Best keep it to myself

  

I was at training on the weekend, learning about understanding and preventing vicarious trauma. It was interesting. But there’s something about having a group of therapists in a room together that could be described as unsettling. By-the-way, the collective noun for a group of therapists is “a worry of…” apparently. Although AI may be playing a little joke on me.

 

There are so many earnest people in the world, and therapists might be near the top the list of earnest-ness; when you are learning about somewhat difficult topics I wonder if what is also needed, running alongside the grizzly truth of how horrid people can be to each other, is a smatter of humour. In these therapy training courses there is much chin-rubbing on a tilted head, the low hum of "hmm-ing", moments of weighty reflection, (unfortunate moments of audible stomach grumbling), and many voices politely trying to have their profound thoughts about their work heard by all.

 

Somehow there is little room for wit on these training courses. And I know – it is because we are talking about Very Serious Things. But when a rather short man in his mid-60s, wearing CND-emblazoned DM-boots topped off with a purple paisley shirt is delivering the hard-hitting content it’s quite testing (especially from the front row because you forgot your glasses) to take everything Extremely Seriously.

 

His DMs squeaked on the hard village hall flooring and the shirt dazzled the eyes with excessive swirling patterns. I am not one to not take these topics seriously, trauma is a hugely interruptive and daunting thing to live with, let alone talk about openly. In this line of work we therapists need to be careful that we don’t end up inhabiting something dreadful that has actually happened to someone else. This is big stuff and cannot be taken flippantly, a person is relying on us to support them with this toughest of material, and the training helped remind me how best to manage with it.

BUT.

Come on therapist colleagues. Please. Just a little loosening of the tight-grip-of-This-Is-Serious.

 

At the start of the training Mr Paisley invited us (we’re always being invited… in hindsight I should maybe have politely declined…) to meditate.

 

We sat there eyes closed, earnestly ‘clearing our minds’ and ‘listening to our breath’ and ‘connecting with the calm beneath the storm’ etc etc and when Mr Paisley said ‘now watch your breath come in and out of your lungs and let your mind be free of … ‘ (something remarkable, I can’t remember what) – when he said the word ‘lungs’ I automatically went into a visual of the recent Silent Witness I’d seen, where Emilia Fox was intently dissecting the lung of a murder victim.

 

And I really got into this replay as it was quite a realistic lung and I remember thinking at the time I wonder if this is fake or some animals lung? Which animal? And then somehow I got to going back in time and thinking about when my dad was in hospital in 1997 after a mega grim operation (called the Whipple Procedure where much of your guts are removed) and when I went to visit him he was in such a terrible state with drips and needles galore and his mouth covered in blood because he kept coughing up gross things from inside… it was deeply disturbing. And then that made my thoughts wiggle (you know how dots join in a funny way in your head, leading you willy-nilly from one place to another) to a conversation I’d had with a friend recently where I’d admitted I not-infrequently imagine the sorts of places you might accidently find a dead body.

 

Oops! I was meant to be clearing my mind and grounding! Not replaying a cheap horror-movie. Mr Paisley invited us to open our eyes and I saw a squirrel zipping up an oak tree that was in the carpark outside the window. Which felt quite normal.

 

Mr Paisley then invited us to talk about our meditation and what nice things we’d encountered.

 

I wasn’t sure that sharing my minds contents at that point would’ve sparked a laugh in the crowd of Earnest Therapists (they may have called 999 and invoked the mental health act 1983), so instead in my gnarly head I laughed like a hyena, while a very clever therapist spent 5 minutes telling us all how marvellously empty her head had been and what a grounding experience the meditation was, thank you so much Mr Paisley.

 

Sliced lung anyone?

 

 

How was yours?

 

I was walking this morning in a fog of thoughts having just returned from a monumental 4 days of Christmas. I began to think of the rhythms of the time around Christmas, the lulls and intensity of activities, the build-up, the crescendos and yes, I’ll say it, the climax… followed by a strange quiet, a sort of letting go, a huge out-breath.

