#for which i am willing to invent the term 'disordered reading.'

[nostalgia-tblr]

repeated note to self: AVOID FANFIC REDDIT D: D: D:

[replicantdeviancy]

PSA;

Just a small note; long rant under cut. This rant involves a personal experience involving internet libel and bullying. Please use discretion if this makes you nervous or upsets you.

I would like to begin this statement by saying that no names or urls will be mentioned for the sake of privacy and to protect the identity of those involved. The bullies in question has been blocked and since reported on all active accounts and at this time no legal action has been taken. I do not condone the act of call outs, cancel culture or witch hunts. I am simply seeking to explain my side of things in hopes that if one comes across these falsities involving my name they will be sensible, rational, and think twice about their validity. Please feel free to open up a dialogue with me at any time (work/sleep schedule taken under consideration) and I will be happy to speak with you. Not just about this unforeseen issue, but in general. Please also have the decency to approach things with a respectful mindset as I will be nothing but respectful with you.

Thank you.

-

In light of a recent conversation I feel I must address this issue as the individual in question seems to have made an unfortunate resurgence. Just under a year ago, in a misguided attempt to use my writing as a means of self-therapy to combat a past trauma I had endured, I decided upon using a narrative in a single AU verse with a single RP partner. Due to some very negative responses from one single individual (I’ll refer to them as A) that narrative had since been abandoned and deleted. However, A brought it upon themselves to perpetuate their false perception of the situation without a rational attempt at speaking with me. Instead of trying to clarify my reason for choosing to participate in something that we, in all actuality, found mutually repugnant, they decided to send me a very harassing message. (I still keep the screenshot of it for legalities sake).

At that time I thought nothing of it. Just a troll trying to shame me for something which offended them. Like most trolls, I expected A was in a very bad place emotionally and was simply deciding to take a shot at low hanging fruit. As such, I responded flippantly. (Please do also not that I personally suffer with extreme generalized anxiety and panic disorder and while I don’t recall every detail of that evening, I do remember I was trembling uncontrollably). I spoke with a few friends about the incident, and they helped me feel better about it. I expected it was over and done. I was incorrect.

A had taken this out of context narrative and my flippant post and decided to call me out, involving a small group of fellow anti’s, perpetually spreading misinformation about the entire situation and framing screenshots to fit their narrative. I wasn’t too upset at the time, still under the impression this individual was someone in a bad place in life, someone with anger issues in need of counseling or therapy. My impression was further proven when this group also began calling out others within the fandom, making outlandish and baseless claims involving the race of some muns and antisemitic remarks. I was also removed from a group chat due to the libel upon my name. Now frightened, I spoke with a few friends again and discovered they too had received call outs. Many of these people had anxiety and similar emotional traumas, mental disorders and the like, which only ended up hurting them further.

I cannot hope to understand why A chose to harm these people, nor what their reason is to blindly make accusations and harass others in place of reasonable dialogues. I did at one point open communication with them, noting their issues on the matter and explaining in no uncertain terms that I agreed with them, that it was simply an exploration of a theme, very closed off and not open to anyone else under any circumstances. (screenshots also kept for legal purposes)  I imagined this communication went well but it appears not to have, as I have come to notice several blogs whom I do not know and have had no contact with already have me blocked.

I am not saying this to garner sympathy, nor to I condone action on anyone’s part involving the individuals in question. I’m a grown adult, perfectly capable of dealing with my inner demons. I have far more concern for those who can’t fight back or don’t have the ability to brush off such vicious negativity directed towards them. I hope others in the future will make the right decision in regard to seeing things on others blogs that they don’t approve of and, rather than go into a fit of wild accusation and blocking that person, being big enough to open up and speak with them with a little compassion.

I will express that some of the themes on this blog are used as a means of personal therapy. Some have worked out, some did not. I have been very private when it comes to my personal life, as no one is entitled to my life story nor my reasons for writing what I choose to. However, apart from a few choice individuals, this has been a very open and caring fandom ( in spite of it’s size ) and most people are rational and compassionate people who just adore their characters and love Detroit: Become Human.

