Thanks, I'll Take the Chair
A personal essay from a couple of years ago about therapy, trauma and never giving up on writing.
Thanks, I’ll Take the Chair
For a brief period of time, the walk to my therapist’s house was the only simple pleasure left in life. I was thirty, newly divorced, skint, and living (like the student I’d never been) in a Crouch End flatshare with two classical musicians and a very witty man who worked for Penguin Books. Without these staunch allies – met the day I crashed out of the marital home – I might have gone under. Because since separating from my wife – and the demise of the band I’d spent my twenties trying to make a success – life’s mailman had delivered nothing but blues. Everything was broken. I was deeply depressed, occasionally suicidal, and worried enough to ask my GP for help.
She referred me at once to a local therapist. I hadn’t asked for a strict Freudian, but that’s what I got – a shock for someone who’d never so much as read a self-help book, and had always medicated their moods with drugs or alcohol. Art was also something I’d found healing in the past, but somehow art had begun to fail me recently. I needed something more urgent, more direct. I needed The Talking Cure. I ended up talking for nearly two years, and the ten-minute evening stroll to my therapist’s place, along a reliably empty North London residential street, always did me good. It cleared my mind for the eviscerating hour ahead in the blank amber of the consultation room.
During the autumn months, the long curve of that street afforded a scintillating view of London, across a stretch of parkland which was, in fact, a reservoir. Being a Crouch End reservoir, it was discreetly covered in well-cut grass, and appeared to the casual observer to be a private games field or pricey sports annexe. From the elevation of the road, the blinking pyramidal tip of Canary Wharf Tower was always visible: a comforting sight – a beacon of hope, of human activity in the dead night of the soul I inhabited back then. Strange to get abstract emotions from an Aviation Warning Light, but I felt it every time. A piercing flash every six seconds, followed by a strange sensation of gratitude. A measure of how ill I was, perhaps.
Once at my therapist’s, the ‘work’, as she called it, would begin. Even though the consultation room was on the ground floor of a solid family house, there was something of the courtesan’s chamber about it. A small room at the back, with a bright downstairs loo adjacent; a gentleman’s umbrella rack outside the door. This, coupled with handing over banknotes at the end of the session, sealed the impression of a furtive, sexual transaction. Of course, most of my therapist’s wealthy clients didn’t open their wallets and deal in cash – they paid by direct debit or transfer. I was a referral, and thus paying a drastically reduced rate. And anyway, my bank had closed my account the previous month.
At the first session, I had been given the option of reclining on the chaise-longue – like all the clichéd representations of therapy in films – or sitting in the armchair.
‘Thanks,’ I said uncertainly. ‘I’ll take the chair . . .’
I didn’t want to feel vulnerable, lying flat, unable to meet the eyes of my interlocutor.
But, as I would come to understand, this was the Freudian method. You weren’t supposed to see your therapist and there was no real interlocution. You talked; you were regressed to childhood; you were made to feel your pain all over again.
I settled into the comfy upholstery, wearing my uniform of black leather jacket and black jeans, only to feel immediate social diminishment. It was a middle-class parlour, really, with soft lamps bearing saffron shades. Outside, a well-kept corner of garden could be seen: decking, urns, wisteria, crimson carnations. Inside, the only furniture aside from the chaise-longue and the two chairs was a large mahogany bookshelf holding many heavy academic tomes and papers. It was like the set of One Foot in the Grave. How could my therapist ever have any understanding of the journey that had led me to her on a rainy Tuesday night?
On commencing, there was an unsettling five minutes silence while I steadied myself and looked at the carpet. Finally, she said,
‘So . . . How can I be of help?’
Where, oh where, to begin?
At the beginning, of course. Though she never said, ‘Tell me about your childhood’, it was implicit from the start.
Over the coming weeks, I told her everything, and she listened inscrutably, saying a maximum of six or seven sentences per session. Highly unnerving, and a reaction I never really got used to. They were costly sentences – for the spirit, and for the wallet. I told her my twin brother and I were from a working-class/ lower-middle-class background, and had grown up in a faceless Hertfordshire commuter town. My mother, the child of Irish immigrants, had grown up in Barnsley in impoverished conditions. She’d trained to be a midwife, and later became an NHS nurse, a job she did for over forty years. My father, by contrast, had grown up in leafy Pinner; a grammar-school boy who managed to get into Oxford on a scholarship. But his mother had been a dinner lady, and his father a pen-pushing Civil Servant, and he’d never felt at home in the ocean of privilege that was (and is) an Oxbridge college.
