Woman of Substances Read online

  That’s the past. As for the future – which in Child 4’s case is the option of turning over a sheet of paper and starting anew – they’re harbingers of doom.

  In defence of Child 4, certainly not all pessimistic or reactive children will grow up wanting to funnel the world up one nostril. There are plenty of coping techniques that, with a bit of encouragement, an individual can employ to regulate their moods. As my mum pointed out, upon reading this chapter, she was a pessimistic child and never sought solace in vodka. She does distract herself with lists, and lists of lists, and lists of lists of lists, though, which flutter like butterflies around the kitchen whenever someone opens the back door. And if one more person tells her, seemingly apropos of nothing, that she should try mindfulness, she’s going to throttle them – and have another coffee.

  The ruined paintings of the Life at Seven kids were a minor setback. In the case of experiencing childhood trauma, having low resilience – like Child 4 – can be a huge risk factor for adult anxiety, depression and problematic substance use.

  One of the most thorough studies of childhood personality began in Melbourne in 1983 and is ongoing. The psychologists and paediatricians behind the Australian Temperament Project have been following the children of 2443 Victorian families. They’ve found that the features of temperament most likely to have long-term influence are persistence, flexibility and reactivity/ emotionality, with the biggest predictor of adult behaviour being self-regulation.

  Someone with poor self-regulation has little capacity to control their reactions, which include physiological responses, such as a churning stomach when something is upsetting, but also their interpersonal attitudes. I was one of those kids who, if a friend came over to play and a row started, would rather endure an hour of anvil-heavy, atom-buzzing silence until their mother arrived to take them away, than try to rectify the situation. Not much has changed. Fast-forward thirty years and there I am necking two beta-blockers before resigning from a job, in order to firmly get my points across without hurling a stapler or letting loose a spittled string of expletives.

  The rage. The fucking rage! It’s always there, inflating inside me, like the Hindenburg awaiting a match. I’ve no doubt that it was the fiery fuel of my benders for all those years, though I hid it well. Usually. Once, on a work trip to California, I thrashed a hotel room so soundly with my belt that the people in the room below – who’d probably already had it up to the hilt after a day at Disneyland with their actual kids – called front desk. The concierge wouldn’t accept my explanation that I’d just had some annoying news and a few martinis, and pushed me aside to check the wardrobes and bathroom for my assailant.

  So why do some people fail at self-regulation? In part it’s hereditary, but it’s also down to the home environment. When a child’s stress-response systems are activated – which means an increased heart rate, rise in blood pressure and release of stress hormones – some calm intervention by a caregiver can bring these responses back down to baseline. If these skills are not observed and learned, the habit of self-regulation will not be routed into the neural pathways. Failure to learn might be through parental neglect or through watching parents catastrophise minor issues. Conversely, pandering to a child’s every whim can mean they’ll never experience disappointment and how to adapt to it. Increasingly, drug and alcohol counsellors are seeing clients in their thirties and forties who are living back at home with enabling parents who never learned to tell them ‘no’.

  In summary, what we know to be high-risk factors for problematic substance use include low resilience, poor self-regulation, low self-efficacy and reactivity. These are all issues that can be tackled with cognitive behavioural therapy, or even with the assistance of the self-help section at any airport bookstore, with techniques put in place before you’re back on the ground at your destination. The danger is that defeat can become comforting. There’s a familiar cycle of disappointment and then – if you grow up to coddle yourself with drugs and alcohol – self-soothing. In time, defeat becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Things are not for the likes of you. Something simply cannot be done. There is no point.

  The brain of a young child might as well be Play-Doh, such is its ability to be moulded. The most critical development period is between the ages of one and seven, but maturation takes form over a few decades, through the establishment of neural pathways.

  These pathways are shaped by repeated behaviour – such as learning language and tootling away on the recorder – in the same way that taking the same route every day through the countryside will establish a track. Information travels down the pathways in the form of neurons, so the routes we create through our habits determine what kind of information we pay attention to.

  But traumatic experiences and environmental factors such as family breakdown, unstable housing, poverty, and dysfunctional parenting can cause profound changes in the wiring of the developing brain. So can the erosive stress of racism, colonisation of your entire culture, or the kind of wartime childhood of my parents.

  One of my father’s earliest memories is of his bedroom window smashing in during the Blitz, showering his teddy bear with glass. His own dad dug bodies out of an East End school, in which 600 people had been sheltering before it scored a direct hit. He wound up spending two spells in a police sanatorium. My mother’s family lived for some time under the misapprehension that her father had been lost at sea after his destroyer was sunk in battle. When he returned, my mother was reunited with a stranger; one who’d survived 115 crewmates.

  It’s hard for a Gen Xer like me, entrenched in an era of confessional navel-gazing, to imagine employing such a stiff upper lip. But to keep calm and carry on, as the wartime slogan goes, doesn’t mean the art of resilience and self-regulation has been learned. More likely, wartime kids were just warned to keep quiet or else; their generation (1925–45) is even known as the Silent Generation.