I personally owe a lot to DBH as some chapters helped me get into a better place when it comes to past trauma. The more negative scenes involving Todd and Kara actually had me shaking and needing to take a break, the scenes with Hank involving alcohol made me nervous. But over time and with exposure I no longer automatically have such negative reactions. I began to be able to take a step back and look at these things with a clearer, more objective mindset and could see this as a characters journey rather than something frightening. It still disturbs me and I don’t like it, but I’m more comfortable now.

It’s rather the same with some of my writing. I only have a few things I will absolutely, expressly NOT write about, because no matter the context I simply cannot make myself write it. That’s an individual thing, and everyone has something like that. I hope we can all be understanding to one another on this matter.

Moving forward, I want to make it expressly clear that I do not condone or even agree with any questionable acts my or any characters engage in on this platform. Please take into account that if someone - anyone - writes about something questionable that they in no way condone these things and that the mundane does not, in fact, equal the muse. They are two separate entities with separate opinions, feelings, emotions, thoughts and mindsets. If we begin to police others on their ethics based solely on the theme portrayed or character written, we fall dangerously towards a slippery slope of thought policing. I urge all of you to read a book entitled 1984 which examines the dangers of this very narrative.

As a closing note, I want to say that I am not angry at A or the group of anti’s for their actions. I’m not even upset that they seem to be keen on spreading misinformation a year after the incident had been resolved. I only wish to say that I sincerely hope they get the help they need and that they someday find themselves in a better, happier place emotionally.

If you yourself are bullied or preyed upon but internet trolls, harassed or otherwise a victim of libel, please have the courage to report it to staff. Block the harasser in question. Do as I have and keep screen caps of their harassing messages and posts and show them to staff. Libel is a federal crime and online bullying is a prosecutable offense in a court of law. And if you yourself are someone who participates in cancel culture or bullying, please, I encourage you to speak with someone and find the source of this anger within yourself. Speak with your primary care physician and begin the path towards therapy, because your mental health is important and there are people who love you. There is no reason to take your aggressions out on others or jump to conclusions. If you cannot afford therapy, I encourage you to use one of the services from the list linked HERE. The saying “Walk a mile in my shoes” should be adopted, for you should be willing to open yourself up and empathize with others. Everyone does something for a reason.

Friends, please be careful out there. Bullies are a rare thing in this fandom as it stands and as they have slowly been banned or moved on, the DBH fandom has become a better, positive place for many individuals to express their love of characters, actors and the game itself and can engage others in fun, inventive writing projects. Let’s continue to be the fans that Bryan and Amelia would be proud of. Let’s stay positive and accepting towards one another. I have been so grateful for the people who chose to follow me and wanted to write with me, who put up with my stupid gushing and silly thread ideas. Not a single one of you is a number to me. You all bring something to the table and I’m glad to be here, two years in and having a blast. I hope each of you have such good fortune.

Take care and be well.

[imspardagus]

Talking about Depression : Part I - This will not do

{This two-part paper - and especially Part II - is a work in progress. The deeper in I go, the more precise I have to be, the less confident I feel that I am up to the task of writing it. But it is important, to me at least. So I have published it in this inchoate form in the hope that the help of others, challenging its ideas and offering suggestions, will help me to refine and strengthen it or else to see where it is misconceived.}

I had lived with depression for more than fifty years. It had wrecked my adolescence, my education, my ability to feel joy and my marriage. And I had appeased it.

But when I found it growing inside my children a wave of grief and anger coursed through me. And in its wake I am left with an insistent voice that says, “This will not do”.

   Depression hurts people. It wastes lives.

 It afflicts one in ten of us. That’s a conservative figure. Whether it is affecting more of our young than it used to, or whether we are just now able to accept that it can (my parents’ generation did not believe it could), the figures show that it does afflict them, in large numbers.

 This will not do.

 But what can I do about it? What can I do for my children? I can’t drive it away, as I hope I would do with any rabid beast that was threatening them. I can’t reason with it to leave. Some of the cleverest people in the world and in all history have been unable to break its hold on their minds, and I am so far from being clever by their standards, or my own. I can’t buy their freedom from it. If money was the answer, the rich and famous would not be among its victims. I can’t invent a cure for it. I’m no scientist. Must I content myself with “being there for them”? Can I do more than impotently watch?

