Higher Than Me

We have been walking through some emotional difficulties with our 9-year-old son in recent months. He is a relatively high functioning autistic child who experienced significant rejection and bullying at school last year. Now he has just started a new school that seems like a better fit, but he is still carrying a lot of trauma from last year.

The last few months have been exhausting, stressful and painful, but they have also been incredibly rich, and I have learnt so much.

I’m going to try now to put some of these thoughts into words… which is easier said than done! It feels a bit like diving for treasures in very deep, murky, and unchartered waters!!

*

Holding my son’s hand through some of the things he has experienced recently has given me a deeper understanding and compassion for the processes involved when people fall apart.

When we see people from afar struggling with their mental health, it’s very easy to point the finger and label them as mad or sick as though it’s something that could never happen to us. It’s only when we stand in the shoes of someone who is going through these experiences and allow ourselves to feel the unbearable pressure they’re trying to withstand that we realise the humbling truth: There’s only so much weight that any one of us can carry before we begin to crack.

In the midst of all the turmoil we’ve been going through with our son, what strikes me is not how bizarre and irrational his feelings and behaviours are, but actually how much sense they make. Every one of his behaviours has a logical cause and serves a valid purpose in his quest to hold himself together in the face of painful experiences and unimaginable anxiety.

My son’s sense of terror about entering his new classroom is not some strange symptom of an unstable mind. It is the direct result of cruelty and rejection that he experienced in his previous class. His insistence on carrying a bottle of water with him at all times (or two, or three) is not a random outworking of OCD. He knows that anxiety makes his mouth dry, so carrying water is his attempt to exercise some sort of control over these unbearable feelings.

My sense of anxiety last week when I met the other parents, and my irrational belief that they were all talking about us when we entered the room, doesn’t mean that I’m suffering from paranoia. I’m just a bit traumatized from previous interactions with unsympathetic parents complaining to me about my son’s behaviour.

*

Sometimes I wonder how many people suffering with severe mental illness who demonstrate strange behaviours and unusual beliefs may actually be a lot less mad than we think. How many of them may have suffered traumatic events that no one has ever listened to, and that they themselves have long since buried and forgotten?

It’s much more comfortable for us “psychologically healthy” people to see mental illness as something senseless and irrational. It makes it feel like it’s further away from us. Something that happens to “other” people who have a genetic weakness or a chemical imbalance in their brain. If we accept that any one of us could become anxious, depressed, paranoid, or delusional if life events took a serious turn for the worse, we start to see that there’s not really such a clear line between “us” and “them.”

I’m not saying that there’s no such thing as mental illness, nor that some people are not more vulnerable to these struggles than others. Nor do I want to add to the heavy burden that parents of children with mental health issues are already carrying by suggesting that the family and home environment are to blame for their child’s difficulties. I think that the interplay between biological vulnerability and stressful life events is far more complex than this.

But what I am saying is that the sort of emotional distress that any one of us can experience simply because life sometimes hurts can lead to very strong reactions beyond our control. These reactions don’t make us sick. They make us human.

*

When we take time to listen to the stories of those who are experiencing mental anguish, we often find that their feelings and behaviours make a lot of sense. We also dignify others by listening to their stories. We communicate the basic belief that their experiences, and therefore their lives, have meaning and value. Listening to stories also opens pathways of empathy and compassion. When we read a medical report with a list of symptoms, we understand with our minds. When we listen to a story, we understand with our hearts and imagine how we ourselves would feel if these events happened to us.

As I support my son to settle into his new school and find myself thrown together with a team of professionals who don’t know him at all and just see his odd and rather worrying behaviours, I feel like one of my most important jobs is that of a storyteller.

These last few weeks, I’ve poured out my son’s story in email and WhatsApp messages to the new professionals in his life. I’ve pushed thousands of words through the clunky machinery of Google Translate, magically transforming them into Hebrew. I’m sure that a great deal of accuracy and nuance is lost in translation, but I don’t think it really matters. Even when there’s no translation involved, these sorts of stories about deep feelings, traumas and insecurities are always clumsy and imperfect, a bit like trying to pin down a cloud.

I find that even across the chasm of translation, with grammatical mistakes and inaccurate terminology, those who have ears to hear are able to hear and comprehend with their hearts the story of a scared and hurting little boy who needs to be led ever so gently back into a place of trust.

In the last few weeks, my greatest achievement as a storyteller has been to move the hearts of the two teachers who share responsibility for my son’s class. These two young women have become fully invested in his story and are passionate about helping him succeed. The communications the three of us have together on our shared WhatsApp group are a deep encouragement. We celebrate every small success and work intently to turn every setback around. I know that these women are putting in time and energy beyond their job descriptions, but I also know that they will be enriched by playing their part in this story, just as I am.

I believe with all my heart that my son’s story will have a happy ending. The truth is that if emotional distress is not just a set of random symptoms, if there really is a clear path that leads us into the dark forest, then there also has to be a clear path that leads us out the other side, however overgrown the trail and small the steps.