Everybody Died, So I Got a Dog

by Emily Dean

  The process itself was shrouded in mystery. ‘Graduates’ (I imagined barefoot people accepting scrolls from a bearded man in a saffron tunic and beads) seemed reluctant to reveal a detailed breakdown of the course. I Googled ‘Hoffman bad review’ in order to confirm my worst fears. But oddly, people’s experiences all seemed to follow a similar trajectory: they started out cynical, it was emotionally exacting, but they all came out of it a little lighter.

  I’d chosen to come off my anti-depressants some months ago. I felt the meds had served their purpose, to get me functioning again. And I felt my issues with depression were more circumstantial than clinical.

  But the bereavements had acted as an unwelcome truth-teller, forcing me to face something that I’d never had the courage to properly confront: a sense that I had lived my whole life as an adjunct to the people around me. Without my father around to be angry at, without my mother to deliver my script, without Rach to tell me what to do, I was kind of lost.

  At times I felt swindled by their sudden collective disappearance, as if they’d extended an invitation to a non-stop drama that left other families in the shade, without warning me that the finale ended in mass carnage. I was the lone survivor in our very own Game of Thrones box set, which, just like that show, had malevolently decided to kill off one of the best-loved characters first.

  I sounded Sue out about the Hoffman Process. ‘I mean, it’s not like the proper therapy I do here. It might be a disaster!’ I said, worried she might not approve.

  ‘If you want to do it, I think you should,’ Sue replied. ‘It’s your decision, though, and one that only you can make.’

  The following week I found myself at work, ignoring the feature on ‘FIVE HOT Party Looks!’ that had to be edited and going back to the Hoffman Process website. Again. I looked through the FAQs, which explained that they screen candidates to check they’re in the right frame of mind. ‘A few places remaining for our October course in Ireland!’ a banner on the home page blinked, in welcoming orange font.

  An hour later I was standing on the South Bank during my lunch break. I decided to call the Hoffman number. A party of schoolchildren were posing noisily for selfies by the Thames. A couple were emerging from the Mondrian hotel, huddling into each other against the cold. Students with bold trainer choices were chatting animatedly on their way into a sushi chain.

  ‘I feel like I’m kind of watching other people live their lives. While I just get through the days,’ I found myself saying to the male stranger on the other end of the line. ‘Plus, I’ve had a lot of bereavements. My whole family in fact,’ I said, slightly defensively. Keen to distance myself from the ‘bored wanker with too much time and money on her hands’ label.

  ‘I see, I see,’ the stranger said soothingly. ‘Well, let’s have a chat about the process. And you can have a think. But it sounds like we might be able to help you, Emily.’

  I stroked my ‘UNLOVEABLE’ sticker, then glanced around the room at the sixteen other white labels listing everyone’s ‘word’, the thing they most feared people finding out about them. I knew mine now, thanks to Sue. Embarrassingly, I didn’t even have to pause when we were asked to select one. I couldn’t tell you my credit card pin number. It had taken me a university degree course to understand the difference between the words ‘naked’ and ‘nude’. But I was all over my own damage.

  I first encountered some of the others at the airport. We smiled nervously as we boarded a coach to a remote house a few hours from Dublin. The introductions were made with the jittery bonhomie of contestants entering the Big Brother house. ‘What the hell have we signed up for?’ ‘I’ll DIE without my phone!’

  There was a handsome man with Emirates first class luggage tags in expensive leisurewear exuding alpha maleness, who barely took his headphones off for the entire journey. I decided he was exactly the sort of bloke I hated. Arrogant and entitled. I nicknamed him the Crown Prince because of his imperial bearing. There was another man, introverted, happy to let the rest of the group take control of pleasantries. I immediately felt drawn to his less challenging aura. I chatted to a girl with messy blonde hair and a Lycra top, who looked like a yoga teacher. She seemed sweet and vulnerable. I decided she would be my friend and named her Boho Gal. Another friendly woman joined our group, buttery highlights, fitted blazer and snowy dentistry. I christened her Belgravia Blonde.

  We met the others when we arrived at the slightly careworn house at the bottom of a drive, set in pretty gardens. I looked at them all, wondering what secrets they carried and why they had decided to take this drastic step. I was introduced to the two women I was sharing an annexed wood cabin with: an elegant-looking forty-something with an ash blonde bob, and a warm matriarchal type with an infectious giggle. We were deferential with one other as we unpacked, offering the loan of shower gels as we organised our possessions, like nervous boarding-school freshers. But the small talk that oils most first encounters was curiously absent. We’d been advised not to discuss the facts of our lives outside of here. All that window dressing was to be stripped away over the next eight days.

  We met our team leaders. J was a white-haired, academically dishevelled man exuding wisdom and disciplined thinking. M had the grace of a retired ballerina and the engaging warmth of Glinda the good witch in The Wizard of Oz. Which was appropriate because we were definitely not in lands I knew how to navigate anymore, Toto.

  One of the first difficult lessons I had to learn was to stop using the word ‘you’ and commit to saying ‘I’. When people talked about themselves in the group sessions (we didn’t call them therapy), our collective dependency on the distancing tic of ‘you’ became astonishingly apparent.

