Slowly but surely, one at a time I can feel switches clicking ‘off’ in my mind.
Thinking at a tangent for a second, I remember the wife’s father came in for a lot of criticism, over the years from both his immediate family, and from myself because of his ‘cut and run’ attitude to his problems. Regardless of the criticism I’d always understood *why* he did the things he did tho many times his timing seemed a little odd having ‘been there’ myself. Maybe the reason I didn’t do the same was just that I had a higher tolerance level than him. Who knows… either way I got to quite like him before he died.
Still… I wonder sometimes if he and I actually had similar feelings about how our lives were panning out and the (possibly neurotic?) desire to avoid conflict? Maybe we did… and just dealt with it differently?
A while ago while chatting to a patient in a psychiatric ward I once worked in he described how he’d felt as his depression progressed. The analogy he came out with was of a spider sitting in a web caught up and stuck by the glue of its own threads. The only way the spider could free itself was by cutting the threads that tied it… one by one. He said he’d always been scared to play the part of the spider and cut his ties with the result he’d turned his thoughts inward, eventually attempting to kill himself. Sadly, some time after I’d stopped working in the hospital and moved away I heard that in the end he had succeeded.
The point he was trying to make wasn’t lost on me however. He, in common with the father -in-law found there came a time when he had to make the decision between self-preservation and self-destruction. That was the only point of contact…. their choices meant they moved in different directions. The father-in-law to self-preservation, Dave to self-destruction.
Don’t know about spider webs… that analogy gives me the creeps… but I can feel connections and links breaking as switches ‘close’.
Raises all sorts of questions… for which I have, as yet, found no answers!
The Eclectic Interweb 