I’d dive and slide under the bed, against the wall. The house shook as he shouted, chasing me upstairs into my room.
THE SILENT PATIENT SEQUEL SERIES
An innocuous remark or a dissenting voice would trigger his anger and set off a series of explosions from which there was no refuge. My father’s unpredictable and arbitrary rages made any situation, no matter how benign, into a potential minefield. But I suspect it originated in my relationship with my father, around whom I was never safe. This anxiety seemed to predate my existence and exist independently of me. In my case, I grew up feeling edgy, afraid anxious. Who knows what indignities we suffered, what torments and abuses, in this land before memory? Our character was formed without our even knowing it. This is frightening, for obvious reasons. As the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott put it, “There is no such thing as a baby.” The development of our personalities doesn’t take place in isolation, but in relationship with others-we are shaped and completed by unseen, unremembered forces namely, our parents.
We are born with a brain half-formed-more like a muddy lump of clay than a divine Olympian. But thanks to increasing research into the development of the brain, we know this is not the case. We like to think of ourselves as emerging from this primordial fog with our characters fully formed, like Aphrodite rising perfect from the sea foam. Whether we are prepared to admit this or not is another question.Īs human beings, in our earliest years we reside in a land before memory. We are drawn to this profession because we are damaged-we study psychology to heal ourselves. I believe the same is true for most people who go into mental health. But that was a secondary aim-particularly at the time I started training. I mean, of course I wanted to help people. “I wanted to help people, I suppose.” I shrugged. I remained conscious of maintaining eye contact as I trotted out a rehearsed response, a sympathetic tale about working part-time in a care home as a teenager and how this inspired an interest in psychology, which led to a postgraduate study of psychotherapy, and so on. I could feel the other members of the panel looking at me. She gave me a small smile-as if to reassure me this was an easy question, a warm-up volley, a precursor to trickier shots to follow. She was in her late fifties with an attractive round face and long jet-black hair streaked with gray. Indira was consultant psychotherapist at the Grove. “What drew you to psychotherapy, do you think?” asked Indira Sharma, peering at me over the rims of her owlish glasses.
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