Excerpts

Chapter 1   January   there's nothing    wrong with me   There's nothing wrong with me. Seriously. Nothing, nada, zilch, bugger all. I'm not a chronic alcoholic, drug abuser, or anorexic. I wasn't locked in a cupboard under the stairs during my childhood or beaten to within an inch of my life by an evil stepparent. Nor have I ever been in a war zone or on a hijacked airplane or suffered a great whacking loss that has left me traumatized. I've never even been in hospital. As a patient, I mean. And my friends and family are all in good health, as far as I know. So, you see, there's absolutely nothing wrong with me. And I definitely don't need to be in therapy.   That's exactly what I would have said if the anxious chatter in my brain had found its way to my lips. It was seven-twenty on the third morning of the new year, twenty minutes before my first therapy session was due to begin. I was sitting in my car outside a grand Victorian tenement building in the West End area of Glasgow revising and rehearsing what I was going to say to the woman I was about to enter into a close personal relationship with. As the early morning darkness began to lift, it was possible to make out a thin blanket of frost covering everything, from the huge Gothic steeple of the city's ancient university on the horizon to the steps leading up to her consulting room. There was hardly a soul to be seen, apart from the occasional jogger and dutiful dog walker. It was beautiful and serene. Inside my car, however, it was an altogether different story. I station-hopped frantically before settling on Good Morning Scotland, turned up almost to full blast in an attempt to drown out the incessant chit-chat in my mind. But the radio, even at high volume, still wasn't loud enough.   Perhaps I shouldn't bother going in? It's not as if anyone's forcing me. But that would be a real cop-out. Plus, I've waited weeks for this appointment. Maybe I should just go for one session? She'll probably burst out laughing and tell me that, compared with all the other bonkers people she sees, I'm the sanest, most together woman she's ever met. Yeah, I'll go for one, even if it is just to be told that there's nothing wrong with me. That this is normal. That I'm normal.   I had woken that morning at around four a.m. with my heart racing, the nape of my neck damp with perspiration, and been unable to get back to sleep. As I contemplated spilling out my most intimate and embarrassing secrets, I began to wonder what I was letting myself in for and what exactly I was hoping to achieve.   I'd always been a major therapy skeptic. Apart from for those who had suffered some major traumatic event in their lives, I'd always dismissed the so-called talking cure as an extravagant con for weak, pathetic, self-indulgent losers who had lots of time and money on their hands but nothing more serious to kvetch about than the terrible hardship of having nothing particularly serious to kvetch about. In other words, people who wanted to whine about their weight/self-esteem/alcohol/commitment problem while blaming their emotionally absent father or overly critical mother or both. I was all for scapegoating when I missed a flight, but pinning the blame for everything on my own flesh and blood seemed a bit harsh.   No doubt my blinkered attitude had something to do with Louise and Katy, who had, for years, been spouting annoying psychobabble to explain just about everything, including, for instance, the screwed-up personalities of warmongering politicians ("It has nothing to do with oil, weapons of mass destruction, or ending despotic regimes and everything to do with unresolved daddy issues and a neurotic craving for power and control").   "Yeah, whatever," I would say to them.   "Everything that drives us, that motivates us, is hidden away in storage" went their refrain. "Everything that's ever happened to us." Until these unconscious factors are brought to our awareness, they insisted, we're doomed. "To what?" I'd occasionally, and foolishly, ask.   "To an inauthentic life. To living a lie--never being who you really are. To making self-destructive choices and decisions. To being driven by jealous, competitive, manipulative, and controlling impulses that we're not even aware of but that run our lives in unsuspected ways. To remain an eternal child or adolescent, imprisoned by the personality your parents inadvertently imposed on you." Case solved, apparently.   "Who cares what makes you the way you are?" I'd often protested. "It's just the way you are. You can't change it. You can't do anything about it."   "Not with that attitude, you can't."   And so it went on.   Adding to my conviction that they had crossed that fine line between sanity and madness was their unyielding insistence that everyone would benefit from a bit of therapy. During their most fervent sermons, they even used to suggest that a spell on the couch should be compulsory before a person has children. "If we don't become who we really are before we reproduce," they would say, "then we just pass all our shit, unconsciously, on to the next generation."   Unlike them, I'd had no time for rummaging around in the past. At least, not in front of an audience. And certainly not one I would have to pay for. Of course, I thought I knew myself. In fact, I'd always thought I was pretty well advanced in the self-awareness stakes. Who doesn't? But I preferred to do my soul searching and navel gazing in the privacy of my own home. Or, if I felt the need to share, I had my friends and family to talk to. Therapy seemed to me a convenient excuse to evade responsibility. Life's too short and too precious to waste time poring over ancient history that can't be changed, I'd often said.   Yes, I had a couple of battered old suitcases bulging with emotional baggage packed away, but, again, who doesn't? I'm a doughty stoic Scot. We don't do touchy-feely. Scottish men pride themselves on being the least emotive and communicative in the UK, if not the world. We pull our socks up and we get on with things. There are members of my extended family who think the word "shrink" means only something that happens to a carelessly washed item of clothing and who think the word "depression" should be capitalized and preceded by the definite article. Repression of our feelings is a survival trait. Clearly, Louise and Katy were national traitors, because, generally speaking, unless intoxicated we Scots would prefer to eat the deep-fried limb of a child than talk about emotional stuff.   If you've got a problem, deal with it. That was what I liked to say and that's exactly what I thought I had been doing. Change your job. Get out of a relationship. If that's too difficult, distract yourself. Get drunk. Do some exercise. Read a good book. Immerse yourself in a worthwhile project. Travel to a foreign land. Go to the movies. Set yourself a goal. Do a detox. Listen to Abba. Think of people worse off than you and start counting your blessings, as my mum would say. Get yourself a wee hobby or some fresh air, as my gran would say. If you absolutely have to, then pop some happy pills, but don't waste your time, your money, and your one and only life confessing all to a stranger and then spending the rest of your days blaming your parents for your problems. That was what I thought.   But that was before I kind of lost the plot.   During the previous few months, as if the missed flights and the repeated speeding fines weren't enough, I'd found myself unable to stop crying. I shed so many tears that I began to think about the history and culture of tears: where they came from, why some people cry easily and others don't, why women cry more than men, whether I was going to dehydrate or whether, as I was beginning to suspect, my reservoir was bottomless. Crying became a sort of second career. I sobbed like an abandoned, inconsolable toddler in my editor's office, in the HR department, in the pub with my friends, in the Coach and Horses in front of colleagues from the Observer (some of whom I hardly even knew), in the swimming pool changing rooms, and in my bed at two, three, and four in the morning. One day I saw an old man sitting alone in a bar with a half pint of Guinness. When he lifted it to his lips, he lost his grip and spilled it all over his trousers. I helped clear it up, then ran to the ladies' for a good bubble. An elderly busker playing the violin, appallingly, just about liquefied me entirely. And emptied my purse.   On another occasion, when I was in London and had missed another flight, I begged an Observer columnist not to take advantage of me because I was a little bit vulnerable. In the unlikely event that he hadn't heard or understood me, I repeatedly told him that he musht pleashe not take advantage of me cosh little bit vulneable as we walked to his home. When it became clear he had no intention of doing anything other than very kindly letting me sleep in his spare room, I saw the chance for some more quality sobbing, and I took it. Why, why, why, I blubbed, didn't he want at least to try to take advantage of me? Excerpted from Girl on the Couch: Life, Love, and Confessions of a Normal Neurotic by Lorna Martin All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.