed duties to the family and refused to make cakes and puddings and treats. All dishes from now on were to be simple and either raw or easily cooked; no fancy sauces nor anything time consuming. The family went into a state of shock and began to complain. Evelyn said she was paying board and was entitled to proper meals. Mark made nasty remarks and resented the loss of his favourite dishes. My mind was made up. I had to get better first and if this meant neglecting the family, then so be it. Everyone blamed me. It was me who

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was upsetting the applecart. All would be well for everyone if I just stepped back in line to where I was before I started this crazy diet. ‘Everyone,’ I thought, ‘except me.’ No. This time I was not going to jump back into the old shoes. For some months the atmosphere in the house was tense. I didn’t want any communication with Mark. I didn’t even sit in the same room with him. Poor man he was getting the brunt of it all. The house was in a state of siege. I decided to join a 15-day retreat/workshop in Rotterdam run by John Christian and Mary Elizabeth Marlow called Journey of the Soul. It was a big decision to make as I would be spending £500 on myself. How could I justify that? But it turned out to be another turning point in my life. There were eight of us from different countries. The retreat was in a house set up by a group committed to helping others along a spiritual pathway. We were confined to the house and garden and we shared the cleaning, cooking and gardening, all the time with yoga techniques in mind. Then we did various exercises: yoga, meditation and visualisations. After the first few days we were paired off. Each pair stayed together in a room for 48 hours. Our meals were brought to us and we could use the bathroom but were not to communicate with anyone else. Each of us was to tell our life story to the other who wrote it down. I was with an Italian girl (29) who was dismayed to find herself with an old woman (54) as she wanted to talk about her sex life and didn’t think I would understand. How we laughed about that afterwards. It was an illuminating experience. We became very close after this sharing. Each evening after this one of the group retold their story to the rest of the group, as much or as little as they wished. We were asked when telling our story to imagine we were on a journey and looking back on the route we had travelled so far. Besides our two leaders there was an astrologer, a healer and the three women who ran the centre. These people helped to interpret what might have been happening as we described events and examined possible ways of viewing them. Despite traumatic experiences that some had suffered there was so much understanding and support that everyone felt relieved, cleansed or at least more comfortable with themselves at the end of the telling. There was much laughter, not at but with each other. We all became very close. I have a lovely warm feeling just thinking of that time.

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Do you remember how long my hair used to be? I hadn’t cut it for about 20 years and kept it twisted in a bun. This was because my hair was difficult and I needed to be in control of it and I guess now it also represented my need for some control in my life. At that retreat John kept teasing me and suggesting I cut off my hair. I was angry with him. How dare he? But it kept popping up in my thoughts. Shall I? One morning I decided I would do it, but insisted it had to be done professionally. A booking was made. The evening before I was due to go John asked the ‘powers that be’ to make sure that I had a hairdresser who would be an artist to cut and style my hair. As he spoke there was a storm outside and as if in reply there was a roll of thunder. We all laughed. You can imagine my surprise the next day to find the hairdresser actually was an artist who couldn’t make enough money with his paintings so he ran a hairdressing business as well. When I walked out of that salon I felt changed. I could feel the lightness of my head and the breeze on my scalp as it lifted my hair. I looked in a shop window and saw a face with a different frame round it, a new me. I really had let go and the result had not been disastrous. I felt a bit out of control. My hair looked OK now but I knew it wasn’t going to be easy. Like my hair, my life from now on was going to be challenging too. In bed that night I began to think about returning home. I still had to face Mark and the family. What would they think? But I knew that my £500 was well spent and that somehow everybody would benefit from this new me. I knew I was on a journey through life and for a while I had been lost, but now I was back on route. From here on I would have to be more careful, observant and watch where I was going. Of course I would still make mistakes and take wrong turnings, but now I felt sure I could find my way back onto the right track and forgive myself for getting lost. As a teacher and now a nutritional therapist I wanted to teach everyone what I had learned but I soon recognised that each person is unique and has their own journey, which can be quite different from mine. Now as a counsellor I try to help clients to find their own way. I benefited so much from working in a group where everyone had their own story to tell. I believe that the mind, body and spirit are connected and that we need to address all three aspects if we are to be well, and to be well doesn’t always mean the absence of disease. Bernie Segal puts it so well in Peace, Love and Healing: ‘Illness and death are not signs of failure; what

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is failure is not living. Our goal is learning to live joyously and lovingly. Disease can often teach us to do that’ (1986, p.3). Our childhood affected all of us. How could it be otherwise? We were helpless then. I think the stress we experienced during our childhood contributed to the illnesses we have suffered, that mental pain manifested as physical symptoms. The physical symptoms are real and may be treated to a certain degree, but until the mental pain is healed the job is only half done. I needed to contact the fear and acknowledge and express the feelings I couldn’t express back then. John Christian once likened it to having a set of videos of life’s happenings and every now and then getting one out and viewing it again. During the Rotterdam retreat I was able to see that my life was quite an exciting story. Did I need that kind of excitement any longer? Or would I feel dead without it? Do you know about visualisations? Well, they are a kind of meditation, when you relax fully and use the ‘mind’s eye’ or imagination, to create images of what you are trying to achieve. They really do work. During a visualisation session I threw all my videos on a bonfire. It still amazes me that something as simple as a visualisation could have such a real effect, but it did. Suddenly those events that had kept me in thrall no longer did so. The strange thing was that I now found I had more confidence to do things by myself. At no time did I feel coerced into staying in the fellowship and when I left it was because I had no further need of it. I guess it was rather like having been part of a family and then leaving home. I had been nurtured and supported and it was time to move on. Paul Soloman died a year or two ago and the fellowship no longer exists. So what about my symptoms? I think I can say I am 90 per cent better. The pain, the asthma, the sun rash, hay fever, the IBS and of course the allergies all wait for the 10 per cent of the time when I lose my way. Certain foods still cause problems, notably milk and tomatoes, and eating out can have a detrimental affect. Then I have to stop and ask myself what I am doing or not doing. I listen to my inner voice and ask myself what help I need. Alan, as you know I’m 68 now – three years older than you. I work two days a week as a counsellor. I walk eight to nine miles each week with

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the Ramblers, cycle, work for hours in our garden, take myself abroad, all unthinkable for me 20 years ago. Growing older is a pleasure for me. I wonder how you feel about getting older and having to retire so early because of your health? I once attended a workshop on ageing. We were asked for words we associated with old age. I was the only one with positive words to offer. How sad that the general view of ageing is of ill health, physical and mental decline. I want to tell everyone it needn’t be so, that it’s never too late to heal past wounds and to enjoy life. Nothing and no one can make up for the past. Only we ourselves can do that. We can get help but we must look for it. We have to make our own journey through life and deep down only we know our way. So, Alan, I’m sorry it’s been such a long story. It turned into my life story didn’t it? I sometimes wonder what it would be like to read the story of your life. Hopefully my story has given you some ideas about the kind of help that might be possible for you. Each of us has to find our own way but I really do believe it can be done. Much love Ginny

References

Chaitow, L. (1985) Candida Albicans. London: Thorsons. MacKarness, R. (1976) Not All In The Mind. London: Pan. Manning, M. (1989) Fighting Back: A Guide To Self Healing. London: Thorsons. Petrioni, P. (1986) Holistic Living. London: Dent. Segal, B. (1990) Peace, Love and Healing. London: Rider. Selye, H. (1975) Stress Without Distress. London: Hodder & Stoughton.

Further reading

Broom, B. (1997) Somatic Illness and the Patient’s Other Story. London: Free Association. Davies, S. and Stewart, A. (1987) Nutritional Medicine. London: Pan. Friday, N. (1977) My Mother Myself. New York: Delacorte Press. Harrison, J. (1984) Love Your Disease, It’s Keeping You Healthy. London: Angus & Robertson. Hay, L. (1988) You Can Heal Your Life. London: Grove Editions. Hunter, J., Alun-Jones, V. and Workman, E. (1984) The Allergy Diet. London: Martin Dunitz.

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Jacobs, M. (1982) Still Small Voice. London: SPCK. Jampolsky, G. (1979) Love is Letting Go of Fear. Berkeley, CA: Celestial Arts. McDougall, J. (1989) Theatres of the Body. London: Free Association. Philpott, W.H. and Kalita, K.K. (1980) Brain Allergies. New Cannan, CT: Keats. Rheinhold, T.G. and Moss, R.W. (1980) Allergies Your Hidden Enemy. New York: Lippincott & Crowell. Segal, B. (1986) Love Medicine and Miracles. London: Rider. Wright, C. (1986) The Wright Diet. London: Collins.

Organisations AAA Action Against Allergy Box 278 Twickenham Middlesex TW1 4QQ Tel: 020 8892 2711 Research Into Allergy PO Box 45 Hinckley Leicestershire LE10 1JY Tel: 01455 250 715

6

Pretending To Be Me Heather Weston

I was born in Hyde, Cheshire, just after the war. Like many families in those days, it was common for newly married couples to live with their parents. We lived with my mother’s parents and my grandmother died soon after I was born, so I lived with my mother, father and grandfather. My father had been in the army and had been injured by shrapnel. I was told, much later, that he suffered ‘shell shock’ and that he had problems keeping a job, so we had very little money to buy our own home. Jimmy also lived with us between term times. He was ten years older than me and my granddad had offered to give him a home after his mother committed suicide, soon after Jimmy’s father had died. He attended a boarding school for orphans, which he later told me he hated. But he came to us every school holiday and I loved him. My father left when I was three leaving mum, granddad and me. My mum’s new man, moved in with us, I was five at the time and didn’t like it but I had to pretend I did ‘cause I heard them talking about sending me away – boarding school I think. So I just kept my head down and hoped for the best, pretending I didn’t mind.

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We went out one day, for a birthday treat to Southport in the car. I heard mum shout ‘Be careful Ken!’ and woke up lying on a seat In someone else’s car. I couldn’t see Over the top Of my swollen leg And I didn’t know what was happening. The operation went well, so they said, My leg was attached With some metal thing To the end of the bed. My mum, they said, was on another ward and couldn’t come to see me yet. Three days later, my 7th birthday, my granddad came with an Ice Cream Cake. Next day, nobody came to see me. I wondered why. Now I know it was the day of my mum’s funeral And I felt very lonely. Two weeks later My aunt came to say ‘Your mother is dead.’ ‘What’s going to happen to me?’ I said, very frightened and really guilty for thinking of me.

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And she told me I was going to live with her. I cried. I wanted to live with my granddad. He was too old, they said And couldn’t look after me. For the next few weeks, I was attached to the bed. I wet the bed And the nurses said, I must stop doing that Or they would smack me. I cried in my sleep And they shook me awake, I was making too much noise And disturbing everyone else. I was on a ward With lots of old people And one morning Someone dropped dead At the side of my bed. The lady in the next bed Got angry with me She climbed out of bed She was going to throw Her locker at me, she said. I screamed for help And men in white coats Jumped on her bed And held her down Until she went quiet. It was really scary.

I went to live with my aunt (my mother’s sister) and uncle and my cousin who was 18 months older than me but they didn’t like the way I was and tried to change me into someone they could be proud of. My uncle, a teacher, wanted me to be clever and I had to stay indoors practising 11-plus papers and learning to play the piano, because they were both very musical – but I wasn’t. I had piano lessons for nine years and no amount of practising

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could make me into a proficient pianist. For one thing, my hands were too small and could hardly reach an octave. My aunt and uncle both had long fingers and my aunt had started playing the piano without music when she was three and even now, in her eighties, can hear a piece of music and just sit down at the piano and play it. My uncle played the piano, accordion and church organ. What was wrong with me I wondered? My aunt wanted me to be more like her and couldn’t understand why I wanted to have friends. Why couldn’t I entertain myself ? She didn’t like my friends and I wasn’t allowed to bring them home. I was allowed to read The Girl comic because it was much more ‘educational’ than The Beano or Schoolfriend. It contained stories of Gladys Aylward, a missionary, and such like. One morning, when I was about 11, I came down to breakfast to find that my aunt had thrown my comic on the fire because it contained ‘unsuitable material’. I still don’t know what on earth could have been in that comic to cause such a reaction, but I was never allowed to read it again (not with their knowledge anyway). From when my cousin was 11 he was often depressed. I was always trying to find ways of cheering him up. One day, we were playing in the attic and he said he was going to put a plastic bag over his head so he wouldn’t have to go on living this way. I went to get help and rushed back to the attic with my uncle, but my cousin said he was only kidding. I knew he wasn’t and I was terrified. When he became a teenager, his relationship with his father, my uncle, grew more turbulent. My uncle used to get so angry with him, losing his temper quite frequently, and insisted that he called him ‘sir’ when spoken to. When my cousin grew older, in the middle of doing A levels, he had a ‘breakdown’. What actually happened was that he stood up for himself. He got so angry one day and threw his dinner at my aunt. I can still remember it sliding down the wall. My uncle went to hit him and it ended up in a fight. My aunt and uncle decided it would be better if he left home after that and arranged a job for him miles away. I couldn’t wait to grow up so that I could leave home. I ran away when I was nine and locked myself in granddad’s bathroom but I had to come out and return to my aunt’s and I didn’t see granddad for months after that. I became frightened to show any affection to my granddad in front of my aunt and uncle in case they banned me from seeing him again. When I was 16 I finished my exams. The teachers said they’d like me to stay and do two more years. I taunted my aunt, knowing that she couldn’t cope with my rebellious ways, and said that I wanted to stay on and do A levels. I knew what she’d say but I wanted to hear her say it. ‘You can’t stay

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here. You must leave home and study away.’ My aunt and uncle encouraged me to find a college as far away as possible so I went to Bristol, relieved that I was finally away from them. I had learnt during this period that in order to be accepted I had to be what other people wanted me to be. I became good at that. I could fit in anywhere. One thing about living with my aunt and uncle, they taught me to behave ‘properly’. My aunt was always worried about ‘what the waiters would say’ or ‘what the neighbours would say’ if I wasn’t on my best behaviour. My life was controlled by what other people would think or say about me. I was doing a course in institutional management just to get away and because my domestic science teacher had encouraged me and noticed me. It wasn’t really what I wanted to do but I had nowhere else to go. Just after I arrived in Bristol, wanting to fit in quickly, I accepted a date with two boys, along with a new friend. They picked us up in a car and as soon as I got into that car I knew we were going to have an accident. The driver sped off and within minutes we were involved in a crash. It was ten years to the exact date that my mother had been killed in the road accident. I was in a state of total shock. I was taken back to the YWCA where I was living and the warden accused me of being drunk. Of course I wasn’t – just extremely shocked. When I went to college the following day, the tutor noticed that I was in a bad way and advised me to go home to my aunt and uncle for a few days to recover. I phoned my aunt but she refused to allow me to come home. She was worried in case I didn’t go back to Bristol. I just had to get on with it. Married at 20, we argued a lot but somehow I managed to become what was expected – a good wife! It took several years of marriage before we became equal partners and started to respect each other as individuals. Looking back, I had wanted and needed a father figure and my husband hadn’t been prepared to take on that role. I worked in a bank and everybody thought it was a respectable job. I wanted to be a social worker but that was not a job for the likes of me. My aunt and uncle had been highly critical of social workers and the people they helped and supported and, still wanting to please them and not having the courage to do things they would disapprove of, I worked in the bank for 25 years. It didn’t feel right for me but I was frightened to be ‘me’ because I knew it wouldn’t be who I was expected to be.

