No More Silent Nights: #MeToo

Like many of us as the year draws to a close, I've been reviewing my year:  the 31 556 926 seconds that will be marked as "2017" in the narrative arc of each of our life stories. Inspired by the ever-wonderful Chris Winson's writing on his diagnosis of depression one year ago, I've been motivated to finish this year of beginner blogging by GOING BIG on one of my most cherished values and beliefs: when you have the capacity to say the things that others find impossible to say, you should do so, if you can, as a support to others who might be thinking about, and wanting to, break their own silence.

This feels a good time for that. What better moment in history to be open and honest than this, when even TIME magazine recognises the courage and willingness of women to break the silence? The #MeToo movement has been phenomenal – sometimes triggering, emotionally depleting, wearing - and also bringing an injection of hope that a new future of openness lies ahead.

For me, as I continue on in this world with OCD, the opportunity to break silence is also a wonderful moment to step into the JOY of exposure. Lisa Coyne writes an eloquent blog about OCD here. It is a beautiful explanation of exposure and its true function: to free us from being stuck and move us towards living with wonder. And what better time of year to move towards this beginner's mind, this trust in what is unfolding, this belief in common humanity than Christmas?

And so,  at the end of 2017, I share the most deeply true statement I can offer about my own suffering, how it brought me to Mindfulness Based Interventions and the ways in which my own story fuels my drive to communicate deeply and fully with others the good, the bad and the ugly of what it is to be human - of what it is to be alive.


“I have recurrent depression since I was 14, OCD since I was 7".  Only, that is not really it, a half-truth, a fragment. This is the story of my life…  Except, life is no story.  It does not have a beginning, middle and end. You can not capture it in one tone, one mood, one voice, one sitting, one inquiry. Which is why it so often feels most comfortable for most of us to say less, in general.

Adverse Childhood Experiences

This is especially true when it comes to the hardest and most difficult to say parts of our learning histories and current contexts. For me, as for many others, things happened to me in childhood I would not have chosen for myself, that I would not choose for my own children.   

Adverse childhood experiences, the experts call them.  ACEs are those experiences humans can have when young that are particularly difficult, traumatic and challenging, and which can impact upon health and well-being across our life-span.

If you are a human, and I am imagining most of you reading this will be, knowing about ACES - your own and the impact they might have on you and others - can be enlightening and can help make sense of situations where people find it hard to talk or are experiencing challenges to health and wellbeing (physical or psychological), especially if you work in health and social care or education:

My own ACEs are pretty high. I have about 7, perhaps 8 - and for me, as for millions of other Irish people now and in the past, growing up in the shadow of the bottle accounts for nearly all of them.

The most important thing to say about this, is that none of this is who I “am”. Nor was it ever. If, like me, you have a few "too many" ACES,  know this: none of this is who you "are", either. Humans having experiences is all any of us are, in any moment, here and now or there and then.

At the same time, just like you, I live in this world as a verbal human - with a mind that likes to categorise and box and explicate and explain and take two and two and turn them into 586.  As a Health Care Professional, I know the very real potential consequences of ACES on physical and mental wellbeing in adulthood and intergenerationally. On a human level, this scares me - very understandably!

My mind uses this information and all the words that make up the stories of my lived past and my imagined futures, and can find itself struggling, deeply. Like all minds do, from time to time. In darker and more challenging moments, I can find myself wondering anxiously, over and over, if people "knew about me", particularly people who “know” about these things (whoever my mind has designated as a predatory authority, in a given context), would they seek out signs that I am not worthy of belonging, or connection? Would they attach to these a raft of words without my permission or my consent, changing my life forever? Would they be right to do so? What if things I remember happening long ago really do mean I am crazy? Broken? Dangerous? Unsafe?


