CHAPTER SEVEN
I was rebirthed once. It wasn’t something I expected, but it did lead to a very bizarre few hours which, ultimately, allowed me to process a big chunk of residual gay shame.
The queen, after Princess Diana’s death, said in her Christmas speech that 1997 had been an ‘annus horribilis’. Well, mine came in 2012. It’s odd recounting this, because it feels like old ground now, and besides that, it really isn’t all that interesting. How many more times can one read about someone who’s had a breakdown and got through it? Blah, blah, blah! We all know that movie and how it ends. It did happen, though; I had a proper breakdown. However, life didn’t immediately go from 0 to 100 on the breakdown scale. I wasn’t drinking coffee one minute and then in the foetal position the next. It was a slow unravelling.
I first realised it was happening when I couldn’t get out of bed, which was very unusual for me. I had recently got a Border terrier puppy, who I’d named Esme, who would sit and watch me in the mornings, and I would think, ‘why is she judging me?’ That was one of my finer moments of therapy actually, saying to my therapist, ‘Lois, I think my dog is judging me.’ I’m sure it was then that she diagnosed me with PTSD. I mean, I’m not sure if judgemental animal projection is in the list of symptoms, but who knows?
Incidentally, one of my other fantastical moments of therapy gold was going to see a shaman and, halfway through the regression, wondering if I might be Jesus. Do with that information what you will.
The next big thing, alongside not getting up, was not being able to eat anything for days, and then just managing to make it to the kitchen to collect dry cereal, and taking it back to bed. It was like student life, but with none of the fun. Poor Esme just sat in bed with me while I stuffed cereal into my face. The other thing I noticed was that whether I was eating loads of food or none, I was dropping weight and was looking super skinny. There is one video I shot during this time, and when I see myself now, I look too skinny and have a sort of ‘lollipop’ head.
The final thing happened on an evening when I was due to take Esme out for her little walk before bed. It was getting harder and harder for me to leave the house, and this particular evening, I do not exaggerate when I say that I walked half bent over with terror, with Esme on her lead. At that time, I lived in a gorgeous house on a gorgeous square, and my lap around that square took me about 15 minutes. It was excruciatingly painful in such a weird way, and this was when the penny dropped that I was, indeed, having a breakdown.
It was something I had only heard about, with someone occasionally whispering, ‘Oh, he had a breakdown a few years ago … ’ about someone. The inference seemed to be that the person had never quite been the same since.
I can attest to that, but not in a shameful manner. I have, indeed, never been the same since, and although so much has changed for the better, life has, at times, been extremely difficult. Being able to say to people that I was having a breakdown was actually quite amazing, though, probably because I was actually in the midst of one! You hear people talk of heading for a breakdown or having had a breakdown, but not often of being IN one. I was in it big time, which I found to be quite an interesting conversation opener at parties. Not that I actually went to many parties; I couldn’t leave the house. Looking back, I sort of wish I’d been able to do more TV shows and be completely honest at that time, because somehow, I was still managing to work.
‘And welcome to the show, Will Young.’
‘Thank you so much for having me on.’
‘So, Will, you’re looking great and very svelte; how are you doing?’
‘I’m great, thank you, and currently going through an incredible breakdown: not eating, staying in bed and taking my dog for walks by crawling along the pavement.’
‘Er … Will Young, everybody.’
I started going to 12-step meetings, which were actually very useful. To be honest, I hadn’t even thought of myself as an addict of any sort. I mean, I wasn’t on the street. I wasn’t staying in my house for weeks on end taking drugs, but there were a few things that led me to face up to what were, I came to realise, very clear addictions.
I never really used porn when I was in a relationship, so when I did, it often came out of loneliness. I would watch it at night, alone in bed, which, I imagine, a lot of people do. However, my period of masturbating over porn at night got longer and longer as the hit I was getting from it diminished. So, a five-minute wank was turning into an hour-long marathon.
