partner called into the pub for “a quick drink” after a tough day at work, there to bump into two old mates. He returned home hours later, just as I was considering phoning the hospitals. Not being a self-pitying cry-baby, I turned my hurt feelings into rightful indignation and yelled at him for being so selfish and unfeeling. He hadn’t even let me know he was delayed. A trifle worse for wear and looking tired, he ignored my tirade and settled himself on the sofa. I was not going to get an apology. I went for him again: “Stop ignoring me! Honestly, you’re heartless. I could be lying unconscious and bleeding on the pavement and you’d just step over me!” He looked up wearily, reached for the remote, clicked, and said “Don’t be such a bloody drama queen”. I was taken a-back, felt he’d switched me off as he switched the TV on. I was overcome with such sudden and extreme distress I feared physical collapse and staggered up to bed.
For the next few days I carried on as usual, but no matter how I tried I couldn’t rid myself of an all-pervasive black mood. It felt as if the earth’s atmosphere was being pressed down by a pall of ever thickening soot, no light or movement anywhere. I had to push myself to do anything, had to drag myself out of bed in the mornings. If this was some reaction to the row, it was totally out of proportion, and anyway we had by now talked all that through. What on earth was happening to me?
Then one night I was jolted awake, presumably by some dream. There was a little girl, still as a statue, staring out of our bedroom window bathed in brilliant, unnatural light. I shook my head – a momentary hallucination – before it, she, vanished. With the ease and practice of long habit, I fell to free associating (letting one thought and emotion drift around and eventually link itself to another). I was finally able to piece together what it was that had escaped my memory store to overwhelm me at the end of that row.
I began with the child at the window. Could she be me? She looked about five or six, pigtails. I had pigtails. The light, what about that strange light . . . ?
As a child I was extremely curious about and sensitive to the world about me, the physical as much as the interpersonal. I had intense emotional reactions to animals, people, nature. Ideas in themselves fascinated me; where did they come from? I asked endless questions which no one seemed able to answer. Everyone decided I was “highly strung” and I was teased about it frequently. I felt a freak, but if it kept them happy. . .
Around five or six years old, I woke one morning to find the world a fairyland of snow and ice – the real thing, deep and crisp and even, glistening and twinkling in bright sunlight. I was entranced, spent the entire morning at the window gazing out at it. I stood very still, afraid that to move or breathe might disturb this vision of loveliness that I was encountering for the first time. Mum kept calling me away but gave up in the end.
Finally we were called to the table to eat. I tore myself from paradise, to find myself literally blind! I screamed for help while Mum fiddled with pans and plates. I screamed again: “I can’t see!” Continuing to serve up, mum said crossly “It’s just the snow. Stop being so highly strung about it.” I was terrified, had never heard of snow blindness, and assumed it was permanent. And no one seemed to care! Panic stricken, I protested but was sent to my room to lie down in the dark, purportedly to cure me, but I knew I was not believed (I was being a drama queen).
My terror in that dark room was twofold; one that I might never see again so could not survive alone, and two that my adored mother whom I trusted totally and on whom my whole life depended did not believe me. She had not calmed and comforted me: instead she’d mocked and scolded, sent me stumbling blindly to my room. I was utterly alone, cast out, and everyone thought I was just making it up. How could such things be possible? Without my mum, centre of my universe, there was no hope of rescue. The world was now as black inside as it was outside. I could only conclude that I had failed her in some monstrous way, let her down. It could not be down to her: she, the embodiment of perfection. The whole thing must be my fault for being highly strung.
It never occurred to me then that there might have been a failure of empathy on her part – or on my husband’s when the ten o’clock news proved more important than my feelings of abandonment when he was so late. Once again I was condemned for being highly strung, a drama queen. The pain was unbearable. Was I never to be forgiven?
My sight gradually recovered over the next couple of days, but my faith in my previously sainted mother, and the husbands for whom she was the template, did not. Hence my rage at the casual lateness that had started the row in the first place.
Would the acute Depression have happened had my husband been more understanding or said he was sorry for causing me distress? Was it healing of an old wound that I was looking for, not a grovelling apology, as he’d assumed? Or were my memories associated with the snow blindness – being banished, extinguished – just looking for an excuse to burst out? Was I yelling at my mother – “Understand me! Rescue me! Believe me!” – as much as at my husband? Staying late at the pub certainly provided a golden opportunity for such a re-enactment to occur.
Perhaps without knowing it I had hoped for a better outcome this time, and when I didn’t get it the old despair took over. Whichever way round it was, I could now see the join-up between present and past. Having come to an understanding of my acute little ‘d’, I gave that poor kid a great big hug before leaving her behind.
Personal History
Look at the diagram again. As year by year you grow into your teens, then young adulthood, your genetic propensities (dotted line) combine with your early formative experiences plus that acquired memory store and its effects on you, to shape what sort of decisions and relationships you are going to persevere with and which ones you will let go of. Accordingly a unique personal history accumulates. Your educational and job choices, love affairs, how you spend your money, whether and where you travel, what hobbies you adopt, will all be largely determined by those background factors. They’re not down to mere chance. You continue building up a unique history, a set of attitudes, aspirations, fears and so forth that will shape the outcome whenever you have to choose a direction, major or minor, along life’s journey.
Whilst your memory store is relegated to the past, its contents kept behind closed doors, this Personal History layer is always readily available to you (unless you suppress it). It’s a chronicle comprising your mistakes and successes; situations you ran from or faced; situations that you learned from or let hurt you, that you never want to encounter again or can’t wait to have a re-run of and do it better this time. The items in this your personal file mould your dreams of a future way of life. You will seek something already designed in your head as a result of your historical choices and reactions to events. You will draw yourself a picture of just what kind of life in the future is going to make you happy, and which kind you wish at all costs to avoid.
As a young adult, more experienced and reflective, you may recognise some uncomfortable patterns in that history. When you look back, you see how some modes of relating or behaving kept repeating, bringing about unwanted consequences, despite your feeling good about other areas of your life. Perhaps you seek help to investigate their origins. The insight so gained enables you not only to straighten out some things but also to sharpen up the picture of how you want to live and relate to others in the next period of your life, how you visualise permanence, maturity, your mid and later years. This personal history can be a treasure or a curse. It can be deployed by you as an aid to wise decision making or you can choose to just ignore it and blame external life events as the sole cause of any unpleasant situation in your current life. To make constructive use of your Personal History layer rather than letting it make use of you, requires you to be highly conscious of it. For this onion layer can be an aid or a saboteur, depending on whether it is owned and used constructively or denied and left to come back and haunt you when you least expect it.
Present Life
And so you set about designing your future settled life, and how to make it happen.
