My Sister and Other Liars by Ruth Dugdall

Author:Ruth Dugdall [Dugdall, Ruth]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781503942288
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer
Published: 2017-04-30T23:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 22

19 January

I arrive for my session at exactly nine o’clock. Clive is waiting for me in his usual chair, in front of the bay window. Outside, the sea is a line of slate under a white sky, rectangular boats sat upon it like tanks in a grey field, container ships heading for the port.

‘How’ve you been sleeping?’ he asks, apropos of nothing.

‘Fine,’ I lie. I can’t go a whole night without waking; thoughts that I banish when I’m awake seep into my unconscious brain and startle me. Mum in the kitchen with her knife, Dad in the dark room, Jena lying on the ground with her brain leaking pulp. Freud was right: we can’t suppress stuff; it finds us in the end.

‘No nightmares?’

‘Nope.’

‘Please, Sam. I’m trying to help you.’ His hands are clasped, a gesture of prayer, and I see that he wants me to be honest. He knows anyway: Birute heard me cry out last night, and came to comfort me; she will have written it up. There are no secrets in here, and everything written will be shown to the board. I abandon my pretence.

‘My dreams have been bad,’ I admit. ‘Since we started this.’

He unclasps his hands, and relaxes a little because he sees I’m not going to resist today. Makes a note in his jotter. ‘Well, I think it’s a good sign,’ he says optimistically, his preferred mood. ‘Think of your dreams as your unconscious unblocking.’

I have the image of him pouring Mr Muscle down my feeding tube to clean me out like a drain, and unexpectedly laugh aloud.

‘Tell me about the nightmare, Sam.’

I don’t like feeling he’s experimenting with me, trying different tricks to open me up. I don’t like feeling that everything I say will be used against me on 1 February.

‘I can’t remember it. Besides, you’re not Freud. Shouldn’t we be focusing on facts?’

He puts the jotter on the table and threads his hands together in his shapeless lap. I can see he’s thinking about giving me a pep talk.

‘No, I’m not a dream therapist or a psychoanalyst, or any of that fancy stuff. Just a bog-standard consultant psychiatrist.’

He’s being ironic. It would have taken years of training to get where he is, and to the other staff he’s God.

‘But I’ve also studied counselling, and psychotherapy, so despite the job title, I see myself as more of an odd-job man. For many years, I didn’t believe the standard combination of drugs and therapy worked with eating disorders. I got disillusioned, which is why I diverted from the clinical side into management. I came to believe that what worked best was a structure, tube-feeding to give the patient strength, and most of all space away from toxic family dynamics. Time away from everyday pressures, and the patient would grow out of it; that’s what I came to think. But that wasn’t working for you, so I’ve gone old-school, back to the talking cure. And you’re making such progress, I’m revising my earlier opinion that therapy doesn’t work.

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