Failed First Placement Interview

Tags

grief, interview, placement

I had my first interview for a counselling placement last week and I didn’t get it.

I walked out of the interview thinking I had blown and I had. I just needed to wait for the email which said that while they were sure I would make a fine counsellor one day and had made some insightful comments, I wasn’t sufficiently advanced in training to be let loose on their clients. I was free to come back to them later. It was, quite frankly, the nicest rejection letter I’ve had.

I felt it was all going wrong when they asked me if I could list stages of grief process, which given that this placement was for bereavement was a reasonable question that I could have anticipated and revised for. I got as far as five or seven stages of grief, depending on which model, that Kubler-Ross was the main model and then totally blanked. No I hadn’t read her, just summaries and discussions. She wasn’t the only person I hadn’t read.

Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance (or DABDA for short) are the main five, just so we know.

There was waffling on my part.

I got stuck on another question of are deaths due to ill health, murder or whatever the same (or some such wording). Every death provokes a different response so they are all different but in that sense they are all the same. Some deaths requires autopsies and police investigations and that complicates and distracts from the grieving process. Sometimes there is time to tie up loose ends and say goodbye first. So every death is the same but they are all different. Does the counsellor handle them all the same? Yes and no. Is that a yes or a no? I said it was both and struggled to choose one.

There were questions about organisational process. If the bereavement is done but there are other issues to deal with would I want to continue. Yes, but the organisation is for bereavement so you signpost on. Funding is for bereavement. Fair enough I said. Was I supposed to anticipate that or not? There were other such questions where I gave my personal view and added that it would depend on the organisation’s policy

How would I deal with someone who cried? Let them, pass the tissues, and if it brought tears to my eyes then let them cry too, but to show empathy, not to lose control.

Many many questions, for an hour. Bowlby, diversity, taking money, … Some I was fine with, others baffled me. I wasn’t really prepared. Why not?

I am not comfortable with interviews and it took me halfway through to settle in and say the right thing. On the one hand it was an interview, on the other hand it was like discussing counselling skills.

How was I with silence? Fine. I need to be aware whether it’s a good silence to let be or an empty one to interrupt. What do I interrupt with? I had to be prompted with “it’s not that complicated” before answering “What are you feeling, how are you” and other such check ins.

Could I challenge? Yes. What did I need before challenging? Trust and sufficient depth. Yes.

I wasn’t in course mode; I was in interview mode and I struggled to bring the two together. Once I got that I was better but felt that I just started the whole thing off in neutral. I gave the right answers eventually but went round the houses to get there.

So I need to do better next time. I have one application in and another I need to write and probably now other organisations to look for.

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Mindful Streaks Aren’t Mindful

Tags

loving-kindness, meditation, metta, mindfulness, streak

 
I have made it, 100 days of calm in a row. A daily mindful streak.

When I first joined Calm, which is totally utterly brilliant by the way, I got an invitation to join the Facebook group, as do all newcomers. In it people post their own tales, their own beautiful meditation spots and their winning streaks. People post pictures of 100 day, 365, and 1000 days.

People also moaned, of starting their 98th meditation five minutes before midnight and it finishing five minutes after so technically not completed within the day and thus breaking the streak. I looked at angst over broken streaks and thought this is not what mindfulness is about.

I also recognised that I could hook into it, even at the stage where I was getting excited about doing 7 days of mindfulness straight. I realised that if I could feel disappointed with myself over such a small streak the disappointment would be bigger over breaking a large one. So I thought about it, how mindfulness is being in the here and now, not leading a streak. I don’t have a good or a bad meditation session, just sometimes my mind is busier than others. In that same way, I decided that missing a session was just a thing that was going to happen and I wasn’t going to see it as a failure.

Inevitably it happened and I broke a streak of over 30 days. I decided to forgive myself and managed to do so. The last streak broke when my son’s GCSE results came out and he had to return from school after collecting his results for a piece of paper before he was allowed to sign up for sixth form. I realised at the end of the day that I’d missed my session and decided I wasn’t going to do it and I wasn’t going to fake it either. I’d just start again.

