It’s World Mental Health Day this week and I was probably going to post something about how important it is to talk about mental health, but I’m going to try and practice what I preach and talk about my own instead. Lead by example and all that.

I’ve talked abstractly about mental health in other blog posts [see Intro , Psychodynamic Therapy , Person-centred Therapy , Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy ] and I’m a lot more comfortable theorising about this stuff than I am talking about my own stuff, because it feels less vulnerable. This post is a more personal account though – sorry if it seems a bit self-indulgent.

WHAT’S BROUGHT THIS ON MATE ARE YOU OK

Yeah I’m fine, thanks. Stuff has happened that has made me struggle a lot in the past though, so I want to reflect on that. I think the best way to ‘get people talking about mental health’ and contributing to the normalisation of it is by talking about my own, so here I am. The time I want to talk about was in relation to the breakdown of a, frankly, incredibly unhealthy will-they-won’t-they friendship/relationship type thing a few years ago.

It’s funny how different events can get to you in different ways. I’ve had two long-term, serious relationships that have spanned 3-4 years each. When they ended I was a little depressed but no more than would be expected, and in both cases I was getting on with life a few months later. I believe that was possible because, regardless of the circumstances and the hurt that I felt, there was a level of emotional honesty involved. Things were talked about openly and we understood what was going on, which – while it hurt – made it ultimately a lot easier to process everything and move on.

Not so in this other case. And funnily enough, this was someone I didn’t even go out with. The whole episode carries a certain fogginess in the back of my mind, but essentially we just spent a lot of time together at university. We spent a lot of time together, and hanging over the whole thing was whether it would become something more after university.

My interpretation was that we were both keen on things happening but for some inexplicable reason she wanted to wait until after university. That was my interpretation because of her saying exactly that. It is largely a testament to my own silliness and lack of congruence that I happily went along with waiting, despite not really understanding why. Why didn’t I ask? A proper explanation seems a fair request, if I was being asked to wait, so why didn’t I ask? I don’t know, but that was a mistake.

After university we spent a couple of nice days together and I sent her a text afterwards asking if we could meet and talk about what was actually going on. Strangely, a couple of days went by and I still hadn’t had any response, so I dropped another text asking if she got the previous one, and reiterating that it’d be cool to meet up.

After the third text, sent a few days after the second (I had the werewithal to wait for a while between texts), I noticed that she’d blocked me on Facebook. We’d known each other for three years, this whole ‘will-they-won’t-they’ nonsense had been going on for about a year or so and had ground me down even at this point, but it was at this point that I realised that I could possibly never hear from her again – and I never did. There was no explanation, no goodbye – she just disappeared, and I had no frame of reference to figure out why.

I cannot emphasise enough that all of the above is my interpretation of what happened. In reality, I have absolutely no idea of anything. Was there actually a tacit agreement to wait until after university, or was that all in my head? Was it a thing she was uncertain about, rather than definitely wanting something? All those little observations and intuitions that regularly told me that she was keen – did I imagine those? She often talked about ‘being messed around in the past’ and ‘not being ready yet’ – was it a case of her wanting something but being too scared? Or was it completely unrequited? Was she taking me for a ride, or was the whole thing a result of my going through a strange, psychotic episode for around a year, where I saw things that simply weren’t there? Did she, in reality, actually suggest that we would ever be anything but friends, or was the whole thing an example of me being a massive, pathetic idiot? Was she manipulative? What role did I play in all this – the victim, a creepy predator, what? I needed to know!

There’s a quote from Vladimir Nabokov in Lolita that I’m always reminded of when I think about this:

“When I try to analyze my own cravings, motives, actions and so forth, I surrender to a sort of retrospective imagination which feeds the analytic faculty with boundless alternatives and which causes each visualized route to fork and re-fork without end in the maddeningly complex prospect of my past.”

After the event, the only frame of reference I had to understand any of it was my own memories and my ability to draw meaning from them. The problem though is that they were subjective, hazy and open to interpretation; too fused with emotion and neuroses. Beyond a certain point, it became like a kaleidoscope – as soon as I settled on one interpretation, the whole thing shifted and it became something else.

I’ve no idea why it happened, I can only guess. Nowadays it’s just an idle curiosity but at the time, she’d been a big part of my life for a few years. Immediately afterwards, a lot of my intellectual and emotional faculties were invested in constantly analysing everything I could remember, just in case I was able to gain some insight that I was missing. But it was a kaleidoscope; it would never settle, I would never get any answers, and my stubornness was almost my undoing as I carried on trying for far too long. The feeling of my brain spinning in a washing machine could be another way of putting it.

