"How are you?" we politely say to each other, and heaven help those who give a long and straight answer.
The truth is not always what we want to hear.
But so many people have now asked me, with unfeigned interest, what happened to the Wildcat that I maybe I really should tell.
The Wildcat herself has been among those curious to know what's been going on during all the "intensive sessions" with Dr F., the psychotherapist expert in psychosomatic medicine.
Suddenly I find myself shy on both fronts!
The Faithful 5 ¾ will have already have read that the Wildcat has prowled back into my life, but you'll also have noticed an absence of flowers since the turn of the year.
After all, it was "just friends" the woman proved really to want in the end, and that's how it became. I shall, however, make no such arrangements with the next thief of my heart -- that's for sure.
So we've had some long chats, but instead of 'phoning me every night as she did for months -- and having me call her back -- the Wildcat's taken to writing, not to me, but really writing: brave and creative work which she finds hard going, but which I strongly encourage, since she's good at it.
She's read long extracts to me, taken my "constructive criticism" with resilience, and mailed me none of it yet. Partly, perhaps, because she still doesn't quite trust me not to publish it. She might have a point.
Something I learned on settling this side of the Channel, fuelled by a typically "British" blend of Mediterranean, Celtic and Saxon but apparently predominantly Norman -- or Viking -- blood (that's as much as my tribe has been able to trace of its origins), was that one old French "meaning" of my paternal name meant somebody who's deceitful.
Dr F., however, left little room for evasion or self-deception in our journey to the core of the Condition that took up so much blogspace last year.
It's difficult to write what happened during our frequent 45-minute encounters. The digging has led to the dissection and inspection of many unexpected parts, the better to put them all together again in an equally surprising way.
Why the past tense?
Well, we reckon something is over, finished.
We've agreed to another meeting in a few weeks, but the last left me in a very different place from the one I'd expected when we started.
This is where the psychology might be of some interest to others.
Cutting short the long tale already told -- and simplifying a little at the expense of the purely physical causes of the Condition -- we worked on the hypothesis that my guts fell apart roughly nine months as a bodily manifestation of a disintegrated mind on the edge of the breakdown I never had.
The explored causes were manifold, but included severe stress, massive information overload, the repression of whole and essential facets of my personality since adolescence, and a capacity for empathy with other people which was both a useful quality and a serious setback.
"Your barriers," the Wildcat once said, "aren't in the same place as mine."
Once Dr F. had got the preliminaries out of the way, she began talking about barriers and how it was conceivable that I didn't have enough of them.
So we started out from the notion that I was only too well socially integrated, rather than cut off from other people, but needed to develop "affective", or emotional, defence mechanisms in place of the "gut reaction" to events, colleagues and friends, and to ideas and demands I refuse to accept -- or swallow.
There was no end to analogies between food, tastes, congestion, digestion, expulsion and our mental processes.
The task of analysing all this was often funny as well as hard work.
During our most recent session, it came to me that where I'd thought we were going to work on sorting out new barriers and limits, we'd instead taken a host of them down.
I hope I'm being clear, because writing rationally about the often unconscious and non-intellectual things that came to light seems semi-contradictory.
Sex, for instance, is nothing like words about sex.
Music is a language quite different from writing abut music.
And so on.
When I said that I felt as if I had, in a process of integrating bits and pieces of my identity (whatever that is), found I had barriers, but completely natural ones, and had no desire to make any artificial ones, Dr F. simply smiled and told me she didn't think we needed to see each other again any time soon.
She didn't say "You're cured" or anything absurd like that.
She's far too bright to suggest that I've got anywhere but the end of one phase and the beginning of another in a lifelong process.
But the rest, right now, is I believe up to me.
That's it, really. That's how I am and where I'm at now.
Since that last meeting with the psychotherapist, which I've "digested" as slowly as ever but thoroughly, I've noticed three things. I've become more curious about other people and their "workings" than ever. For the first time in years, I've just lived through a new moon time of the month without going into a downer or temporarily losing my sense of humour.
And women seem to have started looking at me -- and teasing me sometimes -- in ways I've never been accustomed to (or at least noticed) before.
That last is, of course, a particularly interesting development...
I even know exactly what it feels like to be "mentally undressed" by somebody else. And, as a frequent practioner of that art, I'm relieved to find that it doesn't always feel so bad. On the contrary! No empathy required.
8:56:32 PM link 
|
|
postbox