Population mental health

ACEs voices

In the spirit of trust and empowerment, Population Mental Health Co-Lead Investigator and Co-Lead of the Liverpool ACEs Alliance Prof Rhiannon Corcoran shares her powerful story.

Before I went to school, most of my time was spent on my bumping chair, an ancient armchair, the sort you just don’t see any more. My parents had been given it, its twin and two-seater couch by my grandmother when she had no further use of it. Stuffed with horsehair, covered in hard-wearing velour – like old-fashioned bus seats. It had a particular smell, which I can call to mind to this day. It became my refuge. Bump., bump, bump… I’d spend hours in this repetitive, rhythmic motion, day in, day out. So well ‘bumped’ was this chair that the old metal springs that fashioned its back came bulging out. It had deformed itself to my requirements. “Where’s Rhi?” they might sometimes ask. “Bumping”, came the reply.

With my grown-up, psychologist’s view of the world, I recognise my bumping as a classic self-soothing activity, tell-tale of neurodiversity or of trauma, or of both.

When my bumping chair was finally removed – dangerous and unsightly now; its severed springs having sliced through the hardy fabric – I was distraught. Although I was consoled by the promise of my very own rocking chair that could mimic the rhythm of bumping while ,( I assume now) making me appear a little less ‘odd’ to others who might visit the house. Several years later, my rocking chair arrived, ready for assembly following a family trip to Walmart. We’d moved to Canada in the intervening years, and by then my young mind had invented other ways to sooth itself. I’d found music with the perfect rhythm to afford an arm-facilitated, side to side movement that worked as an adequate bumping substitute but which may have looked just as odd as its behavioural predecessor, had I ever been discovered doing it. Don’t tell anyone…I was still enjoying music this way in my early teens which turned out to be rather solitary years.

The truth is the family was odd or, maybe, more kindly folk might have called us eccentric. Teenage sweethearts whose families were not on good terms, my parents’ marriage was an unhappy, rather tragic power struggle. I can only really summarise their relationship in terms of how it made me feel. It was a source of fear and uncertainty right from the time I emerged from babyhood and became capable of representing what was going on around me. The physical and verbal assaults that had to be skirted around were divided by days upon days of my mother retreating to bed, talking to no-one and neglecting herself and us. With my father at work, we were left to sort life out by ourselves. Towards me, the youngest, my brothers swung unpredictably between acting as my over-protective champions against the world to being my bullies and tormenters. The eldest, my sister, was out making her own life. She was a warm and secure presence, when around. She was one of the people who made it seem OK.

A conundrum – ‘neurodiverse’ or traumatised…or both? I know both feel true to me, and both are probably true but what would the ‘services’ of those days have said about me if my parents had cared to expose themselves by stepping out of their own struggles to seek advice about my behaviours? I regard the fact that they didn’t as one of the most important things they did for me. For their neglect in this allowed me to be my odd self, never to question my essential sanity, to accept that I am my reactions to the circumstances within which I exist. The question was not what was wrong with me but rather how could my reactions to the things happening around me help me to survive and, maybe, to thrive. Did my parents understand this? I don’t think they did.

Plenty of challenges to me thriving lay ahead. The raw and threatening abuse of my parents’ relationship; my father’s drinking, his ‘sticks and stones’ that aggravated my mother’s rages and subsequent bed-ridden absence. My brothers’ relentless name-calling and teasing. The countless moves to new places accompanied by the inevitable tummy-tying first days in a new school that would never become an old school. Some cruel humiliations as I struggled, in remedial classes, to accomplish the basics so effortless to others (a chief cause of my enduring imposter syndrome). A spell when I was unable to leave the house. Teenage years spent in hand-me-downs too dated to get away with. And, my mother’s frequent attempts to leave this world and us behind in it and, the consequences of brutal ECT (Electroconvulsive Therapy) that psychiatric services called therapy. My brothers’ declines into paranoia for one and conduct problems for another. My father’s time spent away and my mother’s final act of choice, her completed suicide.

But I’m ok, you know. There were people and things that got me through. My sister was one of those special people as was my maternal grandmother, a life-hardened lady who only knew how to live a basic life but in whom I could always depend. Those two were always on my side. There was respite time spent away from parents with paternal grandparents during the summer, on the sands and feeding the wild ponies after hair-raising trips in Grandpa’s painting and decorating van. Oh! and his timber, paint and coal-filled garage cum shed at the bottom of the yard. This was a magic place where broken things got fixed and, from which, new things emerged.

Apart from these life-affirming, protective people and places, two less tangible thoughts exist as vital protectors of me. The first, despite their flaws, I always believed in my parents’ strengths, knowledge and essential goodness. They were never knowingly cruel to us after all, though they were undoubtedly thoughtless of their children and did often say needless, unkind things. We may seldom have felt the warmth of a cuddle or the joy of a shared laugh but, when we did, the episodes stuck fast precisely because of their infrequency. The second protection was my name, an unusual one to have to live with outside Wales or Ireland in the 60s and 70s (before Fleetwood Mac). Living up to it, protecting it’s spelling and pronunciation (both first and surname) meant asserting myself in an everyday way. The need to do this morphed into an enduring sense of self, my core, my heart that I could assert, defend and feel at home with.

How you become who you are is complex. In part we are laid down in DNA with switches and triggers tripped and activated by events and circumstances beyond our control. Mostly though, we become us because of how we each cope with and manage the things that have or haven’t happened to us. This is why, sometimes, it can feel as if there are none so different from us as our siblings and, if things go well, none as familiar to us as our children.

I hope my children know that I am always on their side.