Even as an adult, I still get absurdly, inappropriately, upset when people are late. I feel, in every sense of the word, abandoned; a feeling that expresses itself in blind panic and the threat of imminent tears—an absurd response in an adult. While, these days, I am better able to reason with myself when somebody isn’t on time and temper my response, I have not conquered it entirely. A vague distress will linger with me for days.
It is what neuroscientists call ‘emotional memory’. Researchers at Duke University Center for Cognitive Neuroscience have found evidence for a self-reinforcing memory loop, in which the brain’s emotional centre triggers the memory centre, which in turn further enhances activity in the memory centre. In a scientific paper published about the findings, they explained that, ‘an emotional cue could trigger recall of the event, which would then loop back to a re-experiencing of the event. Or, remembering the event may trigger the emotional reaction associated with the event, which in turn could trigger more intense recall.’
It is the first study of its kind using neuroimaging in human brains and provides clear evidence that the brain’s emotional centre, called the amygdala, interacts with memory-related brain regions during the formation of emotional memories. They are hoping that their insights can contribute to an understanding of the role that the neural mechanisms underlying emotional memory formation play in post-traumatic stress disorder and depression.
So, perhaps I have a faulty trigger in my memory system. One like this: Every time I go to an airport, I feel an overwhelming urge to cry and feel a terrible, black sense of despair. It makes no sense. I am an adult. I love adventures and exploring new places and different cultures. I love foreignness and strangeness, which make me feel immediately at home, perhaps for obvious reasons. I love the smell of camel dung and urine, the dusty heat and noise of African villages, the car horns and chaos of Indian cities.
I even love flying, enjoy the ritual of airports, the sharply acrid smell of aeroplane fuel, the shimmer of runway lights, the no-man’s land of transit lounges. In my earlier career, first as a fashion writer on Vogue and the Observer and then as the editor of Elle, I was forever jumping on and off planes to Milan, Paris and New York and other far-flung destinations. It was work that I loved; these were trips I loved to take. Yet, even when I am going to a place that I long to see, I always feel a dreadful sense of despair. My throat closes until I can hardly speak or breathe and I feel perpetually close to tears.
It was only when I tracked it back that I understood it has to do with an old, but, for me, terrible, reality. It means the end of the school holidays, leaving the light and warmth of Africa or Arabia and my parents’ house and flying back to England, and that cold, dark and unlovely boarding school I hated so much.
And while I still feel tearful at an airport, I have lost that awful sense of dread. I am able to reason with myself until the feeling goes. It’s harder than it sounds. I have to literally remind myself that I am no longer a child, perpetually being moved from country to country, school to school, house to house; a situation over which I had no power and in which I had no choice.
But when I feel that feeling again it is, I now know, a feeling pretty much like depression.
13
What We Resist Persists
Sometimes I lie awake at night and think, ‘Where have I gone wrong?’ Then a voice says to me, ‘This is going to take more than one night.’
Charles M. Schulz
Two years after we returned to England, my mother went out to Oman to join my father and I was sent to an English boarding school where 750 girls were treated much as I imagine a farmer might treat battery hens, fed and housed with cold, humourless efficiency and with only one end product in mind: our education.
Just like those battery hens, we were weighed as soon as the new term started and four weeks before it ended. This was presumably because it was the beginning of awareness of anorexia but the treatment for weight loss was punishing in itself.
One term I did lose far too much weight. I was a teenager, growing fast and the food was so vile as to be inedible. I was also desperately unhappy. When they weighed me towards the end of the term, I was far too thin. I couldn’t possibly be sent home in that state. What would my parents say? So, for a week, I was forced to take all my meals in the sanatorium where they could watch me. If you refused to eat, they simply held your nose, shovelled the food into your mouth and held it shut so you were forced to swallow. I soon learned to eat.
The sanatorium, anyway, was not a place to linger. It was certainly not a place in which to be ill or seek comfort. It was staffed by a matron who took any illness as a personal affront and dealt with it as briskly and sharply as possible. She did not, either, believe that a girl was sick unless her thermometer told her so and I am still in the habit of believing that I cannot possibly be ill unless I have a high temperature to prove it. And the temperature of depression is, of course, low.
I was sufficiently clever to do well, at least in exam results, and sufficiently bright to cloak inward disrespect with an outward cloak of obedience so was rarely in trouble. As for the rest, I was good at sport, captain of this and that, and good, too, at making myself liked. Popularity, as I learned very early in life, is a useful defence against bullying, of which there was a great deal. The bullying left no marks; or at least not of a physical nature. Teenage girls are mistresses of the most insidious forms of emotional manipulation and torture, the worst of which is the practice known as ‘Being Sent to Coventry.’
