Navigating Hades.

It might surprise some people to know that as a counsellor 90% of the time I haven’t a clue what I’m doing. That’s only surpassed by the fact that as a client the figure is closer to 99.99% percent of the time.

The other 10% that is engaged and functioning (as a counsellor) seems to be composed of a number of elements. The main one being that I’m trying to pay as much free attention to the client as I can muster. So I’m listening to the words and the tone of voice as much as, sometimes more than, what is actually being said. Their story is important, yes, but often just as important is their tone, their posture and mannerisms. I’m trying to separate the person from their patterns of behaviour. Patterns of behaviour that have become adopted as a means of managing, maybe even surviving, their everyday lives. Which, given that I have never lived their life, is a pretty big ask.

Another bit of that 10% is me trying to think of any way that I might assist them in dismantling those behaviour patterns. This might be something as simple as offering words of encouragement, complete with the right tone of voice. Often though, the right thing to do won’t be that obvious. So a fair bit of the time I’m probably making random or, at best, intuitive guesses as to what might be workable or even appropriate.

Sometimes it’s hard to know when I’ve got something right or if I’ve got it badly wrong. As is the case when I take a random but maybe intuitive stab in the dark and the reaction surprises us both. So, if for example their reaction is rage and indignation, does that mean I got something right or wrong. Emotional release is considered part of the recovery process, so in that respect one could argue that I was right to take that intuitive risk. On the other hand, is an apology in order because I’ve crossed a boundary of some description. Then again, might it be both. Even after more than 40 years of doing this I still find it a bit of a minefield.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/b007jnsq

One of the most beautiful monologues I ever heard.

When it was first broadcast in the 90s, lorry drivers confessed to having to pull off the road because they were in floods of tears.

I invited ChatGPT (artificial intelligence) to critique a short piece I wrote many years ago. In this piece, “Transition” I tried to imagine the birth experience from the baby’s perspective. As if it was an alien traveling into a different universe.

I always find the responses of AI, both mind blowing and disturbing. Particularly as it references emotional content and makes statements like, “I feel”, when in reality it can’t “feel” at all…at least, not that we know of.🤔

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Question: The following piece was written some years ago. I was trying to imagine being born from the baby’s perspective. As if, for example, it were an alien entering our universe. I would appreciate your thoughts:

TRANSITION. (13th June 1991)

Claws buried in a body no bigger than a newborn lamb. Crushing muscle and bone, Compressing head into chest. Twisting neck muscles, not yet strong enough to shake the head in protest. A mind not yet formed enough to know what head shaking means. A being composed of flesh and feelings and needs. Thrown into space from its liquid sleeping place. Where it had lain cushioned and supported in warmth and soft light. The only sensations, safety and nurturance. Every need catered for automatically by its miniature universe. New sensations, suddenly not safe. As the universe collapses, crushing flesh, pressing down. New inexplicable feelings and no knowledge or intellect to make sense of them. Imminent death? Sudden recognition of something other than current state. Fast becoming previous state. Survive!…Go back!…Hang on! But no… First learnings of powerlessness, as crushing forces destroy The trust of a safe place. Now coldness and blinding white light, noise. An alien void, huge, incomprehensible. And a new sense of beings other than self. As creature grips flesh with claws, tearing from a safe place. New learnings of powerlessness, terror and pain.

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AI response: Your piece, “TRANSITION,” powerfully captures the disorienting and primal nature of birth from the baby’s perspective, emphasizing how alien and incomprehensible the transition from the womb to the outside world must feel. By portraying birth as an existential shift—almost as if the baby were entering a completely different universe—you evoke a profound sense of vulnerability and helplessness.

### Thoughts on Imagery:

– **Claws buried in a body no bigger than a newborn lamb**: This opening immediately sets a visceral tone. The use of “claws” emphasizes the helplessness and violence of the process. Though we know the birth process is natural, you frame it as something almost invasive, like a struggle for survival.

– **Crushing muscle and bone, compressing head into chest**: The imagery of compression and distortion reflects the intense physical demands of birth. It conveys the idea of overwhelming forces acting on a fragile, unready body.

