Category / Family and therapy

by Therapy place uk

Much love, your brother …

My younger sibling would be turning 50 this year. I wonder what would have been explored in the last half century had that sibling survived?

I think of what pleasures and pains would have been created if I had always had the youngster beneath me in the family. I wonder how my own life experience would have been altered by being the big brother?

As a four year-old, my rather large bedroom in the eaves of the house I grew up in was ready to be divided for the coming of the newest member of our household. I clearly remember how my parents began to manipulate my thinking in preparation for the commencement of the building works. It was ‘going to be fun’ having a smaller room. I’d ‘get to choose my own bedspread’ – I’d even be allowed one that represented the cockpit of a racing car, if I’d ‘just give up [my] protests, see sense and take a positive view’. Of course, being four, I didn’t really understand what was going on and I certainly didn’t understand why my older sister was getting to keep a room of her own with all of her stuff and things in it. There would be no consequence of reduced space for her. I was very resistant and, although I say it myself, rightly so!

Skip forward a few months and a different message was circulating in my life. Unseen, but not unfelt by me, my mother had lost the baby that was due in the family. Suddenly my peace was being shattered by another direct assault on my space: apparently there was someone already in existence who might be coming to share my room. The audacity! An adopted child – whatever that meant. We were now expecting a cuckoo!

As it happens, the cuckoo-child never arrived. But as time followed on I was next introduced to the idea of emigration to Australia, where we would all ‘get new lives’.

The changes seemed to mount and I really didn’t like all of this unsettled social soup that we were living in. Most noticeably, my mother’s health began to deteriorate – her body quietly rejecting something. Loss in her was transformed into chronic painful illness. By the time a full seven years had passed from the loss of the child we were finally moving – but it wasn’t across the globe. Leading up to this move, the basement of our house, which my ‘aunt’ lived in, was converted into a self-contained flat. A new bathroom was created on the ground floor, and then the three upper floors that had been my family home were split  to form yet more self-contained properties. My ‘aunt’, a casualty of this change, moved out. It was a personal loss.

On the day before the morning I started secondary school we moved to a small house away from my friends. It seemed that for seven years one loss became another. Loss transformed until it couldn’t be clearly seen what was actually missing anymore.

Imaginations and dreams gave way to decomposition as I watched my father retreat into what I would later realise was depression. My once-safe comforting mother had, by then, almost totally dissolved into pain and anger. When both my parents were in their final phases of life I dared to fully and directly bring up the loss of the youngest member of our family – but it was ‘too late’, too hidden, ‘hardly remembered’ they said. My child that had sought the adult answers continued to be denied the required explanations, but therapy helped give the events a narrative by which to understand the family loss, pain, anxiety and depression.

Having permanently returned to my home city this year, the ‘golden’ anniversary of all that loss, I allow myself to wonder what different path there might have been if that younger sibling of mine had made it though. RIP Little One.

Much love,

Your brother

Duncan challenges you to …

… reach out to a sibling whatever your shared history.

All rights reserved © Copyright Duncan E. Stafford 2022. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from the author of this post is strictly prohibited. (This article was originally published in 2019 as part of the Three Men with a Blog project.)

All character-based realisations contained in this post are either of a fictional nature or have been derived from heavily disguised, consensually given information. 

by Therapy place uk

Dying Twice

This year, and for the first time, the anniversary of my father’s death some years ago passed by without me remembering …

It had been a short drive to the nursing home my father had moved to eight days previously. My wife and I had been his primary carers for close to a decade but when, fourteen weeks earlier, he had fallen and broken his hip, his move away from his home and into the healthcare system sparked in him a serious decline. There was also a touch of guilt at the freedoms his move was affording to us.

As we neared the care home, an ambulance on an emergency call passed us. A minute later we drew up behind it and a paramedic vehicle already parked at the home. My wife said to me, ‘It’s for your father.’ I winced; I felt her to be right.

As we strode down the corridor of the second floor suite in which my father had taken residency, a member of staff addressed us: ‘Are you here to see Brian?’

‘Yes,’ we both smiled.

There was already a temporal shift occurring – odd, I thought, no one has addressed us in such a way before. A nurse blocked our path to my father’s room: ‘You’re Brian’s relatives?’ Somehow, in a moment, we were all in her office. My wife looked pale: ‘You’d better sit down Mrs Stafford.’ But there was a dreadful tension and confusion in the space. With my psychotherapist’s hat on I honed in on the emotion – there was huge anxiety being broadcast from this experienced nurse. After a few words she left us saying, ‘I’ll just check on your father’s condition.’ It hit my wife and me at the same moment and we rushed along the corridor.

Bundling into my father’s room we saw a paramedic ‘shouting’ at the prone and half naked figure: ‘Come on Brian … stay with us.’ My father’s chest heaved in physical distress as a bag covered his mouth and another medic prepared to shock him. His skin had the waxy hue and paleness I’d seen on my mother as she passed away.

In the small living space that had become my father’s whole world the paraphernalia of modern emergency support was strewn all around. My wife was first to enunciate her horror: ‘What are you doing this for?!’