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Beginning to be me

I had tried to be me but it had all gone terribly wrong. I made a conscious effort to be myself one day with my aunt. She was getting older, my uncle had died and she had decided she wanted to live close to me. I asked her what she wanted of me because I didn’t want to live with her high expectations any more. She became very angry and remarked that she didn’t want anything from me – that she didn’t need me and that there was ‘something’ in me: ‘I’ve always known there was something in you.’ I thought she was saying that there was something evil in me and that it was something passed on from my father who she had always said was ‘no good’. She packed her bags and went home, not speaking to me for three years, and I was left wondering if I really did have something evil in me. It was at this point that I began the healing process. Because I wasn’t listening to my own needs my body began to take over, making sure I had to stop and take a good long look at what I was doing. After years of pretending to be me this was the beginning of what became a long slow process of recovery and a discovery of who I really was. My illness began when my husband had a ‘breakdown’, saying that he couldn’t go on anymore. The child in me was terrified, just as I had felt when my mother died and I was left alone. Who was going to look after me now? But now the child inside me realised that no one was ever going to look after her. She panicked. My body screamed in pain. Bit by bit, parts of my hands were becoming numb. Some of my fingers had constant pins and needles and some were excruciatingly painful. My GP kept handing out painkillers that had no effect whatsoever. Then, to my horror, parts of my legs and feet also began to react in the same creepy way and I was no longer able to function properly. My hands were useless and I was unable to work. When I eventually saw a consultant he said, ‘I don’t want to alarm you but I want you in hospital today.’ But I was very alarmed. What did he think was the matter with me, was I going to die? I went straight to hospital where I was prodded and poked, X-rayed, seen by what seemed like an endless stream of doctors, given potions and medications and had blood taken from me until I wondered how much blood I had left. In the meantime more bits of my body were becoming numb and painful. Eventually I was transferred into the care of a neurologist in a different hospital for more tests. I had electric currents passed through my body, MRI scans, more blood taken and a lumbar puncture. I overheard the consultant remark to the registrar that my motor neurones weren’t working properly. Did he think I had motor

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neurone disease? Perhaps it was a brain tumour? The registrar had said he wanted me to have a brain scan. I was very frightened. ‘You have mono neuritis multiplex,’ he said eventually. Mono neuritis multiplex is a disorder involving simultaneous or sequential damage to more than one nerve group. It is a form of peripheral neuropathy (damage to nerves other than the nerves of the brain and spinal cord). It involves isolated damage to at least two separate nerve areas. Mono neuritis multiplex is a group of symptoms, not a distinct disease entity. The underlying disorder involves isolated nerves in multiple, random areas. As the disorder worsens, the damage may appear less multifocal and more symmetric, resembling polyneuropathy. Finally I had a diagnosis and discovered that my disabilities were going to be long term. I was prescribed high doses of steroids, along with AZT and other drugs. I knew that the steroids were going to make me fat. I was extremely fed up about that as I’d just spent six months working very hard to lose weight and I was at that time at my perfect weight. I was also aware that the AZT could cause cancer in later years, but my doctor insisted that it would be better for me to have quality of life now rather than later on and that if I didn’t take these drugs I could die. I’m not sure that I believed that. He warned that if it went to my kidneys I would have to go on dialysis and that I needed to be very aware of my eyes in case it spread to my brain. He also told me that taking the drugs should put a halt to the progress of whatever was going on inside my body. I tried hard to reduce the dosage as fast as I could, but it took two years to come off all the drugs completely. During this time however life began to take on new meaning for me. It was a scary time but it was also a time when I began to appreciate life. Relationships became more important and nature in all its beauty stood out as if I was wearing rose-coloured glasses. It was as though my senses had heightened and I was seeing things with clarity for the first time. I never wanted this feeling to end and I now realise that this was an awakening of my spirituality. I couldn’t use my hands properly and the bank decided to terminate my employment, giving me an early retirement package. I was so relieved. I had been unhappy for so long in that job and finally I had an excuse to leave. It was at this stage that I began to wonder if somehow my illness was connected to my past and I went into therapy to explore the frightened, lonely child within me. During a counselling session I became increasingly aware of how I was constantly looking to my male counsellor for guidance and nurturance. I felt ashamed and embarrassed. It took me some time to

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realise that my ‘inner child’ was screaming out for the father she had never known. I had a huge sense of sadness when I became aware of the loss of the relationship with my father. I also became aware of intense anger towards my grandfather for giving me away so easily. My father had left us after a row one day. I remember my granddad calling him a ‘fat-head’ and although I was only three at the time, I knew that this was a really horrible thing to call someone. I didn’t see him again for some time and then only for a couple of hours one afternoon when he stood at the bottom of the garden, looking over the gate when he came to collect me. We went to Manchester and I cried in the crowded street. My father phoned my granddad, telling him to come and collect me because he couldn’t do anything with me. That was the last I saw of him until after the accident when I was seven. I also realised during therapy the enormous loss I had felt for Jimmy, who had been like a brother to me before the accident. When Jimmy left school he joined the army to do his national service but he always returned home on leave. Just before the accident he was planning to go and work in South Africa and he left England the week after my mother died. I didn’t see him again until four years later when he returned home to be married. I was extremely jealous of his fiancé. I was in love with Jimmy after all, so how could he marry someone else? His new bride-to-be had stayed with us before Jimmy returned home and she told me, years later, how she had then written to Jimmy expressing her concern at the way I seemed to be unable to do anything right for my aunt and uncle. I was extremely grateful to her for telling me this because it confirmed how my life had been at the time – miserable. No wonder I had felt so miserable. I had never been able to acknowledge all of these losses: my mother, my home, my school, my friends, my father, Jimmy and my granddad. I’d even forgotten my beloved dog who had also died in the accident. I’d never even mentioned my dog before. These counselling sessions were extremely painful. Further counselling sessions revealed that beliefs I held about myself were totally inappropriate and untrue. I believed that I was a nuisance to people, that I wasn’t clever, that I wasn’t good enough, that other people were more important than me. I gradually became aware that I believed the child inside me had died at the time of the accident. During several painful sessions I was able to reconnect with her. As I came to know her better I realised that she was, on the whole, a carefree, happy child. She had loved to play in the fields at the bottom of her garden; loved to help her granddad and pick his tomatoes. She loved the

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smell of his greenhouse and going for walks with him. Her granddad was the most important person in her life and she adored him. He always had a Fox’s glacier mint in his pocket and always had time for her. He seemed to enjoy her company as much as she enjoyed his. Together they fed the robins with worms they dug up and he spent hours running after her, holding onto the seat of her two-wheeler bike until she learnt to ride it on her own. He let her stay up late to watch TV when her mum was out. He was always there when things went wrong – like when she fell into the brook at the bottom of the garden and screamed because she thought she was sitting on a load of water beetles; or when she swallowed bubblegum and thought she was going to die. All these happy memories had been buried, forgotten in the trauma of the accident and I realised that this happy carefree child was still a part of me. She wasn’t bad after all and she certainly hadn’t died in the accident, although I had real difficulty finding her again. The time spent in the hospital had been traumatic. My aunt remarked recently that I had been a good patient during the time I spent there (three months altogether). If only she knew. As a child I had been terrified and traumatised. Trauma was compounded by trauma: the accident itself; being in a ward with a lot of much older people and seeing someone drop dead at the side of my bed; nobody talking about any of it; nobody asking about my feelings or explaining what was going on; the additional trauma of the woman in the next bed, obviously suffering from some form of mental illness or drug-induced hallucination, threatening to throw her locker at me and climbing out of bed to attack me. My dreams replayed the terror of my daytime nightmare existence, crying in my sleep, only to be woken and told that I was making too much noise and waking other patients. I had no idea what to do and felt so confused, waking every morning with yet another wet bed, trying to hide it from the nurses, hoping it would dry before it was discovered because the nurse had threatened to smack me if I wet the bed again. I hadn’t attended my mother’s funeral – I didn’t even know that she was dead. I didn’t really believe she was dead. I had heard people talking about her death when they thought I couldn’t hear them. I heard them say she had been flung over a railway embankment and had broken her neck, but I didn’t really believe it. No, I believed that my mother was hiding her disfigurements from me and that she would reappear when they were better. It was four years after the accident, standing in the playground one day, when I suddenly realised that my mother wasn’t coming back. But I had nobody

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to talk to about it. My aunt had a chest in her bedroom containing some of my mum’s clothes and shoes. When they were out, I used to go to the chest and put on her shoes. I would touch her clothes and hold them close to me, hoping that my aunt and uncle wouldn’t return and catch me. But I felt a bit closer to my mum. My aunt and uncle never talked about my mum and I didn’t dare mention her in case I upset them. So I’d never said goodbye to my mum. But I did try to say goodbye when I was 15. I overheard someone saying that my mum was buried in Stockport cemetery so I went there on the bus (it was a two-hour bus journey and I’d saved up my pocket money to pay for it). When I got there the cemetery gates were locked, so I climbed over the wall and ran through the cemetery, desperately looking for my mother’s grave. There seemed to be thousands of headstones and as it began to get dark I realised that my search was futile. I found out later that my mother had been cremated. So I said goodbye to her in a counselling session. I felt so sad and my insides shook. I realised that I often shook inside when my emotions were painful. So my aunt was right. I had been carrying something inside for years and it was this pain – not the evil of which she had accused me. My father had visited me in hospital. He brought me the biggest, ugliest doll I had ever seen. It was dressed as a bride and was almost as big as me. There was no way it would share my hospital bed. He also brought a toy piano – totally inappropriate for a hospital ward where I was supposed to be quiet. Maybe you think I sound ungrateful, but I hadn’t seen him for four years and I wondered why this stranger was bringing me presents. He told me that I was going to live with him – well not really him, but his sister and her husband. When my aunt and uncle came to visit, I told them that I was going to live with my father and overheard their conversation with the ward sister when they told her they had to remove me from the hospital before my father came back. I never saw my father again. As a teenager, I could never get it right for my aunt and uncle. I guess some of that was normal teenage stuff, but their Victorian attitudes made life really difficult. It seemed I was never allowed to do anything – listen to pop music, wear the clothes and shoes that my friends were wearing, have the right sort of friends, go out on a weekday evening, stay out later than 10 pm on a Saturday night. Nothing I did was ever right and I was never given any praise, hugs or love. I wore make-up for the first time when I was 16 and my uncle grabbed me and scrubbed it off. He would grab my hair and plaster it

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to my head because he couldn’t stand my curls. I rebelled, or so I have been told. For years I felt ashamed of my antics: sneaking out to badminton club on a Tuesday night when my aunt and uncle were out, making sure I was back before they returned; seeing friends who had been banned because their families ‘weren’t up to much’; and putting on make-up as soon as I was out of the house. I went to the Mecca dancing on a Sunday night when my aunt and uncle thought I was at the cathedral youth club. They told me I brought shame onto the family when I rescued a tramp and brought him back to the local park and fed him daily. When my uncle found out I was banned from going out for a month. It was all so innocent and yet I was treated as though I had committed a crime. I realised during counselling that I was a completely normal teenager and I was able to forgive myself and understand my need to be loved and cherished. I knew I had nothing evil in me. What a relief. I began to see that I wasn’t as bad as I’d been led to believe. I had hated working in the bank because it didn’t fit with my values or anything I stood for. Where had these values come from I wondered? They certainly hadn’t been learnt from my aunt and uncle. It seemed that I was actually capable of thinking for myself and able to work out my own value system. Perhaps part of this came from my newly found spirituality, I don’t mean ‘religion’ as such, but I had discovered a relationship with God and my spiritual journey had begun. I had struggled with ‘the church’ and some of the people in it who tried to exert their power over others, but I came through that and found my own spirituality – another liberating experience. Jimmy has also been part of my healing process. He spent 30 years in Africa, but now lives back in England and we have been able to talk about our childhood. He has filled in many gaps for me. I had often wondered about my mother and her relationship with Ken, her new man. We had a TV set that constantly seemed to need repairing. Ken owned a TV shop and he had always come out to repair it. I had also wondered why we had visited his house. His wife had been in a wheelchair and I often felt guilty that my mother had stolen someone else’s husband. Jimmy was able to explain why we had visited so often. Jimmy had always loved classical music and Ken had a hi-fi system that played classical music brilliantly, so Jimmy had been used as an excuse for us to visit. My father, according to Jimmy, loved a drink or two and Jimmy had always been the one to babysit so that my father could go to the pub. I get the feeling that Jimmy plays down some of the things my father used to get up to. Jimmy has helped me to put my life into more per-

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spective. I didn’t, after all, have the perfect mother and father – only the longing for them to be. My body began a long slow healing process. My inner child had been abandoned for years and she too needed to recover and express her anger at the way I had ignored her. I realised that I was Acceptable And I could be the person I was intended to be And could be myself Without upsetting others I could love myself and be myself And I don’t need To pretend anymore I’m allowed to have All sorts of feelings That I wasn’t allowed before WHEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

I now work as a counsellor for people diagnosed with MS and people who have been diagnosed with other disabling illnesses. Many of their stories are similar to mine in that they also contain stories of trauma. I’m convinced that trauma and stress play a huge part in our physical and mental well-being. It’s as though our bodies can only take so much stress and if we are unable to release our emotions our bodies cry out in pain until we do listen. As I listen to other people’s stories and to the child inside them, my own story begins to sound more common. I believe for most people being listened to is hugely cathartic. But more importantly, I help my clients themselves to listen to the child within so that they can connect again to the inner strength and creativity that has helped them to survive the childhood traumas they have suffered. Looking back on my own life, I recognise that the strength of my spirit has carried me through my traumatic experiences and that I am a unique expression of God. Without my childhood, I would not be the person I am today – I am here to be myself: All of our stories tell of a hero/heroine, a divine child who was exiled and who is on a journey to find his true self. (Bradshaw 1990, p.268)

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Reference

Bradshaw, J. (1990) The Homecoming: Reclaiming and Championing your Inner Child. London: Piatkus.

7

Pain in Paradise Healing in the Tao

Michael Wai Hin Len

As we Hawaiians say in pidgin English, ‘Let’s talk story.’ I’m a baby boomer, born in 1946 and auspiciously named ‘Michael Wai Hin’. Michael means ‘like unto God’, while the Chinese names translate to ‘great’ and ‘wise’. I love my three given names, although at home I was certainly not treated like a god – nor even great or wise. Instead, my seventeen-and-a-half years in a Chinese-Hawaiian house in the fiftieth American state devastated me emotionally and physically. Some regard the islands as a paradise, but I sure didn’t. However, I kept my Oriental names despite their association with my abusive childhood. It’s a Chinese custom to change names to enhance an aspect of life, like health. So I often wonder why I retained Wai Hin even though I legally changed my surname. Was it because I sensed that I would eventually return to my origins, adopting Taoist healing skills from the culture that I would disown for more than 40 years?

Early dark days

We were lower middle class, but comfortable enough. My parents were typical Orientals – desperate for us kids to ‘buckle down and study’ and ‘make something’ of ourselves. They didn’t talk about their backgrounds, so I only know that she was boastfully ‘pure’ Chinese, while he had Hawaiian ethnicity as well. There were hints that one of his brothers – a professional gambler – died of knife wounds in a street brawl, and that other relations led non-productive lives. My mother, meanwhile, fell out with her siblings so they were absent from the picture.

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My sisters were one and two years older, my brother seven years younger than I was. We children didn’t like one another and behaved like barnyard chickens pecking at each other. We didn’t care when one of the others was on the butcher’s block. I was tormented by my parents so much more than they were. I guess it had to do with my parents’ belief that the eldest son had to do well and not end up like their siblings. My younger brother led a charmed life compared to me. My paternal aunts, uncles and cousins were totally alienated by my mother by the time I was 11 or 12. I regretted that. One aunt owned a farm and I daydreamed that by going to live there in summer I would grow bigger and stronger. You see, I was terribly weak and meek, unable to feel stronger due to my parents’ constant shaming and scolding. I was always apprehensive, anticipating the next tongue lashing. I forever ‘watched my back’ and literally curled forward, slumped and hunched over. The army later diagnosed ‘first degree spondylolisthesis of the fifth lumbar, with severe intravertebral disc syndrome and lumbosacral strain’. In about 5 per cent of the adult population, there is a developmental crack in one of the vertebrae, usually at the point at which the lower (lumbar) part of the spine joins the tailbone (sacrum). It may develop as a stress fracture. Due to the constant forces the lower back experiences, this fracture does not usually heal as normal bone. This type of fracture (called a spondylolysis) is simply a crack in part of the vertebra and may cause no problem at all. However, sometimes the cracked vertebra does slip forward over the vertebra below it. This is known as adult isthmic spondylolisthesis. I was the only one in the family with this condition and I now believe that the emotional battering I received exacerbated it. To make matters worse I was skinny as a rail. There was no meat on me to turn into muscle. My paternal grandmother constantly paraded me before visitors. ‘Come here! Oh…look this boy…how skinny.’ Even if I was in another room I had to go show myself. Everyone would stare at my ‘skin and bones’. I felt like shit. But you know, I liked her – and she was skinny, just like me! In fact, we only knew her as ‘Skinny Popo’, the Chinese title for grandmother. She incurred the wrath of my mother and during a subsequent illness found herself and all her belongings bundled off to one of my aunts. My mother said, ‘It’s your turn to keep her.’ After that…no more aunts, uncles, cousins! I was a nervous wreck in these surroundings and I caught hell for being sickly. I remember a time when I was five or six hiding in a closet, frightened to death that my father would hear me coughing. He did and threatened, ‘If I don’t see you, God will.’ So even God wasn’t on my side?