Today, I am just over a year on and the less I worry about my streaks the longer they are. My ten minute daily calm meditations have brought me self-awareness and contributed to increased inner peace. I have felt more connected to myself than ever before. I have noticed my ability to be mindful in real life as well, not just in practice.

Today’s meditation was a loving-kindness one, or metta prayer,  in commemoration of World AIDS Day. The first time I did a loving-kindness meditation I felt it stupid. This time I was tearful. I felt greater warmth towards myself, increased self-compassion. I was kinder to me.

So I share 100 days of calm, and my pride in this achievement, whilst simultaneously recognising that today it is today’s meditation that matters, as it will also be tomorrow.

 

 

Mental Well-being Needs a Safety Net

Tags

body, connections, Kolk, safety net

I’ve recently been reading The Body Keeps the Score: Mind, Brain and Body in the Transformation of Trauma by Dr Bessel van der Kolk, an excellent book marred only by being in 8pt which has made it difficult to read. There’s some irony there if you will.

Mental well-being (as opposed to mental health which always refer to a lack of it) is determined by one’s ability to bounce back rather than fall all the way through to the ground. Bear with me, I’m being metaphorical.

If I have a strong safety net then it stops me falling more than a little bit and bounces me back up. The weaker it is, the further I fall and the harder it is to bounce back up. If it’s too weak then I might fall through it and crash down all the way to the bottom, which is so far down I cannot see it. Then I have to climb back up which is a lot harder.

So it’s really important to have the strongest, bounciest safety net I can. The safety net is formed of connections: connections between myself and family, close friends, acquaintances, librarians, random strangers I pass on the street. Connections are also between myself and places I go for all sorts of different reasons: my college, for learning, the river Thames and my local canal, for beauty, tranquillity and green stuff, my local pub, for good cheer and silliness, theatre for culture etc.

Some of these connections are tiny weak threads of cotton, others are big strong pieces of rope. Some are life long and others are short. Together they can make the net strong and balanced (I cannot find an appropriate picture of the sort of net I envisage in my mind).

But connections aren’t just the external ones. It’s also about the connections to my mind and my body.

Am I self-aware, do I know what is going on in my head and why, do I understand me? Can I spend time in my own company? These are all the connections between me, myself and I that also form part of my safety net. Therapy and mindfulness goes a long way to highlighting my connections with my mind but this is about truly living it, not just practising it on a daily basis.

Increasingly now I am aware that I have been lacking connections with my body and am using daily Pilates (go me!) to try and re-connect with my body. So body connections are about an awareness of what my body does for me, caring for it, knowing which parts are stronger or weaker than others, recognising that my body is part of who I am and is not just a meat suit I put on (thanks to whichever TV series put that name in my head). Body awareness is also about recognising, seeing, feeling, noting what goes on in my body at times of stress, recognising the reaction in my pulse, tremors, butterflies, all that is built in reaction. It doesn’t just apply to times of stress either; I need to learn to be aware of my physical responses to all situations, in particular times of strong emotions. I am only just beginning to get this.

So, external connections, internal mind connections and internal body connections all come together to weave a hopefully strong safety net that stops me falling when I struggle. I cannot ignore any of these three aspects of connectivity if I want to make my safety net big and strong.

My Relationship with Books

Tags

books

My mother taught us three daughters to read by the time we were three. I didn’t realise how difficult this was until I tried and failed with my own children who had to wait until the more usual age of six. Whether as a result of this early practice or not I do not know, but I read very fast, going through normal fiction at 150 pages per hour, which will go down to 50 pph for the densest tome and much faster for the light weight or well known. I read about 250 books a year, a number that I think has been fairly constant throughout my life.

Books have saved me: they have always been there, ready to whisk me away to an unknown or even a familiar land. They take me away from reality and teach me, mostly without lecture or hectoring tone.

