PUTTING UP BARRIERS – Therapy

Content warning: corporal punishment of children.

I was taken to the junior part of the boys boarding school I eventually attended for an interview with the headmaster, part of the admission process. I’d have been nine, possibly ten, and this particular school had been a recommendation from Mum’s stepfather, a master at a local grammar school. The government was going to pay the fees as they moved Dad from place to place every couple of years and this avoided changing schools with every move.

My parents dropped me off with the headmaster’s secretary and went in search of a coffee. I waited on a hard chair outside the headmaster’s office. A short while later, a boy, a year or two older than me, came out of the office, crying hard, gasping for breath, obviously in distress. A little later the headmaster’s secretary ushered me in and I witnessed him returning a cane to a cupboard in the corner. I stumbled over the answers to the first few questions, the words struggling to get round the solid lump of dread that had risen up from my stomach.

A few months later, now ten years old, my parents dropped me off to start there. I don’t remember a goodbye hug. I remember my mother being ostentatiously stoic, holding herself stiffly in a way that let everyone know how stoic she was being. She could do that at times. I suspect I took her example and was stoic too.

I was put into a dormitory with boys starting their second or third year at the school and they all seemed to know each other. I remember lying in the dark feeling isolated and lonely and I think I might have cried a bit, though I suspect I might have carried on being stoic.

Not by dormitory, but so close it made me shudder.

The other boys were excited to be back together and were talking and generally messing about after lights out. A master came in, turned the lights on, grabbed a boy who was out of bed and took him outside. In the hallway he described in cold detail how, if he had to come back again, the boy was going to be taken to the bathroom, bent over the bath with his pyjamas down and thrashed with a cane. My bed was next to the door and I heard every word.

With hindsight, something about the way the master described the threatened punishment in such lurid detail (“and then I will pull your pyjamas down to your ankles….” etc etc) smells all wrong. I suspect it excited him to incite such fear in the small boy in front of him. Bastard.

Behind the door, it incited just as much fear in me. Perhaps it was intended to. Perhaps it worked. I stayed out of trouble throughout my time there, stayed out of trouble to the extent they made me head boy in the final year when I was 13. My name will be on a plaque in the hall, not that I’ve ever been back.

My therapist thinks that, as a child, I was constantly trying to please my parents, especially my mother, hoping for a hug that never came. If so, that pattern of behaviour was reinforced by my start at school, just trying to please everyone to avoid that beating. It’s a pattern that has driven much of my life.

The paradox that I’ve never quite resolved is that the thought of that boy being beaten in the bathroom was exciting too. A little piece of me wanted that to happen, perhaps even wanted that for myself.

We tried hypnosis this week but I couldn’t let go enough, couldn’t quiet the warning voices in my head telling me this wasn’t going to work. Some parts of me clearly didn’t want it to happen. I wonder what they thought we might find. I wonder what they were protecting me from. Perhaps we’d find the 10 year old who’d just said goodbye to his parents and was hiding under the sheets in a cold school dormitory. Perhaps there’s some other, more hurt, version of me that I’ve hidden deeper than this one.

We talked about finding a place and time in my memory where I was warm and calm and safe that I might be able to reach in hypnosis. I thought of driving a catamaran in the early afternoon breeze at Vassiliki in Greece, before the force 5 or 6 kicks in and you have to leap around the boat to stop it capsizing. Or skiing power snow in Italy as I did just before lockdown. She asked if Lyra or my boys would be with me in this place and I realised that for true peace I would have to be alone. When I’m with someone else I never quite switch off. Part of me is alert, constantly looking out to make sure the other person is enjoying themselves. Over 50 years later, I’m still the little boy trying to please everyone.

The deepest, most trance-like calm I’ve ever achieved is being over a bench with someone hitting me hard with a cane. In that state the voices in my head are quiet, my mind and body are in perfect harmony and I can allow myself the rare pleasure of truly focussing on me.

I wonder if I could find one of these calm places in a hypnosis session. Perhaps then my gatekeeepers would allow the therapist and my adult self to meet child me and tell him it’s OK now; tell him that his parents truly loved him even if they couldn’t show it; tell him he doesn’t have to worry about being punished any more and finally free him from the past.

It would be good, that. Very good.

I always feel slightly fraudulent writing this sort of post. I have people in my life who suffered much more in their childhood. My childhood was privileged and without significant, obvious trauma. I suspect some might look at my upbringing and ask “what about that could possibly need therapy?” But what started out as exploring poor sleep patterns has turned into a deep dive into what it is to be me and the reasons why I have spent much of my life being unhappy.

Or at least, not being actively happy, which is almost, but not quite, the same thing.