How I Rescued My Brain Read online

  After she moved into a share house, I made a vegetable garden for her. I sheet-mulched the lawn with disused student-information booklets, added manure and straw, and then planted it out. This gave her a season’s worth of herbs and vegetables at her doorstep.

  Without noticing at first, we started whispering our dreams to each other — dreams that included both of us. We agreed that we’d like to live in the country outside of a major city, on acreage, and grow fruit and vegetables. I would like to be near the sea. We both wanted children.

  After seeing me meditate one morning on one of our camping trips, Anna said that she’d fallen in love with me.

  A year or so after cooking that first batch of baba ghanoush, she looked at me and said, ‘We have these big dreams, Dave, but where are we going with this? Are we really going to do these things we talk about together?’

  I had no answer. Although I imagined a future with her, I’d been happy cruising along. When we’d first met, I told her that I wasn’t interested in short-term relationships; I was looking for a marriage partner. This had almost put her off. But now I had got cold feet, and I didn’t know why. Maybe it was because if I committed to something or someone, I felt compelled to see it through. If I were to commit to Anna, it meant that we would grow old together.

  During that day and night, her question filtered through my mind. By the next morning, I hadn’t come up with any reasons as to why we shouldn’t get married — after all, I really did love her. Standing at the sink in my share house, washing the morning’s dishes while she dried them, soap bubbles foaming up my arms, I asked her to marry me. She said yes.

  A few months later, her extended family gathered at her grandparents’ home in Sydney. It was the first time I would meet them; an opportunity for Anna to show off her fiancé. Her grandparents, post-war migrants, had made good through hard work, thrift, and family togetherness.

  Anna had warned me: ‘The family can be a bit overwhelming.’ As we sat around in the dining area off the kitchen, I was both shell-shocked and fascinated by the noise. The conversation was like a rugby maul — each person diving in over the top of another. There were no pauses, but somehow it worked. Yet I couldn’t see how to enter the scrum.

  After a while, Anna’s grandmother touched an index finger to her temple, and, loud enough to be heard by everyone, said, ‘What’s wrong with him? He don’t speak. Is he dumb?’

  All eyes turned towards me; this was my moment. ‘I like to think before I speak,’ I said, straight-faced. Everyone, Anna’s grandmother included, exploded with good-natured laughter, as if it was one of the funniest one-liners they’d heard. An aunty squawked, ‘You gotta get in when you can, love.’ I joined in the laughter. The ice had been broken.

  Over the next few years, I grew to like Anna’s warm, inclusive family very much, and her grandmother especially.

  Sixteen years after the marriage proposal at the kitchen sink, we had achieved many of the dreams we’d talked about then: the house (although not on acreage) in a community-minded town by the coast, three healthy daughters, a thriving food garden, financial security, and a great network of friends. And our relationship had matured: over the years, the companionship and trust had increased, and we had become best friends. But romance and the sex that once went with it had died. This irked Anna greatly.

  ‘Something’s got to change,’ Anna had told me recently, her tone conveying an unthinkable ultimatum.

  I had sympathy for her. We’d lain in our matrimonial bed for the last two years like warmed-up corpses: a kiss goodnight, sometimes brief spooning, before rolling over onto our respective sides. Progressively, I had come to reject her advances. Sometimes I heard her cry softly in the dark. I didn’t know what to do then.

  So now we were going to see a relationship therapist. I had initiated the sessions; I didn’t know what else to do. I was confounded by my loss of sexual interest in her. Four years earlier, I had attended a professional workshop given by a sex therapist. She had said that the most common sexual problem for long-term couples was discrepancy in desire, which existed in almost all marriages, and the couple’s unpreparedness for this. I had completed a self-evaluation, which revealed my sexual desire was at least average. So what was wrong with me?

  Loss of libido was a classic symptom of depression, and sure, this had been at play when I’d first started seeing Wayne. But as my depression had begun to lift, I could see that it was more than this. Reluctantly, I was forced to admit that the idea of sex had become repulsive. I was still physically attracted to women, but sex was somehow loathsome.

  I was hoping that I could find some answers and we could get back to where we had once been. I had stopped the sessions with Wayne: we couldn’t afford both.

  Today was our first session. The therapist, a sympathetic, youthful-looking woman, asked each of us: ‘Are you committed to staying in the marriage for six months while we work on this?’

  We both agreed.

  I was glad we had time. Anna was not suddenly going to get up and go — that was my worst fear.

  Anna wanted to get straight to fixing up our sex life, but the therapist was insistent. ‘You have to clear away resentments from the past if you’re going to approach sex afresh.’ She had us describe what it was that attracted us to each other in the early days. It was like opening a photograph album and reminiscing.

  Then we got on to our grievances. Anna told the therapist that she did not feel loved, that she felt abandoned by me — I had rejected her too many times. I was plagued by resentment towards Anna, feeling that I carried the financial load and that we were not always pulling together as a team. I saw all the things about her that annoyed me. But I also knew that she couldn’t be only these things. I still loved her. Yet my irritability, my stress, was filtering my view of her. I was looking through a prism of negative distortion, but how distorted was my view? I couldn’t tell anymore.

