TW: Rape

This is part 3 of a set of series, part 1 and part 2 are here.

The truth is, writing these blogs have been just as much about therapy for me as they have been about sharing my experiences to help others. In doing so, I have re-opened the most painful and darkest moments in my life. I felt a physical, searing pain in my body and cried when I wrote them. 

This blog, in particular, has been one of the most difficult ones I have written. You will see that my experiences from my childhood, what most would say were adverse childhood experiences, shaped me as a person. It was not all bad. I consider myself a kind person which for me is something I choose to be and something I would never change. Kindness is what makes our world go round, and in light of the awful events we see again, (rest in peace George Floyd) ‘kindness’ is needed now more than ever. 

My second therapy session with Becky was not what I expected in the least. Have you ever burst into tears when someone has asked how you are? Well, this is precisely what I did. I cried uncontrollably. I cried, and Becky didn’t say a word. She let me cry, and cry, and cry until I stopped. ‘Why are you crying?’ I didn’t know. How was I to know? I was all over the place, a mess. We sat in silence for a while, and before I knew it, I started talking about something I had not discussed in detail for 27 years.

Growing up in an ethnic minority household in the UK was difficult. My parents were strict, and I spent a lot of my teenage years rebelling against them. I hated that I didn’t have the freedom my ‘English’ friends did so I would find any opportunity I could to get out of the house and ‘have some fun’. On a Wednesday night, I was allowed to attend a drama youth theatre. This would be the highlight of my week. Not only did I get to mix with older people, but I didn’t have to be home until 9.15 pm. A group of older boys arrived one week and began to attend every week. They seemed funny and keen on taking part. I recognised one of the boys as I had seen him at the gate of my school on a few occasions waiting for some of my peers after school. He was put into the same group as me, and we seemed to hit it off straight away. I found myself thinking about him a lot, and I’m sure it was obvious that I fancied him.

After a few weeks, he asked me to be his girlfriend. He was just 18, and I was 15 and had never had a boyfriend before. I was scared and couldn’t believe that he wanted to be with me! It was a strange situation because I never saw him other than on a Wednesday, apart from a few times he came to my school but pretended he didn’t know me. I remember always being hurt by this, but always accepting his excuses. I wanted to be his girlfriend, and so I guessed that was just how boys behaved.

One night after Drama, he offered to walk me home, but for some reason, he wanted to go through the local park. This was a detour to my house, but I agreed anyway. As soon as we were out of sight of our friends, he turned and kissed me. I was on cloud 9. I couldn’t wait to tell my best friend in the morning that I had actually had my first kiss! We talked and he asked me if I was a virgin. I told him I was, albeit uncomfortable with the question. He smiled. ‘Good, I like that’. I was proud to be a virgin. I knew that when I decided to ‘lose it’ it would be to the man, I would spend the rest of my life with. Oh, the thoughts of an innocent 15-year-old. As we strolled through the park hand in hand, we crossed into a secluded car park. I had no idea what his intentions were, but I remember feeling worried that I would be late home. Little did I know at the time that he had plans to ‘pop my cherry’. I remember telling him I didn’t want to and that I was going to get into trouble for being late, but he didn’t seem to care. He kept pulling me towards him and telling me I had nothing to be afraid of. When he came to the realisation that I was not going to give in, he got nasty. ‘Why you so frigid?’ ‘Playing hard to get won’t get you anywhere’ ‘Look, touch me, you can see how much I want you, but it won’t last long if you carry on being a frigid bitch’. At this point, I got quite upset, and with tears in my eyes, I tried to walk away. I didn’t get very far before he tripped me up, and before long, I was forced to the ground.

It all happened so quickly. I was in such shock, I couldn’t even scream, or cry, or move. By the time it was all over, I had taken my mind to a far distant place. He got up, helped to my feet and before walking away rebuked me one last time. ‘Well, that was shit’. I couldn’t tell you what was going on in my mind at that moment. I just kept thinking about the excuses I was going to come up with for being late home.

The walk home was arduous. I was sure that the people walking past me knew what had just happened, and I felt so ashamed. I had to stop myself from crying because I couldn’t let me, my parents know what had happened. Not only would my dad go ape shit, but I would never be allowed out of the house again.

