Pam's Story Encounters with Little Pam

Nine months after I left the Henderson Hospital my social worker, Ann, refused to see me alone: individual counselling was to stop. Instead she offered, together with a marriage counsellor, to work with both Pete and myself. My jealousy was unbearable, waves of anger, flowed through me. Blame? What had I done wrong? Deep, deep feelings of love. Was that why?. Oh the pain, such a pain, in my tummy. There were no words to explain. I did not know some of these feelings, or where they came from. I remembered similar feelings in my teens, anger directed at my mother; jumbled up emotions that would sweep through my body in quick succession. Violence and self destruction; love; fear of being completely out of control.

I knew that hospitalisation would again only suppress what was wrong. During my teens a hospital cell, ECT and drugs held me.

I had a repeat episode in my mid-twenties. I met Pete when I was seventeen and married him soon after. We had two children and settled down in a new town outside London. I lived in a fantasy of being a perfect mother and wife for five years. Any marital problems were pushed away; after all, in a perfect set-up there is no room for problems. Inevitably this fantasy crashed. It happened when we moved back to London and my younger child started school. My past plagued me to the point that I was again admitted to a mental hospital. My life began to shatter around me. The children went into care, and our marriage was in considerable danger of breaking up. The hospital treated me with drugs and ECT again, and any thoughts or feelings from childhood were once more suppressed.

When I came out of hospital, Maria, my social worker at this time, referred me to a day centre. I attended there for some months. Both Maria and the day-centre staff encouraged m