 I can talk about it, about my experience of it, and about what I think I have learned. And if I do, perhaps someone else will add their thoughts, if only to correct my thinking. And if we pool what we know and what we think we know, each one adding her or his tiny beam of insight maybe  we can shed enough light on depression to see it for what it is. And maybe then we might be able to save our children and their children from some of the harm it does.

 Some of you will say, I am sure, that we already know all we need to know about depression and, brilliant creatures that we are, we have developed wonderful drugs and clever strategies to cure it. To that I can only shake my head. It is obvious to me that, far as we have come, we have yet to reach the point of understanding depression; and all our treatments so far are at best symptomatic.

 This will not do.

 If you disagree; if you think that there is nothing to consider, nothing to discuss, go in peace. If you are willing to indulge me for a while, please read on.

 A boy named depression

 I first learned that I had a condition known as clinical depression (or major depressive disorder as it is now often referred to) when I was in my mid-thirties. The diagnosis helped a lot. Which was odd because what it added, in terms of understanding, was very little. It simply meant that there was a name for what I now realised had been afflicting me, since I was eleven. Give something a name and you imbue it with substance, rather like when the once brilliant Maureen Lipman said “you’ve got an Ology”. You take away its deniability.

 No, that’s not quite right. It did more than that. It allowed me to see, for the first time, was that all the misery that had dogged my life up to then was not the visitation of occasional, inexplicable, unconnected downward mood swings. Depression, I could see now, was an entire landscape in which these were just the most treacherous ravines and canyons that I had stumbled into. It was a map of lowness where all the contour lines had negative values. Joy was only ever a hope without hope for what might be over in the next valley. Meanwhile the need to watch my feet continually robbed me of the ability to embrace the light-hearted pleasure that my friends carelessly enjoyed. Every day of travel was punctuated by frequent plunges into bogs of cloying despair.

 Less poetically, but more importantly  (because I had come to believe otherwise), I was now able to understand on an intellectual level that all this struggling with a constant sense of failure was not because I was weak, nor because I was a loser, an inept seeker after goals beyond my pathetic ability. It was because something powerful kept dragging me down.

 I delved back into memories. I wanted to know where this had come from. And like Scrooge transported to his past, I saw a boy who had been happy once and confident, a climber of trees and leader of wild, day-long summer games in Valentines Park, a reader of books, a good pupil doing well at school, well regarded, well-liked. Now, as he moved into his teens, suddenly painfully tired and frightened of being seen or heard. “Growing pains”, the doctor called it, “He’s outgrown his strength.” But I saw this boy at his grammar school desk unable to focus on the board or what his teacher was saying because a thick fog of bewildering sadness and unfathomable threat was around him. I saw him as a fifteen-year-old listening in on the weekend exploits of his peers but unable to imagine himself participating; looking at the pairings of strutting boys and achingly desirable girls and shuddering at the mere thought of bringing himself to the attention of any of them, humiliation seeming so much more likely than that someone might find his attentions welcome.

 I saw the lonely young man trying to study law with a brain that would not let him get beyond a paragraph or maybe two before shutting him out, whose evenings were not spent raucously propping up the student bar but alone in his room listening to the tirades of his own mind against his uselessness.

 I saw the young lawyer, taunted in his head by his poor exam results, living daily with the belief that he had no right to the job he had secured; soon everyone surely would see that he was a fraud, just as he already knew himself to be.

 I saw the same young man disabled from engaging intimately with anyone he found attractive by the mere fact of wanting to. I watched him eventually taken in hand by a kind friend but, even then, in the midst of what should have been blissful release into normality, only able to feel wracked with anxiety and guilt. In his mind, he had no business feeling good; in his mind he could only ever be a crap lover.

 I saw now that these were not isolated the one from the other. I saw that they were all connected and the connection was a thing of darkness.

 But I still had no answer to what this thing was, or why and how it was doing this to me.