When my dad answered the door, he gave his usual suspicious look. ‘Where have you been?’ I told him that Drama had finished late as we had a performance the following week. ‘Why are you lying? I walked up the road to meet you, and the building was closed’. I had to think on my feet. What the hell do I say now? ‘Oh erm, I walked a friend of mine home first’. And here it started again ‘why do you always put others before you? One of these days something will happen to you because you always have to make sure other people are safe before yourself’.

While he continued to shout at me, I walked upstairs and into the bathroom where I ran myself the hottest bath. I sat there for what seemed like hours. Flashbacks to what had just happened were continually running through my mind. I didn’t cry; I didn’t feel anything. I was numb. Needless to say, that night, I didn’t sleep very well. Tomorrow was going to be a new day, and I had to keep going and make sure that no one found out. And then, of course, my own self-berating mulled through my mind and stayed there… ‘Stupid girl, you really thought he liked you!’ ‘who in their right mind would want to be with you!’ ‘I’m not a virgin anymore’ ‘I’M NOT A VIRGIN ANYMORE – No one will ever want to be with me now’. My heart that night broke in two, along with my dignity. I was ashamed. Ashamed that this had happened and ashamed that I had let it happen.

I would like to say that after that night, I started to pick up the pieces and move on, but unbeknownst to me, things were about to get a lot worse.

In the morning, I left the house early to avoid conversations with my family. I still felt quite sore, and my stomach was in agony. I got to the local sweetshop and noticed my best friend crying. My instinct to make sure she was ok kicked in, but before I could say anything, she ran towards me and slapped me around the face. ‘Why the fuck didn’t you call me last night? Why didn’t you call me?’ I just stood there staring at her. I didn’t know what to say. She continued to cry, ‘I know you… I know you would never do something like that… I know what happened, I know you would never do that in the car park. I’m your best friend. Why did you not call me to tell me you had been raped?” At that moment, I wanted the ground to swallow me up. How did she know? Who else knows? What am I going to do? My mind went into overdrive. I cried for the first time since it had happened. She hugged me and told me that we would get through it together. She knew exactly how I felt. She had been raped only a few months before it happened to me.

For months I endured the most horrendous torture from my peers. Sniggering in the playground, people openly shouting out that I had been ‘fucked in the car park’. There was no place for me to hide. I had to be strong. My younger sister was in the year below me, and I was petrified of her finding out in case she told my parents. If she had known about it, she certainly never told me, and I didn’t tell her for a long time afterwards.

I would like to have said that this was the only adverse experience I had. My first was when I was nine years old and although I was not raped, being touched by a man, my father’s age was wrong, and I knew it. Thankfully I was able to get away, but the grimace on his face was the last thing I would see before I went to sleep every night for a long time.

Back in the room with Becky, I was shocked that I had told her something I had locked away in the deepest part of my brain. I thought I had thrown the key away and yet here I was, transported back in time. My body language changed, and my heart was racing. I was 15 again. What seemed strange to me was that in that session, (and in many others), I had not just spoken about work. But I was signed off with work-related stress! How could this be? I felt guilty; I felt like a fraud. This, of course, only made my mental health worse over time.

My feelings of self-worth were creased from the age of 9 but they were crushed on the night I was raped. I fell into some damaging relationships after that that only perpetuated how I felt about myself. I look back now, and at what I have achieved and honestly, I could not tell you where the strength came from. But it was obviously there. I didn’t become a statistic. When I went into teaching, I made the choice to work with children who needed the most help, the most support, the most love. I have spent my entire teaching career trying to save children… and now I realise I need to help them to help themselves, support themselves and above all, love themselves. I didn’t love myself at 15. I didn’t love myself for many, many years, and when I had my breakdown, I hated myself even more. 

Learning to love yourself is one of the hardest things I have had to relearn. My aunty used to tell me ‘if you don’t love yourself, how can you expect someone else to love you?’ So every day I tell myself these affirmations and one day I know that these will resonate deep within my soul. 