The biggest factor in me eventually feeling better again was deciding to stop trying to settle on a particular interpretation of the whole thing; realising that all I could do was put a big ‘I don’t know’ circle around it and leave it alone. Nature hates a vacuum and it was easier said that done, but gradually I was able to go about my day without finding myself in the kaleidoscope/washing machine again. That’s been my attitude since, and I’ve learned not to try and understand it on any deeper level than that, because it’s an endless rabbit warren.

“You’re a victim and I’m here to save you! Because I’m so nice!”

Identity is a funny thing. I am David, I am from Sheffield, I am white, I am British, I am a counsellor, I support Sheffield United Football Club, I am northern, I am a debt advisor, I like curry, I like to write, I have an irreverent sense of humour, I am left-handed, I am…and so on. These and thousands of other things accumulate and overlap to build up my sense of how I see myself. Who do I support? Sheffield United. What do I do? Debt advice and counselling. There’s no soul-searching, I don’t need to think about it, they’re just in there. Having a consistent sense of self makes this whole ‘life’ thing a lot easier.

I wouldn’t have verbalised it, but a fundamental part of how I saw myself during this time was as a ‘nice guy’. I was the nice guy. Yeah. She, by the way, and just so you know, was a victim. She had been treated really badly in the past (precisely how, I don’t know because she didn’t explain, but she had) and I was a nice guy to care for her, and show her that I cared enough to wait until she was ready. You know? The nice guy. The rescuer. She was the victim and I was the rescuer. I was going to look after her. Maybe it was really stupid of me to put up with having to wait so long – but it was only because I cared! And I cared so much because I was a nice guy.

All this, of course, was extremely self-serving. It wasn’t entirely conscious, but that was ultimately the way in which I viewed our relationship. She wanted something but she wasn’t ready, so I’m going to show how much I care and be happy to wait. Because I care; because I need to show her that I care; because she’s a victim and she needs someone who cares. She’s helpless, you see. Utterly helpless. Most people wouldn’t have waited, because they wouldn’t have cared so much, because they’re not as nice as me. But I’m nice, I’m the rescuer and she needs to be rescued. And I’m really, really, really nice.

It’s an attractive idea, isn’t it? Being the nice guy? It felt extremely validating to be a nice guy. It made me feel important, like I was a really good person – better than many other people, anyway, people who would have given up sooner.

I think that my motivations were more to do with satisfying my own insecurities and my own ego than they were with caring for her on any kind of genuinely humane and respectful level. Would I have liked her so much if she hadn’t had such a hard time in the past? Honestly, I don’t think so. I think I enjoyed the hope of eventually getting to play the rescuer role full time, and I think that was largely what I got out of it. It made me feel worthwhile.

If I imagine we got together and after a while she stopped being a helpless victim and gradually started acting in a more assertive and independent way – what would that have been like for me? Well, I’d probably be uncomfortable because I was on the verge of becoming redundant. What use was a rescuer if she no longer needed rescuing? I imagine there’d be some kind of indirect, probably subconscious sabotage going on, with the subtextual message being “get back in your victim role – you’re making me uncomfortable!”

(The Karpman drama triangle is a concept used in psychotherapy, specifically family therapy as part of Transactional Analysis . Wikipedia has a decent page on it drama triangle – yes I’m referring ot wikipedia, but it’s a decent overview.)

Kitchen Floor Reset

So this whole thing kicked off a Kitchen Floor Reset. I was back with my parents, having deferred my PGCE until the following year, and looking for a job.

Her ignoring me was particularly hard because I wanted to help her (because I’m so nice) – and now I couldn’t! A big part of my pain was not being able to help her (because I’m so nice), and also her not seeing how much I wanted to help her. Pretty fucked up, huh?

On a deeper level, this thing also posed a significant challenge to the nice guy identity itself, which was a very important to me at the time. What…if I wasn’t nice after all? What…if the whole thing was an ego-trip? Furthermore, what if I had misinterpreted the whole thing and she just wasn’t interested and yet I proceeded anyway – maybe I’m the perpetrator (read: bad person)! Or, on the other hand, maybe she had strung me along – maybe she is in fact the bad person and I am the victim in all this!

Do you see how confused I was? My sense of self was all over the place; changing with every move of the keleidoscope. It went through three different interpretations:

“I’m a really nice guy who just wanted to help her.”

“No, fuck! I’m a piece of shit perpetrator !”

“You know what? I’ve been royally fucked over. I’m actually the helpless victim in all of this!”