  IT TOOK SEVERAL sessions to wade through the hurt and resentments we both had. I didn’t know how this process was for Anna, but for me it was liberating. I felt more comfortable talking about our relationship with the therapist present. She came in if one of us was accusatory; it was like we had an umpire. We were made to stay in the present and on track.

  Anna said that our sex life wasn’t right even in the beginning; I thought it had only been a problem since she was pregnant with our first child and we’d relocated from Canberra to Sydney. This was when I was focused on building my first private practice, and the strain of this, along with the grief I was plunged into after my mother’s unexpected death, had had an impact on our sex life. I remembered when we had left Sydney, eight years before, to go on a road trip around Australia. We had camped for three months, and along the way my sexual desire had resurfaced. Our lovemaking had flowed again, even though we had a two-year-old, Ashley, with us. I’d noticed before how work and life stress could soak up my energy for sex and romance, but with these absent, things had been different.

  The therapist gave us instructions on how to reconnect at home, such as catching up at the end of the day to debrief over a glass of wine, and having daily hugs. She also gave us intimacy exercises: non-sexual stroking and massage. When we tried these the next day, there were two versions of me: one that was relieved to be touching and reconnecting with this woman whose body had become a stranger to me; the other hovering close to nausea and wanting to run out of the room. It wasn’t anything Anna was doing; it was me.

  Some years earlier, I’d come across a newspaper article about the work of James Pennebaker, a professor of psychology at the University of Texas. It said that he’d conducted a research study in which college students were asked to write, for twenty minutes a day over four consecutive days, about a traumatic event or an emotional upheaval in their lives. In particular, they were asked to write about their thoughts and feelings on it. After the four days, the stude
nts’ immune function was shown to be boosted, an effect that lasted for six weeks afterwards. Six months on, their visits to the doctor had halved. Not only had the writing exercise helped them to achieve some emotional resolution of a difficult experience, the article said, but it had also improved their physical health.

  After reading Pennebaker’s article, I had suggested his writing exercise to some of my clients, as a method for moving past difficult emotions. But I’d never done it myself. Perhaps I could use writing to shift my negative feelings towards Anna?

  I reacquainted myself with Pennebaker’s approach. Keeping secrets, he said, was bad for your health. And writing about difficult personal events helped to create meaning out of the experiences: a process of psychological reorganisation that linked cause and effect.

  His instructions were simple. Write about a past or present emotional upheaval and how you feel about it now. Write for yourself — not for anyone to read it. Don’t censor what you write. Don’t worry about spelling and grammar. Do it for 15–20 minutes over 3–4 days.

  So I decided to try it — or at least a version of it. Over the next few weeks, whenever I boiled with annoyance or anger towards Anna, I went away and wrote whatever came to mind. I didn’t do it, as Pennebaker suggested, over several consecutive days; it was only at those times when I thought I might explode. There were often weeks between writing sessions. But each time it felt as if I was a pressure valve releasing steam. In some ways, it was better than face-to-face therapy; I could reveal any secret, write anything: no one was going to read it.

  LATER THAT YEAR, an opportunity came up for Anna to travel to Europe with her mother, meeting up with her sister in London. She would also see her grandmother’s homeland, which I knew was one of her life dreams. I agreed that she should go, and she set off on a six-week trip.

  This interval gave me a chance to explore with the therapist my confused attitude to sex. I had a theory on this. In our next session, I told her that I’d had a lot of exposure to sexual offenders and victims in my work, and thought that there may be a connection.

  She asked me more about this. I explained that I had first met paedophiles, serial rapists, and psychopaths while working as a psychologist in the New South Wales prison system in the mid-1980s, when I was in my twenties. I told her of my work with adult victims of sexual abuse and assault during my career, and my work in the last five years for the state’s Children’s Court, seeing children in awful circumstances. Yes, she said, this exposure could be affecting how I felt about sex.

  That evening, with the memories fresh in my mind, my skin prickled with a sticky feeling and I was nauseous: the same sensations I got when I thought of lovemaking. The familiar swell of panic rose. During the night, the violent nightmares resurfaced.

  And I remembered the woman who had been abducted, raped, and murdered by three men, one of whom I’d met while I was working in the prison system.

  After eighteen months of working at Grafton Correctional Centre, I had been transferred to another jail in the state. It was a large, maximum-security prison sitting in the middle of a field, resembling a castle, with ramparts of razor wire. To get to my office in the innermost section, where I had direct access to the inmates, I needed to walk through eleven doors and gates, and all of these, except for my office door, had to be unlocked by a prison officer. It took fifteen minutes to walk a distance of 200 metres.

  The arrest of the suspects in this particular case had led to intense media attention. In my first month on the job, I found myself sitting at a small table opposite a frightened young man, not all that much younger than me. I had been told he was ‘not coping’, that he and his family had been getting death threats, and that I was to help him in whatever way I could.

