Anti-pop consortium: dead in motion
Monday morning. This I hate.
All around me the city drags itself alive, dusts itself down after the weekend, squints in the mirror and pulls a face, dons a suit and grumbles its way to work. By rights this should be my lot, but I am not one of the socially acceptable, the acceptably contributory. I am part of the army of the incapacitated. Monday mornings smell to me of shame and the humiliation of having given up. After years of keeping the bits of my mind in one basket through a multi-cloured universe of bizarre behaviour, I've finally admitted defeat. Well, hell, it was always a losing battle really; my doctors knew it, my therapists knew it, my friends knew it. Seems that I was the only one that didn't, holding in there like a soap-doctor performing CPR on my functionality long after it was feasible, having to be dragged off: "it's time now, just let her go".
So the process of DBT begins. Dialectical behavioural therapy, designed and masterminded in America by Marsha Linehan, the first treatment for BPD which accepts us as struggling human beings, not, as we are usually characterised, manipulative, because frankly a borderline is too incapable of interpreting the behaviour of others to manipulate them. Too shit to manipulate. It is also the first treatment programme to really have faith iin our capacity to heal. For years, decades, ever since Freud first identified a group of women existing in the hinterlands between hysteria and psychosis, exhibitiing features of both, and coined the term "borderline" for us, we have been consisdered hopeless. Unresponsive, untreatable, exhausting to work with. The dross of the in-patient wards, coming back and back, eaach time a bit more anger and a few more scars. Linehan recognised us for what we are- desperate and unhappy people doing our best to live in a world we don't understand.
The mind of the borderline builds itself wrong. A childhood of abuse, neglect, amotional deprivation, the "invalidating environment" and "emotional enmeshment" so beloved of the text books leads to a warped and stunted growth. Essentially, you learn to build between yourself and the world a shell of protective normality. As a child, you seem precocious; serious, grown-up. As an adult you often seem functional and people have trouble reconciling this with your obvious bonkersness. This shell is fragile, though, and beneath it your mind remains largely unformed. Your coneption of self iis almost non-existant, and your capacity to distinguish between what is in here and what is out there is faulty at best. The world is a constant shifting mess of abandonment, need, incomprehensible pain. A constant shuttling between painful opposites.
DBT aims to break down that shell and build your mind again from scratch, like an adult remaking a child's mangled toy. First you have to give up the pretence of functionality which has sustained and tortured you for so long. Then you sttart to learn the skills which other people were taught from birth. The process of regrowing your personality is painful and humiliating. It also has its moments of humour.
Tuesday afternoon, mindfulness group. A bunch of embarassed and largely socially inept women attempt to learn how to control their attention; we ought to have learned this one between the ages of two and seven, but better late than never. We do exercises- breathing exercises, mindful sitting, eating a raisin slowly and with absolute focus. Mindful walking. When you walk mindfully you walk slowly, focused entirely on the feeling of the ground under your feet, the way you legs bend and streach. You try and feel the breath circulating your body. Locomotion becomes a bizarre and halting process, as a person engrossed in the feel of carpet under shoe pauses and wiggles their toes. You look lobotomised. You just do. Try it; you too will look like you are missing a chunk from your frontal lobe.
The room we practice in is small. Too small for eight women to mindfully walk simultaneously, and it doesn't really work doing it one an a time; you feel a bit of a prat when people are watching you and that breaks the concentration. Someone has the bright idea of going outside. And so at four thirty on a greyy and blustery tuesday afternoon eight mad women fan out across the lawn outside the mental hospital and start to walk slowly in a kind of buggered impression of Brownian motion. I have truly never seen a tableau more reminiscent of the popular stereotype of the mentally ill. We walk slowly and haltiingly, hunched over and looking at our feet. It is obvious that none of us are going anywhere particular. A nurse, actually unconnected to us, stands by the main entrance smoking a fag, watching us without concern. It could be a short story by Beckett. It could be a play abut the sadness of lunacy. It cold be a Daily Mail reader's wet dream about the faliure of care in the community.
Afterwards, we drink tea and eat biscuits. We try to avoid eye-contact, true, because that is what borderlines do and anyway, we're all a little bit embarassed. Every now and then someone sniggers. You can be sure as hell that we all get the joke.