 Seeing is the first step

 Just the naming of ills can be a great source of comfort. It can even be the key to despatching them. Cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) rests pretty much on that premise: if you can see the problem, you can change your way of responding to it. Like Ry Cooder singing “Trouble, you can’t fool me, hiding behind that tree”.

 But there’s a problem with depression. It’s not like, say, “compound fracture of the fibula” “cystic fibrosis” or “flu”. The term “clinical depression” does not describe a physical condition such as an injury, organic malfunction or  growth. If only it did. I have known any number of fellow sufferers who have said how much they wished they had a “real” illness, meaning something visible that the rest of the world could recognise and therefore accept and sympathise with.

 Nor does it pin down the cause of a condition (such as “fell off a swing”, or “genetic disorder” or “bacterial invasion”). The diagnosis “depression” is simply the name associated with a collection of identifiers, or symptoms – how you are “presenting”. When a medical professional says you have “clinical depression” all she or he is reporting is no more than that you have scored positive on a set of indicators from which the existence of a state of mind to which the name “clinical depression” has been attached can be inferred. Except in the rare cases where there is a cyst pressing on some part of the brain or a physical dysfunction in the brain’s nerve cells and receptors causing either reduced production of serotonin or over-take-up of it, the diagnosis more properly describes a syndrome than a condition.

 It seems to do more. It seems to lend definition, substance, to the depression: it suggests that there is this entity, this depression. In reality, however, even though the chosen indicators may broadly and conveniently correlate it is has no form or substance. No pathological examination will find it in you. You can’t isolate it, photograph it or measure it except inferentially. And yet, to those afflicted by it, it could not be any more real if it were a massive cast iron ball and chain manacled to their lives.

 I will already be getting shakes of the head from some scientific quarters. No physiological presence? They will want to point me to a chemical imbalance in the brain: specifically too much re-capture of serotonin. But that seems to me to mistake the process for the processor, the messenger for the message. Serotonin in the brain, the presence of which and its take-up are associated with mood, and, in particular, with depression, is not invasive, nor toxic, nor faulty. Nor is it autonomous or self-activating. It is simply a chemical utilised by the brain to bring about a state on mind (and body). If you cannot reach a friend on your cellphone, you do not assume that the radio waves are faulty. You assume that the server is down, or the handset is broken, or something is blocking the signal, or perhaps that you have keyed in the wrong number. Blaming serotonin is like blaming radio waves.

 The question with depression is not whether serotonin is misbehaving: it is not. Nor is the question how your mood is being brought down, because we have evidence almost to the point of knowledge that mood change – specifically enhanced levels of low mood and anxiety (note, these go hand in hand) is because the brain is using the serotonin in a particular way – taking it out of circulation. The question is why your brain is using them to bring down your mood. And it has to be that question because, unless we interfere in the process with our own chemicals, which we call medicines, only the brain can perform this trick on us.

 The question why has two components: why is the brain doing this to us – to itself - and what, if anything, is provoking the brain to do it. They may look like the same question but they are not. Try this: Why am I chewing? Because I need to break down the food in my mouth. But why am I chewing? Because it’s mealtime.

 Let me count the ways

 The onset of depression can often be linked to things that you have been subjected to (this is the “what is provoking the brain” aspect of the question). Across my life, I have witnessed many of them and experienced some.

 I have seen dejection and defeat on the faces of Biafran, Bangladeshi, Rwandan, Kurdish and Syrian refugees. It is horribly consistent: the look of abject surrender to the onslaught of inhumane conflict which has wiped away what little gain that all the years of toiling in grinding poverty had brought them: home, family, security. Their eyes convey a terrifying acquiescent prayer – when you have finished with me, grant me release.

 I have seen unresolved grief born of loss, sometimes of a person, sometimes of health, wash a tsunami of cold, demotivating sadness over the lives of people who had thought themselves strong and contented. And I have felt that grief myself.

 And I have seen another form of grief when dreams finally fall apart and people have to admit that they will never be a ballet dancer, rock star, priest or prime minister, whatever it was that they had set their heart on being, the final surrender of hope turning all the wonder of what they actually are into something bitter and unacceptable; because the dream was their skyhook and its loss has seen them not simply thrown to the ground but broken by the fall.