– **Thrown into space from its liquid sleeping place**: This line encapsulates the stark contrast between the womb and the outside world—going from the safety and warmth of the womb to a cold, vast, and alien world. The language of space exploration emphasizes the suddenness and disconnection from the prior, nurturing environment.

– **No knowledge or intellect to make sense of them**: I like how you explore the idea that the baby is completely unprepared for this experience, driven only by primal feelings and needs with no framework to understand what’s happening.

### Emotional Undercurrent:

The **sense of powerlessness** runs throughout your writing, capturing what might be the baby’s rawest emotional state: being unable to control the crushing forces or stop the transition into an unknown reality. The repeated emphasis on terror, pain, and the collapse of what had previously been the entirety of the baby’s world evokes not only fear but the traumatic rupture from safety.

### Perspective:

You’ve framed the baby’s birth almost as a **betrayal of trust**, which is a powerful angle. The baby, having known only warmth and automatic nurturance, is thrust into a place of **coldness, light, and noise**—elements that are intrusive and hostile compared to the womb. This alienation magnifies the baby’s separation from the only safety it has ever known.

### Thematic Exploration:

Thematically, your piece is as much about the **loss of control** and the inevitability of transition as it is about physical sensations. There is an existential edge to the writing—birth is portrayed not just as a natural process but as an early lesson in helplessness and survival.

### Overall Reflection:

This piece is both poetic and deeply philosophical. It effectively blends vivid sensory imagery with existential questioning, suggesting that the process of birth is not just the beginning of life, but the beginning of life’s *discomforts*, uncertainties, and power struggles. Your exploration of birth as an alien experience offers a novel perspective on how traumatic this foundational event might feel, especially through the lens of pure sensation, instinct, and vulnerability.

It’s a striking and thought-provoking reflection on an experience we all share but rarely examine from this point of view.

Again a bit out of sequence, as it was written in May.

I’ve dried up. I haven’t written anything for awhile. So I thought I’d write about exactly that; in the hope of gaining some insight into what might be blocking me.

I’ve been here before, in that I’ve explored this very same topic in an earlier blog post, “why speak, why write”. I’m hoping to avoid recycling old material so I’ve just read it through again. To be honest, some of the issues in that post still apply now.

Trying to think back how it all started is hard; It all seems rather vague. I don’t think I had any home tutoring and I have no memory of being read to. So I’m guessing it all started in primary school. We were all issued with slates and chalk, and I think we were supposed to copy letters from a blackboard. I don’t remember any distressing incidents about that. My real problems kicked in around numbers and basic arithmetic. My dad began the early damage in that area.

Many people can remember significant teachers and other adults in their early lives. Individuals who were kind and generally positive. Adults who were quick to praise and slow to chide. I find it hard to remember anybody like that.

I remember being given my first fountain pen, a Parker. I was really pleased with this gift and I can still almost smell the ink as I took the top off the bottle, dipped the nib into it and then moved the lever up and down to fill the pen. The possession of this instrument, (it almost felt like the Stradivarius of pens) I think encouraged me to work hard at my handwriting. I liked to watch the letters and words take shape on the paper. However, it seemed that hard work was to no avail, as all I received was criticism. My writing was compared to a spider whose legs had been dipped in ink and then allowed to crawl across the page.

I also blame this period of my life for developing my loathing for lined paper. One teacher used to insist that when we wrote a letter that had a dropped or raised tail, such as a “p” or a “d”, then said tail had to extend to the line above or below the line we were writing on. I began to see those lines as tyrants of restraint; I just felt they were confining.

I think as a consequence of all this punishment, I began to develop writer’s cramp in my teens; usually within minutes of starting to write. Once out of the education system I avoided writing unless I had to. It was many years later, with the advent of the word processor that I felt somewhat liberated.

