Conversations with Carolyn Spring: Recent Episodes
Carolyn Spring
Carolyn Spring is a writer and speaker in the field of trauma recovery and mental health. Her podcast is an encouraging, inspirational and yet candid look at some of the key issues, for both survivors and helping professionals, in reversing adversity. Check out her website at www.carolynspring.com
We're often used to the idea that it's hard to tolerate distressing emotions. But for many of us as trauma survivors, we can be easily triggered by positive emotions too. Good feelings can be strange, novel and frightening. When we've experienced grooming, they can appear to be the prelude to abuse. And they can feel just plain wrong! In this podcast I look at why we can find positive emotions so difficult, and what we can do about it.
Therapy can be, and often is, transformational. But why? I benefitted greatly from the empathy and attunement offered by my therapist, but over time I also had to adjust my expectations about how change would occur in me. I had to learn to consider what's really going on when we feel misattuned-to as well. I needed validation and acceptance, but I also needed to be challenged. Here's the story of how that played out in one particular therapy session, and the question that at first offended, and then transformed me.
Trust is so key for smooth human relationships, but it's also invariably damaged after we have suffered trauma, especially abuse. So how do we learn to build it again? In this episode I talk about how there aren't 'three top tips', but how it's a meticulous process of firstly learning to trust ourselves, to tune into our internal radar, and then to bring our front brain online to assess the data we're presented with – especially when we say 'no' to people.
In this second and final part, I look at the cognitive mindsets and practical approaches I've employed to keep going even when everything in me wants to give up: because 'keeping on keeping on' matters to me, not least because by doing so, things do invariably improve.
There's often nothing we can do to prevent challenging times happening – they're part of life. But when they hit, how do we keep going? In this episode (part 1 of 2), I look at the painfulness of overwhelm of trauma, the heart-cry of which is often 'There's nobody there' and the need for us, in learnable ways, to develop self-compassion.
Trauma teaches us that we are helpless to act in the face of danger. But recovery from trauma involves learning to act, learning to take steps, learning to start to find and create the solutions. In this podcast, I talk about the symptoms of trauma and how they drive us towards a solution.
Trauma isn’t something we’re supposed to get over easily. It’s supposed to impact us. It’s supposed to change us. That’s part of why it’s so hard to shift. The problem isn’t with us. In this podcast, I talk about the impacts of trauma and how it isn’t something that we can get over easily.
Sometimes life doesn’t go to plan. In this episode, I discuss the circumstances that led me back into therapy, the return of dissociative parts of the personality, and how I'm rising again after being knocked (and literally falling) down.
Unkindness is rife in our society. Extreme unkindness is, in simplistic terms, called abuse. To heal from abuse, we need an abundance of kindness. But our survival-based back brain preferentially focuses on unkindness, on danger and threat. In this podcast I talk about how to retrain our front brains to focus on and notice the many kindnesses that are in fact all around us.
Recovery from trauma is a journey, an orientation, a direction, not a specific location. Just head north - where you're at is less important than which direction you're headed in. In this podcast, I discuss why we can feel that recovery is impossible, how recovery perhaps doesn't look as we imagine it to, and how society needs to help with 'public transport' to help us on our way.
Recovering from trauma takes time. In this podcast, I look at how we often missed out on developmental stages during childhood, and how we have to learn what we were not in a position to learn as children - not least our ability to regulate our emotions, which isn’t a sign of character deficiency, but simply the loss of opportunity.
When we have suffered trauma and pain, our brains find it hard to experience joy. But we need to put ourselves in the right place to find joy, and we need to cultivate it. In this podcast I talk about a life-transforming trip from 2012 and how the big breakthroughs are built on the backs of daily small breakthroughs.
Reindeer and suncream?! Life doesn’t always appear as we expect it to. In this podcast, I talk about how trauma anticipates danger and badness, and how to develop the imagination for life to be different.
