Get Well Soon

by Nick Duerden

  The morning after, over breakfast, the tour guide asked where we had gone yesterday. I told him about the bomb scare.

  ‘I wish you had not seen that, and I hope you don’t write about it,’ he said. ‘This is not typical of our country, you know.’

  But it is, or at least it was. A week after our return, the food market we had visited did become a target. The rumours had been true. Many were injured.

  ‘And so why did you stay at the time?’ the TV news correspondent asked me now. ‘Why didn’t you leave when your tour guide told you to?’

  I explained of my excitement at being able to witness how people lived their lives in compromised situations, and that I felt lucky to be able to tell their story. I had thought Tel Aviv a beautiful city, full of fascinating, resilient, complicated people. The inherent danger of living there was what made it so vivid. I hadn’t wanted to leave.

  ‘Then you are one of us,’ she told me, a compliment more generous than she could have known, given that I was already fretting about how I would negotiate my fatigue on the long trek home.

  As we said goodbye, she gave me her card, encouraging me to contact her. I told her I would, knowing full well I wouldn’t, couldn’t.

  I brood over my conversation with the war correspondent for weeks, and realise that what I had said to her about witnessing how people lived their lives in compromised situations pretty much summed up how I was living my life now. My illness was a compromising one and had extinguished my sense of adventure, but not entirely. I wanted it back.

  A few weeks later, and surely under her lingering influence, we rashly but entirely logically decide to move to China. The sense that life is out there while we merely paddle in its shallow end becomes increasingly insistent and painful. Elena is keen. We weigh up the pros and cons, more cons than pros, among them the conviction that the children, who crave only familiarity and friends, would never forgive us, and still decide it makes perfect sense. I act fast. I call up a local estate agent with a view to putting the house up for rent, and I cancel magazine subscriptions. We will go for six months, maybe more, but certainly not less. I buy books on the country, and pore over them in a frenzy of research.

  I am raring to go. At night, we look at websites for international schools in Shanghai, comparing one against another. They are all prohibitively expensive, so we decide that while Elena works, making the money, I will homeschool the girls.

  It seems like the most unhinged, lucid plan we have ever had.

  There is some context here: my condition had made me a fantasist long before now. Three years previously, it was Bristol we were going to move to. The nightmare neighbours were still with us then, I was essentially housebound, and so Bristol offered an out. When in doubt about so much in life, flee. We’d been to Bristol several times, and liked it. Bristol would do, even though neither of us ever really wanted to leave London.

  Then, one morning, we read in a newspaper that Ho Chi Minh City was fast becoming a major international hub, increasingly popular with Western start-up types and youthful entrepreneurs. We fell into neither camp, but we had visited Ho Chi Minh once in our previous lives, and loved it so much that we were reluctant to leave. An idea, fully realised, instantaneously dawned: forget Bristol. We would go East!

  It’s always healthy to foster a lively dream life, but perhaps not when it spills over into the real one, consuming waking hours and sleepless nights. But when you are ill, or long-term unhealthy, dreams become a buoy on which to cling in the hope that it will float towards new horizons. And ours remained eminently tangible. If I could be tired in London, why not in another major international city? We decided to keep our options open, and considered Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, Bangkok – anywhere, as long as it was far, far away, and promised adventure, new leaves turned.

  And then, one day, the planets align. Elena is sent to Shanghai for work, training scientists on how to achieve optimum lab results. China is an emerging, rapidly growing market, and a potentially lucrative one. Her boss wonders whether she might be prepared to travel to China multiple times over the next few years.

  ‘It’s a shame we don’t have anyone based out there,’ her boss says to her, and Elena does well to keep her voice free of the hysteria mounting within her when she replies, evenly, ‘Yes, it is a shame.’

  This, we reasonably conclude, is a sign. China works. Elena could get a secondment to Shanghai. We would follow her out there, and I could write, could correspond for magazines, newspapers.

