How I Rescued My Brain (6 page)

‘The van is the family and me together as a unit.'

‘And what does the road represent?'

‘It's a pathway, a way of getting from A to B. The road is narrow and we are stuck, hemmed in, trapped.'

‘What does a bridge refer to?'

‘It's a means for getting over things, like a river or a canyon. It can collapse.'

‘And water?'

‘It's a liquid; it can be life-saving or it can take away life.'

Wayne offered an interpretation. ‘The dreamer is on a journey, the journey the family is undertaking. The family is being constricted — trapped and suffocated by what's happening around them, what's being done to them. The family is being drowned in the heaviness of sorrow and the weight that you feel. You and they are stuck in a place in which you can see no way out. At present, the dreamer cannot clearly see any means of survival for the family. He feels that he has lost control and is unable to save his family.'

What he said felt right. I had lost control. We were under threat and I could not save my family. But why was I traumatised when I had never been physically harmed?

‘It's the threat of harm, and feeling what others are feeling, when they describe what they've been through, that has injured you,' he said. Each awful story I'd been told had been a nick in my psychological armour. Rachel's story was one too many; my armour had shattered. Wayne said that the nightmares were re-traumatising me; the terror I had experienced was real. My imagination was a gift and a curse: it let me put myself into others' shoes, but it also concocted vivid images that damaged me. My capacity for empathy had become a poison.

Wayne told me that he had stopped working intensively with war veterans when their horrific stories had become too much. Now he took fewer appointments and continued to see only a handful of long-term clients, and instead presented more workshops and provided clinical supervision.

I felt that he understood. But I couldn't let go of the sense of failure so easily. I thought I'd let everyone down: my family, my profession, my community, the taxpayers who had helped to fund my nine years of training. I was a sought-after expert; now I was useless. No, even worse — I was a liability.

Wayne said that I was in a transition phase. My time at the coalface of clinical psychology was probably over, but I could draw on this experience in the next phase. He told me that all psychologists at some time in their career confronted this dilemma: how to maintain empathy for their clients without taking on too much of their suffering.

IN THE FOLLOWING
sessions, I reported more dreams — some that involved the family, some in which I tried to save others, some in which I died, some in which I escaped. Wayne, using a cognitive behaviour therapy approach, challenged my thoughts of failure and sense of worthlessness.

In one of my dreams, I was riding a bicycle over the tops of prison cells, which had a wire-mesh roof so that I could see inmates below running and jumping, trying to catch me. I managed to escape. Wayne saw this as positive. He asked me to think of my nightmares as healing dreams: my unconscious mind processing the bad memories, clearing the decks.

And slowly, like an ocean liner being turned in the harbour, I began to change tack. Even though I still
felt
like a failure, I sensed that I could have a future that drew upon my past. I didn't have to blame myself: bad things happened to good people through no fault of their own. My intentions had been good. I was doing my best.

‘No matter what has happened to you recently,' Wayne said, ‘that has not changed all the help you gave to hundreds of others. Your clients' lives are better for having met you. Be easier on yourself. Start thinking about the next stage of your life.'

I realised that going through pain changes you. I could never be the same person I was, but perhaps I could begin to think about becoming someone new.

4

‘OPEN YOUR MOUTH
wider, see, like this.' Lily demonstrated by giving an exaggerated, carefree laugh while sitting at the digital piano. I chuckled. A mental picture of a mythical wide-mouthed frog came to mind.

We were in her lounge room, a short walk from my house. Now that I was not working as much, I had the time to take singing lessons. Today Lily had been playing scales, up and down, and getting me to shape my mouth around the different vowel sounds.

She turned side on, her face looking up at me, impossibly bright for this time of the morning. As she had instructed, I was standing with my feet apart, holding a solid core, one hand on my abdomen to gauge its movement. She had placed a mirror in front of me. It was disconcerting to watch my freckled face, with a nose that always looked bent, contorting into these facial poses. ‘Over-exaggerate,' she exhorted.

My early years had been spent at a small Roman Catholic convent school. One day, when I was eight, I and some other classmates were pulled in from the playground and made to stand by the school's cranky piano. In turns, we were asked to sing a song about flowers growing in a garden, while one of the nuns played. This audition led to me being selected, together with a handful of others, to attend a major eisteddfod in the city.

A few lunchtime rehearsals followed, after which several of us boys piled into Mum's station wagon, some lolling like seals in the back cabin, and set off on a ninety-minute drive to the city. It was early summer, and we took bags of cherries to munch on. By the time we arrived, I was feeling sick, although still enthusiastic about the performance.

Until it happened.

I was pushed onto the stage of the biggest hall I had been in, hundreds of faces looking up at me, the only other person with me an unfamiliar pianist. Fear grabbed me by the throat. The woman at the piano played the intro for my song, but when I was supposed to sing, nothing happened; I was still staring at all the people.

The piano stopped.

‘Shall we start again?' the woman asked in a kind voice.

I nodded.

The second time around I actually made a sound, and then held the tune to the end of the song. The adjudicator awarded me a highly commended, with a comment: ‘Open your mouth more and your voice will sound even better. Good work.'

I had found out I could sing, and that I quite liked it.

As a teenager, I had played in a high-school rock group and fancied myself a singer–songwriter. During university, I'd played in a semi-professional dance band. Yet while I'd had years of guitar lessons — Dad insisting that I learn classical guitar, to get a good technique — I'd never trained as a singer.

