Beware. There is a lot of ranting in this post. My ire is mainly the rage I usually harbour on the relevant matters, but the particularly belligerent style of some of the following is also partly attributable to the fact that I’m listening to Metallica as I write this.
So, if you’re averse to cursing or aggressive outbursts, then you’d better fuck off now.
Triggers: domestic violence, sexual abuse (including the idea of a resulting pregnancy), self-harm, suicide (vaguely), religion (loosely and rantishly, sorry), parental violence, general un-karmic unfairness.
I felt that Monday’s session was extremely productive, if extraordinarily difficult in retrospect. After the usual initial ‘what do I say now’ questions, I found myself on a sort of discursive roll, and talked openly and honestly for quite a while. When he inevitably had to end the session, I was frustrated rather than my usual relieved.
The truth is that very little of the more meaningful work centred around sexual abuse. I spent the vast majority of the useful part of the session discussing my parents, their relationship, and my relationship with them. A lot of the stuff discussed has already been covered elsewhere on this blog already, so forgive me for any repetitiveness.
I’ll warn you again of triggers – revisiting this material as I have been writing it up caused me to end up in tears. Perhaps it’s not particularly triggering to outsiders – I think my upset comes from my closeness to it – but consider yourselves cautioned nevertheless. [LATER: I've just tried to proof-read this post, and I can't help but feel that I've been overly histrionic in my trigger warnings, expressions of harrowment (yes, it is a word) and various breakdowns in the course of this post. The material certainly isn't all fluffy and dainty, but still - if I've been OTT I'm sorry. I feel like a bit of a twat, but the stuff herein is both close and important to me.]
The session opened with a rant about how shit NHS mental health services are. What a surprise! The short version of this conversation is that Paul thinks I’ve been treated like utter shite by them. Yeah – tell me something I don’t know, mate.
The conversation arose due to my telling him that I was meeting my new CPN the following day (and shitting myself regarding same) and further, that NewVCB had requested a surprise encounter on Wednesday. Paul asked why I felt they were “upping the ante” (have we heard that phrase anywhere recently, readers?) by suddenly throwing all this extra ‘care’ at me.
I proffered the opinion that they were running scared, as when I’d last seen NewVCB, I was on the verge of exit-bagging myself to death. (I later retracted this criticism a little. I am a cynic, pessimist and misanthrope by nature, and until I have definite proof that people aren’t out to get me, I both choose to believe and innately feel that they are. In reality, NewVCB is not a bad person to have as a consultant ((despite her (((inherited))) nickname on this blog)), and I don’t necessarily believe that she is acting to cover her, or indeed the Trust’s, arse).
I told Paul about how his ‘upping the ante’ phrase reminded me of that two-faced whore from last January. I also added that she had apparently told C that she had “no concerns about my mental health” (I still can’t get over that one – how offensive and disgustingly inaccurate!).
Paul said, “it’s like they only care if you die. They don’t care how much you suffer, as long as you’re still alive and they don’t have to justify themselves to anyone.”
Nails on heads there, Paul. I couldn’t agree more. I mean, I think NewVCB does (and perhaps Christine will) give a flying shite about my actual welfare as opposed to my mere continued existence, but as a bureaucratic entity, I distinctly feel that the NHS does not – and as long-term readers will know, that is hardly a new opinion. (Though having said that, the deeper I go into mental health services, the more I see how much my care lacked over the past 13/14 years. I touched on that a little on Wednesday, and may elaborate in a future post).
I assume that my continued rage is palpable from the tone of this narrative. It certainly was to Paul, though I tried my best to remain measured. The reality was I wanted to kick the living shit out of the poor, innocent shelf on my left, imagining it was Mr Director-Person‘s smug, elfish face. I wanted to take the phone on said shelf and use it to smash his management-wrinkled cheeks into smithereens.
This inevitably led to a conversation on transference. I would make clear at this point, again, that Paul agrees that the Trust have treated me like some turd they stood in, and believes my anger towards them to be fair and absolutely just. Yet he also has a theory about the sheer strength of it. Essentially, he wonders if I unconsciously see the Trust in loco parentis – is my hateful anger displaced towards them instead of being focused on my parents?