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He would snigger if I won some little certificate or award, telling me, ‘Put it away. It don’t look good.’ When I wrote about being a lion for a school essay, he was furious because that wouldn’t have been his choice. They never spoke to me kindly, never explained things. It was always, ‘You wrong…stupid…lazy…always daydreaming.’ Yes, I daydreamed that I had been switched at the hospital; that I was adopted; or I was not the child of that man and that’s why he hated me. But I knew these were far-fetched ideas. Even running away wasn’t an option because I was so weak. I was especially terrified when I had to help him with DIY. Just being near him filled me with dread, but he also expected me to jump at his commands, even anticipate them. If I were slow or made a mistake, he would clench his fist and feign a punch at me. I could never show that I was tired, much less unhappy. I just stayed frozen and silent, wondering why all this raw hatred and abuse was being showered down on me. My father gave me ‘dirty lickings’ – pidgin English for physical beatings. It was for offences as innocent as accidentally breaking something to actually taking something without permission. I was scared witless when forced over his knee to be walloped on the backside. He normally used his open hand, though I recall one occasion when he broke a coat hanger over me. He would strike in the heat of anger. I tried not to cry, but he hit viciously – until I could no longer hold out. To me, that wasn’t fair. It seemed like a power thing on his part, instead of being straightforward punishment. I remember my mother once ordering him, ‘Okay, that’s enough.’ He hounded me. ‘Stand straight, yeh!’ How could I? My spine hurt and I was scared all the time. They wanted me to look healthy though I wasn’t and they were making me worse. Mealtimes were gut wrenching. With a menacing look, my father would call on us children to introduce a word and its definition, or to give some recitation. There would be hell to pay if he wasn’t satisfied. Or there was bog standard scolding and interrogation by either parent. I desperately prayed to be spared! Nowadays I hate dining tables and eat sitting on my bed. I feel sure these dreaded mealtimes ruined my digestion and contributed to my skinny physique and weakness. Only once do I remember showing happiness. I was dancing about – not knowing that my father was around the corner. His freezing stare banished my enthusiasm instantly. My spirit sank, my anxiety skyrocketed. I never dared show joy again. I drew closer within myself, assuming the foetal position even whilst standing, as they continued to shame and blame me. These incidents were more than what Orientals call ‘losing face’ – which is

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bad enough. No, this was the more serious island phenomenon of ‘making ass’ – a real serious blow to my Hawaiian masculinity. Some people can’t believe there were no happy times for me. It is hard to comprehend, isn’t it? Even when we went to the park or the beach, I had to play ‘catch’ with him for what seemed like hours. He became enraged if I didn’t throw the ball exactly into his hands, and his hateful glare sliced right through me. Though I’d never flown a kite before, he screamed at me when I didn’t do it right. Can you understand how it is to be filled with fear by the very presence of those who are supposed to be closest to you? And these were supposed to be the fun times. One school assignment required me to come up with a happy family event to print on a home-made Christmas card. I panicked, as I couldn’t think of even one. So I embellished some trivial incident to make it seem pleasurable to me, while not going overboard lest they got suspicious. Happy times, what are they?

Weak outside the house as well

We Chinese are a small minority in Hawaii, so I know how it feels to be the victim of prejudice. Yet that didn’t entice me to associate more closely with my ethnic group. Not only did they remind me of the folks at home, but also I didn’t want to make it obvious that I was a member of the out-group. So I felt isolated, alone. Meanwhile, I could see that my upbringing was not the same as that of other Chinese kids. They were favoured and spoiled. The Hawaiians too are known for adoring their offspring. But my mother ridiculed Hawaiians for being ‘shiftless’ and ‘good-for-nothing’ – like my father’s relations. You might think that belonging to both cultures would earn me a double dose of affection. Not a chance. How I wish I had been born into a home more typical of the Hawaiians or Chinese. My parents did not allow me to keep up with my classmates in terms of joining in the same activities, having the same things such as a bicycle, or even dressing the same way. This compounded my feeling of being an outcast. And it’s another reason why I’m a late bloomer to this very day. In primary school, for example, I was nominated to be a junior police officer. I was absolutely thrilled! It was simply the job of a ‘lollipop lady’, but it meant belonging to an elite macho group of boys with uniforms, supervised by real cops. My parents said, ‘No! If rain, you going get sick; who going take care you?’ I was devastated. I would have been so proud and it would have helped me stand taller, with my shoulders back.

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Hardly any money was spent on me and I was never given pocket money. Purchasing power for Chinese males is essential to our sense of identity. I recently saw men in China posing in their fashionable clothing, swaggering and carrying both pagers and mobile phones. It was as important for me in the West, where everyone at school had money. Meanwhile, I was humiliated by having to carry a ‘sack lunch’ from home and wearing old-fashioned clothes. The embarrassment of being seen in funny clothing also contributed to my hunched over posture. So I sought company elsewhere, but seemed always to be ‘looking for love in all the wrong places’ – as the song goes. While some mates just investigated a Baptist youth programme, I bought into religion totally. I went to every service and event, daydreaming of being ‘adopted’ by another family. The fairy tale of gypsies kidnapping children didn’t scare me – I wished for it! My involvement with the Church displeased my mother. She threatened, ‘I don’t want a preacher in the family!’ I remember thinking, ‘You call this a family!’ and ‘Why not, when religion brings me some comfort?’ Organised religion was to assume great significance in my later years. I became closely involved with the Congregational Church and Council of Churches, and qualified as an Episcopalian Lay Reader, an Interfaith Minister and a Methodist Lay Preacher. Unlike my classmates, I didn’t date. I wore silly clothes and never had spending money. I felt and behaved like a fish out of water: ‘Looking for love in all the wrong places, looking for love in too many places.’ I still feel deeply embarrassed when I think about those schooldays.

The great escape: ‘You’re in the Army now.’

At home they all predicted, ‘Michael going leave here, and never come back.’ I didn’t have the grades to go to university even though I was in the brainy group in school. I was all aptitude and no achievement and was grateful just to graduate. All my hopes and dreams centred on ‘escape’. My solution was to enlist in the Army. Well, beggars can’t be choosers, yeh? At the military airport my mother leaned forward to kiss my cheek. I could sense her wanting a show of affection in return but I remained stony faced, staring straight ahead. She’d never done that before, so why now? My warders were about to release me and my life would begin. What joy! I then became totally immersed in the white culture, drifting further from my Chinese-Hawaiian origins. That was my goal. It also conformed to parental demands to ‘be Western…study…get good grades, or else… stand

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straight…speak up…talk good English’. They really didn’t have to shove the dominant culture down my throat because I had always been attracted to the Caucasian. At a family gathering, a sweet cousin who shyly expressed a liking for me was rebuked and teased, ‘Michael like haole girls’ (haole meaning Caucasian). I take after the white race without even trying. I dream in Western terms. I don’t even speak pidgin English, so Hawaiians think I’m from another state. Many British people think my accent is Canadian. My uncanny ease with the English language became evident as soon as I left home and served as a diplomatic translator, but I’m getting ahead of myself. The Army was my salvation, even though it was on the firing range that I was soundly kicked in the ‘tailbone’ by a very nasty drill instructor. So my physical impairment was aggravated and officially recorded by the agency I joined to get away from home. Despite this, I proudly qualified as the top marksman out of a group of 50. This was the first indication that if I put my mind to it I could really focus, centre and concentrate. This would help later, in learning the healing Taoist way. At Army boot camp I scored badly on the foreign language proficiency exam, so it was a miracle to be chosen to study Portuguese. Smarter mates were assigned the more complicated languages like Arabic, Russian, Chinese, Thai and Vietnamese. Although I had to leave the elite language institute earlier than they did, I didn’t have to go to any god-forsaken border outpost or Vietnam. Was there finally an angel, a spirit guide in my life? Portuguese and more involvement on the Western front – well, the course earned me university credits. Hooray, this skinny dumb kid had some smarts after all! And I came first in my class. I really focused and hunched over the books tirelessly. I sought recognition from my parents, but received none. I was even named an Honour Graduate for the Army Combat Training despite my frailty, night blindness and colour blindness. I just couldn’t shake off this intense need to achieve and to show them they were wrong to treat me like a failure. After that first year of physical and language training I served three more at the National Security Agency in Washington – a plum assignment involving diplomatic work. My colleagues were university graduates, young, attractive, civilian women. Meanwhile, some of my mates were being rotated to the frontline in Southeast Asia. Such good fortune had befallen me after traumatic early years. I took the opportunity to hit the books in night classes and completed a full year of university – as an Honour Student no less! Again, none of my success earned praise from home.

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My first psychology course really fired up my ambition. I thought I’d found the solution and chose to become what I needed myself: a therapeutic professional. I resolved to be highly educated, earn a PhD and the title of ‘Doctor’. Maybe through osmosis my posture, psyche and entire life would then be straightened out. At National Security I had sessions with the in-house psychologist about my childhood and anxieties concerning my parents, especially when they were due to visit our nation’s capital – and me! I also received physiotherapy and heat treatment for my shoulder and back pains, bringing symptomatic relief but no cure.

Life as a free, albeit foolish, young adult

I think it was a mistake to return and live at home in 1968, after four Army years. I thought I would win my parents’ approval as a full-time university student – like a scholar, a Chinese mandarin. I gave it a try, but they treated me as though I’d never left. So I took up digs elsewhere in Honolulu. I have no doubt that it was a big mistake to get involved with the girl next door. To have remained a virgin during four years in the Army reflected my complete lack of self-confidence. Pam was an older Caucasian divorcee from Iowa, a single mother with three lively American kids. Her ancestors had come over from Shropshire. She liked me especially because of my race and had as much affinity for Chinese as I had for Caucasians. The university counsellor I consulted was quite alarmed when I confessed to her that I didn’t feel comfortable in that relationship, but the kids wanted me for their stepdad. ‘But do you want to be their dad?’ she asked. I told her I felt obligated and feared making anyone unhappy and was too weak to walk away. Only Pam’s race and the sexual activity were positives. After my first degree in 1971, I escaped that family by taking a gap year at the belated age of 24. But before leaving Hawaii for Europe I took Pam to meet my parents, perhaps to show them that someone liked me. That was the last time I ever saw my family. Last year I learned that a private detective was searching for me through friends back home. No, he wasn’t from Hawaii 5-0, the TV show, this one was real. His message was that my mother had died, as had a couple of brothers-in-law I had never known. None of this affected me. I sent word back to my brother: I have absolutely no idea why I am being sought. This is how life is for me now: ‘family’ means nothing to me. My life has been richly challenging, more hard times than good, but now I have reached a stage where it is

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stable, peaceful, resolved, contented, centered. I have reconciled and now co-exist with my past – my first seventeen-and-a-half years of constant fear, disparagement, humiliation, depersonalisation. Whatever I did, whatever I felt, whatever I expressed was not right. I was not a person, not an individual, and whatever they deemed me to be was considered and treated as loathsome. I have had to overcome my soul, my spirit, being treated like dirt. This does not imply I think I was a good, easy child – I just wanted not to be treated as a hated, worthless, undeserving person. As you can deduce, I have absolutely no desire for ‘family’ news. Peace be with you, Michael

Being around them had literally made me ill. I reacted and felt like a victim who could not stand up for his own existence. So why should I go back, even after all this time? My half-year European adventure was great. I lived with a family in Lisbon, lovingly cared for by Silvinia who was in her late sixties. I grieved later when her daughter Graciette notified me of her death. I still refer to her as my ‘Portuguese mother’ and continue to visit my ‘adopted’ family. It was during my stay there, however, that I wrote and proposed to Pam whilst feeling ill and lonely. Coincidentally, in China it is expected that couples would marry once they became sexually involved. Was I simply obeying my ‘genetic memory’? So I ended up in a menagerie! Me – the equivalent of a simple island adolescent, virginal and still weak and meek. Her three children, aged five, nine and ten – loud, untrained and unrestrained – they drove me batty! And their father – on his third or fourth marriage, with stepchildren. I felt like the proverbial ‘fish in the barrel’ being shot at and involved in vitriolic arguments over child support, visitation and custodial rights. I didn’t have a clue how to manage all this and was absolutely flummoxed. I was embarrassed to be around them, just as I had felt with my birth family. Why hadn’t I walked away from the very beginning?

Starting to grow up, finally

Pam initiated the divorce in 1982 after eleven-and-a-half years. My own approach to our time together was very Oriental: I was proud to be surviving the troubles. I learned in a university sociology course that Chinese males are renowned for extreme patience in relationships, so I would have stayed on, conforming to my heritage. But actually I welcomed

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the divorce. During those marital years, I had more remedial treatment for my spine from the Army veterans’ clinic. There was no curative breakthrough, but I kept on trying orthodox medical methods. I earned a Masters degree in social work and a doctorate in psychology even while miserably married with three wilful stepchildren and working full time. I competed for and was awarded two travel fellowships: to Asia and India from the Congregational Church and to Cornwall and Devon from Rotary International. I was elated since these successes proved I had inner strength despite the years of childhood abasement. But still I wondered when would I really become ‘healed’, physically and emotionally. I wrote my doctoral dissertation on ‘criminality and other psychosocial effects of parental abuse and punishment’, the topic reflected my upbringing of course. My internship in hypnotherapy reflected my brief interest in past lives and age regression. I still joke that in another life I was a Bri’ish gent’man. How else can I account for my affinity for all things British? Actually I’m agnostic when it comes to reincarnation. Indeed I’m very indecisive and not doctrinaire about much. Am I still ‘watching my back’ – not taking a stand on any issue? I’ve since used my skills in clinical hypnosis to teach relaxation, as well as enhance my own Taoist energy work. So it was yet another life experience that informed my own healing. It’s marvellous how these earlier threads eventually came together to form an effective remedy for me. My research also related to my work counselling offenders and families for a charity named after John Howard, the seventeenth-century English penal reformer. Was this another indication of my future British residency? These university degrees gave me a desirable aura of being smart and, with my Chinese appearance, wise. Well anyway, that’s what I was told. Truthfully, the parental browbeating to be an academic success – or else – left me with terribly mixed feelings towards scholarship. Studying is a real struggle for me, even though I love the appearance of being learned and even though I lectured at a university.

In the right direction – Anglophilia

My attraction to the British increased when I discovered the autobiographical fiction by Samuel Butler (1835–1902) The Way of All Flesh. I experienced a ‘eureka’ moment when I read how the seventeenth-century hero Ernest Pontifex disowned his cruel father, an Anglican minister. His story was mine and I felt vindicated. We both flourished after shedding our

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parental tormentors. I identified closely with Ernest: ‘“I will not take the £100 from my father, and I will never see him or my mother again.” If he took money from them, he could not cut them and he wanted to cut them. He would get on a great deal better doing as he proposed, breaking completely with his father and mother: ‘Tell them from me that they must think of me as one dead, for I am dead to them…if they write to me I will return their letters unopened…if they come and see me I will protect myself in whatever way I can.’ I also gladly relinquished any legacy I might have had coming. My mother’s excuse for not providing me with spending money or ‘normal’ clothing as a young person was that she was leaving the money to her children in her will. How stupid! They could have spared me the miserable shame every day at school – and even used me as the reason for not doing so. Well, I gladly repudiated their money in exchange for freedom. Unlike Ernest I didn’t return unopened their few letters – but neither did I reply to them. In Taoism we teach folk to avoid trouble and to save energy. They would only have misinterpreted any reply and continued to reach out. So why would I want to encourage it? I became a genuine Anglophile when I received that grant to travel to Cornwall and Devon. I stayed with a dozen Rotary Club families in the weeks coinciding with the 1982 Falklands War. I felt so fortunate and was warmly accepted and complimented for my sense of humour. I told my hosts that divorce awaited me, but I think they could sense that I was unconcerned. I felt good – finally a huge weight would be off my shoulders. It is a wonderful Eastern trait to laugh easily and let things slide off our backs – the ‘laughing Buddha’ stereotype.

