therapist as novelist as monster
“All therapists are frustrated novelists”
… a comment made by novelist Fay Wheldon that I heard in a radio interview some fifteen years ago, before I even trained as a therapist. She went further, blaming the collapse of her thirty year marriage on her husband’s psychotherapist, declaring them as dangerous, ‘wielding enormous power’ attempting to rewrite the lives of their clients as though characters in a novel they are too ill-adept to write. She cleverly then went on to write a book about her experience.
Most of the clients that I work with through the Learning Disabilities Service are unable to read, have never learnt, would be unable to learn, or chose not to. At some level being a novelist wouldn’t be much direct help to them. Yet, they are all incredibly adept story-tellers.
One of my clients made clay pots, crockery, utensils, the painted design of each only changed so very slightly each week. They created a lot of work. It would fill boxes, that would fill the cupboard, but each piece was contained in it’s form, varying in size, but always recognisable by it’s utility. It never felt beyond my ability to cope; the work never overwhelmed me or apparently my client. Each session was quiet; a workshop, productive. It only occurred to me after many weeks how much useful, purposeful artwork was being created by someone regarded by society as ‘un-useful’, useless, or as a burden on a country’s wealth. My client had told me a story about being disabled, and I could only imagine that the later shattered, unrepairable pots that appeared as treatment progressed told me something of how they might feel about their apparent uselessness.
In the realm of significant trauma or ‘moral injury’ we now understand how narrative and being able to rethink or perhaps retell your trauma are important in normalising experience and avoiding the depths of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). In a study of Second World War veterans (The Grant Study, Harvard Medical School) those who did not develop PTSD, which was the vast majority, tell very different stories when they were tested in the 1990s than immediately after the trauma in 1945. Their experience had now been retold as one of camaraderie, of shared experiences, or patriotism and how it helped them grow as individuals. Those that hadn’t found this new retelling of experience lived with the trauma as though it was happening to them still.
Those without PTSD had literally rewritten their experience, embellishing it with adventure, heroism and meaning. They had also recounted stories that were shared; memories emerging of common enemies and joint action. In his therapeutic work with refugees Renos Papadopoulus notes that there is a shared story of survival for pre-migratory refugees; a process incredibly important for how they can later make sense of their experience. He notes how Nelson Mandela and his fellow ANC members spoke of surviving imprisonment on Robben Island through ‘understanding what the authorities were intending to do to us, and sharing that understanding with each other’; a shared narrative that offered for those involved a place of shared security.
In the quiet of the therapeutic space I find much privilege in experiencing the stories of my clients, painful and unnerving as this can be for both of us. At times I tug and pull on information, teasing it out, at others I am guiding, enclosing, ‘making safe’ as waves of information are thrown around the room in all colours and all materials. We are weaving the stories, co-creating layers of paint and encrusted clay bringing safe-shape to memories that otherwise would be overwhelming, disrupting abilities to have normal relationships with themselves and others.
As I look through my bookcase of novels at home, it occurs to me that the books that I keep that haven’t ended up in the charity shop are those in which questions are asked that help me to look at the world beyond myself, to weave my memory and experience with others. They bring me safely into the world. I am not attracted by writers that tell me how it is, how life should be, or always was. I am not attracted by novelists with large axes to grind, or weighty egos to share. I think I could say the same about therapists, but then I am the one writing this blog; shaping, editing, embellishing my memory as I go …