Of late, I have become completely obsessed with the idea that my mother is going to die. Well, of course she’s going to die – aren’t we all? But you know what I mean; I’m terrified she’s going to drop dead in the next few years, which is something with which I do not think I could cope. I’m both advantaged and disadvantaged by the fact that my parents were in their 40s when I was born – on the one hand, I had a mother that had lived already (insofar as my father allowed, at least), with all the knowledge and education that that brings. On the other, of course, that means that I’m statistically more likely than my peers to lose her when I’m fairly young. As you know, my father has already snuffed it, not that I care about him.
Anyway, when Paul asked me about my apparent anger towards the two of them, I told him that I was not allowed to criticise my mother for the above reason. Furthermore, she is on holiday this week. If I am in any way critical of her before her flight on Saturday, then the plane will crash and I will have killed her through my horrible words.
He raised his eyebrow incredulously and said, “you’re very bloody powerful.”
I laughed bitterly. “You should have seen me last week,” I sneered. “I was responsible for Colonel Gadafi’s evil and have caused a potential mass genocide in Libya.”
I watched his face carefully. He may claim he’s not an intellectual, but when he furrows his brow in a certain way, you know he’s processing, analysing, computing. Had his skull been transparent, I wouldn’t have been surprised to see a full system of cogs turning in there. Cogs that say things like ‘magical thinking’, ‘delusions’ or ‘psychosis’.
Of course, Paul does not like “labels” (I word I still abhor in this context), so rather than merely accuse me of any of these things, he was evidently trying to work out why Colonel Gadafi is my fault (perhaps I was his mother in a past life? Who knows). However, he surprised me when he didn’t quiz me on that particular supposition.
Instead, he said, “in that great psychological tradition, tell me about your mother.”
Ah, I see. He thinks Gadafi is a deflection. It probably was, to be fair.
“How do you feel about your mother right now?” he continued.
“I feel sorry for her,” I told him.
“Why?”
“Because my father was such an epic wanker. She deserved better from him…and probably from me too.”
Talk about opening the fucking floodgates.
“She deserved better than me because I was very difficult for her to deal with as a teenager,” I went on. “In my defence, I was clinically ill – but how does a person with no frame of reference [I'm an only child] distinguish severe depression from ‘mere’ teenage angst?”
Paul asked for more detail. That detail is something I’ve shirked from on this blog, because I can’t bear thinking about those horrible days. I hated my first five years at grammar school; they remain, quite steadfastly, the most dark and bleak of my life (even though these last three have sort of been more mental, if you get the distinction). Just thinking about my complete desolation back then can bring a tear to my eye.
How is this linked to my Mum? Well, as noted, not only did I hate school, but I was utterly crippled by major depressive illness. These issues conspired together and rendered me completely incapable of even getting out of bed for virtually weeks on end. There were times I didn’t even rise to take a piss, which I know is repulsive, but there you have it. It was that bad. Mum, in part acting on manipulative information fed to her by my Head of Year (a grotesque, vile little man), assumed that my behaviour was standard jadedness and sloth.
This resulted in Some Bad Stuff. Only she, I (having been there) and A (as I told him) know of this, but here goes. In order, I assume, to ruse me out of my pit of despair, she used to beat the living shite out of me. I have very distinct memories of lying, staring at my purple bedroom wall, my back to her, as she brought her clenched fists down – on my arms, abdomen, legs. Even my head and face at times. She would do this in blind fits of seeing-red-rage, meaning, of course, that the fist/me impact was all the greater. One side of my body would end up being as purple from bruising as the wall that I non-reactively fixated my eyes upon.
“Of course,” I said to Paul, “it’s not her fault; not really. She didn’t know what was normal teen moodiness, and what was serious, raw suffering.”
He pursed his lips slightly and asked if my teenage self had realised that.
To be honest, my teenage self hadn’t realised anything much. A lot of the time I didn’t even feel the agony with which I should have been faced after such violence. Depression was all I was. It was all I felt, physically, psychologically, every -ally. I didn’t register anything else for the majority of the time.
“Where was your father when all this was happening?” he queried, carefully.
Cue another scornful laugh. “You tell me,” I said, my bitter spite hardly curbed.
But I thought for a minute. Where was my father? Yeah, probably drunk in a ditch after trying to rape some woman then beating her up because she fought him – but, on a wider level, where was he? He died in 2007 (I think), which would have made me 23 or 24. So we would have been talking about nine or 10 years previously.
That’s where he was, I thought, having one of those rare ‘aha’ moments of existence. He was in a nursing home.
