When my therapist bursts out laughing, I question “how does that help?” and if it happens more than once in a session I ask for a discount.
Although I think she wanted me on tablets, or in a padded cell it was my wife’s idea for me to try therapy. Like most boomers, and the silent majority, who were our parents, I was sceptical. I saw it as psycho-babble nonsense for losers who couldn’t hack it. But when I was down to less than two hours sleep a night and waking up every night in nightmares, I had to try something.
One of my good mates who was CEO of a global firm had spent two months in residential psychological care, so he had blazed the trail. The first in my peer group to do so. He made a good recovery. I saw him when he was at peak nutter. In fact, I drove 150 miles on Boxing day 2014 to help him. I took him to the Priory for an emergency assessment and was pretty unimpressed when they handed him back to me. “Can’t you section him or something” I said. They looked back awkwardly. I expect they wanted to but did not have a spare cell. About four weeks later they took him in. Lack of sleep plus other stuff had pushed him over. Nine years on and he is no madder than anyone else I know. They cured him. There was hope. My clinical assessment was stress and depression, and the recommendation was tablets and therapy. I went for straight therapy. Nothing to lose. But crucially, I decided to give it max. No holding back. Do your best. Believe in it. Be honest. Don’t be embarrassed. You don’t even know the person you will be admitting your weaknesses and frailties to.
As a consumer (patient) my experience has been very positive. It worked! It helped me change the way I see things and led to me better ways of managing the thinking that caused problems and forced me to change things in my work environment that were unhealthy.
The early sessions were hard. Describing your worries, pressures, yourself, and your opinion of yourself in an honest way is very emotionally disturbing. Emotion? You have to do emotion? That thing that toxic masculinity forbids. Yes, I am afraid so.
We’ve all supplied other people with help, but to pick back through my own troubles, especially the dark memories of years in struggling start-ups, where work translated into long periods of stress and depression, was very hard. There were years of hanging by a thread when I needed to keep up appearances for employees, suppliers, family friends. They were horrible memories. Then we had, “Why did you choose that hard life?”. I considered it. Yes. Why? Was I trying to prove something? Showing people who looked down on me that I was as good as them? When I was successful I had a massive fear that I would lose it all and experienced constant impostor syndrome. This is now v trendy but I’ve lived my whole adult life with it thinking everyone laughs behind my back and that I am about to get chucked out. Mad isn’t it?, but the emotions are real, I confess there were tears when I looked back in pity on myself. What a warped view I had. But this is about laughs. Laughs? Sure, there are laughs in therapy. The biggest therapy laugh was about golf. Why I play that game I do not know. It’s exactly the wrong place for someone with “impostor syndrome”. My form is almost entirely dependent on who is looking. If I think anyone is looking I play badly. Ideally, I would play on my own private course in the dark wearing a mask. On the other hand, it’s exactly the right place to confront impostor syndrome. Anyway, we had been working on building up a more balanced sense of entitlement. That means convincing myself to see the world more rationally and believe I truly belong there. I used reasoning and distraction techniques to manage the inner voice that poisons with doubt and derision. I told my therapist I had taken a brave step and accepted an invite to play in a charity golf tournament, real golf, real rules, proper players, packed course.
She was impressed and asked how it went.
I said “The secretary of the Golf Club was in our party of four which added to the tension. During the front nine, I was just about hanging on. It was patchy. Hard to relax. I was spraying golf balls around, playing from the rough, missing 6-inch putts (there are no gimmes in a competition). But the wheels totally fell off on the ninth. I suffered the public humiliation of the walk of shame. I had to walk back to the tee to play a second ball as we couldn’t find my first. This held up everyone. They were all nice, but I could feel waves of contempt.
My therapist asked “How did you feel?”
“How do you think I felt?” I said.
“I ask the questions”, she said.
I said “Okay then, pretty shit like anyone would”
She said “Then what?”
I continued “The 10th tee was in front of the clubhouse. It was a sunny day. Lots of people were outside having lunch on the paito. In front of them players were using the practice putting green. They all had a great view of us teeing off from the 10th tee. My three partners went before me, as you tee off in the order of how you finished the last hole. That’s another golf rule of shame. I was last. I kept teeing off last. Everyone watching knew that I was the worst player in our group, so they would be waiting for me to mess it up”.
“How do you know that everyone was watching?”
I said “okay maybe not everyone but I bet it was most of them. Anyway, I really concentrated and did the routine that we agreed on. I relaxed. I closed my eyes. I put all external thoughts outside of my mind and when I opened my eyes, I just looked down at the ball and took my swing. But about one inch into my backswing, the doubts came rushing back and tried to take control of my arms. I fought it the whole way down the swing until I hit the ball”.
She said eagerly “And, was it okay?”
“No” I said “Of course it wasn’t Okay. If it was okay, I wouldn’t be talking about it would I? It went about fifty yards like a rocket but only about a foot off the ground, and then it hit a tree and came flying back at us so I shouted out “duck!” and hit the deck. My playing partners, who had not been paying attention, wondered what I was doing laying on the ground until a ball whizzed past about waist height still going at full speed. It was terrifying. And then – it hit another tree and turned towards the clubhouse and the players practising on the putting green. They scattered but, miraculously, it missed everyone and came to rest in the car park. Everyone looked up, wondering where the hell it came from. It wasn’t obviously me, so I could have got away with it, but I faced up and walked through the practice putters with my head held high to where the ball was waiting and picked it up (it was out of bounds and therefore unplayable) and walked back with it to take my shot again. This time I assure you everyone was definitely looking at me”.
At this point in my traumatic recall, I was becoming emotionally exhausted and paused to look at the therapist. Instead of seeing the knotted brow and nodding head of somebody reliving a patient’s depths of despair, and showing sympathy and sharing the pain, she was bent over double, splitting her sides in silent laughter. I said “I don’t think much of that. How unprofessional. Probably even unethical”. I asked if there was a form I could fill in to report her and said, “I’ve never been so insulted in my life. How do you know I am not so effected I won’t commit suicide?” I was milking it for laughs. Turning a serious situation into a joke is a well-known psychological diversion which we got onto later, when she calmed back down, but not before we both agreed it was a classic comedy moment and it was ok to laugh. In fact it had been the cause of a lot of laughter after golf in the bar and is still frequently mentioned in awe by people who witnessed it. Far from being a pariah I am now a legend at Lyme Regis golf club.
“What happened with your next shot?” she said when things had died down. That set us both off again.
“Good question”. I said. “It went okay. In fact, after that my game improved noticeably from utter total crap to normal crap” so in the end it wasn’t a bad day.
