29th February 2016
The hefty and more than impressive camera’s are set up and ready. The bright lights giving the room an aura of subtle yet intense dazzling radiation. To most the studio looks professional and intriguing, a dazzling performance about to unfold before their eyes. To me there is nothing intriguing or dazzling about it, I am fully aware of the horrors I am about to face and forced to endure.
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My body feels numb as I’m dressed in a tiny Ann Summers style outfit sitting on a chair in a dark side room. I’m alone which makes a refreshing change to being ordered about continuously whenever I’m in ‘their’ presence. But in some ways it’s worse. My mind wonders as I try so hard to stop myself from thinking what’s about to happen. I start giving myself a pep talk in my head telling my mind how ridiculous I’m being. “I’ve done this so many times before, man up and get over yourself.” But I can’t get rid of the deep bottomless sick feeling that’s slowly penetrating every inch of my body. Luckily the drugs start kicking in and it doesn’t take long for the tingling numbing calming sensation to overtake the sickening nerves.
As I walk through the door the camera’s have already begun rolling. In the made-up showroom in the middle of the studio four men are warming up and getting themselves ready. It’s in this moment before the pain and the torment begins that I wish I could be anywhere but here. That I crave being curled up in the safety of my mum’s arms like nothing else. That I wish fear didn’t stop me every day from telling her about the people I had accidentally crossed paths with and the world I had been forced into. The hatred I felt towards myself for lying to everyone around me and the double life I was now living starts consuming my every thought and feeling . I want to turn and run. Run away so far and never look back. But the consequences of that choice I knew would make life even more unbearable and so just existing remained my best and only option.
I was about 13 or 14 when it first happened. As my body lay rigid on the bed, despite the drugs, the excruciating pain never ceased to surpass and take the lead. I was suddenly paralysed and immobilised. The pain completely vanished and the next thing I knew I was looking down on myself from above. I must have been about ceiling height because I could see the bed, the men, the camera’s, the lights and the whole studio below me. Was I dead? Had I overdosed on heroine? It was the strangest outer body experience I’d ever experienced. I don’t remember a huge amount of it and it was all pretty vague but from that moment it started happening every time I had to go through anything related to ‘them’.
As the months and years went on I started remembering less and less of the experiences but very soon after the first episode, it begun happening in normal day to day life too. I had brain scans, MRI scans, was tested for epilepsy and brain tumours on a very regular basis and eventually when I was in my late teens I was finally diagnosed with a Dissociative Disorder. During my most intense physical and emotional abuse my mind had developed a coping mechanism to help me survive by dissociating my body from everything that was going on. Dissociation wasn’t a choice, it became my mind’s involuntary way of coping with life. Except for that very first time I rarely remembered anything about it and wouldn’t be able to tell you much of what had happened during my periods of dissociating.
After I finally got my life back and turned my back on that dark world forever I thought it would go. But it didn’t. My dissociation became beyond uncontrollable and it started having a detrimental affect on my life.
You see this is the power of the mind… If I was faced with any pressure, any major stress, any pain or fear I would dissociate. I wouldn’t know where I was, who anyone was or even who I was. My mind and my body would be completely gone and I used to just start running. The power of that feeling of wanting to run away in that studio all those years ago had been such a powerful desire yet it became my most dreaded implementation.
For the past 13 years I have gone missing hundreds and hundreds of times. I have had full police forces, helicopters and sniffer dogs pursue me and spend, probably now in the millions of pounds, in staff and resources trying to find me. I have walked and ran thousands of miles, ending up in places all round the country. I have run onto motorways, jumped off bridges and into numerous rivers, walked barefoot in minus degrees, gone missing for not just hours but days and days and once almost a week, suffered with severe dehydration and hyperthermia time and time and time again. I have been on the news, woken up in hundreds of hospital tied up and sedated on more occasions than I will ever be able to list or remember. What started off as my mind’s incredible way of keeping me alive and allowing me to survive the abuse and the pain, became my most hated and feared default. For years and years I couldn’t live a normal life. I was in and out of general hospitals, psychiatric institutions, mental wards and police cells. No one knew what to do with me because I was either running having no clue who I was or what I was doing or I presented better than most normal people without any issues!
And then my miracle happened – and when I say miracle this didn’t happen overnight. But it’s my miracle because I was given insight into my disorder and into my brain in ways most people I’d come across had never been given the opportunity. I will be forever grateful for Mercy Ministries – the programme I got onto to help me sort my life out, beyond grateful for my therapist, Gemma, who I have been working with for the past however many years now and who has become just an incredible person and friend in my life and for my support network for who I don’t even have any words. Without them there is no way I’d be in the place I’d be in now. Between them all they’ve encountered so many sleepless nights, been involved in so many police chases, been sat at home waiting to hear the dreaded news that this time I had not survived, and gone through the agonising pain of just waiting for any news at all of my whereabouts.
It’s been hard work. Oh my days, like beyond explanation! You see the way Gemma described it to me was that my brain had formed my dissociative coping mechanism during the most severe, intense and hardest times. However, as that period of my life has now disappeared, my subconscious can’t distinguish between what is a house on fire and what is just toast burning. It smells smoke (which can be stress, fear, pain etc…) and it’s the trigger for my mind to know there’s danger (however minor that might be) and dissociate. It’s taken literally months almost years to start to completely re-train my brain and change the default coping mechanism into something that is now more appropriate for my life today.
Why am I telling you all of this? Because of the power of our minds.
The mind is a such an incredibly powerful force. It can enslave us to a point of no return or empower us beyond measure . It can plunge us into the depths of misery or take us to the heights of ecstasy. For so many years I was enslaved to it. I was victim to my own insanity and reasoning. I felt hopeless, out of control and was plunged into the depths of despair time and time again. It has taken a huge amount of patience, faith, studying, reading, talking, insight and understanding to begin to realise how my brain works and change the way it thinks and acts. But it’s been possible, and despite the work it took, it’s transformed the life I am able to lead today. And not only that – the techniques and skills learnt through it all I’m able to use with anything life throws at me however small or insignificant it may seem.
I plan to write a lot more about this topic, about my dissociation, what I’ve learnt through it and the skills and techniques that are out there on offer for us all to use at our disposal; but I hope this has given you a taste of how uniquely powerful our minds really are. It can plunge us into the depths of misery or take us to the heights of ecstasy – I know which one I choose. If we can learn how to master our brains and how we act, feel and think and realise the power that lies inside each of us; the possibilities become endless, the opportunities limitless and our chances infinite.
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