Shoot the Damn Dog: A Memoir of Depression (11 page)

Our childhood was spent moving. We were brought up in six different countries, in Brunei, Brazil, Aden, Oman and Angola—and England too—following my father wherever his work took him. All three of us were sent to boarding schools, which were not the benign, liberal institutions that most are today. If we were ever made unhappy by our disrupted, peripatetic childhood, we did not say so. Not to each other and rarely to our parents although I was the most vocal of us three. But I am the most volatile too although that volatility, when I look at what goes on in other families, seems a very tepid thing. We do not, as a family, ever say how we really feel. We just get on with things and if ever we did express distress, there was always our mother to say, ‘Don’t upset yourself.’

I am, these days, amused by that phrase; it is so beautifully English. It tells us two things. It says that the initial upset is not important enough to be taken seriously and that it is anyway, you who is upsetting yourself. It’s a lose-lose situation so better to put up and shut up. It was not intended unkindly. It just shows, I think, how the details of family lore can, quite innocently, weave their way into an impenetrable emotional deadlock.

I saw this clearly, perhaps for the first time, when I was driving my younger brother, Tony, to the airport. At the time, I was still struggling with my depression and deep in therapy, so I was perhaps more conscious than usual of odd behaviour. I was also very conscious of the depression that seems to haunt our family or, at least, us children. When he was young, between the ages of about fifteen to twenty-five, my older brother, Michael, suffered badly from depression. He got no help. We do not, like most families, have any dealings with psychiatrists or therapists and this was thirty years ago, long before such things were commonplace or acceptable.

At the time I drove Tony to the airport, he was also depressed. He had lost a startling amount of weight, was deathly pale and had great black rings circling his eyes. The medication he was taking did not appear to be working. Tony’s self-prescribed remedy for depression was to go off around the world, alone. He left his wife and three children behind and arranged a three-month sabbatical from his City job. The company for which he works is very formal so is not in the habit of handing out leave to senior employees but when he explained he had severe depression, they were sympathetic.

As we drove I said, ‘Have Mum and Dad asked you why you are going away?’

Tony shrugged. ‘No.’

‘Have they asked you why you look so dreadful?’

He smiled faintly. ‘Thanks and no, they haven’t.’

‘They’ve said nothing to you at all?’

‘No.’

‘So you’ve told your boss that you’re depressed, but not Mum and Dad?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Have they asked you how you are emotionally?’

He grinned, a familiar cheeky smile that held echoes of our childhood. ‘Of course not.’

My parents are not uncaring. They love their children very much. It is just they do not express emotion well because it was never expressed to them. We do not knit our behaviour into patterns on our own. We learn them from our parents. And they learn them from their parents before them. We are all following a pattern that was laid down years before we were even born.

Those childhood patterns are hard to break. I still, after years of therapy, dislike saying how I really feel. The effort of it chokes me, literally, with a constriction at my throat. And there, obviously, are the origins of the throat monster. I don’t need to be an amateur psychologist to know that. I’ve had plenty of experts to tell me. I swallow down my feelings and choke on my true instincts. I have no idea, in the classic therapeutic phrase, ‘how to get my needs met’.

Why? Because, as one therapist told me, I have been beautifully trained to have no needs or, when I had them, to deny them. I needed, as a child, to feel safe, to be secure, to form lasting attachments and not only to people but also to places and things. Living between six countries over a period of eighteen years, leaving schools, houses, friends and cultures was not the best way to feel secure.

As human beings we all have to learn to adapt, it is part of our condition. As children we have to learn to adapt in order to survive because we are so wholly dependent on adults. So I adapted. Impermanence was so much a part of my childhood that to my childish mind, I became the only fixed point in my landscape. I was powerless to change the way things were and it seemed to me that my parents were powerless too. No point making a fuss, no point wishing life was otherwise.

I remember, when I was nine and we left Aden for the last time, the sight of Bimbo, our dog, snuffling happily in the garbage heaps piled on the sandy pavements outside our house.

He was the only dog we had ever owned, or would ever own. We moved too much to have pets. It was not fair to leave them behind, on us or on them. Bimbo was being sent to live with another family. I knew that I would never see him again. I knew, too, that Aden was becoming a dangerous place. There had been a bomb at the airport some weeks before. A friend of mine, a child, had been hospitalised after a piece of shrapnel was blown into her stomach. As far as my nine-year-old self was concerned, we were abandoning our dog to danger. I lay in my bunk on the boat back to England and cried. But I knew that there was nothing to be done and nothing would come of crying about it, just as I had discovered that nothing could be done about leaving my friends in Aden, my school, my house and all the other familiar things that bring comfort.

And so, as I understand it, I adjusted to constant loss as well as the inability to articulate any distress on, as one therapist described it, an ‘adapted’ level. The term, ‘adapted child’ was originally used by Eric Berne, the father of Transactional Analysis in the 1950s. Essentially it means the compliant, orderly side of us that hides anger, pleases others and generally acts the good girl or boy. The more that behaviour is rewarded (and the more that any other behaviour is punished or, more usually, ignored) the more we adapt ourselves to keeping quiet and not making a fuss. Put in another way, we adopt the position known in therapeutic terms as ‘abandonment or withdrawal’.

It is not, either, only the still, pale, silent child who has withdrawn. Withdrawal takes place at a far deeper level and may be disguised by a bright, lively and social exterior—the sort of exterior that indicates compliance because compliance brings its own rewards.