Not that I have any problem with masturbation. It can alter your mood for the better and help settle your nervous system, but I often felt a sense of loss and abandonment afterwards, because I was lonely, and what I really wanted was connection. Eventually, I was watching porn in the loo on my phone at a department store, or silently in the back of a cab (not wanking, I hasten to add) but I still didn’t think I was being triggered into a state by it, until in 2012 I went on an experiential course where we all had to stand around a fire, write something down on paper, say it aloud to the assembled group, and then throw the paper into the fire. It was saying the words aloud that helped me realise that my porn habit was addictive, and how ashamed of it I was. I was expunging my shame by sharing it.
Some of the course wasn’t quite as helpful. Like the time I had to lie on a plastic mat and imagine I was dead and about to be buried by my family, voicing all the reasons they might have been disappointed by my death. I never quite saw the point of that, and also it was raining outside. I remember thinking, what the fuck is this all about, as I listened to people all around me, vocalising from their plastic mats.
Aside from porn, there were other addictions. Love addiction, for example. This can be a difficult topic to grasp. It’s when we obsess about our potential or real partner. We live without any boundaries; we are desperate to do anything to gain validation. Often, if we’re a love addict, we’ll be attracted to someone who is a love avoidant and unable to give us what we emotionally need. Love avoidance also falls under the love addict category, in that a person can be drawn constantly to relationships, yet will withdraw, because, emotionally, they are unable to give their partner what they want. Both love addicts and love avoidants can be driven by a deep fear of abandonment. The addict clinging to the other due to terror that they will leave, the avoidant seeing being left as inevitable, so they create a scenario to make them feel like they’re in control.
Often in relationships, we can yo-yo between love addicts and love avoidants, attracting the opposite, depending on what energy we are giving out.
I did a love addiction course in Arizona, which, ironically, started on Valentine’s Day, and it wasn’t terribly glamorous. I stayed in the kind of motel where murderers go to wash the blood off their hands, and every night I ended up going to the McDonald’s drive-through for my dinner. On my third appearance at the drive-through, I arrived to find the entire staff peering at me through the window, giggling. As it turned out, they couldn’t believe my accent and thought I was Hugh Grant. I corrected them, telling them that I was, in fact, royal.
The joy continued when I caught pubic lice from the bed sheets at the motel and ended up at a clinic, which was set to cost $900 for treatment. However, I managed to swerve that particular expense after telling the doctor I was a musician, and him asking me if I knew the band Elbow, who he loved. I lied and told him I did, so he let me off paying.
Love addiction is nuanced, and for a while I didn’t really get it. A love addict is someone who might meet someone and immediately think, Yes! He or she is the one! They will fill this void in me! They will take away my shame and the pain of abandonment! It’s immediate and very heightened, but ultimately those kinds of relationships rarely work, because they – we – are often attracted to the kind of person who will, again, abandon us. These days, I walk away when I feel that kind of rush, which is a high rather than a warm feeling in your tummy. I try to steer clear of acting on that kind of impulse. It is a very difficult pattern to break, and one I am still working on.
I was addicted to shopping, I used alcohol and cigarettes as a mood alterer, I was addicted to buying houses (a rarer disease, yet I had the means!), I bought loads of cars. I still have the rush of shopping inside me, and it flares up on occasion. The reason we have addictions is to take away the everyday pain we are living with.
Interestingly, despite my long list of addictions, I never felt I was a sex addict, although, for me, apps like Grindr haven’t always been the healthiest of things. Grindr is a fascinating hunting ground that, in my opinion, is rarely healthy. I have, on occasion, had some great adult sexual experiences, where I just wanted the physical contact of sex. Even then, there was probably a yearning, and emotional hole that needed filling. The profiles on Grindr I find most fascinating are the ones that simply show a rippling torso, yet the accompanying biogs say that they are looking for an adult, long-term relationship. There are a lot of those. It is a sign, in my opinion, of how worthwhile the person thinks they are, and there is a clear paradox. The person looking for love perhaps wants marriage, yet thinks the way to get it is to display his best asset, which is a gym-toned body.
A while back, a friend asked me why I didn’t have a boyfriend. As it happened, there was no particular reason, while his reason for not having one took me aback slightly.
‘I want to be in a monogamous relationship,’ he said. ‘Everyone I meet doesn’t want that.’
‘I find that odd,’ I said. ‘You’re saying you don’t meet anyone that wants to be in an exclusive couple?’
‘No, I don’t,’ he says. ‘They all want to be open or just to sleep around.’
