Baby

My most excellent therapist and I have worked out that the cause of my pain - the emotional trauma that my brain is using the physical pain to distract me from - dates right back to the neglect and abandonment I suffered as a baby. Whilst it's good to know this, it's really not good news. It means that in trying to fix it, I'm 'dealing' with a 'baby' who hasn't even learned to recognise speech yet.

The idea with this kind of therapy is you work out where the problem stems from - what period and experience in your life - then you try to reddress the balance. If the problem is lack of love, you give love, if it's not listening, you listen. But you're talking and listening to the 'you' of whatever age you were then.

When I did all this over the sexual abuse, I was dealing with a 'me' aged between four and eight (the age I was when he abused me). But my mother's neglect and abandonment began from the minute I was born.

I know I was a breech baby, so I'm guessing it was a difficult labour; I know my dad was violently jealous of the attention my prescence took away from him; I know my grandparents shunned my parents because I was due 10 months after they were married - my gran didn't believe I'd been conceived in wedlock (which my mother denies, although she told me over and over throughout my childhood that I was an accident, which always made me feel like crap); I know my mother was young by today's standards (21) and had no experience of babies, being an only child; I know she didn't breast feed me (though whether that was out of choice, or in response to advice, I don't know); I know my father had already narrowly avoided jail for violent crime leading up to the wedding and she was probably scared of him; I know that parenting advice at the time told new mothers not to pick babies up when they cried, but to let them sort themselves out. I suspect, but don't know, that my mother suffered post natal depression. All of this together conspired to create a mother who didn't / couldn't bond with her baby.

She didn't pick me up, she didn't cuddle me. She changed my nappy and she fed and bathed me; that's it. She made no emotional connection whatsoever; she did nothing to make me feel safe or secure or loved. She didn't play with, she didn't sit with me- she just put me in my pram and left me there.

Once, she left me in the pram at my father's work (a car exhaust place), where he was supposed to be watching me. I grappled for nearly 40 years with a horrifying memory of being left alone and terrified underground, near a twisting spiral entryway, with a dark figure looming over me. I finally remembered a year or so ago what that was - the underground workshop where my father was. I don't know who the dark figure was, I don't think it matters. What matters is I was left there in terror, crying hysterically, when one or other of my parents should have been looking after me.

It's all this stuff that I have to deal with, if I ever want to be free of the pain. Somehow, I have to make that less-than-a-year-old baby inside of me feel safe and secure and loved. But that baby doesn't understand language, she only senses intent, senses what the other person feels towards her.

The therapist has recommended touch - that's how you might make a baby feel safe, stroke it's cheek or hand. The best I can do is to stroke my own hand or cheek, but I can't cuddle myself the way I would a baby; I can't hold her close so she can feel my heartbeat and feel safe. The therapist also suggested a pet that's more happy to be stroked than the chins. But I'd have to move house for that - turns out my landlord gave me permission for the chins when pets aren't actually allowed in the building - and I don't want to do that.

I'm finding music helpful - I think that's why I'm suddenly so obsessed with it. But somehow I have to find a way to allow a pre-speech baby to express the fury she feels at being abandoned, and to replace the attention, love and security that same pre-speech baby never received as a child, and is desperately seeking. Shit.


Addendum
Can you imagine the conversation where I tell my mother I don't want to see her? It goes something like this:
Remember how you thought you could avoid culpability over the sexual abuse, by the fact that you weren't the actual abuser? Conveniently overlooking the fact that you didn't protect me.

Well, this is all on you. Good luck trying to wriggle your way out of this one.

It's been a really bad 24hours.

After a day yesterday of good pain levels, being able to control things through mantras etc, it all turned to shit around midnight.

I still don't know why, but the pain just exploded. For no apparent reason, it went from totally bearable to I-want-to-die in the space of about five minutes.

I hadn't taken any top up pills, because I hadn't needed them at the usual 10 / 11 o'clock. But that meant that when the pain exploded, I was scrabbling to catch up. I always find the top-ups are less effective at night, and when you combine that with pain going ballistic in a scarily short time, it's a disaster. And it was.

I tried all the mantras that'd been working so well all day, but they were useless. I had to take 15mg at midnight, then another 20mg only half an hour later, because it had got significantly worse, and was still rising. Even that didn't do a lot, but at least I managed to fall asleep.

Unfortunately, things weren't much better when I got up this morning. I spent five hours fighting the pain, trying not to take pills, using all the mantras from yesterday, plus trying out new ones. They touched it, but little else. Then when it got so bad I nearly collapsed answering the door, I had to give in.

That brought it down a bit but didn't stop it. I carried on trying with the mantras, but still I couldn't find one that really worked. I took another 10mg top-up at 7pm (on top of doubling the slow-release all day) and still nothing. Then about 8, I suddenly seemed to hit on the right mantra.

