6.4 'Your Newness'

This is part of an autobiographical series. For more information, see right.



I raced through the kitchen, Frog thundering down the stairs behind me.
    ‘Come back,’ he shouted. ‘Come back. Don’t you dare run away from me.’
    It was the middle of the night and Frog was on the rampage again.
    I was heading for the downstairs bathroom where I hoped to slam the door behind me, lock it and collapse to the floor.
    Unfortunately I didn’t make it. Frog caught up with me and stood in the bathroom doorway blocking my exit.
    ‘Why do you shut me out?’ he boomed, his voice echoing round the tiled room ‘What do I do wrong? Why can’t I do anything right?’

It was the same old stuff, the same old pattern. Frog had wanted sex, I’d frozen. He’d gone into what I called his ‘victim mode’, droning on for hours and hours and hours about how hard-done-by he was. I’d lain beside him in bed, blocking my ears because I knew that by now that there was absolutely nothing I could do to stop him, that anything I said simply made him worse. And then, in the darkness, he’d caught sight of me with hands over my ears and switched to angry mode and I’d fled, knowing it wasn’t safe for us to be together any more as I might get angry too and then we might kill each other.
    

‘Don’t block your ears,’ he shouted as I cringed backwards trying to edge the bathroom door between him and me. ‘Listen to me. React.’
    All at once, something new filled my being. I thought I'd exhausted every option for dealing with these situations, but suddenly I saw a way out. I stood tall, facing Frog. I looked him in the eyes.
    ‘Just stop,’ I said.
    I wasn’t shouting. I wasn’t even raising my voice. But I was speaking firmly, with every ounce of my determination. For that moment, I had total faith in myself and what I was doing.
    Frog stopped instantly and looked at me, astonished.

We weren’t conscious of being different after our years with Pat, but we knew that we now had some strategies for dealing with our emotions and with each other - even though we still needed lots of practice. Equally importantly, we now had hope.

My fortieth birthday arrived and Frog gave me a card with a magical picture on the front of a woman in a cloak bending over a crystal ball with a solar eclipse behind her. Inside he wrote ‘Tiz said life begins at 40. Happy new life’.

On my forty-first birthday he gave me a card of a castle perched on the edge of a torrential waterfall. Inside he’d written ‘Happy birthday, Your Newness’ (‘Your Newness’ being a quotation from the Beatles’ film Yellow Submarine, one of his favourites).

We still saw Sam occasionally, but always together. She gave me a card too, in which she’d written:

I just wanted to write a note to you. . . . I dunno . . . just to say that I have been thinking of you a great deal and to say that I admire your strength. You are a very rare person.
    Also that I think we can learn much from each other and it would be good if we didn’t lose contact. I hope to get to know you better.
    I love you both.

I didn’t know what Sam could learn from me but I did know that I’d learnt a great deal from her.

To be continued . . . 

6.3 Dreams and Whispers

This is part of an autobiographical series. See right for more about it and a link to the full list of instalments.



‘Close your eyes and relax every part of your body,’ said Pat.
    She then went through each part of my body in turn suggesting that it was now warm and soft, much as we did in yoga, except that Pat concentrated on unusual parts such as my stomach and I realised how much tension I carried there. She was speaking very softly and I could only just hear her.
    I wasn’t frightened as I knew now, after our practice session the previous week, that hypnosis didn’t involve loss of control. It was almost the opposite. I was more in control because I was steering from a different part of myself, a deeper part. And my initial trust of Pat had only deepened over the two years that Frog and I had been seeing her.
    In the practice session I’d sat in my usual armchair. Now I was on a futon on the floor of Pat’s room, on my back, covered in a light blanket.
    As before, she asked me to count down in my head from one hundred and to tell her when the numbers disappeared. This they did very quickly as my usual brain took a back seat and I found myself in a world of shadows and fleeting glimpses as if I was halfway between sleep and being awake.
    That was as far as we'd gone in the first session, but this time she carried on.
    ‘You’re walking down some stairs,’ she said. ‘Tell me what you see.’