Then came the Tao and, finally, healing

I enmeshed myself in a very foolish post-divorce, live-in affair with a woman for two years. Once again I was ‘looking for love in all the wrong places’. I then decided I really needed to ‘suck it up’, as we islanders say, and start heading in the right direction. After that relationship ended I enjoyed four blissfully uneventful years keeping myself to myself. Then came my most productive period as I discovered Tai Chi and Taoism at the advanced age of 42. This proved to be exactly what I needed for my healing. There are so many races and their disciplines in the melting pot called Hawaii. As a teenager I had dabbled in Oriental martial arts in the hope that they would make me stronger. In fact, I remained pitifully frail and despised those aggressive classes. So I rejoiced 25 years later when I found Chinese

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exercises which use mental energy and breath control instead of muscle power. Tai Chi means ‘Supreme Ultimate’ and involves memorised movements, as in ballroom dancing. The more stationary exercises are called Chi Kung or ‘energy work’. They both emphasise the relaxed use of inner strength derived from imagery and proper breathing. Their foundation is Taoism, the spiritual philosophy that advocates harmony with nature in a balanced and inclusive manner. It promotes give and take, acceptance and calm perseverance to achieve centredness and serenity. The ‘dance’ routine and exercises embody these principles and in turn are tools for using ‘chi’ energy to ease these values into a person’s daily life. As I practise Tai Chi I have pleasant visions and a quiet, happy mind. My back is comfortable and my shoulders are straight. I have a sense of uprightness and feel a union with spirits and other sentient beings. The physical expertise required to perform the routine and the wisdom to recall the movements creates greater self-esteem and self-confidence. My spinal pain dissipates with the slow and gentle Tai Chi exercises. Energy can be collected and transferred to the back and torso, to other parts of the body and even to other living things. This kind of sharing brings peace and harmony. The movements suit my condition, as my back feels better while I am dancing than when I sit in meditation. Yet I needed to work hard to make it my own. I was impatient to learn the art quickly and I struggled with memories of its association with that awful Chinese upbringing. But the positive qualities of the physical discipline and its friendly philosophy won out. It was wonderful to be centred and made whole through breathing and energy exercises utilising mind and body as well as spirit. My self-perception, physique, health and entire being were strengthened.

You can’t go home again?

As I learned these lessons I decided to reconnect with my past. I sensed intuitively that I could no longer keep my face turned from the Orient. Ironically, I believe that I wouldn’t have gained that insight were it not for my complete denunciation of my birth family. It was right to escape when I did. I tried to reconcile with them and when they wouldn’t treat me with more respect, I decided it had to be a clean break. Yes, I denounced my parents, like the Chinese people did during the Cultural Revolution. So, 17 years afterwards I appreciated that I didn’t have to go back to them literally, but neither did I have to deny all aspects of the culture from which they

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came. I could balance things out: just taking the good and leaving the negative. I marvel that it was in Western Europe where I deepened my love for these Eastern arts. It resembles the paradox of the return to my own roots for healing, when I had rejected those origins for causing me misery in the first place. It is remarkable that despite so much involvement with Christianity from the ages of 30 to 52, my centre eventually came to rest in a Chinese philosophy. Oh, I know the Confucian system espouses that family and filial piety are paramount but it is not unusual for us Taoists to disagree with the Confucians. Taoism supports the journey towards balance and harmony; unquestioned obedience does not play a part. I redeemed my ethnicity, so as not to die within myself. I might have figuratively curled up within myself and remained a misfit. My deformity would have extended from my spine to my entire existence. Instead, I am balancing ownership of the good portion of my heritage against the disregard of my birth family and all those horrible memories. I can have a new harmonious beginning. Balance and harmony are the great hallmarks of Taoism: balance within myself – to heal myself – and harmony with others, in order to relate with others. The Taoist philosophy and its energy work – Chi Kung, Tai Chi, breathing exercises and meditation – also help me deal with anger. I am less resentful of the mistreatment I suffered because I see that it exemplifies balance. That part of my life is over and I am free of it – the scales have tipped away from the negative. Now I try to put lots of emphasis on the Taoist goals of harmony and non-aggression. So, my adoption of the Taoist wisdom has certainly been ironic and even mystical. But, how fortunate!

The future – in sickness and in health

I am lucky that Tai Chi and Chi Kung are so popular in the UK. I sense admiration from people who discover that I am a practitioner. I am filled with pride and stand straighter, though I want their regard to be for the ancient wisdom, not for me personally. This is because being egoless, non-competitive and humble are important Taoist values. Unfortunately, my devotion to balance has me waiting for ‘the other shoe to drop’, for something to go wrong, once again ‘watching my back’. But I am determined to observe the principles of healing and wholeness. Taoism is so valuable and influential to my diet, consumerism, relationships and spirituality. It even has me celebrating the ‘silver linings’ of the clouds of my upbringing. Those dark days now make me content to live with less and

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more simply, to happily anticipate and appreciate little things; to accept whatever tomorrow brings; and to enjoy my own company. At 56, I’m finally a confirmed bachelor. Yet I remain constantly centred and focused on keeping the scales balanced. There are still skeletons in the closet – ‘sins of the father visited upon me’. For example, I find myself sometimes wanting unquestioned obedience, like my parents did of me. Fortunately I neither covet nor need any position or status. I can be free of bullies and I never have to be one again. Yes, I am a late bloomer, but paradoxically I have been allowed to stand back from the world of ego, ambition and competition at this relatively early age. My suffering seems to have been rewarded by achieving balance: struggle and pain today, remission and even blessings tomorrow. I have certainly lived in interesting times – lots of desert, dry bones days – yet also many peak experiences. I attribute my survival to the Western Holy Spirit and to the Tao itself. This Tao – The Way, The Path, Nature, The Universe – gave me the wisdom and patience to reclaim the positive qualities from my own heritage. It’s a completion of the circle, isn’t it? It seems as if the Tao awaited me, knowing I needed it.

The truth – Vera

I also give much credit for my journey thus far to a human messenger. Vera hailed from generations of Lancashire folk. During cancer remission she visited a rest home in the Southwest of England where I was a resident worker performing manual labour and rugged outdoor chores. I hadn’t expected to be involved in backbreaking toil from the ages of 47 to 52, especially with my tropical upbringing, white-collar past and bad back. But I thrived during those five years because I centred into my Taoism. It provided me with the attitude to accept and the physical drills to be strong in the face of arduous tasks in deepest winter. I started out wanting only a little intimacy with Vera, who was five years my senior and had never married. She worked with children and families for decades and was held in high regard by her peers. We knew she was going to die and we wanted to be married before she left this earth. I am still deeply saddened for not accepting months before when she first proposed. She understood, though, for it was she who remembered that I had exclaimed at lunch once, ‘Man, what a nightmare, I had a terrible dream last night… I dreamed I was married again!’ As her name implies, Vera was involved in ‘truth’. She journeyed towards it in energy work, spiritual arts and complementary health and

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healing. She was very much a teacher to me and gave me confidence that my spirit was sound and that my energy skills were strong. She encouraged my Taoist lifestyle and my devotion to it. We were acquainted for two years. I recall occasions, shopping, for example, when her shoulders would sag more than usual. The side effects of her mastectomy were telling and seeing her laboured posture reminded me of what I had felt when I also stooped like that. We had much in common. Vera contrived to have our wedding on my forty-ninth birthday in 1995, at her bedside, three days earlier than we planned. She died 17 days after that. During breaks from her deathbed vigil, I performed Tai Chi in the gardens below her window, sending energy and good wishes up to her. As my only personal bereavement, I finally have in Vera ‘my someone special’ who I can go to after this lifetime. Those who have their own families of birth or marriage, or who are parents, siblings or someone’s child, may not understand the significance of this ‘presence’. I have none of those and I choose to be none of those. I would like to believe that our next life would be with truly loving families surrounding us and without illnesses and disadvantages. But as a simple Taoist I don’t pretend to know. It’s just wonderful for me, whose relationships have been painful ones and whose condition had been weak and meek, to have gained healing through Taoism, England and Vera – all in this one lifetime.

8

Around the Slices of Herself Gillie Bolton

Safe she drags darkness over her head and arms curled around knees folded to breasts the clock ticks but she is in the centre where a still nail pins the hands. Bolton (1991)

How do you write a story like this? I am bound by social rules which instruct me not to tell, that this should not even be whispered within the family. I carry the belief that my suffering is my own fault. Psychological wisdom preaches that the child is the innocent victim and not the wicked perpetrator of the crime. But that’s theory, not me. But I will try; I will try and tell you what I can. But the story cannot be told straight. As Emily Dickinson (1970) said, it has to be told slant. I will tell it using the medium in which it presented itself to me: poetry. Poetic diary writing is an effective route to selfunderstanding as it uses images, metaphors and the voices of others, just as psychotherapy does. The girl in the poem Safe, does not know she is in a catatonic, foetal position, or why. She senses the world whirling dangerously and retreats from it. The image of the hands of a clock compulsively moving around a holding stationary nail is important. Poetic voices and images are explorations. They are a way of trying things out, rather than expressing literal truth. The poems in this chapter were all part of my own therapeutic journey using writing for dealing with

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my own incest-related psychological and physical problems. As an adult I could never trust a person enough to explore this horror, so psychotherapy was not very useful. But the page is a silent, accepting recipient. It holds secrets trustworthily until I, as writer, could bear to become reader and develop the understanding of those secrets further. Now a senior research fellow at Kings College London, I am researching the power of therapeutic writing. For the last 20 years my work has centred on this, as well as expressive and explorative writing for reflective practice in medicine and healthcare. I reckoned that if this kind of writing could enable me fruitfully to explore seemingly impossible areas, then it could also work for others. I began training as a psychotherapist, but decided to concentrate my energy on the research. I trained as a counsellor with Cruse for the Bereaved.

Voices from cultural heritage

Twenty or so years ago, I came to understandings through allowing the different voices within me to express themselves. There are so many abused girls in history, literature and folk-lore, such as Ygraine, Gretel, Cordelia. They clamoured to tell their stories to help me understand mine. They offered their voices and I accepted gladly because I did not understand what had happened to me. As I explored my story, it helped that I didn’t have to tell my own experiences directly, even to a safe piece of paper. This is the story of Susannah and Leda of Elizabeth I, Ygraine, Cordelia, and Freya, of Gretel, Mary and Tracy. To begin – a little girl little more than a baby

Little Red Riding Hood and the Wolf I hold up my chin As Mum fastens the buttons and ties up the hood of my red shiny mac. ‘Tell Granny we love her and give her these cakes and these flowers. But beware, in the woods.’

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Red is the light of the day on my head through my crimson umbrella: a shield from the footsteps of rain. Daddy holds out his hand and I take it – the path is all Slippy and sloshy with wet. The quicksilver bole of the beech is the pole of a tent and the pattern of leaves on the grey of the sky is a roof. I am cold, my legs bare. But I do as I’m told In the wet and the rustle and the grunt of the whispers of the wood. Granny caresses my cheek and my hair: ‘You look pale dear; your lip trembles and oh, your hand shakes. ‘The wind in the trees should bring roses of joy to your skin, when you walk with your daddy. ‘You’re safe with your daddy, he’s so big and so strong with such a sharp axe, and he loves you so much.’ Bolton (1991, 1997b)

Little Red Riding Hood told her tale, as did the daughters of Lot. I took comfort from the sense of the universality of this story: that Elizabeth I, Freya and Mary the child next-door-but-one could have told it. Two daughters which have not known man. (from the story of Lot, Genesis 19.8) You took the easy way out, Mother drowning in your weeping, theatrically crystallising yourself in the salt of your tears. You can stand there forever looking towards home. We had to carry on. We have to think of the future.

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It’ll be forgotten that you lowered your eyes when Father offered us to the Sodomite mob. It was no thanks to you we weren’t raped. And we’re here in the cold and dark. No home but this cave, no company but each other and Father. What’s the good to us now of your spotless floors, and the glass from Tyre reflecting the light in blue pools? He sits scowling at the fire. He won’t speak. He drinks his wine. He’ll sleep and snore. Now we’re here and you’re not. Would you’ve been proud of your girls, our bellies swollen with our own half-brothers? They will grow and leave – despising their patrimony, their mothers. The only jewels here, they reach for the flames.

Bolton (1991)

The tale of Lot’s daughters (they have no names) is shocking. They are only saved from their father pimping them to the rape-mad hordes of Sodom because the hordes are only interested in two beautiful male angels. God kills this wicked mob by throwing fire and brimstone and, because there are no other men, the daughters later bear their father’s sons – the fruit of incest. The above didn’t start out as poems. They began as reams of wild diary notes written on A5, A1, backs of envelopes, in crimson felt tip and hard faint pencil. The writing sometimes went round in circles, or in blotches on the page, in huge capitals, or tiny script. This writing enabled me to come to understand what had happened: slowly and in a paced yet inexorable way.

An idyllic childhood

My childhood had all the ingredients. Our little house was built on a notch out of my grandfather’s dairy pasture on the edge of a huge beech and hornbeam forest. My paternal grandparents lived at the bottom of that field

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in a Georgian farmhouse, my other grandparents about a mile away. When I was at home I had the kind of country childhood no longer experienced due to the current obsessive fear of those bogeymen: strangers. Yet it isn’t usually the stranger who molests, disturbs, rapes. It’s far more often the very known person, the one within the cosy hearth and home. Such as the father. I didn’t know this until I was in my late twenties. This was post-war Britain. The family was centrally important: with its integrity and ability to build the kind of good citizens needed by Britain. Where else could a child, especially a girl, the mother of future Britain, be safely nurtured? The strength of this belief inculcated a culture of secrecy. No tales could be told out of the home. I wonder if any tales had been told, whether they would have been believed anyway: such was the need for this myth. The secrecy and the attendant sense of guilt enormously increased my trauma. My schooldays were dogged with anxiety, fear and frail-seeming health. I went to boarding school at the age of nine in 1960; it had a progressive student-centred approach. We pupils were considered to be people with thinking minds and ability to look things up, invent and discuss. But I was desperately homesick and sleepwalked so badly I’d wake up completely disoriented at the far end of the school and had to work out where I was, and walk back in the dark or moonlight, through the large sprawling Queen Anne mansion with classroom extensions. And I was always frightened – in the dorm, in the classroom, in the grounds with my friends. I didn’t know then that this is not normal. I was skinny, pale and always ailing – colds, flu, earaches which broke my eardrums. Looking back, I was a pain in the neck. But no one tried to find out why I was a pain. I came from an extremely respectable family. I went to an extremely respectable prep school: one of my friends was the son of the admiral, another the daughter of a sculptor whose work graces the New Tate. No one bothered that I was a far greater pain to myself than to my parents or school. The following poem has an inevitable boarding school central image of food. I wrote it after a conference held in a building which felt like school to me. I suppose I will always have problems with events held in institutions like this, just as I still dread the end of August – the beginning of the new school year.

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Boarding School, Age Nine the row of iron framed beds is dwarfed by many paned windows overlooking the terrace, lawn and lake; it’s still light as we squat, dressing gowned where ladies once sipped tea on straight backed chairs; surrounded by the smell of steamed fish we share impossible plans of goodies to buy for the Midnight Feast that’s always tomorrow just some fruit would do give me an apple and I’m home.

Bolton (1995)

That school really was an idyll compared to the girls’ public school I was then sent to. This was in the great British tradition of repression of childish individuality, flair, thoughtfulness, creativity, high spirits or any enjoyment. We were regimented from the rising bell in the morning, through lessons and sport, finishing at 6.15 with chapel, through prep all evening, until lights out. Sundays were worse. Saturdays – joy oh joy – had a few hours in the afternoon when I could do what I liked (within the rules and bounds of the school). From the age of nine I was too old to be molested at home, so the job was given to my school. I was safe at my prep school, but at public school the molestation was all psychological and social, rather than physical or sexual. Boys suffered physical and sexual molestation at their boarding schools. Bars were put on the windows of my dormitory because of my sleepwalking. But no one mentioned it to me at the time. No one tried to help, that is until my teens when the school doctor made the completely inexplicable (to me) suggestion that I talk to her every week. The only thing I can remember of those encounters is telling her I couldn’t sleep at night because I worried about my father. I trusted her, along with my village primary school teacher, my music teacher at the prep school and my home village postmistress. That’s a pathetic handful of people isn’t it?