In this podcast, I talk about the crippling isolation of shame, and how to move beyond it. I talk about how shame is a survival strategy which tries to keep us from being hurt. But in moving towards ‘Unshame’ – the title of my new book – we need to find out who we really are and live from that place of deep self-compassion.
My new book ‘Unshame: healing trauma-based shame through psychotherapy’ is available:
- on Kindle at: amzn.to/2Wnj6Fu
- as a paperback at: carolynspring.com/unshame-book.
The ‘Working with Shame’ online training course is available to purchase and with more information at: www.carolynspring.com/shame-course
The Myers-Briggs assessment tool is available at: 16personalities.com
The VIA Strengths assessment tool is available at: www.viacharacter.org
Transcript Hi there! I’m Carolyn Spring and welcome to my podcast where I talk about all things trauma. I dig into the nuts and bolts of trauma, how we can recover, what blocks us, and all things neuroscience-y – what actually goes on in the body and brain during and after trauma, especially from the perspective of evolutionary neurobiology. This podcast is for anyone who’s experienced trauma, or knows someone who has, which is pretty much everyone. For more podcasts, blogposts, books and training check out my website at carolynspring.com.
Welcome to this episode – ‘Shame, unshame and who you really are’.
So it’s been a really busy few months, mainly focused around launching a new course ‘Working with Shame’ and also, connected to that, my new book ‘Unshame: healing trauma-based shame through psychotherapy‘. So really I’ve spent the last six months immersed in the shame research, and immersed in my own process of figuring out what shame is, how it’s affected me, its links with trauma, and how we can move out of the crippling isolation of shame: How can we overcome the self-hatred and self-loathing which really gets in the way of us doing anything, enjoying anything, being anything.
Probably my main insight, at least for myself, is that shame isn’t all bad. It’s something that we think of as debilitating and ugly and just destructive, and it is those things, but it’s those things for a reason. Really, shame is just trying to protect us and keep us safe. It’s beating us up for a reason. It lies to us to try to keep us from being hurt.
So two examples then of how shame keeps us safe. Firstly, when we’re being abused, by someone more powerful than us, most of the time it’s not safe to retaliate. It’s not safe to fight back. If we’re a child being abused by an adult, then if we complain about that, if we tell anyone, if we physically resist, then we might be hurt more. And so it’s adaptive – it’s smart – to lie still, to go into the freeze response, which is the shame response, and to just take it. Because then at least it might be over and done with more quickly, and we m
Is recovery from trauma and abuse – resulting in dissociation and even a dissociative disorder – possible? That’s the subject of this podcast where I talk about the vulnerability of hoping for good things, the difference between correlation and causation, and the difference between hoping for and planning for.
Transcript Hi there! I’m Carolyn Spring and welcome to my podcast where I talk about all things trauma. I dig into the nuts and bolts of trauma, how we can recover, what blocks us, and all things neuroscience-y – what actually goes on in the body and brain during and after trauma, especially from the perspective of evolutionary neurobiology. This podcast is for anyone who’s experienced trauma, or knows someone who has, which is pretty much everyone. For more podcasts, blogposts, books and training check out my website at carolynspring.com.
Welcome to this episode – ‘Can we heal?’
So over the years I’ve received hundreds if not thousands of emails from survivors of trauma and a lot of them are, understandably, looking for help. It’s always struck me that people don’t know, firstly, if they can recover from trauma, and secondly, if that is possible, they don’t know how. Or people say, ‘Can I heal?’ They want to know – and they’re desperate – they want to know if recovery is really possible for them.
And what I find interesting is that it’s put out there often in these very vague, nebulous terms: ‘Can I recover? Can I heal?’ What does that mean? What does that look like? And how can I answer that question? How can I peer into the future of this complete stranger and discern whether their future will be any better than their past? I don’t know anything about them, so of course, I can’t. And whether someone will recover or not depends on a lot of variables. It’s not a one-size-fits-all kind of thing. So I always think, ‘What is this person, right here, right now, what are they really asking me?’
