We are All Just Walking Each Other Home

Emma Freud Pick of the week Radio 4

“ My final pick I the final moment of the award winning prison drama “This Thing of Darkness”
It’s a programe about the psychological impact that the act of murder has on teenagers who committed murder.
These are the closing thoughts from the psychologist running their prison therapy group
It’s the heinous act of murder taken not as good versus evil but viewed without judgement by an expert on the darkest workings of the human mind.

“I had a wise forensic colleague who had a particular interest in the way violent offenders changed their language of agency over time. As if they were filling in the missing colours of their personal narrative. He talked about a long staircase of acceptance; they climbed with small incremental steps, beginning with the first step of, “It wasn’t me”. And ending in a final step of taking responsibility by saying “I killed”.
Antony had got stuck on the first step.
Not helped by his mother, who so desperately wanted and needed to believe in him. I have seen many mothers like her, clinging fast to righteousness no matter what their children had done.
I do like the image of the staircase, but often what Ive seen, coming out of denial is so hard and so bad, it’s more like walking on the road to Calvary , a kind of excruciating stumble towards responsibility and redemption .
Not everyone gets there.
Therapists neither like me, judge nor fix those who travel this difficult path. Nor do we try to make them behave better
We just walk with them,
Whilst they do the work of accepting who they are.
We are their companions to the way, keeping them company on the journey.
I thinks that is the most we can ask of any of our fellows in times of suffering, to be with us.
I think of the great spiritual teacher Ram Dass saying

We are all just walking each other home

Ghosts

 I fell asleep on the couch yesterday afternoon and woke in darkness. The tv had turned itself off ( it does this as it’s on some sort of timer I haven’t been able to figure out as yet) but the fire was still burning , just that much to give the room some warmth and some light. 

The dogs were asleep.

Dorothy next and on me, the other two in the cracks.

I wasn’t sure when it was, and lay there blinking. 

I could hear the wind, and the tick of the kitchen clock

Then Albert walked passed the couch. 

I heard him rub the couch as cats do with their sides when they are not in a hurry.

A muted rub and a vibration through the cushion 

Then nothing more

I blinked once again and didn’t move then closed my eyes again for a few moments 

before realising it was around 6 pm and time to get up for work

Frankie Goes To Hollywood - The Power Of Love

The tongue in cheek video, somehow spoils the song, which was the backdrop to my psychiatric nurse days back in 1984. It was ironic , for despite being madly in unrequited love with my best friend two years before this date, I was not going to properly fall in love with someone for another decade or so. 

That decade taught me to make and nurture and love my friends

Most of whom I still retain to this day.

At the end of Les Mistersbles , Jean Valjean and Fantine sing “ and remember the truth that was once was spoken….to love another person is to see the face of God” 

That’s where the Frankie Goes to Hollywood video hails from, me now thinks.

I’ve been in love with three men in my life, only one of whom properly loved me back.

I’ve loved many more men and women, as friends and more, and I’m lucky those that love me back do so in a way that I can acknowledge and get comfort from.

My dogs love me too but in a different way as I love them 

They are animals where

Love is more a bond.

“ Dreams are like Angels,

They keep bad at bay, bad at bay, 

Love is the light,

Scaring darkness away”

All Of Us Strangers

Intriguing and emotional films, should in my mind, be seen with someone else in tow. 

Post Mortem’s need to be sat through. Points of view need discussion and raw nerves need to be soothed

As All of Us Strangers finished Chic Eleanor wiped her cheeks and tearfully lisped “Darling that was beautiful “ 

And she is right, it is….it’s a lovely film.

It’s a four handed drama that centres around a forty something gay scriptwriter (Andrew Scott)  , his tentative romance with a lonely brittle neighbour ( Paul Mescal) and his unexpected reunion with the  “ghosts” of his dead parents, ( Claire Foy and Jamie Bell) who died together in a car accident in the 1980s 

I will not explain it any more than that, as this hypnotic, beautifully shot and incredibly acted study of grief, childhood damage, and redemption through love can be viewed in a score of different ways. 

