What did happen next? Okay, I’ll tell you. The black box opened, the missing pieces fell out all over the floor, my world turned upside down, I went to Venice and then I came back and the work began. I went to my therapist and said the words I’d never said, and I doubted myself completely. She asked me if I’d ever made anything else up, if I’d ever before willingly and knowingly deceived someone into believing a story that wasn’t true. I said no. She said there are a certain, unwavering flags of the survivor, and doubting your own story is one of them. I said I had a metallic taste in my mouth and my head felt like it was in a clamp. She said the body cannot lie and the metallic taste is shock. She told me to read Waking The Tiger. I was still drinking and smoking, I hadn’t realised that part where stillness is required, I was still lighting fires and washing them out. I don’t remember who I told. My ManPerson, definitely. A friend in America who rang when I was sitting in my car having just done an interview on live tv because in my literary working life in that first summer of knowing I was also promoting my debut; realising a dream for which I’d worked so hard it made me cry like I cried when I told this friend in America, the adrenaline rushing and the surreal simultaneous truth spilling out in the car park of Sky tv. In that first summer, this new reality that was terrible yet I was better for it would often come to me while I was being someone else. More often than not I would shake my head and say no, I must have made it up, it was a moment of madness, an attention seeking spat. I’d try to reassemble the old picture; a childhood of glamour and basic neglect in a tall cold house in London, a busy, absent mother, a loving, absent father, wayward, unfathomable people tasked with our care. Yet the body cannot lie and it would revolt and say No. Look. See how that picture frightens you while the other calms you down. And it was true. The other with its horror made everything settle. The overwhelming feeling of seeing it was relief. The body cannot lie. When autumn came I embarked on a self-prescribed course of medical marijuana, illegal but quietly done and designed to begin the healing of my battered nervous system; six months of careful dose. I carried on smoking and drinking. It was 2019, you can guess what’s coming, news was filtering out of a virus, a friend who’d be in Wuhan came home and was terribly ill. Christmas came and went. My therapist recommended I see a colleague trained in Somatic Experiencing. I made an appointment. In four year’s time I’d recognise the state of emotional flashback I’m in almost a hundred percent of the time, and learn to say to that child, I am always happy to see you, but back then everything was new. I was identified. I hadn’t met the parts that rise up in their varying attempts to protect her. With the somatic experiencing therapist I would. I would learn to not push her away. I am always happy to see you.
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and BRAVE!!!
More power and the greatest of guidance to you in all ways always EB. You are a brilliant writer and story teller that's very clear and certain. xxx