How I Rescued My Brain

by David Roland

  I knew that I needed help, but from whom? I was the helper — the one others always relied upon to know what to do. I’d talked to my colleagues, but how much could I burden them? I needed someone else; I couldn’t do this by myself anymore.

  I thought of the psychologists in our area. There were not many with more experience than me. I called Wayne, a clinical psychologist. I knew he had done his PhD on psychological trauma in Vietnam War veterans, and we’d spoken a couple of times, over the phone, about trauma cases. He was the best I could find. I made an appointment for September.

  3

  WAYNE’S OFFICE WAS on the first floor of an old building in a nearby town. As I walked up the staircase, each step felt like a deepening admission of my crushed sense of invincibility. At the top, there was no receptionist. I waited in a poky room, alone, sitting on one of the worn chairs. A radio bleated from the corner.

  Out of a door came a tall, broad-shouldered man in his late fifties, dressed like a farmer in town clothes. He had florid hair — a style that was a throwback to the seventies — a fleshy face, and a generous mouth. ‘David?’ he said, looking at me.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘G’day. Wayne.’

  He invited me in. Like mine, his consulting room was unadorned; there were no personal items, except for framed degrees and certificates. But it was light-filled, with a big open window. The noises of cars, conversation, and a busker’s banjo floated up from the street below.

  ‘Have a seat over there.’ He pointed to a two-seater sofa. Then he sat down on a swivel chair by the desk, below the window. He turned to face me, brought his chair closer, and crossed his legs, resting a clipboard on his lap. ‘What can I do to help — what brings you here?’ he said. There was warmth in his voice, although his face was impassive.

  I leant forward, resting my elbows on my knees. I noticed the chunky soles of his shoes. ‘I … I don’t think I can cope anymore,’ I told the carpet. I could hear a quaver in my voice. ‘It’s hard to describe. I’m — I don’t want to go into the office anymore. I went on a yoga retreat and I felt freed from everything. Umm, I realised how sick I’ve been. I’ve had this bad back, and … I’ve been getting pains in my stomach; the pains come and go.’

  Then I told him about Rachel and the response I’d had.

  ‘Do you still think of her?’

  ‘I think of — I think of how bad her life was as a child, how cruel her uncle was, how a society can let that happen. I think of my girls. I couldn’t handle it if they went through something like that.’

  ‘Are you thinking about this in words or are you imagining it in scenes?’

  ‘I see the girls in horrible situations, maybe … being abducted or raped or …’

  ‘That’s terrible!’

  I lifted my gaze. Wayne was leaning back, eyes wide in alarm. ‘I’m a father myself,’ he said. His reaction surprised me: what I was saying must be bad. His eyebrows knitted together. ‘How have you managed with this? Have you had anyone you can speak to about it?’

  ‘Yes, that’s it. I don’t have anyone I can really talk to. Anna’s sympathetic, but she can’t understand. She wants me to tell her about the bad things I’ve heard, but I don’t want to traumatise her with it, and it’s confidential, anyway. Ian, my mate from work, we talk. But he’s caught up in family and work. I have a peer supervision group; they know I’ve been having a hard time. But we only meet once a month. I’ve really come out of desperation … I can’t do it on my own.’ I was talking to the carpet again.

  ‘Are you thinking you will continue with your practice?’

  ‘I think I can get back; I’ve given myself six months off. We have some savings, so it’s not desperate.’

  Wayne asked me to tell him about my sleep. I told him that I was going to bed early; I got very tired but it took a long time to fall asleep. When I did, I was troubled by nightmares, mostly of things happening to the family. ‘There’s a crime show we watch on Fridays. There was a scene where the owner of a Chinese restaurant is stood over by these heavies who want money. When he says he doesn’t have it, they put his hand into a deep-fryer of boiling oil and hold it there. I know these are shows, but they seem real to me. The scenes are stuck in my brain; I can’t get them out. It’s getting worse. I break down in tears watching the news; I can’t stand bad things happening to people. I feel like a broken-down machine. I’ve failed.’

  Wayne leant forward. ‘How have you failed, who have you failed, what have you failed at?’

  ‘It feels like I’ve let my mother down. She was a psychiatrist and went through her whole career without this happening to her. I’ve got other friends who are psychologists who seem to be doing okay. So why can’t I do it anymore? I’ve got all this training and experience. I’m at the height of my career and I can’t help anyone.’

  Wayne asked if my mother was proud of my work as a psychologist.

  ‘Anna told me that Mum used to listen to me on the radio when I was a regular guest. I don’t think she minded what I did, as long as I was happy doing it. I know that she loved me, but she wasn’t an outwardly affectionate sort of person. One day, in my early twenties, I came home for a visit and gave her a hug; she liked it, and after that we always hugged. But Dad was the more affectionate one.’

  I told him about Dad. I also said that on Sundays I swam in a group, the Stingrays, and we caught up for coffee afterwards. This had helped.

  ‘Do you ever think of doing away with yourself?’ Wayne asked.

  ‘Yeah, I’ve had thoughts about that. It scares me.’

  ‘How serious?’

