Counselling
Without Prejudice
I would tell everyone that has been through a major trauma, death of a loved one, anyone that has gone through any major life altering episode that you have to have counselling.
The counsellors we were assigned were so very very good. A Man and a woman named Trevor and Liz..... B came the first time and then no more. The girls came twice or three times and I went for months. Sometimes that appointment was all I had to look forward to and I would count the hours between them. Somebody I could talk to about Lauren, who would not try and not hear, not see my pain. My need to talk and talk and talk about her.
The first thing they said that put me at ease was that they did not know what I was going through, but they knew that grief goes through stages. I was in stage 1. Shock, numbness. The brain supplies feel good hormones to get you through the initial feeling of shock and then all those feel good hormones die off and you are left with raw pain. Bottoming out, raw feelings, isolation, feeling like others don't understand.
We had to get through Christmas and I don't think any decent human being could go through a Christmas like that. It was raw and empty and painful We put in a little effort for the girls and baby Kyle, but it was miserable at best. Bob invited some friends to share it with us but we both knew after we would have to face each other and I simply did not want to.
There is such a feeling of unreality about it all. By rights Lauren should be there and this disgusting man I had been married to should have been gone. I had turned away from him eons before and by now we were just going through the motions. But I kept up with the counseling, sometimes just holding on for the time when I could once again speak of her.
Bob said 6 weeks after she died, I was not to speak of her. I said
"I had for her twelve and a half years, how can I not talk of her?"
But at that time his word was law and the girls and I had to comply.
The day when the counselling really began to help was when Debbie spoke up. She had fought with a friend and attacked her 3 weeks after Lauren died. The friend had wanted to leave a party with a guy who was pissed and stoned and Debbie would not let the friend go. And they had a vicious fight and Deb ended up hurting the friend quite badly. This came as no surprise to the Counsellors. They knew Deb was angry and frustrated and asked her who was she really angry at.
"My Dad", came the reply.
"Why?", they asked.
"Because he acts like nothing is wrong and he has just continued on with his life as if nothing has happened ", Debbie replied.
The Counsellors then explained they had met Bob the once and realised he had significant anger issues, they had written to him personally ( a fact he did not relay to us ) and asked him to return to see them. He didn't.
I will let you in on what Bob is like, I think he is probably a sociopath or similar. He has no idea of what it is like to be a human being. He is quite extraordinarily unsympathetic to any one else's plight. When the girls and I were with him it was always what we called "The Bob Hancock Circus". he would like some of us one day and then take a sudden and intense dislike to others. There was a period in Alena's life where he mostly didn't talk to her at all. She was naughty kid, rebel. He possibly didn't recognise her or talk to her for a bout 3 years. She tried to overdose herself on Valium, aged 12. He couldn't have cared less and said so.
No, it was all about Bob.
His girls were screaming out for attention and Bob was in a phase at that time where he only wanted to relate to 2, 19 year old females, who were his "friends", even though at that time he had a 19 year old daughter who he hardly spoke to. Yvette was 18 when Lauren died and 2 weeks prior had given birth to her first baby. Bob considered Yvette a "slut", her boyfriend a "loser" and so on and so on and so on. He hated everybody pretty much, his parents who were to blame for his anger and rotten life.
He talked often of how cruel his parents were to him. Poor little me type stories, How he was made to shoot his own dog on the farm, how he was sent to school wearing a nappy, because he wet his pants. How his Mother painted his nails and sent him to school like that so he would stop biting his nails. How his Mother led him by the hand to the wood heap and threatened to chop off his old fella if he didn't stop wetting his pants. That she actually had the axe on the swing before he sobbed. All these stories, Gwen, my adored Mother In Law denies. But he told us those stories endlessly, and at first I had believed them, so convincing is he.
Bobs Mum and sisters denied these stories. He always wanted us to be unwaveringly loyal to him and we were but no matter what we did, he didn't like us and now that he was back home to be of comfort to the family, he started keeping lists of what we did to him.
The counsellors gave me tapes to listen to and upstairs in the darkened office I would listen to them. People were so kind and I had literally hundreds of cards and letters from people. One day I went home and Yvette eagerly offered more cards to me. One was from Joyce my half sister in London. I grabbed the cards after opening Joyce's and pushed them off the bench and on to the floor.
