[kiwigirl]

Hi Benjamin,

I'm about half way through your book which I am really enjoying. To cut a long story short, about 20 months ago I had a nervous breakdown in NZ where I was living at the time. Previous to this, I had suffered with intermittent depression, which seemed to get better for a while and then get worse. I was taking your standard antidepressant for this and it seemed to keep the worst of it at bay. Previous to my nervous breakdown, I had also has recurring bouts of laybyrinthitis over a four year period where I was unable to stand up without feeling dizzy or sick - and where it was a battle to keep any food down. At first the ENT specialist diagnosed it as a problem with my ears - but I was sent from doctor to doctor over the next four years after the insertion of four different sets of grommets failed to solve the problem.

Shortly after my nervous breakdown (which was unexpected) it kind of just hit me one day - couldn't stop crying couldn't function was terrified for no known reason - I got sick again and was finally spent to a specialist who diagnosed the problem as being my sinus passages. I had an operation last April and have been clear ever since.

However, the first year after my nervous breakdown was a nightmare - it was all I could do to get through a day - I was on a lot of medication (some of which I think caused more harm than good) - I couldn't stop shaking and I was terrified - mostly of 'nothingness.'

I continued to work in quite a high powered job at a university but spent most of my days in isolation in my quiet office. The silence drove me nuts and I felt detached and cut off from the real world.

In essence, I was falling apart (one failed suicide attempt) though God knows how I managed to survive that! My husband was very supportive through all of this and one thing seemed to come out with my psychiatrist at the time - issues I had with my mother and her treatment of me whilst I was growing up. I am the first-born and my parents were absolutely terrified of me doing anything 'naughty' so when I did - I was punished (not physically) but quite badly. Being grounded for six months for talking back to my parents, being slapped by my mother and called a slut because she didn't like the black stockings I was wearing to a school ball etc.

Anyway - my mother and I finally sat down and talked about it all - she accepted her mistakes and we cleared the air - so I feel like I have dealth with that now. We are a lot closer.

I moved back to the UK a year ago and I have been getting better all the time - the depression has lifted but my battle has mainly been with anxiety. Up until about six weeks ago - it totally froze me at least once per day. Although mostly recovered from the breakdown and now off a lot of the medication - I still don't feel very happy - which of course is why I am reading your book.

Earlier this year I had an affair with a guy who I was working with and during that period I was ecstatically happy as he showered me with compliments and put me on a pedestal. He was married with children an was talking about leaving his wife - but he changed his mind at the last minute. At the time, my husband was busy with everything in his life and I felt like I was the last priority. I was lonely and fed up with being miserable which is why I think I had the affair.

Anway - my husband and I have resolved things and are working hard at creating a stronger marriage.

Finally - one other thing - I have had two terminations - one when I was 18 and one when I was24. My mother is convinced that I did not deal with this properly and that is why I am still unhappy.

Can you help? Or at least point me in the right direction? I'm having trouble understanding what situations my unconscious is leading me into and why?

Thanks

kiwigirl

[Benjamin Fry]

Firstly, Iím sorry for the slow response. My intention is to prioritise this section, helping people to get the maximum practical use in their own lives from the more general material in my book. Thank you for your feedback and questions.

There seems to be quite a lot here to deal with and I think it is a challenge to pick a path through it that shows a clear link between the past and the present. In many ways that is the challenge that we all face when we are overcome by our emotions for seemingly no reason. Just as an apple falls from a tree for a reason (gravity) so emotions are stimulated for a reason. That reason though is often hidden by the repressive (and safety) mechanism of trauma.

Your childhood sounds very frightening and not very nurturing. Your parents may have meant well but they were paying far too much attention to other peopleís opinions and attitudes and almost none to your essential needs as a baby and a child. Thus your survival was threatened and yet you had nowhere to take this fear to. It just had to get bottled up. This reservoir of fear exploded with a bang in what you describe as your nervous breakdown when you were ìterrified for no known reasonî. Actually you know the reason. You wrote about it here. You just donít feel the connection, like you would if, say, a lion jumped out at you and half a second later you were running for your life. In your case it can be half a lifetime later that the emotion gets released.

