Families And How To Escape Them - Chapter Twenty Three - Moving Sideways

The church weekend and events that came after put me at an unexpected crossroads. Normally I would say that talk of 'being at a crossroads' was a cliche to be resisted, but there I was my cliche was real life. I felt that something in me had changed, but I had not worked out what it was, or where it was going to take me. One of the more obvious ways in which I felt this was that I was sleeping badly. Without talking to anyone about this, not even my doctor, I struck upon what seemed like a workable solution.7

In the gestalt therapy I had experienced one of the oddest experiences I'd had up to that point in my life. In it I felt both united and internally divided as I watched myself obeying instructions from the therapist to talk as an adult to a cushion that represented my insecure and frightened childhood self. It seemed both strange and normal at the same time. I was not going to get therapy via my doctor for at least a year. I decided to start what would now be called journaling simply so that I could get better sleep. Without prior thought or planning my idea proved to be quite intense; it was to fill an A4 pad with every thought I'd had that day that had not gone anywhere, but had remained in my head, before going to sleep. Even if the idea even partially left my head before the night I put it down on paper. Who knows how much I was influenced by the phrase of St Paul, 'Don't let the sun go down on your anger.'? I didn't know, I had my problems with how St Paul was quoted anyway. What I knew was that filling an A4 pad was a cheap cure for a lack of sleep and over time it might allow me to reflect on, and change, the way I thought. It might help me put an end to ideas I'd had that were awkward to own around other people, church people.  21

When I was not that much younger my mother had shared with me a similar, but less helpful, idea. In her version the troubling situation was written out in a piece of paper and the paper had to be destroyed, flushed down the toilet or torn to bits, as if flushing the description away flushed away the real life trouble, itself. And anyway with Mother's 'flush it away' approach I could not stop myself thinking that where the trouble came from real people in live situations that we refused to deal with then the piece of paper flushed away left us doubly exposed to the real life source of the trouble; we thought we had dealt with it but we had not. And anyway hadn't I been flushed round the education system via her consenting to me going to the boarding school/care home between 1972, and 1977? And even then I had been returned to my family in a different, but as bad, a place as when I was first sent away? My privacy was what allowed me to keep the writing, my place of safety that allowed this therapy substitute to do it's work. I felt a lot better keeping the  jottings that aided my sleep, and using them to reflect further on situations where flushing the description of the problem away left me with a watery and unhelpful real life situation.35

Being one of Adelaide's tenants, I was now in a much more open space. It was open in a way that we were all grown ups who could choose much more what to rely on each other for, whether that meant video taping programmes for each other when one person was out, or basic household duties like cleaning and tidying the garden. Adelaide had a shelf full of psychotherapy and social work books which were part of her training reading for being a senior social worker which she allowed me to borrow, read, and return. I don't have a list of the many books I read but I read which included all sorts of esoteric takes on trauma, and counselling, some of which I identified with, a lot I didn't as much as I'd hoped. 43

By far the most helpful psychotherapy book was one that I found by chance in a charity shop in West Bridgford. It was called 'Dibbs: In Search of Self' by Virginia Axline. It is the verbatim account of the play therapy process of a child of privileged professional, but distant, New York parents who was withdrawn and angry towards with his family. The parents sent the child to a play therapy unit, where under the influence of Carl Rodgers the therapist had to watch Dibs play with the soldiers and other figures in the sand box, and talk with Dibs, then talk with him to get him to be open about the thoughts behind his play. The therapist had sit level with Dibs to get close with him as through play his constricted emotions, including anger, are slowly loosened and express themselves through the commentary and narratives Dibs gave the figures he plays with. 58

I cannot underestimate  how much this book meant to me, both when I first read it and for a long time after. As I read the book, so my gestalt process extended and Dibs' therapist became my therapist. As Dibs' verbatim responses in therapy, and anger and many other emotions slowly unlocked themselves through his play, so I found my own responses and thanked Bibs' therapist for helping me let out a quite a lot of my emotions onto the A4 pad. I emoted less than Dibs did. But with the open-ness of what I wrote on the pad, the pad became even more of a reliable emotional prop for me. This diary was started in the November of 1990. I stopped adding further entries in the April/May of 1992. By then I felt emptied. I had let out as much of the long supressed emotions through writing as l could. 68

If local people saw me as more approachable for keeping the better sleep diary then they did not know why, their incuriosity could only help me by accident. Beyond surface observation they would always be incurably middle class. One subject that came up in the A4 pad was the period of time I'd had earlier as part of a hot headed Pentecostal church where their belief in miracles was such that they thought that if they had access to mental hospitals then by breaking into the hospital and forcibly laying their hands on the patients they could heal the patients and put an end to the medication that in the view of the Pentecostal church perpetuated the illnesses that the patients were suffering from. There was nothing as hot headed in the beliefs of West Bridgford Baptist Church, but there was a sense of detachment from the views of mental health professionals, the better to believe that the church knew better than the mental health professionals did, whilst avoiding any of the specifics that might prove the church wrong to itself. 80

The church response to homosexuality was nearly as neutral as it's responses to troubled mental health. Their collective public view was that both homosexuality and the gay culture were some sort of false construct made by men and women whom the church believed earlier in their life had received too little support to be a good example of from the parent of the same gender as the lesbian or gay man. This 'blame the parents approach at least held the tongues of church goers from blaming the gay men and lesbians they met who were open about their sexuality in the hope of being more responsible about how it worked. But this argument was rarely opened out because the easy counter argument was 'how are you going to get the horse back in the stable once it has bolted? How are you going to get the parents of these gay people who you say with hindsight raised their children in imbalanced way?90

My friend from the city centre church, Spyder, met gay men socially and accepted them at face value. He must still have known more than he could share about the stereotypical passive/active role play that gay men were apparently prone to. He once shared with me a shockingly lame joke about two camp gay men in which they played the role of being camp to the hilt and it fitted all too well around the misconceived machismo of heterosexual male society all too well. But on the whole he steered an affirmative path with the gay men he thought of as his friends.96

I knew about the role of sexual passivity, it was implied to me when I was in short trousers and around older boys. I had first experienced it, when violence was said to be 'playful', at age twelve. I could never imagine me playing out an 'active' sexual role to somebody else being passive. But then I was still effectively 'in the closet', as regards what I could imagine. The emotional diary writing had not really opened up that side of my life, though it would get closer to doing that later. But even so opening up about the forced social passivity of my past, and how it made me sexually passive, was like dismantling the fuse of a live bomb-evoking any memories too precisely, particularly bad memories, would make me want to re-enact them.     104

Meanwhile that Christmas the biggest surprise came to me when an employee of the church who worked for Boots the Chemist gave me the tip off for a temporary job working for the company. It started straight after Christmas. The biggest surprise to me was how well I was paid. For the first time ever, after being available for work for fourteen years and doing hand to mouth temporary part time jobs this job was full time and paid me wages that put me above being able to claim housing benefit for the first time...    110