  He’s checking my level of suicidal intention: do I have a thought-through plan, have I made any attempts.

  Suicidal urges had sneaked up on me, like unwanted acquaintances tapping me on the shoulder, wresting my attention. I hadn’t told anyone before. I had pictured myself jumping off the cape, a huge headland near home, onto the boulders below, and imagined my lifeless body being raised by the sea’s swell and carried away. I had imagined slipping quietly into the water at the edge of the beach — just another swimmer in the early evening — and propelling myself further and further out into the growing darkness, breathing through the fear that would surely come, until I tired, or something took me under.

  But, like reining in a bolting horse, I’d managed to pull these thoughts up short. I’d considered those left behind. I couldn’t let the girls grow up without a father — who would protect them? I knew from my work that suicide and the death of a child were the most heart-rending of deaths for those left behind, creating a gut-twisting cocktail of incomprehension, sadness, guilt, and anger.

  ‘Do you agree to tell me if you really think you would?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, looking at him squarely. I knew how necessary it was for a clinician to hear this. I didn’t mind reassuring him: I hadn’t believed that I would really go through with it.

  ‘You can ring me at any time.’

  He wanted to know when I got the uninvited, disturbing thoughts or images that changed my mood.

  ‘If I read about something in the newspaper — a murder, or something bad happening to a child — that sets me off.’

  ‘What about just out of the blue?’

  ‘Yes, yes … I can’t recognise any pattern to it often.’

  ‘When some people have a panic attack, they get a sense of dread that something bad is about to happen, and it can be very physical.’ He swept his arm through the air as if including all possibilities.

  ‘Yes, I get that. It feels like I’m under attack: my body tightens, shakes. But I don’t know what the threat is, or where it is. The world’s an unfair place; the weak are trodden on. Our society is dislocated, falling apart.’

  He asked how I was getting on with Anna and the children, about other physical symptoms, about my medica
l and family history, and then about drinking. I said that I’d been having two to three glasses of wine a night — more than I used to. I tried to have two alcohol-free days a week. But it was getting harder to take my mind off drinking.

  Towards the end of the session, Wayne said, ‘I think you’ve got a post-traumatic stress reaction and the depression that goes with it. Really, your battery is very flat. You’ve not had healthy sleep now for so long. Psychologists are witness to an enormous amount of suffering. We do our work in a closed room and we can’t share our work experiences like those in most other occupations can.’

  So I hadn’t been imagining it. A diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder was heavy stuff; I really was sick.

  ‘Stop watching the news,’ he said. ‘Nowadays, you’re going to see genuine grief, multiple incidents of violence, in one half-hour. It’s necessary to start protecting your imagination. Exercise. Simplify your life.’

  He wanted me to write down my dreams. I was to ask myself a deliberately open-ended question before I went to sleep: Would it be okay to remember a dream about the problem I am facing or about its solution?

  WAYNE AND I caught up again in a fortnight. I described one of my recent dreams while he listened attentively. ‘I’m driving a van. The three children are in the back seat and Anna’s in the front. We’re going down a winding road towards a bridge over a river. It’s late in the day and the light is failing. The van crashes through the railings and plunges into the water. The girls scream. I look across at Anna’s ashen face. We are sinking. Do I wind down the windows so we can swim out, or is it best to keep everything shut so we still have a pocket of air? Movie images of people trapped in ships, boats, cars flash through my mind: what did they do?

  ‘The water is squirting through the gaps in the van; it’s murky and getting dark. We can still breathe, but it’s hard to see the children. “Anna, grab the one nearest to you!” I shout. “Push yourself out the door!” There’s two girls left — I can only help one. I grab Amelia and yell to Ashley to follow me. I push against the door … The water pressure is immense. I’m not going to make it … Then I wake up hot and shaking; I think I’ve just died.’

  I told Wayne that I remembered the nightmare protocol, a series of questions to help orientate the individual that I used to give to clients: Where am I? What’s in the room? What time is it? Am I safe?

  Wayne wanted to analyse the dream. ‘What is the dictionary definition of a van?’

  ‘It’s a form of transport.’

  ‘What emotional association does a van have for you? What could it represent?’

  ‘The van is the family and me together as a unit.’

  ‘And what does the road represent?’

  ‘It’s a pathway, a way of getting from A to B. The road is narrow and we are stuck, hemmed in, trapped.’

  ‘What does a bridge refer to?’

  ‘It’s a means for getting over things, like a river or a canyon. It can collapse.’

  ‘And water?’

  ‘It’s a liquid; it can be life-saving or it can take away life.’

  Wayne offered an interpretation. ‘The dreamer is on a journey, the journey the family is undertaking. The family is being constricted — trapped and suffocated by what’s happening around them, what’s being done to them. The family is being drowned in the heaviness of sorrow and the weight that you feel. You and they are stuck in a place in which you can see no way out. At present, the dreamer cannot clearly see any means of survival for the family. He feels that he has lost control and is unable to save his family.’

  What he said felt right. I had lost control. We were under threat and I could not save my family. But why was I traumatised when I had never been physically harmed?