Our parents split up when we were six, and my mother’s new partner (eventually our stepfather) entered our lives. A trainee nurse, he was an imposing, aggressive and paradoxically camp Yorkshireman. Over the fourteen years he was with us, he was consistently physically and emotionally abusive (and, on the one occasion I can remember, sexually abusive) towards me and my brother. He would nearly always mete out the violence behind our mother’s back. Once, he kicked us both up the stairs to bed after a wedding in Yorkshire. You could always be sure of the back of his hand if you ‘lipped’ him. He was often absent from the house – where he went, we never knew. By the time we were eleven and starting the first year at the local single-sex State comp, we were used to his threatening presence – it was just the sea we swam in. The fact that most of our friends had parents who stayed together, and treated them with kindness and respect, should have made our situation seem stranger than it did. By then we had moved to a Wimpy estate on the outskirts of town. My mother was by now a district nurse, and bringing us up largely on her own, my father having moved to France for work. A fish fingers and chips childhood, with a side-order of chaos and fear. When my mother eventually married our hated stepfather, we were fifteen. It was a marriage doomed to failure.
The effect of this upbringing was that my brother and I quickly started making plans to escape the domestic situation and the prison of small-town life. We did this by forming a band and taking lots of drugs. I left school at sixteen and went to work in Iceland (the supermarket, not the country), while my brother stayed at school in order to keep a foot in the door of the house my father still kept in town, since living with our stepfather was intolerable. I ended up doing a couple of A-levels (one at home, one at Stevenage College), but any thought of university – the real ticket out – evaporated in the chaos. We’d had the customary brilliant English teacher who’d encouraged us to write fiction, and pushed us to apply for Cambridge, which we did. We passed the interview but deliberately flunked the entrance exam – I think my brother might have even been tripping.
Looking back, I can see this act of self-sabotage was a reaction to extreme mental disturbance. I was certainly deeply – if not clinically – depressed; spending days paralysed by a black lethargy; a stew of self-hate and anxiety churning in the pit of my stomach. It was only the promise of moving to London and starting afresh that pulled me out of the nosedive. I found a job in a steel-castings factory, rehearsed my band five nights a week, and moved out into a bedsit alone. Our friends had all flown the coop to University. My mother’s second marriage had imploded, and she would soon return to Yorkshire. There was nothing to stay for, and only one thing to do: get out of town.
London was hard. To arrive at nineteen with no money or contacts was, in retrospect, suicidal. But we managed, somehow – after five long years of bedsits and the dole – to break through. From working on building sites and as a cycle courier when I first arrived, I became a key-holder at a studio and learnt recording engineering. We found a drummer and a manager for our band, and wrote a set of songs that would take us to the next level. Writing was a constant and vital form of therapy at the time: poetry and lyrics, mainly, as I found I couldn’t write fiction with the same ease as I had at fifteen. Our new songs confronted our years of trauma head-on – a lesson for later writing: don’t shilly-shally, say what has to be said most urgently first. As Britpop raged around us, it felt cathartic to be singing these dark songs in front of increasingly large audiences. It was a form of primal screaming. Instead of internalising, I directed my anger outwards, and not just on stage (where I’d once skated a Fender telecaster into the monitors after a bad gig), but in the studio too. I could go there to record any time of day or night and express myself into a microphone. Too bad we’re not allowed to scream, Prince once sang. But I could, and I did.
In the end, we made an album and four singles, toured the UK and Europe with Echobelly, and sold 20,000 records worldwide. We were reviewed by Charles Shaar Murray. Richey Manic was a fan, as was Brian Wilson, apparently. A modest achievement, by some standards, but I felt too much had been sacrificed to get there. My education, for a start. Looking back, I can see that the band was too important for us. It meant everything. We were never in it for the craic, for fame or groupies, or with an eye on future media careers. It was an artistic project that had to succeed – there was no safety net, financial or otherwise. When we split after a ragged European tour, with our manager deserting us to Australia to have kids with her partner, it felt like we’d failed. There was a pressing lack of money or any real measure of success. I medicated this perceived failure by getting married at twenty-seven, which turned out to be catastrophic. We were both too young, and my wife was physically abusive towards me. I’d somehow recreated the domestic situation of my childhood in an adult relationship. We lasted three years, by which time I was pushing thirty and working on Camden Market to make ends meet. When I found myself living in the shared Crouch End flat, the intense depression of my adolescence returned, and I began walking every Tuesday night to the house of a strict Freudian in order to talk about it.
