Articles About The Centre

PICTURE this. You are distraught beyond your capacity to understand. Depressed beyond your capacity to endure.
Paranoid beyond your capacity to reason. Scared. Very very scared. Nothing fits together and you are flooded by pain and anxiety. You are agitated. No soothing is possible. Your mind bombards you with negative thoughts. Hurtful, self-critical images relentlessly stab your mental space. You feel trapped, incapable of being understood. Lost from yourself. Horrified that this is who you are.
You lose a sense of yourself outside of this state. You are only the pain that vibrates through you now. You feel ashamed in front of your family and loved ones. You can't imagine that they can accept you. You hate yourself. Why should they love you? How could they? You are angry and desperate. Why can't they make it better? Restore your equilibrium? Why do they keep giving you those pitiful looks as if you have a terminal disease?
Everything irritates. The only restful thought maybe that of suicide. A desire to take control of the pain and release yourself. This is what everyone around you fears. They can't bear your distress. They can barely manage to hear it. It is too upsetting and threatening. They want it to go away. They want you not to feel that way or, if you do, for them to be able to, intervene effectively. But they can't find a way. They are too close and it scares them too much.
Eventually someone suggests medication. It feels like an insurance policy; an action to ward off suicidal thoughts. You try, but the medication removes you from yourself so that you are trapped looking at your pain through net curtains, numbed but not so much that you don't feel. Your brain is muffled. You try to punch through to connect with real feelings but it's all cotton candy. All that registers is a dull thud.
The psychiatrist takes a history. No eureka experiences release you from your hell. Your desperation increases. Your ability to hold any hope, to look after yourself, to engage, is entirely eroded. You consider going to a mental hospital but can't dispel the imagery of madness found there. Sympathetic people suggest a refuge. A place of safety. A home where you can live where people will help you with your pain without their being alarmed.
You remember reading something about such sanctuaries. Places where the pain can be unlocked and allowed to flow away from you. You still feel deeply upset about being in such a sorry state but you go along in order to find out more.
Nothing makes much sense, but the idea of a room in a pleasant house with good food, other people in distress who above all don't interfere, seems appealing. You are not all that sure how you are supposed to get better but the house co-ordinator is unalarmed by your condition and reassuring. He or she exudes calm. You even imagine that one day you too could feel calm and at case with yourself again.
Although the bureaucratic arrangements to take you on are tedious, you are encouraged in your efforts to find the funding to stay because the,

other residents talk so well of the house. They value the weekly house meetings, the sense of community, the twice weekly therapy sessions which are held outside the house. And they like the house co-ordinators.
You very much appreciate the combination of care and discretion. Your great pain is recognised. Your privacy is respected. You are treated as an adult. The social relations between the guests, although complex, start from the premise that they are capable of engaging with each other without interference. There is no live-in warden surveying the goings-on of the residents, or exercising a chilling effect on the expression of feelings, or standing in as a mummy or daddy on to whom bad feelings are offloaded.
There is quite a bit of disruptive behaviour, many minidramas which pull in all the occupants of the house, disputes between one or another of the residents. But much love and caring is generated too between the residents. Their own hurt doesn't impair their capacity to give. Rather their pain makes one's own feel less extraordinary and peculiar and more just what it is.
You begin to relax and engage with the life of the house, to start your therapy and to begin to accept the terrible mental space you are occupying. In that acceptance the pain begins to shift and you develop a different perception of yourself and what is hurting so much.
You grieve, you rage, you despair. What was once an overwhelming emotional morass sifts out into manageable themes. Your pain becomes endurable and comprehensible. You develop narratives to explain it. You work for clarity and emotional truth and, in reaching for these, you find the transformative power of language and emotion twinned as they need be, authentically. Slowly you grow the psychological muscles to enjoy yourself again, to ingest new experience rather than slot what exists into pre-existing- painful scenarios. Your capacity to reflect on your mental state develops and you can tolerate and digest more of what has been difficult. You feel renewed.
attributes you valued or loathed before may silt out in a different place. Certain aspects of your new self may feel awkward and tentative. But you are intrigued and interested by how you are developing. Frail and delicate, you nevertheless sense a potential solidity and substance. You feel the possibility of hope, of your humanity swimming into you, allowing you to make contact with others. Out of your darkness, there is now a chance to move forward.
The Arbours Association, which is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year, runs several houses and a crisis centre to help people in difficulty. Its great success and innovative programmes are in danger as local government legislation reclassifies its activities as hostels, requiring 24-hour custodial cover quite at odds with the ethos and aims of the organisation. For more information contact Arbours Association (020 8340 7646).
Sanctuary: The Arbours Experience Of Alternative Community Care, edited by Joseph Berke, Chandra Masoliver and Thomas J Ryan. is published by Process Press, price £15.99.