My Bereavement Counsellor Was Too Small

I promised myself that I would write you a lighter piece this week so here is a little story. I am on my way up to the Labour Party Conference. If you would like to know about that I can report back. If you can please can consider becoming a paid subscriber. It will pay for the outfits that one needs for such occasions as I don’t have a supportive Lord at hand to help me out…

When you  have known for a long time that someone is going to die and then they do, one mistakenly assumes that the grief will be less. You knew it was coming. It may in fact be a relief. That’s what people say. That’s what you say to yourself. This would be true if we were creatures of reason alone, but we are not.

My Mum took a long time to die, and she did not want to. She was 59 when first diagnosed with cancer and the tumour was already big. She died a year or so later. She was the sort of woman who never made a fuss about pain, who described childbirth to me as “One minute you are sitting on the sofa and then it’s time to go upstairs. There is no need to make the dreadful noise that some women do”. I am of the generation that were born at home.

She never liked to bother doctors so when she told me she just knew she had something very wrong with her, I knew that she did.

We had a spiky, difficult relationship. It’s quite something to be thrown out of a cancer ward for having a stupid row with a patient and I managed it but she of course started it! She told me that my clothes were horrible and I would never get any kind of job the way I looked. I was about to go see The Guardian about a regular column but because this meant nothing in Ipswich, which she insisted didn’t have The Guardian, she didn’t get it at all.

I spent a year yo-yoing between Ipswich and London trying to look after her as well as my own two small kids and working. Looking back, never in my life have I enjoyed silly media parties and dos more . Distraction ,trivia , gossip were useful in this limbo. My form of pre-grieving involved going to launches of books, opening of envelopes, first nights, previews .Chatter.  When she did finally die. I found unsurprisingly that my grieving was not done.  It could not be so easily cremated and packed away into an urn.

A friend of mine suggested bereavement counselling as she had lost a sister. She recommended a woman who had helped her. She didn’t say anything much else about her and I duly went along.

When the counsellor answered the door, I was shocked. She was tiny. Very small indeed. It discombobulated me. I cannot remember anything about the session as I was fixated on the fact that my friend had not mentioned her size. Why had she not told me this thing, the thing about the therapist being so little?

Unsurprisingly by the second and third sessions, she seemed to be shrinking before my eyes. Indeed, when I recall her now, she is less than 3 feet tall. Obviously I was frightened that my feelings were too big, that my grief was overwhelming and part of me felt that in fact that it may well kill her.

Years later when I did some therapy training myself I could both dismiss my feelings about the pocket-sized counsellor as ridiculous but also observe in practice that there just IS something very physical going on in “therapy”. Observing others, being observed which is part of the practice of training of becoming a psychotherapist, one can see or feel quite instantly that some people have an ability to “contain” in a way others don’t.  

Whatever you throw at them is not going to shock them, overwhelm them or as I had worried about, actually destroy them. One guy who I became friends with had ‘it”. The way he sat. Or something. Some of my favourite tutors had “it’. They could not be thrown. Somehow they could be trusted with the darkest materials.

All of this can be explained by the different modalities of various psychotherapeutic approaches and theories blah blah blah. Suffice to say the mind/body split dissolves upon any real inspection or experience. Remember Freud only put his patients on the couch because it was, he, who felt uncomfortable. Sitting opposite someone is much more of a challenge, fifty minutes of face to face is harder that it looks for both the client and the shrink.

Basically, though I could rationalise my inability to trust my bereavement counsellor, even at the time ,there is something else I have to tell you.  

A popular programme in those days was Animal Hospital presented by Rolf Harris. My kids loved it. On a trip to Venice, I remember trying to explain Da Vinci to my daughter. The whole ‘Renaissance man’ deal about someone being brilliant in so many different areas : painting, inventing, science. “Like Rolf Harris?” she piped up “He is good at painting and singing and looking after animals.”

Um…we didn’t know THEN  that he was also good at being a