He was 32 years old, and in his experience, everyone in in the gay community wanted open relationships so they could sleep around.
I think the perception of gay men is often that they are sexual beings who just want to shag the whole time. Some people can’t even grasp the idea of two gay men being friends without fucking. We’re all just fucking, all the time. It’s a constant orgy. There’s also the idea that many men just aren’t able to keep their knobs in their pants, but that’s not just gay men, that’s all men. If straight men could get away with hooking up with the ease that gay men do, I’m sure they would.
The truth is, I have friends who are in open relationships and they are very happy about it. In fact, they are thriving, and it’s lovely to see. Still, hearing about this particular friend’s experience surprised me and made me a little sad. I’m sure there are many gay men in monogamous relationships, but are they in a minority? Perhaps I thought that marriage might have solidified the idea of an exclusive gay couple, and that two men might choose to just sleep with each other and no one else.
I continued to work through all my addictions in the 12-step programme, and I managed to get to a much deeper level of trauma than I’d expected. At the time, I’d just started in the musical Cabaret at the Savoy Theatre in London, but halfway through the run, my body gave up and went into full-on protective mode. For around six weeks, I thought I was actually going insane. I lost all sense of where I was and who people were. Emotionally, I could not connect to anything. It was like I had become a robot. I couldn’t see my face in the mirror.
One day, I went for lunch with my manager, Faye, in the same restaurant in the same area I had been going for 12 years, but I didn’t really have any clue who she was. I started ‘falling away from the table’, as if I were next to myself, watching the conversation between the two of us. I had no emotional connection whatsoever to Faye. It was extremely difficult to describe to people and at first I wondered if it might be the new medication I was taking.
After weeks arguing with my psychiatrist – who at one stage said, ‘Fuck you! I’m the expert,’ which was incredible and, within the context, brilliant and totally cool – I finally found, through the power of Google, that my symptoms matched completely that of various forms of disassociation: called depersonalisation and derealisation. Interestingly, since going public about these two disassociate conditions, some people close to me experiencing the same thing have opened up to me, telling me that they also had no idea what was wrong with them.
Once the conditions really took hold, I had to go into residential treatment in Oxford, Khiron House. I knew Oxford well and felt comfortable there, and Khiron House was near to the university parks. I’d lived in Oxford before, while retaking my A levels, and I’d worked on the high street, so as much as it was a relief to go into the house for treatment, it was also nice to be back in such a wonderful place. This is not to say that my time in treatment was a holiday camp. It wasn’t.
I arrived in the house having already done some group therapy work. Plus, having done the 12-step programme and some work on boundaries, I felt well equipped to handle what was to come. I was fortunate enough to have my own room at the top of the house. There were around eight of us residing there, and, if I remember correctly, there was only one other man. Our day consisted of group therapy in the morning, a break, and then either mindfulness or a lecture before lunch. After that, we would either have art therapy or Tai Chi, before another group session, which was followed by yoga. Group therapy was one of the most, if not the most important factor in my recovery. To sit and be open about what was truly going on, and to hear others who were feeling similar things and telling similar stories, was hugely calming. It allowed me to see that I was not defective in some way, odd or peculiar, and also that I wasn’t going mad. I quickly became friends with a couple of people, but got on well with everybody.
Art therapy was one of my favourite things, even though when I first started it, I was presented with some moulding clay and asked to ‘sculpt’ my feelings. I recall sitting there on the floor of the basement room that looked out onto the garden thinking, ‘how the fuck did I end up here? I am 35 years old, and I am being asked to mould clay. The last time I did this was when I was five.’ I remember it clearly because I’d tried to eat the clay and had to go to the doctors. By the end of art therapy, however, I was fully engrossed in it, and my defining piece was created during my final week, when I’d decided to do an art installation in the compost heap. I painted my face and hung my coloured socks all around a chestnut tree that stood above the compost heap. I had become fully ensconced in the garden, and it was a huge source of comfort to be able to mow the lawn, clear the leaves and create new flowerbeds. Tracey Emin I was not, but I like to think that my work, which I titled ‘Compost Corner’, still lives in infamy in that small corner of an Oxford garden.