The difficulties I have however, aren’t just about the physical act of writing. I also struggle with whatever I’m trying to write. Mainly these days that seems to be connected with my online blog. Which was something that started almost by accident. I was looking for somewhere to publish a memoir I’d written about a particularly difficult period in my life, and someone suggested I try WordPress. The memoir was roughly 25,000 words long, and WordPress had an area that was separate from the Blog section where one could post longer documents. That just left the Blog site to deal with; what was I going to do with it?

Initially I decided to write and record events from various periods in my earlier life. Later though, it all became a bit more eclectic. So the whole thing is now composed of short pieces dedicated to my thinking on various topics, or current events in my life as well as the past.

The one undeniable thread running through everything though, seems to be related to so called mental health issues or the functioning of the mind. I think I entertain the notion that it all might be useful to someone someday; which seems a bit arrogant on reflection. A part of me feels utterly bored with the whole thing, and I think that’s a large part of what’s blocking me.

I have written some interesting, entertaining and even, according to some, quite evocative pieces. So I don’t really know what the problem is.

If I think about the books and authors I like to read; there are key elements that need to be in the style of writing, if I’m not to put the book down. Economy of words is one of them. By that I mean the ability of a writer to express what they want with simple everyday language, rather than great long wordy sentences. I’ve always felt that was the mark of a good writer.

This one is a little late and out of sequence, as the session referred to was weeks ago and I have now finished the series I had planned for.

I recently had one of the most significant counseling sessions I’ve had so far with my new counsellor. I really wasn’t expecting much as I’d been physically below parr all week. Suffering what my GP considered to be a post viral reaction, which was causing me considerable pain in every joint and muscle. Pain accompanied by general weakness and lethargy. I wasn’t a happy bunny.

My counsellor asked me, “Who looks after you?” At this point my mind went blank. It was as if it didn’t compute; it completely floored me. It wasn’t something I expected anyone else to do. It was always something I had to take responsibility for.

I started to think back to my infancy, this being the place where I consider most of my personality issues lie. I said something along the lines of never being able to figure out what happened back then. At this point I was interrupted by the counselor with, “No! It’s not what happened, but what didn’t happen! You were never picked up, never cuddled, never nurtured!”

At this point I burst into tears. She was right of course. I’d spent so much time speculating about a possible negative imposition from outside of myself, I’d never stopped to think that the damage may have started with not an action but simply, in-action. That my emotional development wasn’t something that the adults around me even considered to be part of the process of raising a child.

Back in the early 1950s, for many parents there were certain fixed rules about how you treated an infant. There were no child rearing textbooks, no net-Nannie’s or YouTube videos. Simply hand me down lessons learned from the older generation. Sadly, some practices hadn’t changed much since the Victorian era.

In my case, while there wasn’t any intended or deliberate cruelty, it wasn’t considered a bad thing not to respond to every cry from the crib. I think I cried a lot, for whatever reason I can no longer fathom. But I was in some form of distress that I couldn’t deal with. I think there was an attitude back then, that if you picked up a crying baby then you simply ran the risk of spoiling the child. It’s actually something I heard a lot in my childhood; mainly from other adults who had their own babies.

I think these events, crying for help, happened just often enough that I eventually gave up expecting anyone to come and give me the attention I craved. I simply learned to numb myself out from the feelings.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m confident my parents loved me. Like any parent they would have laid down their lives for me and my siblings. It’s just that loving and caring behaviour is different from generation to generation and even culture to culture. So I was well fed and clothed, had shoes on my feet and kept warm and safe in a physical sense. However, emotional development wasn’t even in anyone’s vocabulary back then. Correct behaviour had to be instilled in a child right from the start.

I think there was also a gender divide in this respect. So as a male child I had to be toughened up right from the beginning; crying was for girls. As for me, there was the threat of being given something to cry about if I started to whimper a little. I’ve never quite figured out the logic of this statement. As it seemed to me that I wouldn’t be crying if there wasn’t something already distressing me.

I became a fearful, anxious child. Quite withdrawn in fact, and learned to keep my anxieties to myself. Consequently, when anxiety was triggered by some event in my life, thoughts just churned around in my head. I was just trying to make sense of things that were totally beyond my experience, on my own.