The pain didn't exactly stop, but it sort of reduced in significance. Like it no longer took up all of my attention, or like it was the same strength and size as before, but the proportion of my consciousness that it represented had reduced. I can't explain it any better than that.

I don't feel the need to take top-up pills tonight, but I daren't risk a repeat of last night, so I'll have to.

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Music

I've never really been much of a radiohead, but I'm finding music is massively important at the moment.

I've found several new bands, very very different to my normal taste, and I just can't stop listening.

Normally, I need visual as well as auditory stimulation in order to enjoy it: if I'm just listening to music, I get bored because there's nothing to see. So I usually only have music on when I drive.

But at the moment, the auditory stimulation is enough: for the first time ever, I can sit and listen to music without needing something to look at. And I'm loving my new bands.

I do remember the last time I was in therapy about the abuse I went through a phase of music different to my usual. And I listened to it a lot. But I don't remember feeling so connected to the music, feeling it was so necessary.

At the moment it feels like the music is nourishing me. Maybe I need it to feed my soul. Or maybe that's just being overly hippy-chick...

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Swimming today. Only managed six lengths, which means I've lost all the progress I had made. But it's six lengths more than I managed last week, so let's focus on that angle.

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Another really bad night, with pain going insane because of the stuff going on in my head. Fortunately, this time, I seem to have worked it through, so the pain has gone down again, but I'm left wide awake, feeling very unsettled and very fed up.

It had been a surprisingly good day; the intensive therapy work I'd been doing, coupled with Friday's appointment, was paying off, and I'd gone from terrible pain levels and enormous amounts of morphine yesterday, to managing the pain mentally and just taking a couple of extra slow-release pills today.

All unsuspecting, I went to bed, listening to a favourite DVD as usual. Then suddenly I started having a real problem; stuff on the DVD - something I've watched a hundred times before - was triggering frighteningly vivid memories of my dad. I had to turn it off, but by then it was too late, and I had no choice but to get into yet another horribly heavy session of trying to analyse and unpick those memories.

And to cap it all, the pain, which for 12 hours had been bearable, just exploded. That told me what was going on was important, but last time it flared that way,it lasted for days and there aren't words for how bad it was. I really didn't want to have to go through that again. But that's the thing with all this - you have no choice. Your only option is to go forward, through whatever horrors your mind throws up this time.

And my stomach is suddenly going crazy too - another sign I'm on the right track, but very hard to cope with.

Eventually the pain did go down, suggesting I'd gotten to the bottom of things, at least for now. But it's left me wide awake and feeling very unsettled and unhappy. I don't know what to do with myself now.

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I figured things would get worse before they got better, but this is a nightmare. Pain levels are through the roof and I'm taking morphine like smarties, but nothing's helping.

Having barely calmed down at all since Tuesday night, it's gone crazy today, following therapy session.

I know it's a good thing, that it means I'm on the right track, that the stuff we're working on is really really important, and most probably is the at the root of the pain. But it's so incredibly hard to bear.

And I know I can't stop now, or all this effort, everything I've gone through so far, will be wasted.

But Jesus Christ...

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Violence

I don't want to go into detail about last night because it was too awful.

All I'll say is that I had a very distressing period of psychological symptoms and revelations, followed by possibly the worst pain flare up ever. The only reason I didn't call an ambulance was that I couldn't get to the door to let them in. And yes, I do think the psych episode caused the pain.

The pain has continued to be unbearable all day, and the morphine has been next to useless, just like last night. On top of that, I keep being overwhelmed by the feelings of 'wait till your father gets home'. The way I used to feel when I had done something wrong, or felt I had, as a child, and I was waiting for the punishment - or the tantrum.

It could be something as ridiculously minor and not in any way 'wrong' as asking my dad how much cheese to put on the lunch I was having to make him (god forbid he should take care of his own children - we had to care for him). It's a real example; he threw a massive fit, screaming at me for not wanting to make his food, not being willing to help and being utterly and completely stupid. Then he sulked, wouldn't talk to me and refused to eat anything at all; I was devastated.

Or it could be a 'bad' report card: full of A minuses instead of As, again true, and something that happened twice a year, every year. I'd be lying in bed, waiting for my dad to get home, hearing the back door go, the low hub of voices, rising as she told him what I'd done. The heavy tread as he walked across the lounge, the door opening and then the stairs. Creaking in time with my thudding heart. Will it be just yelling, or will there be hitting?

The feeling of knowing you've done something to precipitate this - that it's all your own fault - is one of being jittery and unsettled, constantly on edge, knowing something awful is coming but completely powerless to prevent it. You feel the harsh injustice and unfairness of knowing no sane person would blame you for that, and the terror of not knowing if he'll actually hit you, or if he'll start throwing things, or breaking glass by slamming doors. Or if he'll just bring you to tears with the evil things he says.

That's how I've been feeling for the past three days. It's scary and draining and truly horrible. No wonder I'm in constant agony.

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