I have to admit that for the longest time I believed I was too complex for therapy. I think my first encounter, in my early 20s, was with a trainee, and I was in an unreachable state. No matter what anyone said, I was right and my father was wrong. Therapy was supposed to be a confirmation of this; my depression, fugue states and dissociation were down to an inadequate recognition of my situation, and this would be rectified by the person in front of me. It didn’t help that at the end of the first session he said: ‘This is not about your father but your mother.’ Of course I now know that neither of us was right.
In 1962 my father was in a car accident that killed his pregnant wife and two-year-old son. He met my mother six months later, and she left her husband and two-year-old daughter to be with him. Eighteen months later I was born into a home of grief and guilt, the symbol of a new start for both parents. It was an impossible burden from the beginning: my father rejected me as evidence of the death of his first son, and my mother, having left her daughter, made the decision that if our family wasn’t perfect, what excuse did she have?
Therapy wasn’t made any easier because I was prone to grandiosity. I believed I possessed insight denied to others, and any challenge was proof of intellectual inadequacy. I stayed alert for disagreement so I could dismiss therapists as not up to the task.
In my early 30s I attended NHS group therapy. While everyone was suffering, their problems seemed to me situational: coming out, chronic pain, divorce. Rightly or wrongly I felt my problem was different in kind. It was existential. I was fighting for the survival of the self.
My natural mode of discourse is theoretical. Reading – philosophy, theology, psychoanalysis – has helped me find connection. But I also used theory as armour-plating. I believed I could out-think anyone. When challenged I went into fight mode: pointing out every contradiction, every logical fallacy. It was a way of removing myself from feeling – one part of the brain going into overdrive so another part could hide.
Then I discovered SSRIs. They seemed to be an answer to my ruminations, and for short periods they lifted my mood. But my attitude remained intrinsically the same. My GP said he could arrange a short course of CBT. ‘Really? I’m almost 50 and a short course of CBT is going to succeed where everything else has failed?’ My view of CBT was that it treated mental ill health like a hernia: the symptom simply needed pushing back in, regardless of the cause. But it is also true that I didn’t think I could be helped as other people are helped. That was itself a disproof of concept.
But then my father died, and something inside me collapsed. My fugue states seemed endless, and I feared disappearing from myself forever. One day, walking the dogs, I remember thinking, ‘You don’t exist.’ It didn’t matter that I could look down at myself, call the dogs, know my way back to the house. My non-existence was an ineluctable truth.
My partner begged me to see someone, anyone at this point. This time my refusal was different: there was no one to turn up. But one day I came across a review of my novel and noticed that the writer was a psychotherapist. It might seem absurd but I thought maybe my novel’s protagonist could stand in for me; the therapist could ask him questions, and because I’d written the book, maybe in answering them I’d reveal something about my previous self and that would be a start. I emailed asking him if reviewing my novel in any way prevented him from seeing me. He suggested an initial consultation.
Non-existence doesn’t preclude an endless stream of theory. After I laid out my origin story I went on to offer every conceivable theory as to why I was the way I was. Every week it was something new. My therapist was silent throughout. In my memory he didn’t say anything for two years.
How he knew this was the best way forward I don’t know, but eventually I wore myself down, and as he began to ask me the odd question, suggest the odd thought, I realised I wasn’t in any kind of fight – that I trusted in his care for me. Our work lasted four years and by the end something fundamental had shifted: my resort to fight mode, to generate conflict as a way to be present, to win every argument as proof I existed, had gone.
This was five years ago and I now realise it was not an end but a beginning. I am now in Lacanian psychoanalysis. Sometimes it’s not about care or cure but living with who you are, what’s called subjective destitution – a final letting go. I’m not there yet.