Unsafe to Say

The stickiest thought driving all this is that "I am unsafe" - on every level.  I will not be seen, I will not be heard, I will not be understood. It will not be safe to speak. It will not be okay to say.  This is a powerful thought, and can wreak immense havoc in my life if I let it - making everyday tasks and getting on with what I want to and need to do more challenging than I find easy to admit.

One of the hardest aspects of the fears I have around these stories is that, in some senses, there is a grain of truth to them. Indeed, particularly when it comes to childhood and sexual trauma,  it is not always safe to speak. When we talk about the most difficult parts of our pasts with honesty and candour, we are often told how "brave" it is, how "courageous". 

In itself, that provides valuable information that talking about these things can be risky to how one will be perceived in the world as a consequence. For anyone who has made even the most cursory glance at the comment pages of the daily rags, it's plain that sometimes such talking is not met with much kindness.  Like many of us, I have had a lot of deeply difficult experiences around this - sometimes in the most unlikely of contexts! Sometimes it has caused problems – very large problems: lost opportunities, lost reputation,  sometimes even lost friendships.

And yet, to live well and joyfully in the context of my life, history and context, I need above all else to trust that, when I commit to JOY -  Jon Hershey and Shala Nicely's acronym for jumping in, opting for the greater good and yielding to uncertainty, things may not always go as I might have imagined they would AND that’s a very far cry from living life alone under a bridge. 

Truthfully? So far, for every negative reaction I have had for speaking my truths as I might see them, I have had many, many more that have been warm, open, nourishing and genuine. The bruises from when people have misinterpreted or not been able to hear being, after all, the cost of whole-hearted living: and also a true and valuable insight into all the ways as humans we can fail to see eachother.

Unspeakable Tales: When We Can’t Find the Words

So, I choose to say what I can when it feels important in some way to do so, bringing my thoughts of the Cat Lady of Annihilation along for the ride. I have learned a lot from travelling with her.

For example, it still surprises me that the smallest memories are the hardest to articulate: how I  somehow do not have the capacity to describe to you what it was like to sit in a crowded train carriage, squeezed into the window, being screamed at repeatedly and relentlessly by my father, called every name under the sun ( "*****", you "****ing ***** - you get the idea), while I sobbed hysterically and people shuffled with papers and stared at their hands all the way from Dublin to Cork.

I can give you no words that can make you understand why what was worst about that was not my father's actions, but the inability of bystanders to even look, and the deep pain of knowing that what they saw did not paint the whole picture of this wise and funny and terribly warm father of mine, retreating again somewhere I had no words to bring him back from - because of his own pain, his own woundedness; the legacy of his own ACEs.

I do not have the words to explain what it felt like, many years later, to find myself in a room where people calling themselves “helping professionals” just like me spoke to one another about their appraisals of my love for my child, which apparently they were “not worried about”, as if it were something they could understand, let alone pass judgement on, without any knowledge of my past or what love meant to me, why I was afraid of leaning into it, of letting go.  

I do not have the words to convey how deeply confused I was when I was told after a mere 40 minutes (my whole, complete and varied life reduced to ticks in a set of 2d boxes) that my “problem" was that I “overestimated the importance of my own thoughts” – as if the grief that I carried in my heart like a stone for my father and all he had lost of himself was nothing. As if the thoughts assumed, but which did not match those experienced, were not normal, human thoughts to have as I transitioned to being a mother, longing to have contact with home and the days when the world was bright and the air danced with fairy dust: scribbled to myself back then in small notes and lyrics, “sometimes the grace lies in letting go”, or “all that I am, all that I ever was, is here in your perfect eyes, they’re all I can see” and, on a bluer day,  “then I understood what made love the saddest word in any language”.


I do not have the words, because there are no words.

But much more troublesome to me, both as a person having those experiences then and, now, reflecting on this with some distance, is how the dignity, bravery and abundance that existed, even then, alongside all the crying and the compulsions, the numbness and the agitation,  was so rarely given space, so rarely amplified, so that the very telling of the pain sometimes made it seem like it was all there was or could be.