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A less than idyllic adolescence

By the time I left school – age 18 and completely ignorant of the world – I was terrified of becoming independent and going to university. I was continually afraid. I had illnesses – constantly examining my body and analysing myself looking for abnormalities. I had spells when I lost control of my body: I did not lose consciousness but had to watch helplessly from somewhere up at the ceiling while my body collapsed and had to be carried to lie down; sometimes I was in bits in different parts of the ceiling. I had periods when I thought my feet weren’t reaching the ground, that I was floating. At times I thought my hands and feet were huge and the rest of me tiny. I was terrified I would get smaller and smaller until I was snuffed out like a candle flame. This last I had had since I was very young: a neurologist my mother took me to see said Lewis Carroll might have suffered from similar and so created Alice with her size and shape variations. Once at university I saw a wonderful psychotherapist – the last of that line of amazing women I trusted through my childhood. I saw her till I was 20. Having brought me to realise that my problem was my father – but no more than that – she finished with me. If only she’d continued, might she have saved me years of anguish and symptoms and anxiety? I think perhaps she retired at that point. I think I pulled through because once I did go to university I never looked back. I met my husband whom I married at the end of my first year. I was afraid of nearly everything and my husband bore with many of my symptoms.

Thirty-five Years Later stroking those marks on her mouth with his softness he licked her eyes as she lay rigid, hands like clubs – afraid of loving, afraid of not loving, afraid; he unwound that curl of her so she could be near him

Bolton (1991)

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Writing my way into understanding

The symptoms did not go away: a problem as I had two small children. I knew I had to bring my feet firmly onto the ground and pull myself together, literally. I knew I had to give myself permission to exist – to eat properly, not to be ill. But I didn’t know how to help myself; I didn’t know there was anything underlying all this. My husband said he’d have to leave me if I couldn’t do something about myself. He suggested – goodness knows where he got the idea from – that I write my autobiography. I wrote the idyllic story sitting at our kitchen table in our village in the middle of nowhere where we grew all our own vegetables and kept goats and hens. I never re-read it. Then I started again. I had discovered writing. I realised I could allow my writing hand to write whatever it wanted to write. I realised I could allow my angst onto the page, instead of making me collapse, tread air, be terrified of being in an enclosed space or amongst many people, or be unable to distinguish between my dreaming and my waking self. I realised that writing was private, that the paper would not snarl at me, frown at me, burst into tears, or be horrified. I could say what I liked, and unsay it, or say the opposite if I liked. There was always a danger in speaking to or being with a person, especially if they knew things. I trusted my husband implicitly; but there was a limit to what the poor fellow could listen to and help with. A piece of paper and a pencil were safe enough. I’d had little experience of safety. I scribbled dream and waking dream images. I wrote anything, however mad it seemed. I wrote curled in my duvet at a corner furthest from the door; I wrote in a wood, with my back against a tree where no one would find me; I scribbled at the top of the moor and against the window of a borrowed fifteenth floor office overlooking a city. Later I went through those chaotic diaries and transcribed and tried to make sense of the images. This was the start of the long redrafting exercise which was to become poetry writing. I defined and redefined. I refined and tried to work out how the images fitted with each other and what they could possibly mean. The images gave me odd sideways glimpses into a far from idyllic country childhood.

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Sunday Lunch rat teeth gnaw eyes sharpen on food tail whips round rat on the lawn just the other side of the glass from us, our spoons poised between mouths and bowls whose rims fruitlessly await sucked stones for soldier, sailor, whom will I marry cherries hang in custard congealing as we watch the rat, and Daddy silently leaving the room listen to the protective click of the door rattle and fumble rat body jerks food falling from claws and fangs in the sunshine. The shot echoes through me as blood spills on the rat side of the glass still holding spoons we sit yellow drips thick onto red

Bolton (1991)

I have a very poor recollection of my childhood, in common with many trauma sufferers. But this snapshot memory where my father shot the rat from my bedroom window while we watched from the other side of the french window, eating our pudding, was crystal clear. The image came to stand for a great deal. The impetus to discover these vital images often came from other people. A poet in a writing workshop I attended suggested Little Red Riding Hood. She suggested writing in the voice of a fairy tale or nursery rhyme character, allowing the story to change slightly in the retelling. The shot rat image started off during a psychotherapy training lecture with the

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question: ‘When did you first die?’ The question made no sense to me. But I was in no doubt of my answer. I still don’t understand the leaps of consciousness (or lack of) which brought me to the image of the shot rat, and then to what it told me about my relationship with my father. But I don’t have to understand, just be grateful for what it gave me, however painful.

How to start writing

I might have made it sound like magic: pick up a pencil and write and write and then think about the images which emerge, redrafting and elaborating on them. But although it is magic – an everyday sort of magic anyone can tap into – it’s really hard work. The first hard (and brave) thing I did was to allow my hand freely to write images which were usually firmly and safely held within my body. I had to trust my writing hand. I do this, and enable others to do it, by writing for six minutes without stopping with no subject other than what is in my mind at the time. It’s often utter rubbish, but that doesn’t matter (there’s plenty of dross with the gold in writing). Sometimes the images begin then. Then I introduce a loose open subject such as: I imagine that an object, which was important to me some time in my life, is held in my cupped hand (such as my spoon holding cherries and custard when I was little). Then I write and write (anything between ten minutes and ten hours). But I stop if I think I am becoming self-conscious and thinking about my writing. The writing must come first and the thinking later. Then, later, I revisit that sometimes joyful but sometimes very uncomfortable place. I need to re-experience those images, reconstruct them and force them into greater and greater clarity. It’s a bit like blowing up a chosen image on a photographic negative; a point is reached where the image gets blurrier. I have to know when to stop obsessively working at an image and move on to the next one. A neighbouring garden had a toy windmill: a little wooden man had endlessly and jerkily to dig when the wind blew. This seemed to me like the way we can dance like puppets to cultural or familial pressures. I thought of the way my own problems perhaps had a basis with my grandparents, and perhaps further back. The rhythm seemed also to stand for that insistent force.

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A Log Fire Warms You Twice Hack, grunt, and again – hatchet man, family man; tin man, toy man, man machine; spring’s wound, once again ratchet jerks clickety-click clickety-click: log pile grows sawdust heaps eyes down, back bent; don’t ask why, worker man warming your family like father before you, you’re screwed to a groove on a cam-shaft, daddy man tickety-tack tickety-tack mother inside looks through the window, nods in approval at each chopper blow.

Bolton (1997a)

Help from another, while using writing in this way, can be sanity saving – at the right time. My husband held me through thick and thin and I’ve had good friends, but I did also accept occasional psychotherapeutic help. There was that brief undergraduate period with my Cambridge psychotherapist; then I did rebirthing and other psychotherapeutic interventions for a short

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time with a lovely therapist in my thirties. He wished me to continue, but I knew I needed the confidence and privacy to go it alone with writing. There was another time in my early forties when I got to the end of my husband’s and my own tether and sought help from my GP. But by the time the psychological services had spat out a community psychiatric nurse in my direction I felt able to cope and refused her efforts to persuade me I needed professional help. This next poem started off with me musing on a teenage conundrum. I come from a family of staunch village Church of England churchgoers and had to attend chapel daily at school. Yet I refused to be confirmed, or to take communion without really knowing why. When I went to Cambridge I found the Quakers (Religious Society of Friends), who believe that every meal is communion (and that everyone has that of god in them, and is equal to everyone else – Friends have no priests or hierarchy). I knew I’d found my spiritual home. Writing enabled me to realise that the image of eating the body and drinking the blood of a man – in Christian communion – was inextricably linked with my own oral rape. The empty stanza, indicated by square brackets below, is the child communicating in silence: she cannot speak because her mouth has been filled against her will. I apologise to readers who are communicating Christians. This poem is not meant to be offensive, but an exploration of what the image and symbol was for me.

Communicant come unto me, little one, that you may be filled with the waters of light Please Father I’ll thank you, everything that you have is given by me, ask and it shall be given unto you I am not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under thy table

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eat to thy fill, for waste is ungratefulness. Thou art fortunate among the children of Eve to be My Daughter I only want milk and an apple take, eat, this is my body please, Father no thank you that you may evermore dwell in me and me in you now repeat after me: Thou that takest away the sins of the world have mercy upon us.

Bolton (1991)

I’m sorry; these are horrid poems. Rereading them to put them in this chapter, I’m finding them horrid. But then it’s a horrid subject.

Anorexia

Communicant and Sunday Lunch might read as the poems of an anorexic, prefigured by Boarding School, Age Nine. I have long been aware this is the path I did not take. I had been half-starved at boarding school, the food was so filthy; I was given malt and cod liver oil and extra milk I was so pale and skinny. At home, in a post-war farming family, food was very important. When I first left school, I found eating very difficult. I was very fashionably thin (it was 1969, the time of Twiggy). But my husband hated and still hates pernicketiness in eating and enjoyment of food is terribly important to him. I suppose that’s why that symptom never developed. I am unable here to tell you the story of others. But I can tell you about my daughter’s severe anorexia. My daughter said a contributory factor was that I brought her up as a boy, because in my experience it’s very dangerous to be a girl. She and her brother spent their pre- and early school years with no television in a tiny village where there were only 12 children in their school. My pre-school

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daughter did not really know of the social difference between boys and girls. Another contributory factor, which my daughter found through psychotherapy to be linked to her anorexia, was that we brought up both children to be independent and to think things through for themselves. This was partly due to my husband’s educational principles, but partly due to my own desire to enable my children to create their own boundaries, to make themselves safe. Of course they were far too young to do so and had accordingly to be too responsible in an adult sort of way. She felt this ‘robbed her of her childhood’ because we did not create enough rules. I felt angry and helpless that my own experience of incest, culled I am sure in turn from a previous generation by my own parents, created intense problems for my own children. The fear of this certainly fuelled my desire to work my way out of my own traumas using my writing, and the help of others when I could not manage on my own. My daughter is pulling through after a long and tough struggle. But her anguish, that of others, and my memories of my own, led me to explore them in writing. I formally interviewed my daughter to enable me to write the following poem. The process brought us very close to each other. She also said it helped her greatly in understanding and respecting aspects of herself.

‘Of course haloes are out of fashion’ (Abse 1977) so you wear your hair shirt under the skin, discipline that muscle bulge with endless exercise, vomit what we persuade you to eat, scour away the ooze and flab of femaleness. You sculpt your body with the purity of no food, float above our weight stuck to the earth. The heaviness of your heart, your thighs drags at you so much you carve it away hack at the sin

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of being alive of being you, and keep guard against the devil who mocks if you sleep or dream. It feels safer up there high on fasting. Out of reach.

Bolton (2000)

My work in Therapeutic Writing and Reflective Writing

I found writing to be personally fulfilling and decided to share my discovery. I directed the creative writing programme at Northern College, Barnsley. My students were all unemployed, from South Yorkshire. The impact of writing upon their lives was huge. I became privy to many personal revelations in supervisions and classes. One lass, a fellow incest survivor I discovered, was able to deal with her obsessive need to scrub herself clean until she bled. I also remember the poetry of one of the first squaddies to enter Dachau after the war. I taught at the English department at Sheffield Hallam University. I realised I was not the only one who could be helped to understanding and acceptance through creative writing. So I turned to developing expressive and explorative creative writing as a form of therapy and as reflective writing for professional development in medicine and healthcare. I train psychotherapists and counsellors, doctors and nurses, psychiatrists and social workers to use therapeutic writing as part of their work (Bolton 1999a and b, 2001b). I also initiate them into how to write stories and poems about vital issues in their work, in order to understand better and develop their practice (Bolton 1999a and b, 2001a; Bolton et al. 2003; Bolton, Gelipter and Nelson 2000).

Endnote

There was still a long way to go. I wrote a further two sequences, and a novel about a woman who murdered seven men. These increased my clarity and strength. I spoke to my parents, confronted them with what they had done to me. This led to a great deal of upset, family disagreement and estrangement, and to my thinking I might cut myself off. But I felt my young children wanted and needed their relations. Eventually I was able to tell my

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parents that I forgave them for everything. I knew I had hurt my own children by being so hurt myself; it had to end somewhere. The symptoms got fewer and fewer. I no longer think I have terrible illnesses or float or lose contact with my body. I’m still unconfident and anxious much of the time and I don’t go in lifts or willingly into supermarkets, but I’m working on all that. I’m lucky. I pulled through; I found writing, or rather it found me. This final poem is all image, written with intensity, followed by great relief and understanding. All my life I have found the moon to be immensely powerful. I am fascinated to watch it in the night sky; but I used also to be terrified of seeing it through glass. I was also afraid of its ghostly seeming light. Having written this poem, and exorcised those memories, I now love the moon in all its phases, as well as its magical light. As a little girl I watched the moon silently wax and wane from my bedroom window. I watched how it seemingly was sliced up, leaving a smaller and smaller segment. This seems rather like my symptom of being disintegrated in bits on the ceiling while my body lay unreachable on the ground. The moon seemed to my childish self to be fragile and alone up there in the dark sky, like an anorectic getting smaller and smaller until it might disappear altogether – rather like my own symptom of being just about to be snuffed out like a candle flame. There is in the poem a pun on pane/pain, and a play on the fact that the father should be the comforter, but yet comes to kiss goodnight as the rapist. I realised through my writing that I empathised with the moon’s apparent losing of itself and its tragic seeming inability to protect itself.

Sliced Moon the last of the neat slices wavers on its tip falls backwards through blue-black unable to whimper the comforter stabs when the pane shatters in fragments as sharp as his knife the night without the glass is just as dark framed by the window’s white sheet she cannot wrap herself around the slices of herself.

Bolton (1991)

AROUND THE SLICES OF HERSELF / 137

References

Abse, D. (1977) Selected Poems. London: Penguin. Bolton, G. (1991) ‘Between the Slices’ (poetry sequence). Bete Noire 10/11, 96–108. Hull University. Bolton, G. (1995) ‘Boarding School Age Nine’ (poem). Spokes Poetry Journal, summer, 54. Bolton, G. (1997a) ‘A Log Fire Warms You Twice’ (poem). The Lancet 349, 1183. Bolton, G. (1997b) Hole in the Moon (poetry collection). Leicester: Waldean Press. Bolton, G. (1999a) The Therapeutic Potential of Creative Writing: Writing Myself. London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers. Bolton, G. (1999b) ‘Every poem breaks a silence which had to be overcome: the therapeutic power of poetry.’ Feminist Review 62, 118–133. Bolton, G. (2000) ‘Of course haloes are out of fashion’ (poem). The Lancet 355, 1193. Bolton, G. (2001a) Reflective Practice Writing for Professional Development. London: Sage. Bolton, G. (2001b) ‘Open the box: writing a therapeutic space.’ In P. Milner (ed) BAC Counselling Reader 2, 106–112. London: Sage. Bolton, G., Gelipter, D. and Nelson, P. (2000) ‘Keep taking the words: therapeutic writing in primary care.’ British Journal of General Practice 50, 450, 80–81. Bolton, G., Howlett, S., Lago, C. and Wright, J. (2003) Writing Cures: Therapeutic Writing in Therapy and Counselling On- and Off-line. London: Brunner Routledge. Dickinson, E. (1970) The Complete Poems. London: Faber & Faber.