Everyone in the place had their own little foibles and characteristics. Mine was walking around coughing the whole time; something I had developed since getting ill. Somatically, it probably represented the repression of or attempt to deal with emotions that were flooding through me. When I was younger, I’d had various tics, as well as a persistent sniff that I still get to this day. It’s a wonder people didn’t think I was some sort of cocaine fiend. Another resident, who I shall call Barbara, was constantly making cups of tea, yet after about three sips would put them down and forget where they were in the house. She would also insist on stirring her brews with any biro or pen she could find. Once a day, we would have to go on ‘mug hunts’ around the house to find out where she had left her various refreshments, and along with the recovered mugs, we would find the various pens and biros we had been using throughout the day to take notes or whatever.
Barbara was one of the characters who, outside the walls of the house, would have been labelled crazy or mentally ill. Inside the house, she was just Barbara, and she had some shit to deal with. We were all, in fact, just a bunch of people in a lot of pain, terrified and at our wits’ ends, trying to make sense of how we had ended up there. Nobody was judged, and nobody was better or worse than anyone else. In this respect, it was the perfect household. That said, Barbara was certainly one of the more fascinating residents. She masterfully avoided doing any cooking, and would occasionally go into other residents’ cupboards and take little items of food. A few biscuits here, some croissants there. She was like a little thieving squirrel. One day, I was especially looking forward to the Magnum I had saved for that evening. On discovering that my section of the freezer was bare, I immediately walked over to Barbara, who was reclining innocently on the sofa.
‘I know you’ve eaten my last double chocolate Magnum, Barbara.’
‘William, I am outraged at this very accusation,’ she said. ‘Be assured, I shall be taking it up with the highest authorities. Outraged, I am.’
‘Barbara, I know you’ve eaten it,’ I said. ‘But out of interest where would you be taking this matter if you hadn’t?’
‘Well, I will, of course, be taking it to the Vatican,’ Barbara said.
Barbara was a staunch Catholic, when it suited her. She would call me a sinner for being gay, and a pointless celebrity who was spoilt and unnecessary.
One afternoon, she decided to give herself a makeover and appeared late to ‘check in’ at group. It was Friday, and she’d decided to put on make-up and curl her hair to look as if she was going out for the evening. In she walked with a sort of of half-permed and half-straightened hairdo. She had mountains of pink blusher on her cheeks, unblended, red lipstick that was sort of smeared around her lips, and heavy mascara on her eyes. This gave her a look of what could only be described as a scary Russian doll. As she sat down and waited for everyone else to check in – which just meant taking a minute to say how they were feeling that day – she became more and more fidgety, clearly dying for people to comment on her new look. No one said anything, so she kept on craning her neck around, and sticking out her face to show, in silence, the transformation she had created. As she caught a person’s eye, she’d give a knowing smile and a nod as if to say, ‘I know, right? I’m a knockout, aren’t I?’
In group, we would be encouraged to ask for some ‘time’ if we wanted to talk about stuff that was going on for us or resolve conflicts. We would ask a person if they were open for feedback, and if the person said they were, then we would create a safe dialogue around whatever was going on. Time could be used for expressing something that resonated in oneself when another resident shared, or could be used to air grievances within the house. On the day of Barbara’s makeover, I immediately asked for time.
‘Barbara, are you open for feedback?’ I asked.
Barbara was over the moon at this request. ‘William, I am indeed; speak on.’
‘Barbara,’ I said, ‘when I see your face and what you’ve done, I’m reminded of a French harlot in sixteenth-century Paris, who also steals ice creams and forgets where she has left her various customers around the city.’
Barbara squirmed with delight in her chair. ‘William, are you open to feedback?’
‘I am, Barbara.’
‘William,’ she said, without any hint of irony or sarcasm, ‘thank you. That is the exact look that I was going for!’
Describing, analysing and investigating where my gay shame was rooted and how it developed was only part of my journey. I noticed, after reading a fantastic book called Healing the Shame That Binds You by John Bradshaw, that there were many other symptoms of shame that I exhibited.