I’m not telling you this story because I want your pity, I am telling you this story because I am a senior leader who has suffered trauma and needed support when I was vulnerable. I know that most Academy Trusts pay for some form of wellbeing counselling, however in my opinion this isn’t enough. In toxic schools where compassion is at the bottom of the list or where kindness is seen as weakness, school leaders and staff have no hope in staying in a career whilst battling with the horrendous life experiences they have tried to hold at bay. So although I was signed off for work related stress, this was the tip of the iceberg for me, the cherry on the cake, the avalanche on the mountain. The treatment I received in the last few months before I broke was not acceptable and the feeling I felt then were the same feelings I felt when ‘he’ walked away saying ‘well that was shit’.

Some people need to be told they are doing a good job, others get by without this validation. We need to do better at supporting our senior leaders, we need to do better at building schools around love, respect and kindness. 

This is guest blog from an anon contributor.

Therapy was a roller coaster. There were times when I left feeling worse than when I had walked in, and other times, I felt as though I could tackle the world to the ground. What I knew for sure was that I needed it. In the weeks I skipped sessions, the anxiety and deep sadness returned and did so with a vengeance. 

After a few months off work, I finally came to the decision that I couldn’t return. Partly due to the fact that I could not see the toxicity at my school getting any better, nor the idea that my mental health would improve had I chosen to go back. Not only did I decide to leave my school, but I had also decided to leave education for good. This decision was not made lightly. I had been teaching for over 15 years and loved working with children, but this was not the first school I had worked in with a hugely toxic environment. I came to the conclusion that I was simply not very good at judging schools before accepting jobs and now I was suffering the consequences, alongside my family, who I relocated to work at this school. 

I was a senior leader in a challenging school with a challenging role. None of this had ever frightened me before; however, after a year of working every hour in the day, the ‘fear’ and need for validation from my close colleagues started to plague me daily. Am I doing a good job? Am I making the right decisions? Do staff like me? Do they think I am doing a good job? I had been signed off work with ‘work-related stress’—a growing concern in the education sector, but one that is still not taken seriously. I loved my job, the kids, the school, but my capacity to do my work to a standard I felt was acceptable, rapidly disappeared. With this came the sleepless nights, responding to emails at all hours, and being the first person in school and last to leave on most days. I barely saw my family, and when I did, I was always working. The more I felt I wasn’t doing a good job, the more I worked. The more I worked, the more anxious I became. This vicious cycle continued for a while before I broke. I say I broke because that is exactly what I feel happened. 

I pride myself on being an ethical leader; someone who is compassionate, open and honest. I believe that my success as a leader has always been in my ability to build strong relationships, even with people who at first struggle to trust me. You get this a lot when you work in toxic schools, and staff will put you through the mill before accepting you are a nice person and a leader they can have confidence in. I treat people the way I want to be treated… with fairness, kindness and respect. However, there have been many times in my life when this has not been how I have been treated, including professionally.

I’ve been told I care too much as a leader, that I need to be tougher, harder, put my game face on more often and not let people see my kindness. This feedback only made me feel more determined to show people that you can lead with compassion and still be as successful as the zero-tolerance towards your staff approach. Unfortunately for me, when I tried to fight back, I was met with open bullying and would often find myself isolated by some of my fellow senior leaders. 

I have stayed in schools where I have been desperately unhappy for years because I loved the kids and the community I served. With each change of school, I had to accept defeat and walk away, hoping that ethical changes would happen for the sake of staff and students.

For anyone who meets me and gets to know me, they will tell you I am confident, funny, caring, a bit loud (sometimes), charismatic, approachable and kind. My mum and dad would often tell me off as a teenager for being too nice for my own good. ‘Wherever you go, you pick up broken wings. You can’t save everyone’. I knew this, but would undoubtedly die trying! My capacity to love knows no end. I love hard and fall harder, but this has never stopped me from wanting to love again. 