9

From the Ashes Matt Valentine

I am looking through the eyes of a child as I glance back at my early years. Perched on the edge of a damp, cold, put-you-up mattress, I look on as ‘my world’ goes into action replay. I am three years old and it’s a Saturday night. I know it’s Saturday because I can smell ‘that smell’. My nostrils flex as whisky-tinged air caresses them on the way into my young, fearful lungs. I am fearful because that smell brings with it a sense of knowing. Experience has taught me what always follows that smell. I look around me as I sit alone on the mattress. The room is bare and I can see the clever fungus sneaking its way towards the ceiling from the rotting skirting board. The wallpaper clings for dear life as the moist concrete of the wall rejects it. I become a little cross-eyed as I view my blonde locks covering my tired eyes. I am tired but I dare not sleep. Not yet. Not until it’s over. Oh I know it hasn’t yet begun, but it will. BANG! I hear a thud from upstairs. ‘Jeff, Jeff ! No, please don’t hit me again,’ the familiar scream of my mother, pleading from the upstairs bedroom. Although I realise the danger, I am calm, almost numb. A familiar feeling for me, somehow I just can’t seem to move from this spot. My hands and feet are icy cold and my breathing shallow. I can see all around me. I can smell the mould and damp in the air, yet my body does not seem to be my own at all. I sense movement to the right of me and suddenly my mother appears in a heap at the bottom of the stairs. I am glued to the spot. I want to rush over and help her, pick her up, clean away the blood trickling from her mouth, but I cannot move. It’s so cold in here. I am very still but I do not know why. Then I see him. My dad descends the stairs with his fists clenched. I gaze at the hairs on his chest, poking through his dirty-white vest. Oddly, I start to think about the lazy evenings when I lay across his chest, twirling the hairs 138

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between my fingers, wondering if Daddy were a bear in disguise. If he were a bear he must have a very sore head tonight because his face is blowtorch red. I can see the angry veins popping out from Daddy’s greasy forehead. The ash from his cigarette falls to the floor as he throws another punch at my mum. She lies at the bottom of the stairs, sobbing as she tries to defend herself. I am useless. So small and so useless. As I begin to drift away into my own little world I hear the back door shutting. My dad is towering over Mum shouting, ‘You bitch, get up!’ as my two sisters rush in. ‘Stop it Dad! Get off her,’ shouts Janet, the older of the two at 18. I am my mum’s only child, Janet and Wendy are from my dad’s previous marriage. ‘Matt, go and get Gail, quick.’ Janet orders me to get the neighbour as they both try to pull Dad off my now very still Mum. I don’t want to. I just want to curl up in my blanket and go to sleep but I do as she says. I run out of the front door and stumble down the dimly lit street. I’m used to this trip to Gail’s. I know when I get there I don’t even need to mumble the words. She’ll know. I kick on the door of Gail’s house. I always kick the door because I can’t reach the doorbell. She opens the door and looks down at me, ‘Not again, oh Matt. OK, come on.’ Gail grabs my grubby hand and pulls me back down the street to my house. It’s almost like we’re rehearsing for a play: everything happens like clockwork. We arrive. Dad has disappeared upstairs, my sisters are sitting in a corner gossiping and Mum is alone, slumped in a chair. Gail calls the police and I stand at the edge of this theatrical performance, waiting for Puss-in-boots to take centre stage and say it’s all a joke. He never does. Gail goes to the kitchen to fetch some water and cotton wool. I am standing alone watching my mum as she stares from behind her dead-fish eyes. Her long black hair hides some of the bruises from last time but her eyes remember. I want so much to go up to her and give her a hug but I’m so cold I cannot move. I’m not sure she’d notice anyway. She hasn’t even looked at me. As I gaze at Mum and wish she’d say something, the police arrive through the open door. It’s exciting when the police arrive. They always let me wear their hats and pretend to talk on the radio. I like it when they brush my hair and call me a ‘good boy’. Dad’s still upstairs. I can hear his feet tapping on the floorboards of the bathroom. He’s probably brushing his teeth; he always does that just before the police arrive…

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‘Now come back to the room Matt. Come back to the room.’ I can hear distantly as my blurred eyes open. I strain to see through the streams of saltwater tears. A vague yet familiar face stares back at me. I recognise that sweet smile of compassion. It’s Chrissie, my healer and spiritual mentor. I feel safe again as she gently strokes my brow and hands me a tissue. I am relieved to be back in ‘now’. But I know that this sense of unreality will continue until I have truly accepted my past and that can only mean returning to it, once again. ‘OK Matt, are you ready?’ Chrissie places her warm hands over my forehead and, almost magically, I regress again back into my early childhood. ‘What can you see Matt?’ Chrissie enquires as I am absorbed again by my history. I am staring at a high window. The beads of condensation tease my thirst for security as I catch a glimpse of a tall figure through the glass. The figure is masculine, safe and warm. I am four years old. I feel a very powerful force pulling me back from my window of hope. As I see a huge bag of Maltesers dropped through the window, I hear a faint whisper in the ‘real’ world. ‘Who is the man Matt? Why can’t he come in?’ The man is my daddy and he can’t come in because the judge said he couldn’t. I am consumed with guilt, as I want to run outside and give him a hug, but the force is still behind me. I turn around and see my mum slumped in a wheelchair staring at me. I feel drawn between the two forces. I want to run to the window and grab my gift but I don’t want to hurt Mummy’s feelings. So I put my tiny arms around Mum and the chair. I hear his heavy footsteps becoming fainter and I flinch at the coldness of the wheelchair. I lean over hugging my mum and wish… I wish I were bigger so that I could keep her safe. I wish she would stop crying. I wish I couldn’t hear Daddy driving away. I wish I didn’t feel so alone. As my arms shroud my mum I can feel the stinging tears roll down my cheeks. Chrissie hands me a tissue in the present, whilst I hide the tears from my mum in the past. I do not want Mum to see my weakness. I must be strong for her. The picture blurs and my body feels numb. Chrissie brings me back to the present and quickly drops some Rescue Remedy1 under my tongue. ‘Now we’re getting somewhere. You’ve gone into shock Matt. Remember that it is simply a return trip, you can leave at any time. The shock you are experiencing now also happened then. That is probably why you have experienced physical symptoms. The body has stored the memories all

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this time,’ Chrissie suggests. I feel uneasy at her insight. It’s as if she can see right through me as her words confirm how I am feeling. ‘Will the regression help my swollen gland?’ I enquire expectantly, not liking her answer: ‘I’m at a bit of a loss with that Matt, we’ve tried so many different remedies now, and those antibiotics from your doctor just made matters worse,’ Chrissie explains as she massages my neck, which contains the blocked salivary gland. ‘The kinesiology2 confirmed that your Mother slapped you on that side of the face when you were very little. So it is possible the regression can help you forgive her, now that you have seen her vulnerability. Try to see her as a human being, just like you, who is suffering. She is trying to deal with her suffering in the best way she can,’ encouraged Chrissie. I find her teaching an immense challenge, even though I know I approached Chrissie in the first place to learn how to heal myself and to use this knowledge for the benefit of other people. But this is so difficult to put into practice. I love my mother dearly, but my strength is wavering. I always have a cold, the pain from my blocked gland is unbearable at times and I have warts on my face. Chrissie says these are manifestations of self-hatred. I often get cold sores which apparently are also linked with my low self-esteem. I question her opinion and she carries out kinesiology2 in order to confirm this. I stretch out my right arm to the side as Chrissie tells me to resist her trying to push down my arm. My left arm is simply resting at the side. We then ‘ask’ if the root cause of the physical condition is low self-esteem. Chrissie again tries to push my arm down. I resist successfully and thus the answer is a ‘positive’ meaning ‘yes.’ If the answer were ‘no’ then I would quite simply be unable to resist. Intuitively I knew anyway, but this confirmation is helpful. Chrissie looks at me with a sense of amusement, which reminds me of the first time I went to her for help. On that occasion I had been plagued by cold and flu for weeks and I knew that my body was trying to tell me something, so I went along to ‘be healed’. In my naivety I had thought it would all be over in one session, but I soon realised that healing, both physically and emotionally, is a continual process. On that first visit with Chrissie, after three minutes in her consulting room I tell her I can’t understand why I am suffering so many colds and flu. ‘Who’s Jeff ?’ She questions in her direct, no-nonsense manner. I am stunned to the point of being speechless. How on earth does she know my dad is called Jeff ? I haven’t told her anything yet. I shudder at her question as memories of my father embrace me in a sweet and sour hold. I let go of my emotion and begin to sob uncontrollably. I collapse forward, burying my

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head in my hands. Chrissie kneels forward from her chair and holds me close to her. She whispers to me that we have found the root cause of my physical symptoms: my nausea and deep sense of shock and realisation seem to confirm her mystical and unnerving insight. Chrissie looks deep into my eyes with such empathic compassion: I feel I might melt. There is such a sense of unconditional love in the room; something I have never experienced before. Then she jumps to her feet and announces, ‘I’m going to make a cup of tea.’ As she turns on her heels and disappears down the stairs with her long blond mane in hot pursuit, I am left alone to become accustomed to this new depth of feeling. Upon her return, and when I have calmed down a little, Chrissie explains that my dad’s ‘energy’3 has contacted me and made me ill, as if to let me know there is unfinished business crying out for attention. I don’t entirely understand what she means. I guess I could look at it as my own ‘energy’ or even memories stored in the body. Somehow the memories must trigger a physical manifestation, thus encouraging me to pay attention to what is unresolved. First and foremost, Chrissie teaches me forgiveness and self-love. In this first session I am instructed in ‘Tong Len’4 meditation, which in its simplest form acts to cleanse the body and mind. So I am taught to close my eyes and imagine a divine source filling me with light or energy. I breathe in the light and exchange it with whatever my body is holding on to. On the outbreath I note what colour I see or sense. My imagination gives me gold or white to breathe in, sometimes with flashes of red. As I breathe out, the colour becomes green or black. As I carry out the practice, my emotions somehow become involved and I begin to cry. ‘Go with that Matt, it’s OK,’ instructs Chrissie, as I fall forward contacting my distress. As I return to the practice, the colours merge into one. I breathe a beautiful golden warmth in and out of my body and I feel lighter. After some time I carry out an extension of the Tong Len practice,5 which involves breathing in another person’s suffering: This meditation is from the Tibetan Buddhist tradition and engenders compassion by means of taking the suffering of others and replacing it with the gift of our own happiness. The practice concentrates on the specific thoughts we have about other people. They can cause us distress of the mind, distress of the emotions and distress of the body. (Widdowson 1995, p.39)

Chrissie sits before me encouraging and guiding me through my experience. I visualise my dad and allow anger to present itself and use the colour

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or energy to let that go. Then Chrissie encourages me to imagine my dad’s suffering as a dark cloud above his head. I then breathe this in and offer him my sense of happiness instead. I use this practice frequently to deal with my issues with many people and although it helps me spiritually: physically I am still struggling with my symptoms. I spend the next few weeks reflecting on ‘me’ and carrying out the practices I have been taught. Then I bump into a friend, coincidentally (or not), whilst out shopping. ‘Matt, you look awful. What’s that big lump on your neck?’ I explain to Yvonne that I had tried ‘everything’ and that, although I am feeling a little stronger emotionally, the lump is still there after two years. The ear, nose and throat surgeon had carried out a scan, which was inconclusive. ‘I’ll give you my homoeopath’s6 number. She’ll sort you out.’ If I had a pound for every time someone promised I’d be ‘sorted out’ I’d be a very rich man. Yvonne hands me a tatty old business card and I duly put it in my wallet. A few days pass and again I begin to slump into depression. Frustrated at how slowly I appear to be healing I make an appointment with the homoeopath. The day arrives and I make the long journey to her consulting room in her very isolated cottage. Once again I am filled with frustration, at myself but also at the fact I always seem to have to hunt high and low for an alternative practitioner and when I find one he or she always lives miles away. Still, I think, maybe this one will be able to help me. I finally arrive, late, for my appointment. As I wait my eyes scan the walls that are adorned with certificates and diplomas. The air harbours a musty smell that strangely comforts me. It isn’t like a doctor’s waiting room, but nor is it like a beauty clinic. It’s just like someone’s front room, apart from the reception desk and pine dresser almost exploding with remedies and ointments. Just as my mind begins to escape to dance amongst the rolling hills and treetops I am called into the consulting room. Hazel, the homoeopath, greets me enthusiastically and immediately begins to take a very detailed history, asking lots of odd questions. ‘Do you prefer to sleep on your left or right side?’ ‘Do you prefer sweet or savoury foods?’ What on earth has that got to do with my condition? I look at her defensively, feeling frustrated as she says, ‘I know this may appear a little strange but please trust me; you’ll see.’ At the end of the first session I stand expectantly. ‘Well do I not get tablets or something?’ I enquire, rather annoyed.

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‘Oh no, I may not be ready to prescribe anything for two or three weeks. Please, trust me and I will see you next week,’ insists Hazel. I walk away, £40 worse off and very angry. I can feel the gland throbbing. I don’t know why, but whenever I feel the pain in my neck I think about my mum, which makes it worse. I run to the car, slump over the steering wheel and begin to sob, feeling once again as if no one can help or understand me. But I know I will return for my next appointment. I am so desperate to look normal again. I am beginning to lose faith as I present for my third session. Hazel still hasn’t given me any remedies, but then: ‘Right Matt, I think we have enough to be going on with. Please take these.’ Hazel hands me three mysterious packages containing white pills. I have very strict instructions of how to take them and when. I am a little unnerved and frustrated at how little she tells me about exactly what the remedies are going to do to me. That night I return home, take the remedies and embrace once again that sense of loneliness that has so often been my companion. Hours after I retire, I awaken in a cold sweat. Immediately I jump for the light, which doesn’t have the calming effect I desire. For as a sleepy moth blindly nosedives the cracked light bulb, I remember the dreaming memory that awoke me: I’m in bed as a ten-year-old boy. The absence of my father seems just a distant memory, as I lie half-asleep. Suddenly: SLAP! I am jolted into the waking world by a heaviness on my face. In a slumbering confusion I try to open my eyes but the light hurts. I struggle to see the threat towering over me with pillar-box red cheeks: ‘Come on you. Where I can see you, I don’t trust you.’ Damn, I fell asleep. I knew this would happen. I always try to stay awake until I can hear Mummy go to bed. But tonight I failed. The last I heard were drunken screams of: ‘God please take me, I want to die. Look after Matthew when I’m gone.’ She always starts rambling after she’s swallowed those yellow pills. Sometimes I wish I could hide them from her. Now I have to wake up, and quickly. I have to have my wits about me. I never know what she will do. I obediently follow Mummy into her bedroom, where she gets into bed and scowls at me through her bloodshot eyes. She screams at me to get in with her. I run round to the other side and crawl into the faded pink sheets. I itch and scratch as I make room for myself amongst the biscuit crumbs and cigarette ash. I fear my heart may

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stop, it’s beating so fast. My mum turns off the light and doesn’t mutter another word. I must not fail again. I must stay awake. I become comforted by the promises made by the green light emanating from the 60s-style digital clock. 6 am…7 am…not long now and I will be able to get up for school. She won’t shout at me for that. I feel a burning sensation inside, as I didn’t dare get up to go to the toilet. ‘Please, please let it be 7.55.’ I always get up at 7.55. At last, the alarm sounds and I jump up to switch it off, hoping she will not stir. ‘Oh hello, what are you doing here?’ enquires my mum. She’s forgotten what happened, as usual. ‘You told me to sleep with you last night Mummy.’ I try to higher my voice so that I sound just a little feeble. She won’t hit me if I do that. ‘I didn’t Matthew, you must have been dreaming.’ My mum rolls over, passes wind and slumps back into a very deep sleep. I begin to feel nauseous as the smell of body odour, whisky and flatulence ascend from her body.