  ‘Then you feel …’

  ‘And you think …’

  J interjected patiently each time. ‘You mean, “I feel.” “I think”?’

  He told us that every time we used the word ‘you’ instead of ‘I’, it minimised our experience and subtly projected it onto someone else. The more we used ‘you’, the more our opinions and feelings were handed over to another person. It was a way of relinquishing responsibility.

  It seemed a bit weird at first, this endless grammar pedantry. I felt like saying, ‘You can’t be expected to police your language all the time. It’s fucking ridiculous.’

  But I didn’t. Because J would have said, ‘How about, “I” can’t be expected to police “my” language all the time. It’s fucking ridiculous?’

  After a while it did start to feel strangely liberating committing to ‘I’. Like choosing to leave a thick, ridged bootprint on the moment rather than my usual brush of a flip-flop. It was the verbal equivalent of coming straight to the point in emails, rather than using self-diminishing softeners like, ‘I just wondered’ or ‘Does that make sense?’

  I also began to see how much I needed to win a room – be the funniest, the most memorable. The first few irreverent heckles I made to gain the others’ admiration were greeted with the polite tolerance given to an over-needy support act. My ‘Look-at-me! Love me! Give me attention!’ shtick fell a little flat in this room full of people who were there to turn their lives around.

  I had sent over several pages’ worth of information about myself before I came, answering questions that started out fairly easily – ‘What do you hope to gain from this?’ – before descending into more hard-core areas like, ‘What emotions are you afraid to express?’ I had to pick out a list of qualities I recognised in each of my parents. Happy to oblige. But then they went and ruined it by asking me to pick out the ones I also recognised in myself. ‘Hello, that’s the point? I’m not like either of them!’ I almost shouted at the stupid questionnaire. Until I reluctantly found one. And another. It turned out there were absolutely shitloads of behaviour patterns I had in common with my parents.

  This is the essence of the Hoffman Process: the idea that we pick up negative patterns in childhood and carry them throughout our lives, without realising it. Or as Philip Larkin put it
slightly more eloquently, ‘Man hands on misery to man. It deepens like a coastal shelf.’

  It’s a fairly simple theory, though the effects it describes are not always easy to see in your own life. But let’s say you grew up around a lot of uncontrolled anger. You’ll generally do one of two things. Grab the fury baton yourself and spend your whole life erupting at everyone, or quietly rebel by burying your real feelings.

  The point is, mostly these are not unique qualities you’re stuck with (mental health conditions aside). They’re learned behavioural patterns, like a really disappointing inheritance. As Larkin also had it, ‘They fill you with the faults they had and add some extra, just for you.’ Whether we like it or not, children are hardwired to absorb the behaviours and moods of caregivers, for the simple reason that they need to survive. Just as dogs learn to hold out a paw, not because it’s their funny little signature move, but because we give them attention every time they do it.

  We had received work folders that bulged dauntingly with pages to be filled over the following week. We started off gradually, sharing our stories as we sat facing one another in a U shape. I heard about violent childhoods, divorce, death and alcoholism. Some people cried, some just recited their history, inured to its impact. Some wouldn’t reveal until the very final day what had really sent them here.

  ‘In the last three years all my family died,’ I heard myself saying. My story sounded raw and unequivocal without the diversionary context of a conversation. Talking about each death without interruption, I realised that I had never had time to confront the impact of the individual losses. My family had become three trunks of trauma that I’d dumped in a cupboard, all piled on top of one another.

  The Hoffman began to feel like the hero’s quest in a movie. We had to battle the dark side in order to reach the celebratory Star-Wars-style victory ceremony at the end. We were going to have to confront our worst fear – our very own ‘I am your father, Luke!’ Darth Vader moment.

  Much of our time was devoted to expelling the past through letters to our parents that we would never send – in my case that I could never send. The idea was to acknowledge how our negative patterns of behaviour had impacted our lives. I found myself writing with a manic confessional urgency, as if I’d opted for a cocktail called ‘Our famous Speed and Truth Serum slammer!’ But for every negative outpouring there was also a positive one. It was not about wallowing in self-pity; it was about learning.

  The prospect of extended silent periods was the thing that filled me with most horror. I had always been terrified of silence, treating it as something to be stood up to, like a poisonous bully. Colleagues reached for headphones to block out my incessant chatter, receptionists in spas whispered, ‘Sorry, we try to keep the noise to a minimum here.’ I reacted to libraries like the Antichrist being led into a church.

  The silence was announced by J in a firm, paternal tone. Sometimes it lasted for a couple of hours, sometimes until the next day. It felt almost funereal at first, as we sat in the kitchen’s conservatory on faded floral couches sipping tea. The ticking clock, stirring of spoons on ceramic and crunching of biscuits was a clattering focus rather than a harmless backdrop.