I remember picking my first adult book off the adult shelves and wondering what it was doing there. To be fair to the six year old it was purple and called “Five Little Pigs”. I picked up Agatha Christie and Alistair Maclean and read them voraciously and repeatedly until I was sick to the sight of them. I’ve never been able to read them since.

My sister went off to university and disposed of her childish things. She gave me two Airey Neaves and two Asimovs, unwittingly doing me a great favour and stimulating life long interests. However my relationship with books is not about a list of authors: it’s what the books do for me.

I have a selection of books that are my comfort blankets. When times are tough, or I’m feeling ill and I just want to cuddle with a book then I have a set of “go to” books; some are a series, a world in which I can immerse myself for a couple of weeks; others are individual stories; several make me cry. When I’m feeling unable to cry about whatever’s going on in my life a book can trigger the release of a good cry. Some are children’s books. A few are ones my mother read as a child. I’ve never stopped reading books for the young and find they can be more imaginative and magical than anything written for adults which in itself is a shame. My favourite librarian and I could happily spend an hour talking about books together if undisturbed by other customers.

About ten years ago I made the amazing discovery that I could not read all the books in the world that I wanted to before I died. Not even if I ceased doing anything else. Before then I had been a haphazard reader, going through my own library on repeat, scouring the shelves of my local library, ordering books from them as I felt like it. I read non fiction as well but noted how much more attention I needed to give. I had previously always finished books that I started on the basis that it might improve, giving up on only about five books in some twenty odd years.

A parallel thought process to this was the need to step out of my comfort zone, that reading and repeating might be comforting but it wasn’t stimulating. The same applied to films in a lesser degree. My parents who have yet to really discover DVDs would play the same videos until they wore out, such was their preference (and still is) for safety and comfort. I started off by banishing formulaic if enjoyable crime novels where the same detective cracks the same sort of cases each time in the same town and the same style with the slight personal development along the way. For me these stories have the comfort of the familiar without taking me anywhere the first few stories in a series haven’t been.

I started cataloguing my books online and vowed never to repeat a read until I have read all my fiction. I still haven’t managed to read all of them although I have not repeated. My fiction is now divided into the majority which I have read and the minority yet to read. Inevitably the easier lighter books have been done and the harder ones remain. I have managed to throw away a few hundred books in the process, teaching myself that if it hasn’t grabbed me in the first fifty pages then I can bin it without finishing it. I intersperse my own books with library books and books that I mostly buy from AbeBooks. I tend to buy second-hand and have always enjoyed a good rummage round a second-hand bookshop. That pleasure has been greatly diminished by the arrival of the internet and the ability to search bookshops the world over for the wanted book, subject only to an ability to pay the price. Currently most of the non-fiction I read is about counselling but random others slip through as and when I need a break. I have a book list with some hundreds of titles, gleaned by reviews, friends, cursory mentions in online articles and of courses books recommended by the author. It was the growth of this list that really made me realise how impossible my desire was to satiate.

I love the physical book. The old hardback that lasts for ever with the fading paper; the cheap and nasty paperback; the war prints with the yellowing paper; the really expensive ones I barely dare read; the different covers; the smell of musty books; the variety in size, colour, cover, design and hue; the memories a particular cover will have, even if the book itself is lost. Books brighten up a room and save the need for decorating.

None of this would be complete without mentioning my parents’ relationship with books. When they moved back to London my father managed to get rid of 1,000 books although he struggled over each and every one. It sounds like a lot but still he remains with some 6,000 odd. My parents bought a house that was double the size of their needs but sufficient to neatly house all the books which provide a comfort blanket to my father. He reserves just one bookcase for fiction which is always kept upstairs out of sight. The vast majority of his are history, economics and current affairs. Both my parents have become increasingly obsessed with thrillers and crime novels, which they call “crimmies”, reading an author thoroughly, completely and repeatedly until they get bored and replace him with another. Only the selected few works of fiction are allowed on the downstairs shelves like Bronte and Kipling. Some of my reading joys overlap with my parents and led from theirs, others are a natural opposite.

