Chris
That
Chris’ mother should have been the patient was obvious from the first time I
met her. She indeed saw a psychiatrist before moving from Dorset. She had been
hospitalised for Anorexia Nervosa.
She was
cured. She got married. Then she had Chris.
If she
did not tell me, I never would have guessed she had Anorexia Nervosa.
At first
I did not even know how I knew.
“She was
a very good looking woman,” my secretary told me one day, “she hasn’t got a bad
figure either.”
Doctors
are not supposed to notice these things and if they do they have to keep it to
themselves.
That was
the discordance. She had a good figure. Many recovered anorectics cannot
maintain a nice balanced figure and I am quite sure it is to do with the
various hormonal upsets from the extreme dieting, a sort of gonadotrophin
stimulating hormone problem.
She did
have fertility treatment in order to have Chris. She would feed me with
information now and again. Perhaps that
had something to do with it.
Chris
was difficult, but no more than the average single parent child. His father had
long since disappeared.
Was
Chris’ behaviour one of the reasons she consulted me?
She was
one of those mothers with lots of questions, and I am one of those
psychiatrists who wanted parents to find their own answers.
In
psychiatry knowing the answer is no guarantee to a cure. In fact it is the same
in many branches of medicine as we still have so many incurable diseases.
Parents do want to have the answer and of course in the commercial world there
are now doctors that cater for that desire. A nice label, be it ADHD, ME, Autism or Asperger.
As long as there is a technical sounding name people are happy. If you
can have a specific drug, so much the better.
If not you may get special education, benefits or both.
As long
as it has nothing to do with “upbringing”.
But
upbringing could be trans-generational.
What happens to one generation can have an impact on the next
generation.
Many
parents want to look at the here and now and a quick fix answer.
One day
mother told me, “I am bulimic!”
Then she
took out some capsules and said that she could not have those as she could not
have an orgasm. She had been seeing an
adult psychiatrist but came to me for the problems she found too embarrassing
to discuss with her own psychiatrist.
She had
a new boy friend who was much older than she was and he was a pilot.
She
wanted me to see him to explain about the side effect of her medication.
“I am
taking 60 mg.” she told me.
I did wonder,
as the 20 mg dosage might have been less problematic.
I
declined the request and she was rather disappointed. She accepted my reasoning
– I did not initiate the treatment.
Three
weeks later she told me she broke up with him.
Then she
told me she normally could not have an orgasm unless she imagined she was
having sex with an older man. She then thought it might work with having an
older boyfriend.
As I
listened mother decided to tell me more.
She had
been abused by her father from about the age of twelve and
the awful thing for her was that she actually enjoyed the sexual side of
things. It was an abuse she found hard to come to terms with. She could not
hate her father because when she came out of hospital after her Anorexia, she
had no breasts to speak of. Her father paid for implants, twice.
When
Chris’s father left he bought a house for them.
He paid
for her private treatment for Bulimia.
Worst of
all, she had to imagine her father whenever she made love to have any chance of
an orgasm.
No. She
had never told anyone else before.
You may also want to
read about Amanda.
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