Frog and I had scuttled back to Devon after the visit to my parents, as ever relieved to be home. We had continued seeing Pat separately.
    Over the months that I'd been seeing her, we’d discussed my migraines, which were plaguing me more and more, and my eating disorders – which twisted and turned and changed their form but never quite went away, even though they were better than they’d been in my teens and early twenties.
    She knew about Brian in London and the terrifying black hole I’d fallen into after he’d taken my virginity and vanished, as well as the impression I’d had at the time of a black shutter crashing down on my life.
    I’d told her about my sexual encounters as a teenager, gropings in the dark which had disgusted me.
    We’d discussed my upbringing, how sex was strictly forbidden before marriage but not encouraged after it as women weren’t supposed to enjoy sex.
    She knew of course about my parents and their condemnation of Frog.
    But did all this explain my struggles, my inability to love him properly?
    She wondered if there was something much earlier going on, perhaps even some form of childhood sexual abuse.
    But I couldn’t remember anything, except for a strange recollection of being fetched from school by unfamiliar people and then left at the side of the road.
    Or was it a dream?
    She’d given me a book to read called When You and Your Mother Can’t Be Friends which took the reader back to their childhood at different ages. From the age of four onwards, for the whole of the rest of the book, I found myself weeping uncontrollably.
    Had something happened at around that time?
    She’d suggested hypnotherapy as a way to uncover hidden memories – and deal with them.

I didn’t answer Pat immediately as I was concentrating on the stairs I was walking down. I knew them well. As I came to the familiar right-angled turn by a window Pat spoke again.
    ‘Where are you now?’ she asked.
    ‘I’m in our old house,’ I said, finding it hard to speak, not because I didn’t want to but because my muscles were so relaxed. ‘Coming down the stairs.’
    Our ‘old house’ was where we lived until I was six.
    ‘How old are you?’
   ‘I’m four,’ I said.
   I don’t know how I knew that. It simply arrived in my head.
    ‘What are you wearing?’
    ‘A red-checked tartan skirt with straps,’ I said.
    Again, I knew that instantly and had a vivid picture in my head of the skirt. I'd never come across the skirt before in my memory.
    ‘What’s happening?’ she asked.
    ‘Someone’s coming out of the kitchen,’ I said. ‘A man.’
    I remembered every room in the old house, and often travelled through them in my mind. The kitchen door was almost opposite the bottom of the stairs.
    ‘And?’ said Pat.
    ‘He’s got a grey apron on,’ I said. ‘The whole of his middle is a grey blur.’
    ‘Do you know him?’ asked Pat.
    ‘I don’t think so,’ I said.
    Then I screamed.
    I was falling into the black hole again and this time it was even more frightening than it had been in London as I had no protection, nothing outside me to fall back on.
    My stomach was rising through my body.

    ‘Help! I’m going to be sick,’ I yelled.
    ‘Count back up to a hundred,’ Pat commanded. ‘Now.’
    It was like making my way up from the bottom of the ocean.

Even though we persevered with the hypnotherapy, we never went quite so deep again. It wasn’t deliberate on my part to avoid anything but I suppose that somewhere inside I was too afraid. And nor did Pat ever ask me about that incident again.
    I felt that it was a pity we hadn’t persevered but I guessed that Pat had had to stop the session as you couldn’t have someone vomiting when half paralysed and lying on their back. It would have been too dangerous.
    I desperately wanted to pull my weeds up by the root but perhaps some weeds were not yet ready to be removed.
    I had no idea what that whole session had been about.

Pat led me into hypnosis slightly differently each time. Usually we started with stairs. Sometimes I went through a mysterious door. Sometimes she asked me to imagine a beautiful safe space, such as sitting under a tree. Sometimes I found a helper – an angelic being who accompanied in my adventures and kept me safe.