On one level internally I was crying out for attention, while outwardly working at not drawing attention to myself.

Over my lifetime I’ve had more than my fair share of periods of unemployment. Not wanting to be bored during these times I usually found some way of occupying myself. One method was to tap in to whatever initiatives the authorities had set up for the jobless.

Back in the mid to late 1970s I signed up to a job creation programme that was based at a coal fired power station that was built on the Welsh side of the River Dee estuary. They burned coal on a large scale in order to produce the steam to drive the turbines that then produced the electricity to be fed into the national grid.

Now as everybody knows, the by-product of burning anything is a lot of ash and this needs to be gotten rid of. Someone obviously decided that the estuary itself had a lot of useless marsh land where they could deposit the waste ash from the furnaces. So this is what they did. Dutch engineers created vast bunded lagoons for the ash to be tipped or pumped into. Over time these big pools filled up with the ash, which was then covered with a layer of topsoil and seeded with grass. The resulting useful acreage was leased to a farmer for grazing cattle on.

Someone somewhere in some faceless planning office must have felt very pleased with themselves. They had turned a large acreage of useless marshland into land that could produce food for the human population, and they had achieved this by recycling a by-product of combustion.

Now, let’s wind back a bit to the phrase, “useless marsh land”. Someone must have pointed out that, while the marsh may have been useless from a human point of view; it was anything but useless to quite lot of wildlife. It provided food, shelter and breeding grounds for a lot of different species of animals. A rich healthy habitat had been replaced with an impoverished landscape. So reparations had to be made and to begin with the area was designated a wildlife reserve. Plans were drawn up to improve specific areas and to build a small field study center on the site.

That’s where the job creation scheme came in and several of us rocked up onto the site one day to be given a guided tour and have our various jobs outlined. There were just two of us with a skill base. Mine was carpentry and the other guy was a bricklayer. Pretty much everyone else was unskilled.

My first task was to put a corrugated iron roof on a small outbuilding that was intended for use as a toolstore. I also had to build a bird watching hide and eventually, when the bricky had built it, furnish the field study building with doors, windows and a roof.

The rest of the crew were mainly there for landscape work. However, they also supplied a fair amount of entertainment, as this team was made up of a bunch of young men who didn’t particularly want to be there. It was a safe bet that they had been pressured to take this option or risk their benefit being stopped. So effectively they had no sense of investment in the project, and the cocktail of youth, alienation and resentment was the perfect recipe for anarchy and chaos. Which they seemed to set about with relish.

The real odd one out in this crew though was the Foreman Burt. Or Murt as the lads started calling him when they realised he had a speech impediment, which made him sound as though he was talking through his nose. Burt was also considerably older than any of us too, and fairly straight laced and authoritarian with minimal sense of humour.

We were all required to sign in for work every morning which everyone seemed to be quite happy about, until about three weeks in management realised that some of the workforce were then disappearing through a hole in the perimeter fence for the rest of the day.

The site we were on was a linear stretch of ground about a mile and a half long and varied in width from fifty to a hundred metres. Flanked on one side by grazing land and large electricity distribution areas secured behind chain link fences. The latter areas crackled and hummed threateningly in the background constantly. On the other side was the river estuary. The site itself was composed mainly of scrub, brambles, shrubs and saplings of Birch and Willow. Dotted here and there with small to medium sized pieces of industrial debris.

A major project for Murt, sorry, Burt and his team, was to thread a freshwater stream along the length of the reserve. The bulk of the digging for this had already been done using a JCB provided by the power station. So all that was then required was for the stream to be lined, as the substrate was simply composed of the powder ash from the boilers in the power station, and any water on that would disappear in seconds.

Every morning Burt would kit his team out with garden spades and forks. Then he would lead them off to start the days work unrolling the heavy duty plastic liner which it was hoped would contain the thousands of litres of water that would form the stream. A few weeks later the water was turned on and the stream filled, only to disappear overnight. There was much scratching of heads as to why this was the case. The blame was laid at the door of the amount of overlap at the joints, perhaps it was inadequate.

