Stigma. Shame. Embarrassing. Needs to toughen up. We just got on with it my day. We don’t have mental health problems in our family – we are really robust.
Scandal!
Shame!
SHHH!
Don’t you feel exposed?
Weakness.
Keep it to yourself will you, for Christ’s sake!
I don’t know anyone who’s needed counselling, therapy: just get over it.
Oh that’s just psychobabble. Did someone put that in your head?
EVERYONE has trauma these days.
For anyone who’s heard these things, felt them, let me tell me you no, no, no. You are you and managing, admitting, attempting to find help for or recovering from something difficult – just like one in four people, at any one time.
Here is my account of what life feels like on a day to day basis and how I manage it. Please be aware that this involves an account of a child and young person – me – but that I have kept the details minimal
First a history. I think I have been managing difficult things for a very long time. In late childhood and through my teen years I had OCD, most troubling as a child because of what were, to me, terrifying ruminations. Unfortunately, those thoughts took hold at least partly because my parents, particularly my mother, absolutely solidified in me the idea that I was a terrible kid and the bringer of harm. Imagine it like this: that the statements and name-calling and the many physical hurts, accompanied by many nice things too which radically confused me and led me to doubt my own mind, went in so deeply that it has taken me decades to unpick. Perhaps it would have been different had there been appropriate intervention, but no. I learned to manage on my own. I think about that kid, that teenager often.
Suicide attempts. Two. 13 and 17. No action taken afterwards. Hush up. I am jittery writing that. Please imagine the despair. I don’t think I had any confidence at all, a sense of myself: anything could hurt me because my identity was so fragile. And I was shamed.
Self harming. That started at about seven years old and continued right into my early thirties. Fear, shame, as a kid thinking that I were not hit, if I were not having my hair pulled, then I had better do it myself. Because I was an aberration and the bringer of harm. Also stress. I didn’t know what else to do so I did that. I tried to tell people at secondary school and was (this motivated me to teach at secondary level – to teach full stop) told that my parents were wonderful and I should not put them under too much stress. They were wonderful in many ways. They also, with others, did me immense harm. My mother mainly; an acquiescent father. I’ve parked it. Tried to be sympathetic. To understand what they may have been feeling – their hurts. And others in my immediate family. Do I forgive them? Nope. That’s too much pressure. Have I let them go? YES. That’s the goal. I’m not mired in it and anyway I am still dealing with the results.
Major depression. Hmmm. Several times
Anxiety. Yep.
Panic attacks. You bet. On the tube. Once on a beautiful beach.
Recurrent nightmares. To this day. I wake up crying. I yell out. But it’s getting better.
Breakdowns – if we want to use that term. Three. Two postnatal.
Hospital stays. Zero. Outpatients only, which I am told is pretty rare when you read my notes.
Flashbacks. Oh my. Getting better. But forever. Vivid, horrible things: the fear of someone behind me, coming into my room, physically hurting me, kicking me, handfuls of hair, everyone pointing and going YOU YOU YOU. I am in another place. I am not sure I am even Anna as many of you know me, but something else: a composite of others’ opinions? Complex PTSD – it hits all my senses and derails me.
Dissociation. The lower end, thank the Lord. It hangs out with the flashbacks or is triggered by stress, exhaustion, fear or someone being shitty; being unkind to me. I don’t know where my edges are – I don’t feel real. It’s like I look back at me.
Medication. Never done much for me, I’m afraid. I take a low dose of amytriptyline at night because my flight or fight responses have been so totally out of whack – hyper-vigilance lingering and in the last few years looking after an ill loved one and being on watch at night. Also magnesium, crystal sound bowls playlist and lavender oil. I’m really boring, aren’t I?
CBT didn’t touch the sides, CAT – CBT with bells and whistles -over a year was wonderfully helpful. I see the local mental health occasionally mainly because he’s a total dreamboat and I am currently engaged in trauma-focused therapy with EMDR. May I leave you to look any of that up? It’s not NHS obviously so that’s a budget of £200 a month to meet with some extra work. I needed to engage in new treatment because we weren’t there yet – and I needed a specialist. I’ve been lucky enough to find a wonderful person.
What does this mean on a daily basis?
That I have to be careful about who or what I see, to avoid conversations with people who speak a lot about these things without experience (crystals, babe do you live near pylons, it didn’t happen – because I would have known, you’re exaggerating). I have a flashback a couple of times a month and maybe one of those horrid scary dreams once a month and, on a daily basis, I need to regulate my breathing, diet, stretch, read and go gently on myself. I am mitigating anxiety ALL the time, horrid thoughts and memories surface regularly so I acknowledge them and hope they do one. I would say I have two to three brief dissociative episodes a month. The specialist support I have at the moment is helping to regulate and reprogramme and if you want to know what I think and feel, you could do worse than read The Body Keeps the Score. Brain, Mind and Body in the Healing of Trauma by Bessel van der Kolk.
I left teaching full time because I could not manage my health and the work’s full-time demands and I have crafted a life of books, teaching and mentoring in which I can make spaces and have some flexibility and still earn. I have been extremely stretched these last few years because of a loved one not receiving care and that has been a difficult path: you’re dealing with the pain of someone you love hand in hand with lack of resources and lack of will. Sometimes with a lack of kindness.
But I will tell you another thing.
Because I’ve seen the darkness and can never, I do not think, be as scared and lonely as the kid-Anna, I will press on. In 2016 I turned rage into my first book and I haven’t stopped. This is just me; how I am evolving, it’s not better than anything you do. Ten books, seven years, I have built a business, kept a hand in teaching, developed my creative writing teaching. I have written across genres and forms and in my books I was developing the line of enquiry – imagination, trauma, magical realism, reading, nature – that will form the basis of the PhD by Published Works I start later this year.
Mainly, though, I am amazed that I am still here.
So, if you meet someone who mocks, sensationalises or cultivates a prurient interest in mental health problems and mental illness – I tend to draw a distinction, with the latter being more serious than the former, but it’s not without problems – know their ignorance. They know few facts and a lot of fear; they pass it on and it does damage. That’s what tabloids do in this country. THAT is shameful. It drives need underground and seals up routes to getting better.
You’re not weak. You are surviving as best you can with all the resources you have. I see you and hold you in my heart. I always feel like I am in transition or living at the edges of something – hence the liminal in the title – and I think that’s because of what’s happened to me and what I manage. I am not scared, though, to propel myself into the centre – to work and do and be and say, here I am. HERE. So please remember to go out into the world, broken as you are, and remember that broken things are beautiful too.
x
Anna Vaught Writes - Dr Anna Vaught: teacher, mentor, author, campaigner 