And sometimes I think they’re looking for permission to recover. Like deep down they know it must be possible, but they don’t know if they’re allowed. Like, they’re thinking, ‘Is this my lot in life?’, ‘Is this what I deserve?’, ‘Is this as good as it gets?’ And, of course, they deserve better than the sheer misery and hell that is life after trauma. Of course they do! But sometimes it’s like they need to hear that from someone else. They need permission to be allowed to believe that things can get better. They need to know that it’s okay to hope, without things automatically getting worse just because they’re hoping.
And what I mean by this is that, very often, when you’ve been abused, you’ve hoped for good things. You’ve hoped for the abuse to stop. You’ve hoped that tonight it won’t happen. You’ve hoped that mummy will love you. You’ve hoped that you won’t get into trouble. And then that hasn’t happened. And so it’s hard to keep a hold of hope when it’s continually being dashed. You live off disappointment. So it’s a natural thing, when that happens a lot, it’s a natural thing for us to protect ourselves from the hurt and the emotional turmoil of that, by stopping hoping. We close down, we resign ourselves to bad stuff.
And so when someone asks me, ‘Can I heal?’ sometimes they’re not asking, ‘Is it technically possible?’ because they’ve often read what I’ve written and know that I’ll say yes, it is possible – and actually, in my writing, I try to show how as well. It’s not just some nebulous
Join me as I talk about how important the relationship between therapist and client is, and what factors go into making a good one.
Transcript Hi there! I’m Carolyn Spring and welcome to my podcast where I talk about all things trauma. I dig into the nuts and bolts of trauma, how we can recover, what blocks us, and all things neuroscience-y – what actually goes on in the body and brain during and after trauma, especially from the perspective of evolutionary neurobiology. This podcast is for anyone who’s experienced trauma, or knows someone who has, which is pretty much everyone. For more podcasts, blogposts, books and training check out my website at carolynspring.com.
Welcome to this episode – ‘The Therapeutic Relationship’
Today I’m going to talk about the importance of the therapeutic relationship – it’s so crucial and yet a lot of people, especially outside the therapy world, don’t really understand why it’s so powerful. And indeed it’s a strange thing, isn’t it? Why does sitting with someone for an hour or so every week, why does that have the ability to completely change your life. It doesn’t seem enough, does it? And it comes with a number of preconceptions. Before I started therapy, I had no idea what it was all about either. I guess I thought that it was a bit of a supportive chat, a bit motivational, a bit of ‘ra ra’ and maybe pointing out where you’re going wrong, giving you a bit of advice, and then, after a while, you would just be ‘fixed’. To be honest, a drugs cure seemed much more attractive. Because while I thought that I was mentally ill, because I thought that I would need a drug to fix me. Because after all, that’s our paradigm from physical health – if you’ve got bronchitis, you might need an antibiotic. If you’ve got cancer, you might need chemotherapy. So, I didn’t really understand how I could stop being ‘mentally ill’ without drugs.
But then I began to reframe it as trauma, not mental illness, but even so the whole therapy thing still didn’t make a lot of sense to me. I suppose I thought that if I just talked about what happened to me, that I’d feel better – I guess I had absorbed some Freudian concepts about repression, and so what I needed, I thought, was a catharsis, I wouldn’t have put it in those terms though. But I thought I just needed the abuse to stop being a secret. I certainly didn’t understand about processing and metabolising traumatic material or learning to feel safe in your body again (what’s technically called neuroception). I didn’t understand that it would be about retraining the brain, or anything like that. And I didn’t see that the therapeutic relationship would be central to it all.
Now, there’s a lot of talk around at the moment about therapy being delivered by AI, by artificial intelligence, and I’m often asked what I think about that. Now, I do think there are some aspects of the recovery journey that can be delivered electronically if you like – for example, the psychoeducational aspects. Because there are a lot of skills that we just need explaining to us, like learning a language. But even then, it’s much more real when that comes from another human being, when it’s rooted in real life, rather than being disembodied. I think left brain stuff of facts and information is so much more ‘learnable’ when it’s delivered in the context of the right brain relationship. So, delivering psychoeducation entirely by computer has its limits. And the really fundamental work of recovering from trauma comes, I believe, from this transformative relationship with another human being.
