News from the couch

by Rick Johansen

WARNING: None of what follows is a whinge. It’s a ramble through today’s mental health therapy session.

God, I’m knackered. I’d quite forgotten just how tiring it is to have mental health therapy. I went along today feeling quite okay, at least physically, but I came out in a fuzz. How can this be?

I’ve been revisiting some very dark places, which I suppose is tiring itself. My therapist took me back, or rather led me back, to childhood times that had slipped to the back of my mind and other times I would rather have forgotten. One of these places was school.

I do not have a view one way or the other about my schooldays. I don’t look upon them as happy or sad. Those days were okay but largely worthless in terms of the way my life panned out. In terms of academia, I learned little. I was hopeless at all the sciences, had (and still have) a rudimentary understanding of Maths and practical subjects – well, let’s not go there. I don’t remember being pushed although I do remember being bullied so badly by the woodwork teacher Mr Jay that one day I walked out of his lesson and went straight home. I hated him so much because he didn’t grasp that I couldn’t understand what he was teaching, not that I didn’t want to. I spent much of the rest of my life trying to avoid people like that.

That not understanding anything has been steady since school, too, and I am not sure up to today quite how I got by for 39 years at work without being sacked. Not for misbehaviour but for not being able to learn. And it’s there now, with for example something that needs to be self-assembled: the instructions, simple to everyone else, but impenetrable for me. Frustrating? Just a bit.

I have had to confront my past in terms of what my mother and father taught me, or rather what they didn’t. This does not apply equally to them, nor does it imply any form of neglect or bad parenting, at least not deliberately bad parenting. I got in deep in certain areas and it was very uncomfortable. I did not want it to look like I was saying my mum was a bad parent because she wasn’t, but she was a stranger in a strange land and never got used to the system. So when I was bombing at school, she never grasped the meaning of it, and there was no one she knew who could offer advice.

Does this read as a confused blog post? You should be me trying to write it. I feel like my brain has been through a 12 round contest with both the Klitschko brothers simultaneously. I know I would last 12 seconds, including the count with either of them, but my grey matter is very mulchy at the moment. I am not sure I was fit to drive back to my home after today’s session, either. I certainly don’t remember anything about driving home, not even the direction I took.

In the grand scheme of things, I am not in a terrible place at the moment because I am not, currently, in a dip. I’m very fidgety, making patterns with my feet at therapy and finding it hard to keep still, but my head is above water.

I cannot believe my slightly unconventional background has had nothing to do with the man I have become. My mother was usually an isolationist, who locked the door when she came home from work and it stayed locked until the morning, regardless of whether anyone came to the door, and my father and I spent decades being father and son via air mail. And me, I ploughed a lone furrow, making my own decisions, or usually indecisions, just trying to get by and not always succeeding.

I’d forgotten just how much of my life has been utterly miserable. Not the family stuff, obviously: I know how lucky I have been in that department for the second part of my life, but the spectre of failure and unfulfilled potential is writ large on my psyche and I cannot see how that can be changed. That’s the reason, again, I am in therapy. There must be something out there that I am good at that could give me the reason to be. Not that there is a reason for life, I know, but this is the only one I am going to have and if someone can give me the opportunity to make it more worthwhile, I am going to take it.

If any of this makes any sense, then I must have got it wrong somewhere along the line because in my tired state, it makes little to me. But I am trying hard to be better and get better just as I always do in therapy. I suppose the most positive thing about it is that I keep coming back for more instead of giving up.

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1 comment

Julian Pirog May 18, 2015 - 14:23

The best psychiatrist I had, David Nutt, said that the hardest part about getting through therapy and to healing was that we had to re-live that pain all over again so that we could get through the therapy. He told me that in the very first session and I was grateful to have the honesty. The hardest for me was when our local authority would not match what his new employer would give and so my attempt at therapy was ended with him.
I hold it works out for you Rick. Be kind to yourself

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