    We explored different aspects of my life and worked out strategies for dealing with difficulties, reprogramming my mental and emotional processes.

    I went back into past lives, including past lives with Frog, to see what I could learn from them.
    I did a lot of crying, with the tears trickling into my ears and me unable to do anything about them.
    The sessions ended with light, with Pat suggesting I imagined being filled and surrounded with it.

However vivid my experiences under hypnosis, most of them dissipated like dreams soon after I woke, and Frog who was also having hypnosis found the same happened with him, so we couldn’t really talk about what we were doing, although we tried.
    We did ask Pat about having hypnosis together, but somehow we never did.

It always took me several minutes to be able to move after I’d come back from a session and opened my eyes. 
    One day – nearly a year perhaps into the hypnotherapy – it took me more than a few minutes. I lay, scarcely able to breathe, for what felt like hours. It was frightening. I felt as if I'd never be able to move again.
    At last I was able to wiggle my fingers.
    ‘I feel like I’ve been on a very long journey,’ I whispered.
    ‘You have,’ said Pat.

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6.2 After the Speech

 This is an instalment of an autobiographical series. See right for more information.

As I came to the end of my speech, I was dizzy with relief. The ordeal I’d been dreading for weeks was over. My muscles relaxed and I felt as if I’d never be able to function again. My hands were still shaking.
    As well as the transcript of my speech, I was also holding a folder containing the letters and I now – as suggested by Pat - put it down on a nearby side table.
    ‘I’m leaving the letters behind,’ I said. ‘I don’t need them any more.’

I hardly dared look up. My parents hadn’t yet said a word. What was their reaction to my first ever attempt at standing up to them?
    Were they monsters or were they real human beings? Could the gulf between us ever be crossed?
    Their faces were inscrutable. They weren’t shocked or angry or even embarrassed. What were they?
    Then my mother shrugged.
    ‘Oh well,’ she said. ‘Things said in the heat of the moment, you know.’
    Coming from her, that was almost an apology, and I almost wanted to hug her.
    She’d never said sorry to me about anything and one of her precepts was ‘Qui s’excuse, s’accuse’. This I’d always taken to be a hangover from her aristocratic background and its associated arrogance (in my opinion).
    She’d made an admission of guilt, but was smoothing it over by making light of her words.
    That was OK. It was a start.
    ‘What I don’t understand’, said my father, squirming in his chair and looking like a small boy as he always did when emotions were in play, ‘is why you were in such a hurry to be married.’
    What hurry, I thought. It hadn’t seemed like a hurry to Frog and me. On the contrary, the months had seemed agonisingly long. Why wait when you knew what you wanted?
    Anyway, I knew how to deal with that observation.
    ‘We’d known each other for nearly a year,’ I said. ‘How long had you and Mum known each other when you got married?’
    I had the answer, of course, but I wondered if my parents remembered, or had made the connection.
    Strangely, Frog and I had married at almost exactly the same age as my parents. We had been 25 and 26 and they had been 24 and 27. Neither of them had had mothers around though. And their fathers didn’t appear to have been close. My mother’s father appeared in only one of the photographs from the occasion and my father’s father not at all.
    ‘A year,’ said my mother.
    Sometimes her outspokenness was a blessing.

Frog then had his say which, being unprepared, was short and slightly repetitive, but I was glad he said something. It was important that he showed support for me by joining in and vital for him to reveal that he was a real person with feelings as I didn’t think that was something my parents had ever credited him as being. Because he wasn’t like them they didn’t see him as fully human or worthy of respect.
    I’d found it difficult to understand how they could have written such awful things about him in the letters, without thinking that he might be reading them. They didn’t know that Frog and I were already living together but even so what sort of a relationship did they think we had, for me not to share the letters with him? And for both Frog and me to share some of what was going on with Frog’s parents?
    The letters had hurt both Frog and his parents and that was an outcome my parents had not considered. Even if my parents had changed to a degree in the way they behaved towards him, I couldn’t forget what they’d said. I was angry for all of us – me, Frog and Frog’s parents.
    Again, I realised that Frog had a lot more going on emotionally than I had credited him with. I wished I’d spent some time helping him prepare a speech. 