 And I have seen the shadows of wariness behind the eyes of people whose relentless displays of happiness are a desperate bid to distance themselves from an awfulness haunting them from childhood. The act itself may have taken place a long time ago, the awfulness of it locked away in their mind. But its ghost hangs around them in the form of a cold, enveloping depression. I have seen grown women and men who, as children, were forced to submit to abominable treatment by someone they should have been able to trust. And I have watched as the worm planted inside them eats into their ability to accept joy or kindness unflinchingly, watched as they pick and pick at the gift of love in a compulsive belief that it will hurt them. I have seen them, those who time and again have sought destructive relationships that reinforce their conviction that to be mistreated over and over again is all they deserve.

 But even in all these instances, the descent into depression is not universal or consistent. It is a response that some people have and some people don’t. If you prick me do I not bleed? Yes, of course I do. But even when assaulted by these extreme emotional insults, not everyone becomes depressed.

 What does this tell us? To begin, it confirms that depression is not simply an automatic chemical reaction. Depression is what you experience as a consequence of the chemical imbalance but your brain has created that imbalance. The brains of some people in some way, and at some level, but certainly not at a conscious level, choose depression (which heralds the second aspect of the question why).

 It is significant if we stop to consider the treatment we presently favour for depression. If the drugs you are given to combat depression simply override the mechanism causing the chemical imbalance then whatever in your brain was creating the depression is not being addressed, only circumvented, whatever reason it had, ignored. That is dangerous.

 Here is a car analogy, if your car has an oil leak but when you take it to the garage the mechanic simply tops up the sump, you still have an oil leak. If he finds the hole but only plugs it with some chewing gum, you still have a hole.

 If you artificially “top up” the serotonin levels, you may feel less depressed: if you introduce a chemical that temporarily gums up the receptors draining the serotonin from your system, you may feel less depressed. But that is all.  The brain had a reason for creating what you are experiencing as depression. It had a reason for altering its uptake of serotonin. It was trying to bring about an outcome. Stay on the drugs and you will be distracted from dealing with it. Stop the drugs and, unless there was an external cause for your depression that has meantime resolved itself (as can happen with grief), the likelihood is that the depression will come back.

 Depressive by nature

 That last passage seems to imply that when the brain makes you feel depressed it is always reacting to a specific external threat or cause. But can there be depression without such a cause? Recalling that suggestion a few paragraphs back that “even when assaulted by these extreme emotional insults, not everyone becomes depressed”, is it possible that those who do have a propensity to do so? Do some brains exist in a continuing state of depression? Are these people “depressives” by nature?

 Once I had the name, depression, to hold on to, I tried to associate my recurring bouts depression with one or more of the forms I had identified. I wanted a reason. I wanted to be able to point to a cause. More than that, I wanted the cause to be “out there”. I was a victim. I wanted to know my attacker.

 But this, I came to see after years of painful interrogation, this depression was none of these. It was in a class of its own. I had not been oppressed by war. At 35, I had not yet suffered grief. I had not, to my knowledge, been abused as a child. I was, though I did not feel it, a tolerable success in my career and, though I could not see why, I was well-liked and even respected. I could find no extrinsic cause for how I was. This depression stood alone, with its own reality. It lived within me and had done at least since I was eleven years old. Not injury, not virus, not invasive parasite but a cancer, a thought cancer, the generation by my own mind of despondent feelings: inescapable feelings of emptiness, hopelessness and utter failure, and of being shut out from joy (anhedonia).

 It wasn’t caused by anything. It had been there all that time, directing the soundtrack to my life. Occasionally it was triggered into a heightened (or, more aptly, deepened) state by an event or a memory (these were the plunging valleys and ravines of its landscape). But it was predatory. It found things to hook itself on to; things that, without it, might have been mere setbacks, obstacles and worries. It attached itself to every negative aspect, and even some positive aspects, of my life and turned them into nightmares, gargoyles, monsters worthy of its pain. It was, as Professor Lewis Wolpert elegantly described it, malignant sadness.