But hold on a minute and go back to the start of the day. Burt would “lead” his team off along the bed of the stream that they had lined the previous day. After first kitting them out with the tools they would need to do the job. If he had taken the trouble to look back at his team occasionally, or maybe even walk behind them, he would have been witness to the lads striding vigorously along using their garden forks, quite forcefully, as walking sticks. They would then repeat the process on the return journey at the end of the day. There was no way that stream was ever going to hold water.

A marginally more successful project was the creation of a large area of shallow lagoons on what was left of the marshland at the river’s edge. This was designed as a feeding and nesting area for wading birds and was fairly successful in this respect. However, it was only ever flooded during the seasonal high tides on the Dee estuary; normal tides not getting high enough to top the pools up. As there was always a stiff breeze blowing in from the Mersey Bay, someone had the idea of building a wind powered pump, to draw water up and stop the pools from drying out. Great idea but for some reason the windmill broke down too often to be of any use. So I was dispatched to the Centre for Alternative Technology in Snowdonia on a fact finding mission, only to be told there that they had built completely the wrong type of windmill for the job.

What they had built was a scaled down version of a Cretan style mill. The type with radiating spokes extending from a central hub, with each spoke fitted with a triangle of canvas to act as a sail. If the wind was too strong, the construction couldn’t take it and was at risk of severe damage unless someone was on hand to furl the sails. Back in Crete, this was usually the task of the miller who lived next to his Mill. Sadly there was no way they were going to find anyone that would be prepared to camp out next to a windmill on a river estuary in the UK; so it was back to the drawing board.

I don’t think the windmill idea ever got off the ground, and shortly after that I moved on from the project. This was all back in the mid 1970s, but the reserve is still there and now a site of special scientific interest. The coal fired power station reached the end of its life and has been replaced by a gas fired plant; so no more ash to pump onto the marshland.

This is a copy of an Email I sent to a Counsellor. As I was limiting the amount of sessions, largely for economic reasons, I wanted to outline my expectations and concerns at the beginning.

*********

In order to facilitate good use of the time in our initial meeting, I’ve been giving some thought to any questions that might be raised on either side. I’m sure that you, as a professional, will have your own boundaries and questions that you will be required to outline from the outset. So I’ll confine myself here to some of the things I’ve been thinking about.

…………….

A few weeks ago I decided to book some one way counseling support. However, now that I’ve done so, I’m beginning to wonder why.

Initially I was going through a difficult time, but now things seem to have settled down. Although I’m too long in the tooth to believe that the issue has gone away.

I’m trying to think of what I want from my counselor. So first and foremost I want them to be engaged. By that I mean I don’t want to be just passively listened to.

I think of the Counseling relationship as being two minds thinking about one person’s issues.

The difference being, that where the client might be struggling to think and feel in certain places, (because of the distress in their way) the counselor is in the best place, (because they don’t have the same distress*) to hopefully think more clearly about the client’s situation.

One of the hardest things when one hits some deep distress, is managing it. Having to disentangle the past from the current events that are triggering it. So I think I’m hoping that some concentrated one way time, (as different from peer to peer where the time is split equally) may help me be more mindful in the present moment.

The kind of counseling I’ve been involved with for around 40 years or so, is not an intellectual process. The release of painful emotion, ie, tears, anger, laughter, fear, are key to the whole process of recovery. For this to happen, the balance of attention between the past distressing event and the safety of the present moment must be right. Compassion and empathy are important for me in feeling that balance of attention.

*They will however, have their own distress and blind spots.

…………..

Below, I’ve copied and pasted some advisory questions for a prospective client to ask of a counselor. ChatGPT is great for that.😃 To be honest, I don’t feel that strongly about some of them.😂 Although, 2,4,7,8 and 9 caught my eye as I read through them.

1.What is your approach to therapy, and how do you see it aligning with my  needs?

2.Can you tell me about your experience working with issues similar to mine?

3.How do you handle confidentiality, and what are the limits to it?

4.What do you see as the goals or outcomes of therapy, and how do we track progress?