It’s comforting to think that many of these experiences found their way, many years later, into my debut novel, which followed the adventures of a failed suicidal poet named Byron Easy (a novel which became one of the most unsuccessful and least talked-about books of the early twenty-first century). It was, by and large, a comic take on events. Art had performed its necessary alchemy; it had made order out of chaos, stylised it, smoothed down the rough edges. But, as Jeanette Winterson writes in her memoir, Why Be Happy When you Can Be Normal?, what really happened before art made its transformation was ‘too painful. I could not survive it’. Art had provided the ‘cover version’, the story she could live with. By the time I started therapy, I was done with the primal scream method, of living daily with raw emotion, and wanted to investigate the past more cerebrally.
The problem was, the Freudian method requires you go back and experience that raw emotion again. It’s clear now that fiction should always have been the way forward – in writerly terms, I should have been penning Herzog or Ariel, rather than trying to recreate the Plastic Ono Band album. My therapist had different ideas, however. She told me I should stop writing altogether, and even throw away the notebooks in which I wrote copiously day after day. This self-absorption was unhealthy, a perpetuation of the pain, she said. The only place for self-confrontation was the safe space of her room. It’s part of the persuasiveness of therapy that I even considered doing this. Maybe she was right, I thought. Maybe I was just extending the anguish by writing confessionally. I can see now this was part of her training, but her didacticism was infuriating. It seemed to demonstrate that she had no real understanding of me. Writing was (and is) as necessary as breathing. I could understand she had no real empathy with someone who’d spent years as a musician in an indie band, but it was infuriating and baffling that she had little conception of, or respect for, the artistic process.
Though her method wasn’t ideal (in retrospect, I would have been better off having standard Psychodynamic therapy, or CBT), I never lost belief in the validity of the therapeutic process. Talking about my upbringing allowed me to come to terms with what I saw as my father’s desertion of the family, and start talking to him again after fifteen years. I could see that my stepfather’s aggression had been passed on to me – like all abusers bequeath their shit. Throwing guitars across stages and yelling into microphones had been a way of ridding myself of it. Now I needed the more nuanced method offered by fiction. While his physical abuse had been easy to cleanse, the emotional and sexual abuse was harder to confront. It took therapy to make me realise how profoundly damaging this had been; how undermining, how much of a violation. How it had resulted in years of self-disgust and suicidal impulses. When re-experiencing these emotions in the consultation room, I often wished I’d taken the chaise-longue instead of the chair. My therapist made me realise I’d internalised more of the traumatic events than I’d previously thought, despite the emancipation provided by music.
The net result was that I became kinder on myself; drank less, stopped doing drugs, learnt to drive, and, later, gave up smoking (the hardest crutch to kick away). I also decided to go back into education. I was 31 before I went to University, and it required an Access course to get there. I spent three years at UCL reading English as a mature student in perhaps the best English department in the world at the time. I was doing it the hard way, perhaps, and it was certainly difficult doing acting gigs and playing bars to pay my way through. But it was a necessary step in my rehabilitation. And all the while, I was working hard on my first novel, the other wholly necessary thing.
By the time I took my last walk along the reservoir to my therapist’s house I was almost thirty-three. She had agreed that our sessions were becoming less and less fruitful, and suggested I try someone else. The leave-taking is a moment all therapists are trained for, and they have to make the suggestion carefully. I was going out with a movement therapist at the time, so I knew how much thought, care and supervision goes into seeing each client. If the analysand is suicidal, the code of conduct prevents them making the suggestion of changing therapist at all. But I was no longer suicidal, just eager to start what I thought of as my new life. And anyway, I could barely afford to keep going. All her clients belonged to a different world. I often wondered whether these captains of industry, these millionaire actors, really needed three nights a week intensely reconstructing shattered childhoods for eighty quid a session. Or was it just a giant ego-trip for them; a chance to sound off at unlimited length on subjects their wives had long since vetoed as too raw or too boring? I was on a discount rate, something she never let me forget. When I complained about money, she would always say: ‘If you’re serious about our work, you should be doing everything in your power to pay for it. Have you considered getting another job? In a restaurant, maybe. You could do the washing up, or wait tables.’ Part of this was deliberate provocation, I knew – one of her dextrous methods to make me reflect on how much I needed therapy. But I felt it had come to a natural conclusion. Writing fiction would be my therapy from now on.
In the end, I was glad I took the chair and not the couch. I can see that the decision allowed me to walk the middle-ground I badly needed at time. Therapy was wholly necessary – I might not be here without it. But art was essential for dealing with trauma too. Its alchemy of chaos – its redemption of lost time – its creation of something beautiful where before there was only ugliness, violation and pain, made it eternally valid, whether it reached an audience or not. And yes, I’ve still got my notebooks.
(This essay was originally published in the Dodo Ink anthology, Trauma: Essays on Art and Mental Health (2021). Available to buy here)