As I reflect on last night’s dream I am filled with a sense of sadness and also fear. How could I have blocked that memory out? And what had suddenly made me remember it? Ah! Was it the remedies? Like a neurotic patient I phone Hazel. ‘Hazel, Hazel. I’ve had this funny dream…’ Hazel listens very calmly as if she hasn’t heard the story a thousand times before. Then, quite coldly, she tells me to ‘go with it’ and she will see me in three weeks. ‘Go with it?’ What is that supposed to mean? That night I have nightmares again, but this time they don’t make as much sense. I dream I am running away from Mulder and Scully from The X-Files. They finally catch up with me but end up chopping my mum’s arms off. There is blood and guts everywhere and I wake myself up. The next day I clamber out of my warm bed reluctantly and stagger to the bathroom trying to forget the nightmare. I apply my shaving foam and begin to shave very carefully so not to cut the warts on my face. But then I see – there are no warts on my face! I went to bed feeling like the ugliest man in the world, as usual, but how can this be? I very quickly shave and rinse off the foam, just to make sure. I cannot help but stare at myself. A huge grin appears on my face as I realise they are completely gone. I remember Hazel muttering something about warts but I couldn’t remember which remedy she gave me for them. I think it could have been the Thuja,7 but who cares anyway? I’ve almost got my face back! It’s still swollen, but today I can live with that. And I do live with it, until a telephone call from Derek, my mum’s

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partner. ‘Matthew, your mother is really upset. You’ve let her down. You haven’t been round for weeks…’ Here we go again. I am already feeling guilty for not visiting my mum, but sometimes I just can’t bear to see her in that constant state of intoxication, which reminds me so much of my violent father. I’m now 27 and still I allow her to influence me in this way. I thought things would get better when I left home but they got worse. The emotional blackmail, the threats, the manipulation. Right now I just don’t feel strong enough and here he is, piling more responsibility on my shoulders: ‘Can you hear her? She’s sobbing because of you. Come round and see her,’ yells Derek. ‘I can’t. I just can’t.’ I put the phone down and immerse myself in rage and guilt. I jump to my feet and pull the telephone from the socket. I hurl it against the wall and kick yet another hole in the kitchen door. Finally I collapse in an exhausted heap on the edge of the fireplace. I pretend not to notice the side of my face is burning as I stare into the flames. It somehow makes me feel better to know I am suffering in some way, just like when I used to bite my arms until they bled. My mum would often say I didn’t know how she felt, how much she suffered with her ‘condition’. Only now, since the regression and other therapies, do I know that her ‘condition’ is completely self-manifested. The therapy, quite simply, had helped me to know who I am; thus I discovered who my mum is, in a very real sense. With this clarity I decide to have contact with my mother again, as I am feeling much stronger. Of course, as usual, the old patterns of behaviour return. I become depressed to the point of being suicidal. My mum and I continue to do ‘the dance’. It’s a dance we are both used to: a dance we get lost in for a while. But it’s a dance that always ends in the same way. This time I have help in recognising that ‘the dance’ is about to come to an abrupt end. It’s a very cold February evening and I am on my way to college. The windscreen of the car battles against the cruel winter frost. I am not looking forward to tonight because I know I feel a little vulnerable. That’s the trouble with counsellor training. I know that my colleagues will easily see through my mask. I finish the group work for the evening as the dreaded personal development (PD) hour approaches. This happens each week at the end of the day. We all sit in a circle and talk about ‘our feelings’. Great, just what I need when I don’t know how I feel. As I plan how to avoid Penny (the facilitator) a deafening silence envelops the room. The group and I sit on our ‘counselling comfy’ seats and I stare at the floor. I can feel Penny’s sensitive glare

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burrow holes in my forehead. I dare not look up. But, of course I do, and she’s got me. ‘I’m wondering where you are Matt?’ I don’t know where I am and so I share my confusion. ‘I don’t know. I don’t know what to say. I feel as if I’m just going round in circles. As if there is something to let out, something big, but I don’t know how.’ I continue in my confusion for half an hour. I talk and I talk and I talk. But still I sit with this intense knot in my solar plexus, a threatening knot that so often tries to destroy me. It needs a voice. It has no voice. The group look at me with such understanding and concern, it’s as if they can feel my frustration. I share that I would love to hug everyone. Penny asks, ‘I’m wondering if that would help Matt?’ I nod shyly and again glance at the floor. For some strange reason I fear she will laugh and say, ‘Only kidding!’ But no, Penny rises from her chair and glides over to me. I have always admired her gentle presence. She has an almost ghost-like quality that is not invasive. Penny puts her arms around me and I respond. I battle with my sense of surprise. Penny never hugs in a PD group. Then it finally happens. I burst into tears and cling to Penny as if I were about to fall down a very deep well. I clutch at her tiny frame as my tears soak into her exquisitely tailored tartan jacket. Grief bellows from my lungs as I lose the fight for control. Penny finally releases me after some minutes; she guides me to my chair where my journey into years of distress continues. My whole body convulses with uncontrollable emotion for what feels like hours. I am hot and moist as the sweat rolls from my hair. I continue to sob as I feel a gentle tap on my knee. ‘I’d like you to hold onto that for now Matt.’ I completely ignore Penny as I simply cannot stop crying. I look up at the group. Some look alarmed and some try to hide their feelings of fear. I have truly ‘lost it’. But just then Penny again rises from her position and gently takes my hand. ‘I think it would be a good idea to sit in another room for a while. Who would you like to go with you?’ I gesture to Charlie who follows Penny and me to a small counselling room with two large comfortable chairs. I just manage to thank Penny as she closes the door and rejoins the group. I jump onto Charlie’s lap and curl up into a ball. He holds me in the safety of his huge arms. Again I begin to sob as my brain forgets to edit my feelings. ‘I want to die. I want to die.’ The reality of my words injects fear into my body. In a vague way, it’s all beginning to make sense.

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The next day I am surrounded and filled with a numb sense of despair. I leave my house in the morning for a walk along the riverside. Hours later I am sitting on an old wooden bench beside the glistening water. The numbness begins to consume me and I know it is time. If I do it now I wouldn’t feel a thing, I know I wouldn’t because I cannot feel anything anymore. I walk to the water’s edge. I lean against a tall oak tree and stare at the barbed wire surrounding the sewerage pipe joining the two riverbanks together. I fantasise about how I am going to climb over the wire so I can position myself high enough to jump into the shallow water, head first. Just then my mobile shrieks from inside my coat. I answer the phone as if on automatic pilot. It’s a voicemail message: ‘Hi Matt, it’s Sheila. I know it’s been a while but I had to call you, I dreamt about you last night. What’s wrong? I don’t know what it is Matt, but I know you do. Call me.’ With that I spring to action as if a thunderbolt has jolted me. I look around at the crispness of the grass and realise just how green everything is. How bizarre it all seems now. And I wanted to leave this behind? I quickly run home and call the only person who truly understands me. ‘Chrissie…help! I need an appointment.’ ‘I recognise that cry!’ she jests as she tells me we can meet at 11 the next day. That night I lie awake and experience the most profound and mixed emotions. I feel glad to be alive, but terrified that I wanted to die just a few hours before. How could I change so quickly? The enormity of my pain now begins to reveal itself. Even when I manage to resist and avoid cognitively, my body always finds a way to let me know something isn’t right and although my mood has now lifted, my neck is swollen and painful. I feel pleased at my self-awareness, but still need a little guidance in knowing what to do with this. The next day, I arrive ten minutes early, knowing I will only have to wait downstairs whilst Chrissie finishes with her last patient. But still, at least I am here. I relax as the sofa pulls me deep down into its safety. I feel the warmth of the incense burning above the fireplace. For just a second I am convinced the brass frog is winking at me from behind the huge Chinese coin it has in its mouth. I enter the room and sit amongst the old books that promise to teach from the towering shelves. Chrissie enters the room and before I even say a word she says, ‘You’ve been suicidal haven’t you? But you’re not now. Well done you.’

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Wow! How she knows I will never truly understand. Nobody on this earth could know and understand that one moment I had wanted to take my own life and the next moment with some shift of energy ‘Matt is back!’ An amazing phenomenon I have been very, very grateful for over the years. I begin to tell Chrissie about the night in PD and then about how that had made me feel the next day. She encourages me to ‘let it out’ and assures me that no matter how much I cry, scream, sob, it is ‘never enough’. Those are reassuring words indeed. I have permission to be a child again. So I spend the next few weeks nurturing this experience, with the help of a flower remedy called Agrimony8 which helps me really to get in touch with my process. When I feel like crying, I cry. When I feel like having a temper tantrum, I have a temper tantrum. It seems to help me truly experience how I am feeling in the moment. And that is when it happened: the moment I had waited for. I am alone at home one evening when the telephone rings. I feel comfortable and warm wrapped in my cream fluffy blanket and so I let the answering machine take the call. As I lose myself in the delicate candlelight shining from the mantelpiece, I can hear my mother’s threatening tone. ‘Matthew, it’s me,’ she slurs. ‘I just want you to know that I still love you. Despite all your faults I will always love you. Goodbye.’ I curl up into a tight ball and wish the voice away. Part of me wants to call her back and tell her what I think of her. Another part of me fears that the message might be her farewell gift before she takes an overdose. And yet another part wishes she would take an overdose. Ashamed as I am to admit it, yes, I wish her dead. Then I would be free. With this thought I become enraged at how desperate my life has become. I throw my security blanket across the room and turn over the sofa in a blind rage. I storm upstairs and trash my bedroom. As I slump onto the floor I hold my aching neck and sob until I fall asleep. As daylight breaks I squint through dazed and watery eyes. Although I am surrounded by chaos, I feel good. I rise to my feet and walk into the bathroom and take the usual morning glance at my abnormally proportioned face. This time I’m actually not that shocked to find the enlarged gland has finally, finally gone. There isn’t even a smallest clue that it was ever there. Again, my body has released something from the past. I am exhausted in every sense of the word, but I am still here! Now, at 29 years of age, I am still on my healing journey. At the moment I have no contact with my mum. I know I am not ready for that. My physical symptoms have not returned (it has now been over a year). Emotionally, I feel stronger than I have ever felt. I continue to see healers and therapists

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with whom I feel comfortable and I know and trust that when the time is right I will be guided to take the next step. Discovering the next step is simple; I just need clarity. The practices that are now such an important part of my life give me that clarity to see. And when you can see things clearly – you can change anything.

Notes 1. 2.

3.

4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

A preparation of five flower remedies commonly used ‘to comfort and reassure’. Effective for pre and post trauma. Rescue Remedy is exclusive to Bach Flower Remedies. Applied kinesiology is a means of using the body as a ‘bio-computer’. You can test for physical strengths and weaknesses (including diet, skeletal structure, supplementation, etc.) by use of muscle testing on the body. It can also extend into testing energy flow and the effect of mental programming and emotional disturbances on the body. The more advanced testing can be used to ascertain the effects of psychic sensitivity and to connect with the individual’s highest wisdom or spiritual connection. (Personal communication with Dr Chrissie Coburn-Krzowska) Called ‘chi’ in China, ‘prana’ in India and sometimes referred to as ‘life force’ in the West, it is invisible and infinite. Energy in the body can be accessed and stimulated by many therapies, for example, acupuncture. Energy in the universe and emanating from a person can be ‘seen’ using Kirlean photography. Sometimes referred to as the ‘human magnetic energy field’ by scientists. Tong Len in any form, should be taught by an experienced practitioner. This extension of Tong Len should only be initially carried out with a reputable and competent teacher. It is a very powerful spiritual practice that requires a level of understanding and respect for the energy being used. A discipline involving treating the whole person and not the symptoms of a condition. Always research your practitioner and check their experience and qualifications. There are differing styles of homoeopathy. A homoeopathic remedy sometimes used for ‘fleshy’ growths and skin complaints, depending on the individual. Always consult a practitioner before treating yourself. A flower remedy (sometimes called a flower essence) helpful when having difficulty experiencing true inner feelings. People who ‘hide behind a brave face’ may find use in Agrimony.

Reference

Widdowson, R. (1995) Easy Steps to Relaxation and Meditation. London: Grange.

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Further Reading

Bach, E. (1933–1997) The Twelve Healers and Other Remedies. Oxford: Dr Edward Bach Centre. Ball, P. (2000) Lucid Dreaming. London: Arcturus. Gerber, R. (2000) Vibrational Medicine for the 21st Century. London: Piatkus. Staunton, T. (2002) Body Psychotherapy. Hove: Brunner-Routledge. Thondup, T. (1996) The Healing Power of Mind. London: Arkana.

10

The Silence of Somatisation Jackie Kneeshaw

Prologue

I am going to tell you a story It is not a fairy story It is story of my life A multi-layered story to present a multi-storied life A story of a quest to understand illness A story of reflections, connections, insight and awareness A story of alternative ways of knowing A restorative story of healing and growth A story silently acknowledging that it is covertly political but declining to be overtly so A story that is inexplicably interwoven with two other stories of trauma and spirituality An abbreviated story because it is impossible to tell the whole story within the parameters of this chapter A restricted story to respect others who will have a different yet equally valid version of the same story and have no right of reply A story that shows transformative moments that are intended to give you a sense of my life. 1949 aged 3 years: I feel like a fairy princess. I am wearing the most beautiful dress in the world. The dress, a delicate shade of powder blue organdie, has a smocked bodice that twinkles like stars and a full soft skirt that billows around me like wispy clouds. It is a magical dress. My mother spent hours creating this beautiful concoction for me.

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Later in the same year: It is Monday morning, washing day, my mother is standing alongside the mangle. I scream at her hysterically, ‘I hate you, I hate you,’ and pound at her body with my fists. She ties me to a kitchen chair and gags me to stop me screaming. I feel as if I will explode with the pain in my head. The only part of my body that can move is my legs, but my legs feel strange, they are my legs but they don’t feel as if they belong to me. They swing helplessly.

I cannot remember the incidents that gave rise to my explosive demonstration. As a far as I am aware this was the last time I expressed my rage and anger as a child. In the culture of the time, this might have been perceived as an appropriate way of protecting my mother and me from perpetrating further damage in my rage. For me, however, the effect was appalling. All the pent-up anger and rage was trapped inside. I know that incident had a profound effect upon me. What I learnt as a small child was that it was not safe for me to express my anger, so from then on I suppressed any form of it. Forty years later I still couldn’t acknowledge anger. The most that I could do was to own that I felt resentment regarding the way that I had been treated. 23 November 1998: Forty-nine years after the incidents I have just described to you. Alone, I am the reluctant driver of a car. Reluctant because I am still recovering from the shock of two previous car accidents within the prior 12 months. The first accident occurred in the autumn of 1997. I was stationary at a zebra crossing when a camper van ploughed into the back of me. The second one happened nine months later, on 23 August 1998. I was in a traffic jam on the motorway moving very slowly when once again I was hit by a car that could not stop. In each case the damage to the car was extensive and both were written off. This time I see a car approaching from a side road to the left. In that moment I know that it is not going to stop. I see a flashback from my childhood, a sudden, vivid pictorial memory of myself bound to a chair and gagged, with my legs flailing. My car is knocked to the other side of the road. I am unconscious. When I come to I see in my mind’s eye my grandfather’s name on his gravestone. I am puzzled. Smoke is pouring from the bonnet, witnesses urge me to get out of the car. I sit frozen. Eventually, to oblige them and because of the fear in their eyes, I move. When I

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am freed from the wrecked car, I stand at the roadside, tip my head back and scream and scream and scream.

It is impossible to tell you my whole story so I have chosen these snapshots of my life which, for me, are significant. I have a sense that my illness story runs parallel with a sexual abuse story which I have explored and distanced myself from to the extent that I no longer describe myself as a survivor of abuse. I have recovered and healed the wounds of that abuse and feel that it happened to a different me a long time ago. In my perception, by the time of the third accident in 1998, having healed the wounds of sexual abuse, depression no longer blighted my life and emotionally I was able to experience peace and joy. I was thrilled with this new way of being, but puzzled that I was still experiencing physical difficulties such as lack of co-ordination in my legs and stiffness in my hips. I had begun to wonder how my history might have contributed to these physical experiences. I had enlisted the help of an osteopath because I was experiencing whiplash injury as a result of the second accident and because I was trying to heal my body in the way that I had healed my mind. I also sought the help of a body therapist in 2000. In 1994 I had been made redundant from my career in teaching. I was 48 then and very disillusioned with Thatcherism and the system in general. I vowed that I would never work for anyone else ever again so I chose to embark upon training to become a professional counsellor. Teaching was my first love and even now there is a part of me that still yearns to teach. I loved my job and I loved the people that I served. Back in 1970 I had completed a basic counselling course to enhance my role as a teacher in the field of personal relationships. I had always found this aspect of my work worthwhile – I find it hard to say enjoyable because often we were dealing with sad issues. It seemed a natural progression therefore to branch out in that direction. The first accident occurred just after I began studying for my diploma in counselling in the autumn of 1997. The second accident occurred in the summer term of the following year and the third three months later, in the autumn term. The course was challenging me to review my personal belief system, philosophy and prejudices. Reading Einstein (Barnett 1995) challenged me to understand that life is an illusion and Edwards (1993) extended this by suggesting that we create our own reality. She specifically states that there are no such things as accidents:

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Every event is a self-created opportunity to learn and grow. If we learn the lesson and act upon it, the situation will change. If we haven’t learnt the lesson, or haven’t learnt the right lesson, the situation will repeat itself in differing scenarios until we do – not because we’re browbeating ourselves or punishing ourselves, but because we want to learn and grow. (Edwards 1993, p.104)

