2006-08-17
“Do you mind if we talk about something heavy? If you’re not up for it we could do it another time”My brother Michael, had phoned about arrangements for our niece’s wedding in a couple of weeks. I dreaded what he had to say because I thought it was going to be something about our ageing parents. Living several hundred miles for them I escape most of the difficulties he has to deal with on a weekly basis. I thought he was going to tell me one of them was ill, or shouldn’t we think about putting them in a home…?
But no. He launched into a tale of his own. How he’s been off work for five weeks with stress or depression. How he’s been sent, by his caring employer, to one of these clinic places where they charge hundreds of pounds a day and put you through several sessions of group and solo analysis to help you work out what the root of your problem is. And ho after all these weeks he hasn’t come up with anything that explains why he’s feeling the way he is. And now they’re telling him that if he can’t find anything in his past then it must be something to do with his present and maybe he should leave his wife and two small children and try to resolve his ‘issues’ with control because clearly they’re not a good influence on his mental health.
He tried some anti-depressants. For a weekend. He took a violent physical reaction to them and they made him suicidal and panicky. He stopped taking them.
Michael is a divorce lawyer. By all accounts he’s very good – not in the sense of getting ‘good’ settlements for his clients, but in the sense of caring about all of the people he deals with. He worries about the abandoned wife and children even when he’s acting for the husband and tries to work towards amicable settlements that enable people to get on with their lives after the mess in a way that does the least damage. He takes his work home in his head. He tries hard. He just wants to find a way of being happy for himself.
The more he talked the more I got annoyed at the potential damage these therapists can do to him at a time when he’s most vulnerable. There’s nothing amiss in his marriage; he has no problems with being a father. His relationship with his wife is just fine as far as I can see.
Obviously they’re struggling to work it out for him. They must have asked him to speak to his siblings – he said he’d had the same conversation with Amanda yesterday. He thought there was nothing in his childhood that could cause him problems of this kind.
And then he mentioned our mother’s affair. And he talked of it as though it was something he was aware of when he was three years old. And as a divorce lawyer he’ll be wondering if the secrets he bore then are coming out of him thirty-odd years later. And I seriously doubt if that is the case. We’ve never spoken about this in the family before; I still don’t know if my father knew about it, I don’t believe my sister did. And I think Michael only really knows because he read my diaries from the time some years later. Eleven years older than him, I was the one who was old enough to understand and our sister had left home by then.
I told him I think if he wants to throw these people a bone he should talk about his unusual childhood (he didn’t even see it as such). A mother who was blind and unable to care from him properly. A father who was always distant. Siblings way older than him and unable to relate to him in the way a child needs. A remote house with no friends of his own age. He must have grown up as a child constantly having to deal with situations he didn’t understand, often being farmed out or seeking a family life with other people. I remember at the age of seven or eight he was coming home from school via the neighbouring house (itself about quarter of a mile away) where he was invited in for television and sandwiches and fun by a kindly couple. And it was clear he was happier there than at home (and come to think of it I never got home before him either).
He needs help. Lynne and I believe he needs chemical help, as she did/does. I seriously doubt he needs this constant ‘therapy’, especially if it isn’t getting anywhere. And he certainly doesn’t need anyone trying to undermine the one part of his life that truly makes him happy.