Coventry, rather like depression, is a cold, unforgiving place; lonely, silent and dead. When you are sent to Coventry, nobody speaks to you or even acknowledges you. It is as if you don’t exist, as if you are dead. It can go on for hours, or days, or weeks. For me, it went on for two weeks, which, in a boarding school from which there is no escape and not even a moment’s respite, is the most extraordinary torture.
To this day, I have no idea why. The girl who led the offensive would give no reason. Perhaps she simply did not like me. You can say that it does not matter, that it is long gone. But it left its marks, the most serious of which is my mistrust of human nature and its unpredictabilities.
I said nothing to anyone. There was nobody to complain to, other than the teaching staff, who dealt with bullies with heavy-handed interference. My situation, anyway, was too isolated and vulnerable. My parents were thousands of miles away, so my letters home took at least five days to arrive and then another five for an answer to appear.
In any case a member of staff checked our letters, presumably for signs of unhappiness that could then be addressed. Instead, the practice served only to make us more than ever secretive and contained. What stiff, formal little letters they must have been. As for the telephone, long-distance calls were events attached only to births and deaths. It was the days when you still had to book a call, to somewhere as foreign as Oman, three hours in advance.
I did once protest about something that was bothering me in a letter smuggled past the checking system but succeeded only in upsetting my parents so badly that I never tried it again.
I remember opening the reply from my mother, remember exactly where I was standing, on the path just outside the dining room. I remember the smell of fried bacon and burnt toast. We had just finished breakfast. Letters were always handed out after breakfast. For a child at boarding school whose parents live abroad, that is the best day of the interminable week. The letter from home day.
In the letter, my mother said that I had upset my father terribly. He had opened the letter while she was away. She wrote that I should never distress him like that again, that it was not fair.
I read the letter and then I threw it in the bushes by the side of the path. And I thought, I’m on my own.
It sounds dramatic and, to my childish mind, it was. I was thirteen but it was as if I made an absolute decision that I had to do everything alone, that I could rely only on myself. It has taken me years to unlearn that lesson. Emotion
al self-sufficiency might be useful in some ways but it is useless when it comes to good relationships.
My mother cannot remember the letter, or writing it. She felt accused when, in the worst of my depression and in trying to untangle some of the reasons for my misery, I asked her about it. She grew angry and tearful.
‘That never happened,’ she said. ‘Show me the letter. If I wrote a letter like that, then show it to me.’
And that’s the trouble with trying to untangle the possible reasons for pain. Emotional pain is subjective, and so is memory. Did it happen? Is it real? Did I make it up? It is real to me and perhaps that’s all that matters. For many years, I did not ask for help because I expected my pleas to be rejected. This was most apparent when I was struggling with depression and the final descent into breakdown. I could not, rather than would not, ask for help. When confronted by any severe emotional difficulty, I shut up and shut down.
It was not just that one incident, of course, but an accumulation across my childhood and is simply a detail in a greater picture of a family in which difficult feelings are never discussed. I doubt we’re alone in this. If my experience in a psychiatric unit, which actively encourages all and every expression of emotion, and seeing the struggle people have in saying how they really feel is anything to go by (and I think it is) then I know my family is in no way unique.
After five long years, I finally found the courage to ask my parents to take me away from that boarding school and let me go to a kinder place; which they did, to a sixth-form college where I also boarded and where I was very happy. It was also where I met Sarah, who has been one of the great gifts that life has given me.
So it was not boarding school itself that I hated so much as that particular school. Nor is being sent away to boarding school a cause of depression—many people are perfectly happy. For others, it may be a precipitating factor. However, one therapist told me that out of her clients, eighty per cent were sent away to boarding schools. All bear quite severe emotional scars.
There was an added reason for my silence. I always felt I should be grateful. My childhood in all its various countries was, in many ways, a privileged existence. We lived in large and often beautiful houses. We had servants. We travelled the world. The ex-patriot life can be astonishingly glamorous although it can, equally, be wretched. Nobody mentions the wretchedness.
And there’s another reason to feel grateful. I was privileged enough to be given an expensive, private education paid for by my father’s company. We could not have afforded it otherwise. And if we were sent away to boarding school, it was for practical reasons. There were no decent schools in the countries where we lived. By sending us away to school, my parents were only doing what was best for us. Besides, what were the options?
All this was drummed into me during my childhood and I understood the reasons to be grateful. It’s just I never actually felt them. I just felt wretched and could not say so, or why.
Before I had a breakdown, I used to believe that misery was something to be left in the past, that there was nothing to be gained from going back over it. Which is why, from the minute I escaped that school, I swore I would never have any contact with it again. And I never have, despite the letters that periodically arrive from people I knew there, who track me down at whatever newspaper or magazine my name happens to appear in. As I have no good memories to share, I prefer not to say anything at all. The letters go in the bin; the emails go unanswered. Not out of malice nor even any memory of any of those girls I was at school with; I can scarcely remember their names or their faces. I recall that most were pleasant and friendly. I have no argument with them. It is the emotions that I associate with them that I find impossible to tolerate.
