How I Rescued My Brain (9 page)

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 aggression? 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.

One day I came across Anna standing by the sink, peeling potatoes. The late-afternoon sun was squeezing through the blinds, illuminating the stainless-steel benchtop. From the pile to her right, she picked up a potato covered in dirt, rinsed it, and began to peel it with a paring knife. The peeled potato was dropped into a pot of water. These actions were repeated. She was quick: her arms rotated back and forth.

I came up behind her. My groin folded around her warm bottom. My chest pressed against the points of her busy shoulder blades. I rested my hands on the delicious curve of her waist.

Yet I was met with a stiff back. Her arms didn't stop. I nuzzled my face into her musk-scented neck, but her head tilted away. She didn't say anything, her shoulder blades still pumping like pistons. Uncertain, I hovered longer; maybe my loving presence would soften her.

‘David, I need to get these on the stove,' she said, turning to face me, her hands gripping the U-shaped handles of the pot.

‘Why don't you want me around you?' I asked.

‘I can't compete with the pictures in your head,' she said, referring to the images I had told her plagued me when thinking of sex.

‘But those are gone now,' I replied impulsively. They hadn't gone, but they were loosening their grip; I had hope. What else could I offer her? I was throwing out a lifeline to stop her from drifting away.

‘It's too late, Dave. I don't have any desire for you anymore. I've switched off. Too much has happened.'

I had no reply. I walked away. I was confused by the lack of softness in her face, her steely logic, the sense of a cause lost. Now I knew what the thud of rejection felt like, what Anna must've felt.

6

SOON AFTER ANNA'S
rebuff, I woke one morning with the thought,
Is there a psychological insurance policy for life shocks
—
a policy that could restore me to how I was before the shock?
What if the things largely outside my control, the ones that had knocked me around — the post-traumatic stress, Anna's feelings towards me, Dad's death — could wash over me and I could bounce back, instead of being left reeling?

In cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT), unhelpful thoughts are challenged and changed to realistic, more useful ones: a process called cognitive reappraisal. Wayne had challenged my view of myself as a failure, encouraging me to see that I could embark upon a new career phase that drew upon my past experience. He had also helped me identify behaviours undermining my recovery. His instruction for me to stop watching television news had been aimed at reducing the amount of human suffering and vicarious trauma I was exposed to: a way of lessening my fight-or-flight response and, consequently, improving my sleeping patterns.

In my PhD research years before, I had developed an extension of the CBT approach to assist musicians in managing their performance anxiety — stage fright — so that they could replicate what they'd done in rehearsal in front of an audience. I'd consulted sports psychologists at the National Institute of Sport in Canberra about performance under pressure, read the latest research on mental rehearsal, and developed imagery techniques for performing artists. It had worked: most performers in my study felt calmer in performance, their heart rates were lower than prior to training, and they made fewer mistakes. I'd even written a self-help book, which ended up being published in four countries, describing the strategies I'd developed. It had been used in university courses, and I'd been asked to deliver many workshops to performance groups. And I'd drawn on the same strategies later on, when asked to help medical doctors taking their oral exams, nervous truck drivers taking their driving tests, and anxious public speakers. I used the approach myself when speaking in front of large audiences, and in radio or television interviews. So the idea of changing the mind with a training technique, such as mental rehearsal, wasn't new to me.

But despite the sessions with Wayne, I could still be overcome by tsunami-sized emotions. The cognitive defences I propped up would be washed away like fences in a flood. I needed a new approach.

When I was nineteen, I had taken a course on transcendental meditation (TM) with my mother, and for the next three years I meditated twice daily for twenty minutes, and did some of the more advanced TM training. But as the years went by and I got busier, my regular practice lapsed. Now my thoughts turned towards meditation again: could I change my mind in some way — maintain an inner calm as I had learnt to do before with TM, but in the face of my challenging circumstances?

And not only meditation: mindfulness was a concept being mentioned more and more often in the mainstream psychology literature I read and at the professional gatherings I attended. I didn't fully understand it, but I did know that it was a different approach from CBT.

I had read a professional book on the subject,
Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy for Depression
by Zindel Segal, Mark Williams, and John Teasdale, the year before I'd closed my practice. They had devised a program to stop depression sufferers from experiencing repeated episodes: relapse prevention. They drew on research which suggested that while cognitive therapy was great for helping people get out of a single depressive episode — especially in conjunction with medication — it was less successful for people with long-term recurrences of depression, especially when these were due to difficult, unchanging personal circumstances.