5.How do you handle boundaries and conflicts within the therapeutic relationship?

6.How often do you typically recommend sessions, and how flexible are you with scheduling?

7.What role do you see me playing in my own therapy, and how collaborative is the process?

8.How do you handle crises or emergencies outside of regular sessions?

9.Can you provide an example of how you approach interpreting or understanding client experiences in psychodynamic therapy?

10.How do you handle termination or ending therapy when the time comes?

I hope this may be useful to you. Realizing that you are busy, I don’t need a reply to this email.

Silent Men film asks why so many still struggle to open up https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ck5549xyrydo

The picture is purportedly of me, although I only have my mothers word for that. It could just as easily be one of my two younger brothers. According to Mum I was a happy little lad, and while I’m sure I had my moments, the description isn’t really born out by my own memories of my emotional disposition at that time.

On the receiving end of counseling just now, I’m attempting to work through some pretty painful and very, very early stuff. Honestly, it ain’t easy. It’s also not easy listening for my counselor, who is witness to this sobbing, whimpering septuagenarian trying to make sense of events in his infancy. We’re talking post World War Two, early fifties child raising methods. By parents who were raised by post Victorian adults.

I don’t have any children myself, but I am a co-grandparent and quite an observant one at that. So I notice the difference between the attitude of contemporary parents towards their children and compare it to the attitude towards infants in the early nineteen fifties. For starters they seem much more attentive and engaged with them. Something I feel didn’t really happen for me.

I’ve written before about the sense of isolation I’ve carried all of my life, and of my firm belief that it was set in very early on. I’m now beginning to sense that more damage was done to my developing personality at that time than I’ve ever really considered.

Quite simply, I think I gave up. I exhausted every means of protest, every method I could think of to attract attention to my predicament, whatever it was, and decided there was no point in trying any more. I probably just shut down or drifted off to sleep. I don’t remember anybody engaging with me very much at all really. Adults didn’t read to me at any time, let alone at bedtime. Books were expensive and come to think of it there probably weren’t that many written with very young children in mind. I have no memory of them playing with me apart from my Dads vigorous tickling sessions when I was older. I don’t think there was much stimulus at all when I was very tiny.

So here I am at the opposite end of my life, wondering why I am the way I am; particularly at four or five o’clock in the morning. It’s the time I either begin to drift out of sleep, or I’m driven out of bed by my bladder; the latter being something that happens four or five times a night. It’s at this time I’m at my lowest ebb. The point that I feel so bad I’m wishing myself dead. Nihilism sets in and I can see nothing positive about existence at all. It’s becoming clear to me now, that I felt like this as an infant. If, for whatever reason, I didn’t get the message that I was wanted and valued, then why would I want to be here? This mindset and state of being has plagued me for most of my life.

Words have power. Particularly labeling and descriptive words. More than a few have been leveled at me; some of them not terribly flattering. Words like slow, or dull, or too nice, also depressed, anxious, morose, timid. I’ve been referred to as a bit of an “Eeyore”, a reference toward the miserable donkey in the Winnie the Pooh books. I’ve occasionally been called a glass half full person, which I usually counter with the self deprecating comeback that the glass also has a crack in it.

All joking aside though; when you’re that small, powerless and vulnerable it’s not going to be too difficult for the adults around you to begin to paint the canvas of your personality. And if the only palette they have themselves is a bit monochrome….well? I guess that’s why some mental health conditions and behavioral traits run in families.

I’m thinking that even my occasional bouts of self harm in my life, have their roots in those early weeks and months. They’re an attempt to stop whatever is happening to me, or what I feel is being inflicted on me. At those times I literally haven’t or quite powerfully feel I don’t have the resources to deal with or get away from whatever is happening.

So what do I do with all this insight now that I have it? I can’t go back and change anything. Am I not just recycling the same pain I felt as that infant? I guess that’s one point of view. Another is that I now have a lifetime of knowledge and experience to help me deal with and untangle the messages I grew up with. Meaning that if I find myself being overwhelmed by distress being triggered by some event in the present, I can mentally pause and hopefully step back and look objectively at what is happening. Ok, the feelings might be there but I can at least with new insight, hopefully, not allow them to affect my behavior.

