What The Therapist Said….

A couple of months ago I endured a particularly monumental and eye opening comedown from an especially life affirming Bangface Weekender. Now usually the Bangface comedown much like the Glastonbury comedown are in a league of their own in terms of crippling intensity. A unpredictable mix of serotonin depletion, lack of sleep, and far too much fun always seem to have an interesting aftermath of paranoia, sleep paralysis, psychosis and sometimes-suicidal tendencies. This one however was a lot different, and that wasn’t just because of the large course of Xanax and Valium I ignorantly proscribed myself with by the handful. This one was quite profound and reflective and made me realize that there are a few items in my psyche that I really do need to address. I noticed that I have a number of issues that I have been sweeping under the rug for my entire adult life, so much so that the pile it has created is now starting to become quite obvious and disruptive to my day-to-day life. Then when a dear friend – also trying to process a few Gulliver issues quoted Louis Theroux in a recent Adam Buxton podcast, where he said that he attends therapy sessions every 18 months as a kind of ‘M.O.T for the mind’. Acknowledging that was a good way to look at it I spent a week shopping around and actually trying to figure out what the problem was I was trying to resolve, then I booked my first therapy session.

 

I suppose I should give both an advanced warning and an apology for this particular entry. I aint written much since I recently decorated the place – I’ve been busy keeping my nose clean. Also the subject and content of this particular entry may lack the fun and frolics of what you’re used to. So if like me you find writing that revolves around the throbbing ego of someone shouting ‘LOOK AT THIS! LOOK HOW DREADFUL MY LIFE HAS BEEN!’ completely self-righteous and boring then you might want to give this one a miss. Fear not though as I’m off on my festival odyssey soon and you’ll all be kept up to date with events there with what I’m hoping is going to be an adventure filled with enough sex, drugs and rock n roll to finally get me that publishing deal I often fantasies about. That’ll be the day eh?   For everyone’s sake though I have tried as best I can to stray away from the darker details as much as possible. As the old Irish saying goes: ‘never let a silly thing like childhood mental, physical and sexual abuse get in the way of a good yarn’

 

I think it was a combination of hitting the latter side of my twenties, the aforementioned come down and the prospect of 3 months lone traveling that made me finally decide that I should really get to the bottom of a few things. Get a few theories as to why I am the way I am. Why do I find it so hard to express emotion? Why am I so intimately stunted towards women and why cant I form meaningful intimate relationships with them? Is my attitude towards sex healthy? Why am I so afraid of commitment? Are all my previous failures and misogynist traits a mix of many underlying things? I spoke to one or two mates who had been through the process already and they had said it helped them so after a few back and forths over phone and email I eventually settled for a £50 a pop in house visit every Monday.

 

Now what I will say is that the following was just my experience of therapy. If you’ve been considering it and are reading this to find out what the process is please do bare in mind that experiences may differ based on your type of treatment and therapist. Although I’m sure the first couple of sessions of telling your life story and trying to word exactly what it is you’re trying to resolve are pretty standard really. I got asked general questions such as ‘what was your earliest memory? What was primary school like? Which parent were you closest to as a child? When did you lose your virginity? When did you discover drugs and alcohol? When did you become independent? That kind of thing dominated the first 2 sessions.

 

What I did realize straight away is that you get out as much of the process as you give in. That is to say the more open and honest you are about things the more your man has to work with. What I think also helps is your relationship with your therapist. Being in the company of someone you feel comfortable telling all your secrets too is vital. My thought on the situation was that I was paying this geezer a fair whack of my weekly salary to listen to all my secrets. I can’t shock him and I’ve done nothing bad enough in my life for him to grass me up to the police about so I might as well tell the whole truth. Also he sounded like Werner Herzog and that relaxed me.

 

The first few sessions were actually a bit uninspiring. Simply because they were about trauma’s I’d been through in my adult life. Situations and scenarios with life and mainly women that I had discussed over and over with friends and had pretty much all but processed and come to terms with and was now bored talking about. When I told my man how all this was water under the bridge now and how I have an understanding of it all he responded telling me that the idea was not to get an intellectual reasoning as to why this shit happened, but was more about getting me to open up on how it all made me feel at the time. It took about 5 sessions in until he uttered ‘Well to find out the route of peoples feelings towards women, we must focus on the first woman we ever come into contact with… What was your relationship like with your mother?’ Then I knew shit was about to get pretty real…

 

One thing I’ve always found about my childhood is that I find quite a lot of it hard to recall. Or what I should say is that I never really find myself in a situation where I have to bring it up so therefore never have to really think about it. The process of being probed on it was a bit like when you go up into the loft in your parents house and route around all the boxes of your childhood possessions. A lot of it you can remember but then you pull something out that you’d completely forgot about and it suddenly invokes all of these memories. That’s what was going on in my mind. Now I’ve always given my childhood a relatively positive spin. Yea sure I acknowledge there were some pretty terrible moments but it was no shitter then the next bloke. However when I was up in that theoretical loft routing through all those cognitive boxes I managed to stumble across some celluloid of some pretty dark and grainy memories that I had hoped I had forgotten about as if they were some terrible nightmare.