Mindfulness Based Interventions - particularly Acceptance and Commitment Therapy and Compassion Focused Therapy - helped me to refind and reconnect with that deep knowing we all share as humans, that each of us is more than how we might be defined by others without the the imagination or humanity to ask and listen instead of speak to define.

The freedom and space mindfulness offered me beyond the relentless focus on the "pathological" added colour, depth and perspective to a time of great sadness and challenge, allowing me to begin again to the physical world of senses and activity and being with things as they were - the good, the bad and the ugly.

The twinkle of lights on the snow. Searching for bats. Visiting the sting rays in the aquarium. Picking blackberries. Making chocolate muffins. Singing my intentions to the world: “I hope you find the feet of a dancer, I hope you can sing in the rain, I hope you find all the easy answers to your pain”. The soft stroke of a health care assistant’s hand as I sobbed and she taught me how to feed my tiny baby and the swell and fizz of gratitude and relief in the heart to be able to nourish my infant son as my mother and grandmother had.

Still, long nights with the heavy warmth of a sleeping, peaceful baby reminding me to stay, stay, stay and cracking my heart open to let the light shine undimmed. “I need your grace to remind me to find my own”. Walking with the wind. Standing in the rain. Sitting on the brow of the hill looking at Corrin Hill. Driving for an hour and a half to get to the coast just to hear the sound of the sea. Sitting on the floor, playing with Duplo even when picking up every brick felt like Sisyphus rolling a boulder up a never ending hill. Playing with sand and water and taking walks in all weathers, no matter how stormy the internal landscape.

And the moments of the most immense courage and love and connection and returning, returning, returning. Over and over, holding the most profound pain for the sadness of the whole world and all the ways I knew I couldn’t stop my most beautiful babies from feeling what it is to be human. And the paragraph I revisited the most, because it spoke most to the deep ache in my own heart for my father who had read Kahlil Gibran’s words to me on my birth and from whom I was estranged at that time:

But, Daniel, time had some bad surprises in store for them. The cancer of alcoholism ate away at the man and he lost his family. This was not something he meant to do or wanted to do, it just was. When you are older, my son, you will learn about how complicated life becomes, how we can lose our way and how people get hurt inside and out. By the time his son had grown up, the man lived away from his family, on his own in a one-roomed flat, living and dying for the bottle. He died on the fifth of January, one day before the anniversary of his son's birth, all those years before in that snowbound city.

But his son was too far away to hear his last words, his final breath, and all the things they might have wished to say to one another were left unspoken. Yet now Daniel, I must tell you that when you let out your first powerful cry in the delivery room of the Adventist Hospital and I became a father, I thought of your grandfather and, foolish though it may seem, hoped that in some way he could hear, across the infinity between the living and the dead, your proud statement of arrival. For if he could hear, he would recognise the distinct voice of family, the sound of hope and new beginnings that you and all your innocence and freshness have brought to the world. 

(Feargal Keane, Letter to Daniel).

Mindfulness Based Interventions such as ACT and CFT are incredibly precious to me because of how they supported me in navigating the most difficult time of my life, gifting me with:

• Freedom
• Sovereignty
• Permission
• A space to listen to my own voice beyond the interpretations of others
• A place of gentle resistance
• Retreat
• Courage
• Vulnerability
• Wholeness
• Refuge

beyond what felt allowed by, or spoken, by services interested only in the details of what was "wrong" with me, and all the many ways that could be unhelpfully communicated:

· 

 “You really will have to engage better if you don’t want your children to suffer the fall out from this” (one missed appointment in thirty, four cancelled by the service). “If you don’t get on top of this now, it will have a lot of long term consequences for your sons”  (what do you think I am trying to do, here?) “It’s really time to stop being a perfect patient now (something to do with needing to seem, oh, more sad or something)”, “Why don’t you use your Mindfulness? A bit less reading about things and maybe you wouldn’t be sitting here crying instead of enjoying your life, babies don’t keep you know” (oops too much crying that time). “You need to be realistic here about recovery” (too much happiness). ”. “You just need to stop thinking so much.” (too much talking)  “Don’t worry, one day you will wake up and it will all seem like a bad dream” (I haven’t got time to listen to you).

