In August 2016 my father went into cardiac arrest and had no pulse for 7 minutes. He was in intensive care for nearly a week and miraculously returned home unscathed not long after; roughly the fourth of his apparent nine lives. This was following several years of cancer treatment – he had been in remission for some time and was beginning to feel better before his heart mysteriously stopped, so is the bitter irony of life. His first (I think) near death experience – I witnessed within 24 hours of a traumatic ‘event’ when I was 15 years old. The confused intertwining of this double trauma produced excessive shame and guilt which is too long and painful a story to go into here. Rothschild’s ‘KEY 5: Reconcile Forgiveness and Shame; Part A. Forgive Your Limitations, Part B. Share Your Shame’ (1) has been invaluable, amongst other ‘shame’ literature, along with counselling placement training and supervision.
Following what felt an excruciating decision to rush out to the US that August, the mindful tools; walking, noticing the surroundings and my movement, etc., I had picked up thus far, became essential. My Dad and Step-Mum had two dogs at the time (see above; a Bassett Hound called ‘Violet’ and a Chocolate Labrador called ‘L’il Pork Chop’, or ‘Lily’ for short, who is sadly no longer with us). I borrowed them quite a lot, took them to the sea and the woods, sat outside with them in between visits to the hospital. In the US suburbs, a person walking is not a very common sight, there are not many pavements, but walking with a dog along the pavement is kind of acceptable. Devika Chawla’s descriptions of walking in the US and the incongruences with her childhood home come to mind,
‘the absence of human bodies on the road made me almost apologetic for being on foot… the landscape was flat, boring, and dismal, a stark contrast to the lush and familiar greenery of the Himalayas – but putting my feet to the ground somehow made the place less strange making it almost a part of me.’ (2)
My Dad’s place is sort of a home-from-home, despite being so far away. Yet being there without my new family was almost unbearable. The walking kept me stable and their dogs became my compensatory attachments (e.g. Kohut, 1977; 3). Evening rituals helped me sleep and I practised grounding myself by holding my hand to my heart when it was aching and breathing steadily as the tears were welling up inside. I now often use my most special stone from the Dorset Coast (please see ‘The Experiment’) in a similar way to ground myself.
I went back to my Dad’s with my husband and daughter on our actual pre-planned trip and we all went to stay in Provincetown, a wonderfully liberal peninsula. The locals describe the sunrise and sunset as ‘the special light’. In the morning the tide is out so far that it feels like walking for miles out to sea. This is one of my ‘safe’ spaces in my inner world of memory and imagination, the other being the Dorset Coast with my dog – lying on a pebble beach with my eyes closed, the warm sun on my face, feeling secure against the firm stones, hearing the comforting sound of my dog paddling in the shallows, smelling wood smoke from the café behind us, refreshed by the cool sea breeze stroking my skin – as gentle as a feather, immersed in the senses and elements, content.
On the emergency flight over to the US that year, I watched a film about grief called ‘Demolition’. It would have been a nice change that I was watching a film in peace without my 2 year old, had I not been agonising over whether my father would be alive or dead, or somewhere in between, when I got there. I later came across a small article about the same film by Julian Edge (a counsellor with Age UK at the time) in the BACP magazine (4). Edge described the storyline as a little ‘convoluted’, with the main character’s ‘desire to dismantle and destroy things – objects, machines, houses’ as a reaction to his grief. I felt, on the other hand, that this aspect of the story was captivating and empowering, almost addictive as an idea. This led later to some long overdue processing of my inner rage in therapy, which involved visualising myself driving a bulldozer and demolishing several houses I have lived in since leaving my childhood farm… until I got back to the farm in the bulldozer, stepped out, stood there and couldn’t work out what to do next.
For a while I was working towards actually, physically, demolishing something, maybe with a hammer, and I briefly (for about 2 minutes) looked into demolition jobs but was put off by the asbestos, amongst other things. I now also wonder if I was drawn to this idea because counselling training and/or therapy are sort of a process of dismantling oneself and then putting the pieces back together again, maybe discarding a few along the way, or finding new ones… and then, preferably, forming a more cohesive whole – allowing the sharp, fragmented, warped memories to soften and fade. Power and movement, destruction and creation, seem crucial for me in releasing what has long been stored up and turned in on myself.
Retroflection, from the Gestalt cycle of experience, can be described as the movement of an ocean current that doubles back on itself. I wonder if this is often where I have got stuck on the cycle. Creating more movement, with my voice, my body, my senses and in my imagination, serves to shift some of the stuckness. Merleau-Ponty draws on Gestalt psychology and Husserlian phenomenology to emphasise that ‘human experience is an immensely complex weave of consciousness, body, and environment, best approached in terms of a holistic philosophy’ (Moran, 2000; 5). I would like to somehow link my two safe spaces together, as it still feels there is a split within me, to achieve wholeness through creativity (e.g. Zinker, 1977; 6). With it being my imagination, there are no rules… and I’m still working on it!
The sometimes overwhelming desire to destroy something, to smash something to smithereens, has calmed down over the past few years. Yet I keep reminding myself that I got back to the farm in the bulldozer (visually, in my mind) and something else was supposed to happen. So what next? I’m guessing I need to say goodbye (please see ‘Unfinished Business’). I’ve tried going back there physically many times throughout my life, surreptitiously creeping past in my car without stopping, but to no avail, as in – no sense of closure was found. Maybe I need to say goodbye in therapy in some way. I’ve considered re-creating the farm with plasticine and adding the toy animals I often work with. And then, I don’t know, say something? As Julian Edge quite rightly pointed out in that film review, ‘If we can shift the ferocious energy of feel-think-do into the matter of words, perhaps we stand a better chance of having our experiences, instead of allowing our experiences to have us.’
Nevertheless, there needs to be a right time to re-visit some things, to go and speak to the ghosts. What with a global pandemic, divided society, systemic racism, climate emergency, political mayhem… and the arrival of my second child… I have decided, for now, to let sleeping dogs lie… and let the baby crawl.
© 2021 Psychodography Blog
REFERENCES
- Rothschild, B. (2010) 8 Keys to Safe Trauma Recovery: Take-charge Strategies to Empower Your Healing. W.W. Norton. New York. London.
- Chawla, D. (2013) Walk, Walking, Talking Home. Rhymes, Reasons, and Ramblings. Retrieved from https://devikachawla.wordpress.com/
- Kohut, H. (1977) The Restoration of the Self. New York: Int. Univ. Press.
- Edge, J. ‘What’s the matter with words?’ Review of Demolition, directed by Jean-Marc Vallée. Therapy Today, Sept. 2016, p.41.
- Moran, D. (2000) Introduction to Phenomenology. New York: Routledge.
- Zinker, J. (1977) Creative Process in Gestalt Therapy. New York: Brunner/Mazel Publishers.
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