Releasing the feelings is a healthy thing. This is what your unconscious pushes you to do. It is really great that your mother was able to respond positively to your concerns about your childhood, but, although this can be hugely supportive, it doesnít mean that the damage done then is instantly healed. You have a lot of feelings to move through before you can recover the authentic, happy you that you were born with. Thatís normal. Itís the stuff of all of our lives. The question is how do we help it to happen?

Thereís another theme in your post about your affair and the terminations. This feels to me like another issue, but Iím not clear about the origin of it. It suggests something askew in your relating to men perhaps and I feel like there is a little bit of a hole in your narrative history where your father might be. You donít mention him directly in the past or the present. Has he been there in either/both? And how would you characterise that relationship? It seems that you have used the relationships with your colleague to bolster your self-esteem, which therefore may have been low in relation to men. You understand how to have a relationship with men since you do so with your husband, but perhaps there is another wilder component to your interactions with men that although it looks like it is the same thing, it fills a different emotional space ñ an older more damaged one.

Terminations can leave terribly deep psychological scars (and can not) which often take years to even emerge, let alone heal (as you may have read in my book). There is a question that perhaps emerges here about what this pattern was trying to stimulate in you psychologically. Can you speculate? Was there any loss in your past that you did not yet deal with fully? It seems to me to be in some way related to the issues that you might have in relationships but Iím not sure how. Was your father not around when he might have been? Did this make your mother extra tense and therefore so keen on controlling you?

To understand where you are going unconsciously, you need to look at two things, but also do so with great objectivity. First you need to see what actually happened. Seeing life as a series of events rather than intentions is hard. For example, you got pregnant twice when you didnít want to. What does that say? If you answer is ìwell itís just an accidentî then you are missing the unconscious story. Secondly, in relation to this or any other real event, think about what feelings these incidents bring up for you. Write down the emotions. Then try to think of the earliest time in your life that you remember feeling these emotions, or even when you think you might have done (some events you might know about but not be able to remember). Then try to expand on these early incidents and connect some feelings directly to them. This reduces the need to use your current life (unconsciously) as an emotional catalyst to reach these feelings (which will always be there waiting to come out).

Let me know what comes to mind in response to this and if finishing the book helped with any of it.

[kiwigirl]

Hi Benjamin,

Thanks for your reply which was interesting.

With regard to my father - I have always had quite a close relationship with him (my mother and father have been married for 35 years) and I guess the reason I don't mention him in my email is because my mother was the dominant force in my life. My mother was always much scarier than my father and I was always my father's 'Little Princess.'

He has always been very understanding about most things but I do remember when I broke down (at about 21) and told my parents of my first termination that his reaction was quite severe. He accused me of ruining my chances of having grandchildren and actually stormed out the house.

I can't really think of any other incidents with my father except for when I was about four years old. He dropped me off to kindergarten in the afternoon and I was crying because I didn't want to let go of him and I didn't want him to go. I remember feeling very scared and upset. I also remember that the kindergarten teacher called me a 'ratbag.'

You suggest there may be something askew in my relationships with men. I had many relationships with men before I married - most of which were quite healthy. I did, however, have a tumultuous four year relationship with a man which left me quite badly hurt and it took me a good year to get over it. He was quite critical of my body which may be where the self-esteem issue and the affair come in?

As for getting pregnant twice - I'm still pretty confused about this one. You ask what feelings are conjured up when I think about my terminations....the things I remember feeling were humiliation, fear, a feeling of being unsafe and being 'bad' or naughty. All I remember thinking at the time was 'right let's get this over with - no-one needs to know - put it in the past and forget about it.'