 

What sprang to mind was a tsunami. I haven’t ever seen one but have a vague idea of what goes on. The leaching of the water away from the beach as the earth, miles away, has shifted so radically that it sucks the sea back only to catapult it out in full force, leaving nothing to spare in its wake. I think that’s what I feel like a bit. On a tiny teeny scale.

 

There is this sense of engaging the brace-position even though what’s about to happen is good! It is! I’m part of a brilliant family. There is nothing to not love about being together. Yet... Yet… The preparation required for The Christmas Period is essentially a powerful message telling the body and brain that something quite big – and possibly risky - is going to happen very soon. Prepare yourself – geographically, financially, nutritionally, physically, relationally, and last but not least, at the top of the Prep-Tower – emotionally. This year was another biggy for our family – 2023/4 was the fallout from the death of my dad, 2025 was the fallout of from the death of my motherinlaw. A powerhouse of organisational skills and detail and the epicentre of the family around whom we rotated – like stars circling the sun. The wretched-hole-of-absence was what we were all manically prepping for.

 

So as the waters began to recede from the metaphorical beach and the excitement began to grow, so did the sense of anxiety around getting it right, honouring this insanely generous woman who had produced our Christmasses for decades, pulling out decorations from under the stairs, saving a nick-nack made by her grandchildren or children even (that tinsel twizzle is nearly 50 years old) – how do you STILL have that? – on the tree it goes regardless of its state of decomposure… It's not about a fashionable colour theme, the theme is family… regardless of age or life-status, if it’s family related, it’s IN (or on).

 

The sea disappears over the horizon and our whatsapps pick up a notch: do we have enough cheese? How many crackers did you say there are? Wait, how many beds do we need clean sheets for? How many roulades feed 17? That means how many pints of cream? We need to hoover the dead ladybirds from the windowsills.

 

Meanwhile a car-key goes awol and the prep-plans hit a bump in the sea-bed momentarily. Me and my sisterinlaw sit in the local municipal dump in a strange moment of calm as the car can’t start without its electric key: a flash of peace descends in the Toyota as we realise there is nothing we can do but sit in the unexpected quiet offered by our immobilization, people outside the car determinedly shove bits of cardboard into huge metal shipping containers. We laugh at the idiocy of the situation and the car ends up having a sleepover in the dump.

 

And then the water is on the rise again, and organised chaos picks up another notch. What time are you arriving? Which day? So that’s how many for dinner on each night? Put washing up liquid on the list. And another washing up brush.

Secret Santa complete.

I think we need more cheese.

The water is galloping across the sea-bed, with our two dogs surfing on the crest, great smiles on their hairy noses, anticipating ham and bacon and turkey and sausage and cheese ‘falling’ off plates…

 

And then we’re in it – being tumbled around by time and joyful greetings and unpacking food and laying presents under the sparkling tree with its wondrous array of decorations – and trying to hold it together as we recognise moments in the day when our mother/inlaw/granny would’ve conducted an activity – shit we didn’t do a jigsaw this year – or run around the house trying to work out why the chimney was smoking so extravagantly this year. The water frothing and churning around us, potato basting and Love Actually, the dishwasher on its 28^th run in 3 days, wrapping paper strewn over the floor, I love it so much thank you.

 

Boxing Day, we wake late, it’s like that moment in the Yellow Pages advert from the 90s when the young man wakes up to see a painting with a moustache graffitied over the art, discombobulated, we had a good time didn’t we? The house is in one piece, we’re in one piece, we made it through with love and joy and tears.

 

We resemble the debris on the beach after the wave has crashed down – we’re not at all destroyed, but we’re in a ‘wow-did-that-happen’ kind of head space; a little messy, a little phewee, we tread carefully down to breakfast, relieved we don’t have to get to church for 930am again.

 

I guess every family does their thing, and I guess the power of Christmas is that they do it together and hope that they can lean on each other in those moments when they need support.