I went outside and kicked the dog, Grunt, who was in my way. Yvette yelled out to me,
"What are you doing"
I've had enough" I yelled back.
"What?", she replied
"I've had enough, I repeated
"People keep saying they know how I feel, they have no idea how I feel. They have no idea how I feel"
Yvette came out with the cards in her hand.
"We lost a sister and we now have to put up with you"
I felt bad but I still grabbed the cards and stuffed them in the bin. Yvette rescued them once again and took them away.
I was glad she did as later I found them great comfort. But at that time I just wanted to people to go away and leave me alone and they wouldn't because they thought I was going to commit suicide.
Christmas was over and the Summer heat arrived and with it came Jackie and Winn, for a week, I by now had moved into the spare bedroom as I didn't want to be any where near Bob and in those dark and desperate nights I was alone and burning up with grief and anger. The pain was incredible, even my eyebrows hurt, everything hurt or was meaningless, trite. I wanted them all to go and leave me and I promised them I wouldn't kill myself. Like my Mother had done. I thought a lot about my Mothers suicide then and I knew what she had been going through.
The counsellors talked of my brothers death and my Mothers and said I had grown up in a grief situation and I was what they called a "Coper". So even though I was churning away on the inside I would never let the emotion take me over and I would just keep soldiering on. I told them how we were never allowed to talk of Jamie, my brother, after he died. They told me that was the way it was back in the 50's. But that nowadays we were to talk of Lauren and talk of her until we could stop and leave room in our brains for something else.
Then they gently probed my relationship with Bob. I told them I felt sorry for him. That I had a good childhood and was loved and cared for and he wasn't. That somehow it was my duty to make him happy, and I said that sometimes I felt like I was the only person that kept him connected to the world. I did all the negotiations at work, I negotiated with the workers on Bob behalf, suppliers, bank Managers, debt collectors. I will never forget what they told me then.
Trevor spoke very softly,
"Bob is a grown man. he is not interested in your pain, but takes your sympathy. Why do you feel sorry for everyone else and not sorry for yourself?'
This was a revelation, that I should feel sorry for myself. I always wanted to make others happy, placate, be the little peace maker.
That phrase began to go around and around in my head and would not stop.
One time Bob brought home some male workers and friends for a game of cards and a big drinking session loomed. They began talking about the Philippines and child prostitutes and I went insane and yelled at them all to go, to get out. Bob was livid and I couldn't have cared less. I was angry, toweringly so and I wanted him gone as well.
I screamed at them all
"You are talking about girls of 12, I just lost a 12 year old girl, you are a bunch of disgusting pigs"
"get out"
Bob let me throw them out and then turned his anger on me. I ignored him and went out to the garage where we had decked it all out as a room for Debbie. I lay on her double water bed and just lay there, my eyes burning but not shedding any tears. I had cried myself out weeks before and I began to take action. Bob had to go and I had no idea how I was going to do it seeing as he had come home to be of "comfort" to the family but I knew I could tolerate him no longer.
One time he was in the shower and I went through his pockets and found a cheque from the business to his paramour in the Phillipines. $400 a month he had been paying her. I confronted him with it and he flew into the most enormous rage and started hitting me around the head. Suddenly Debbie broke in,
"Leave her alone", she screamed. We were both shocked as we thought somehow we kept his violent behaviour hidden.
Bob told her to get out but she entered anyway. She was standing head to head to him and looked at him straight in the eyes. deb was tall like him.
"hit me instead you fucking bastard"
Bob raised his arm to backhand her and he didn't. His arm dropped and he backed away.
We limped on and I kept going to counseling. In April I refused to go back to the factory and Debbie went on her own. She relayed all and sundry as to his behaviour and the counsellors continued with their advice and I at last started to listen. The phrase still singing in my head for a month, "Why do you feel sorry for him, why not feel sorry for yourself". They told me they had continued to write to Bob, asking them to come see them, but he wouldn't. Bob had never believed there was anything wrong with him. It was all me, I was 99 percent in the wrong. he tried to get the girls on side but they began to keep their own counsel. We helped Yvette with the baby and tried to ignore Bob as much as possible.
