Now or Never 5

I was discharged from treatment yesterday. I lasted twenty-three days.
In that time, I learnt that I was neglected from birth by one invisible parent (Dad), one emotionally unavailable parent (Mum) and three older sisters (who didn’t know any better).
Although neglect is seen as a baby-version of child abuse, I also learnt that it can be just as damaging to a life, causing problems with intimacy, self-awareness, loneliness and self-worth.
When the pain of living is too much to bear, and once neglected babies have grown into adults, they are often prone to look for ways of better blocking unwanted thoughts and feelings that urge them to explore who they are.
By seeking solace in drink and drugs, or shopping and money, or work and food, the thoughts are relieved in an ephemeral way. When they return, and they always do, the pain of living is just that little bit more daunting. It’s constant subconscious neglect of one’s own neglected child within.
By going through the trauma of understanding more about my past (which I felt I needed to do more than anything else), in the safety of a treatment centre, the hope was that therapy would bring on a mental breakdown. The theory is that once I am truly broken, I am then ready for reconstruction, like an emotional six-million lira man. Lots of people do it, and I wanted to be one of them. The pain of living had become too much to bear, again. The last time had worked for a while, but I gave in too quickly and got stoned, and pissed, and gambled, for another twelve years. A slow burn.
With the process of breaking down underway, guided by therapeutic groups and continued sobriety to restore my working ethics as naturally as possible, I became open enough to see things from a totally new perspective for the first time since trauma began.
My own story is not uncommon.
I was conceived when a contraceptive broke while my parents made love in a hotel room in New York. My three sisters and grandmother were in the next room.
Pretty much throughout the ‘brain drain’, Dad had been working for engineering companies in the States and Canada for a number of years.
At this time, one of these companies offered him a place on the board. He’d have been made for life and my sisters and mother, who’d travelled wherever his ambition took them, would have finally been able to settle.
But then, in a twist of fate, he was approached by Cambridge University with the irresistible prospect of research director.
It was unheard of for Cambridge to offer such a role to someone who hadn’t studied there.
In the end, he went with the intellectual prestige, an ego-massage and a gargantuan pay-cut.
After crossing the Atlantic in Mum’s tummy on the Queen Mary, I was born in an old people’s home in Cambridge in 1965.
Just after my birth, Mum had to have a major operation on her forehead. Dad had quickly torn into a passionate affair with a high-up colleague’s wife, a beautiful American woman. With no one to guide them, my sisters ran riot through Cambridge, doing whatever they pleased.
With Mum out for the count, Dad inventing new theories and my sisters doing whatever, I’m trying to picture myself as a baby. Was I left alone in a cot, screaming for attention with Mum in hospital? Had my sisters wanted me out of the way? Was I one too many?
I’ll never know the extent of my neglect.
It’s a bleak picture, with Dad strutting his stuff around campus like a princely peacock and Mum trying to recover from major head surgery with four kids at her feet. It must have been a house of maternal mayhem.
In a way, I’ve always felt responsible for bringing on Mum’s illness. I always thought that if I hadn’t been born, she’d have got away with it.
At age two, we had to move again. Dad’s affair had blown up in his face and all of Cambridge knew, all apart from Mum, who’d struggled to find the right house for us.
If the daily troubles of being a mother-of-four, settling my sisters into school, having me, the operation and recovering, all in the space of a year, weren’t enough to take her over the edge, her husband’s infidelity was the ultimate kick in the teeth.
In a deal typical of the time’s hierarchy, Dad was offered a professorship at Liverpool University, where he could research for himself, albeit banished from the top.
We moved to a big house in New Brighton.
When he wasn’t at the university, Dad would lock himself in the attic, where he wrote ‘Creep Analysis’, a means of testing for metallic fatigue which is still used today.
Mum was depressed. She wanted to divorce Dad, but the thought of us being put in homes held her from doing so, and so the house became a prickly place of resentment and anger. If Dad was around, he was either quiet and broody or angry and loud.
He and Mum niggled at each other until the usual fight broke out, with my oldest sister acting as the ref in the ring between them. I’d be sat on the stairs next to the cactus plants, out of the way but too scared that something bad might come of it to go into my room. I had a thing about being upstairs alone, which was most nights, being the youngest by five years, so Mum or a sister would have to wait at the end of my bed until I’d dropped off.
All through my time in New Brighton, I was allowed to do pretty much what I wanted. Unfortunately, I was never taught right from wrong, so I did a lot of wrong and learnt to cancel it out with the right when I needed to get away with something.
By the age of seven, I was stealing money to play the fruit-machines on the promenade. Mum never questioned me about the money and the family let me do as I pleased. Dad had no role to play in my upbringing, and continued his plight as the self-centred, banished, angst-riddled genius.