  Then there’s intergenerational trauma, as experienced by the children of Holocaust survivors and of course Aboriginal families. Such trauma can induce epigenetic changes to sperm and egg cells through chemical tags that attach to our DNA, switching genes on and off, and increasing the likelihood of stress disorders in the next generation. In other words, stress is affecting the individual’s brain before they’ve even been born, through fetal programming.

  Addiction expert Dr Gabor Maté explained in his TEDxRio+20 talk, ‘The Power of Addiction and the Addiction of Power’, that he had been a baby when the German Army moved into Budapest. When the infant Maté wouldn’t stop crying, his mother called the paediatrician, who explained that Jewish babies were crying en masse. ‘Why?’ adult Maté mused. ‘What do babies know about Hitler or genocide or war? Nothing. What they’re picking up on is the stresses, the terrors and the depression of our mothers. And that actually shapes the child’s brain. What happens then is I get the message that the world doesn’t want me. Because if she’s not happy around me, she must not want me.’ He concludes that this experience pushed him to become so renowned as a doctor that everybody would need him. ‘This is how we pass it on. We pass on the trauma and suffering unconsciously from one generation to the next.’

  The effect of this kind of early-life stress on the brain can serve an individual a double whammy. Rats, as ever, can demonstrate. In 2002, Professor Michael Meaney observed with his team that rats who had experienced maternal separation went on to have significantly higher responses to stress and higher sensitivity to cocaine. For humans, being sensitised to stress can lead to significant long-term neurophysiological adaptations, provoking intense anxiety, reactivity and hypervigilance, perhaps even triggering a range of psychiatric disorders. Then, if they self-soothe these symptoms with drugs, they’ll have a heightened sensitivity to the effects and so will become highly motivated to continue taking them.

  A person’s physical health doesn’t fare much better. Back in 1995, Dr Vincent Felitti, who was the director of an obesity clinic, and medical epidemiologist Dr Robert Anda began interviewing 17,000 participants in San Diego. This became the groundbreaking, longitudinal Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study that identified ten types of childhood trauma and examined the long-term health outcomes. The higher the number of adversities experienced, the more susceptible the participant was, not only to problematic substance use, promiscuity, depression and suicidal tendencies, but also to physical conditions such as obesity, decreased immune system efficiency, increased inflammatory response, heart disease, cancer and lung disease.

  In comment sections across the internet, the battle rages eternal as to whether drug-takers are mad, bad or sad. The research is clear. A toxic combination of temperament traits and environmental stress efficiently turns some people into a time bomb for addiction.

  Perhaps there’s something else insidiously growing in that Petri dish of you. Child sexual abuse is an almost drearily familiar tale to those working in the drug and alcohol field. The professionals whom I interviewed for this book variously said that around seventy per cent to ‘ninety-nine-point-nine’ per cent of their female clients had been sexually abused as children. And yet politicians persist in investing their energies into the war on drugs rather than tackling addiction as a public health issue.

  I had a cock in my mouth by the age of seven. It was fairly pedestrian abuse when set against some of the stories I’ve heard in researching this book, but it set off a catastrophic chain reaction all the same.

  It was a neighbourhood boy, five years older and a big lug, with a bumfluff moustache and the sullen countenance of Adrian Mole. Adrian had known me since I was born. It was during a game of sardines that we found ourselves behind the same patchwork curtain. He reckoned I’d groped him, and he announced it loudly. I hadn’t, but I laughed like a donkey, delighted to be included in older company.

  The game disintegrated, but after I’d gone to bed he took the stairs stealthily and woke me up. There was such a struggle to prise my hands away from between my legs that, to this day, I have a phobia of being touched on the hollows of my hips where he dug in with his fingers, even if it’s just a cat jumping on my lap.

  ‘You shouldn’t be doing this,’ he whispered admiringly, between smothering wet kisses that patiently sought out my mouth whenever I whipped my head away into the pillow. His subsequent visits grew more daring. It took me about fifteen years to sleep well again.

  The thought of telling my mother about Adrian was so agonising that, when I finally did, I underplayed the details, not that I would have had the vocabulary to elaborate. He had been coming to my room and … meaningful look. I thought the hint had been taken, a misunderstanding that dragged out for decades, but actually he’d been mistaken for a pest, not a sex pest. Adrian was allowed to keep coming over. Having been ordered not to disturb me at night, he instead bored his eyes into me over the dinner table, or covertly reached for my hand in the car.

  On the surface, life carried on as normal. I wrote a newspaper on my typewriter and distributed it, in rollerskates, on our street. I learned recorder and became absorbed in the maths of music. I built a Barbie house out of a cardboard box and Dad’s fag packets. I familiarised myself with the oeuvre of Andrew Lloyd-Webber and Tim Rice. Watched by a shelf of Cabbage Patch Kids, I taught a friend how to have oral sex until she whined at me to stop. She tasted like the gap behind a loose milk tooth.