Perfectionism – I was fixated on making everything I did at work perfect. If I sang a note I wasn’t happy with, I would dissect it afterwards. It wasn’t just that I wanted work to be perfect, but I also wanted to be a ‘perfect’ person. The best friend, the best son, the best pop star. The problem with perfectionism is that the ultimate conclusion is we aren’t good enough. As soon as we are in a perfectionist cycle we set ourselves up for a fall. It is an unattainable goal and therefore is a tool we use to berate ourselves and reaffirm our core belief that we’re not good enough.
Comparing – Along with perfectionism, I found myself constantly comparing myself to others. This infiltrated my entire life. In work I would compare myself, in friendships I would conclude that others were doing better than me, and it ripped through my relationships, really fucking me up. I even compared myself with everyday people on the street: their clothes are better than mine; I should be driving that car, not the crap car I have; I should be living in this street rather than the one I live on. It was constant, and it was again a cycle that would ultimately end up with me feeling shit and not good enough. When we enter the comparison game, the end result is that we are often left feeling defective, or that our lives are failing. There is however another nuanced conclusion to the comparison game, which is that we go ‘one up’ on others. It is the alternative option to going ‘one down’ and yet it is still a sign that we carry core shame. Our self-esteem is so low and lacking that we compare ourselves against others and conclude that we are much better than they are: better looking than them, or that we have a much better car or job or new suit. It is something I used to do, and always felt so ashamed of. As soon as I read John Bradshaw, and also Pia Mellody’s work, I realised why I always went into these cycles of comparison. Whether we get a quick fix from going ‘one up’, or the kidney punch of a reaffirming ‘one down’, the result is ultimately the same: a dead-end road of shame and self-hate. We enter the comparison game because we have deep wounds.
Fixing – I LOVED being the fixer. The person who would solve the problems of others. I was very good at it. It was something that allowed me to feel wanted, useful and worthwhile. If I was solving people’s problems, listening to their hardships or their relationship woes, I was someone who was worth having around. I’m still very good at it, only now I make a huge effort to do it in a non-co-dependent way. My co-dependence was that if I wasn’t fixing other people and making them happy, I could not be happy. I relied entirely on other people’s lives. In fact, I often wouldn’t allow people to just sit with their feelings and find their own path. I denied people their realties so I could shift mine.
Anger – I never thought I had anger issues, but I did. I would often internalise anger so in close relationships, I would strop, withdraw and isolate. Sometimes, I would explode, but this was mostly within a work environment. I never really understood why I did it, because it never felt truly like me. Something would just take over. I think this can often happen in a relationship, where we find ourselves becoming someone we don’t even recognise. This is a sure sign that ‘stuff’ from our past is hijacking our present reality.
Inability to have adult relationships – relationships were not my forte. When I got into a relationship, I became obsessive in my thinking. Now, a lot of this was down to core abandonment, which was something separate from my gay shame. I would rely too much on a sexual relationship, rather than connecting on a deeper and more loving level. The intensity of sex would seem like love; however, it was merely a plaster over a lack of connection. Sometimes, we confuse intense sex for a true connection with someone. For me, it’s a litmus test of a connection that is based on abandonment and shame. Many therapists say that if two people get together who both have abandonment issues, and will, at some point, abandon each other physically and emotionally, the sex is so intense because it is based on a yearning from both parties. Incidentally, this doesn’t mean sex cannot be intense, yet true, loving sex in a functional adult relationship feels very different. My relationships would generally have a honeymoon period of about a month before my insecurities would creep in. My modus operandi was to compare myself and always come off worse. I wasn’t gay enough, slim enough, cool enough, I didn’t have as interesting friends; it could be anything. It was debilitating and really destroyed me while I was in a relationship.
Body dysmorphia/obsession – body obsession is a sign of emotional pain. In the gay world it’s glaringly noticeable on various apps, and in real life, of course, people can be obsessed with how they look. We may think we are too thin or too fat, not muscly enough or too muscly. I think I had body dysmorphia for years, thinking I was too fat. Now I look back at pictures, I really was quite the little Twink – with a very sporty figure! A Twink-Jock, perhaps?
‘Not really,’ my friend told me when I suggested it the other day. ‘You were just posh!’
