Essays from The Shadows
Volume Three
I have no idea how to do therapy. I only know this strange mix that has evolved for us. The aftermath, the time where I go home and I sleep and ponder and think and try to decide what it is I have learnt, is fraught with wrong turns and misdirection.
I struggled initially to manage without his guidance and even felt slightly abandoned. Over the first week I found myself stabilising and starting to understand that I am already seeing things differently.
I carried on remembering details but now they just seemed to be filling in blanks and there was no panic attached. I was completely comfortable just continuing to tell my therapist things without hesitation or fear.
Over the first couple of weeks, I was noting things and processing for myself and seeing things clearly. My behaviour, the way I reacted and responded to things. Small details that changed things.
I noticed that if someone showed me care or looked after me, I wanted to cry. In almost the same breath I noticed if I made a decision about myself and put something in place that was self-care, I would also feel like crying.
I kept thinking about specific moments in the therapy sessions and had this yearning to be back in that moment and to feel the same feelings. I got annoyed that I didn’t live in Holland anymore where I could have been a short train journey away and had that experience every week, or anytime I needed it.
I keep seeing subtle, small things hidden and lurking in the everyday and familiar. I have started to feel and understand the problem with being a boy with no before. The absence of things.
I have no idea what I was before violence because violence has always been present so there are no drawings or recognisable foundations. There is no sexual behaviour or thought to revert to because I hadn’t started exploring any of it before it was hijacked. No blueprints, no shape of the boy I might have been, the teen I was going to be, the man I would become.
I discovered that if I started my day with dog walking, breakfast and a shower, my body felt cared for and understood. If I tried the best I could to stick to ordered eating instead of disordered, it gave me light structure and awareness of self-care. A deliberate choice.
Sarcastic, pithy and acerbic is often just a lifestyle choice for a British boy but sometimes it is a harsh defensive armour that has been honed to a sharp edge to protect and keep me from harm. Maybe it is time to learn which is which and rely on other forms of communication.
A profound moment of clarity where I witnessed myself finding someone attractive and my body joined in and at the very same moment shame was seeping into my bloodstream. The two aligned as if they were entwined around my desire and I found myself wondering how long that had been going on and when it had started.
There has been a growing awareness that of course violence and cruelty were terrible to deal with and should never have happened and they left damage. But it was the absence of things. That was what played out over decades. When the normal trappings of a normal childhood are absent, you cope. You improvise and do the best you can.
Of course, I have sort of known these things, or perhaps a more accurate statement is that I had a growing awareness of them. They are starting to come into focus in new ways. Actually seeing them in action. Examining detail means you start to see how they exist, what they do in real time.
An eternal truth for survivors is that they can hold two extreme truths at the same time and still let them co-exist, and I believe that is something caused by the trauma of abuse.
The absolute version of this is when someone is doing something sexual to you that you do not under any circumstances want to be happening while at the same time your body is sinking into the pleasure of the moment and allowing you to slip into orgasm. It is where we learnt to do it, but it has been applied to far too many aspects of ourselves.
We can want to say no to things while nodding our heads and agreeing and going along with it. We can desperately want human comfort while crawling into a dark corner and isolating ourselves for a week. We can allow someone to be in our life who is a very unhealthy person, but we have no capacity to do anything about it so we just let it happen.
We can agree to go places, be with people, take on work, travel, stick with things, all against our better judgement, none of it what we would choose for ourselves.
My therapist has taught me it is because I don’t have a no. If I try to disagree with him, apparently that is a no I am not allowed.