Alice Miller, psychoanalyst and author of
The Drama of Being a Child
, describes the ways in which children recognise their parents’ needs at a very young age and then repress their own, often very intense, feelings and needs, because he or she believes they are unacceptable to the parents. Miller writes,

I remember, clearly, the first obvious sign of my brother Michael’s depression. We were living in Oman, a slice of land just above Saudi Arabia, and had planned to go on a fishing trip with another family. When we were about to leave, everybody gathered together except Michael, who had disappeared. We searched the house, which was quickly done, and the area immediately outside the house. We lived in the desert, but a desert made of steep ravines and gorges. The temperatures there were unbearable, sometimes reaching 130 degrees Fahrenheit in the shade. After a brief search, we asked our houseboy, Mohammed, to go out and look. Mohammed knew the terrain intimately and could run up and down the ravines barefoot, dodging the scorpions and snakes that lived there. It was not a place for a fourteen-year-old schoolboy, fresh off the plane from England, to be wandering. Mohammed came back empty-handed.

We sat and waited. The silence seemed endless.

Two hours later, Michael appeared. He looked startled to find us in the house. He obviously thought that we would all have gone on the boat trip, as planned. He said simply, ‘I didn’t want to go on the boat, so I went for a walk.’

My mother, who was understandably frightened and angry, asked him furiously why he had not said anything or told anyone.

Michael simply shrugged. ‘I thought that nobody would notice.’

Nobody would notice
. That remark has haunted me for years.

‘Stop abandoning yourself,’ a therapist, Elizabeth, once said to me.

‘What?’ I didn’t understand.

She explained it like this.

Every time you feel sad and swallow down your tears, you abandon yourself.

If somebody hurts you and you pretend that you are fine, you abandon yourself.

Every time you don’t eat, or fail to feed yourself, you abandon yourself.

If you are tired, but refuse to rest, you abandon yourself.

If you drink too much and poison yourself with alcohol, you abandon yourself.

If you don’t ask for what you need from somebody with whom you are intimate, you abandon yourself.

The times when you resent putting somebody else’s needs before your own are the times when you are abandoning yourself.

If you don’t ask for help when you need it, you abandon yourself.

‘You suffer,’ Elizabeth said, ‘from a failure of care.’

From who?

‘From yourself,’ she says. ‘And before that, from your parents. They are the ones who should have taught you how to take care of yourself.’

A failure of care. It sounds so harsh. And at the same time so childlike. Both things are true. An inability to take care of oneself or soothe oneself is a sign of immaturity. It is a failure of understanding, or of teaching. If you are not taught as a child how to take care of yourself, you do not know as an adult. The pattern becomes ingrained. You are now an adult inhabited by a child. The child pleads, the adult overrules. You deny yourself proper care.

There are, of course, many theories about the effects of childhood on later, adult depression but this particular idea rings true about my own. If nothing was constant, it was better not to become attached and better not to need. If you are bullied as a child, as I was, often, at the various schools I attended, it is better to make yourself smaller or disappear entirely. Either that or pretend that you are impervious.

None of this, of course, occurred to me at the time. It did not even occur to me in my twenties and thirties when my mantra was: ‘It is better to be alone.’ I learned very early that anything I loved—people, dogs, schools, houses—was taken away from me. So I decided, although not consciously, never to become too attached to anything.

To put that in therapeutic language, this state of detachment is best described as becoming ‘wantless and needless’. If you adopt the position of not wanting or needing anything emotionally, you are unlikely to get hurt. To sustain that entirely, you withdraw emotionally and even physically from others, although you may show a perfectly sociable exterior when you are out in the world. It is the interior that is fiercely defended. Some people (as I did) adopt this as a solution to emotional pain, forgetting that we are communal animals, biologically and genetically determined to interact with others. The solution then becomes the problem. We not only need emotional comfort, we are programmed to seek it out, which is perhaps why I married twice. It is also, perhaps, why both marriages failed—a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy. Like the adapted child, we become the adapted adult. We engage on the exterior but remain withdrawn on the interior.

It was only as I got older that I began to understand that what I actually meant was, ‘It is
easier
to be alone.’ Exposing our frailties and vulnerabilities is frightening so it is easier not to do so. A part of me still believes that, even though depression showed me that shutting myself away is ruinous for my own emotional health. It is, I believe, ruinous for everybody’s emotional health and I know I am happier when I am connected to other people. Even so, to this day, when I am low, my natural default setting is to shut down and hide even though I am, by nature, gregarious. In a low mood, I still have to force myself out of the door or to answer the phone. Leaving my flat still seems difficult, if not frightening. Yet, every time I manage to answer the phone, make a call or seek out the company of friends, I am amazed at the way that my mood can lift.

Nearly every depressive I know has a similar default setting, so similar that it is given a name, ‘duvet-diving’. It means hiding in bed, not answering the phone, turning down invitations and generally ignoring the world. And it is the worst possible thing that we can do for ourselves.

Another name given to it is ‘isolating’, a word that you hear many depressives use. Isolating in a depressive frame of mind is quite different from choosing to spend time alone, which many of us need to do in order to re-establish our equilibrium. Isolating is a fearful, threatened state of aloneness, when even the sound of the telephone feels like a terrible demand and when we rarely use the time constructively but in a restless, ineffective way or numbly, slumped in front of the television. It is a negative, alienating sense of aloneness rather than a positive and constructive state.

Another way in which depressives (or anyone else) might hide is by keeping their true needs, instincts and demands disguised by the face that they present to the world. In psychoanalytical thinking this is called ‘splitting’ and is when true feelings (the true self) are hidden by a mask or the false self.

We often say one thing and feel another and, as people are liable always to take us on what we say—and have no idea what we feel unless we tell them—we are in a state of almost constant frustration, not to mention confusion. Sometimes, we expect other people to be mind readers and when they fail in their clairvoyant duties we are apt to shut down even further, taking their lack of response as further evidence that they don’t care.