Unfortunately, we, in the gay community, can fixate on how we look, thinking that all we’re worth is our muscle. It is a sad reality of some gay people’s mentality that we think that we will only be attractive to someone if we look as close to an underwear model as possible. Of course, different if we just want sex and therefore want to show what we look like naked. It’s rare, however, that this is done in a healthy way. I have done it myself – sent nude pictures from a place of desperately wanting to be validated and wanted.
I believe that body consciousness and body shame is becoming a bigger and bigger problem in the LGBTQ+ community, but we just don’t talk about it. We don’t talk about how we can shame ourselves, on an hourly basis, about the way we look. It can destroy our confidence and become another tool we use to bash ourselves over the head.
I felt terribly body conscious when I was in the West End show Strictly Ballroom. All the boy dancers had such wonderful physiques and I felt unattractive in comparison. Note the comparison game flaring up! I wanted to turn up to one of the pre-show warm-ups wearing only my pants, making a statement that I was doing it because I was so body conscious. However, when it came to it, a) I was too ashamed; b) It might not have been the most contained thing to do anyway.
Overworking – obsession with work is common, and it can act as a distraction from what is lacking in other areas of our lives. Often, when I check in with my therapist, I go through various areas of my life to see how I am doing: work, friends, relationships, spiritually and family. Work should be one of the categories, not the ONLY category.
I had all of the above in me, and it was a light-bulb moment when I realised it meant that I harboured a deep, spiritual wound that needed fixing. But how does one do this?
The number one tool, I have found – and I have to remind myself of it, time and time again – is to connect with others. To safely express my vulnerability. This can be in gay men’s groups or it can be in 12-step groups. Group therapy, I believe, is absolutely essential to getting out the shame that has been placed onto us.
The paradox of healing shame is that the very thing we need to do is the very thing that shame stops us from doing. We need to bring ourselves into the light, while shame wants us to hide and shy away from other people and the world. Brené Brown is extremely good at explaining shame, and I would highly recommend her TED talk.
As I came into the light and worked through my gay shame, it began to dissipate. I found the motivating energy of anger, resistance, and disbelief at what I had lived through. I started to look outwards, toward my community. Looking at people who still needed support. I believe that gay shame is specific, and therefore needs to have some nurturing and holding within LGBTQ+ groups and spaces. I had to feel safe to be able to say things that, I felt, heterosexual people wouldn’t understand.
During my time in Khiron House, a lot of painful work went on, and at one stage, I was working so hard in my sessions that I developed shingles, and I burst a blood vessel in my eye on more than one occasion. My nervous system was working overtime, and it really took its toll on my body. There were extra-curricular activities that we could all do outside the house, from horse therapy to craniosacral therapy. One of these that cropped up was breath work. I wasn’t quite sure what it meant, but one of the residents who had done it said it was very beneficial, so off I trotted one Thursday lunchtime, to the garden shed of a very pleasant woman in north Oxford. What occurred there was that, through my breathing, I ended up, to all intents and purposes, rebirthing myself. God knows what was going on, but when the session finished I felt drained and rather relaxed. Thanking the woman for a fantastic ‘birthing experience’, I gently walked back to the house, deciding to go through town. This walk ended up being a very peculiar, yet incredible turn of events, that led to me working through the leftovers of my gay shame.
As I turned into the top of the high street, by a shop called Crabtree & Evelyn, I spotted Thom Yorke from Radiohead. I knew he lived in Oxford, and went over to say hello. He nodded rather curtly and I was more than happy with that response from someone as musically iconic as he. Feeling even more buoyant, after not only a rebirthing but a run-in with Thom Yorke, I sauntered on toward Boots, where I saw three guys in their mid-teens surrounding a busker. The busker was holding a harp, and I thought he was probably a nerdy student from Oxford. The guys were clearly intimidating, so I thought I would gently step in.
‘Hey guys,’ I said, and turned to the busker. ‘Wow! That’s a cool instrument; is that a harp? Were you guys wondering the same thing?’
The trio began to mutter and then decided to turn their attention fully to me.
‘Hey, you’re that singer, aren’t you?’ one of them said.
‘Yeah, from The X Factor, innit,’ said another.
‘I am,’ I replied. ‘I’m Will Young.’
