I’ve lost a lot of my friends because they didn’t understand. I would be talking about my daughter self-harming or wanting to die and they didn’t understand it and I got comments like, Shes attention seeking. Just tell her to get over it. Shes only fifteen. What’s she got to be depressed about? So I just kind of pushed a lot of my friends. I just thought, I can’t.

Yes.

I’ve got enough to deal with at the minute to worry about what you think about it.

I think also, looking after yourself, looking after your own sort of mental and physical health is really, really important and I sought help myself and had some had some counselling support. I was fortunate enough to get that from through work because I carried on working, for me work was a very useful distraction from all these things that were going on but it could also be a problem because I struggled to have the emotional energy to cope with work as well as everything that was going on with home. And I spoke to people at work about that and, eventually, got some help and I think I was very, very fortunate with that actually to get that help.

Was there anything else that you would have liked that you didn’t have?

I think what I would have liked is more parental support. It’s very difficult, when you’re in that situation, you don’t exactly want to go and talk to other people because you’re so focussed on yourself but, as time went by, I realised, especially in the past six months or so, because there are still really hard times. There are still very, very hard evenings, very hard nights, when she gets very upset and slightly unsafe. At those times you feel you feel, God I can’t go on. I’ve had three and a half years of this, I can’t see an end of it and I can’t go on. At those times, it would be really nice to be able to pick up the phone and talk to somebody who knows what you’re talking about. If you talk to your friends, with all the best will in the world, and they’ve been absolutely amazing, my friends and colleagues, they really have, but their reaction is quite justifiably, Oh my god. When you say what happens. I have met and spoken with some other parents over the years and their reaction is, Yes and that’s how I deal with it. And it’s that understanding of where you’re coming from.

Yes.

So that’s what I miss and that’s what would be really nice to know that there is some sort of mutual support.

Doesn’t have to be formal. You’re not talking about receiving counselling from somebody else, you’re talking about being able to pick up the phone and say, I’m having a really really hard evening. And have a chat.

Yes.

Because again, professionals, they’re wonderful, they’re amazing but they’re very professional. Quite rightly so and there isn’t that level of sympathy.

Yes.

Which you wouldn’t want anyway because you’d be crossing boundaries but you it’s.

Just to talk to somebody who’s been in the same place and really does understand it from that point of view.

Yes.

Yes.

Yeah.

So is there a chance of that being set up do you think?

Well, myself and other parents, you know, when an idea is right it seems. I contacted the CAMHS people saying, What about this? And they came back, saying Actually, there are other parents saying exactly the same thing so were at the very initial stages of working on a parental group. I think the support element is a little bit down the road because we have to think exactly what we want but it is about getting together and asking questions and how to find answers. And not everybody has had the positive [laughs] positive experience of professionals. Not positive experience but, you know, the good experience with professionals.

Yes, yes.

That I have had, other parents haven’t and I think that’s equally important to discuss why they feel how they feel and see where we can go with that in a non-confrontational manner.

It is so amazing to have the support services such as [mental health charity] that are just indispensable, they really are. I mean I do not know where we would be if we didn’t have our worker from [mental health charity]. She has been an absolute godsend, she really has and I, you know, I thank Him every single day for having someone like [name] in the world because I literally do not know what we would have done without her. She doesn’t speak to my husband like hes an idiot. She doesn’t speak down to him. She doesn’t speak to him as though hes stupid or he hes just someone that, you know, has done something stupid and should be treated so. She understands him on a level, you know, and they have an understanding between the two of them. My husband has trust issues, very, very high trust issues and it takes a lot for my husband to let you in and with our [mental health charity] worker, she laid her cards on the table from day one. She didn’t make any false promises, which is what weve been used to before. She didn’t patronise us. She treated us as a family. She treated us as a family that needed help and she has earned the respect and the trust from both of us and if she says shes coming out, she comes out. She comes out every week without fail. She is on the phone twenty four seven, if need be. She will actually, go out of her way to make sure that we are okay and that’s in every sense, you know. That’s in the sense of our children. That’s in the sense of my husband, it’s in the sense of myself.

And she has arranged goals for [my husband] to meet. She has arranged ideas that my husband never knew were possible before. She has helped put steps in place that he then has something to look forward to, you know. It’s all about helping him change the way that he thinks and think that his life doesn’t have to be the way that it always was. So and shes also, going to do CBT therapy with him. She has also, off her own back, investigated and looked into and researched all about PTSD.

