1066 All Stars

License To (Be) Ill

Having accepted that there was a problem, the road to recovery led me to the Priory.

A couple of weeks before I was due to start I went for a visit and to meet my key worker. She asked me a series of questions to get to the bottom of my issues and to give me an outline of what to expect.

To start with, I would do therapy part time. Some days would be all day sessions, others would see me go back to work in the afternoon. It was an arrangement that lasted 3 days; after that I spoke to my psychiatrist and told him that I couldn’t manage both at once. To my surprise, he agreed but said he had done it that way deliberately as he didn’t think I would accept going into therapy full time without trying and failing to manage both first. Clever bastard.

I wonder what people think when I tell them I received treatment at the Priory. Do they think it is a cosy country club where I got to hang around with booze-addled, fading rockers for instance. The truth was far less glamorous.

I have written before about the broad concepts and themes I encountered at the Priory and the various lessons they taught me. So let us instead take a step inside that world to see what the daily life of therapy is really like.

I should caveat from the outset; I was a day patient, so I went for my sessions, spent time on the hospital premises but at the end of each day, went home to my family. This is undoubtedly a fundamentally different experience to full time patients who live at the hospital during their treatment.

With that established, my first session was a group therapy and indeed this would be how most days would start. Groups would vary in size; sometimes there may be as many as 8 or 9, other days there were only 2 of us. Either way, the basic principles are the same; we would work our way round the room, each person introducing themselves and sharing their current mood, providing as much or as little additional information as they felt comfortable. All patients in my group were day patients but the reasons for seeking therapy were varied. Some, like me, struggled with anxiety and depression. Others may have sought solace in self harm, suffered a loss or any number of other issues. Either way, we had all reached a point of desperation where we needed help to find our way back.

To start with I found the sessions awkward. I didn’t know what to say and was uncomfortable expressing my emotions. I tried to make a light of things, hiding behind humour as we are so often wont to do. And like many, I would use a range of words to describe my state of mind without actually using the core emotions, obfuscating my real feelings. More on that later.

It was in one of these early sessions that another patient described themselves as being ill. This was truly a unique concept to me at the time. I assumed I was flawed or weak. Illness sounds like something you can recover from and I felt very far from that. But gradually I began to open up and share. I came to understand the thoughts that drove my feelings and influenced my behaviour. In time, I came to take an active role in these sessions, even feeling confident enough to engage the other patients and offer the benefit of my experience where appropriate.

In many ways these group sessions were the most important part of my recovery process. Whilst other sessions were still conducted within groups, these morning sessions were more intimate and direct, patients engaging with each other, coaxing out details or just sharing a sense of understanding. They helped to create bonds and friendships that helped me through.

Other sessions followed a similar path in that they comprised groups, usually then splintered down into pairs or smaller groups to discuss subjects in more detail. Content varied from an understanding of the biology of anxiety, to stress management techniques, assertiveness training to exercises designed to help us get in touch with our emotions.

And this is perhaps my biggest take away. I had become so used to hiding or ignoring my emotions that, to this day, I struggle with understanding them. We all use a variety of words to explain how we feel; annoyed, upset, frustrated, glad, fuming, aggravated. The list is virtually endless. But what do these words mean? Is aggravated worse than annoyed? Is being upset worse than being frustrated?

And so to clear up this confusion, we were encouraged to think of the core emotions; anger, sadness, happiness and fear. It can come as a jolt when you describe your mood as sad. Indeed the most common reaction is to try and fix it. But sadness is a valid emotional response that we should allow ourselves to feel. It doesn’t need to be fixed, it needs to be felt, experienced and understood. Only then are we able to process and move on.

Sometimes I feel angry. I am very often afraid. Right now, I feel an undercurrent of sadness. And that’s okay. I will work through it until I emerge on the other side.

And happiness? I’m working on it.

The Lonely Traveller

I’ve always been a bit of loner. From eating lunch in the car to lunchtime walks, I have tended to isolate myself from the group, something I will explore in more detail in the next instalment.

During my Priory stay, I made a number of friendships. We helped and supported each other through and I greatly valued these relationships. But post-Priory, all but one of these relationships have disappeared, the surviving one, I am ashamed to say, owing more to the boundless enthusiasm of the other party than any effort on my part.

But why should this be so? I certainly value these friendships. Part of it is clearly down to the deep rooted issues of insecurity. An inherent sense of inferiority leads me to believe that the other person sees me only as an arms length friend and so I hold my distance so as not to embarrass myself by appearing too keen. Of course the other party probably feels I am being stand offish, finding other relationships that are far less work. This in turn reinforces the sense that they didn’t like me that much in the first place and the cycle is perpetuated.

The friendships I do hold are borne out of two distinct sets of circumstances, at least in my mind. First, that we became friends at a different time when I was a different person and so they didn’t know the doubt-ridden, inferithon I have come to view myself as. These relationships are so well established that I hold no sense of insecurity over them, they are battles that have been fought and won many years ago. Second, where the other person does most of the heavy lifting, chipping away at the outer layers, forcing their way in until I open up and accept them. It must be hard work, which makes me feel guilty, but it also serves to create a deep sense of bonding.

Against this backdrop, I navigated my way through therapy with a sense of resentment. I was always open about where I was and what I was doing but had a tangible sense that, outside of family and a couple of close friends, I was doing this alone. Break your leg and you get a card and flowers. Break your brain and people don’t know what to think. Maybe they say nothing for fear of saying the wrong thing? Perhaps. But I would take a clumsy attempt at understanding over deafening silence.

It is worth reiterating, I was in a mental hospital. A hospital. For people with mental health problems. It wasn’t a holiday club, it wasn’t 3 months off work. It was hard, emotionally draining work. Everyday we were forced to challenge our thoughts, confront our feelings and begin to change our behaviour. It is a task not undertaken lightly.

I spent 12 years on my old job yet I remain in regular contact with just two ex-colleagues. Again, I am forced to ask myself, why? I do not always like the answer.