COMPASSION

When I started seeing a therapist eighteen months ago, it was with the hope that I might be able to address my insomnia, although choosing that path was a recognition that insomnia was, for me at least, the symptom rather than the disease, and that my stress and unhappiness were what I really needed help with. It’s been quite a journey.

This week, I think I finally accepted something that my therapist, in her quietly insistent way, has been putting to me for a few months; something that’s so painful to get my head around that only teasing it into words, and pulling those words into a coherent enough shape to share on here, might let me understand what it really is that I’ve accepted, and what that might mean for how I live my life.

There were important milestones  on the way to this post from before I started therapy, notably a piece about surviving boarding school:

I wrote about my early pre-boarding school life and this revelation my mother made to my second wife:

She once told my wife (not me) that she hadn’t been openly loving to us when we were small because she knew we would have to go to boarding school and wanted us to be ready. I think that was her way of rationalising the fact that, because of her own upbringing, she hadn’t really known how.

I described boarding school itself, a time I only had positive memories of but about which the post asked critical questions:

I dealt with issues and problems in my own head rather than talk about them because that was the normal in that institution and I had no way to recognise that my normal lacked the communication and emotional engagement that others might have grown up with.

I described how I seem to have spent much of my later life continuing to avoid strong emotions:

I believe I spent so much time controlling how I expressed myself that it became easier not to have strong feelings, easier to live life on an even keel, neither happy nor unhappy, and just refuse to recognise any sentiment, positive or negative, that threatened that equilibrium. 

I’m often asked by my therapist how I remember my early family life and I’ve found it difficult to take myself back there, finding only glimpses: a house, a car, a holiday. No remembered emotions, mine or other peoples. Do people really remember how they felt as a child? Apparently they do.

“How was you father to you when you were growing up?” she might say.

“Fifty years is a long time to roll back!” I might reply, looking to move on to easier ground.

I’ve fought hard against the idea that I was in some way “damaged” by my upbringing, not wanting to apply any sense of blame to my parents, especially now they are past the point where they could mount a defence to such an accusation. And yet I’ve spent almost my entire life just putting one foot in front of the other, trying to stay on that even keel, resolutely denying myself emotions, or at best locking them away in a room at the back of my mind; locking them away until the room can’t hold them anymore, and they leak under the door in a festering stream of anger and resentment, usually directed at myself.

Only in the past few years, firstly through my exploration of kinky sex and, then in my recent, openly loving relationship, have I allowed myself to feel and express strong emotions, to really live for myself and for others; to do more than put one foot in front of the other. It’s felt like becoming a different person. My therapist has guided me through this with care and compassion, and given me a language to understand it. The idea of internal family systems has been particularly helpful, allowing me to think objectively about those parts of me that carried the resentment and anger and the other parts that protected me from them. But, I’ve continued to find it hard to show compassion to the difficult parts of myself. I have often said to my therapist: “I don’t like what I did then” or “I hate that I feel like this,” continuing a lifetime of destructive self-criticism.

I have always found it easier to visualise an unpleasant or destructive part of me, that needs to be controlled, than a damaged part of me that needs to be helped.

And then, right at the end of our last Skype therapy session, I broke through that wall. I can’t really remember how we got there, and perhaps it doesn’t matter, but I was suddenly flooded with compassion for the little boy whose parents hadn’t known how to express their love for him, who was always the sensible, dutiful one, hoping perhaps that if he was good enough he might get a hug; the same little boy who went to boarding school at the age of ten and carried on being the sensible one, neither particularly loved nor disliked by anyone, but just there, on the edge of the group, made head boy twice because of his sensibleness and dependability. I saw that lifetime of putting one foot in front of the other and felt genuine compassion for the young man who had gone to university, spent time in the army and got married, because that was what people expected of him. I grieved for the affection and love that he hadn’t been able to share through two marriages, and for the joy he could have found in his children if only he’d been able to open himself up to it.; if only he hadn’t just been putting one foot in front of the other.

I saw all of it, all at the same time and it was too much.

At exactly that moment, the surveyor working for the buyers of my house, who I had left on his own to do his tour, put his head round the kitchen door to see a 62 year old man sobbing in front of an iPad. Poor guy. He didn’t know where to put himself.

I’m going to leave this post there, finding myself feeling a bit wrung out from the effort of wrestling thoughts into words and with a head full of questions. I’ll revisit those another time.

If you’ve got this far, thank you for staying with it. Knowing you are out there and interested enough to work through a thousand words of deep introspection is helpful to me.