My parents listened to him without comment.
    I wondered if this whole situation was as alien to them as it was to me. Perhaps they simply didn’t know how to react or what to say.

My ‘alternative arrangements’ were my old schoolfriend, Trish’s daughter, who’d offered Frog and me a bed for the night if we needed it. Her support touched me as I’d always found her family harmonious and perfect. I rang her and said I thought we could manage to stay with my parents.
    Not that I wanted to, but I felt that to leave now would be cowardly – even more cowardly than I normally was. It was also unkind and might lead to a permanent rift, and I didn’t want that.
    I’d tried to get away from the problem by living in Devon but it had followed me down and I knew now that physical distance did not mean emotional distance.
    I still flipped between my parents’ view of Frog and mine. My (non) relationship with my parents still drove a wedge between Frog and me. I wanted it sorted.

The next day was fine, so my mother took her pre-lunch glass of wine out into the garden. My father sat inside with his pre-lunch whisky. He didn’t trust the sun. He’d suffered heat rash all over his body when in Calcutta with the navy during the war. My mother, being half Scandinavian, was fanatical about light. Whatever the temperature, if the weather was fine you had to be outside.

    I sat inside with my father.
    I’d always found him less scary than my mother. He tended not to hit below the belt and his letters, while equally devastating to me, had perhaps come from a better place than my mother’s. Or perhaps I was simply more willing to excuse him.
    ‘I didn’t need to marry someone like you,’ I said. ‘I had you as a father.’
    He looked so pleased that I stood up and gave him a hug, as prescribed by Pat.
    It didn’t feel too bad.
    Then I went outside to join my mother.
    ‘You’ll never change him, you know,’ she said, smiling ruefully.
    Did that mean she’d changed, or thought she had? Had I been working on outdated information all this time?
    If that was the case, why on earth hadn’t she said something? I wasn’t a mind-reader. Words could only be cancelled out by words.

As we all made our way to the kitchen for lunch, my father leant against a wall with a silly smile on his face.
    Both my parents drank huge amounts and I could remember them arriving back from parties and my mother racing to the bathroom looking green without even stopping to say hello to us children. I’d only occasionally seen my father wobbly, however.
   This was perhaps one of those times, but he looked happier than I remembered ever seeing him.

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PART 6. 1 My Speech

This is an instalment of an autobiographical series. For more information, see right.



1992

‘What I’m talking about is what happened before I got married and the letters you wrote to me. Because of the pain it is not a subject I have been able even to think about let alone speak about for fourteen years. But I think it’s vital that we now clear the air. I feel that we are drifting further and further apart and I’m finding it more and more of a farce to come home. It has not been easy coming to see you all these years knowing what you think of me and what you think of John. Please believe that I’ve done it out of love, not duty and if I didn’t love you I wouldn’t be here today.’

My hands were shaking as I read from my sheaf of papers.
    Love wasn’t a word we ever used in my family except at the end of letters. I wondered if this was already the end of my attempt to make a speech and whether my parents were about to hoot in derision since that was what usually happened when I expressed things close to my heart. How did I ever get to be a daughter of theirs?
    Frog and I were on a high upright sofa against the wall with my parents opposite us, lower down in squishy armchairs.
    We were in the ‘blue room’, the small sitting-room in which my parents usually spent their evenings when they were on their own. It was cosy and a little dark with a wall of shelves crammed with books. I was glad we were there as it was more informal than the big ‘yellow room’ with its two large sofas at right angles to each other, its three sides of windows and its doors leading on to a terrace.
    It was after supper on the first evening of our visit to my parents and I’d plunged straight in to my talk. My parents had looked surprised when I’d asked them to sit down but had done so without complaint.
    The room was still silent so I carried on.