  But weird things were happening in class. I’d be trying to pay attention to the teacher and the top of my skull would rise up into a burning hot ridge. I had to keep patting it. Sometimes the burning would spread downwards to my old chickenpox scar, and I’d dig my nails into that. My fingers would trace the trail of lava, over my lips, down the centre of my throat, down my sternum. At night, I had to chant an increasingly long chain of farewells to my mother before she was allowed to leave the room, all in the right order. In the morning, my teeth ached from grinding. When I walked to school, I’d keep tapping the sign of the cross on my chest, relieved by its symmetry.

  My best friend – my kindred spirit, as Anne of Green Gables would say – was cast out from our group in my cruel, prolonged bullying campaign. We’d always insisted we were the same in every way. Now we were not, and I resented her with a simmering spite that wouldn’t abate. A girl from over the road told her parents about a sexual dance I’d been doing (in all fairness, I was choreographing a Bananarama song) and she wasn’t allowed to come over anymore. A boy who lived around the corner agreed to push a screwdriver handle up inside me, then we took turns pissing behind a hedge. That was becoming a bit of a theme. Sometimes, alone, I would pee on the bedroom carpet. I didn’t know why.

  But for three years I never thought about Adrian. Then, when I was ten, I remembered that summer as if I was emerging from a blackout. I’d been doing as the Brownie Guide Handbook had advised: trying to clean the house before my parents awoke, so that they would be thrilled with their secret helper. Who could it be? They’d never know. A Brownie Guide never curries favour.

  I wasn’t really being as selfless as an elf, because I was opening the kitchen cupboard to retrieve the vacuum cleaner, the noise of which would alert sleeping parents to any pious activity. I reached for it and I remembered everything. Triggered by what? Seemingly nothing. But the guilt and shame washed over me like a stain that would never come out.

  My family were atheists, but I started going to church alone, searching for comfort and hoping that God, the ultimate judge of character, would let me know I was off the hook. The shame of re-enacting Adrian’s scenes with friends my own age made me feel complicit. I had a children’s Bible with an index at the back, which was supposed to list your potential concern and then refer you to an appropriate passage, but they didn’t have anything about oral sex. Maybe it was the wrong denomination. Anyhow, when comfort never came, I renounced the Lord. A persistent rage began to burn in my heart.

  At home I was alternately clingy and distant. I became hypervigilant to the sexual interest of men around me, which, now the scales had fallen from my eyes, seemed omnipresent and insidious. When it was there, I felt revulsion. When it wasn’t there, I tried to incite it. Eight, nine, ten years old: flouncing past men drinking cider in a graveyard and getting a thrill when one of them muttered, ‘I would if you were older’; making eyes at soldiers in a troopy on the motorway out of the back window of our family car; rolling around on the floor when someone came to the door to talk to my mother.

  Like most young girls in the 1980s, I’d been heavily into Wham! – the pop duo whose tight shorts, peppy backing singers and sloganeering T-shirts were designed to illuminate the circuits of the prepubescent brain. But post-Adrian, I became repelled by George Michael. The two had the same flicky fringe, square face and slant of the eyes. Thirty years on, if I see someone’s eyebrow hairs flaring towards the middle, or hear a whiny nasal admonishment, or see a petulant lower lip that might stick to mine – just these minute traces – I recoil. Sometimes I even spot them fleetingly in myself and am revolted.

  Already this dichotomy was developing: rage and need, two sides of a coin. If I was sure nobody could hear, I’d pummel the soft furnishings, threaten the walls, splinter pencils in my mouth. Among my harem of dolls there was one plastic-haired boy. One afternoon I punched him till his eyelids rattled. I obliterated his face with crayons, stabbed him with a kitchen knife, and left him for dead in a flowerbed.

  While the Australian Temperament Project found no differences between boys and girls concerning anxiety, the findings did support the idea of girls having higher levels of depression than boys, from the age of thirteen onwards.

  Anhedonia is a symptom of depression in which the individual has a reduced capacity to feel pleasure. It can be triggered by rodeo-riding the reward circuits, but it can also occur through being stuck in an environment without any control (be that at home, school or prison), which begets no stimulation of the reward system. The cruel irony is that someone might use drugs to lift them out of the sort of teenage anhedonia that can come about through circumstances, then emerge the other end, decades later, in a version that’s drug-induced.

  In the 1970s psychiatrist Aaron Beck defined ‘the cognitive triad’. Essentially, people who are depressed believe that the self is powerless, the world is unfair, and the future is unchanging. But while someone so inclined might think there’s no point in trying to facilitate change, there’s always the option of self-soothing. That’s where drugs come in.

  ‘Have a banana,’ Mum would say routinely, once I hit thirteen and anhedonia hit me back. She’d read that bananas would boost serotonin levels, which would surely help my mood. (We know better now, though: serotonin derived from bananas can’t cross the blood–brain barrier.)

  I needed something stronger than a banana. I’d found that lately I was avoiding my classmates during school time and dragging myself around my usual high-street haunts at weekends, sapped of all energy. I couldn’t figure out what was wrong with me. I wasn’t from a broken home, and that’s where my imagination ran out. There was a hard lump in my throat, a keening sensation in my chest, and what felt like a vice clamped around my forehead.