The Little Prisoner_ A Memoir - Jane Elliott [65]
All the strain of propping my failing sanity up was now falling on Steve’s shoulders, with a little support from a few friends I had made in our new location.
Steve’s parents were always so kind to me, but it must have been a terrible shock to them when their son first brought home a girl from the sort of family background I’d had. I’m sure they were relieved when we split up for six months, but once Steve had made his mind up that I was the one he wanted, they always backed us both up in every way possible and treated me just like a daughter.
Now they were under relentless pressure from my family, who were making threatening phone calls in the night and doing a lot of other stuff they wouldn’t tell me because they didn’t want to upset me. They were not the sort of people to be easily intimidated, but it was making their lives unpleasant and confirmed that we had made the right decision in not putting that same pressure on anyone else who might have buckled under it.
With Sophie’s arrival, there were three people who needed me to get better in order to be able to cope with our family life properly. Finally, after spending a year on the waiting list, I was given an appointment with a clinical psychiatrist at the local mental health centre. She talked to me very nicely, explaining where I was on the scale between depressed and euphoric – and I was pretty near the bottom.
I kept begging her to section me. I just wanted a rest and to be looked after by someone else.
‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘If you didn’t have a family then I would, but if I take you away from them there’s a danger you’ll simply give up.’
Many times when I was in her waiting room over the coming weeks I would hear people crying and screaming because they had been sectioned when they didn’t want to be and I was envious of them.
She prescribed me tranquillizers, anti-depressants, vitamins and sleeping pills, some of them so strong they could only be dispensed by the hospital, and referred me on to a psychologist.
‘You’re a man!’ I said when I first walked into his office. Not only was he a man, but he also looked about my own age, which I thought was going to be a bit embarrassing.
‘Is that a problem?’ he asked.
‘I think so. I want a woman. How do I know you aren’t doing these things to your own kids?’
‘Since you’re here, why don’t you try me?’ he suggested. ‘Because it could be a long wait if you ask to go to someone else.’
I did as he suggested and immediately knew that I had found the right person. It was as if a lead weight had been lifted from my shoulders from the first moment I started talking to him. I poured out everything that had happened to me since the age of four, sparing him none of the details, and he listened and understood how I felt. Someone was actually paying attention to me and not getting angry or being shocked or telling me to pull myself together or to go to the police or anything, just listening.
Often as I talked his eyes would start watering up. ‘It’s me who’s meant to be crying,’ I would joke, ‘not you.’
When I showed him some poems I’d written during my bleakest moments he asked if he could take them home to read as he found it a bit much with me in the room. He later told me that everything I had written was classic for someone who had been through what I had.
Over the coming months he did a brilliant job at making me feel better about myself. For the first time I began to believe that everything that had happened to me hadn’t been my own fault and I started to feel my courage growing. I still didn’t feel strong enough to go to the police and start the long battle to have Silly Git put away, but a number of things were falling into place in my head. I actually began to think that perhaps I didn’t have anything to feel guilty and ashamed about. I truly was the wronged party here.
The psychologist also recommended books for me to read which opened my eyes to the fact that I wasn’t alone in the world, there were other people who understood it all. After years of being told that reading