 

My moment was the waving goodbye to people as they drove off. Waving goodbye to a carload of people, standing next to my niece I realised that oh crapsticks here comes my own mini-tidal-wave, as my motherinlaw was a stickler for a proper wave-off to anyone from her house, and would wave until the car was out of sight. The absence hit like the second-tidal-wave they always say you need to be prepared for, there’s usually more than one.

 

Boom. Turning to my niece we both craughed (cry-laughed) as we knew exactly what the other was thinking in that moment.

Fuckadoodle doooo.

Did we have enough cheese in the end? Well yes we bloody did. 

 

 

 

 

The Whistling Ghost

When I was little I used to believe in Father Christmas. And the Tooth Fairy. And that icing sugar might be poisonous (mum caught me with my fingers in the box and got angry and said you can't go round licking things when you don't know what they are, they might be poison...  She also told my brother that peanut butter was made from grass and he believed her for years...). And I knew ghosts and that were maybe not real but at times I did believe in them because people I trusted told me about their ghosty experiences, even Dad. My brothers girlfriend told us she'd felt someone sit heavily on her bed (in our family home) when she was asleep, and it definitely wasn't my brother, she said. And Granny's dogs occasionally used to bark at the stairs, apparently, at things she definitely couldn't see. And when we stayed once in Chesapeake Bay (USA) in an old house that was the epicentre of a tobacco plantation in the peak of slavery horrendousness, I had never in my life felt such psychological disturbance, I slept not one wink all night, terrified of unknown shades of intense sadness and fear.

There have been sightings – by reliable sources – of things in the pub next door (an old building with some sad stories to go with it) and lordy lorks when we were little we did not go into the graveyard at 6pm or 12am – no siree.

As I grew older and more sceptical these childish and teenish tendencies diluted and whilst fun to watch a horror movie, there was a ‘yeah, but it’s not real’ defiance. Occasionally a visit to the loo in the middle of the night down the long corridor of my mother in laws house in Suffolk would lead me to keep my eyes shut and my hands out in front of me for guidance rather than risk ‘seeing’ something. I only ever stumped my toe on the bed as a result.

So the other day I was staying in London and running a bath. The day had been long and beautiful, I’d had many treats and was feeling happy and relaxed, a little giddy from sharing a bottle of wine with my daughter and the world was a good place in that moment.

As I sat in the bath, stirring the water with my hands shaped like paddles, I heard this loud whistling coming from the bedroom on the other side of the bathroom door. I thought my daughter must be next door whistling a little tune (we’d just been to a concert). “Lovely!” I shouted above the sound of the running water. More whistling. I’d asked her to bring my toothbrush as I’d left it in the wrong place, “Just leave my toothbrush by the door I’ll get it in a moment, I’m actually in the bath now!” Nothing from my daughter. More whistling. That was odd I thought.

More whistling, so I shouted out “Ha ha! Love the whistling!”

Nothing, again. Weird, I thought to myself. I switched off the tap, and got out of the bath and went to the bathroom door and nakedly peered into the bedroom which was completely empty.

HUH? But someone was literally just whistling in there! I shouted up to Pol – “Er, were you just whistling in the bedroom?” No reply.

?

“POL! Were you just whistling?!” She heard a squeaky urgency in my voice and I could hear her dash down the stairs to where I was peeking out from behind the bathroom door. 

“Mum, what? Whistling? No!” She looked at me like I was a bit mad.

But someone was just in this room Pol, whistling! I could hear them! Clear as a whistle! "Not me" she clarified.

Our neck-hairs prickled.

Our eyeballs got big.

“That’s creepy. Really creepy.”

We didn’t like that at all. Who was whistling? Where was the whistler? Why couldn’t we see them? Ugh. And then the light in the bedroom flickered as though warning us of something. Goosebumps galore. 

With great difficulty we agreed to reconvene after my bath.

I got back into the bath, skin bristling and turned the tap back on, at which point the whistling started, loud and clear, and I realised the sound was coming out of the hot tap! Pol heard it from the bedroom and we burst out laughing.