Unlike the Heart by Nicola Redhouse

Author:Nicola Redhouse
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Queensland Press

16

In Dr Parkes’s consulting rooms all my questions of biology and evidence and brain science returned to their academic pedestals. Twice a week, I lay on his couch and recounted my dreams, said whatever, cried. Twice a week I was silent, said nothing at all. Outside those doors life was a freefall of growth – one white molar pushing up through pink gum, size 1 clothes bagged and packed away, no more swaddling, cot lowered, safety locks back on cupboard doors, a shoe grown too small. Inside, there is no way to describe what went on.

I dreamed over and over again of a city in Europe that I had been to and wanted to visit again, that was near-magical in its exotic delights: it was filled with hanging lanterns, a warm yellow light, the smell of baking bread, the smoke of cooking. It was Granada, where I had been as a young adult on my year-long backpacking trip, and Berlin, which I had only read about. It was the upcoming time in Holland. It was Paris, again, but this time with pleasure.

What was it I gained in that room? What was it in there and with Dr Parkes that could lift me from feeling there was nothing to salvage in myself, that I would always be trying to go overseas as I had as a teenager, never able to leave home? If the European city I dreamed of was the life I wished to live, autonomous, creative, resilient, adult, it beckoned closer every time I returned to Dr Parkes.

‘You’re benefiting from a good therapeutic alliance,’ Joni told me. The concept of therapeutic alliance refers to the quality of the relationship between the therapist and patient, the strength of their collaboration, and the way their goals line up for outcomes. Studies have shown that the weight of these factors determines how successful therapy will be, regardless of the method or mode of therapy itself. In Joni’s version of things, any progress I was making with Dr Parkes was because we both wanted the same thing: for me to feel better, or to know what made me feel bad. The validity of Freud’s model of the mind was irrelevant.

Was she right? Would I have made exactly the same progress, fallen into exactly the same panic, understood myself any more or less if I had gone twice a week to see a cognitive behavioural therapist, who would have given me exercises to change my unhealthy conscious thoughts, or to a counsellor, who would have offered me concrete, real-life advice about how to manage my problems? Maybe I would have made the same progress visiting the psychiatrist once in a while to report back on my feelings and tweak my medication.

Joni had in recent years undergone cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), which had amounted to a veritable familial rebellion at the time. Aaron and I had shaken our heads gravely at each other at any furtive opportunity during family gatherings when Joni had mentioned how it was going.

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