‘I can’t brush all those events under the carpet and pretend that nothing happened when I’m boiling over with anger and unhappiness – still, even though it was fourteen years ago. You had your say, but I never have. And I’d like to have it now. I must have it now if we are to repair things between us.’

My words had started to sound melodramatic and clichéd, and my throat was locking, but I couldn’t stop now. That would make me look even more of an idiot, and I’d never have the courage to reach this stage again.

‘First I’ll read out a few of the accusations you levelled against me – and I’m quoting from the letters.

    Irresponsible
    Drifting from whim to whim
    Inclined to ‘frivvle’ money
    Anticipating money
    Immature and not sensible
    Impulsive
    Acting with unseemly haste
    Inconsiderate
    Acting in an unsavoury manner
    Acting unfairly
    Likely to let people down
    Acting abruptly
    Not respecting other people’s point of view
    Discourteous
    Unkind
    Thoughtless
    Bigoted
    Dishonest

‘And now some of the judgements you passed on John – again from the letters.

    No brains or charm
    Unable to provide properly
    Not settled in a reasonable career
    Irresponsible
    Unlikeable
    Difficult to talk to
    Naïve
    Prejudiced
    Cliché-ridden
    Uneducated
    Ill-mannered

‘It was devastating to hear this from you. I can’t express how sad it made me to feel you misunderstood me so much and had such a low opinion of me and everything I’d been doing while growing up.
    ‘It also made me very angry that you felt you had a right to inflict your opinions on me. You’ve never asked me what my views on life are. You’ve always tried to mould me in your image. You’ve implied that it was my duty to behave like you. And that if I didn’t I was being ungrateful or naughty or stupid or something.
    ‘I have to follow my own conscience, wherever it takes me. It’s not right that anyone should be dominated by someone else. I’m different from you. I’m a different generation, a different person. You’ve never realised this and never given me the freedom to be myself.
    ‘Of course I want you to be happy, but I can’t betray myself to make you happy. You’d no right to use emotional blackmail on me and I think this is what angers me more than anything else.
    ‘Not so much you Dad as I realise a lot of what you said was said from genuine concern but perhaps over-protectiveness. It is statements like the following (and I’m quoting here from two of Mum’s letters).

 
    “It was difficult to say that it was lovely to see you last weekend. I think it was almost the saddest few days of my life,”
   and
    “I’m not sending you conventional phrases of good wishes. They would stick in my throat.”

 
‘Those are terrible things to say.
    ‘I blame myself for never having stood up to you properly before. In fact I’ve always tried to please you. Everything I did was to please you. But nothing has ever been good enough. And I realise now that I was a fool and very wrong to let it go on for so long. If you really find me so objectionable and such a disappointment to you there’s no earthly reason why we should ever see each other again.’

I sounded screechy and childish and I was beginning to see that I was forgetting everything Pat had taught us about speaking from the heart and not accusing, but it was too late now to change my words.
    I’d written the speech almost automatically and not edited it, knowing that, if I did try to do so, it would fall apart.
    I’d never spoken to my parents like this before and I knew I still had a lot to learn.

‘But if we do continue to see each other it is essential that you respect and listen to me and my views. You have to let me be free. Anything else is very destructive. I can’t see you on any other terms.
    ‘We must be able to disagree with each other without you taking it personally. If I disagree with you I’m not criticising you or dismissing your way of life. It’s just a sign that I’m alive. I’m not just a copy of you. I’m a person in my own right.
    ‘You may say that all these events I’m talking about happened fourteen years ago and what on earth’s the point of bringing them up now. They’re over and done with. But they’re not and I can’t forget them.
    ‘If I’ve upset you I’m sorry. I’m trying to repair things between us and help things develop. They have been stuck at a very bad patch for a long time. However if you can’t put up with me any more I don’t have to stay a moment longer. I’ve made alternative arrangements for tonight should it be necessary.
    ‘But if we can clear the air and move forward together with honesty and tolerance I shall be overjoyed.’