My innate compassion comes from my grandfather, who passed away when I was nine years old. Such was his impact on my life that I still think about him often and sometimes talk to him in times of need. When I was 16, I truanted from college on a few occasions, always managing to get home on time in order for my parents not to suspect I hadn’t been. On this particular day, after spending the day with some friends, I walked towards the bus stop to get the first of two buses home. As I approached the stop, I noticed a woman on a bench. She was crying, holding her stomach. I sat next to her and glanced at her quickly. She was pregnant and homeless. I asked her if she was ok and if there was anything I could do for her. She continued to cry and explained that she thought she was in labour but could not go to the hospital as ‘they will take my baby away’. I didn’t understand why this would have happened, who takes children away from their mothers? Why would they? And then, of course, I realised that she had no home to go to and would therefore not be able to look after her baby when it was born. Trying to remain calm, I told her that I only had a pound to my name and that this would take us straight to the nearest hospital. It wasn’t a good idea to have the baby at a bus stop, and I had never helped to deliver one! It started to snow. After an hour of negotiating, I finally convinced Claire to let me take her. I refused to leave her on her own and persisted until she gave in. I remember people looking at us on the bus, some in utter contempt. Even the bus driver asked me if I knew ‘this woman’. What the hell was wrong with people? Could they not see she needed help?

When we finally got to the hospital, she was in excruciating pain. I asked if I could stay in the waiting room but was told to go home. Home, Oh god, I was so late. Everything had come to a standstill as the snow had come down like a cloud on the ground. Three hours late home, what excuse could I make up now? First things first, call my mum and explain what had happened. As I had no more money left to get the second bus home, I made a collect call and begged my mum to ask my dad to come and get me. ‘Why are you at that particular hospital, it’s the opposite way to your college?’ I made up a silly excuse, which my mum didn’t believe, and as punishment, my dad refused to come a get me. I walked for an hour before calling again. I couldn’t feel my feet, and I wasn’t dressed for the weather. ‘What can I say? You will never learn. Always needing to help someone. One of these days you will help the wrong person, and we will find you dead’. My mum always had a habit of exaggerating. After a further hour of walking and with 3 miles still to go, I called a third time, this time crying for my dad to come and get me. He did, and all the way home, I was given the usual lecture. ‘You’re too nice for your own good’ blah blah blah. 

This wasn’t the first, nor the last time I got into trouble for trying to help someone. I say trouble but realise now that I am a parent, that my mum and dad were just worried. I didn’t see this at the time. I find myself thinking about Claire sometimes and wonder whether she managed to get the help she desperately needed and whether she was able to keep her baby. These small encounters with strangers have a habit of coming back to me every so often. 

Back to my first therapy session; I cannot remember a lot, other than my meagre efforts to sound sane. Stringing a sentence together would take a lot of energy, and one that made any sense well that rarely happened during this time. 

I choose to work in challenging schools in hard to reach communities. I want to make a difference to people, children and the world. I want to change lives and build a more equal and fairer society. When I had my breakdown, this hadn’t changed, it never had and never will. What changed the darkness I found myself in and the idea that I could not get out of it. So what else could I do with my life now I decided to leave teaching? I had no idea I didn’t know if I could love something else as much as I loved my job. This thought circled my mind for months.

What will come in the next few blogs are some life experiences that I have never shared more widely than with some very close friends, and certainly hadn’t deal with since they happened. You will see that my feelings of self-worth and value had been crushed from the age of 9 and that in fact, the issues I was tackling at work were taking me back to a time where I felt helpless where I felt like a nobody. 

This is part of a series of blogs. Part one can be found here.

 

 

 

 

This series of guest posts come from an educator who wants to share their experiences to highlight and normalise issue around teacher mental health.

 

I have felt scared before, but finally writing this blog has erupted various feelings and emotions and I am not quite sure I can pinpoint just one. This has been a long time coming, and today, while I sit in isolation from the world (except my family), I have decided that now is the time. This blog will be in several parts. It has taken a lot of courage to write this and revisiting painful experiences can be just as hard as living through them at the time… but this time with some perspective and a clearer mind.

 

After suffering a massive mental breakdown last year, stepping back into social media was something that I never imagined I would ever do. Strange as it sounds, before making the decision to delete my Twitter, Facebook and Instagram accounts, I would obsess for hours, trawling through people’s profiles, searching for something, anything that would connect me to the ‘outside’ world. I struggled to accept I was having a breakdown, to accept that my brain was so powerful that it could stop me from doing the simplest of things; getting out of bed; getting dressed; getting into my car and into the school I loved working at. I went from being the life and soul of the party, the laughter in the corridors, the one that ‘fixes’ everything, to being a person I did not recognise. Just think for a minute, I did not recognise who I was! I knew my name, where I lived, the fact that I had a husband and children. But I was vacant, ‘out of order’, no longer working. My brain just said no.

