Shoot the Damn Dog: A Memoir of Depression (15 page)

We can leave the last word on this to Freud. Who else?

My mother’s irritation with and disappointment in my father has a source, even if it is not one that we understood as we were growing up. Although he has never been officially diagnosed, it seems almost certain that he has Asperger’s syndrome. This condition, also known as high-functioning autism, was not officially recognised until the early nineties, although it was described in medical literature in 1944 by Hans Asperger. It has become yet more public since the publication of the best-selling novel,
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
by Mark Haddon, in which the main character, a young boy, suffers from Asperger’s. Its sufferers are predominantly male and the spectrum of the condition ranges from very mild to severe in its manifestation.

The recentness of its discovery explains why my father, who is now in his eighties, was oblivious to the condition. He only became aware of it when my nephew, Michael’s son, was diagnosed and, in order to better understand the condition affecting his grandson, read a textbook on the syndrome. He pointed out that he recognised himself on every page. And we recognised him. Michael, himself aware that he also has distinct characteristics of Asperger’s, is convinced that my father is affected.

It has always been apparent that there was something very different about my dad. It was just that until recently, we did not know what. The most pronounced characteristics of the syndrome are social discomfort to the point of avoidance of any situation involving unfamiliar people or places, repetitive behaviour patterns and extreme difficulty in looking somebody in the eye. As children, we used to put my father’s odd manner down to an almost pathological shyness. Even normal interactions, which the rest of us take for granted, are difficult.

There is also a possible link between Asperger’s and depression. According to the Autism Research Institute, researchers believe that Asperger’s syndrome is, ‘probably hereditary because many families report having an “odd” relative or two. In addition, depression and bipolar disorder are often reported in those with Asperger’s syndrome as well as in family members.’

The other, and most difficult characteristic of Asperger’s syndrome is the distinct absence of what we call normal emotions or attitudes. Among its described behaviours are,

While I always felt valued for my ability and loved in every practical way, I never felt in any way understood by my father. And I never felt that I understood him and, to extrapolate from there I never felt that I understood men or male behaviour. This is what, according to every piece of research, little girls use their fathers for; as a sort of test case.

My brothers weren’t much help either in that they both disappeared to school when I was very young. Perhaps it’s no wonder that I didn’t understand relationships either, or how to have them, as two failed marriages bear testimony. I am still astonished when men behave kindly towards me, in an emotional rather than a practical sense, and find it difficult to reveal any emotional fears or weaknesses, not out of any fear of ridicule but because I always feel that it will be met with either blank incomprehension or indifference. I have no such difficulties with my female friends.

That is my father’s legacy to me. Or, rather, the legacy of the condition from which he suffers. I’m sure, too, that it is the legacy of every child growing up with an Asperger’s parent although there has been very little documented or written about this. Modern research seems almost exclusively concerned with theories about dealing with an Asperger’s child but as the research around the condition is still, in every sense, in its infancy, this is perhaps not surprising.

I love my father, very much. He is a kind man, supremely well intentioned in every respect. His nature is, in every way, good. But I would despair, sometimes, of his behaviour. And so I would watch him with a mixture of love and hopelessness, wanting him to be in charge, to take control or to show some empathy and understanding. I also, in my mother’s footsteps, felt blind irritation. Why could he not behave like normal men?

This, of course, was at its worst when I was a teenager, wanting some lead or direction and wanting, more importantly, some emotional support and understanding. There is not, in my father, an inability to love. On the contrary. There is, instead, an inability to empathise. That might seem like a small distinction but in my emotional terrain, it is huge. I am aware of a constant sense of frustration, a nagging undertow of feeling perpetually misunderstood and the belief that my deeper and most important feelings will always be rejected or ignored. As my mother has a similar emotional blindness to my father, through her own undiagnosed depression, this was doubly enforced.

In a wider context, a child who feels ignored or misunderstood turns that message against themselves. It becomes,
I have no right to feel the way that I do
. And an analyst will, inevitably, take that to yet another level. A child whose deeper feelings are constantly minimised, challenged or simply ignored, ends up believing,
I have no right to be the way that I am. I reject myself
.

Depression, some thinkers believe, is a rejection of the self.

John Bowlby, psychotherapist and the originator of attachment theory, puts it this way, ‘Whether a child or adult is in a state of insecurity, anxiety or distress is determined in large part by the accessibility or responsiveness of his principal attachment figure.’

This responsiveness or what, these days, we might call unconditional positive regard is the quality that children actively need in order to flourish. Certainly, it’s the quality that lays the blueprint for an emotionally healthy adult. A lack of it or a skewed weakness is known as attachment disorder and all sorts of emotional conditions from depression to addiction are ascribed to its presence.

I can look at my parents’ responses, today, and track their ghostly echoes back to my childhood. Their responses to me as an adult have changed very little from their responses to me as a child, which in many ways is how they still, inevitably, regard me. That’s why our own parents’ behaviour can trigger responses in us, as adults, that seem, in adult terms, to be wildly inappropriate. They are inculcated, hardwired, if you like, into our personal belief systems. They become the scripts according to which we lead our lives. And they are very difficult, without conscious effort, to change, which is where the hard work of therapy comes in.

My father, years after the event, remains baffled by Jonathan’s and my decision to end our marriage. At the time, he was plainly disbelieving. Our continuing friendship confused him more, not less. When I said that we separated because we were very unhappy, he said, ‘What does unhappiness have to do with it?’