Now, who better to take lessons with than my friend Lily? We'd met in 1990 in Canberra, where I'd moved to take up a university position while finishing off my PhD research. I'd won a local amateur songwriting competition, the prize being time in a recording studio; Lily, then a voice student, helped me with the backing vocals. A few years ago, she and her family had moved to the same country town as us. Our agreement was that she would give me a lesson one morning a week in return for a bottle of aged wine from my collection. After each session, we stopped for tea.

Lily had recorded a CD with a series of scales and exercises that had become my vocal homework. In the morning, when the kids were off at school and not much else seemed worth doing, I went into the room downstairs, closed the windows — so the neighbours were less likely to hear — turned on my CD player, and sang to her recording, moulding my face and breathing as she had shown me. And my lumpen body and despondent mood responded.

Without a weekly lesson at which I was required to demonstrate progress, I would've forgone these exercises. But I couldn't disappoint Lily. When I turned up at her house, she'd call out with a singsong ‘Halloo.' Her joyousness, and her commitment to willing me on, didn't let up from that moment.

In time, Lily had me singing an Italian aria, ‘Amarilli, Mia Bella'. It was a love
poem
; I'd never sung anything like it before. It was a good song, she said, for people who were changing their vocal technique. My voice was too nasally and needed to come from the belly.

‘You have to get out of your head. Feel love in your heart,' she said, placing a hand on her chest, her face expressing yearning. ‘Imagine the person you're singing to.'

I wondered if the song choice was not only about vocal technique, but also Lily's ploy to get me more in touch with expressing my feelings.

After weeks of this, I said, ‘Lily, singing is different from playing an instrument; it wakes up the whole body. The body is your instrument. You can't be depressed and sing at the same time.'

She smiled: this revelation wasn't new to her.

The discovery that I couldn't sing properly while slumped in despondency showed me that working the body in certain ways changed one's mood. It bypassed the head — that ruminating heavyweight in which I was so often stuck.

Lily's choice of songs had extended me, vocally and emotionally. I had discovered that I was a baritone, with a two-octave range: from a resonating low to a flute-like high. Singing awakened a joyousness that I thought had been quashed — a feeling that came with the beauty of the sound I could make.

I HAD BEEN
visiting Dad intermittently over the last fourteen months, since he'd been in the nursing home. Now in a wheelchair, he used his feet to paddle through the corridors, and, like a lizard, he fossicked out the sunny spots during the day's diurnal changes. He liked the food they served and had bulked up, his sunken cheeks now a memory. He didn't ask about home anymore.

Dad enjoyed socialising with the staff and other residents, who soon learnt about The Petition. Since his retirement, he had engaged in environmental activism — in particular, in starting up petitions to promote various environmental causes. He was a ceaseless letter-writer, and in an age of digital speed, he wrote long letters in a feathery-like script. He used to collect signatures in public places, setting up a table and chair. When my siblings and I were younger, he had embarrassed us many times with the way he pounced on any new friend or visitor who came to our home, asking, ‘Have you signed the petition yet?' with a cheeky grin. After the expected ‘no', he'd passionately argue his case for protection, and the newcomer would duly sign. His petitioning efforts brought success, too: he became a formidable force in advancing awareness of potential dangers to the Great Barrier Reef, and his amassed signatures helped in the ultimate declaration of the area as a marine national park.

In the nursing home, the deputy director of nursing had, like a colonial governor granting parcels of land, given him a wedge of territory in her office — a drawer in her filing cabinet — where he stored his papers and correspondence, away from the cleaners' zealous clutches.

Sometimes, on my visits, I found him in his room, in the wheelchair, by the windowpane tinged with the gold of afternoon sun, asleep. His papers sliding off his lap, pen limp in his hand, chin resting on his chest, and a line of spittle hanging from parted lips. And in that sagging body I could see the boy he once was, still driving this old man. If a painter were asked to interpret the scene, he might have depicted a boy in old man's clothes, climbing up the mature eucalyptus tree outside the window, determined to explore.

Then, in mid-October, I got an unexpected call from my sister. ‘Dad's not eating,' she said.

This was a federal election year. Dad had been working with a preoccupied feverishness, writing letters to all the politicians he thought would promote his views. When I went in to see him, I learnt that he had been off his food since he began his letter campaign. He drank enough of the protein milk given to him in the little cartons to keep the nurses off his back, but my siblings and I found bits of food hidden away in his drawers and under the bed. He told me that he was trying to fool the staff into believing he was eating more than he was. It was a bit like me when I was a boy, slipping the dreaded peas under the dining-room table and out of sight.

A couple of weeks later, once his last round of letters was posted out, he stopped eating altogether. I asked him why, but he didn't really answer. I wasn't sure if he was being evasive or if he was just tired by the line of questioning.

He was becoming skeletal again.

The deputy director of nursing asked my siblings and me if we wanted him to be fed by a nasal tube, in which case he would need to be transferred to the hospital. I thought of that white, antiseptic room. Dad liked it here — it had become his home. My siblings felt similarly; we agreed that we would encourage him to eat but we would not sanction forced feeding. My father was showing obstinate self-determination; that was his character, and I admired him for it.

DAD AND I
had spoken about death before. I knew from these discussions that he did not fear it, and this comforted me. I did not need to reassure him about something that was a mystery to me.

There were no unspoken grievances between us. Two years earlier I had undertaken an online course taught by professor Martin Seligman, a founder of the positive-psychology movement, a relatively new field of social science that focused on increasing contentment and happiness in individuals, groups, and institutions. One of the exercises had been to write a ‘gratitude letter'. The aim was to choose someone important to you, tell them the ways in which you felt grateful to them, and thank them for the positive things they had done for you. Then you met with the letter's recipient, if they were still alive, and read it out to them. Seligman told us that this had a positive and lasting effect on the letter-writer.