Acknowledging and accepting

There have already been signs that people's mental health is being affected by self-isolation. It's quite apparent that the feelings are mostly connected to a sense of loss (freedom, income, certainty, etc.), apart from the obvious potential threat to survival.

This feeling of loss often changes our relationship with others, and how we relate to ourselves too. Our attachment to people and things now absent becomes a source of pain and suffering for us. We try to hide or lock away our suffering as an unconscious process, failing to realise that this gives our feelings more power.

"I shouldn't be feeling this way." The exact words we use to say this don't really matter. The message we send ourselves is essentially the same. We try to deny our emotions, our humanity, but like a child pulling at a trouser leg to get attention, our feelings remind us of their existence.

Acknowledging how we feel is, in the longer term, how we learn to accept and integrate difficult feelings into our existence. Once we make the feeling a part of our conscious awareness, we are more able to decide how we engage with the feeling. For many of us, this first step involves talking to someone we trust about how we feel.

We can no more avoid what we feel than we can avoid being human, and it is our attempts to avoid, rather than accept, what we feel that create the greater part of our suffering. However we come to acknowledge what we feel, it is our first step in accepting the feeling as a part of our experience and limiting its power over us.

There is more to be said, but maybe I have said enough for now.

Lockdown, day 1

Lockdown day one. People seem to be more short-tempered than usual. The shops seem to have returned to some semblance of normality. I was able to get bread, cereal and tinned fruit. There was no toilet tissue, though. It was disappointing to see a general lack of awareness of personal space. I wonder how many people will become ill, or even leave this world before their time, due to what seems like either a lack of awareness or a lack of concern.

In small ways, and ways that aren't so small, this situation is likely to affect the mental health of many people. Maybe things will change. Maybe there will be the growing realisation that it is better to act cooperatively, rather than competitively and adversarially. Hopefully it's within us to do that.



Physical exercise is arguably more important than ever. Many of the warnings about going out, and meeting with others, say that we only have to sit on a sofa. That feels more than a little irresponsible. To be fair, a number of personal trainers, yoga instructors, martial artists and others have started putting free lessons online. Could it be that we're starting to see how our fates are intertwined?

This isn't too far removed from my everyday experience. For some, the lack of connection with others, and the absence of the physical presence of friends and acquaintances will be hard. That's something I spend much of my time dealing with. In recent months, it's been something I've chosen to do. There are times when our suffering takes us to dark places, and that darkness may, in turn, cause suffering for others. Maintaining a distance from others, in such circumstances, is an act of kindness, but they may see it as something different.

I've been waiting for an assessment, to see whether something fundamentally different in the structure of my brain has been responsible for difficulties experienced over the course of a lifetime. That meeting is now on hold, of course. In one way, such things are an opportunity - an opportunity to practise acceptance of uncertainty.

Warmth

In my last year at high school, one of the girls wanted to talk to me. I was walking home from a swimming lesson that had taken place at the local leisure centre. From the other side of the footbridge I had just crossed, my name was called.

As I turned, she called for me to wait for her. She increased her pace; her long hair billowed out behind her and, coming closer, her smile broadened. After the customary pleasantries, and an acknowledgement that we hadn't really had the chance to talk before, she told me what was on her mind as we walked together.

That evening, she would be going on a date for the first time. She was nervous. She wasn't sure how she should act, what she should wear or whether she would meet the expectations of the young man in whose company she'd be spending some time. She had been thinking about cancelling the date, because she was sure to make a fool of herself.

I took a brief look at her, walking next to me. She was tall, slender. Her dark hair provided a contrast to her pale complexion. She was quite attractive, not just in outward appearance but also in her mannerisms, the tone of her voice, the pace of her speech and other things unique to her. Hearing that she doubted herself came as a surprise.

None of the girls had spoken to me in this way before. A number of the boys had, for reasons known only to them, walked at least part of the way home with me and talked about things that had been troubling them. A girl wanting to open up to me was new.

I knew that I was seen as a little unusual. It was, unfortunately, a particularly lonely time for me. Adolescence can feel like a limbo, in which we are neither a child nor an adult - neither one thing nor another. It's a time when many of us find our "crowd": the people with whom we identify as having similar traits or interests.

For some of us, it's a time when we come to realise that we don't fit in. We find no one with whom we particularly identify. In truth, I identified most with the world cinema I'd watch in the early hours of the morning. Using the small TV in my room, I'd watch numerous subtitled films which two of the available stations would broadcast at unsociable hours. They had a profound effect on how I perceived the world around me.