  I started to think about why I loathed silence. I realised that it was an entirely foreign phenomenon in our house. The only time I experienced it was when we had done something really, really bad. Our worst misdeeds were met by our mum not with hysteria, but with what Rach called ‘the monk’s vow’. Sometimes these silent treatments lasted for several days. They got more frequent as we got older. One of the longest came after a teenage ball. As Rach and I clambered out of Mum’s car with our dates, in a whirl of floral scent and excitement, I caught sight of her face at the steering wheel, flooded with hurt. She didn’t speak to us properly for weeks, walking out of the room when we came in and pinning notes on cupboards to communicate basic information.

  She eventually revealed the reason behind the long Benedictine blackout.

  ‘You didn’t thank me properly for giving you a lift when you got out of the car,’ she said. ‘And I found it very hard to forgive.’

  This became a long-standing joke between Rach and me. Lift-gate. But examining this cold case now, I think of what must have been rearing up in my mother’s mind as we tumbled off into the night with our glitzy make-up and handsome escorts. That we didn’t need her anymore. That we had the opportunity of youth and the excitement of futures. That she felt suddenly relegated to the role of elderly chauffeur, rather than the third member of our girlish triumvirate. Perhaps she just felt very alone.

  Silence allows you to avoid the potential rejection that the truth risks. My grandmother often talked about my mother’s ‘terrible sulks’ as a child. I now saw that they might have been a silent rebellion against the tornado of drunken madness she was flung into on a daily basis.

  I gradually accepted that this was a pattern of punishment I had used myself occasionally, freezing out friends who had upset me rather than confronting them, sitting on boyfriends’ texts for several hours to punish them. ‘Look, which part of “Man hands on misery to man” did you not understand?’ the spirit of Philip Larkin muttered impatiently as I finally made this behavioural link.

  As the week passed I started to form strong bonds with everyone here, despite knowing so little about their lives outside. Or was it because of that? I knew the deep fears that kept the lawyer up at night, but I didn’t know where he hung out or who his friends were. I had no idea what the young girl with the engaging manner studied at university or where she lived but I had an intimate knowledge of her childhood story.

  ‘It’s so strange meeting people’s insides before their outsides,’ I told M one day in our morning check-in. ‘When you know what people hide, it’s weird how much more compassion you have for them.’

  I had heard the word ‘transference’ before, as a kind of therapy buzzword. I knew it was something to do with redirecting feelings from our past onto someone in our present. I had even thrown it into conversations when I was slagging someone off. But I’d never considered how I might be guilty of it. Pretty much on a daily basis.

  That time when a boss closed their office door slightly too emphatically and glanced through the glass in my direction while talking to a colleague … Not sure how your thoughts go, but my internal story arc has always run like this. They are talking about me. They have discovered something bad I did. They hate me. Why are they looking at that computer screen? Finalising the details of the termination letter, probably. Maybe I should just leave before they do it. Thank God for this unique insight I have that allows me to always know exactly what people are thinking. It is such a helpful tool that improves my life in every way.

  I won’t even tell you where things went when a boyfriend started taking his phone into the bathroom except to say that it involved an apologetic private detective handing me photos in a manila envelope. (I’m not sure why the detective hadn’t caught up with the digital age yet; it must have caused him a lot of issues.) ‘No charge, Miss,’ I imagined him saying. ‘After seeing those photos, this one’s on the house.’

  You get the point. This was all what my father used to call ‘emotion in wild excess of the fact.’ None of it had anything to do with the boss or the boyfriend. It was more likely rooted in something that happened when I was eight years old, which I’d stored away, accessing it every time I felt vulnerable and adding another layer of paranoia. Until eventually it turned into a giant Jenga tower of toxic shame, which came crashing down with hurt fury when someone I ran into at a party forgot they’d met me before.

  This noisy traffic from the past that runs through people’s minds can become a bottleneck of fear. Psychologists refer to it when world-class strikers freeze in the face of a penalty shoot-out. Therapists explain that it’s why people abandon relationships at the first sign of conflict. And why they erupt at a family Christmas when a relative suggests how to deal with a grouchy child.

  We can’t stop ourselve
s from feeling those triggers. But when we trace where they come from and confront the source, it becomes easier to understand our reactions. A bit like when Gareth Southgate made the England team sit through footage of previous penalty shoot-out disasters. You need to face the fuck-ups to stop being haunted by them.

  There was one part of the Hoffman I had been really dreading. I’d read about it in an article before coming here. It’s where you tell the other members of the group about the negative responses you had to them. I reside permanently on the corner of Love Me Street and People Please Avenue – I’d rather set fire to my eyebrows than give anyone a cast-iron reason not to like me. But it was explained to us that the purpose was to consider our own responses. How you experience someone is not always who they are. Still, I hoped no one was about to call me ‘a mean selfish bitch with bad skin’.

  I filled out my shit list of incidents and took a deep breath as I addressed the Crown Prince. He had become one of my closest pals over this week. It had been nice knowing him.

  ‘When I first saw you at the airport I experienced you as being aloof with me, and arrogant. Freezing me out. When you put on headphones I took it personally as a rejection.’

  He smiled, which seemed incredibly generous, considering.

  I explained why I thought I’d reacted like that, how it echoed things I’d felt since childhood.

  ‘How do you view him now, Emily?’ asked M.