 

The breakdown happened almost overnight. I had suffered a panic attack the day before and then, the following day, I woke up confused, anxious, afraid and utterly dismayed by the thoughts going through my head. I have suffered from anxiety in the past, but I have always been artful at managing it (or so I thought). When I faced the prospect of being at work, around colleagues and students, I simply could not muster the strength to get out of bed. Aside from the fact that I had symptoms of food poisoning, I felt utterly helpless. I was on a continuous pendulum. Crying, pacing the house, struggling to breathe, sleeping on the sofa, flicking channels on the TV, eating, not eating, and calling my parents in a state, and round in this cycle all day long. By the time my husband would come home from work, I would be exhausted from the days ‘madness’, and yet there was never any let up unless I was asleep (which never lasted more than a few hours).

 

My frustration and anger towards myself grew daily. Why was I so stupid? What the hell was wrong with me? Why can’t I just ‘get a grip’? JUST GET A GRIP! The more I berated myself, or had these negative thoughts, the more I struggled to do just that… get a grip. I hated myself for allowing this to happen and for being so weak. That is how I felt. Weak. And this weakness ate away at me every minute of every day. I felt like I had let everyone down and that no one would ever forgive me for the pathetic state I found myself in.

 

Struggling to understand what people were saying to me made day to day life challenging. I knew that the language people spoke was one I too, could talk, but I simply could not understand anything people said. This misunderstanding led to many evenings of me snapping at my husband, children, family and friends. And then the self-hate continued into the night. I’m a rubbish wife, a worthless mother, a terrible daughter and a crap friend. What was the point? And then it happened. What was the point? I clung onto this idea for weeks until one night, I sat alone, contemplating whether my family and friends would be better off without me. Never in all my life, had I ever got to the point where I would ever consider committing suicide— even writing that now, brings a pang to my heart. I knew people who had done so and have seen first-hand what the impact of this has been on the people left behind to pick up the pieces. Yet here I was, thinking about the best way to do it so that my children would be least effected and wouldn’t go on living with the fact that their mother decided enough was enough.

 

This was the turning point for me. The downturn spiral was fast and if I did not try to seek help, things would only get worse. I took to Facebook and asked my local community for therapists. I was inundated with contacts. A hurdle in itself as going through them all was quite a task. Eventually, I called one and spoke to a wonderful woman who referred me to the person who I now consider to have been one of my ‘life lines’. After a few sessions, Becky was able to sift through my thoughts and decipher my ramblings, getting me to consider why I felt the way I did. It was clear to her that I was self-destructive, always feeling the need to validate my worth and value and that I had suffered colossal trauma in my earlier life which was beginning to come back and haunt me. I had to accept that things had happened to me when I was younger and my reactions, feelings and thoughts when someone would treat me in a particular way only fuelled those same feelings and thoughts at a time when I felt most helpless.

 

So why have I decided to do this now? Recognising now that I was not alone in my feelings of despair and confusion, I look back and wish that I could have found someone that knew what I was going through. Someone who would tell me I was not alone and that I would get through this awful time. And so for me, I have decided to write this series of blogs for those people suffering in silence, suffering and not seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. I couldn’t see it for a long time, but I did, and the tunnel is slowly disappearing.

 

This is so difficult. I know that this is not a completed ‘story’. I promise it does get better and isn’t all doom and gloom, but at this point, I need to take a breath.

 

 

 

 

This amazing resource comes from Alice N’diaye.

This is part 2: Inclusive Anxiety and Emotional

Part 1 can be found here.

I have put together a selection of over 30 picture books that children and families might find helpful at the moment.  They support the key elements of social and emotional learning and, as learning happens best when children see themselves, I have tried to be as inclusive as possible.  I have also included additional resources; songs, sketches, shorts with similar themes and aims.