Suffice to say , that Scott’s painful memories of being a gay child in the 1980s are beautifully and from my perspective painfully portrayed as his loving but slightly clueless parents grapple with the “ reality” of how their 1980s parenting helped and didn’t help him through

It’s an intensely personal and heart wrenching study by director Andrew Haigh. Andrew Scott is magnificent in the lead role, he wears  a sad smile which could literally  break your heart, as he plays opposite his “ parents “ and one scene in particular when his dad realises that he has let his son down is a wonderfully powerful piece of cinema , made so much better by Jamie Bell’s subtle depiction of a kind man just out of his depth. 

Is it a ghost story? Or a love story ? Or a metaphor for therapy and forgiveness ? 

It doesn’t matter

As All of us Strangers is all of these things and more.

It’s a great piece of cinema.

Roseanne: DAD'S DEAD!

Nurses are taught to say “ Died” not gone, or passed or anything else

I loved this bit of tv gold

Lovely quiet day today. I met my sister Ann, her husband and my late brother’s wife for lunch at the Dinorban Arms https://www.brunningandprice.co.uk/dinorbenarms/homepage/

I scrubbed up and enjoyed lovely food but average service 

Tomorrow, Chic Eleanor and I are off to see All of Us Strangers 

ABBA The Visitors - Under Attack

I went to Sainsbury’s for lunch.

Their filter coffee is nice and the bustle of the cafe reminds me I’m not feeling lonely today.

A chap started talking to me on scruff which is a chatting/ dating app. He seemed interesting and chatty and talked about choirs and theatre and cinema that was until he asked to see of Photo of me . I sent him one of me and Dorothy in profile and he asked if he could view a “ lower one” 

I sent him a photo of my shoes prefixed by the word, sigh , then blocked him.

I had bangers and mash for lunch and had a small bout of road rage on the way home when a man stopped dead behind tome minor flooding causing several cars to shriek to a halt . The man refused to move on, for an age and I called out in my best Les Dawson voice You Big Girl’s Blouse ! 

Incongruously he waved what looked like a large feather duster at me

So much for learning all about being non judgemental in college yesterday

I played my ABBA LP When I got home 

Who was the favourite?

 Who was your favourite patient ?

It was a question a more junior nurse asked me a few days ago. She punctuated the question with the word ever! 

Thus making the answer all rather difficult.

Forty one years of patients

You’d think they would merge into one.

They don’t! 

Former medic Should Fish More will, I think agree with me here

Certain patients will capture your heart, head, humour , conscience, memory and psychi for all different reasons, and will remain close by like memories of a lovely holiday or a particularly sad family funeral.

Favourite isn’t the right word to use here, it can’t be.

A chic Italian interpreter who wanted to dance with me before she died ( we danced)

A lost, and handsome  North Yorkshire man, shaken by mental illness wanting to hold my hand when he saw me out shopping in central York in 1987

An Iraqi boy of eleven, paralysed in the war careering around the spinal unit, cackling like a loon, with my first dog Finlay tied to the front of his wheelchair.

Indumati, a bad tempered, irascible Hindu lady who could hit me with a piece of fruit at ten feet even though she was blind as a bat.

Being the birthing partner of a Sheffield teenager giving birth to her first baby who she called Harley Davidson 

The wife of a man with a lacerated liver who begged me to save his life as he bled to death.

The jovial schizophrenic lady to annoyed the pious chaplain of Chester’s Deva hospital by peeing on the chapel’s floor during Church service.

And the Welsh farmer’s wife who gave me a pair of Turkey poults after I had looked after her on intensive care.

I could go on….. I’m on a roll.

Self Care

 I’ve got skills practice in an hour. 

This is a recorded zoom meeting between me and my colleague Donna .

It will last an hour with each one of us playing the therapist for thirty minutes each.

Our tutor will assess the video sometime this week.

Yesterday I set up zoom and got everything set up.

In between times I called friends for chats, 

It’s amazing how much the cottage feels alive with the sound of chatter in it.

I’m working nights tonight so made a big brunch.

Soda bread toasted with garlic topped with Greek yogurt, salmon and avocado , topped with a left over spoon of mushy peas…

Bloody lovely.

I won’t eat again until this evening 

Eating special meals has always been important to me, and it’s a skill I have indulged myself in since I was single. 

In counselling , it would be termed self care 

Respect and care for myself in a time which isn’t always as nurturing as it could be.

Or perhaps I just like my food