Breaking the Bonds. Dorothy Rowe

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ said, ‘All my life I’ve been looking after other people. But I’d always told myself that when Peter was grown up I was going to travel. I intended to go absolutely everywhere. I felt that I deserved that.’

      So, at long last, Pat could begin to fulfil her ambition to travel. In the summer holidays she and a woman friend went to China. In Peking Pat fell dangerously ill and was rushed to hospital. An immediate operation was necessary. She survived, but her friend had to return home before Pat was well enough to travel. So Pat found herself weak, in pain and alone in a foreign hospital whose standards of care and cleanliness were far below what she had expected.

      Pat told me how she had summoned up every iota of strength to travel home. Then she had to go into hospital again, and there she was told that she should plan to take early retirement, for now she would need to lead a quiet life with little physical effort and certainly no stress.

      All this she endured in the same stoical way she had endured the troubles of her life. She left hospital and returned home feeling tired and uncertain about what she would do. Her son had returned from Paris to be with her, but as soon as she could Pat urged him to go back to his studies. She assured him that she would be quite all right.

      However, when the taxi taking him away had disappeared down the road and she closed her front door behind her she was assailed by the most terrible fear. She felt that her very being was shattering. She clung to the coats hanging behind the door, trying to get from their softness a sense of being held, but knowing that they were only coats. She hoped that if this were death it would come quickly.

      Eventually, the fear ebbed and she made her way carefully upstairs. She sat on the edge of her bed, hardly daring to breathe lest an untoward movement brought back the fear again. She saw it as a dark, foreboding ocean whose tide at any time would rise and engulf her.

      Much later she lay down on the bed, and much, much later she slept. When she awoke it was to a new world, a world from which all colour had been drained and where the familiar objects of her bedroom had taken on a strange, sinister meaning. She lay in bed all morning, fearing to traverse the vast distance between bed and door and to face the impossible tasks of bathing and changing her clothes. She longed for someone to come and rescue her, but when she heard her neighbour knocking she buried her head under the pillow. Her kindly neighbour now seemed to her as someone she must fear.

      Only the thought that her neighbour might well call the police got her from her bed and into a semblance of living. As the days passed she discovered in herself a facility for lying, declaring to all who might ask that she was well. She gave all kinds of reasons why she could not accept their invitations out but never the true one, that she was frightened to leave the security of her own home and venture into the company of people who, in the guise of friends, threatened injury. She felt exposed and vulnerable and needed to hide away, yet that isolation was near unendurable. She said, ‘I feel that I’m in jail and they’ve thrown away the key.’

      Some friends were not deceived. They contacted her son, and he came again to see her. He told her to consult a psychiatrist. Her friends and sisters said the same. She felt that she could not refuse, and so heard her life of striving, hard work, devotion and self-sacrifice dismissed as unimportant and her profound experiences reduced to a label and a pill.

      Pat’s experience of fear and painful isolation is very common. For many people it comes towards the end of a life of hard work, self-sacrifice and disappointments bravely born. For many others it comes in the middle years, when the rewards for hard work, unselfishness and devotion do not materialize, or, if they do, prove to be a disappointment. For many women the experience comes in their twenties and thirties when, after childbirth, they do not discover in themselves the bountiful fountains of mother love which society assures them resides in all good, natural women. For many teenagers the experience comes when they face the insecurities, the hurdles and the dangers of adult life and they doubt that they have the strength and ability to deal with these. For many children the experience comes when the world which they took to be solid and secure is shattered by the death, defection or disloyalty of someone on whom they depend.

      So terrible is this fear and the painful isolation that follows that few people have the courage to talk about them as they actually are. Instead we conspire to pretend that the fear and the isolation do not exist. Some of us maintain the pretence by remaining silent about our experiences, and others conspire to deny the fear and the isolation by ignoring, belittling and redefining them.

      The aim of this book is to break the silence and to show that the fear and the isolation are not shameful aspects of inadequate people but are central to our experience and understanding of ourselves and our lives. Through understanding our fear and isolation we find courage and relationships.

      Let’s begin with the isolation, for we have a word for that – depression.

       2 Depression – the Painful Isolation

      ‘Depression’ and ‘depressed’ are very common words. We often use them, and usually when we mean something else.

      We say, ‘Isn’t it a depressing day?’, when we mean, ‘I don’t like this weather’.

      We say, ‘This job is so depressing’, when we mean, ‘I’m bored with this job’.

      We say, ‘I’m really depressed about having to spend Christmas with my in-laws’, when we mean, ‘I’m angry’.

      We say, ‘I’m depressed about my child’s exam results’, when we mean, ‘I’m disappointed’.

      We say, ‘I feel really depressed’, when we mean, ‘I’m unhappy’.

      Until we have actually been depressed we do not realize that there is a great difference between being depressed and being unhappy. When we are unhappy, no matter what terrible things have happened to us, we still feel in contact with the rest of the world. When other people offer comfort and love we can feel it warm and support us.

      When we are depressed we feel cut off from the rest of the world. When other people offer us comfort and love that comfort and love does not get through the barrier and we are neither warmed nor supported.

      When we are unhappy, even if there is no one there to comfort us, we comfort ourselves. We are kind to ourselves and look after ourselves. We are close to ourselves. We are a good friend to ourselves.

      When we are depressed we do not comfort and look after ourselves. Instead we hurt ourselves and make life even more difficult. We become cut off from ourselves. We become our own worst enemy.

      Tom described the difference between his experience of unhappiness and depression. He said. The time of my greatest unhappiness was in early 1976. I had a good chance of being selected for the Olympics in the long jump when I was knocked down and run over by a car. It smashed my right leg. I was in hospital for weeks, and most of the time I was miserable and angry with the guy who’d done it to me. But one of the best things that ever happened to me happened then. I knew Dad cared a lot about my going to the Olympics, but when he came to see me in hospital straight after the accident I could see he was upset about me and not about the Olympics. He put his arms around me and gave me a big hug and said he was so glad I was alive. He came to see me every day in hospital and we had some great talks. I felt really close to him.

      ‘That memory’s very precious to me because he died about five years after. At least he wasn’t here to see what a fool I made of myself when my firm let me go. There I was, thinking I had this great job for life, then one СКАЧАТЬ