Their eight-week group program drew on the work of Doctor Jon Kabat-Zinn and the mindfulness-based stress-reduction program he had developed at the University of Massachusetts Medical School years before. I'd come across Kabat-Zinn's approach for sufferers of chronic medical conditions briefly during my postgraduate training, when we'd had a seminar on the management of chronic pain. Kabat-Zinn offered a way for patients to live more contentedly. The aim was not to change their condition, but to change their relationship to it: to change their psychological response to physical pain.

Segal and his colleagues found that their program reduced the likelihood of those who'd had three or more previous depressive episodes falling back into depression by 50 per cent, when compared with the conventional relapse-prevention methods of medication and CBT. This was a startling result.

I pulled
Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy for Depression
off my bookshelf and re-read it, to find out what was different about their approach. They viewed conventional CBT as a ‘doing' approach; it tried to problem-solve a way out of depression, anxiety, or other undesirable states of mind. But if the circumstances triggering the depression or anxiety were unchanging and outside the sufferer's control, how could one problem-solve their way out of that? Mindfulness, on the other hand, was a ‘being' approach, they said; it encouraged acceptance, a sense of equanimity in the midst of a person's circumstances. This took the pressure off having to change disturbing thoughts, uncomfortable feelings, or unpleasant bodily sensations such as pain. The mindfulness tradition came out of Buddhism.

I had used their approach with one client who had a history of depression, not long before I'd closed my practice. He was concerned that he might have a relapse. I told him that it was a new approach — he'd tried everything else — and he agreed to give it a go. We started with the raisin exercise: you take a raisin in your hand and look at it as if it is the first time you've ever seen such a thing. You rub it between your fingers to get the texture and weight of it. You smell it. Then, you put it in your mouth and eat it slowly, taking in every sensation about it that you can. I gave him the instructions for the breathing meditation described in the book. He did the exercises and the homework for four weeks, but then he had to discontinue his sessions due to personal circumstances. He liked the exercises, but unfortunately it was too early to observe how much of a difference they made.

I had also attended a daylong workshop given by a clinical psychologist who spoke of mindfulness in the context of treating anxiety and depression. He had found it useful personally, saying that he'd always had a very active mind and needed something to slow it down. He had invited a PhD student, and she spoke of her research with adolescents who had obsessive–compulsive disorder. She'd trained her subjects to see their obsessive thoughts as the flotsam and jetsam of the mind — things they didn't need to place importance on or act upon. She found that her adolescents reduced the ritualistic behaviours they usually engaged in to relieve their anxiety.

The clinical psychologist gave us each a CD with his recording of a breathing meditation, a walking meditation, and a body scan. The walking meditation encouraged the focus of attention to the feet's contact with the ground, while the body scan cast the mind's eye to the sensations in every part of the body. I tried these out at home, but his brief teaching of the mindfulness concept and the exercises didn't do much for me. Still, I remained excited about its possibilities, and had always meant to look into it further.

Could mindfulness and meditation — whatever the connection between them was — be the insurance policy I was looking for? If I could get the hang of them, they seemed to promise mental composure in the face of my circumstances.

THE CEILING DREW
my gaze up to a diamond-shaped skylight at its apex. I was in a vast circular building at Sydney's Olympic Park. Before me was a broad stage, behind which hung long paintings of Buddha-like figures in yellow and gold. An elevated seat dominated the centre of the stage. To the right and left of it, monks and nuns in maroon, grey, black, or brown robes sat cross-legged on cushions.

I was sitting in the middle of a row close to the stage. I didn't know anyone. The people around me looked decidedly ordinary. Some had a glassy-eyed look of devotion; many talked excitedly, filling the auditorium with a human hum.

I had come for a five-day course, Stages of Meditation. I'd seen it advertised a few months before, and it sounded like it would take the attendee progressively through the different levels of meditation practice. And it was being taught by the Dalai Lama: a man I admired for his compassion and wisdom.

There was movement behind the monks and nuns. A slightly stooped figure, wearing square-rimmed glasses and maroon robes, emerged from behind them. It was the Dalai Lama. He bowed to monks and nuns on his way to the front of the stage, taking their hands in his, sometimes touching his forehead to theirs. Great respect was evident among them. When he got to the front, he acknowledged us with palms raised together. There was loud applause. He climbed onto the seat and sat cross-legged, securing a microphone, the kind that pop stars and motivational speakers wear, to his head. ‘Good morning, everybody.'