As for the school, I never mention the place, never acknowledge I even know of it, let alone spent five years there. Just one memory is apt to make me miserable so, until severe depression forced me to confront my demons, I kept my face turned resolutely to the future and believed I had succeeded in wiping most of that time from my mind. ‘It happened,’ I thought. ‘It’s over. Deal with it.’
Which would have been fine and is the way that most people deal with past unhappiness except that for me, well into my thirties, even the words boarding school were apt to send me into immediate distress. When Jonathan said, simply in passing, that one day Molly might like to go to boarding school, I dissolved in such a storm of tears that he was at first astonished, and then deeply worried.
Once I had calmed down I simply said that I hated my school and wanted no more mention of boarding schools. I didn’t dwell on my tears or even think about them and I suspect that had I not become so severely depressed, I would never have gone in for any self-examination.
To be brutally honest, were it not for the insistent clamour that sometimes still rages at my throat or the dark and desperate moods that periodically drag me down I would, even after endless hours of therapy (during which I became adept at leading therapists down every dark alley except the one that troubled me the most: that school) happily leave the memories of that place well alone.
Which is, of course, entirely self-defeating. I am the one paying for therapy. I am the one for whose benefit it is performed so such contrariness is simple self-sabotage. It was not the therapists I was leading down dark alleys, but myself.
This is why therapy is so terribly difficult. Or, at least, good therapy. Good therapy is incredibly hard work. In order to truly engage with it, you first have to truly engage with yourself. But why bother? Only because, at some point in our lives, unresolved pain is likely to kneecap us and at times and in ways that we least expect.
It was the psychotherapist Carl Rogers who first used the line, ‘what we resist, will persist’. You can keep difficult emotions at bay for a very long time, even for a lifetime but for most of us, at some point in our lives, they will demand to be heard. Usually, it takes some cataclysmic event—the breakdown of a relationship, the death of someone we love, a career that goes suddenly, brutally wrong—for us to feel our own pain.
We might have felt it, a little, before. It manifests itself in all sorts of ways from headaches to inexplicable back pain, to stomach ulcers or drinking too much, to getting blasted on drugs, eating too much or too little. Every addiction is a manifestation of emotional distress. Nobody becomes an alcoholic or a binge eater because they love alcohol or food, they simply use excess alcohol or food to dull the pain that they are unable to express in words.
Finally, when everything else fails to soothe us, when the drink or the food or the shopping or the sex stop making us feel better, then come the tears and overwhelming despair, anxiety or depression. Most of this, of course, is unconscious. What does seem to be true is that patterns of destructive or negative thinking stop us from recovering from depression. And staying recovered. If those behaviours or patterns of thought have their roots in childhood, or the family, then they must be worth examining and challenging.
14
The Elephant in the Room
Everybody knows how to raise children, except the people who have them.
P. J. O’Rourke
Our family depression can, I think, be traced to my mother and before her, I suspect, to her father, my grandfather. Had I not been searching for the genetic roots of my depression, as well as that of my brothers, I would never have come across a type of depression known as dysthymia, a chronic condition that can wreak havoc on a person’s life and happiness.
There are the diagnostic criteria, as set out by the World Health Organisation:
A chronic depression of mood which does not currently fulfil the criteria for recurrent depressive disorder. The balance between phases of mild depression and periods of comparative normality is very variable. Sufferers usually have periods of days or weeks when they describe themselves as well, but most of the time (often for months at a time) they feel tired and depressed; everything is an effort and nothing is enjoyed. They brood and complain, sleep badly and feel inadequ
ate, but are usually able to cope with the basic demands of everyday life.
It is an almost precise portrait of my mother. Her discontent has always been obvious in a tightly wound tension, constant insomnia and an apparently insurmountable fatigue. The demands of her life sometimes seem too much for her to bear, and I remember spending much of those two years when I was nine and we lived together in England, fetching and carrying for her, worrying about her and generally trying to cheer her up.
The effects of dysthymia are not confined to the sufferer; as with every depressive disorder, it affects all those around it. As a family, we have always tiptoed around my mother as if treading on eggshells. If she is happy, the atmosphere is good and the rest of the family is happy. If she is unhappy, we all suffer.
My mother is funny, lively, extremely clever and intensely social. When she is well it is almost impossible to recognise the creature that she can become and who, anyway, she tends to keep confined to the privacy of her own home. Few of her friends would recognise this portrait of her but the presence of those outside her immediate family seems to act on her like a tonic and she is able to throw off her mood, at least for a couple of hours. She is best, always, in company.
Shoot the Damn Dog: A Memoir of Depression Page 15