  She comes back from her first Shanghai trip in high spirits. Summoning the courage, she asks her boss about the likelihood of a six-month transfer to the city. It would be something for the CV, she says, and could work well for the team. Her boss likes the idea, and tries hard to make it work. For the next few weeks, it is all we talk about, a secret between the two of us until all is confirmed. The estate agent keeps calling, desperate to erect a To Let sign by our front gate. We monitor the daily pollution levels in Shanghai, and start shopping at the local Asian supermarket in preparation, noodles somehow a foreign concept to our girls, who insist they prefer spaghetti. Gradually, they come round.

  But by the time Elena goes to Shanghai again, many long months later, the possibility of a transfer is abruptly off the table. Despite early positive signs, the Chinese cannot quite commit to the course her company offers, and so it simply wouldn’t prove cost-effective.

  And so, just like that, our dream is packed neatly away, its full ramifications to brood over defeatedly at a later date, and our world shrinks back into its usual parameters, leaving us thinking of what might have been while reverting back to the life we know, and leaving me with the new normal I am by now desperate to be shot of.

  In the weeks and months following the Let Go seminar, I find myself muttering fuck it repeatedly, sometimes daily, aware now of tension, or anxiety, the moment it arises, and gradually transforming my inner ‘no’ into something approaching a ‘yes’. I say it, and I slope my shoulders, exhale and let go. It helps. As does meditation, which is increasingly becoming both habit and ritual, something I do not even think about any more; I just do it. I am up and doing it before seven every morning, then fit in another session before picking up the girls from school mid-afternoon. And if I am out, on a bus, a train, then I close my book and close my eyes, and the world shrinks away. Slowly but steadily, my physical limitations are diminishing by stealth. I no longer bother keeping a diary.

  I interview a bubbly TV celebrity, an American living in London, who tells me she too meditates, and in fact spends much of her downtime travelling the world’s health retreats for days of silence, chanting, group hugging and introspection, as well as having her own daily routine at home. It turns out we both rise at the same time each morning to do it, though she does it arguably better, and more properly, in Lycra and in the lotus position in a room she tells me she has decorated specifically for the purpose. She tells me about balancing her chakras, and I nod knowledgeably, because I sense she wants me to, but already our connection is withering away. I do not balance my chakras.

  I think I know what chakras are. They came up in previous meditation sessions, but I edited them out of my consciousness because it felt easy to do so. They are (I look them up later, for confirmation) the energy centres in our body through which energy flows, and there are seven of them: the root chakra, which represents our foundations and feelings of being grounded; the sacral chakra, which gives us the ability to accept others and be open to new experiences; the solar plexus chakra, which boosts confidence and self-control over our lives; the heart chakra, which gives us an ability to love; the throat chakra, for communication; the third eye chakra, which encourages us to see the bigger picture; and the crown chakra, which represents our ability to be fully connected spiritually.

  I grasp the concept of them, ish, but what I cannot grasp is how to balance them, and what to do with them when I do. I ask her, the bubbly TV celebrity, and she tells me she simply focuses on them:
‘I don’t have to do anything else, just that. It’s enough.’

  I think that perhaps the chakras are beyond me, a little too Eastern and wholemeal. But this is fine. John C. Parkin would tell me to fuck it, of course, to do what I feel comfortable with for now, and no more, to take it one step at a time, to assimilate myself gradually. So I do.

  Eighteen

  It is about this time, by now over a full year into my adventures in alternative therapy, that I find myself craving a more straightforwardly psychoanalytical explanation for what I am doing here, this tireless, and slightly frenzied, pursuit for health by whatever means necessary. The answer, simply and fundamentally, is that I am searching for help: help in understanding my new self, and wanting, to some extent, to be looked after by someone, anyone, in the wake of the most dragging illness, and to have restored what has been so conspicuously lost. When we develop a long-term condition that forces a change in the way we live, it is nothing less than an assault on the very notion we have of our self. Where have we gone? Who are we now? To find a way back, we seek out guides, mentors, the loudest voices, proponents of affirmative action. In our search, we cast our nets wide.