 

My timeline of shit that I’m prepared to share outside of that room is this: When I was about 8 my old man ran his chauffer business into the ground causing him to go bankrupt and lose a lot of assets one of which was very nearly our house. The tension of this seemed to go on for years and was always top of the agenda in my parents very loud, intense and occasionally violent rows. This didn’t help my mothers mental health which she’d always struggled with even when I was much younger. When my old man eventually did find another job it would cause him to spend pretty much every week day away, leaving me and my brother at home to deal with our very unpredictable, manically depressed mother. Sometimes she’d just lie in bed and leave us to fend for ourselves, sometimes she’d scream really nasty things at us, but to be fair I’m sure a lot of the time she was sound as a pound. However on a few occasions she’d go so mental she’d get sectioned. I still have very clear memories of going to visit her in that hospital. At the age I was I remember only being able to process that my mum was sick, I didn’t know what was really wrong with her. When those days eventually passed it was then my brother who took up the role of family burden by getting in with the wrong crowd and getting heavily addicted to drugs. With that came the standard junky traits of relentless lies, things going missing – mainly my dvds, computer games and pocket money. He’d also be very aggressive and often violent towards not just me but my mother as well. I remember one particular incident where I had to call the police because he’d chucked my mother through a bathroom door. This seemed to dominate my entire early teens and it wasn’t until I turned about 16 and he moved away that the family was free of him. What angered me about the whole chapter was that my old man never really did anything about it. Infact even in the years to come my dad was to make allowances and essentially enable my brother. It’s a resentment I’ve bought up with him in person quite recently…. My brother still uses drugs but is not a junky anymore, which in some strange way to his credit defies the status quo. However he is the most vile person I have ever met and even to this day continues to be a burden to the family with his complete inability to gain independence. However I now mainly pity instead of hate him. I think he only ever contacts my dad when he wants something. I don’t make any effort to contact him.

 

Right that’ll do for now…

 

What was interesting about regaling this in such detail was that I had never really gone over it again with anyone. Yea sure I may have mentioned minor details to friends like I did just there but to really let out all the emotions I felt about that particular period of my life gave me a feeling of liberation that I cannot really describe. It wasn’t until I left the session when I was all shaking and choked up that I noticed what effect it had on me. What’s more, to be told by someone that infact my childhood was filled with hostility, fear and the sense that I wasn’t safe in my home was a truth that I had secretly always knew but had never given the time to admit. This being said I do have plenty of fond memories from childhood and adolescents and I often reflect on it in a positive light. A lot of that shit as you probably can imagine does follow you to your adult life. But more on that later.

 

Once all the repressed childhood memories were out the way the sessions would focus more on my emotional issues and my frustration at not being able to express them. The irony of this was that I couldn’t convey what it was I was feeling, that was the problem and I sometimes found that I was just agreeing with whatever my man was saying just so we could change the subject and talk about something else. Then at the start of some sessions when he’d ask me how I’d like to use the time and I’d say that for instance that I’d like to talk about sex and how in recent years it has mostly been a series of meaningless one night stands and that this has upset me. That would then digress to talking about intimacy, which would then again revert back to expressing my emotions and questioning my persona. It was frustrating but I was starting to see where the problem lay.

 

What was to my disadvantage was the little time I had to fit these sessions in. I think in total I got about 10 before having to call it a day for my travels. This was frustrating as I felt it took about 8 sessions to really get going, the final session however was the one where by just simply asking a few questions, the theories I was looking for clicked into place.

 

‘You mentioned that both your mother and your brother were too very emotionally unstable people?… And these feelings have always made you feel uncomfortable when they have surfaced with in you? Do you find that the majority of women you have been able to form intimate relationships with have also been in their own way emotionally unstable?… All these questions were answered with yes, and that spoke volumes.

 

I was then told that the importance of emotions to a person are that they are what make you truly experience life and although there may be a lot more practice to express these emotions in future now may be the time to slow down when these feelings start to surface, take some time to understand what it is they are doing and then slow down and then express them.

 

I was also questioned on whether my persona of a being a tough, emotionless patriarch was also part of the issue. I finally admitted that this was true and that over the coming months of traveling I should focus on trying to change this persona. To keep the level headed side of me that lacks the paranoia and uses logic in his decision and the confidence that does make me not give a fuck what people think of me but to also now take the time to open up more to people and see where that leads me and finally quash that contradiction that despite I may let on that I don’t care what others think, I’d hate for them to see me as less of a man for expressing tender feelings.

 

Like I said it was ashame I had such little time to scratch the surface of my issues. I thought that not being conventionally fucked up would be to my benefit when in fact that because I am so emotionally dense it was always going to be a challenge.

 

So that is what I am going to use these next 3 months for…. Instead of shutting those feelings that surface whenever I meet a woman that I like because I feel that expressing them may make me feel week or less of a man I am going to overpower that side of myself and just do it. The illusion that a man shouldn’t express his feelings is so dated now it’s almost decayed beyond recognition and where has it ever got any of us? But the one piece of advice that will stick with me is that our emotions are what make us feel life. They are our passions and are loves and are what make this short journey all worthwhile.

I would recommend a course of therapy for those of you who can afford it. Especially for the blokes as I think a lot of us are still holding a lot of shit in and even that simple process of just sitting in a room with someone and finally opening up in an environment of total honesty and no judgment it can really let a huge weight off your shoulders you didn’t realize was weighing you down so much. I still have a long way to go to get to the bottom of my issues with women and relationships but in that short time I already feel more comfortable to express things I hadn’t before…. Consider it atleast, you may know just how helpful it may be.