Heroes Not Zombies

Not all days are the same.

Not all changes are significant.

But when you look at a tree like this you realise something has happened, not once, not twice, but several times. This tree seems to have started growing pretty normally but then, for unknown reasons, has take a right angled turn to grow horizontally for a bit. Was that a storm? A strong gust of wind? An animal or a human who bent the young tree over like that? Then a little later, the tree keeps on the horizontal but takes another right angle turn. How do you explain that one? I can’t. But surely we’d agree both turns were significant. On both occasions the future path of the tree was changed enormously. Not long after this second swerve, it starts on an upward path again, as you might expect any tree to do. But we can’t explain why it happened then.

You know, I think life is often like this.

Here’s one of the most useful questions I’d ask a patient – “When did you last feel completely well?” I liked that question because over the course of weeks, months and years an illness changes. It can change so much that at the point of presentation it looks quite different from how it began. So, I didn’t ask “When did this [insert diagnosis here] start?” Or, “When did you get sick?” Those questions often missed the origins of the illness. Also, many times, people would present with more than one diagnosis. Human beings can’t be compartmentalised into neat separate diagnostic boxes without losing sight of them as human beings. Sometimes a story, or narrative if you prefer that word, would begin with a certain illness, but then others would emerge on top….either replacing the original one, or blending in somehow. It was, therefore, more revealing to ask “When did you last feel completely well?”

You’d be surprised how often that was a difficult question to answer. Often I needed to prompt and coax, sometimes going right back to early school days, before someone would say, yes, that’s when I last felt completely well.

Once they’d told me when they had been well, we’d then start to discuss two things. Firstly, what was happening in life around the time you began not feeling well, and, secondly, tell me about what you experienced when you first started to feel unwell. I don’t claim that the revelation of significant traumatic events, be they accidents, infections, emotional traumas or abuse, then enabled me to say it was this or that event which caused your illness. But pulling together these pieces of a person’s story frequently opened up a new level of understanding. And, actually, somewhat surprisingly for the patient, it often revealed just how amazingly they’d coped with significant traumas.

So when I look at an image like this tree, I’m immediately wondering what the story is……how did the tree develop in this particular way? What was going on when these dramatic twists and turns took place?

I’m not finished yet…….because the other thing this tree tells me is to consider the wider, fuller picture. It’s hard enough to unpick key events, but you need a longer view, a more holistic view, to make sense of the fuller life story.

Here’s what seems to have happened next…..

That upward movement we looked at a few moments ago continued until the tree managed to contact its neighbour. Then they bonded. They made a connection. And they grew upwards together for the rest of their lives (OK, I don’t actually know how much longer these trees lived so maybe it wasn’t for the rest of their lives, but we say that when we tell stories, don’t we?)

We still don’t know what happened in those early phases of life, but with this longer, fuller view, we can at least make sense of the final turn upwards. We can see what appears to be a seeking for a connection, a movement towards an-other. Or at least, our story-telling brains make it easy to make sense of what we are seeing by interpreting it this way.

I don’t think you ever fully know another person. I don’t think anyone can ever make complete sense of another person’s life. In fact, I’m not sure we can even do that for ourselves. But we can spot patterns. We can see shapes, and movements, and directions, and rhythms. And when we weave those together into a lifetime narrative they really can help us to make sense of our experiences.

At least, that’s what I found.