  ‘When you are ill without the benefit of a diagnosis that is of any use to you, then what are you supposed to do?’ the psychoanalyst Susie Orbach will say to me. ‘If you have been a person of action, and doing, then how do you do, and act, when you continue to feel so unwell for such a long time? It is a dreadful situation to be in, and so no wonder it’s a struggle.’

  To help process the struggle, I require now an educated overview into what my search might have left me with, and, pertinently, what I might have gained from it all. I want the opinion of someone I have heard of, with a public body of work behind them, respected in their field, boasting letters after their name. I am familiar with Susie Orbach’s work, have read her and admired her, and found her radio series on theraphy illuminating. I decide she’ll be ideal.

  She grants my request for an interview, and we meet just once, for an hour. As suggested earlier, I have long been fascinated by psychoanalysts – their owl-like silences, the stealth of their attention spans – and Orbach doesn’t disappoint. Curled up on a handsome leather armchair in her North-west London practice, she listens to my story with what strikes me as deeply professional acumen, all ears, barely a word spoken, appraising me not with judgement but with a cool and languid separation that, by the end of our hour together, convinces me she is half feline. I had been hoping, with habitual naivety, that she would do most of the talking, unfussily imparting psychological smarts, and that I would take notes. But she tells me that she doesn’t know me, isn’t familiar with my case, and so I have to talk first, and explain as much as I can in the time permitted. So I do. I expect her to rein me in from time to time, but she doesn’t, and whenever we fall into what I instantaneously perceive to be an awkward silence, I fill it with more babble. On those occasions when she does talk, I immediately lean forward to better absorb her words, as if each were sap from a tree that I want to carefully collect and preserve.

  ‘From what you’ve told me so far,’ she says at one point, ‘you’ve had some kind of serious breakdown within your system that was essentially crying out: Help! I need help! Now, I cannot possibly know yet what you did to break your system, but you clearly overstrained it, you became exhausted because of that, and so at some point you simply stopped.’

  She asks me why I didn’t seek out psychoanalysis in the first place, and I answer as honestly as I can: that, through my own ignorance and perhaps compounded by initial misdirection, I believed myself to be physically unwell, not psychologically. By the time I accepted that there was a psychological malfunction going on, I didn’t know where to turn, or to whom. Frankly, I also didn’t have the necessary capital for psychoanalysis. When I tell her about my failure in securing CBT, she tells me that CBT wouldn’t have been the right kind of therapy anyway (the NHS, of course, suggests otherwise). ‘It’s not about meaning, it’s about behaviour,’ she says.

  She believes the fact that I felt less tired – or, in her more psychoanalytical terminology, that I felt more safe – at home than I did outside suggests that my condition might well have had its roots in some kind of phobia. ‘Maybe the journalist who was running around the world all the time simply needed to be home more?’ She shrugs. ‘But, look, I don’t know. There are so many possible explanations for what happens to people, and people are all individual.’

  Had we met when I first fell ill, she says, she would have striven to secure as much medical oversight as psychological, considerably more so than I myself had managed. ‘If somebody is given your diagnosis, which is not really a concrete diagnosis at all, then I certainly wouldn’t want to reduce it to the psychological. I would want to regularly liaise with a doctor – although,’ she adds, ‘that has already proved problematical for me in the past.’

  Orbach had previously overseen the case of a colleague whose patient had chronic fatigue, but the patient’s doctor, who had been treating her for the condition, wasn’t happy that she was also in therapy. ‘There were protocols, presumably, and as a result of these complicated protocols, she suffered. She went downhill fast, though she is getting better now. But that was really shocking to me. Usually, you cooperate as a therapist and a doctor. But clearly not in this case.’

  Why?

  She sighs. ‘I wish I knew. I’m not used to this sort of competition between professionals. And I can’t say I find it particularly helpful.’

