Free The Dark Threads by Jean Davison Page B

‘I hoped ECT would have wiped it out. We’ve got to push right down’ – he motioned downwards with his hand – ‘these thoughts about religion.’
    I was sitting opposite him fighting to stay awake enough to take in what he was saying and thinking vaguely that this seemed like brainwashing. I didn’t want my thoughts wiped out or pushed down. None of my thoughts about anything. Ever since my first ECT I’d been afraid of forgetting things that were important to me or becoming unable to put them into words. And if, for example, I was to forget for ever, before sorting it out properly in my mind, why the belief about God sending people to hell had troubled me, then … then I would never be whole.
    â€˜I mustn’t forget anything,’ I said.
    Dr Prior sighed and wrote something on the papers balanced on his knee while I stared at the floor thinking: They don’t understand me. They don’t understand me at all.
    And I certainly didn’t understand the reasoning behind the workings of the system, which had pinned me to the ground, as if beneath big powerful wheels, crushed and broken. If they wanted me to relinquish all thoughts of God, why didn’t they try to help me see that life could be bearable, even happy, without a God to believe in? Instead they kept on subjecting me to ‘treatment’ which made me cry out in desperation to this remote, perhaps fictitious, ‘God’ to help me. More than ever before I wanted and needed Him now.
    I went to a Sunday service at the hospital chapel with Lynette. She didn’t like going by herself and I felt I owed her for my passivity during that appalling incident when Sister had been trying to make her eat. It seemed an odd place for a chapel, deep inside the labyrinth of bleak corridors. A large crucifix, above the words ‘Chapel Of Christ The King’, marked the entrance. A Catholic priest and a Church of England chaplain used this chapel at different times to conduct their services.
    The black-robed chaplain took his place at the pulpit and proceeded to lead as ‘normal’ a service as possible, while an elderly woman seated near the front, her head reverently bowed as if in prayer, was muttering a string of obscenities and meaningless mumbo-jumbo. The chaplain began to speak in what seemed to me like meaningless mumbo-jumbo too. Words fell off his tongue and rolled to the floor.
    What was I doing in this chapel? Had I really only come to help Lynette or was I trying to hold on to religion like a drowning person clutches at straws? Hold on. Hold on. No, I have to let go. But, oh dear God, it’s hard to face up to being so truly alone in a world that’s turned cold and dark and frightening. I can’t bear the suffering and sadness I see and feel and breathe in the air all around me.
    Tension mounted as part of me struggled to hold on tightly to Christian beliefs while another part was telling me I needed to let go. Hold on. Let go. Hold on. Let go. I didn’t even know what I was supposed to be trying to do.
    Something I remembered reading in the Bible sprang forcefully to my mind: the warning that we ought to fear him who can kill not just the body but the soul. It was not the usual religious meaning of these words that was making the impact. It was the uneasy feeling that this was applicable to the effects on me of the hospital environment and my treatment – that it was destructive not only to my body but also to the very core of my personality, whether one called it the ‘soul’ or something else. But I must have swallowed the sickness concept along with the pills, for whenever I started thinking and questioning in this way, I would tell myself that this must be the ‘sick’ part of me, the part I had to ‘push right down’.
    Push everything right down: bind tears and feelings and questions into strait-jackets. But what happens to all the incarcerated