You may have read this title, seen the word ‘parts’ and assumed this was going to be a post all about my lady garden. My nethers. My foo. My camel toe. My savage cabbage. But you’d be wrong (and I’m sure, deeply disappointed) to learn that this is instead a blog about my adventures with mental health (crazy quotient) and the even crazier things I’ve done to overcome my crazy.
Now…I get that the word ‘crazy’ is somewhat un-PC. But stuff it, really. If I’m the one who owns the crazy in question, the crazy we’ll be talking about in here, then I’ll be the one to decide how to describe it. And I prefer to call a spade a spade and a meltdown a meltdown. It’s much easier than to have you try to piece together a bunch of socially acceptable euphemisms to try to make head or tail of what I’m discussing.
So, I shall start with the brutal and ugly truth. Last year I was struck down by the second worst bout of severe depression in my life, coupled with crippling anxiety. I won’t trouble you with too many of the reasons why because they were manifold. Life throwing multiple challenges, nonsense and bollocks at me as fast as a gatling gun, combined with severe empty nest syndrome when the youngen left for university and a rather horrendous slipped disc. Oh and 40% of my hair fell out with stress and hormonal shifting, which as you can imagine made me feel reaaallly reaaally sexy (not).
MAD AND BALD
Suffice to say, after trying the usual things to shift the blues and finding I was still spending regular amounts of time every day in a pool of my own tears, snotting like a bison into what remained of my hair, dehydrating my face with the sea of misery that would drain from it every day as I sobbed till my shoulders bobbed up and down and I couldn’t catch my breath…well, I realised that I needed to shift the battle against the dreaded black dog up a notch. Several notches in fact. And I’m glad I did.
The first part of this involved conventional therapy, kindly arranged via the NHS. For which I had opted for Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) because I’ve found the interactive nature of this type of thing worked well for me in the past. I had a brilliant local therapist who saw me for 10 weeks (extended from the usual four they grant you on our sadly-overstretched mental health resources in the UK) until I’d gone from testing as ‘severely depressed and anxious’ to a much more manageable ‘mild to moderately depressed and anxious’, with a bevvy of coping strategies now at my fingertips and saved in my homework folder like a good student of mental health. I aced the course. Became teacher’s pet. Adored my therapist and miss her already.
As my sessions were drawing to an end, I could feel my anxiety rising at the thought of going it alone again. My poor partner André, had absorbed enough of my tears and mucous in the shoulders of his tshirts over the previous few months to leave them permanently stiffened epaulettes of despair. Most of my friends and immediate family were overwhelmed with life-crises of their own and had little energy or time to spare me and my endless exhausting wibbles, and those who remained I felt I had become a burden to. I had given up phoning The Samaritans because you can never get the same operator twice and after having spoken to the most wonderful Samaritan ever – an elderly Welsh gent who talked me down from a state of panic at 1:30am in the morning one night and made me feel like I had a loving grandpa again – well, after that, no one else would really do.
EMOTIONAL SUPPORT COCONUT
That Samaritan had the kind of voice I imagined my emotional support coconut would have. ‘Emotional support coconut?’ I hear you ask. Well, yes. And don’t knock it till you’ve tried it is all I can say.
Professor Winston Coconut is a professional emotional support coconut. He’s professional because we had to pay for his services (from Tesco…he cost £1.50). He arrived in my life because pre-CBT this year I was putting up barriers and resistance to the idea of having therapy at all (as people with depression are in the habit of doing about any proposed solution to their problems, because at the time all you can see is what could go wrong). I was remembering the last time I had counselling on the NHS around the time my marriage ended, and waited 2 years to finally see a woman who clearly wasn’t trained in my requested CBT at all but instead had spent many years at university or college or somewhere to be paid a lot of money (more than me anyway) to simply gesture to a chair, then stare at me in silence until the awkwardness made me start to babble incoherently about every single thing in my mind for an hour just to fill the time and deal with the embarrassment of her attitude. No structure, no actual counselling, no questioning, no reasoning, no homework (what can I say? I was a nerd at school and I love homework), no anything…she just sat there and occasionally glanced at the clock like she was counting down the minutes until she could escape. It was such an awful experience all those years ago that I had gone in with mild anxiety and came out nearly suicidal because I’d dragged up every bad thing in my life just to have something to talk about to this person who wasn’t interacting with me at all.
So when people first started making gentle suggestions to me that I needed to seek professional help, flashbacks of that wrong-fit-useless-what-the-hell-is-she-being-paid-for-so-called-therapist came flooding back to me and I said I might as well be talking to a coconut for all the use it was last time. So André, my beloved, who made me laugh every day no matter how dark my blues got, went and got me that coconut as a stop gap until I got my lovely CBT with my lovely therapist. And do you know what? That coconut made me smile every single time I looked at it.
Look at him.
Look at his kindly face.
See how much he cares.
He radiates wisdom and empathy doesn’t he?
I honestly thought about mass-marketing these as therapy aids for other depressed people. And if anyone steals my idea I’ll come round your house and kill your entire family and defecate on your telly. I could do that, you see, because I’m unhinged. At least part time. It’s part of the privilege of being an artist, you see. No one really quite knows when we are joking. I wasn’t joking about the emotional support coconut actually working. You can draw your own conclusions about the threat of murder and poop.