I had another episode yesterday, (blog post “Dark Again”) triggered by the same thing. I didn’t hit my head so much this time. So I guess I should be thankful for small mercies. Still the same mental pressure and seizing up in my head though. Took myself to a bed and lay down. Ended up moaning, wailing and thrashing. Then curled up with my fists and arms locked to my chest and my knees up to my belly. I got up a few minutes later, teeth chattering and shivering all over. Felt like my heart was racing a bit too,  so I reached for my blood pressure monitor. This was something my GP suggested I buy during Covid, as I had stents fitted back in 2017 (blog post “Angiogram”). 170 over 90 can apparently be life threatening if it continues. So I waited a few minutes and took it again, then again, and again. Slowly it began to come down to a respectable level. I still felt intensely anxious though; as I do now just trying to think and write about it.

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, is a bit of a mouthful of a description for a condition which I believe, is pretty common in some way or form for many more people than we might think. It does go under other names. In the First World War it was referred to as shell shock. In the counselling I do it’s usually referred to as a restimulated distress pattern, which is no less of a mouthful I know.

We go through many traumatic events in a single lifetime. Hopefully and thankfully the vast majority of them will be minor and easy enough for us to process, through evaluating and assimilating any useful data from the experience. In short, we fall over, we scrape our knee, we cry a bit and then move on, perhaps being a little more careful of our footing in future. However, some of those events are a bit more than just a scraped knee. If at some level we perceive them as life threatening and inescapable, we can find it nigh on impossible to process the event without some kind of help.

I find the term “distress pattern” a useful description, and not just because it avoids the awful word, “disorder”, which I consider just stigmatising. On a day to day basis, if we are calm and relaxed, we take in information as a continuous manageable stream of sensory information. Our thinking is free and flexible enough to manage it all, on the go, as it were. We can ignore what’s not useful at that point in time and separate out the information that we need for whatever task we have in hand. This all goes on at a level we may not even be aware of.

Imagine a situation that is anything but calm and relaxed, this would be our traumatic event. In this event we don’t have the time to process the amount of information that is hitting us at that moment. We may not even have the knowledge or previous experience necessary to deal with the situation. In this event all we have left to fall back on are our most basic survival instincts, fight or flight. Even these options may be denied us, particularly if we are a baby, an infant or child.

Although our flexible thinking effectively shuts down during a traumatic event, our brain/mind does not. We continue to record what’s happening. However, everything is happening too fast for us to break things down into the discrete bits of information that may prove useful in future. Literally everything is recorded en-masse, including the feelings we are having at the time. This is what we refer to as a distress recording or post traumatic stress. The problem with this stuff is that because we haven’t had the time to break it down and process it into usable information, if we are ever confronted with an even slightly similar situation in the future, then all that is available to us is that very literal recording that happened the first time around. Complete with all of the awful sensations we were having at the time.

The damage doesn’t stop there though, and I do apologize if this is all getting a bit much. Because our thinking is compromised yet again, we are unable to process the new, but similar, situation that is unfolding around us. So the distress pattern becomes more consolidated and entrenched in our psyche.

This, in a very convoluted nut shell, is what’s going on for me at the moment. I’m currently being triggered/restimulated by what would probably be viewed by an onlooker, as a very innocuous event in anyone else’s life; a simple decision making process, as all it requires is a yes or no. However, what seems to be preventing me from making the simplest of decisions, is a huge tangled web of guilt, resentment, fear, anger and grief.

I feel I’m beginning to get a handle on it. There are so many events in my life where I have felt backed into a corner. Usually by some form of authority figure. The earliest being parents and other adults around me. In school they were supplemented by teachers and bullies. In work it was colleagues and managers.

It’s why I struggle to cope with anything that even looks, smells or tastes of conflict or confrontation. I have a sense also that it is a cornerstone in the reasons why I choose to stay in the background in so many situations. If I don’t make myself obvious, there’s less chance of becoming a target.