What I didn't want was to reinforce in any way the idea that I was odd. Actually, hearing a girl talk openly about her concerns to me, as we walked home, felt like a chance moment of connection with someone who might not otherwise have been too aware of my existence. Her eagerness to make a good impression, on her imminent date, mirrored my own eagerness to leave a good impression at that moment.

I asked whether she had asked her date for the evening to go out with her, or whether he had been the one to ask. She replied that he had been the one to ask. I said that I admired his courage. The possibility of rejection was something he had been willing to accept, I reasoned, in exchange for the mere possibility of spending some time with her. He had seen something in her which had made him want to spend that time with her.

How nervous did she think he might be about their date? She answered that he was probably feeling much the same as she was. She smiled. At that moment, we had come to the place where our paths home diverged.

She suggested that in future I might spend some time with her and her friends, and talk with them, during breaks in the school day. Knowing that some of the girls she thought of as friends would object to that development, I made excuses I can no longer remember.

The hug was unexpected. I didn't know how to respond. Much of the discussion I'd heard regarding such situations had suggested that males should be especially careful with the physical boundaries of females. As much as I resented the implication that some bodies were inherently more valuable than others, I didn't reciprocate. My arms hung limply by my sides.

She felt soft and warm. There was the feint scent of a musky, floral perfume. She released her hold, and said she'd see me at school. I only managed to nod in response, and watch for a moment as she crossed the road and walked down a side street. The impression left by her being next to me remained long after she had gone.

No one, as far as I could remember, had hugged me before. It seemed strange to think that it had never happened, but I certainly couldn't remember it happening. Until this isolated display of affection, I had been okay with that. After, I wasn't okay. I wasn't okay at all. In terms of my mental health, I went off the rails for a while. You can't miss what you've never had, I guess. After experiencing it, it was missed greatly.

Within a space of about ten minutes, I'd experienced more warmth from another human than I had for as long as I could remember.

If we experience, early in our lives, a lack of warmth and affection, it can be difficult to know how to respond. It can feel so disconnected from our experience that we find it hard to accept, and we may find it equally difficult to give to others.

It's all too easy to fall into the trap of believing that we must not have deserved warmth and affection, or it would have been offered to us. We dismiss the thought that those around us, for reasons entirely their own, may have struggled to show warmth towards us.

In more recent times, I've had to come to terms with the emotional response I have to any suggestion of warmth and affection from others. Speaking to a counsellor helped me to see this as something akin to a man crossing the desert, and suddenly being given a glass of water. Leaving behind the notion that I must have been somehow unworthy of love is a battle that continues to this day. The messages we receive in childhood have a profound and lasting effect on how we see ourselves.

Compassion in a time of crisis

Sometimes I forget. When my thoughts turn to those who are in need, and are denied access to what is essential to them, I feel anger towards those who selfishly serve their own needs to the detriment of others. What I forget in those moments is something fundamental to the practice of compassion.

In recent weeks, the breaking out of a pandemic has put a spotlight on human behaviour. The shelves of supermarkets have been emptied at a greater rate as the panic sets in. Governments around the world have been applauded or condemned by their people, depending on how they have responded to the crisis.

I found that I became increasingly puzzled, and then angry, at reports that people were buying supplies in bulk, leaving fewer or none of the essentials for others. In my mind, it was an example of those who already had too much, and could afford to buy in bulk, depriving those who weren't able to do so. In my mind, it was an all too visible representation of social and economic inequality.

It would seem that those buying in bulk lack compassion for their fellow human beings. Their behaviour, at least, would suggest a lack of compassion. A self-centred greed, which appears to be a symptom of a society's move away from a sense of community to a greater focus on the individual, may be the root. That, however, may not provide an adequate explanation for what is driving the behaviour on an individual level. Print, broadcast and social media perpetuate assumptions much of the time, and serve through those assumptions to fuel fear, hatred and anger.

What if we were to separate the behaviour from the person? What if we observed the behaviour and looked for other potential mechanisms behind it? We might then see fear and anxiety. What we see then, is that acts which cause great suffering are being performed by people who, internally, are suffering too.

Recognising the suffering of others is not to excuse their behaviour - it is simply to change our perspective. It has been said that holding on to anger is akin to holding a hot piece of coal. Our choice is to vent our anger, in a way that is appropriate, or to question from where our anger arises.

It's all too easy to say the above. My work involves listening to the suffering of others with sensitivity, compassion and a non-judgemental attitude. Sometimes though, as I said at the start of this piece, I forget. Part of the training for my work covered this, and I've started to make peace with the fact that sometimes I fall short of the standards I set for myself.

After all, how are we to show compassion for others, if we are unable to offer it to ourselves?