I’m sure I’ve alluded to this before, but for the initiated or those that don’t have photographic memories, V (father) developed MS, and was placed in a home as the illness progressed. I have always resented this with more bitterness than I can describe, even with all the pejorative words and expletives of the English language at my grand disposal.
Aside from raping and beating my mother, cuckolding her, trying to kill her, throwing her out windows etc, he also completely fucked her financially. He took every spare penny she had, and spent it on alcohol. When she divorced him – which was done to protect me, the final straw for same being after he (accidentally, but drunkenly) dropped my few-weeks-old self onto the hearth one day – she even agreed to his demands to pay the remainder of the mortgage, just so as she could get rid of him.
Then. Then! He gets his nice benefits, and they pay for him to have a nice room in a nice home with nice staff treating him to nice things, like nice papers in the morning and nice trips to the football in the afterfuckingnoon. I’m sorry (especially to Christian readers), but there can be no God in this despicable universe. If there was, how would – how could - He allow such outrageously unjust acts to permeate this gruesome species that He created? How in anyone’s estimation can that be considered a reasonable way to conduct the universe You own? (And please, please, no ‘God works in mysterious ways’ shit. I know most of you would never condescend me in that fashion, but avoidance of doubt is always a good thing).
I remembered Georgie and Merv, the fucking cunts, who went to see V when he was in this home. I remembered whatever their son and his bitch are called doing the same, and said bitch feeling sorry for the nasty cunting fucker. For those that don’t know the fucked-up dynamics of my family, Georgie is my mother’s sister, and is married to Merv, my father’s brother. Nice bit of pseudo-incest going on there, oh yes.
My mother’s sister. MY MOTHER’S FUCKING SISTER. She spent 20 years idly listening to tales of my mother’s horrible life from the other side of the Atlantic, and then – then – just because that FAT FUCK became ill, he is somehow worthy of her flying eight hours to come and fucking see him?! FUCKING CUNTWHOREBITCH. I hate her. I fucking despise the fucking nasty, hypocritical, self-righteous CUNT. (Much as I love it, sometimes I wish I didn’t use the word cunt with such frequency, because it loses its impact in this circumstance. But rest assured, dearest readers, I despise her with a passion almost unrivalled. HATE HATE HATE).
Then they took all the money when V died, despite the rightful entitlement to same lying with my mother, after the financial rape he inflicted upon her. But this has never been about money; just indescribable injustice.
Something randomly occurred to me at this point in the session. I met Paul, and indeed first went to Nexus, last August. A good half-year since I changed my name.
“Are you aware that [Pandora Serial-Insomniac] is not my born name?” I asked Paul. “I wasn’t born with this surname. I changed it to dissociate myself from V and his family.”
“No, I didn’t know that,” he returned thoughtfully. “Did it work?”
“I feel better for having done it,” I nodded. And I do.
[An aside - he got the reference vis a vis my new name. I am most impressed 
]
So, my anger towards V was abundantly clear by this point. My earlier sweet, sweet fantasy of battering Mr D-P’s face in with a phone was superseded by an uncomfortable but viscerally murderous rage towards my father and his pack of cunts. That was not enough to satisfy Paul, however.
“Where’s the anger at your mother in all this?” he asked again, looking over his glasses intently at me.
Part of me wanted to say there that wasn’t – there isn’t – any. Whatever she, in her at-the-time ignorance, did to me as an adolescent, pales into abject insignificance when compared to what he did to her (and by extension to me). She didn’t do any of it because she’s evil, or because she hated me or something. She did it borne out of frustration and ignorance. She is better informed now.
But that denial wouldn’t be entirely true, would it? Any of you that have read the archives here or follow me on Twitter will have seen me rant about her with not-inconsiderable frequency. I know, I know – all daughters find themselves irritated at their mothers from time to time. Often, though, minor instances of irritation between us blow up into screeching, blazing rows (again, I know that happens to the rest of the world on occasion, but it seems to be frequent within our relationship). Having learnt the dynamics, I sometimes have to try really hard to bite my tongue rather than express even the most basic opinion to my mother. It may well be the same from her angle – I have no idea.
I relayed the information to Paul. “And when I rant about her online, then either she’s nice to me, or I catch a glimpse of her wedding photo, and I burst into tears of both guilt over my actions and of sorrow for the shit life she’s been given.”
The wedding photo one is the worst. She was only 21, and she was educated, attractive, personable and smart. Life, and the future it brought, should have been so encouraging and bright for her. Instead there was nothing but pain and bitter anguish throughout. She deserved better than that.