Books are so vitally important: they educate through stories as well as non-fiction; they comfort and provide succour. They stimulate through presenting topics in multi-faceted ways, whether it’s thinking about sociology through science-fiction or reading the graphic novel version of “The Origin of the Species”. There is no need for text books to be the dull tomes they usually are. Books have saved me and they will continue to save me. They will also continue to delight, provoke, prod, entertain and make me laugh. No wonder they’re so important.

Being Ambushed by His Dad

Tags

ambush, father, memory, son

My eldest son was 14 and about to embark on his GCEs, probably even GCSEs by then. I was a single parent with three other children who were still at primary. The age gap between him and his siblings was over five years. They all shared a room which was fine but not brilliant.

So when his father phoned me up, sometime in the summer term and suggested that our son go and live with him as he needed to take his schoolwork more seriously (not that it worked) I saw some sense in it. I also emotionally rejected it outright but I listened. His dad lives with his mother and there were other family members around so 1son would have more of a sense of his wider family. He would get a room of his own which he would of course love. His grandmother was a teacher and his father quite bright so there would be support for his education and peace in which to do homework.

As I sat and discussed this, rationally, over the telephone, I was trying not to cry out loud, to not give him the satisfaction of knowing he had made me cry at the very basic thought that I might be willing to surrender my child to him. He might have stopped drinking but I didn’t trust him. He’d fucked up our marriage, why should I believe he could look after a teenager?

And so I said I would go away and think about it, as the suggestion had come as a shock and I need to give it some consideration.

At which point he tells me that he’s already discussed it with 1son who thinks it’s a great idea and is ready to pack. My body is shaking at this memory, with anger and feeling irrelevant. I realised I had no choice in the matter. My son wanted to go. If I said no I would be unreasonable. He could always come back. I spent the weekend crying, accepted it and moved on. My son still lives with his dad and I still resent it. I will always miss him. I missed up on the awkward teenage years and telling him to clear his room every five minutes and maybe it hasn’t done our relationship any harm.

But I felt hurt that his father could be so insensitive as to not give me a chance to think it through first. What I thought was irrelevant. He had decided, as my father decided things, and had told me when it was too late to say no.

A Hard Weekend

Tags

2son, autism, fear, journey, love, pain

I spent Friday going to visit 2son at his new school. They are very happy with him and he is settling down well. We then managed to spend a couple of hours together and he talked of his fear of getting depressed again and how he couldn’t accept his progress and how well he had settled in as he expected to crash. It was a difficult conversation but much better to have it although I found it so hard to not put my arms around him and never let him go. He is as settled as he can be.

It was a long day travelling, 16 hours door to door that I did by train. Whether it was the length of the day or the conversations I had with him I do not know but I spent the weekend feeling emotionally and physically drained. I felt a need to recover and recuperate, to curl up on the sofa and watch crap TV, so I mostly did.

I felt and still feel the tension in my body, a tightness in my chest and butterflies in my stomach. I worry for him but I also feel the parallels with my own journey. I am beginning to grasp the need to look after myself, physically as well as mentally. I want to do so more in terms of developing mindfulness and physical activity that I risk worrying myself about doing everything I have decided I need to do. Self care is so complicated. 2son has had a brief taster of mindfulness and apparently of yoga. He is very disconnected from his body and his mind and has a long way to go.

I think the conversation I had with him reminded me of how far he has to go and that while the getting out of bed and going to college is brilliant, he also has to work on all these other aspects and learn to cope with himself and at this he is a mere egg. He will have to go through a lot of painful self examination, trying and failing at all sorts of things in order to develop ways to live that he can cope with and I think I’m just feeling heavy from the thought of what he has yet to go through. I love him so much and yet I cannot do this for him. He has to do it himself. But he is in a good place and there is much warmth from the staff and he is clearly well looked after. Choosing this place was my contribution. Now he has to work with the staff and make his.

