Support

About nine months ago I came to the end of a year of talking therapy with a private counsellor. At the time I described it to friends as “sitting in a room and paying a woman to watch me weep”. When we discussed this in a session, the therapist did that head-tilty thing that therapists always do and said “That’s an interesting way to view therapy…” before leaving us to sit in uncomfortable silence, another of her specialities. Which was nevertheless irritatingly effective at helping me unravel my complicated bundle of emotions. Damn the woman. Being able to rant and offload about the specifics of what had happened (and was still happening) was useful. There were times that I absolutely howled, surprising myself at how physical grief can be, my whole body rocking in the chair. Definitely not the usual apologetic and half-suppressed tears that I had been surviving on up until then, there was catharsis and I was grateful for that. But after a while you get tired of talking, and feel a desperate sense of wanting to be better, wanting to feel less pain. You want answers, practical solutions. I hear a previous counsellor speaking in my ear now, a woman with hennaed hair and many scarves and bangles that I saw when I was an unhappy teenager. She is telling me off for saying “you” when I meant “I”, she would say that I was distancing myself from the discussion and that it was important to “own the action”. I think what I was actually looking for at 16 was to be understood. I wanted to tell someone that I had all these terrible and sad thoughts in my head, and I was desperate for someone else to recognise that and tell me that I was normal. To tell me that being a fully thinking, feeling human is very hard work sometimes.

However mystifying and unsatisfactory I found it as a teenager, sitting in that overheated therapy room faintly scented with patchouli, at least I had the benefit of a real life human sitting opposite me. News headlines are full of the unhappiness of young people, it’s often described in terms of a crisis, and I worry about stories of young people turning to chatbots for therapy. Isn’t that the very definition of introspection and rumination? Chat GPT and all the other AI companions can only be a mirror, reflecting your own thoughts. Sometimes reflection is useful, it can pull you up short to have your own words fed back to you, it can spark insight. But is it always useful? Can it lead to spiralling without the challenge of another cognitive perspective? Because despite being called artificial intelligence, AI can't actually think. We all have to find our psychological strength from inside ourselves (that’s all there is surely?) but we need other humans to help us. I strongly believe that. Whether those other humans are a long dead poet’s words pressed inside a book, a stranger at a bus stop commenting on your great outfit (in a strictly non-creepy way) and being brave enough to spark connection, or our oldest friend supporting us through some terrible grief, we are not meant to cope alone. We need each other. So what really ‘works’ in terms of mental health support, what would ideal look like?

I suppose the bigger question is how do we get on with this difficult business of living our lives, dealing with things that feel unbearable. When my daughter's struggles became visible around the age of 14 at the big box academy she attended, I was immediately placed by school staff into the category of ‘SEN parent’, a label that the part of my brain that values accuracy in language is perturbed by, as it seems to suggest that I am a parent with special educational needs, rather than my child needing support. There is another nibble of persnicketyness here, in that the education part was never really the problem for my daughter, she is fantastic at learning, it was more being inside a huge chaotic noisy clattery building that was the problem.  When you become a ‘SEN parent’ you will often be told by well-meaning people that it's important to ‘find time for yourself’ (without anyone explaining how this might actually be possible). You are also ‘signposted’, which means you’re given a list of websites and various helplines, as the Kafkaesque system of securing help for your child is impossible to navigate alone. Finally, you will be offered ‘coffee mornings’ where you will be encouraged to connect with other sad-faced women sitting tense with worry in plastic chairs clutching terrible coffee, because although these groups are billed as being for SEN parents, in practice this always means mothers.

I have phoned the helplines, sometimes they help. I have sat in the coffee mornings and absorbed the sadness of others. Sometimes this is a relief, to find solidarity, sometimes it is just too sad. So is it any wonder that I find myself delicately constructing a different ‘support package’ for myself? I cycle to Grow Wilder on Fridays and find companionship there without any pressure to talk about my life, as we’re too busy pulling out horsetail or spotting swathes of bristly black caterpillars munching nettles (soon to become peacock butterflies, how exciting!). I slow down to walk through the alley behind my house on the way to tiny Tesco to buy milk, challenging myself to an urban safari, identifying plants with a mixture of Google lens and old wildflower guides picked up from charity shops. I use social media sparingly, mainly to find out about real life opportunities that will fill me up with experiences to write about. This week this included discovering free events as part of Bristol’s Festival of Nature, which led to me cat/cowing on a yoga mat with a whole crowd of others in my local park before going for a guided tree walk with a local expert (which definitely needs its own piece of writing, I’m working on it). It has taken time to put this life together, and none of these individual actions does anything as simple as make things better, or fix me. Instead they make things bearable by diluting the unbearable. I sit in the early morning sun in my garden each day, surrounded by life bursting and blooming, lulled by my bee sisters, and I wonder if I can carry just a fraction of that feeling of calm and contentment into my day. Work in progress…

Photo shows a cinnabar moth (Tyria jacobaeae) spotted on my alleyway excursion. This is a scheduled post as life has intervened again and gobbled up my free time. It's thankfully the last of my daughter's exams today, a major relief. I have been reading a lot this week, mostly novels, but also dipping into Upstream, a collection of essays by Mary Oliver. I wish I could write as clearly and concisely as her, maybe one day. I also listened to Kate Raworth on the Radical podcast with Amol Rajan. I have read her Doughnut Economics (2017) book but hearing her speak really crystallises her ideas. Growth outside planetary boundaries is not sustainable, seems very straightforward to me!