THIS BLOG POST IS NOT ABOUT COCONUTS OR MASTURBATION
But this post is NOT about kindly coconuts, nor useful, practical CBT, nor safe and gentle yoga, fresh air and sunshine, sensible dieting, mood diaries and gratitude journals, close harmony singing, meditation, masturbation nor any of the other fun things of life you can use to battle common or garden emotional plummets. No, this blog is to introduce you to my private parts.
We all have private parts. (Stop laughing. Stop it!) But some of us are more in touch with them than others. And those of you who may have ventured into the interesting realms of hypnotherapy to any degree may have already been introduced to your own ‘parts’.
And it was through a lovely friend of mine from the Metis Women Business Group called Deborah Mulvaney that I was re-introduced to some of my own parts. I say reintroduced because a few years ago I’d had a tiny bit of what’s known in hypnotic circles as ‘Parts Therapy’ with another fab friend of mine, Ali Hollands – the therapist who helped André stop smoking in just one session. But over the years I’d forgotten all about my parts until Debs offered to help me with my depression and anxiety with a new system of parts therapy called ‘The Control System’.
So what the hell are parts, you’re wondering? Well, I can’t give you the full scientific explanation because my mind is still a bit fluffy even now, but in layman’s terms, they are elements of your subconscious. It seems that in childhood, and possibly even other traumatic times in our life, our subconscious mind can create ‘sub-sections’ in our mind to deal with particular challenges in life, and under hypnosis we can address them directly as if they are different people. It’s very common for these parts to have different names, personalities, genders, ages and even accents!
I told you this was going to sound just a little bit bonkers, but bear with me…
Most people have heard of, even in the Hollywood sense, multiple or split personality disorders, yes? Well, one theory being banded about by some therapists is that these multiple personalities develop as coping strategies for young children who have suffered emotional trauma and can’t process these experiences in a conscious/adult way. That they assign the experience (and the means of coping with it in their own way) to a subconscious ‘part’. I think this is pretty much what happens to most of us, it’s just that with your more common or garden brain *, and the milder traumas of a normalish childhood **, we’re unaware of these subconscious parts and in the person with the multiple personality disorder it seems some of these personalities or parts may indeed vie for dominance of the conscious brain and make themselves more readily apparent. These are all just theories at the moment – like everything to do with the brain really. Craziness, like most things, can be seen as a spectrum that we’re all somewhere on. Sometimes the systems designed to protect us can go into overdrive and start causing us harm. Much like an overactive immune system but for the brain. It’s all fascinating and I don’t profess to be a scientist or to completely understand it or explain it well. But if you ever get the chance to try Parts Therapy of any kind, then go for it! It’s weird and wonderful and interesting and helpful.
So…I digress…our ‘parts’ have been there most of our life in the background of our subconscious mind, and their job is to help us. Ever wondered why when you are trying SO hard to diet and lose weight that there’s an opposing voice in your head when temptations present themselves or when you’ve had a bad day saying ‘Go on, it’s just ONE ice cream, it’s not going to kill you?’ That could well be one of your subconscious parts talking to you. But that part isn’t trying to sabotage your diet and make you obese and unhappy. It has learned at a very young age that (at least in the short term), having a nice treat to eat makes you feel better in that moment. Your parts want you to feel happy, so they each do their own thing to try to take care of your happiness, safety and wellbeing. But most of these parts are formed when we are tiny children…and so in a way they think like children…and they often get things a bit wrong, and don’t see the bigger picture, so can end up working against what you really need to be happy or safe or fulfilled. And this is where The Control System comes in….
The Control System, developed by a clever chappie called Tim Box, and now used by many therapists including the lovely Debs, was designed to teach people to self-hypnotise in a non-trance way, and to communicate directly with their own subconscious parts to basically ask for their help in changing your life for the better. Negotiating with the team that runs your brain, so to speak. And I’ve made it sound quite simple when I explain it like that. And maybe it would be simple, until you meet MY parts…
WELCOME TO MY BRAIN
There’s Ursa (pronounced Oorsa) – A mighty warrior woman with a heavy Russian accent, who looks like a cross between a Viking shield maiden and Queen Boudicca. She routinely carries a spear and has metal cones on her boobs and a crested helmet like something from a Kirk Douglas movie.
We have Beeva – A real worrier, an old crone, fussing and terrified of everything, seeing all the negatives. Usually found cowering directly behind Ursa.
We have Laura – An 8 year old girl, who panics about being hungry and just wants to play, and has the occasional full on tantrum if she doesn’t get her way or if she’s tired or afraid.
We have Pete – who communicates only in thoughts but not actual words and never fully shows his face, who is my maintenance man, and doesn’t socialise with the others.
These are the four parts that Debs had to start to negotiate with on my behalf to aid me in my quest for better mental health and a happier life. Let’s just say Debs had her work cut out. But thankfully Debs was not phased at all by the sum of my parts because she’d undergone parts therapy herself in her training and had her own awesomely bonkers experiences to rival those of my own brain-bunch.
Now I hate to leave you hanging, but you’ll have to wait till the next blogisode to find out more about what the hell my parts have been doing all my life, how Debs cleverly re-assigned them to new and more helpful ‘duties’, and how I’d made some assumptions and misjudged some of my own parts – underestimating their full potential, and how since finishing my Control training, I’ve discovered a brand new wild part in my life that is proving rather challenging to tame. Tune in next time to hear how we got my parts in training for the next phase of my life (and theirs!) and how being a bit mental is now a game the whole family can play.
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*disclaimer: I don’t know what one of those looks like.
** nor one of those, come to think of it.
