I’d Rather Have A Bottle In Front Of Me

'Now, just before you go, I’ll drop a bombshell. What would you think about psychosurgery?'

To my eternal satisfaction, I gave an involuntary snort. Then I said, 'What, you mean cut out a bit of my brain?'

'Oh no,' she said, 'they don’t do that these days. No, these days they just pass a wire through and target a very small area.'

(Oh, well that’s all right then. If I buy one do I get one free?

And can I nominate you for the other one?

First.)

I didn’t actually say the lines in brackets. I was probably still in shock.

It was just over twenty years ago and I had gone to one of my fortnightly psychology appointments. Sometimes I saw the head of department who was supervising a trainee, a young woman in her mid-twenties who had a degree in psychology and was now studying the equivalent of a PhD to become a clinical psychologist. Sometimes I saw only the trainee and sometimes I saw them both together. Today it was the trainee.

A few days earlier, I had bumped into a friend I hadn’t seen for years, one of so many coincidences. Jill was involved with Rokpa, a Tibetan Buddhist Charity, and when I told her that I was struggling with my OCD again, she suggested a place called Lothlorien which is not only a healing forest in Lord of the Rings but is also a therapeutic community in the Dumfries and Galloway countryside, offering an alternative approach to supporting folk with mental ill health.

I checked it out on the Web and it looked like it just might be helpful so, at my next Psychology appointment, I mentioned it to the therapist, a trainee clinical psychologist if you remember. She was very negative, constantly blocking me with 'you don’t know if they are any good', 'you don’t know if they’ve been trained properly', 'you don’t know if they have good connections with the local health services' and the like. Eventually it was left that, of course, she couldn’t make a decision, since she was only a trainee, so she would speak to the supervisor and I would come back in a fortnight as usual.

I was just getting my jacket on and she was just gathering up her papers and folder from one of those low desks where they keep a box of tissues in case they make you cry, and that’s when she dropped her bombshell.

As you might guess, I declined her generous offer and when I saw the supervisor two weeks later it was obvious that Lothlorien was not going to be recommended. It would have required funding, you see.

It was a few days later when Jill and too many coincidences to enumerate rode to the rescue. Jill suggested that if Lothlorien wasn’t possible then there was always Samyé Ling. The Ling is a Tibetan Buddhist monastery in Dumfries & Galloway, in Eskdalemuir. I thought about it for a few days but wasn’t too sure about going to live in a Buddhist monastery. However, thanks to all those coincidences too many to tell, I did eventually spend four years there getting my life as near to on-track as it will ever be, and six years after that I did make it to Lothlorien, living for two years as a volunteer co-worker supporting folk who were not quite as far along the road to recovery as I was. Or in one or two cases, further along.

But all that belongs to another story.