It was either one or the other, you see. And around and round it went! Corresponding with these interpretations were different emotions, felt at different times – anger at her for being so completely ruthless, self-hatred for being such a piece of shit, and self-pity for being so hard done by. Different masks, different feelings, switching around depending on my interpetation at that moment. For a few months my entire inner life was dedicated to getting to the bottom of this conundrum of which of the three I truly was, and it went around and around and around without end.*

(*Of course the answer was that I was none of them, because I’m a complex human being and not a fucking archetype, and seeing only three possibilities in people was a part of my problem. In any case, a better description would have been ‘pillock’.)

Because I wasn’t sure of what kind of person I was, I became uncertain about all kinds of other things too, like how much I deserved. Also, did my family actually love me, or were they just pretending because they had to? Did my friends really like me, or were they just putting up with me? I thought my friends and family liked me, but how could I know? I’d gotten it wrong in the past, so who’s to say I hadn’t gotten it wrong again?

These kinds of questions pervaded most social interactions that I had around this time. I couldn’t, for a single second, assume that anyone liked me. They could just be putting up with me, and were ready to disappear from my life at any moment – just like she did. I needed to be conscious of that. Ironically, the significant social anxiety that this caused probably made me a little harder to interact with anyway.

These anxieties became particularly acute when I tried talking to anyone about what had happened. Whenever I explained as best I could to someone, I could feel fine at the time but would have unbearable anxiety, as soon as the person went away, that they would never speak to me again. Maybe it was just silliness; I was aware of that at the time; but then maybe, in reality, she was the only one who saw the ‘real’ me. Maybe she saw the truth that I was utterly repulsive and despicable, and that other people would also shut me off if they saw it too.

Four months after I’d moved home it hadn’t gotten any better – I was still stuck in the kaleidoscope washing machine – and I opened up properly to my mum about it. We talked until she went to bed. We talked, she told me she loved me and that she’d always be there for me, she went to bed, and that night I hardly slept due to having incredible anxiety over the idea that I might never see her again. It was this – me feeling that way about my mum – that made me realise that something was seriously wrong, that I needed help. That was when I sought out a counsellor.

A Safe Space

I think mental health attitudes are slowly changing, but I can be quite stubborn and it was hard to admit that I couldn’t figure it out by myself. Perhaps being a bloke has something to do with this also, though hopefully that attitude is changing too.

In describing it, I’m tempted to say that I was either close to or actually had a mental breakdown, but I’m not certain how that is defined nowadays. I don’t think I broke down entirely – but you know when you’ve got too much stuff running on you computer so that, although it’s still on, it’s almost completely fucking unusable? My head felt like that. It was still working but 90% of it’s resources were busy working on something else, and I wasn’t much practical use for over six months.

Counselling helped a lot though. I only saw the lady for six sessions but having that space to process and to be completely accepted in the moment made the world of difference. During this time and in the months afterwards, I gradually began to feel like myself again.

I recently emailed the counsellor lady who I saw, seven years after seeing her, to tell her how much she helped me. I’ve recently qualified as a counsellor and my initial interest in counselling began at this time. One thing I know now is that even with something so personal, it’s hard to know for certain what impact you have, and I wanted her to know for certain.

At the time I was floundering completely; struggling to cope with basic social interactions even with loved ones, and with concentrating enough to stack shelves at Morrison’s. It’s hard to know how my life would have ended up if I hadn’t found that space, but I find it reasonable to consider that she could have saved my life.

Kicking the Ladder from Beneath You

I think climbing out of any serious mental struggle involves kicking the ladder from beneath you – of bricking up walls in your head and cutting off certain parts of your experiences so that you don’t have them following you around everywhere. I’m not sure what that means entirely, but it resonates as I try to find the words to describe how I actually felt during that time, and find that I’m struggling to go back there.

It felt like I was screaming frantically but was unable to make a noise. Like I was living in a vacuum. Like my external life and the inner life in my head were separated by an impenetrable wall. Later, when I was getting better, it often felt like I was in a pit and thinking I was getting out only to find, cruelly, that I had never left the bottom.

Words like ‘depression’ and ‘anxiety’ are useful in getting a frame of reference for experiences and even the clinical diagnosis which can get extra support, but I’m very skeptical about the idea of pretending that these labels do any kind of justice to a person’s experience, and that they’re anything other than labels we’ve created so that we can pretend to understand these things.

These labels can be empowering if they’re used to describe, but I think it’s the opposite if they’re used to categorise what kind of object a person is. You can’t begin properly understand a person by merely using labels like ‘depression’ and ‘anxiety’ – they have their uses, but if we’re to learn about a person’s mental health then I think that labels should be regarded as the beginning of the conversation, and not the end.