If this was correct then I had to ask myself some serious questions. Why had I created redundancy and three accidents? So I embarked upon a new stage of my journey of discovery, trying to understand the lessons that I needed to learn from these events. What had happened immediately after the third accident seemed very bizarre to me. I could make sense of the flashback of myself tied to a chair, recognising that this had indeed happened to me. What was more difficult to understand was waking up to a picture of myself standing reading my grandfather’s name on his headstone. I had never known my grandfather who had died two years before I was born, so why was I standing at his grave reading his inscription? So I asked my mother if 23 November, the day of the third accident, was in any way significant and she told me it had been her father’s birthday. I could not stop thinking about two portrait photographs that were placed at each end of the mantelshelf in my Italian Catholic maternal grandmother’s home: one of my grandmother, the other of my grandfather. Whenever I had tried to look at these photographs I had a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. But I decided that I would try to overcome this response so I forced myself to look at them again. I felt extremely uncomfortable and eventually I became aware that I was afraid. I began to realise that I felt as if I was looking into my own eyes. I felt confused. I had had a very good relationship with my grandmother whom I adored. She spoke little English, although she had lived in England for some time, and I spoke no Italian, but in spite of that we managed to communicate with each other. One day when I had accompanied her to a hospital appointment she had tried for the second time to give me her wedding ring, but I refused to accept it until she died. Now I also have the dress that she was wearing in the photograph on the mantelpiece: it was her wedding dress. I had borrowed this dress to wear for a Victorian cricket match. It might have been made for me. During the counselling course I had begun to read about the belief systems in other cultures, beliefs about reincarnation, karma and attaching spirits (Rinpoche 1994; Yogananda 1996). I had also been reading about

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transgenerational therapy (Hellinger with Weber and Beaumont 1998; Rocha and Jorde 1995). I had been very stimulated, provoked and challenged by all of this learning and I prayed for understanding and insight. I had read about the possibility that we could be reincarnated in two forms simultaneously. The question I had avoided asking myself all along is whether I could possibly have reincarnated as both my grandmother and my grandfather. Even now as I write this I know this is too much for me to accept but, as yet, I have found no other possible explanation for my strong ‘felt sense’ (Gendlin 1978) as I gazed at their photos. I have made some sense of my connection with my grandmother, but not with my grandfather. After I finished my training in July 1999 I attended a ‘family constellation’ workshop which had been suggested by my body therapist with whom I had just finished working. This is sometimes referred to as ‘Order of Love’ and is based upon the work of Bert Hellinger (1998) who believes that when love becomes blocked by trauma in previous generations, it can be played out in subsequent generations. Hellinger was born in Germany and escaped from the Gestapo who suspected him of being an ‘enemy of the people’ at the age of 17. He was drafted into the army where he experienced combat, defeat and life in a prisoner of war camp (www.Hellinger.com). After the war, at the age of 20, he entered a Catholic religious order where he began a period of contemplation, study and ‘purification of body and mind’. Sixteen years in a Zulu mission as a teacher and a parish priest sharpened his awareness of the relativity of many cultural values and led him to perceive systems of relationships and the human commonality that underlie cultural diversity. After 25 years he left the religious life and began training as a psychoanalyst. He later became interested in body-based psychotherapy, Gestalt, transactional analysis and a range of other therapeutic approaches. Further training in family therapy provided him with his first encounter with family constellation. His current approach represents an integration of all those influences. Hunter Beaumont, in his introduction to a book on Hellinger’s work, says: If you want love to flourish, you need to do what it demands and to refrain from doing what harms it. Love follows the hidden order of the Greater Soul. The therapeutic work documented in this book shows what happens when we injure love or ignore what it requires. It also shows the healing that happens when our intimate relationships are restored to order. It reveals how children’s innocent love blindly perpetuates what’s harmful, and how injuries to the Order of Love by earlier members of the family

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affect the lives of later members, just as the waves and ripples in a river caused by a submerged boulder upstream still twist and swell far downstream. (Hellinger 1998, p.x – in Introduction)

This seemed to take me one step beyond Edwards’s idea that we create our own reality into the possibility that we may also choose to play out the karma of ancestors, or be affected by role models that we absorb unconsciously. It is impossible within the parameters of this chapter to do justice to the work of Bert Hellinger so I shall attempt to explain the process as I experienced it. The group met together for two full days during which each person worked on a family-related issue that they wished to explore. As the principal participant began to work with these issues, the facilitator/therapist asked questions regarding family history, paying attention to unusual events such as accidents, suicides, murders and miscarriages, to name a few. The principal participant then chose other members of the group to represent current or dead family members and made her internal perceptions of her family constellation visible. The ‘material’ gradually emerged from within the energy field of the constellation as the group members who were representing family members began to feel emotionally and physically like the individuals they represented, even those who had been unknown or excluded. Sometimes unconscious entanglements that spanned several generations came to light. Sometimes it turned out that the family member present in the group unknowingly carried the guilt of an ancestor in order to atone for previous injustices. As the facilitator asked the participants questions, feelings were brought out into the open. These feelings sometimes seemed at first to be completely unrelated to what was happening, but often the apparently unrelated revelations turned out to be significant, meaningful and made sense to the principal participant. This process took anything from 45 minutes to two and half hours and over the two days each of the seven group members created their family constellation in turn. During that weekend I repeatedly found myself playing the part of someone who carried another person’s pain. This led me to re-examine my relationship with my grandmother who gave me the greatest gift of all, my spirituality. It was my love for her that caused me as a young woman to make a deal with God to carry her pain three months prior to her death, as I watched her slip into a semi-coma. She had suffered from poor circulation for years; gangrene took hold of her toes and slowly they began to disintegrate. As she was dying she told me that she must be a very wicked woman. I

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retaliated vigorously and asked her why she thought that way. She replied that God had taken her husband, her brothers and sisters, half of her children and her friends, but he did not want her – that she was not good enough to go to heaven. I was angry, so angry. My beloved grandmother deserved a better death than this. In my fury I had knelt and prayed. God, if there is a God, if you want me to believe in you, do something quickly. If you want someone to suffer then I will suffer for her. I really meant it. Nowadays I am really shocked to realise that as a young woman I had really believed in a God who wanted me to offer suffering to him. So after what had been shown to me during the family constellation weekend I asked myself whether I had indeed carried my grandmother’s pain. The idea that one could make ‘psychic contracts’, as described by Edwards, was very challenging. My early training had been in the sciences so I was finding these new ideas very difficult to accept. In my scientific training I had learnt that a theory had to be proved. I could not prove these new ideas and, worse than that, I was ashamed that people would consider me stupid for thinking the way I did. They might believe I was mad for making a connection between the family constellation weekend and my grandmother’s death 24 years ago. It seemed to me that in our family to be mad was the worst fate of all. For days I pondered on all these ideas. Then a rational explanation occurred to me. Somewhere along the line I had read that memory is held in every cell of the body. If that is so, then memory is held in every sperm and ova that contributes the genetic inheritance of each human being. I felt relieved to be able to find an explanation of these ideas. My mother was the youngest daughter born after my grandmother had experienced miscarriage, stillbirths and the traumatic death of a three-year-old son. Was it possible then that both my mother and I could have inherited the memory of my grandmother’s grief, loss and pain? At the beginning of this story I identified a problem in my hips and legs. On reading Levine’s Waking the Tiger, Healing Trauma (1997) I wondered if those parts of my body might still be holding trauma. The osteopath had identified that the movement in my hips was restricted. However, I knew that this was not the whole story. I felt as if there was something wrong with my legs, yet they appeared to be perfectly normal. However, my coordination had always been poor. As a child I had problems in the gym class in school and even as an adult I had problems in my yoga class. My yoga teacher was empathic and observed my frustration when I couldn’t perform

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apparently simple exercises. She suggested I imagine that I was doing the exercise without difficulty and eventually I would be able to match my thought with action. My osteopath told me that my recovery may take time because I had very deep-seated injuries. My body therapist told me that she needed to treat me very gently because my body felt as if it had been ‘battered’. This was a new experience for me. Here were three professional women that I trusted all listening respectfully to what I said. Collectively they enhanced my understanding of what was happening to me, stimulated my process, raised my awareness and encouraged me to listen to my body and to learn the lessons that it was trying to teach me. Simultaneously, I was reflecting on the family constellation weekend. Over the years I have discovered that I learn best experientially. By taking part in seven constellations during that weekend, culminating in my own, I had learned a great deal. It was also significant that a good friend accompanied me, so I have a witness to the events that unfolded and no one can say that I am mad. I need to tell you here about this fear of madness. There was an unspoken fear of madness in my family. My grandmother had been put into a straitjacket and kept in a padded cell after the death of her child. The family constellation had revealed that my grandmother was unable to separate or let go of two of her children who had died. I vaguely recollected having conversations with her about stillborn babies and miscarriages. In the constellation the person representing one of the dead children, when asked how he felt, replied, ‘I feel as if I am in limbo, I am so close to these people around me, but I’m separate from them, yet I feel drawn towards my mother.’ This was a transforming moment for me. My grandmother had always unreservedly accepted the teachings of her Church. In her day the Church taught that stillborn children could not be baptised and that unbaptised children could not go to heaven, but went instead to limbo, a sort of inaccessible but humane ‘no man’s land’. I suspect that the natural grief and loss that any mother would experience was exacerbated by the pain of knowing that she and her children would never be reunited in heaven. After the family constellation weekend I questioned my mother about these events but she remembered nothing. I turned to her only remaining sister and asked if she could remember having brothers and sisters who had died. Her reply was dramatic. ‘Yes, it was awful. There was a little boy. He was three years old. He became ill very suddenly. Your Nana took him to

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hospital, carrying him in her arms. They took him away and returned to tell her that her son was dead. She went mad.’ As she said these final words my aunt gasped, her eyes bulged and she put her hand over her mouth. She had finally said what had previously been unspeakable in our family. When I attended the family constellation weekend, the therapist explained that in the following months ‘blockages’ in the family system could be released. She didn’t elaborate on how this would happen, but encouraged us to monitor our own process and not to talk about it casually because that could dilute the effectiveness of the work. It felt as if the floodgates had opened. Within 12 hours of my return from the family constellation weekend my mother telephoned, distressed because she had watched a play depicting the sexual abuse of young boys within our social care system. Until then it had been my perception that my mother was in denial regarding the possibility of child sexual abuse. For the first time we had a conversation about sexual abuse. It was not easy because we have never been comfortable talking about sex. Despite this, the experience was healing for me because I felt that at long last my mother was acknowledging my reality. In effect she was saying ‘you were not imagining things, you were not crazy’. It is impossible for me to put into words the deep psychological significance of her acknowledgement. I can only tell you that I felt different, lighter, relieved. The conversation with my aunt had also reassured me that snippets of memory drawn from conversations I had had many years ago with my grandmother and godmother were indeed accurate. I began to see possible connections between my grandmother’s injuries and my own. As a child I had accompanied my grandmother to hospital for day surgery for the removal of the mole on her face that was a suspected melanoma. Later in life I had three suspected melanomas removed from my face. When my grandmother went mad after the loss of her child, she was put in a straitjacket. When I had my third car accident I was placed on a spinal board which totally restricted my movement, particularly at the neck and lower down between the waist and hips. At work I had seen a demonstration where a patient was put into a straitjacket and I had been greatly distressed watching this without understanding why. Now, years later, I’m beginning to understand. A straitjacket and a spinal board restrict the movement of the body in very similar ways. I have also tried to understand the difficulties I have with my legs. Perhaps by now you will not be surprised if I tell you that my grandmother also had problems with her legs. She had broken her right leg during a fall

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downstairs. Because it was then badly set, it ended up several inches shorter than her left leg. So she wore a full-length caliper on her right leg and a built-up boot on the other foot. I never heard her complain and even though the caliper was padded it must have ground into her groin. I also recall dressing a nasty ulcer on her left leg. I can’t remember how old I was. Years later I developed a patch in almost the same place on my left leg which was similar to the melanomas on my face. Why were all these connections coming into my awareness? I didn’t understand. I just observed them. I was intrigued. I believe now that it is possible to heal myself. At the time of the third car accident I was attempting to heal myself using creative visualisation techniques. I was disappointed when I didn’t get an instant result and discussed the matter with my osteopath. Previously I had experienced creative visualisation and imagery as powerful healing tools. If they were not effective now, what was different I wondered? The words of the osteopath, ‘you have a very deep-seated injury’, kept going round and round in my head. I had a sense that this deep injury was connected to the psychic contract I had made to carry my grandmother’s pain. If I wanted to heal I needed to break that contract. I needed to make a conscious decision not to carry my grandmother’s pain, or to carry pain for anyone. I began to wonder if the third car accident and resulting process were a means to my healing; guiding me to learn about psychic contracts and providing me with an opportunity to break them and heal. During the enforced inactivity resulting from the accident I had taken the opportunity to read the series of books by Neil Donald Walsch, Conversations with God. I liked the values of the God that Neil depicted. His books helped me to construct my own vision of a non-judgemental, loving God who, far from being angry, would be delighted if I broke these inappropriate vows and contracts. So I broke that contract and gradually my situation improved. If this seems bizarre to you my reader, I am not surprised. I found it hugely challenging myself. It is impossible to identify the factors in this story that were most instrumental in my healing. I can only tell it to you as it happened to me and leave you to draw your own conclusions. A few months after the constellation weekend further silences were broken within our family system. I had received conflicting information from two perceived ‘experts’. In Family Secrets Bradshaw (1995) implies that unspoken secrets undermine the family and can have a detrimental effect on the family members. The therapist on the family constellation weekend said, in contrast, that it was appropriate to keep secrets from children, who should

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not be burdened with family guilt. When I first broke my silence about my abuse to my GP and my husband, my sons were very young. We had not yet had discussions about sex. I desperately wanted their sex lives to be uncomplicated, happy, joyous experiences, unlike my own. I genuinely didn’t want them burdened with the guilt that was another man’s. I chose then not to tell them when they asked me what was wrong with me. I told them that I could not find suitable words to explain the situation but when they were old enough to understand I would tell them if they still wanted to know. I was grappling with these different concepts when my prospective daughter-in-law asked me to break my silence and disclose the family secret because my son was carrying it as an intolerable burden. She also told me that he already knew what this unspoken secret was but he needed to hear it from me. He had worked it out by asking himself ‘what could have happened that made mum ill and meant that mum and dad no longer trusted granddad?’ He knew it had to be something serious. I spoke to my son immediately and confirmed his suspicions that I had been sexually abused by my father. I asked him what he felt about this. He was very sad because he could remember the ‘lovely grandad’ who was kind to him, but he believed me and rationalised the abuse as I did. The abusive man was a sick man who had been a prisoner of war and used as enforced labour to build a concentration camp. He had experienced atrocities that we will never have to endure. It didn’t make it right or excuse him, it just helped us to be less judgemental and more understanding. My son was very relieved to have the truth confirmed. I too was very relieved that my dilemma had been resolved. My physical and emotional health continued to improve. I patiently continued with the osteopath and the yoga teacher, hoping that I would eventually restore my body. My progress seemed to peak and then plateau. By then I had worked through the emotional trauma and improved physically so that as long as I did not exert myself I was free from pain without taking painkillers. I was feeling better than I had ever felt. I was able to experience excitement and joy in anticipation of welcome events, which was new to me. Previously I had welcomed positive events but not felt the joy that accompanied them. I had often felt guilty for feeling ‘low’ because I had been brought up to count my blessings and I had been so well blessed. As I am writing this part of my story I make another connection. I understand that ‘being silenced’ is an important part of my experience. I was silenced when my mother gagged me. My father silenced me by abusing me and by distancing me, making me frame my questions perfectly so that I

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ended up being afraid to ask questions at all. The osteopath felt that I had saved myself from experiencing worse injuries by releasing adrenaline by screaming after the accident. I know for myself that I released a lot of my early trauma with that scream. I have learnt to be patient and not to beat myself up. I also appreciate that I need time to consolidate and absorb new learning at a deep and intrinsic level. The co-ordination in my legs has improved beyond measure; slowly my hips are relaxing and the suppleness of the lower part of my body is improving. I can’t tell you exactly how or why these things happened – only that they happened. My life has changed for the better. Most days I experience joy and peace. I am comfortable with my body and in my body. My sense is that I have managed to integrate healing at a physical, emotional and spiritual level. And my story goes on: ‘When you are in a minority of one the truth is still the truth’ (Gandhi).

Postscript

Sunday, 5.40 am. Letter to Kim After our lengthy conversation about my chapter this afternoon, trying to explain to you the feeling I had looking into the eyes of the photos, I went to bed. Had a restless night, woke several times. At 5.30 am I suddenly found an answer! As you know I am flying off to South Africa tomorrow so I won’t have a chance to alter it myself before your deadline for submission so I wanted to ask you to include it in my story in whatever way you can – please. I remembered that the writing on karmic attachment teaches that we come back into a life to resolve issues and learn lessons that we need to learn; or even to help a loved one learn a lesson they need to learn. It seems possible then that we have known our current family/friends in previous lifetimes. What I have just understood (and I’m crying with tears of relief as I write this – i