Complex PTSD Workbook – Contributing Factors

Tags

birth, childhood, early childhood, stress, tension

1. Intensity, duration and timing
2. Genetics
3. Environment
4. In-utero influence
5. Family dynamics
6. Modeling
7. Presence of a learning disability or ADHD
8. Lack of resilience factors

Which of these contributing factors of C-PTSD relate to my life? (p25)
(1) I cannot say what happened during the first three years of my life and therefore how it affected me. We only lived at my birthplace for two years. The myth is that we only went so I could be Yorkshire born. The reality of moving for a job that didn’t work out would have been a lot harder. We moved back to London when I was one so there would have been lots of stress of moving, settling into new job, new area and new schools. My mother would have struggled to make friends. So I would have been affected by stress and tension even if I knew nothing of what was going on.

My teenage years were blighted with bullying, lack of friendship with peers, adult relationships, fear and total introversion. Moving and settling in, my parents again suffering stress of relocation. This time I remember how “ill” my father was when he started his new job and how much that affected family life. Then there was the moving out at 16, supposedly with my parents’ support only to find out that my father was having an affair with the woman I had moved in with.

(2) Were my parents traumatised? I’ll never really know but my mother was an unmarried pregnant woman in the late fifties when such things were not done. I don’t think she’d have married my father if she hadn’t been pregnant and from the very little she said I think she found those first years of marriage and getting used to my father traumatic. As to my father, he lost a brother as a teenager whilst away from home. So both parents had traumas and there may well have been a biological predisposition passed down.

(3) My early childhood was confusing. My mother taught me to read by the age of three and took me out to museums and theatres from a very young age. Some of her reasons for that would be to get out of the house and escape. My father would occasionally take me into work for the day, which I enjoyed and tell me a story at bedtime. But on the other hand we went for walks (right from birth) where I had no say and was just expected to get along. There was a tension between my parents that was always there and I think I was vaguely aware of it well before I could have identified it: that need to behave, to be especially good or quiet when he was in a mood, not that the mood was ever acknowledged. I would have been about five when my sister got pregnant and that would have created an atmosphere.

(4) I can opine that my mother was stressed: we had moved to a new town a few months before I was conceived and my father was always incredibly stressed when starting a new job. My sisters would have been in primary school and going through the difficulties of settling in a new job. Ex-utero my mother had me on a four hour feeding schedule as advised by the doctors and would let me cry if the time wasn’t right.

(5) My eldest sister had been an unplanned and unwanted pregnancy. My middle sister was a few years later and then there was a long gap. It turned out that my parents had planned on having a fourth but I was unaware of that and at some level I think I always wondered why I existed. It’s really hard to look back at this and to try and not put words into my head but I remember watching my sisters as teenagers who might have mostly hated each other but there was an unmistakable bond between them that I could never have. The very fact that I watched them rather than participated is a reminder. My mother talks about the need for me to be a Gemini and how that therefore meant I took longer to be conceived. But I also had to be Yorkshire born which conflicts with the myth above. The truth will stay unknown. Life would have been very different if I had been born a Londoner and left to get on with my own self-identity.

(6) This is hard. I didn’t lack medical care when needed but I did lack care and compassion when I was feeling unwell, being made to go to school to the point of getting sent home for not being well enough. Healthy eating was never an issue: you ate what was on the table or went hungry. I never went hungry although I did have to wait for mealtimes with snacks being discouraged. My mother made a lot of cakes and stodgy puddings and I learned to bake before 7. My parents drank, but in a mostly controlled way and my mother smoked at home but gave up on holidays. Money was controlled but we were never at risk and I was never aware of it being a problem. I do not remember my eldest sister leaving home.

(7) Not applicable.

(8) I did have an adult from the age of 7 who was an additional support to me on a very regular basis and was a definite positive attachment figure. My mother was a protective resource except for when she wasn’t so lacked the consistency and my father wasn’t. I didn’t have other protective factors like good friends or hobbies outside the house. As a teenager one of my attachment figures was my dad’s mistress so again a lack of consistency and a definite conflict. Plus she was not a good role-model in multiple ways. My grandmothers provided positive and supportive relationships, but from a distance and in holidays only although I did write to them in between times.