I think the simplest way of understanding it is that we have experienced a wound – what we might call relational trauma. It’s been perpetrated or caused by another human being. And so we need to have a reparative experience, an opposite experience, where instead of hurt and har
Join me as I talk about how important I found it to discover who I am as an individual, rather than as someone trying to simply ‘fit in’.
Transcript Hi there! I’m Carolyn Spring and welcome to my podcast where I talk about all things trauma. I dig into the nuts and bolts of trauma, how we can recover, what blocks us, and all things neuroscience-y – what actually goes on in the body and brain during and after trauma, especially from the perspective of evolutionary neurobiology. This podcast is for anyone who’s experienced trauma, or knows someone who has, which is pretty much everyone. For more podcasts, blogposts, books and training check out my website at carolynspring.com.
Welcome to this episode – ‘Learning to enjoy life’
So, I want to talk in this podcast about learning to enjoy life, which really is diametrically opposite to the state of trauma we often experience. One of the best, yet disarmingly simple questions, I’ve ever been asked was shortly after my breakdown in 2005. This person was being friendly, trying to get to know me, and they said to me, ‘So what do you do when you’re not working? What do you like to do in your spare time?’ And their question completely freaked me out. Because I didn’t have a clue what to say. I didn’t do anything when I wasn’t working. I had no hobbies, no interests, no life. I had never made space in my life for it. I had never had that level of self-care. And really it took me a number of years to see hobbies and interests as a part of self-care. It’s basically asking the question of who we are when we’re not striving, or doing, or achieving, or giving, or learning, or loving. When we get stripped back, when we have space just to be us, who are we?
So how would I answer that question now? Who am I now? And actually, I’m a very different person, with a different answer to when I was first asked that! Over the intervening years I’ve made it a priority to develop a sense of who I am and who I want to be. I began to give myself time and space to be who I am. So I started small. I asked the question: what did I like doing when I was a kid? Because it seemed to me that as children we naturally gravitate to the things that interest us, the things we want to do. The world is more set up for us like that. As adults, it’s harder, because there aren’t after-school clubs and no-one is expecting us to find out what we like. We get pants and socks and drills and smellies for our birthdays, not things related to ‘play’.
So as a child, I was always outside, whenever I could be. And I was always playing football. Or reading about football. Or watching football. Or talking football. It was my all-consuming passion. Back then, in the seventies, it was quite unusual, even ‘weird’, for a girl to be sooo interested in football. In fact, I didn’t know any other girls who were even vaguely interested in football. But for me, it was my overriding passion. I supported Manchester United and my hero was Bryan Robson. Pretty much my entire childhood fantasy life revolved around United and Captain Marvel, which was Bryan Robson’s nickname. And every opportunity I had, I would be playing football with my mates, or failing that, I’d just play on my own. I loved other sports too, but nothing came close to my passion for football.
I then got to play properly at University. It was the first opportunity I’d ever had to play in a team. It just didn’t exist in school or anywhere else. So day one of term one of year one at College, I sought out the women’s football team and joined. And I worked my way up and was playing in the end for the University, for the Blues’ team.
I stopped playing though when I injured my back just before I left University. My back never healed properly and I never played again, which was really sad. I still loved football but I was too poo
Join me as I talk about the most important things to focus on for survivors at the start of their journey of recovery.
Transcript Hi there! I’m Carolyn Spring and welcome to my podcast where I talk about all things trauma. I dig into the nuts and bolts of trauma, how we can recover, what blocks us, and all things neuroscience-y – what actually goes on in the body and brain during and after trauma, especially from the perspective of evolutionary neurobiology. This podcast is for anyone who’s experienced trauma, or knows someone who has, which is pretty much everyone. For more podcasts, blogposts, books and training check out my website at carolynspring.com.