“You said your father raped your mother,” Paul said, interrupting my introspective musing. “Did you ever witness one of those incidents?”
I’m amazed that I was able to answer this. How can I speak to a virtual stranger about something I’ve never spoken to anyone else about before? (Well, technically I spoke to one person before him, which I shall explain forthwith).
I’ve had a picture of one particular evening in my mind for virtually all my life. V had left our home at the time, but it was before I was at school (I think), so I must have been three or four. I got out of bed for some reason – possibly simply because I knew V was still there, or maybe because I heard something – and, apparently surreptitiously, made my way downstairs. When I opened the door into what was then the living room, I was confronted with a…scene.
My mother turned her head in horror and ordered me back upstairs. My father just sort of…I don’t know…hung (?) there, trying to avoid my gaze. I retreated, though, as I was told.
The next day, when V had fucked off again, I confronted my mother about what I had seen.
She looked confused (which I’m fairly certain was an act, given the context, but what do I know) and said, “but your Dad wasn’t even here after you went to bed last night. You must have been dreaming.” [LOL, Mum. Yeah. Pre-school children really dream about their parents fucking].
“I wasn’t dreaming,” I protested assuredly.
“Now, now, Pandora, you must have been,” she replied nonchalantly. “He wasn’t here! Now then, let’s do…[end of conversation].”
I never raised it with her (or anyone else, obviously) again, though I’ve thought about it often enough. There are a number of possible explanations for it:
- I did witness them engaged in sex, but it was consensual.
- I did witness them engaged in sex, but it was rape (more likely, given their estrangement).
- I genuinely was dreaming.
- It is a phantom memory.
(4) has been the one I’ve always tried to convince myself of, because I remember so clearly that I was absolutely adamant (to myself as well as Mum) that I wasn’t dreaming. As noted, what small kid dreams of such things anyway? If it is real, then I hope (1) is the applicable explanation…but my mother has always been governed by morals when it comes to sex. I really can’t see her willingly engaging in so-called ‘ex-sex’ in any circumstance.
It does get worse. Sorry. My mother has advised me that raped her a lot, inflicted physical violence on her on an almost daily basis, he threw her out a window “a couple” of times, and he tried to kill her on several occasions. Smothering, strangling, crushing – asphyxia mostly, but there were other methods too. However, the worst comes in the untold stories. She has admitted all this indescribably terrible stuff to me – but, she also tells me, there is a fuck of a lot more that she will “take to her grave and never share with anyone.”
How can it get any worse? Seriously? How unimaginable must the rest be, given how really-quite-a-bit-unimaginable the stuff I do know is?!
They had been married, if you can call such a violent sham a ‘marriage’, 20 years when I was born. I presume that violence of every conceivable manner was the staple of my mother’s existence at the time. There’s no evidence that I have ever been party to, and no reason to presume that any even exists, to suggest that they had any good times together by that point. Well – ostensibly they occasionally did; they wore their dainty little masks of smug-married-ness to the golf club and so on, even though the vast majority of those they knew were aware of the reality – but in real terms, no. She stuck with him because, she claims, she had “meant her marriage vows”. He stuck with her, I’d surmise, because she brought in most of the household income, and was an easy scapegoat for his repugnant aggression.
I’m rambling now, but there is a point to this. By the early ’80s, after 20 years of this, there can’t have been much love between them. So…how did I come into the world?
My mother has denied that I am a product of rape. I have confronted her on the issue twice, and though I’d like the truth, I’ll forgive her for lying to me on this occasion. One characteristic I inherited from my father (not a particularly appealing one, but then what genes from him would be?) was the ability to lie to someone with great skill. My mother, coming from a differing bloodline (though with the Georgie/Merv thing, one could be forgiven for getting confused on that!), has not got that particular attribute.
Is the line the lady doth protest too much from Hamlet? I think so. Clearly my mother hadn’t read the play on the occasions on which I asked her about my conception. If it wasn’t so tragic it would actually be funny – here’s an example of what she gushed on one occasion:
Of course you were not conceived by a rape! Not at all, no! No, it was lovely [incidentally, I don't want to think about the mechanics of it either way, but meh]. I knew right away that I was pregnant [yes, of course you did, Mum - reproduction is instant after all ***cough***], and I was so happy, it was the one such incident at the time where we were actually really happy together!