This post is a response to p25 of The Complex PTSD Workbook: A Mind-Body Approach to Regaining Emotional Control and Becoming Whole which I am working through. The author can be found at Dr Arielle Schwartz

Feeling Vulnerable

Tags

bullying, parents, passive-aggressive, peers, priest, sister, suicide, teachers, vulnerable

I went *there* in triads this week. I didn’t want to but felt that there is little else on my mind. It started off being a conversation about a running slanging match I’m trying not to have with someone via work. His aggressive hectoring attitude makes me feel small and insignificant so I have responded totally unprofessionally by running away and ignoring him. This has naturally made me think about the bigger picture and I chose to go there. In some ways I think the last three years of counselling has been about getting me to go there.

I don’t deal well with hectoring bullies. The last time I had to was about ten years ago and that time I did go to pieces and struggled to get back. This time I felt more that I knew what I was running away from and why.

My father bullied my mother. Not in an overt domestic abuse type of way, but in a very passive-aggressive manner that said “if you don’t make things happen how I want them to happen then I will not be happy and if I’m not going to be happy then no one else in this household is going to be remotely happy”. No pressure.

I’m not sure I’ve ever called it bullying before.

My peers bullied me at school, both primary and secondary. Catherine started it, the American who had enjoyed (I think) the position of being the only foreigner and maybe I threatened her status. What did it involve? I struggle to recollect. There was lining up for the school bus home and being accused of queue jumping, no matter how long I’d been there. I’d have to let her and her little friends in or else. It was whispers, words spread, that I smelt, or was dirty, or was mean. I really struggle to put words to it.

The local priest (Roman Catholic) bullied me at school. I was the only one in the year who was not preparing for my First Communion. The priest took us for RE, which was probably more Religious Instruction than Education. He belittled me for only being a Protestant and I was thankful that my parents hadn’t been honest and put me down as an atheist. He tried to convert me, almost by force, and it failed. We also had to go to confession after our First Communion and once a fortnight we would spend the afternoon in church taking it in turns to confess. As a Protestant I didn’t have to confess but I did have to spend two or three hours contemplating my sins and my inadequacies of not being a good Catholic, sitting in a dull and dreary church with nothing to do.

My French teacher bullied me at secondary school. Mme Van De Steen didn’t like foreigners. I never knew whether it was just the English speaking foreigners or all of them (I did meet an American who had also suffered at her hands who had somehow managed to resolve it). It didn’t much matter. She told me she would make me repeat the year if I didn’t buck up and then she would sit there and not help me. We would go through exam papers and review the answer and she would pick me out to answer a question I hadn’t been able to answer and still couldn’t and she would mock me for not knowing. I expect my French was better than her English but that wasn’t the point.

My sister bullied me in a passive-aggressive way. One-upmanship. She needed to put me down in order to feel better about herself. This went on well into her thirties, if not forties. What hurt with her is that my mother used to be very aware of it and would thank me for not biting back. Then one day she stopped seeing it, as if something had just switched off and she couldn’t any more. I did call her out on it and she just didn’t know what I was talking about.

My first boyfriend made me cry a lot. I honestly have no idea why, just that we’d sit in the pub and I’d spend the evening crying while we were talking. When I did split up with him he then threatened suicide, which is another form of bullying and it took me a year to really split up with him. He didn’t commit suicide.

My second boyfriend had been to Oxford so my dad liked him. He was incredibly sarcastic which was fine up to a point. I was not very nice to him and he was generous. He moved from one side of London to the other so I didn’t have to commute in order to go to college and then I dumped him. But there was an underlying edge to him that wasn’t bullying, more just poking holes at me.

All my subsequent partners followed similar patterns: they would seek to dominate through bullying or passive-aggressive behaviour and just wear me down. They almost succeeded.