All around me the city drags itself alive, dusts itself down after the weekend, squints in the mirror and pulls a face, dons a suit and grumbles its way to work. By rights this should be my lot, but I am not one of the socially acceptable, the acceptably contributory. I am part of the army of the incapacitated. Monday mornings smell to me of shame and the humiliation of having given up. After years of keeping the bits of my mind in one basket through a multi-cloured universe of bizarre behaviour, I've finally admitted defeat. Well, hell, it was always a losing battle really; my doctors knew it, my therapists knew it, my friends knew it. Seems that I was the only one that didn't, holding in there like a soap-doctor performing CPR on my functionality long after it was feasible, having to be dragged off: "it's time now, just let her go".
So the process of DBT begins. Dialectical behavioural therapy, designed and masterminded in America by Marsha Linehan, the first treatment for BPD which accepts us as struggling human beings, not, as we are usually characterised, manipulative, because frankly a borderline is too incapable of interpreting the behaviour of others to manipulate them. Too shit to manipulate. It is also the first treatment programme to really have faith iin our capacity to heal. For years, decades, ever since Freud first identified a group of women existing in the hinterlands between hysteria and psychosis, exhibitiing features of both, and coined the term "borderline" for us, we have been consisdered hopeless. Unresponsive, untreatable, exhausting to work with. The dross of the in-patient wards, coming back and back, eaach time a bit more anger and a few more scars. Linehan recognised us for what we are- desperate and unhappy people doing our best to live in a world we don't understand.
The mind of the borderline builds itself wrong. A childhood of abuse, neglect, amotional deprivation, the "invalidating environment" and "emotional enmeshment" so beloved of the text books leads to a warped and stunted growth. Essentially, you learn to build between yourself and the world a shell of protective normality. As a child, you seem precocious; serious, grown-up. As an adult you often seem functional and people have trouble reconciling this with your obvious bonkersness. This shell is fragile, though, and beneath it your mind remains largely unformed. Your coneption of self iis almost non-existant, and your capacity to distinguish between what is in here and what is out there is faulty at best. The world is a constant shifting mess of abandonment, need, incomprehensible pain. A constant shuttling between painful opposites.
DBT aims to break down that shell and build your mind again from scratch, like an adult remaking a child's mangled toy. First you have to give up the pretence of functionality which has sustained and tortured you for so long. Then you sttart to learn the skills which other people were taught from birth. The process of regrowing your personality is painful and humiliating. It also has its moments of humour.
Tuesday afternoon, mindfulness group. A bunch of embarassed and largely socially inept women attempt to learn how to control their attention; we ought to have learned this one between the ages of two and seven, but better late than never. We do exercises- breathing exercises, mindful sitting, eating a raisin slowly and with absolute focus. Mindful walking. When you walk mindfully you walk slowly, focused entirely on the feeling of the ground under your feet, the way you legs bend and streach. You try and feel the breath circulating your body. Locomotion becomes a bizarre and halting process, as a person engrossed in the feel of carpet under shoe pauses and wiggles their toes. You look lobotomised. You just do. Try it; you too will look like you are missing a chunk from your frontal lobe.
The room we practice in is small. Too small for eight women to mindfully walk simultaneously, and it doesn't really work doing it one an a time; you feel a bit of a prat when people are watching you and that breaks the concentration. Someone has the bright idea of going outside. And so at four thirty on a greyy and blustery tuesday afternoon eight mad women fan out across the lawn outside the mental hospital and start to walk slowly in a kind of buggered impression of Brownian motion. I have truly never seen a tableau more reminiscent of the popular stereotype of the mentally ill. We walk slowly and haltiingly, hunched over and looking at our feet. It is obvious that none of us are going anywhere particular. A nurse, actually unconnected to us, stands by the main entrance smoking a fag, watching us without concern. It could be a short story by Beckett. It could be a play abut the sadness of lunacy. It cold be a Daily Mail reader's wet dream about the faliure of care in the community.
Afterwards, we drink tea and eat biscuits. We try to avoid eye-contact, true, because that is what borderlines do and anyway, we're all a little bit embarassed. Every now and then someone sniggers. You can be sure as hell that we all get the joke.
posted by tattybluetrees at 3:37 AM
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