  ‘It’s the threat of harm, and feeling what others are feeling, when they describe what they’ve been through, that has injured you,’ he said. Each awful story I’d been told had been a nick in my psychological armour. Rachel’s story was one too many; my armour had shattered. Wayne said that the nightmares were re-traumatising me; the terror I had experienced was real. My imagination was a gift and a curse: it let me put myself into others’ shoes, but it also concocted vivid images that damaged me. My capacity for empathy had become a poison.

  Wayne told me that he had stopped working intensively with war veterans when their horrific stories had become too much. Now he took fewer appointments and continued to see only a handful of long-term clients, and instead presented more workshops and provided clinical supervision.

  I felt that he understood. But I couldn’t let go of the sense of failure so easily. I thought I’d let everyone down: my family, my profession, my community, the taxpayers who had helped to fund my nine years of training. I was a sought-after expert; now I was useless. No, even worse — I was a liability.

  Wayne said that I was in a transition phase. My time at the coalface of clinical psychology was probably over, but I could draw on this experience in the next phase. He told me that all psychologists at some time in their career confronted this dilemma: how to maintain empathy for their clients without taking on too much of their suffering.

  IN THE FOLLOWING sessions, I reported more dreams — some that involved the family, some in which I tried to save others, some in which I died, some in which I escaped. Wayne, using a cognitive behaviour therapy approach, challenged my thoughts of failure and sense of worthlessness.

  In one of my dreams, I was riding a bicycle over the tops of prison cells, which had a wire-mesh roof so that I could see inmates below running and jumping, trying to catch me. I managed to escape. Wayne saw this as positive. He asked me to think of my nightmares as healing dreams: my unconscious mind processing the bad memories, clearing the decks.

  And slowly, like an ocean liner being turned in the harbour, I began to change tack. Even though I still felt like a failure, I sensed that I could have a future that drew upon my past. I didn’t have to blame myself: bad things happened to good people through no fault of their own. My intentions had been good. I was doing my best.

  ‘No matter what has happened to you recently,’ Wayne said, ‘that has not changed all the help you gave to hundreds of others. Your clients’ lives are better for having met you. Be easier on yourself. Start thinking about the next stage of your life.’

  I realised that going through pain changes you. I could never be the same person I was, but perhaps I could begin to think about becoming someone new.

  4

  ‘OPEN YOUR MOUTH wider, see, like this.’ Lily demonstrated by giving an exaggerated, carefree laugh while sitting at the digital piano. I chuckled. A mental picture of a mythical wide-mouthed frog came to mind.

  We were in her lounge room, a short walk from my house. Now that I was not working as much, I had the time to take singing lessons. Today Lily had been playing scales, up and down, and getting me to shape my mouth around the different vowel sounds.

  She turned side on, her face looking up at me, impossibly bright for this time of the morning. As she had instructed, I was standing with my feet apart, holding a solid core, one hand on my abdomen to gauge its movement. She had placed a mirror in front of me. It was disconcerting to watch my freckled face, with a nose that always looked bent, contorting into these facial poses. ‘Over-exaggerate,’ she exhorted.

  My early years had been spent at a small Roman Catholic convent school. One day, when I was eight, I and some other classmates were pulled in from the playground and made to stand by the school’s cranky piano. In turns, we were asked to sing a song about flowers growing in a garden, while one of the nuns played. This audition led to me being selected, together with a handful of others, to attend a major eisteddfod in the city.

  A few lunchtime rehearsals followed, after which several of us boys piled into Mum’s station wagon, some lolling like seals in the back cabin, and set off on a ni
nety-minute drive to the city. It was early summer, and we took bags of cherries to munch on. By the time we arrived, I was feeling sick, although still enthusiastic about the performance.

  Until it happened.

  I was pushed onto the stage of the biggest hall I had been in, hundreds of faces looking up at me, the only other person with me an unfamiliar pianist. Fear grabbed me by the throat. The woman at the piano played the intro for my song, but when I was supposed to sing, nothing happened; I was still staring at all the people.

  The piano stopped.

  ‘Shall we start again?’ the woman asked in a kind voice.

  I nodded.

  The second time around I actually made a sound, and then held the tune to the end of the song. The adjudicator awarded me a highly commended, with a comment: ‘Open your mouth more and your voice will sound even better. Good work.’

  I had found out I could sing, and that I quite liked it.

  As a teenager, I had played in a high-school rock group and fancied myself a singer–songwriter. During university, I’d played in a semi-professional dance band. Yet while I’d had years of guitar lessons — Dad insisting that I learn classical guitar, to get a good technique — I’d never trained as a singer.

  Now, who better to take lessons with than my friend Lily? We’d met in 1990 in Canberra, where I’d moved to take up a university position while finishing off my PhD research. I’d won a local amateur songwriting competition, the prize being time in a recording studio; Lily, then a voice student, helped me with the backing vocals. A few years ago, she and her family had moved to the same country town as us. Our agreement was that she would give me a lesson one morning a week in return for a bottle of aged wine from my collection. After each session, we stopped for tea.