 

About My Body

Tags

body, ignored, invisible

Having looked at my mindmap of self with my therapist, one area I found difficult to deal with was that of my body. So I’m endeavouring to zoom in on that part of my self and identify.

Starting at the very beginning, my mother breast fed me on a strict four hour schedule regardless of whether I was crying or screaming. She told me how hard she found it to let me cry.

As a child, the messages my body sent out were ignored. I was often car sick, which considering that all are holidays were made by car, was an inconvenience. My father would always want to go on, without a planned stop and it would take my mother turning around, seeing my green face and telling him that we really needed to stop. I learned to sit upright in the car, to not read, to stare out of the window at the far horizons and also to sleep through as much travel as possible. When I got older and there weren’t three of us in the back I would occasionally be allowed to sit in front, which affected me a lot less. My middle sister would also complain of feeling car sick so she could sit up front. Years later she told me she thought I was just pretending so I could sit up front too.

If I was ill, my father would come home and simply say “is she going to school tomorrow”, not asking how I was feeling but whether I was going in. I went to school regardless of how ill I felt and was sent home on more than one occasion when they thought I was too ill be be there. So illnesses were also discouraged as a personal failure. It also put stress on my mother having to look after me or my sisters and my father didn’t like that.

My father always put my mother first, in all things. He speaks fondly and admiringly of the four (?) times she put her foot down and said no to her. He would defer to her but never saw our opinions as having value, other than to mock and point out our errors. She was always beautiful in whatever she wore but I needed to put a pretty dress on to be told I looked nice. It also didn’t matter how fat she was whereas I got told I needed to lose weight. I felt I was well below her in the pecking order. This paragraph is stressing me out so I need to come back to this area later.

When it came to the cold seasons, the heating was not put on much. We were encouraged to “put another jumper on” and I did learn to layer up. It would be turned up if my mother insisted, not if we children asked. I still keep the heating abnormally low.

I’ve talked about the walking in the previous post but it was only when writing it that I realised that no other physical activity was ever offered or made available. I had PE at school but, other than the occasional family cricket in the garden or game of catch I remember little else. My mother did take me swimming when I was very young, but my learning at school was very sporadic and I mostly remember being ignored as not being able to swim (which makes you wonder what the lessons were for). I ended up being mostly self taught and a very slow swimmer. I did learn though and would disappear for several hours to our local swimming pool which was a lovely big Olympic one with proper diving boards. Only later did I realise how lucky that was. Now I love swimming but I really don’t like most swimming pools so I don’t go as often as I could. That’s a cop out and I need to think about that too.

I felt that my body was invisible or irrelevant, to be mostly ignored and not paid attention to. I didn’t have long hair (ever that I recall) although I sometimes grew it to shoulder length and so didn’t spend time plaiting it, styling it or messing about with it. I didn’t do dress up or make up. My mother never wore any. Very little attention was paid to my physical appearance and it’s not something I did with my older sisters either. I never watched either of them getting ready for a date or a party.

I also found puberty very difficult. My parents never talked about bodily functions and they certainly never belched or farted but stayed in control at all times. My mother told me about periods just before mine started and there was an informative leaflet as well. She later told me of how difficult hers were as she was the first to start them in primary school and they had to put in bins and whatever else in just for her so she was very embarrassed. Sex was not really ever discussed and by the time my mother got round to trying to talk to me about if, after having produced another leaflet, I had her in hysterics by telling her not to worry as I knew it all already. She told this to all her friends with whoops of laughter. I never learned to talk about periods or sex, to friends or partners and I suppose in some ways I am rather inhibited. Even writing this is hard for me.

Pain was also to be ignored and tears were never welcome.

More to come on this…

Was Walking Traumatic?

Tags

exercise, trauma, walks

When I was seven years old we went on a 100 mile walk around the foothills of Mont Blanc, doing ten miles a day. It was one of the last big holidays that the five of us took together. I loved walking on the snow and the crunch it made. I loved seeing women in scanty bikini tops and shorts, contrasting with the big rucksack on their back and shoes on their feet. I remember not feeling at all worried about walking until we were crossing a slippery slope with a sharp slide down the valley and my father told me how to dig my fingers in to the ice if I started falling. Then I got nervous.

