Hello. It’s 7am, I’ve managed to rectify my sleeping patterns since M’s departure. I now go to bed at a reasonable time, and wake up, likewise, which is a relief.
I do feel a bit low these last days, but given the situation, that’s understandable. M has hardly even texted and when he does it doesn’t even make sense. Sometimes I just feel astonished at myself that I stuck with him for so long. It’s not even something I can explain by ‘illness’. I had quite a few windows in my depression and ‘highs’ when I could have dumped him (to be fair I did try), but I guess I was just genuinely ‘in love’ with him and that made me, to a certain extent, blind to his faults.
I convinced myself that he needed me but I no longer believe that. We all like to feel needed don’t we? And my own relationship with my son is currently in a pitifully poor state, and M was an outlet for that maternal instinct to care for and protect someone. Thank God he’s gone though. Hopefully my son will forgive me in time for this lamentable lapse of judgment on my part, and realise that he is way more important to me than M will ever be.
Plus, I was lonely. When M came into my life, I was acutely psychotic AND lonely, having recently been abandoned by a close friend whom I loved, my partner of 12 years and even the Romanians who moved in with me over Christmas of 2010. I couldn’t have been more delighted to have a partner in my madness…someone who, at the time, seemed very much on my wavelength. I could relate to his misanthropy. To his religious mania. To the way he lived…for the moment, just scraping by from one ‘fix’ to another, whether that be of food, tobacco, music, shopping or whatever. The life of an addict, and a mad one at that.
I followed M around like a duckling its ‘mother’. He used to say I was a baby, and in many ways I was.
When I went to the Philosophy Forum on ‘blame’ I learned that a philosopher called Peter Strawson (a contemporary of Bertrand Russell, I believe) argued that if we refuse ever to blame a person for anything we are effectively reducing them to the level of an animal, child or object. To be handled, managed, cured, trained, but never treated as an adult, a fully human equal. Which causes me to reflect that this is how people with mental health problems are often treated by their ‘service providers’.
This was M to a tee. He couldn’t accept any blame or responsibility for anything ever. He treated me as if I was the same…not an adult, not responsible, a child. A part of me wanted nothing more than to regress to that ‘child’ persona. But the other part – the adult part – struggled and kicked against it more and more as time went on, until finally the adult part won. I DON’T expect to be exempt from blame or responsibility. My ‘illness’ does NOT explain all my misjudgments and wrongdoing. I have to hold up my hands to having hurt many people to a greater or lesser extent over the course of my life.
The mental health workers I have liked and appreciated over the years (as I discussed in a previous post, ‘Saying a big thank you’) have been those who treated me as an equal – a whole, adult human being. It horrifies me to be reduced to the level of ‘animal, child, object’, even though when someone is acutely psychotic and in hospital say, it is maybe understandable. But the person’s full humanity should never be forgotten.
There have been times when I’ve been blamed disproportionately and unjustly for things I haven’t done of course. Probably all of us have experienced this. The blame game can be very destructive indeed. You have to look at the motivation and agenda of the ‘blamer’, who often just wants to shift the heat from themselves to another. But I am convinced that we cannot throw out blame altogether, for the reasons that Strawson suggests. Accepting reproach and being accountable is one of the things that makes us fully human.
However there have been times when excessive guilt has caused me to become very depressed. No one was actually blaming me when my son J began having problems, refusing school, retreating into his room and isolating himself, etc. Well, apart from him I guess. But I took the blame all on myself. I felt I was uniquely responsible for his situation. When I finally surfaced from a grinding 16 month depression which culminated in me having obsessive thoughts of suicide toward the end, I finally recognised that in any situation, there is rarely only one person ‘to blame’. The more deeply you look into it the more you realise that there are multiple players to whom attaches at least some responsibility. These players can include agencies, groups , families and ultimately society itself.
This, together with the realisation that ‘no one person is worth more than another’, and that we, each one of us, are infinitely valuable, really relieved my mind and I began, at that point to emerge from the crippling depression. Some acknowledgement and thanks for these two ‘life lessons’ has to go to the facilitator of my therapy/Life Skills group, Rigby. I will be eternally grateful to him. He is a wonderfully humane psychologist who runs many groups at my local NHS Mental Health centre, and is really passionate about what he does. We are so lucky to have him, and I am sure he touches many, many lives in the course of his work.
Well luckily Group is this afternoon. I need it. I will busy myself in the morning in arranging appointments, registering at the gym and doing a bit of shopping. Keeping busy and connected are both key in preventing me from lapsing back into feeling sorry for myself. Spending time with positive friends also really helps. I spent most of yesterday with one and she really looked after me, cooked a lovely vegetarian dinner etc. I also enjoyed chatting with her lovely 21-year-old daughter, with whom she is very close and who is a credit to her.
Of course that makes me wistful and sad about the state of my own relationship with my son, but heck. Relationships are a living entity. They can grow and develop, and go through different phases, just like people. I have to go on striving to be the person that any son could be proud to call his mother. I may never get there. But that is no reason not to try.
Love, Zoe xx
Am I Still Ill? 