Families And How To Escape Them - Chapter Twenty Four - In Praise Of 'Dibs'

I knew that something in me had shifted, and what had shifted was something other than my sinuses. But I was unclear as to what it was that had moved.  My sinuses were much improved, and with that improvement I thought I should have been sleeping better than I actually slept. I did not know what it was that was leaving me unsettled. 

I was newly in the queue for group therapy. But I could not see the front of the queue, and I would not see the front of the queue for a long while. Mental health was low priority on the NHS. The queue could be cancelled and I might not be told of the cancellation. My invitation to join a group would not come to me for a long while. One of the more pressing symptoms that I found hard to ignore was how badly I slept. It could not be bad sinuses in the way it had been, however they varied. Without talking to anyone about this, not even my doctor, I struck upon what seemed like a workable solution for improving my sleep.

In the gestalt therapy one of the oddest experiences I had was seeing myself in the third person, where I felt both united and internally divided as I watched myself obeying the therapist as she instructed me to talk as an adult to a cushion that represented my insecure and frightened childhood self. It seemed both weird and normal at the same time but the process had it's own consistent logic. Without consulting anyone as to how the idea was meant to work, I decided to start what would now be called journaling. The paper and pens were cheap and I did not need a doctors script to take it up. I thoughts that if I wrote down enough of the arguments that chased each other round my head as if it were their personal echo chamber, then I would sleep better.

I started with an A4 foolscap pad and took it from there. I made no prior assumptions as to how much to write. Enough to sleep was the aim. The quantity of writing averaged out at four or five sides of A4 a night. If that seems like a lot, then it perhaps proves either how bunged up my thoughts were, or how as a method for getting better sleep mild anti-depressants with a sleeping pill effect would have been a lot better. I did not ask my doctor for pills: I did not know think I could.

When I was much younger my mother shared with me something similar to my 'write it out' idea. In her version the piece of paper with the troublesome thought always had to be flushed down the toilet with the inference that flushing the paper away and not discussing the thought any further erased the discussion and all previous thought about it from your head. Mother never shared how her theory of mind/paper flushing actually worked. If she had shared how a thought could be flushed away, never to return, then I think her idea would have fallen apart quite early on the discussion, which would have led to discussions of what scapegoats originally symbolised and how the use of them had once worked. When Mother thought that she was half right about something in her own household then she thought the whole world agreed with her. Whereas I knew that the world did not agree with me. But this disagreement was what permitted me to keep my paper and the thoughts in it as long as I wanted to keep them.

 Adelaide had a shelf full of psychotherapy and social work books which were part of her training reading for being a senior social worker. She allowed me to borrow, read, and return the books in the house. I never kept a list of what I read but even when I disagreed with a book, or found it to be a blind alley, reading the material always opened me up to some new idea where the next idea was what fired me up more. What I read included all sort of esoteric takes on trauma, and counselling, a lot of which I identified with, not that I was going to explore it furthers on my own.

Whilst doing my nightly 4 or 5 sides of A4 writing to sleep better and going through Adelaide the books on Adelaide's Social Work shelf, the book that most helped me I found by myself in a charity shop in West Bridgford.

It was called 'Dibs: In Search of Self' by Virginia Axline and was the verbatim account of the child of privileged professional, but emotionally distant, New York, parents. The child, Dibs, was withdrawn and angry towards with his family. The parents sent the child to a special play therapy unit. There the therapist had to at first just watch Dibs play with the soldiers and other figures in the sand, or talk with Dibs. To get him to be open about his thoughts. Sometimes the therapist had sit level with Dibs to get close with him as through play Dibs' unexpressed emotions, including some quite extreme anger, were slowly loosened. Dibs expressed himself well through play, and the narratives he gave his the soldiers and other figures he played with, including the anger which later led to warmth.

I cannot overstate how much this book meant to me when I first read it, and for a long time after. As the book quoted Dibs' verbatim responses in therapy, and anger and many other emotions slowly unlocked themselves through his play. So my reading of Dibs responses at each session he attended helped me let out a quite a lot of my emotions onto the A4 pad. I could not emote as much as Dibs did, that would have required the skills of a therapist. But for what I wrote the pad became something of a reliable emotional prop for me. This 'get to sleep better at night' diary started in earnest the December of 1990. I stopped adding further entries in the April/May of 1992. By then I felt that I had let out as much of the long supressed emotions through writing as l could.

The people I knew most, and thought they knew me, were church people. I admitted to nobody in the church that I was keeping this diary to get better sleep. I could not imagine starting a conversation with them which might develop into sharing something as personal as admitting  that I wrote as personally as I did and I was not sleeping well. The churches view of therapy issues was that the person who thought they needed therapy was more in need of God. God did not need to be as good as therapist: he just needed to God. In the dimmer recesses of my past I had briefly belonged to a hot headed Pentecostal church where their belief in miracles was such that they thought that if they had access to mental hospitals then by the laying on of hands they could heal all the patients sufficient to get them off the drugs that in the churches view were making the patients more ill in the long run. I did not dare ask which mental hospitals they had in mind and what sort of time scale and resources their idea required.  a conversation that might allow me to say anything along those lines might start. In Lady Bay better the nearest there was to a view of mental health was that Freud and Jung and their associates were clever but dishonest. Their ideas 'could not be trusted'. 

I had very little patience with the church response to homosexuality. There the general comment was that the origin of a lot of homosexual inclinations among adults was the the result of lack of exposure to positive same gender heterosexual behaviour in childhood, that so damaged the perspective of the resulting adult. This was a safe argument for the church to make, particularly when the church cut off reference to Freud etc, and avoided all talk about the means of accessing the unbalanced childhood that they said was the source of the imbalance in the adult they discussed. The church had no interest in getting the horse back in the stable, so to speak, once the horse had bolted. 98

More interesting to me was the complexity of social and sexual role play. I had seen the postcard where two babies, one male and one female, both look into their nappies and one says to the other 'That explains the difference between our pay packets.'. I wondered what the equivalent of that cartoon was in terms of domestic and emotional hierarchy, and other matters, was were the two babies to be of the same gender? My friend Spider had told a few risque jokes about gay men and sex once or twice, in which it was easy to read the humour as projections of what heterosexuals expected two young gay men to be like. But he also knew how an invisible minority needed to be seen as equal to the majority society to esteem themselves.108

Where the postcard challenged the script and made its point with wit, I knew more about the script of how sexual passivity was engineered than I wanted to know, or could find an audience for, to explain. I had been taught it from the age of twelve. I could never imagine playing out an 'active' sexual role where I made somebody else 'passive'. But I was still effectively 'in the closet'. The emotional diary writing had not opened up that side of my thoughts. Though the diary would get closer to that later. 114

Meanwhile that Christmas gift that most surprised me came from a church member who was an employee of Boots the Chemist. He got me a temporary job working for the company. It started straight after Christmas. The biggest surprise to me was how well I was paid. For the first time ever, and after being available for work for fourteen years and doing hand to mouth temporary part time jobs this job was full time and paid me wages that put me above being able to claim housing benefit for the first time...120

Please left click here for Chapter Twenty Five.