  I tell her about the alternative health practices I’ve dabbled in, my experiences with energy practitioners and meditation practitioners, those who try to eradicate my negative thought patterns by stopping them with repeated affirmations and reciting more positive ones; I tell her about the attempted kinesiology via pendulum over Skype. And while she makes it clear to me that she is no expert in the alternative market, which means that her opinion might be no more solid than anybody else’s, some of it, she concedes, does sound a little unusual.

  ‘Obviously, there are wonderful people out there who have found ways of helping people, but there are also those whose qualifications to practise might have come from a weekend course. In many ways, it’s no different to a 12-step programme, a fellowship of hurt people who get better by helping other people. I don’t have any particular problem with that – therapists have their own histories, after all – but it’s how we use it, and under what circumstances.

  ‘I confess I don’t know very much about kinesiology, but the methodology you experienced, via Skype, is problematical for me. I would have thought that, even in terms of its own science, doing something over computers wouldn’t work. What about the electricity between the two machines? I’m sorry, but the physics of it sounds crazy. I would think you’d have to be in the same room for it to work, even in the ways they suggest it works . . .’

  As far as banishing negative thought patterns by announcing loudly, in my head, STOP!, she suggests that that also presents issues for psychoanalysts, ‘because we are not trying to get rid of bad thoughts; we are trying to help people manage what they find difficult in life. So not to extract it, not to perform exorcisms, but to work with them.’

  I explain that, as I had understood it, exorcism in this respect at least had become necessary, directly because my bad thoughts had become such harmful ones, and were limiting my health, and my life, accordingly.

  ‘Yes, but bad and harmful thoughts are part of the human condition. When you go to a therapist, you try to understand what those harmful thoughts are a protection against, and learn how, in time, you can accept disappointment and hurt, rather than turning it into self-hatred. What we talk about is not leaving the bad thoughts behind but rather, through gradual understanding, changing that negative dynamic inside of you. It’s more about finding that bit of you that can dare to be okay with yourself when you have been caught up in a very bad pattern. So our approach focuses on a different emphasis, ultimately.’

>   (Later, I go back and consult Anna from the Optimum Health Clinic about this. Might they be wrong, I wonder, to advocate such harsh neurological pattern breaks after all? Anna tells me that she understands where Orbach is coming from entirely. ‘You don’t want to make the bad bits wrong, you don’t want to demonise any part of yourself, because that is to cut yourself off from it. And the negative thoughts are, in essence, just trying to protect you, which is why you ultimately do need to engage with them. But the problem, from a chronic fatigue perspective, is that this is quite a long process, and the idea of using stops, or equivalents, is simply to try, as quickly as possible, to calm the system down. If we just worked with you emotionally, then we would likely get to the same point, but that can take a really long time to do that. So while we are striving to get more clarity on what’s going on emotionally, we are also trying to calm the system down as quickly as possible.’)

  Had I initially sought out a psychotherapist, Orbach says, they would have talked less and listened more. ‘A therapist would have been interested in what this illness meant to you, how scared you were by it, what your feelings were, your history of work, your parents’ history; the whole picture.’

  And by simply talking about it, I ask, and coming to understand it, my physical symptoms – and the overriding fear I had of them – might have diminished, and I might have become better quicker?

  ‘I think so, yes.’

  I tell Susie Orbach, briefly, about the final two practices I underwent. The first, The Lightning Process, was another mind/body training programme, this one claiming success over all sorts of issues: anxiety, low self-esteem, panic attacks, eating disorders, depression, chronic pain, irritable bowel syndrome, multiple sclerosis, chronic fatigue. There was also much controversy surrounding The Lightning Process, but it does have that ultimate marker of approval in the 21st century: celebrity endorsement. Actors and sportsmen and women have done it, so too singers, explorers, the poorly children of celebrated TV presenters. According to testimonials, it has made them well again, cured.