Welcome to this episode: ‘Trauma is feeling unsafe’.
I’m often asked by survivors who are just at the beginning of their recovery journey what the most important things to focus on are. And although the practical details of that are going to be different for each individual, depending on their circumstances, I think there are some overarching principles which I’ve found to be really important.
The first is to have hope for recovery. Our beliefs influence our behaviours massively. If we don’t really think we can recover, if we don’t think life can be better, if we don’t think we can learn to manage and eventually overcome our symptoms, then we’re not going to put the effort into doing the things that will bring that about.
An example, like I’ve used before, is that of playing the piano. When I was a child, I was repeatedly told that I wasn’t musical. My sister, on the other hand, was. She had recorder lessons and clarinet lessons. I was told that I didn’t have a musical bone in my body. I didn’t have any music lessons, and at school it was the one subject that I didn’t put any effort into. Because, after all, what was the point? I wasn’t musical, so it would have been wasted effort. I thought I wasn’t any good at music, so I didn’t bother trying. But of course now I see that as part of what Carol Dweck calls the fixed mindset, and it’s massively influential. If we don’t believe we can do something, we won’t put the effort into developing the skills that mean that we learn to do it.
And I think the same is true for recovery. If we don’t believe we can recover, we won’t persevere in finding ways to manage our emotions, and control our switching, and resolve the trauma. Because what’s the point? We can’t do it. And we prove to ourselves that we can’t do it by our lack of control, our lack of skill to do it. That’s like me as a child saying, ‘Obviously I’m not musical, because look – I can’t play a musical instrument.’ But if I’d had music lessons things might have been very different …
So, if you’re on this recovery journey, it’s vital that you believe that you can recover. Don’t judge your potential for musicality by your inability to play the piano right now. If you have lessons, if you practice, if you keep working at it, you will learn to play the piano. Now we often think that there are some people who are just more naturally gifted than others at things like music, and we translate that across to recovery. But actually the research isn’t all that clear on innate ability. It’s an assumption that we have. But if you read the work of people like Anders Ericsson and Carol Dweckand Angela Duckworth, you’ll find that actually it’s the people who put the effort in who get the results – not natural geniuses.
And anyway, I think it’s a bit of a moot point. Because we’re not talking about becoming a Mozart. We’re talking about b
Recovery from trauma isn’t about ‘getting over’ something upsetting. It often requires building skills for managing emotions. In this podcast, I explain the process.
Transcript Hi there! I’m Carolyn Spring and welcome to my podcast where I talk about all things trauma. I dig into the nuts and bolts of trauma, how we can recover, what blocks us, and all things neuroscience-y – what actually goes on in the body and brain during and after trauma, especially from the perspective of evolutionary neurobiology. This podcast is for anyone who’s experienced trauma, or knows someone who has, which is pretty much everyone. For more podcasts, blogposts, books and training check out my website at carolynspring.com.
Welcome to this podcast – ‘Recovery is building skills’
I’m often asked how life is different for me now compared to when things were at their worst, which was probably around 2007-2008. At that point I’d been in therapy a couple of years and everything was kicking off. I was in the middle of the police investigation into my abusers. And I was ‘florid DID’ – lots of parts taking over, lots of things like dissociative fugues, losing time, uncontrolled switching, flashbacks, overdoses: just terrible.
Just to explain: ‘dissociative fugue’ refers to a specific condition in the DSM-5, but I’m using it here in the context of my behaviour at that time rather than a specific psychiatric diagnosis. So it’s often where you’ve been triggered in some way – pushed outside your ‘window of tolerance’ – and you take flight. You go off somewhere but you have very little conscious awareness of what you’re doing or where you’re going. Eventually – hopefully! – you’ll ‘come’ to and you might be miles from home. You’ve basically switched to another part and you’ve got amnesia for that, and for some reason – and usually there’s a very good reason – for some reason, this part has taken you somewhere else.