What I wanted to add was, ‘I’ve just been rebirthed, bitches, and actually, it was Pop Idol, not The X Factor.’ But I decided, for the sake of simplicity, that I wouldn’t.
‘Urrrrghhh! You’re that batty boy, aren’t you?’ one of the teenagers said.
‘Yeah, you’re that faggot! Urrgghhh! You’re disgusting. Batty boy, batty boy!’
Well, as you can imagine, this wasn’t the most ideal situation post-rebirthing, and, I noted, the harp nerd wasn’t helping in the slightest. So, in I launched.
‘You can’t actually say that anymore,’ I said. ‘This is offensive and illegal, and if you want to, I can walk up to the police station with you and we can talk to the police about it.’
‘Yeah, whatever, poof. Urrgghhhh! Batty boy, bum boy, faggot. You’re disgusting, man.’
I repeated my offer to walk with them to the police station, and they played ball for about five yards. After that, they stopped, rounding on me and getting a bit more aggressive. It was then that I decided to employ a tactic I’d wanted to try for some time. I shouted at the top of my voice to the whole high street.
‘HELLO, MY NAME IS WILL YOUNG, AND THESE THREE BOYS ARE CALLING ME A FAGGOT, HOMOPHOBICALLY ATTACKING ME, AND BEING AGGRESSIVE!’
The three guys Lost. Their. Shit! They didn’t know what to do. They started screaming and shouting at me.
‘I’m going to fuck your mum. I’m going to rape your mum. I’m going to fuck you up.’
Me again: ‘HEY, EVERYBODY! THEY ARE NOW TELLING ME THAT THEY ARE GOING TO FUCK MY MUM, AND RAPE HER, AND FUCK ME UP!’
It was the most fascinating of experiments. The whole street literally turned their attention onto these three boys, with the mood of the entire street changing. One man came up, aggressively telling the boys to ‘shut up’ before threatening to attack them. A woman came over and was absolutely foul-mouthed toward them. It was wonderful! What I found so fascinating was that, if this had occurred a couple of years back, the public might not have seen it as offensive and downright wrong. What I witnessed, however, was how the mood had changed. People were standing up and saying, ‘This doesn’t happen in this city and this country.’
My tactic had been a huge success, so every time the boys got within three yards of me, I would just start screaming, unashamedly. They followed me for a bit longer and then finally gave up.
I did then go to the police, who were brilliant, trying their hardest to find and identify the boys, but ultimately they couldn’t. When I got back to the house, I didn’t actually feel too bad, if a little weary. What with the rebirthing, it had been a busy afternoon.
The next day, I bought the incident up in my session with Vijay (who I called the Space Cowboy.) Vijay and I worked somatically, which, in my kindergarten description, means that I would sense into my body, and release the stored traumatic tension trapped there. Vijay thought this incident was a good thing to explore, and the resulting session was one of the most difficult of my life.
With complete consent, and with both therapist and client being utterly aware of boundaries and my capabilities, Vijay took on the role of the three homophobic bullies in the street the day before. Vijay sat at one end of the basement room of the house, and I sat at the other. After checking I was happy with the distance between us, he then took on the language and, effectively, the form of the homophobic kids.
He sucked his teeth. ‘Hey batty boy, arse bandit, batty boy batty boy … ’
I felt the shame rise up in me. It was like a cloud to begin with, taking over my whole torso and then spreading over my face and head, forming a sort of fog. It vibrated with so much energy that it was almost suffocating
‘Faggot, batty boy, poofter, arse muncher. You’re disgusting man. Urrghhh! You suck dick and put dicks in your mouth. BATTY BOY!’
I felt the cloud turn to a black tarry substance in my stomach. My legs were beginning to wobble. Even now, I’m trying to remain really and truly grounded to take myself back to that time; it became almost unbearable. Vijay apologised. He felt awful doing it, and told me so, just so he could maintain that therapist connection and support me in the overwhelming shame and self-disgust that was coming. He checked if I was OK, and I nodded; then he started to practise boundaries, advancing slowly towards me. I stood up from my chair and told him to stop, firmly holding my arms out straight, and making sure I could feel my feet on the ground. I squeezed my hands together to find strength in my arms and stamped my feet on the floor. I found more of my voice and stated firmly and increasingly loudly, ‘STOP!’ Vijay encouraged me and continued with the insults. I wobbled and he supported me, suggesting again that I find strength in my arms and legs. There was some resistance but I found it again. We repeated this three or four times: the cycles of strength, then doubt and weakness. It went round and round, and then, when I had firmly found a place of continued strength, I began to voice, giving back the shame that was being cast onto me.