The bulk of the material came from CBeebies and Sesame Street (via YouTube) which are definitely worth exploring if you haven’t before.

Please note this was created, quickly,  for use with pupils and their families for digital story-times during school closures or to support PSHE delivery at this difficult time.  I have used YouTube links to enable equity of access; I hope authors and illustrators are okay with this.  I am sure that many readers will be inspired by what they read and will buy a book or two if they can.   Any suggestions of additional books (with digital version) or resources will be gratefully received. 😊

Download the full resource with links here

This blog also featured here. Andrew Milne has put together a set of microblogs for April 2020 head over and enjoy.

Ironically, I am writing this blog on a Saturday night while drinking a glass of white wine, thinking I really should relax more. Andrew Milne has asked me to describe ways in which educators can benefit from self-care.

Before I start the journey, let’s start with the core purpose or the why around ‘self-care’.I often hear teachers state that they never take time off when they’re sick, that they will not let the children down, and the children come before everything.
Although commendable, this is highly problematic. If we start with the last statement that the children are the most critical aspect of our profession, then the previous two comments don’t make sense.
The children we serve deserve to have healthy, well and happy teachers. Self-care is not an act of the self; it is fundamentally an act of giving, it is neither selfish or indulgent, self-care is essentially part of your job and duty to the young people we serve.

Tip 1

If we look at ‘time for yourself’ as an act of work and part of your duty, then treat it as such. Many teachers will factor in time to grade or mark papers and set aside everything else in this time as it must be done. I would advocate doing the same thing but with an act with which you choose to recharge. Personally, I knit, now that may sound silly to many of you. However, this is part of my self-care routine. The act of setting aside five minutes, where I sit with my needles in perfect concentration every couple of hours during this isolation has been a godsend. I am 100 % sure it has also made me more productive in all of my daily tasks.

Tip 2

Value your mental health as much as you value your physical health. Actually, scratch that, you are all educators and lots of us put our physical health to the back of the queue. While working it’s challenging to escape from the high-pressure environment and assess where you fall on the spectrum of okay to not okay.
If you break your leg, a doctor will often rest the leg and keep your weight off it for a prolonged period. Resting your brain does not work in the same way as you cannot keep the burden or the strain of the weight off of it.
My way of evaluating my current state is to check in with people who I trust regularly. These are people I bear the content of my mind to regularly. I share my feelings, my thoughts and my reactions and they are much better placed to judge my mental well-being than I am when I am either ill or becoming more sick or pressured.

Tip 3

As many of you know, I suffer from appearances from the ‘Black dog’, excuse the colloquialism from the UK. The Black dog represents depression. This analogy means that the dog returns time and time and weighs us down and/or stays in the shadows, hindering our progress as the mental illness does.
One of the symptoms of depression is the loss of joy; I often curse myself for this ailment because not only does my brain tell me to be sad every day it also refuses to take comfort in the remedies I try.

For this final tip, I would say listen to your brain. Yes, it’s great to train for a marathon or to learn a new language or to play the violin at the highest level. However, it’s essential to listen to your brain instead of telling it what you think you should be doing. If your mind says have a duvet day, listen and dig under the duvet, stay in bed and make a fortress. If your brain says go and do some exercise, do that exercise. Educators are experts in telling our pupils what’s right for them. Sometimes we don’t need someone to say to us; sometimes we just need to listen.

This amazing resource comes from Alice N’diaye.

I have put together a selection of over 30 picture books that children and families might find helpful at the moment.  They support the key elements of social and emotional learning and, as learning happens best when children see themselves, I have tried to be as inclusive as possible.  I have also included additional resources; songs, sketches, shorts with similar themes and aims.

The bulk of the material came from CBeebies and Sesame Street (via YouTube) which are definitely worth exploring if you haven’t before.

Please note this was created, quickly,  for use with pupils and their families for digital story-times during school closures or to support PSHE delivery at this difficult time.  I have used YouTube links to enable equity of access; I hope authors and illustrators are okay with this.  I am sure that many readers will be inspired by what they read and will buy a book or two if they can.   Any suggestions of additional books (with digital version) or resources will be gratefully received. 😊

Download the full resource with links here.