But, problematically, that act of allowing out the memories, the dissociative parts of the self that I had kept firmly in the box, brought with it a collapse of my previous coping strategies and my previous ‘logic’ for life. Things don’t work the way they used to. Life previously functioned a certain way, and then overnight, everything changes, and nothing is the same. As an analogy, a woman in her fifties goes to work in the morning and comes home in the evening and finds her husband dead in the lounge. Her life has unexpectedly been turned upside down. Suddenly, she can’t do what she was going to do that evening. She can’t make dinner and talk about her day and ask him to take the bin out and feed the cat. She can’t just get up the next morning and go to work and pop to Tesco’s on the way home and send a birthday card to her cousin. Suddenly everything is different. It’s a new situation. She’s got a funeral to organise, and she’s never done it before, and it’s overwhelming. She’s used to talking about her day with her husband and he’s not there. When she’s upset, she’s used to going to him for comfort and support, but at the point at which she most needs comfort and support, he’s not there. She’s not a married woman anymore; she’s a widow: it’s a change of identity. Her finances are different. She has to learn about the servicing schedule for the car and get someone to help her hump the Christmas tree down from the loft. Life is suddenly very, very different.
And when she goes a bit ’crazy,’ when she starts crying and can’t stop, when she sits and stares into space for an hour because she can’t figure out what to do next or how to do it, when she doesn’t want to go for a drink after work with her colleagues and can’t bear their jollity, when she can’t concentrate at work or remember what it was that she was doing, when she lies awake at night worrying about how to pay the mortgage… when all these things happen, no one actually says that she’s gone mad. Everyone understands that she’s in grief and that it will take time, perhaps a long time if the death was sudden and unexpected, for her to rearrange her life again so that the new normal becomes automatic and comfortable and comprehensible. And even then, for decades afterwards she may contend with the why? questions of sudden tragedy and life not being as sugar-sweet as the John Lewis adverts suggest. But when we have a ‘breakdown,’ when our dissociative coping strategy that has kept our trauma or abuse at bay for years or years suddenly collapses in the lounge and dies on the floor, and we find when we come home from work that it’s not there anymore, people don’t see our resultant behaviour as normal. Even we ourselves think we have just ‘gone mad.’ We don’t have a paradigm for it. And because there’s no corpse in the lounge, no funeral cortège, no life insurance pay-out and a bank statement in a single name, because it’s all intrapsychic and hidden in the undergrowth of our mind, then our outward behaviours do seem ‘crazy.’ When we can’t go to work the next day, and we can’t concentrate, and we keep bursting into tears, and we can’t bear to socialise, and we lie awake at night, and everything seems too much, then we don’t think, ‘This is normal.’ We think, ‘I’m insane.’