And shes wanting to do some work with my husband on that as well. I mean this is this is not even in her job description. She doesn’t have to do this kind of stuff and yet off her own back, she does it. We are so lucky to have her alongside our GP and our new psychiatrist and our mental health worker. I mean without them, now that we have a team that is working so closely together to help, it makes all the difference. It’s brilliant and I’m just glad that my husband has got all the support that he needs and that hes getting it and that’s it.

I did have one very positive experience because after a good after a good patch, [my daughter] then self-harmed and the school, I think it was because shed self-harmed, shed had some issue at school and shed gone to the school nurse and the nurse phoned me up and said she had self-harmed. So she, Did you know? And I said, No, I didn’t know. And it was awful and so sad and so depressing and I was just utterly miserable and I phoned up, you’re going to want to know who it was and I don’t know, I just looked up a number on the internet, well, maybe it was Parent Line or something.

Does that exist?

Yes, yes.

I think I might have gone via Child Line and to somewhere and I phoned them up and because just because, you know, I wanted to talk to someone and they were fantastic and I just cried at them really and they said, you know, they were good. They said it’s not it’s not the worst, you know, it’s not the worst things they’ve heard by a long way and to, you know, it would be all right.

So that was helpful and?

It really, yes, it really was. I think I think my husband was away. He travels a bit. I think he was away so I felt really on my own. I’d have never imagined phoning up a helpline [laughs] a couple of years ago. There you go, they obviously seem to serve a purpose.

With forums, theres so, and the great thing with the internet now is we are linked in to everybody. I think you have to be a little bit careful in as much as theres always going to be a lot of people with a lot worse stories than you and I think you have to be a little bit careful not to get scared. You know, get anxious, Oh, is that going to be me?

I think, for me personally, if I was to analyse myself, I’m a fixer. I probably give more to these forums now and probably have always given more. I mean I’ve made friends with people who maybe have a child with borderline personality disorder because I’ve been willing to share some of my experiences and I want people to know that there is life after all this. It might take a long time and it might be a different life but I think sharing can be very cathartic. I think sometimes if you feel you, you know, I don’t want to use the word burden, but if you don’t, if you feel you’ve shared enough with your own family, your partner, whatever, sometimes it can just be somewhere where you can go and let off steam, where you can go and say, I don’t know what to do. It can be a place, usually, the forums will be run by people with quite a lot of knowledge so I mean there will, there should always be information pages, you know, where you can actually go and get facts. It can be anonymous and for some people that’s really important.

You can, you know, the other great thing about the internet is you can post something at three o’clock in the morning. You know, when the house is quiet and you’re scared and you think, I really can’t wake my partner again. Or whatever, you know, you can go and maybe talk to someone who’s on a totally different time zone to you but understands. But everyones experience will be different. I’ve met, I’ve met some amazing people, with very different experiences, but again, it’s like reading that one sentence in a book, if someone can just say to you one thing, one thing. I mean there is, there is a lady I’ve got to know quite well and her daughter is a few years younger than mine and shes now just getting to that stage where shes starting to let go a little bit, you know, to actually step back. And, you know, I can quietly encourage her and say, you know, You’re just doing so well. It’s hard. I know how hard it is. But the relief you feel when you know you are talking to someone who really gets you, even if their experience is different, that they know the pain, they know the fear, they know the anxiety, they know that feeling of bleakness that you, they know that feeling of absolute terror that you might lose your child. There, you don’t feel so alone and it can be an incredibly lonely place, you know, sort of, when your child is growing up with lots of issues and lots of problems.

Could you talk a bit about dialectical behavioural therapy and how that affects your life?

Right. It’s two and a half hours skills group and then one hour individual one to one therapy. So the, the one to one therapy, you talk about whatever has come up during that week. Right, so basically you have diary sheets and on that diary sheet you, on one side it’s theres a grid and you have to put, have to rate each emotion that you have that day , your strongest emotions. You know, so theres things like quitting therapy, suicidal urges, self-harm urges, urges to take drugs or alcohol. And then theres so they’re the urges and you, you rate them. Then you rate joy, pain anger, shame, fear, you rate them and then then you rate whether you have self-harmed so action to urges and underneath that you write what each day has held for you so that you know what’s triggered things.