 This was clinical depression.

 Like cancer, it seemed incurable. I dutifully tried all the versions of anti-depressants. Some of them brought a little temporary respite. Most made things worse. So much worse that to remain on them was unbearable. The drugs wrapped my brain up in dense cotton wool. They made sustained analytical thinking impossible. My job was sustained analytical thinking. To lose my clarity of thought was, so far from being a relief, a massive confirmation of my worst fears. Worse still. every bout of depression always brought its monstrous sister, anxiety, in tow anyway. And yet all the drugs for depression carried contra-indications of heightened anxiety, and they delivered on their promise. That I did not need and could not stand. Time on drugs was time when thoughts of ending my life were at their most insistent.

 I dutifully tried talking therapies. In theory they seemed to have much to commend them (though, as I will attempt to explain later, I now doubt that they can be of much more value than a crutch to a lame man.) But in practice, in the way they were practised, they seemed more akin to cruel and unusual punishment. Few, very few, of the practitioners I saw seemed to have any insight: into their trade or the humanity of the person before them. It seemed not to occur to them that you were in pain, that more than this, you were exhausted, and that their procedures were also exhausting. They probed with a rote inanity like mental hygienists, fixated upon finding examples of poor self-care with which to challenge you. And in all this, it seemed so cosmetic, gouging painfully into your fragile equilibrium but barely scratching the surface of cloying black ooze of the depression clogging your mind and making it difficult at times to breathe.

 Over time, I came to see that the best you could hope for was to recognise the early signs of resurgent depression and head them off or contain them. I was, for a long while, no closer to finding the answer to why my brain was doing this to me.

 And that was how I lived for years, and am still living now.

 Then, suddenly, it was what I was faced with watching as it attached itself to my children’s lives.

 Then it came for them

 For my daughter, who showed the signs first, though she was the younger of our children, it looked at first as if the break-up of the marriage, her mother and me, followed later by her mother’s decision to move to the US to be with someone she loved, had induced the kind of traumatic response typically found in such children.

 She had always been a bright child, with a strong will that, occasionally, got in her way (like when she refused to have music lessons, preferring to be self-taught to taking instruction). She was creative and popular, morally very sound but always full of fun and curiosity. All this survived the break-up of the marriage itself (which her mother and I handled as amicably as we could manage: we were friends, we loved each other but we could not live together); but not her mother’s departure, a few years later, to America.

 The change was dramatic. She became angry and self-destructive. Hardly a day went by without my having to go into school or talk on the phone to a teacher or deputy head. She dropped all of the good friends she had had and took up with others who would sanction and drive her dysfunctional, self-harming and anti-social behaviour. She would not be helped even though it was evident that she was deeply unhappy. It was agonising for both her mother and me to watch.

 It went on for three years. She refused all offers of help. All we could do was be there, take all the shit and offer occasional trite advice when she was sufficiently in despair to reach out. And I did. I told her, blithely trying to believe it myself, you can choose to be a victim, or you can choose to take back control; after years of experience I would not recommend being a victim. She appeared not to be listening. I blamed myself for not being a good enough parent. I am sure her mother did the same. But something inside our daughter was listening and, as she later confirmed, she knew that she was only hurting herself. She just could not stop herself. It was as if she had to live out all the hurt she was feeling inside.

When the turn-around came, which, mercifully, it did, it was even more astonishing than what had gone before. She ditched the destructive aspects of her life and rebuilt herself. She achieved three good A levels from a school that had wanted to chuck her out. She acquired new friendships that were positive and supportive and became that warm, loving, kind enthusiastic person that the child had been meant to be.

 But when the anger and the rest had melted away, and what had emerged was a thoughtful, mature and very able young woman, it was now impossible, for her and for me, not to be aware of what remained.  She had a black shadow.

 Self-doubt, strong enough to bring her down for days, worries that she will never find out what she wants to be, fears that she is purposeless and without direction and it will always be this way, finally manifesting themselves physically in anxiety-driven stomach disorders that cause her disabling cramps and nausea, these are some of what she has to live with. They are inhibiting her progress, hampering her development. They shut her down repeatedly. They are poisoning her happiness. And nothing that any of us can say or do by way of correction can displace them.