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5.8 Sex etc

This is an instalment of an autobiographical series (unnamed as yet). For more about it, see right.

So then we tackled the thorny subject of sex.

Pat gave us a book to read. It was a collection of people’s sexual fantasies, possibly only those of women, but I can’t remember. I can’t remember the title either.
    It helped up to a point, but I didn’t like using fantasy – whether my own or other people’s. My fantasies were unpleasant, about being degraded and coerced, and I didn’t want to encourage them.
    Fantasy didn’t solve my fundamental blockages; it simply bypassed them. It wasn’t a long-term solution.
    Nor did using fantasy seem fair to Frog. It took me away from him.
    And I don’t think Frog ever used fantasy, not that we talked about it. It wasn’t in his nature. He was far too pragmatic.

Classic sexual therapy was next on the agenda. This involved taking things slowly – going to a certain point, as directed by Pat in her session with us that week, and then stopping. And then, all being well, going a little bit further the following week. Again, as directed by Pat.
    This didn’t work for me either as I switched off before we even started. In other words, I would do what I always did at the prospect of sex. I would stop breathing, my stomach would clench, my whole body would lock and my brain would fuse.
    We had a holiday booked during this part of our time with Pat and while on holiday we fell straight back into our old patterns.

We started to see her separately.

In Frog’s case, I suspected this meant him being able to give full rein to his grievances, his complaints about me. We didn’t talk about his sessions though. I think we felt that we’d already done enough talking – and shouting - with each other. We were so tired of it.
    In my case, seeing Pat alone meant talking about my parents, and in particular what I called The Letters – the letters my parents had written to me when Frog and I wanted to marry.
    I’d kept the letters in a file in the bottom of a drawer hoping to forget about them but not wanting to destroy them because I had an inkling that they might one day be important. They were evidence. I hadn’t forgotten about them however. In fact I thought about them every day.
    ‘During Sam’, as Frog and I now called the year when he was seeing her and I knew about it, I’d shown them to two people. To Di, the friend I met every week for lunch. She’d laughed and I’d wished I could too. And to Sam. As she finished reading them, she’d nodded.
    ‘I see,’ she said. ‘These make a lot of things much clearer.’
    I was grateful for her understanding.
    I brought them in to show Pat and she read through the file in silence while I waited.
    Up until then Pat had not expressed an opinion about anything, which was another of my surprises about counselling. I’d expected – from the name of the therapy – that being told what to do was its primary function. On the contrary. Its primary function, as far as I could see, was for us to find solutions for ourselves, through Pat’s questioning.
    I didn’t therefore expect her to pass any comment on the letters. I was simply showing them to her to give her the background.
    When she’d finished reading however, she looked up at me, her eyes shiny behind her serious black glasses.
    ‘Oh dear, Belinda,’ she said. ‘These are terrible.’

I would visit my parents, Pat and I decided, and talk to them about the effect of the letters on me. I wrote out what I was going to say, knowing that I would be incapable of saying anything otherwise. I read my speech out to Pat and she nodded her approval.
    ‘Why don’t you give your parents some spontaneous gestures of affection when you’re there,’ she said.
    I looked at her in horror. I’d never done such a thing. We didn’t do things like that in our family.
    ‘And when you’ve finished speaking,’ she said, ‘give them the letters back.’
    Frog was going to say something too but, in true Frog fashion, he didn’t prepare anything. He preferred speaking off the cuff. He did it all the time on the radio and he loved the adrenalin rush it gave him. I hated adrenalin. It gave me migraines.
    I made a date with my parents for Frog and me to visit, without telling them why. I wanted it to be a normal visit, as far they were concerned. I didn’t want to put any pressure on the situation. As far as I was concerned, it had more than enough already.
    The visit loomed over me like the entrance to a dark tunnel. It was the most frightening thing I’d ever done.

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