But we had to prepare for this walk. We went walking at the weekends often and I couldn’t plead exams or homework to get out of it. I don’t hugely remember my sisters being there but they were. After a walk my parents would often have a pint or possibly two, whilst we three girls would sit outside, with maybe a lemonade and a packet of crisps to share. For the most part children weren’t allowed in pubs then, although I’m not sure how much my parents tried.

Our holidays comprised walks. Wales, the Lake District, Scotland. That was it, other than the visits to my grandmother in France. I remember nothing else of Britain from back then. Just hillsides, hills, paths, and putting one foot in front of the other. I remember going to the specialist shop to get my climbing boots, one of the few, if not the only time my father took an interest in buying me anything. They had to fit properly and they had to be worn in, until I became one with the shoe.

We walked in the dry; we walked in the wet; we walked in the hot and the cold. We would stop every couple of hours and my father would dish out a chocolate square each, maybe two, if the bar was big enough and the journey short enough. We didn’t carry water bottles. We could wait until we got there. There would be one to share so a swig each. We didn’t stop for toilet breaks either.

My father wouldn’t make any unplanned stop or diversion. If you wanted to look at the view, and there were plenty of beautiful views, you looked as you walked, in between watching where you put your feet down. There was no stopping to look at the view and the only time I got a chance, was if the map came out.

My father was also 6″2′, as it said on his passport. The reality was half an inch shorter and I suppose it’s even less now. But a man of 6″2′ has legs that are twice as long as those of a six year old. I had to put effort in to keep up and it was up to me to learn to walk fast rather than for anyone else to slow down. If I didn’t try to keep up then I would simply miss out on any rest and the chocolate. I’d have to wait until next time. So, like my mother before me, I learned to walk quickly. Something I kept up until I had babies and slowed down to walk at their pace. I never forced them to keep up with my and now it’s my father who asks us to slow down to let him move at his pace.

Did I protest at these walks? I think so but do not  remember doing so. Not that it would have done much good. I am told that I alternated between wearing only skirts or wearing only trousers, for months on end. Again I don’t remember this, not then. I had skirts for school. I do remember that no other form of exercise was ever on offer, other than playing cricket in the garden. My mother took me to the swimming pool and started to teach me to swim although I wouldn’t learn properly until secondary school and even then it was mostly self taught. Once I learned to swim I went to the pool on my bike in Brussels, spending as much of the day there as I could. I never learned to swim fast but I did enjoy the peace and quiet.

As an adult I sort of enjoy walking for pleasure but I don’t do it much, which sorts of suggests that I don’t, or at least not as much as I might. Over the past few years I have really tried to get into some form of physical activity, from going to classes to activities on the wii and they’ve all fallen by the wayside. I’ve tried going for short walks locally that I don’t have to prepare for as I think the whole planning the walk contributes to my lack of interest. I’m currently on my second round of 30 days Pilates challenge (ten minutes a day) which I’m doing before my meditation and that is working.  So fingers crossed.

Reading about complex trauma, one of the responses of the body is to freeze and to learn to stop moving, as moving probably will cause issues. Staying hidden and motionless is the best defence against whatever might happen. I wonder if this has stayed with me and made me as physically lazy as I possibly could be, although of course I was very active with children. Now, though, it’s my choice and I’m choosing not to. I recognise that I need to move more and am trying, with a bit of gardening, a bit of Pilates, the occasional walk. The experts say that yoga is best for trauma and I have to think about whether I’m going to give that a go rather than my lovely Pilates Robin (find her at The Balanced Life) who is engaging and non-judgmental.

Putting the link together of healing mind and body explains partly why I’ve been feeling that this has been a journey parallel to therapy and will hopefully motivate me to keep being a little bit more active. There is a greater clarity to what is going on inside me but I’m still rather fed up of it all.