For several weeks in three separate medical establishments my father, despite his communication difficulties caused by a stroke some years earlier, had made himself understood – he wanted to die. For the long years before he broke his hip my wife and I had cared for my father, it had been difficult to watch his almost daily decline; he had been a proud, principled and independent man, a teacher and an artist. At eighty, long overdue, he become a published poet. Difficult as it was to watch, we respected that this was a man fading out at his own request. And yet here we were, thrust into the most terrible of moments – a man who wanted to die being forced back into a world he no longer had an interest in. Our protestations that my father be allowed to pass away brought yet more tension into the room. The ‘shouting’ stopped, but our fourteen weeks of frustrations at the NHS care system were too much for me and my wife.

In counterpoint we made our cases aloud to the six medics about respect and civilised treatment. But apparently, my father’s DNR (do not resuscitate) wishes had not been recorded in the requisite manner. Procedure and regulation were in the way of care and welfare, and overrode my father’s desires.

For his entire adult life, my father voted for a system that respected people, treated them well; a welfare state, a national health service, free at the point of need – one of the marks of a civilised and mature society. Those entrusted to administer NHS continuing healthcare had already attempted piracy with his rights and, now, these paramedics were clearly having to apply procedure rather than the human care they so obviously wished to dispense.

My father was being denied his wish to die peacefully and with respect. This was a system seeking to revive him so that it might take him back to a hospital he had already refused to be taken to, in order that he could ‘die’ once more, probably on a trolly in a corridor in A&E.

Before all was lost, the senior paramedic took control and through several different stages and conversations that involved myself and my father’s GP the paramedics were allowed to ‘withdraw’. And then the room was quiet and my father once more calm. His beloved radio could be heard in the corner of his room and death once more began to claim his body. Peacefully and with us as comforters for his passage he was able to complete his life, with respect and dignity.

All rights reserved © Copyright Duncan E. Stafford 2022. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from the author of this post is strictly prohibited. (This article was originally published on Three men with a blog in 2018.)

by Therapy place uk

Where we live: family, home and not making assumptions

bloghomes

The situation in which people live is a common subject that comes up in therapy. There are students new to semi-independent living. There are couples going through the pains of divorce without knowing if one or other of them will be able to afford a new house or be able to keep the family home going. There are people who were brought up in care where the idea of family and home itself might be a challenge, even years after the childhood situation has been resolved.

In Cambridge and Bristol (the two cities in which I work) and, indeed, in much of the UK­, being able to afford to buy your own home is a far-off dream for many people. Home is often the fantasy; everything from situation comedy to the big-budget movies and advertising sells the home, the family, in terms of an ideal myth. Think of the Christmas hearth with burning logs, or the burgeoning table with succulent turkey and steaming hot gravy. And now, as we approach Christmas, the pressure really cranks up for the perfect home and the perfect family.

Anyone who has worked with me or read my blog knows that I keep what happens in the therapy space strictly confidential. But in the run-up to Christmas and the unbalancing pressure it can bring to home and family, I’ve asked two men if I might recount a little from recent conversations I’ve had with them for the Therapy Place Blog. They are men who, in the last few weeks, have challenged some of my automatic thinking about Christmas, home and family, and I hope they might make you pause and contemplate for a moment or two before December 25 arrives.

Simon* (54) was brought up in the care system north of Cambridge. He never knew his real parents, as he was placed in care very early in life. Growing up in care was difficult. He found himself in a series of foster placements but he never felt anyone cared for him very much. He reported being quite a naughty child. ‘I probably just wanted someone to notice me,’ he said. ‘A psychologist told me once that it’s better to get negative attention for being naughty [if you can’t get praise for positive actions] than it is to be ignored. I don’t know what it’s like these days, but when I reached my 18th birthday, that was that! I was sent to the hostel and just had to get on with life on my own.’

Through his 20s and 30s Simon was an alcoholic, but when the doctors told him he was going to die from the effects of his consumption he was able to stop permanently. Simon has never known any family, but he reports having friends he can trust.

Until 2002, Dan* (52) was the owner of his own engineering business in Bristol. ‘I grew up in a large family – two brothers, three sisters, me, my mum and dad, and my gran and pops all lived in the same house. It was pretty mad but we mostly got on. I had a lot of freedom, and from my teens I enjoyed recreational drugs. I never really liked to drink so I sort of joined in by letting go by other means. I got through tech college and set up my own business repairing mechanical things that went wrong. For a long time I had it really made when I think back on it.’

Dan pauses. His eyes tear up. ‘I repaired everything from washing machines to motorbikes. It all went wrong though. I lost my daughter, my wife and my house when I started taking heroin. Even my mum and dad refused to help me out. I stole things from them to support my habit, I was an awful person because of drugs.’

Dan has been clean for four and a half years.

‘I actually found it more difficult to give up the prescription meds than the heroin. I’d really like to get back with my family now but I understand why they can’t trust me – at least not just yet.’

So why do Simon and Dan challenge my automatic thinking about Christmas, home and family? I met Simon sitting on the pavement close to St Andrew’s Street, Cambridge; I met Dan on Prince Street Bridge, Bristol. There had been frost the night before I met each of them. Simon has spent 36 years living rough, and Dan has been sleeping out for 18 months. It’s interesting to think who we walk past in our busy lives planning for the illusive ‘perfect’ Christmas.

Joyeux Noël!

*Names and certain details have been altered in order to protect the identity of both men.