‘THIS IS NOT MY SHAME.’ I spoke firmly with resonance and belief. ‘THIS IS NOT MY SHAME. I HAND IT BACK TO YOU. THIS IS NOT MY SHAME. THIS HAS BEEN PUT ONTO ME, AND I WILL NOT ACCEPT IT. I HAND IT BACK WITH LOVE AND EMPATHY AND POWER AND ABSOLUTE CONVICTION AND RESOLUTENESS.’
I wavered again and again, but found my strength and continued these words. Then there was the final piece, which is what I call ‘a completion piece’, something that, in somatic experiencing, brings back a different and empowering result. It is a technique used in trauma work, where we take ourselves into our body and our imagination, back to a place of helplessness and hopelessness, and then determine a different outcome. It allows the traumatic narrative and energy to ‘complete’, finding a different story, and a new freeing ending for ourselves and our bodies. It is a felt sense, and shows our nervous system that we can experience a different outcome.
It is important, at this juncture, to introduce a caveat. Often, the imagined and felt sense that happens in a differently formed outcome doesn’t mean this will happen in real life. What I mean by this, and specifically to my sessions, was that often my ending would be of gladiatorial proportions! An example. When I did work on a terrifying teacher at my prep school, I found myself imagining myself at one end of a football pitch with a group of boys standing behind me. Next to me were my dogs, past and present; especially prominent was my brother’s Siberian husky/German shepherd, who looks like a white wolf. As well as her, there was an enormous Alsatian called Martha, who used to stray onto the football pitch from a local farm. I stood there resolute and firm. The teacher, who had terrorised me at Horris Hill, approached, red-faced and furious. He advanced, and I stopped him with a flick of a finger. I was so powerful, firm and protective in front of these children, while, weirdly, I seemed to be 11 years old but also an adult at the same time. I felt so strong that I could have simply swept my arm up, and he would have flown off the football pitch, out into oblivion. In the final part of the vision I sliced his head clean off with a samurai sword. God knows where the sword came from, but that doesn’t matter, it was my imagination and my empowering dream. We all have dreams where we can fly or can run super fast. It’s of course, not real, and I did not and WILL not cut anyone’s head off!
I was astonished at where my mind had taken me; the feeling was astounding. It had taken me two years to gain that strength and to feel that power, and now I’d proved to myself that I had it in me. It had brought up a protective nature in me, as well some ferocious animal instincts. I was like a lioness! When harnessed, that strength and assuredness was more powerful than I had ever imagined, and I believe it’s something we all have within us.
When it came to finding a conclusion for the deep shame that had been put on me for years and years, I ended up becoming an eagle. This is something that is often explored within shamanism. We take on forms of animals and use what they represent for us. I was always obsessed with the giant eagles in The Hobbit, to the point that when I watched it with my friend at an IMAX cinema in London, 3D glasses firmly on, I stood up when the eagles turned up toward the end and proclaimed, ‘The eagles are here! The eagles are here!’
My friend sank down into her seat and whispered to me, ‘They’re not real, William.’
‘Sarah,’ I replied, ‘who hurt you?’
When I took on the form of a giant eagle in my session with Vijay, I picked up all the shame that I had extracted from my body, held it in my talons, and flew it up towards the sun, where I released it, watching the sun burn it clear away. I soared back down over the high street and swept my giant wings, blowing the homophobic thugs away, watching them roll down the high street. After the session, I felt elated. It wasn’t an ultimate cure and I still had to work on the shame, continuing to reduce it, extract it and burn it away.
My rebirthing had led me into a situation that ultimately allowed me to process a bucket load of shame. It still lives within me and there have been times where it is still activated, but the traumatic energy has been reduced, and now, it’s much more contained.
Who knew a rebirthing session, Thom Yorke, a harpist and an eagle would lead to me actually becoming more empowered in myself.