And more darkly: “I feel your husband isn’t supporting you very well. Perhaps you shouldn’t tell him about this conversation, he might find this difficult to understand”. Yes. My husband, who used to walk with me every week to the Rape Crisis Centre and wait for me in his big brown jumper his Granny knit him with a shy smile and a rickety old bike by his side, who held me and, just... was.  My husband, who brought me back to understanding myself as lovely and spontaneous and fun, just by seeing that it had never gone away. My husband, who understood that when that was said, the function was to prevent me complaining about a serious dereliction of duty that would lead to nine months of the most arduous, dehumanising complaints process and a 32 page apology.

You get the picture.

For I have no words. I do not know why our systems allow us to treat a human being like this and call it care.  I know now that this happens, because I was there and it happened to me. I also know what it was like to say that aloud and have no one listen, or believe.

Changing the inhumane and dispassionate ways we communicate around the loss and longings of the human heart is my reason, given to me by my life story, my "what for" and why I committed to training in Mindfulness Based Interventions: to be the rainbow for others that Mindfulness and Compassion were for me in my own cloud:

What I have learned from observing my own mind, my own body, the movings and longings and pains and desires of this human heart, is that what I needed then and what I need now, like all humans, is to feel connected to others and understood and be yet allowed to bring quiet reverence to my most deep and sacred emotions and their histories -  without anyone extrapolating that they can know what it is to be me from the merest, and often most meaningless, of fragments of my past.

                                      

And so, I remember. I remember that, whatever the context, when I am labelled with words that reduce my humanity to indicators of "risk" or "clusters of symptoms", I feel alone. When my experiences are dismembered and spoken about as things in the world that someone other than me can define and recommend actions on without even engaging in dialogue with me, I feel alone.  A loneliness beyond the hand of God.

We are each more than the sum of our negative experiences.

The rules of human interaction will never replace experience, or presence, and when it comes to the ephemeral, insubstantial, ever-shifting nature of the heart, they tend to pull us away from it more than connect us. Flexibility, not rigidity, opens our perspective and our heart to what it might mean to live a different life, in a different skin.

This is how we can communicate. When we can meet as equals and touch the intention of curiosity to experience with openness and courage and the desire to fade and fix reduces, then we can really meet, not halfway - but as whole human beings, able to live a whole life, no matter where we began.  

To open to it all, to know that in life, half is not enough, that we must learn to hold the hands both of pleasure and pain - this is what 2017 taught me, too.

Half is not enough...  (Do Not Love Half Lovers)

Do not love half lovers
Do not entertain half friends
Do not indulge in works of the half talented
Do not live half a life and do not die a half death
If you choose silence, then be silent
When you speak, do so until you are finished
Do not silence yourself to say something
And do not speak to be silent
If you accept, then express it bluntly
Do not mask it
If you refuse then be clear about it
for an ambiguous refusal
is but a weak acceptance
Do not accept half a solution
Do not believe half truths
Do not dream half a dream
Do not fantasize about half hopes
Half a drink will not quench your thirst
Half a meal will not satiate your hunger
Half the way will get you no where
Half an idea will bear you no results
Your other half is not the one you love
It is you in another time yet in the same space
It is you when you are not
Half a life is a life you didn't live,
A word you have not said
A smile you postponed
A love you have not had
A friendship you did not know
To reach and not arrive
Work and not work
Attend only to be absent
What makes you a stranger to them closest to you
and they strangers to you
The half is a mere moment of inability
but you are able for you are not half a being
You are a whole that exists
to live a life not half a life


Khalil Gibran