 Our son seemed to have got away without the affliction, surprising given that both his parents were long-term depressed and almost certainly both sets of grandparents too.

 He has had a passion for IT since he was three. By the time he went to secondary school, he knew, self-taught, far more than his teachers (a fact they sensibly realised and utilised after a few initial hiccups). That, I suppose, gave him somewhere to be, to retreat to: the boost that comes from ascendancy over problems. But though he was teased for being a nerd, a term he willingly and self-mockingly accepted until they gave up using it, I came to see that there was so much more to him. He was, and could be, annoyingly rational and clear headed. But he also had great insight into people and, from somewhere, a profound but practical kindness. So far from the classic introspective geek or nerd, he loved engaging with people – all people. Those same friends who taunted him for his logic, turned always to him for help when life knocked them back. There wasn’t, and isn’t, a malicious bone in his body.

 Unlike his sister, he appeared to accept his mother’s decision to move away and got on with life. He showed neither anger nor sadness. He continued to love her and to embrace her presence in his life. He spoke plainly to both of us, his honesty sometimes painful to receive. But he was usually right and I believe his mother and I both appreciated his insights. He also helped dissipate the antagonism between his sister and her and designed and built many of the bridges they needed to come back together.

 If ever emotional intelligence needed an exemplar, our son was it.

 Out in the big world, he proved a success of his own making, determinedly finding the right course at university, and from it the right employer, and he quickly came to be appreciated by his employer for his unusual ability to be the bridge between his IT colleagues and their clients. Everything seemed to be turning out for the best.

  So much so that I tried to believe it, and was glad. But the shadow was there too, waiting to be cast in some period of darkness by the glaring light of emotional pain.

 When his friends were “playing the field”, drifting easily in and out of simple, undemanding interactions that were more like try-outs than relationships, he wasn’t. When eventually he took up with someone it was, for him, deeply felt; and his treatment of her was protective and loving. He cared, he empathised, he resolved. I had already come to see myself as “Son of Lassie” – the sheepdog that is driven by an indefeasibly deep sense of duty to care for his flock. Here before me, I realised, was the son of Son of Lassie. And because of that I started to worry. Being a sheepdog is not something you choose for yourself and it comes at a price and the price is always waiting to be paid.

 His first serious relationship came to an abrupt end after two years. For him it came without warning. I am sure that, as she broke the news to him as they drove back to university to prepare for their first year exams, inside his head he was thinking “what did I do?” He refused to blame his friend. He accepted that she had made her decision. He showed no sign of resentment. Took it all on, and into, himself. The effect on him was devastating. He could not eat for days. Literally could not swallow (I remember having to coax him back, recommending plain soup and thin porridge). His almost hyperactive mind and body slowed dramatically. He seemed defeated.

 In time he recovered but now there was a hint of wariness, of holding back, like a dog that has been beaten and is afraid now of the affection it craves.

 But then along came a new friend. She was one of those people who can light a room just by entering it and we all fell in love with her. My son looked happier than I had ever seen him. The friendship seemed perfect. Watching them together brought me close to joy and tears.

 It lasted three years. Then he sensed that for all that he was happy, and though she was trying to be, she was not. A less emotionally intelligent person would have closed his eyes to the perception and hoped it would somehow just work itself out but he loved her too much to do that. And so, one night he invited her to tell him what was wrong and she did and they realised that, friends though they were, they could no longer be lovers.

 And friends they remained. Close friends. Though she found another man it was always to my son that she turned for help and he could not withhold it. And I watched it eating him up, being unable to cut the tie and walk away, persuading himself that it was his fault that he was alone. Worse, that it was only natural, that there was something wrong with him: “Two long term relationships, both failed. Says something.”

 His work became his consolation. His recreation became a crazed distraction. But when he was still, the shadow of deep sadness was on his face. Depression had made its move on him.

 This will not do.

Part 2 - The Alpha in your head