I let work
consume
me. I swam
endless laps,
I wore black
and navy to
create the
semblance of
order... What
was eddying
around me
was traumacharacterised by our inability to fully connect. It was the last
occasion on which we met.
With such a slow-growth connection it was impossible to
predict the landslide impact that that email would have. What
was so hurtful was that he had taken a decision that I felt
was not his alone to take.It was six months later, when I moved back to Britain
from Hong Kong, that the tiles started to dislodge. I
felt at odds with myself, with the self that philosopher
Isaiah Berlin called one’s “inner citadel”. I sought
counsel from friends, made appointments with a
therapist, wolfed down self-help books, constructed
action plans and wrote letters to my father that I then ripped
up or burnt. “Why do you want to open the door? To have
it slammed shut in your face again?” concluded the therapist.
The “you are worth better” Elastoplasts and “get over it” ice
packs soothed and emboldened, but the hurt had calcified.
A part of me was in shutdown.
Then, one August day, while sitting by Lake Wörthersee
in Austria at the end of a short retreat at the Mayr clinic, a
chink of light started to appear. I had had two sessions with
a psychotherapist who practised hypnotherapy, kinesiologyand eye-movement desensitisation and reprocessing (EMDR)- which is sometimes used in the treatment of post-traumatic
stress disorder. During the first, I explained my feelings of
rejection, and she got to work tackling my issues with two
troublesome past boyfriends (previous relationships can act
as blocks); next came the “father session”. At its close, I was
asked to repeat, “Thank you for my life,” three times. “That’s
a few big coals thrown from your backpack,” the therapist
smiled, as I shed tears and felt a wave of profound relief –
although I had learnt that trauma can take many forms, and
that it’s not easily fathomed or “let go”.
On my return to London, life began to be full of life again,
but I wanted to continue what I’d started in Austria, so I
picked up the thread with EMDR practitioner Joshua
Dickson. He advised me to read The Body Keeps the Score by
Bessel van der Kolk, a seminal book that outlines the author’s
pioneering work with ex-soldiers and abuse sufferers in
America. Immediately, the temptation was to question
whether I “qualified” or was indulging in a “pity party”.
Dickson reassured me with an analogy: “If you lose all four
limbs in a car crash, then that’s bad, right? That’s an extreme
case of trauma. So if you lose one limb, is that bad, too? That’s
what we’re dealing with here.”
In his book, Van der Kolk posits that while
normal memory is linear, traumatic memories
are held in the subconscious as jagged
flashbacks that can be triggered randomly – in
my case, Hong Kong was the final, massive
earthquake on a fault line that had always
rumbled. In practice, my EMDR sessions
with Dickson, spread over a year, involved
assessment, resourcing and stabilisation work
prior to confrontation of the trauma itself.
For this, the set-up is techy – it requires being
connected to a laptop that measures heart-rate
variance (HRV ) while bilateral stimulation is
received via headphones and buzzers. I was
guided back to revisit the trauma, connecting
to new, adaptive information until it was
securely reprocessed.
More than once I wanted to give up. As the
reprocessing began, sessions would often leave
me exhausted. “It’s like surgery, either we
excavate the wound and sew it back up,
knowing there is an infection that might create
a limp in the future. Or, we clean it out
thoroughly,” said Dickson, after I pleaded,
“How much further?” Double ruptures – age
four, age 45 – take a while to tease out, and
then I had to manoeuvre through self-
recriminatory impulses to comprehend that
blood can be thinner than water. The
acceptance was a form of closure.
Ultimately, Dickson helped me to reframe
my trauma. In the early summer of last year
I revisited Hong Kong and stayed at my old
apartment, where a friend is now living. I
walked there via the blue-crab seller and the
ginseng stores, and said hello to my old
security guard, who gently squeezed my
shoulder. Like family, friends and therapists,
he signalled that I was going to be more than
OK. The apartment windows I gazed from
as I snapped shut my laptop were clear: that
shattered line was fused back into the past. n
The writer’s name has been changed
AL
AM
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03-20-FOB-Viewpoint-Disinheritance_1687417.indd 209 17/12/2019 15:44211