I’ve been in counselling a lot in my 50 years. My father died on Christmas Day when I was five after which my mental health, unsurprisingly, plummeted. And then I knew I was gay from about 10, and Dorset didn’t have the greatest LGBTQ+ acceptance or visibility, and nor did the church where we went every Sunday – in fact, they were downright hostile about anybody who was gay or indeed anyone who ate more than their fair share of pink wafers with the coffee after the service.
Then came the suicidal thoughts, the loneliness and, in my early 20s, the lying beast that is anorexia. In my 40s, after a false allegation when I was teaching, clinical depression came on me like a heavyweight boxer pummelling a cushion – the stuffing was out, and I had no sense of how to get it back in again.
I had a year of support from crisis teams, made multiple suicide attempts and had stays in psychiatric hospitals, which are not the five-star luxury resorts you might imagine. They are all-inclusive though, which is a bonus, and if congealed baked potatoes for lunch every day are your thing, then I would definitely recommend a visit.
Some intense counselling around these events was clearly needed. But there was something else lingering as well, a nagging hangnail; a deep-seated something that was fleetingly present, mostly in my unconscious but never formed into anything specific.
I thought I knew what to expect from my new counsellor on the spring afternoon we first met in a comforting basement room, with a view out to the garden and a chair you could sink your bottom into. The therapeutic relationship is so unique, there’s nothing quite like it, and counselling’s uniqueness was my salvation. We spoke about my father, the accusation, anger, injustice and loss, and it all started to help.
I realise you’re not supposed to rank the counsellors you’ve seen in a sort of Tripadvisor review style, but this one was the best – amazing in their capacity to be themselves and use their skills to full effect, amazing in their total transparency and endless care.
A few months in, a memory came back one afternoon when I was reading at home – a recollection so terrifying it made me gasp with pain and truth. I had been sexually abused as a child within the church by a priest and by a family friend.
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Over the next few months the memories came back like scenes in a film, bit by bit, leaving me breathless with shock. This was so, so awful, so terrifying, surely I would have remembered something so utterly horrendous? I mean, I write books about mental health. I’ve spent years gaining insight into my own, and years helping others with theirs. What the heck was going on? But there’s nothing like being complacent to bring you back in line and to remember we’re all on this dizzying, confusing journey together, and the nirvana of self-actualisation can be elusive.
In the almost sacred counselling room every week we looked at the memories together, each jigsaw piece of pain, and put it where it needed to be to reform and restructure my past. I certainly hadn’t been digging for memories – at the start I resented their resurfacing with a passion – but now I see how important it was that they did come back and how they would not have arisen without that trusting relationship. The memories were ready to return, not to haunt me but to heal me. Pain becomes visible, expressible and eventually manageable when there is safety and compassion.
I’ve started to come back into my body – one that had been used by others and that I’ve spent my entire life hating. I’ve started the process of reclaiming my childhood on my terms, not theirs.
I’ve started to reclaim me.