Even assuming that were true (it’s not utterly impossible, but it does seem unlikely), how can she be so sure which incident resulted in her pregnancy? If he was sexually assaulting her as frequently as he was inflicting grievous bodily harm on her person, then she could have had virtually no way of determining that.
After I’d finally concluded my verbal narrative on this issue to Paul, he said, “you were born out of a toxic, horrible place…and all too soon you were forced back [by Paedo] to a toxic horrible place.”
“The thing is,” I said flatly, “I connect all the dots. Once again, I’m the common denominator in all of this. It’s about me, something I’ve somehow brought about, not others. It’s all my fault.”
[When I first re-read my notes on this session, I completely collapsed at this point with a raw, profound, overwhelming sadness, the like of which I have not experienced in years - perhaps since my grandfather died].
Paul said, “you take on the burden of being the ‘common denominator’ too easily. The common denominator is not you – it’s an abusive family.”
Actually, it isn’t – my father and Paedo are completely unrelated, other than by their respective marriages. Nevertheless, writing this, I find myself struck dumb by Paul’s statement. I detest V with every fibre of my being, and I know this is an irrational thing to say, but I’ve never seen my family in this way. They just are. They might be freaks, they might be dull, they might irritate the living fuck out of me – but abusive? They’re not abusive! And yet – two of them are. Two of them were. V and Paedo. Paedo and V.
Abusive. It’s a strong word.
I conceded that my family were/are “not the bastions of moral upstanding” (typical Pandorian deflective-response there) and added that if all of them – Mum most assuredly excepted, though – sunk into the Irish Sea tomorrow, I wouldn’t bat an eyelid nor shed a tear. Perhaps that’s not entirely true, but it’s a reasonable reflection of my ambivalence.
And then…
“We’re going to have to finish there,” he said, apologetically. Actually, I think he was almost embarrassed. For my part, I was profoundly frustrated. I’d got into a sort of rhythm where all this stuff just seemed to roll off my tongue without any real cerebral planning, and now it was being cruelly broken.
I tried to play it down, but my annoyance was pretty obvious. It wasn’t directed at Paul in the least, but at the whole arbitrary 50-minute-hour bullshit. Therapy is such a weird construct.
He asked how the session had been for me.
I said that I was bad.
“Why?!” Paul queried, apparently genuinely confused. “I actually thought we just did some really good work.”
Thank fuck for that, then. “Actually, me too,” I admitted. “I’m just aware that I’m here to discuss one type of traumatic incident with you, and here I am blathering about my parents. I can’t help but think it’s still very relevant, though.”
He nodded. “It’s all inter-connected, all part of the system that you’re now dealing with. Inevitably this informed your childhood a lot, so it’s definitely relevant. And going over gory details of your abuse every week isn’t necessarily therapeutic.”
So. That was Monday’s meeting. Now, this is the weird thing. Apart from the two instances of anger I described in the foregoing prose, I sat there and spoke quite matter-of-factly as I detailed all the sordid, horrible truths to Paul. I left the building and went to the shop as I often do, returning to house to start writing Monday’s post. I went to see Christine on Tuesday and the only thing that concerned me at the time was my unfamiliarity with her.
On Tuesday night, I read the notes I’d taken pertaining to this session, and at the ‘common denominator’ point, a mental paradigm shift starting slapping me around the face. I broke down and wept…proper wailing, sobbing, snot, the horrible works. I wept for my mother, and her undeservedly horrible, shit life. And I wept for myself. And as I’ve typed this up, I’ve broken down several times. In fact, in the nearly two years I’ve been blogging here, this has been the most harrowing post I’ve ever written. Harrowing. Another big word. But the only one that fits.
When A inevitably noticed my upset on Tuesday and asked what was wrong, I said, “it’s just such a sad story.”
“What is?” he asked gently.
“My life!” I sobbed. “No child should ever have to go through any of that!”
What’s that you say, lovely reader? Compassion? Moreover…a little self-compassion? Acceptance? Grief?
I don’t know. I really don’t. I do know, though, that I don’t think I have any meaningful secrets left to tell you. All of this material was the last major batch of Stuff You Didn’t Yet Know About Pandora. So there you go, readers. You know, to all intents and purposes, everything about me. Everything about my life.
My life, the sad story.
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). Although it would be beyond absolutely incredible to win, to be in the position I already am is more than enough.