  We were seated in the protection unit, sitting on characterless plastic chairs. Inmates sent to this unit were there for protection from the wider prison population because of the nature of their crimes, which made them a target. Child molesters, known as ‘rock spiders’, were usually placed ‘on protection’. Although this man was awaiting trial, there was no doubt among the prison officers I spoke to that he was guilty.

  Grafton, a country jail, had been like a retirement home for many of the ‘lifers’: inmates who would see out their days in incarceration. I’d read through their files — as horrendous as some of their acts of violence were, the crimes had been committed well in the past; their intensity was muted by time. But now, I was sitting across the table from a man who had, I believed, recently committed a horrific murder. His mop of dark hair, slight body, prison-green shorts, and tan-coloured shirt gave him the appearance of a toughened schoolboy rather than a killer. But if the reports were correct, he was ruthless and vicious.

  The room we were in had no window, flooded instead by fluorescent light that made everything look washed out. A door banged off to my right, where the nearest prison officer was stationed. The air tasted of confinement, and every so often I caught the unsettling whiff of sweat and testosterone. I saw the man’s two accomplices through the glass wall behind him. One was prowling up and down in the small, sparse dining area. He stopped, turned, and sent a cold stare in my direction. I wasn’t sure if he was trying to intimidate me or if that was how he always acted. The other was scribbling diligently in an exercise book at the table, as though doing his homework. I was told later that he was making notes for his trial.

  The young man sitting in front of me was sniffling. As he spoke, I listened quietly and eased back in my seat, trying to present a picture of professional calm.

  In the almost two years that I had been working in the prison system, I had been struck by how sad most of the inmates’ lives had been. Repeatedly, I had asked myself, If I had been brought up in the same circumstances as these men, would I have made some similar choices? They elicited my empathy but also a feeling of hopelessness: how much would my puny input help when they were so damaged? And yet, I tried to be one caring human being in the system.

  But in this case, I was having difficulty. I could never imagine making the same choice as the man sitting in front of me. Swelling within me was a torrent of disgust. I worried that I might vomit. I reminded myself of my role here: not to judge; to see the person before me, and help if I could. I pushed down the welling repulsion. I willed myself to lean forward, to bring my face closer to his, and even to feel sympathy for him. Sweat glistened on his upper lip.

  After this meeting, we had one more. For confidentiality reasons I cannot say what we spoke about in either of them, but he seemed helped by having someone neutral to talk to. After that, he no longer requested my presence; he was swept away in daily court appearances and meetings with his lawyer. I was relieved.

  After a year at the jail, the small world of the prison had expanded in my mind, while the world outside had become small. When I would meet new people ‘on the outside’, I’d ask myself, What do they want from me? Can I trust them? Mentally, I’d become an inmate.

  I resigned and moved to my old hometown, where I commenced my PhD, and eventually I took a position in Canberra, where I met Anna. I seemed to forget the prison experiences, and things were good for a while. But after Anna and I relocated to Sydney, I worked for a consultancy that offered psychological debriefing in workplaces after critical incidents such as robberies, assaults, and industrial accidents. I was thrust into situations that reminded me again of how much harm was caused by criminals, and in particular, it seemed to me, by men. One day, I said to one of the consultancy partners, ‘You know, Helen, most of the abuse and violence in the world is caused by men. I’m ashamed to be male.’

  There was silence on the other end of the line: was she taken aback by what I’d said, or was she in agreement? Then she replied, ‘We can only change what we can,’ and gave me the details of the new call-out she had for me.

  Now I wondered: was I carrying within me a web of memories of male aggres
sion? Had it become welded, for me, onto the sex act? Was sex a form of aggression, a violation? Was this what I carried into lovemaking?

  But my criminal work wasn’t the only thing I connected with my distaste for sex. I thought back to my role in carrying out family reports for the Children’s Court. Children were taken from their parents when there was abuse or neglect, or when the parents were not coping because of substance dependence, mental illness, or intellectual delay. I often assessed children of similar ages to mine.

  I remembered the woman who’d had seven children to two partners. All had been removed from her care, and it was the eighth child — a baby to a third partner — whose future the court was considering when I was asked to submit an assessment. I had stated in my report that I doubted she was capable of looking after her child adequately. It wasn’t long after the court’s determination that the baby be permanently removed from her care that she and her partner came up to me in a local cafe. Given the circumstances, I was surprised when they beamed, greeting me like a friend. ‘Janice is pregnant,’ her partner said. ‘We’re so happy.’

  I thought, Another child that will be pushed into the world with the hope, at best, of being parented by a caring stranger. Look at what sex does.

  MAKING THIS LINK between my professional exposure and my attitude to sex gave me greater perspective. I could see now that the source of the disgust was old memories, body memories. I could gain release from them, some separation. A healing could begin. I’d made an important discovery.

  When Anna returned, we seemed to be nicer towards each other. I told her about my discovery in regard to sex. I had something I could work with. She digested the news quietly.

  Slowly, over the next few weeks, my sexual desire started to come back. Time apart from Anna, having our resentments out in the open, and making sense of my relationship to sex had all helped. Something I’d thought had been lost had been found. Over the coming weeks I made tentative advances — a hug, a kiss — not to be sexual, but to express a newfound affection.