I’ve asked myself ‘who am I?’ many times throughout my life, but the biggest clues always lead back to the start, which is the place I just can’t seem to get to. I’ve tried hypnotherapy, treatment for alcoholism, gambling and addiction, psychotherapy and psychoanalysis, but none seem to have had the desired effect.
I ask questions like: Am I my father’s son? Why did he never have time for me? Why can’t I remember one decent talk with him, one moment of love? Did he ever care? Where was Mum in all this? Why was our relationship so unhealthy? Did she compensate for Dad’s apathy to me by showing me too much love? So what if I was a burst durex in a hotel room! I was their son.
The core ethic of this particular treatment centre is to encourage people to get in touch with their feelings by going back in time, usually to childhood. As all alcoholics and addicts tend to relapse on pent-up feelings, they are given tools to slowly gouge out those deeply embedded fears and anxieties that trigger mental instability. Once revealed, these insecurities turn into nuggets of emotional gold. When they are better understood, they become the linchpins of truth, acceptance and nurturing in order to bring about oneness with the inner-child, which in turn allows that person to receive a spiritual awakening. It’s a twelve step program based on that of Alcoholics Anonymous.
This awakening is the desired reward from three to six months of full-time residential therapy, and can, if all the tools of love continue to be used with care, bring about a complete transformation.
As time went by, though, I realised that I could only go so close to my inner-child, at which time I’d shy away by backing off emotionally and playing the lonesome cowboy. Old behaviour set in without me even seeing it.
At the end of my first week, I called the police station to let them know my new address and wasn’t surprised to hear that the charge of robbery made against me had been dropped. I asked them to confirm this in writing, well aware of their fickleness. When I put the phone down, it felt as if a huge weight had been lifted from me, and I hoped that the thought of staying sober was turning into a more solid ideal.
I prayed every morning and every night. I went to AA meetings most evenings and I was eating well. Sleep was accompanied by amazing dreams, although I could never understand them on waking. Sexual urges were coming back, too.
During the group sessions, I felt compelled to share deep, dark fears to do with my childhood.
On one occasion, I almost cried when the subject of my own beautiful children was brought up, but I refused, I unknowingly started plodding back into my shell.
The shock of being exposed with my feelings in a group of people was too much to bear. I couldn’t even open my mouth because I knew I’d cry if I did.
About a fortnight into my stay, I was issued with a ‘contract’ (which is a written warning that has to be read out in front of the entire group twice weekly until such a time that the offence has been properly curtailed) for ‘using discriminatory language’.
Before making this unacceptable remark, I’d been in an altercation with a peer in the kitchen. He was German, about sixty, a cold, sly, scrawny figure, and someone who couldn’t resist putting me in my place as a newcomer.
It happened at about a quarter past seven on a weekday and I was having breakfast alone in the dining room.
When I finished eating my cereal, I went to use the tap to clean my bowl in the kitchen.
The German quickly turned and jerked the tap away from me with his elbow, clutching chicken fillets that he was cooking for lunch. I walked away and put some bread in the toaster.
A bad atmosphere developed between us as I waited for the toast. As he snipped and coated chicken fillets with breadcrumbs, I stood looking at the toaster, still half-asleep.
I buttered the toast and sat down again to eat. Once I’d finished, I got up and went to the sink to wash my plate.
Again, he came to the sink and started to wash his dirty, chicken-riddled hands over the plate that I was washing. Veins and sinew glided over the whiteness of my plate.
‘What the hell are you doing?’ I said, angered by his ignorance.
He turned to me. ‘Washing my hands. What does it look like?’
With his thick German accent, he sounded like Terminator’s grandad.
After drying the plate, I went to put it away and turned to leave, but he just stood there in front of me.
I could see that he had an eight-inch meat cleaver in his hand pointing at my stomach from about two foot away, so I stood still.
‘I’m trying to cook,’ he said, ominously.
The knife glistened in the light and his face turned nasty. His hand shook and the knife juddered accordingly.
‘I cook every morning for lunch, Richard,’ he said. ‘You must stay out of the way when I’m cooking.’
He talked in a horribly low voice that aired itself uncomfortably between missing teeth and hollowed gums. He sounded like a sinister version of the turbo-charged tortoise in the old cartoons.
When someone came into the kitchen, he carefully put down the knife.
‘You keep winding me up, Richard,’ he said, ‘and I don’t like it.’
My temper snapped. ‘Well, just keep your German face out of mine and you’ll be alright, won’t you!’ I shouted at him. ‘You shouldn’t be cooking lunch at breakfast anyway. It’s disgusting!’
I stormed out, past the bewildered faces of peers and into the garden. A roll-up was in order.