Because at that time, I was trying to work through the trauma of two childhood pregnancies that I had as a result of rape. I’d held them out of mind – dissociated from them – because they was just too awful to bear. I couldn’t come to terms with them. The emotional pain was overwhelming. So instead, I acted out in my behavior. I acted out what I couldn’t speak out in words. And I kept ‘fugue-ing’. I kept going off, in another part of my personality, to the place where the births had taken place, trying to find the babies. Those parts of me, stuck in trauma-time, couldn’t see that over 20 years had passed. They were just trying to find the babies. They were trying to piece it all together, to change the ending – I’m not sure what they were trying to do, but they were definitely stuck in a time-warp.
So I’d just ‘come round’ and I’d be somewhere else. I’d be sat in a car in the villages where it happened. Hours would have passed. There’d be a dozen missed calls on my phone from people trying to find me. I’d have a very vague sense of stuff happening, but it’s like I couldn’t separate out reality from dream from memory. I just felt overwhelmingly distressed and upset. And it was always really hard to get my front brain back online, to be able to think clearly, to calm down, to make decisions. Sometimes I’d get stuck, half aware that I was miles from home, and then just be frozen and stuck and unable to move or do anything about it, switching in and out and feeling really helpless. And I think as well part of me wanted to be rescued. Part of me desperately wanted someone to come and make it all alright for me.
This went on for a while, and I started to deal with it, started to stop it happening, fundamentally, I think, by paying attention to what was going on in me – what was going on in my parts. Because at that time I wasn’t willing to listen to my parts. I didn’t want to know what they were thinking or feelin
Is recovery possible? I’d say it is … based not just on my own personal experience, but on the fact that it’s how our bodies and brains are designed by default. Often when people don’t recover, it’s a problem with the therapy or the ‘treatment’, rather than a problem with a person. In this thought-provoking podcast, I bring hope for healing.
Transcript Hi there! I’m Carolyn Spring and welcome to my podcast where I talk about all things trauma. I dig into the nuts and bolts of trauma, how we can recover, what blocks us, and all things neuroscience-y – what actually goes on in the body and brain during and after trauma, especially from the perspective of evolutionary neurobiology. This podcast is for anyone who’s experienced trauma, or knows someone who has, which is pretty much everyone. For more podcasts, blogposts, books and training check out my website at carolynspring.com.
Welcome to this episode – ‘Recovery is possible’.
So if you’ve read anything I’ve written you’ll have clocked on pretty quickly to the fact that I’m very strong on the fact that people can recover from trauma – from even the most appalling suffering. Firstly, because I’ve seen that change in my life. It’s been unbelievable – complete transformation. I’m not sorted, but I am transformed. And I know that I’m not anything special, the therapy I received wasn’t anything special, and so if I can do it, anybody can. And secondly, because I think our default as human beings is to heal. It’s this amazing miracle that we’re alive in the first place – it’s against all odds. And then if you look at the level of the cell, at all the incredibly complex things that go on every single second of every single day to keep us alive and functioning, it’s remarkable. There’s so much healing going on in our cells all the time – whole systems and procedures for clearing out the gunk, repairing damage, renewing our bodies. So when we talk about recovery from trauma, healing from it, we’re not talking about a concept that is alien to nature. In fact, it’s endemic to it. If we didn’t have a healing thing going on by default, we’d all be dead. So that gives me a lot of hope.
Of course, though, I recognise that there are a lot of people who have been traumatised who don’t ever achieve a significant level of recovery. And I wouldn’t want to make recovery sound easy. It’s an enormous task, especially when we’re talking about the levels and types of trauma that have led to a dissociative disorder. But just because something is difficult doesn’t mean it’s impossible.