Trying to relate these feeling to my early years is difficult. The closest I can get at the moment is probably my first day at school (in terms of being scared, feeling unsafe etc) and I think I used to wet my pants quite a bit when I first went to school (which made me feel bad and naughty.)

One prevailing feeling I seem to have been left with after my nervous breakdown is a strong sense of emptiness and a fear of doing things. By this I mean - some days I'm actually scared of going to work for no reason at all - or I cancel social engagements because I feel unsafe.

I am working hard on this and on filling my life with things I enjoy. What I don't want to do is to cover up my problems or blank them out with other stuff. I know no after finishing your book that I must go through to come out the other end. I have also made an appointment to see a psychotherapist in the hope that she may be able to help me peel back the layers one by one.

Does this help?

Thanks Benjamin

Kiwigirl

[Benjamin Fry]

I think that thereís two points to pick up on here. Firstly, the symptoms of your breakdown suggested to me a cause in early childhood of a build up of traumatic fear that was not resolved. We have not come up with a specific reason for this, which is not unusual, but the earliest memory that you suggest may in fact be a clue. Iíd like to suggest the possibility that as a young baby you were left to cry by yourself more than might have been healthy. This was perhaps the fashion at the time and would particularly dovetail with the strict upbringing that you describe by your mother. If so, then the example you give of being distraught about your first day of school might be illustrating how even at that young age, this separation was impacting on you very hard ñ I suspect that it carried with it an echo of earlier (perhaps non-verbal) feelings of separation. After all some kids go into school just fine, others donít. There is some nurture in there with the differences in nature. Perhaps you can investigate since your mother is co-operative? Bottom line is that fear doesnít just appear out of nowhere. The better you can connect with the cause, the more sense your recovery will make to you.

Secondly, I think what you describe about your father is interesting. You seem to have placed onto him the ìgoodî in the parenting dynamic and onto your mother the ìbadî. This may have some grounding in reality, but it is also a classic psychological construction. However, there are some drawbacks to this. In a very subtle way, you may have repressed all of your negative feelings towards your father in order to keep him in the ìgoodî camp. One thought or feeling that seems to be absent is why the hell he didnít protect you better from your mother. Could it be that you unconsciously resented that he didnít be more of a man for you? (Remember that we are trying to look for an unconscious reason for your actions, so it wonít be something that you would immediately consciously agree with). There seems to be a merging of the partnership between you and your father that perhaps should more regularly have been between him and his wife. This is very common and I think that his reaction when you revealed the abortion speaks volumes. He was clearly very upset for himself, not on behalf of his daughter. This suggests to me that he was unconsciously jealous that you had given yourself to another man (very common, and not too weird). Perhaps he too relied on your closeness to get some nurturing in the family? If so, you may well have played on this on a conscious level to win his love, but unconsciously have been angry that he couldnít provide the safe family framework that a fatherís role is to do. This may explain the abortions (certainly once you saw how it upset your father, you did do it again), and it may explain the affair, which perhaps was a way to re-experience that kind of adoration (on the pedestal) that a father will give to his daughter.

These are all just possibilities and ideas and might give you something to toss about in therapy. If any of them really irritate you, unfortunately they are probably right. Thatís usually the sign of our unconscious getting too close to the surface. You are definitely doing all the right things. Engaging with the book, writing here, making a commitment to your feelings and getting the help you need from a therapist show that you are going in the right direction with courage and honesty. Itís not easy peeling back the layers, but it can be both interesting and very rewarding.

If it gets tough to hang onto the feelings, remind yourself of the theoretical connections in the book. Feelings come from something. That something was a reasonable reaction to your circumstances once upon a time. Just because you donít remember it, doesnít make the feelings invalid. I have found that 80% of the battle is giving up my resistance to the feelings. The feelings themselves are actually a piece of cake compared to my resistance and anguish at having feelings that I tell myself are ìwrongî. Understanding the logic of where they come from helps to reprogram the mind not to see them as ìwrongî anymore. Then they just flow and you get out the other side a bit quicker and with less suffering.