Free How I Rescued My Brain by David Roland

We had camped for three months, and along the way my sexual desire had resurfaced. Our lovemaking had flowed again, even though we had a two-year-old, Ashley, with us. I’d noticed before how work and life stress could soak up my energy for sex and romance, but with these absent, things had been different.
    The therapist gave us instructions on how to reconnect at home, such as catching up at the end of the day to debrief over a glass of wine, and having daily hugs. She also gave us intimacy exercises: non-sexual stroking and massage. When we tried these the next day, there were two versions of me: one that was relieved to be touching and reconnecting with this woman whose body had become a stranger to me; the other hovering close to nausea and wanting to run out of the room. It wasn’t anything Anna was doing; it was me.
    Some years earlier, I’d come across a newspaper article about the work of James Pennebaker, a professor of psychology at the University of Texas. It said that he’d conducted a research study in which college students were asked to write, for twenty minutes a day over four consecutive days, about a traumatic event or an emotional upheaval in their lives. In particular, they were asked to write about their thoughts and feelings on it. After the four days, the students’ immune function was shown to be boosted, an effect that lasted for six weeks afterwards. Six months on, their visits to the doctor had halved. Not only had the writing exercise helped them to achieve some emotional resolution of a difficult experience, the article said, but it had also improved their physical health.
    After reading Pennebaker’s article, I had suggested his writing exercise to some of my clients, as a method for moving past difficult emotions. But I’d never done it myself. Perhaps I could use writing to shift my negative feelings towards Anna?
    I reacquainted myself with Pennebaker’s approach. Keeping secrets, he said, was bad for your health. And writing about difficult personal events helped to create meaning out of the experiences: a process of psychological reorganisation that linked cause and effect.
    His instructions were simple. Write about a past or present emotional upheaval and how you feel about it now. Write for yourself — not for anyone to read it. Don’t censor what you write. Don’t worry about spelling and grammar. Do it for 15–20 minutes over 3–4 days.
    So I decided to try it — or at least a version of it. Over the next few weeks, whenever I boiled with annoyance or anger towards Anna, I went away and wrote whatever came to mind. I didn’t do it, as Pennebaker suggested, over several consecutive days; it was only at those times when I thought I might explode. There were often weeks between writing sessions. But each time it felt as if I was a pressure valve releasing steam. In some ways, it was better than face-to-face therapy; I could reveal any secret, write anything: no one was going to read it.
    LATER THAT YEAR, an opportunity came up for Anna to travel to Europe with her mother, meeting up with her sister in London. She would also see her grandmother’s homeland, which I knew was one of her life dreams. I agreed that she should go, and she set off on a six-week trip.
    This interval gave me a chance to explore with the therapist my confused attitude to sex. I had a theory on this. In our next session, I told her that I’d had a lot of exposure to sexual offenders and victims in my work, and thought that there may be a connection.
    She asked me more about this. I explained that I had first met paedophiles, serial rapists, and psychopaths while working as a psychologist in the New South Wales prison system in the mid-1980s, when I was in my twenties. I told her of my work with adult victims of sexual abuse and assault during my career, and my work in the last five years for the state’s Children’s Court, seeing children in