Hello,
I wish I could remember who said,
We could re-write our life story every ten years and it would be quite different each time.
I’m feeling the truth of that.
The feeling was prompted by an email from a reader who wrote to me looking for greater clarity after hearing me speak on the Dear Nelly Podcast, then reading my memoir Lovelands.
In my book I tell how my ex-therapist breached trust and ethics by embarking on his seduction of me - which is a central aspect of my memoir. I also spoke of this on the podcast, with a focus on how traumatic that time was.
Yet, on the other hand, I wrote in Lovelands how in some ways we ‘saved each other’ and I describe how we contributed positively to one another’s lives too.
The reader wanted me to clarify, help her to understand whether the relationship was essentially good or bad, abusive or loving. I seemed to be sending mixed messages, I concur, but in truth, it was not always clear to me. Deeper understanding of the complexity comes from my evolving perspective over time.
Lovelands was published by Hardie Grant Australia almost 6 years ago now. I’ve continued to grow a great deal since I first set pen to paper, using my life as a starting place to reflect on the themes of love, loss, mistakes, and the complications of falling for your therapist.
It is very real to me that I do not see everything the same way as I did back then. The same events are now viewed through more finely developed lenses in me, influenced by an ever-expanding societal consciousness, and from a greater temporal distance.
Nothing has changed in my history, what’s done is done, but everything has continued to change in the ways I see it - some aspects subtly evolving, others radically shifting.
Even just a few years ago, I was holding on to a low-level need to make excuses for abuses against myself, a need I no longer have. I mean, I don’t want to sell myself short here - I absolutely called things out, I named the wrongs in my book. Yet, perhaps I softened some edges.
It’s only looking back that I’m aware I couldn’t let myself fully admit how terrible the situation was, because I would not have been able to manage my rage and grief. I was afraid they would eat me alive. So I found excuses, not pardons, but softeners, reasons around what happened.
I let the reader make up their own mind to a large extent about the darkness and the light in the relationship with my therapist as I wrote about it in the book. I tried to focus on offering lessons from my mistakes for us all, make the suffering worth something.
Now I believe I went too easy on him. I hold him a great deal more culpable for his behaviour now, his abuse of his power and his abuses of me, than I was able to at the time. The reason that’s important to clarify now, is that I do not wish to ever make excuses for abuses, against myself, or against anyone.
I do not demonise him, not at all, but I need not veil his seduction of myself, his former long-term, much younger patient, with the sheer protective shroud I threw around it at the time. An updated writing would see him through my more grown eyes - without the softer, somewhat idealised focus I granted him years back.
I remain very proud of Lovelands, it’s a good read, if I do say so myself. It still has much to offer the reader in my opinion, about being human, making mistakes and recovering. An updated version would not be dramatically different. A trauma dump, or pages of rage absolutely would not reflect my feelings. Nor would I call the relationship a trauma bond.
Our power balance shifted dramatically over the course of our relationship, we gave each other ‘outs’ but didn’t choose to take them. We shared much that was good somehow. It was highly complex.
So, if I wrote it again now, I would hope to write with even more depth and balance in my perspective, if I could find the words. I would try to be even less judgmental, but less guarded too. I would be on alert for softening, cloaking or hiding my rawness behind any protective veils at all, because I don’t need to anymore.
I wonder what evolving perspectives another few years will bring.
Would your memoir be quite different each decade, not in content, but in the meanings you draw from it, lessons learned and the perspectives from which you see your life to date?
Let me know. And please send your questions.
Love to you,
Thank you for your transparency, Debra, more importantly though, in my opinion, is the ability to readdress our past and change our minds. Emotional maturity, as you well know, allows for comfortability in not being fixed on perspectives and to therefore, change our minds. The times you refer to in your book/this email, were so very different to now. Women were seen as lesser than men and inappropriateness was the norm. FYI I had an affair when I was 18 and he was 33, the CEO of the advertising agency I worked in and very charming. Similarly there is much I look back on in the way that I thought he was caring for me because what I knew of care and love was very skewed. It took me a long time to be able to disentangle myself from him, but eventually I did, without recrimination. We occassionally have coffee now but I see him and his behaviour toward me very differently than I ever had. Would I ask him about it? No. Last time we spoke he tried to convince me of the divisiveness of a YES to the Voice, and I realised that we had grown in way different directions. It was not his fault I was as broken as I was at 18, but he was old enough to know better. Life is for learning. xx
All we can do, all we have really, is to keep learning. Be well, Debra. xx