And then on the back, theres a lot of skills. So theres four modules. Theres mindfulness, interpersonal skills, distress tolerance and emotional regulation and within those modules there are many skills. So then you have to write down which skills you’ve used and whether they, whether you’ve thought about them, whether you’ve used them, whether you could couldn’t, whether they worked, whether they came naturally to you at a rating of one to seven. So you, you rate those and then you go to group and you feedback, not your personal stuff. You feedback your personal stuff to your individual therapist and shell go through what, what you’ve experienced and then the group therapy, you read your skills, so what skills you’ve used during the week. You don’t you don’t tell anybody why you’ve needed them unless it’s appropriate. You never ever discuss self-harm. Theres a lot of rules in place. It’s very, very strict and structured and then you learn, so were on mindfulness, the mindfulness module now and distress tolerance.

So you learn those skills and then you go away and practise them. And when you’re going through anything, once you start learning them, when you’re going through like, for instance, when [my daughter] was smashing her head on the on the floor, my immediate response was grab her, just stop her, do anything you can, panic, you know, just the emotion kicked in. But the DBT skills I used them and they enabled me just to sit through the emotion, know that it’s upsetting, but I could sit through it and I could get through it, just take a step back, not immerse myself fully into what was happening. And so you put, you, you just think of the skills, they just become fairly natural to you once you, it’s a long intensive course. It’s a year at least but I’m on a top-up course now so this is, I’ve done the year and then I stopped and went back. I was referred back. This is six months to a year and actually, it’s more embedded now and I find that I use the skills more easily. Things like using opposite emotion action, if you don’t if you don’t want to go out, if you don’t want to see anybody, the, the right thing would be to actually go out and see somebody. So you do opposite and, you know, sort of increasing positive emotions and there are so many.

It it’s very, very therapeutic and it is very structured and it’s not based on what’s happened to you in the past. I believe a lot of people are, have been abused, that go there, it’s about radically accepting. You can’t change the past but you can let go of the suffering and you can still have the pain, but let go of the suffering. It’s quite Zen. It’s very Zen based and it does really, really help. I would say anybody that is having, it’s not just, it is designed for people with borderline personality disorders but, where we live, it’s, it’s traits of as well. So although I’ve just got traits of, they accept me but one of the criteria is that you self-harm. So they, you know, unless you’re a self-harmer, you wouldn’t get onto the course but I would recommend anybody that’s struggling, if they could get on this course, it’s fantastic, very, very good.

Ah ha. In order to, to fill the gap and perhaps join the dots between the services and parents and carers and encouraged by my daughter, I have to say, I wrote a book for parents, the Parent’s Guide to Self-Harm, which I’m pleased to say was the first, or is the first book by a parent writing for other parents and including the insight and narratives of other parents.

So it’s not a book about my own experience with my daughter. It’s not my story. It’s a book that gives practical suggestions and takes the reader through from discovering self-harm to understanding self-harm, right the way through getting professional help and support through recovery to managing vulnerable times and overcoming and it has a first aid chart as well and lots of references to other organisations from where parents and carers can get help. And I think also I’m hoping that it’ll be of real use to medical staff and other interested carers, such as, you know, counsellors and other, other people in caring roles.

Samaritans has been a huge influence. I have I have got a number of very, very good friends people who’ve been Samaritans colleagues, who’ve developed into friends. My Samaritans training has probably been one of the best supports I can have had, that ability to take a step back. I’ll never forget saying to her, and it went down like a lead balloon, one time she was standing in her bedroom door screaming at me, I’m going to kill myself if you keep on doing this. And I turned round, I took a deep breath and I turned round to her and I said to her, If you choose to do that, I would be very hurt and very upset but it’s your choice and I can’t stop you and I really would rather that you didn’t, but if that’s what you choose to do then that’s your choice.

And I turned and I walked away and there was this completely stunned silence because what she was really looking for was some kind of highly emotional response. She didn’t speak to me for about a day and a half because she was so annoyed. She said to me afterwards, You weren’t supposed to say that. You were supposed to say something else. And it was like, Well, that was the day I decided we were playing by different rules. So actually, that that training has, I found it really helpful in in distancing myself from, only a little bit because I’m because I’m a mum, but it’s just given me that tiny bit of distance that’s enabled me to hold it all together when I’ve needed to.

Yes.

And that’s been most useful for me.

Yes, my faith means a lot to me. It’s something that I embrace wholeheartedly. I see God as being my everything. Hes my, he gives me inner strength. He gives me peace. Hes my reason for living. Hes my soul’s survival. So even when things are going wrong and even when I feel like my back is pressed against the wall and when things has been at its lowest, you know, hes been my inspiration. Hell give me an inspiration. Hell say to me, What, you know, have you thought of trying it, trying this or, you know, approaching it this way or talking to her that way. You know, or just doing things with her, you know, to make her feel validated, you know.