He was not being provocative. It is, for him, a perfectly logical question. While he understands the more obvious emotions such as grief or happiness, he does not get the spaces in between, the delicate nuances of unhappiness or happiness, the body language and unspoken behaviour that make up at least eighty per cent of communication. Emotions such as unhappiness, isolation, lack of intimacy, growing apart; all these may as well be a foreign language.

Before I knew that my dad had Asperger’s, I used to think that he simply didn’t care. I grew used to it, eventually, by ceasing to hope that he would ever engage with me emotionally, but there is in that very hopelessness a huge well of loneliness. It was not that I thought that he did not love me because he showed me that he did, in all sorts of practical ways. It was simply that I knew that he did not know me, and furthermore did not appear to want to. He took no interest in me that was not, at its heart, purely pragmatic; knew nothing of my hopes or dreams, my fears or difficulties. Such conversations as we had were brief, emotionless exchanges; we dealt in facts not feelings.

He is apt to have an impact, to more humorous effect, on other people too. All my life, my father has behaved in quite astonishingly tactless ways, at least according to normal social conventions. If a guest at a dinner party at his house turns down a pudding on the grounds that they have put on weight recently, he will simply agree with them.

‘I’ve got so fat,’ they cry, in mock despair.

‘Yes, you have,’ he says, eyeing the expanse of their stomach.

He takes them at their word and is perplexed by the nuances of language and behaviour that dictate that he should disagree with them when what they say is so self-evidently true.

But, just as most social behaviour is learned, so the person with Asperger’s will gradually learn to deal with the puzzling antics of human beings. This, certainly, is the case with Dad. He has mellowed and become easier as he has aged, but he has had eighty years to become familiar with our ways. I say ‘our’ not in a pejorative way but because it is, I suspect, like arriving on earth and only speaking Martian.

Soon after I became ill, a therapist asked me what my relationship was like with my father. I found I could not answer her. I could say, ‘I love him and he loves me,’ but more than that was impossible. Before I was ill, I had never sat down alone with my father and talked to him about anything of importance. And when I say, never, I don’t mean it as a dramatic exaggeration. I mean, never, not once. So I called my father and asked him to come and visit me, I said that I needed to talk to him because I did not know who he was. I was crying.

There was a long silence. I could almost hear his mind attempting to compute this strange and, in our family, positively bizarre request. Eventually he said, ‘I am your father and I love you.’

Which is, as I said, what I had always known. The only thing about him I had always known. There is also, in that statement, all the beautiful logic and simplicity of the Aspergic mind.

So he came to lunch with me, by himself (in itself an extraordinary event), as he was to do for many weeks afterwards. I was too ill to leave my flat by then so Dad made the journey to London by train. I would watch him walking slowly up the road to my flat, wearing his flat tweed cap and clutching (always) a bunch of flowers. The sight of him made me cry. He looked so near, so dear and familiar and yet I knew from long experience just how far away he actually was.

Over those lunches, I tried to get to know him by asking him a series of questions.

First, I asked him how he would describe himself.

This is what he said.

‘I am a man who has no imagination.’

He did not mean that he has no creative imagination, although he hasn’t. He meant that he lacks the ability to imagine how other people might feel and without imagination, there can be no empathy. If you cannot imagine another person’s pain, you are unlikely to feel any sympathy for it.

He said, ‘I don’t understand what it is that people talk about. I have never, for example, understood jokes. When somebody tells a joke, I watch everybody really carefully. And when they laugh, I laugh too.’

This does not mean that he does not have a sense of humour. He does, but it is always formed around a play on words—which is a particular characteristic of Asperger’s. Jokes, as he says, are lost on him. So are abstract concepts such as despair. I had never told my parents that during my most severe period of depression, I tried to kill myself. I wrote about it, in a newspaper, instead.

Here are the opening lines of that newspaper article, published in the
Daily Telegraph
.

It went on in a similarly candid (some might say brutal) vein but, after he read the article, the only thing my father said was that he thought it was a fine piece of writing, and that he was pleased to see that I was getting work again. He did not ask me how I had felt about trying to kill myself, about the illness or even about the ways in which I was coping. He said nothing at all about the actual subject in hand.

Some people might think that odd. I simply think it is my dad. Since my illness and the time we spent together, we have become closer. He telephones me without being prompted. We see each other often. We do the crossword together. I don’t confide in him because to do so would only frustrate me and revive the terrible certainty I have felt since I was a child that my dad is simply a mirage; the closer you get to him, the further he recedes.

My father was not a normal father if normal means leading his children confidently, emotionally as well as practically, into and through the ways of the world. Put that together with my mother’s inclination to depression and it has meant, I think, that my brothers and I each stumbled into the world in our own ways. We are travellers with no sure guides; a pattern only heightened by our peripatetic and disrupted childhood growing up in so many different countries.

I think, though, that my parents, like most parents, did the best that they could, so in looking back at our relationship, I don’t mean to imply blame. Blame is the least helpful and most destructive of all the emotions. It solves nothing. What is needed is acceptance and understanding. If I am to be free of depression, I need to be aware of the unpleasant truths that took me there in the first place. If I can understand the origins of my responses and the ways in which they are flawed or detrimental to my happiness, I might stand a better chance of changing them. The truth, as the saying goes, will set you free.