I think what we’ve been finding over the last twenty years or so is that the way we’ve approached healing trauma hasn’t been helpful. We’ve basically had one of two models: firstly, a medication approach, which does nothing to heal the trauma, as it just suppresses the symptoms; and secondly, talking therapies. And we’re really only at the beginning of understanding how to use talking therapies to resolve trauma. A lot of the way we’ve approached it to date hasn’t been hugely effective and in some cases it has made things worse.
We’ve tended to think, based on Freud, that we need to talk about what happened to us and we need a big catharsis of emotion. We’ve taken on board the concepts of suppression and repression and we’ve thought that the problem is that we haven’t felt our feelings, and we haven’t talked about our trauma. And that’s partly right. But to do that is also like pouring petrol on a fire when it comes to trauma. And so people haven’t made progress and in many cases they’ve become worse.
Now that doesn’t mean that people can’t recover. It just means that we haven’t got our approach right. And I think that’s an important distinction to make, between the treatment and the person. If we think that this person cannot recover, then we’re in trouble. But if we think, no this approach isn’t very
In this episode I talk about suicide … my own experience of numerous suicide attempts, the hopelessness and sense of trappedness, and how I’ve moved towards recovery.
Transcript Hi there! I’m Carolyn Spring and welcome to my podcast where I talk about all things trauma. I dig into the nuts and bolts of trauma, how we can recover, what blocks us, and all things neuroscience-y – what actually goes on in the body and brain during and after trauma, especially from the perspective of evolutionary neurobiology. This podcast is for anyone who’s experienced trauma, or knows someone who has, which is pretty much everyone. For more podcasts, blogposts, books and training check out my website at carolynspring.com.
Welcome to episode 1 – simply titled ‘Suicide’. In this first episode, I’m going to be talking about suicide because that’s what trauma has driven me towards and it’s the biggest, the most profound impact that trauma can have. So why is this and what can we do about it?
My caveat to start with though is that in reality I don’t have any experience at all of suicide itself. Because I’m still alive. And by saying that, I’m not joking or being facetious. I’m saying that I think it’s important that we recognise that what we know about suicide is by its very nature limited. And that there may well be a difference between people who go on to kill themselves, and those who engage in suicidal feelings and even actions, but who do not actually end up dead – people like me.
So, although I have a long history of suicidality, and I’ve talked to a lot of people and I’ve done tonnes of reading and research, it may be that people who end up killing themselves are in some way qualitatively different from people like me. So, in everything I train on and everything I say, that’s my caveat.
What I do have though, is a lot of experience of suicidal feelings. I distinctly remember the first time I was hit by suicidality, even though it was so long ago. It was a Friday afternoon, possibly October or November, and I was, I think, about 15 years old. It was a couple of months before I went down with chronic fatigue syndrome or ME as it’s also known. As a teenager, I had been super-sporty, very athletic, being involved in absolutely every sport I could, running on a morning, that type of thing – and in the January I went to hockey practice after school as usual, as I did on a Monday. And I came home and fell asleep on the settee before dinner. And I didn’t really wake up. Not that day and not really for the next 9 months. I was completely bed-bound, absolutely exhausted, and in a lot of pain. I could only get around in a wheelchair because I was so exhausted. I was like that for about 3 years, all through my GCSE year and my A-levels.
Anyway, it was a couple of months before that happened that there was this day which was in many respects a precursor to that … it was a Friday afternoon and I was at school in an English class. For some reason I remember the weather – it was threatening rain clouds but not yet any rain. And I remember that because that seemed to mirror my mood. I remember the class because we had been turfed out of the normal English class and we were in the physics laboratory for some reason. It’s strange the details you remember. And it was a lesson with my favourite teacher, Miss Barr. But it was on my least favourite aspect of English, which was poetry.
And this dark cloud just seemed to be enveloping me and I felt like I’d fallen down, deep, deep down within myself. I felt utterly bereft and hopeless and empty and despairing. And I didn’t engage in that English lesson at all – and that was very unusual for me, because I was a proper geek, I was a model student – but all I could think about in that lesson was how I wanted to die. It’s like I got wrapped up in those thou