At the second visit and just before Christmas the counsellors had said,
"we believe you have a beautiful new Grandson"
Kyle was with us in the room, a month old and lying in his bassinet. I thought they were crazy talking about Kyle. to me he was a little blob in a basket and I didn't know him. I was there to talk about Lauren. They carefully explained there was nothing I could do for Lauren but Kyle was our future. I remembered then all the little notes in her school diary as to how many days there were to wait before her sister, Yvette, had her baby. Lauren was still alive when he was born and he was 2 weeks when she died.
Kyle became a reason for Debbie, Alena,Yvette and me to keep going. Yvette was lost in a world of her own, suffering post natal depression and grief she just flipped and we began to take care of Kyle a lot more. Rising in the night and feeding him and making sure he was Ok, the rest of the time. That time was madness for all of us. People came around constantly, for the girls, for me, for Bob, too. We went to Tasmania as Bob was in the Blackjack championships. I remember nothing of the trip except when we told people our daughter had just died. There was a complete hushed silence. That was a great conversation stopper, right there.
we flew home early and discovered Yvette had taken one of the work cars out of the driveway and driven to Glen Innes where Simon her boyfriend was. She thought he was with another girl, discovered he wasn't and let him drive the car. He flipped it and wrote it off. It wasn't insured. Bob went ape shit and threw all the girls out on to the street. Debbie, Alena, Yvette, and Mara. they begged to come home but Bob would not let them.
I took a trip to Queensland with Kerry, Lauren's best friend. I remember basically nothing of that trip. I was still lost in my own world and cared for nothing or no one. I look at photos and I am there in them, but can't remember any of it. Bob was there to greet me when I got back and the girls had been allowed to come home after 2 weeks of living on the streets, sleeping at friends. They were angry at Yvette with valid reason. Bob had blamed Debbie unfairly, reasoning she was the oldest and should have known what was going on. Debbie disagreed violently as Yvette had stolen the car out of our driveway in the middle of the night and was beside herself when she realised what had happened. The damage to the car was $12,000.
One Saturday morning Bob roared up the driveway in his GT falcon and came in the door in a fury. He had run over the hose in the driveway. He started yelling at the girls, calling them, his own daughters "sluts" I was sweeping the floor, slowly. The moment was frozen in time, a tableau I was to remember forever. Debbie was at the stovetop cooking lunch. The other girls sat at the bench.
"You don't seem happy, Bob " I said.
He began yelling again about the hose.
"If you don't like it, why don't you just leave". I said quietly.
Bob looked like he was about to explode and reached up to the wall unit to get out his two written sheets of what we did wrong to him. the dreaded "list". You could hear a pin drop, the girls were tensed up ready for another battle and I just kept sweeping and sweeping.
Bob hesitated and looked at me, I raised my head and looked back. Whatever was in my face at that second was enough to make him falter.
He suddenly left the room and started packing his bags. None of us said a thing. he made 5 trips back and forth to the car and no one stopped him or said a thing. Then he was gone and we all sagged in relief and ate lunch.
And he was gone and I will be perfectly honest I never missed him for even one split second. Never. we were done, we had been done from day one. You miss someone because of the love, the affection, the times shared together. I couldn't remember a day with out rancour. I couldn't remember a day that we had agreed on anything or had not been at war with each other. And all that was left was the blissful feeling of relief. I cut up tomatoes the next day and there was no Bob standing over me saying I was stupid for cutting tomatoes my way. His way was the only was. And I guess that says it all about our marriage. I had allowed him to become a tyrant and if he was an abuser, I wondered what that made me ? I was full of self loathing for a while.
I would tell everyone that has been through a major trauma, death of a loved one, anyone that has gone through any major life altering episode that you have to have counselling.
The counsellors we were assigned were so very very good. A Man and a woman named Trevor and Liz..... B came the first time and then no more. The girls came twice or three times and I went for months. Sometimes that appointment was all I had to look forward to and I would count the hours between them. Somebody I could talk to about Lauren, who would not try and not hear, not see my pain. My need to talk and talk and talk about her.
The first thing they said that put me at ease was that they did not know what I was going through, but they knew that grief goes through stages. I was in stage 1. Shock, numbness. The brain supplies feel good hormones to get you through the initial feeling of shock and then all those feel good hormones die off and you are left with raw pain. Bottoming out, raw feelings, isolation, feeling like others don't understand.
We had to get through Christmas and I don't think any decent human being could go through a Christmas like that. It was raw and empty and painful We put in a little effort for the girls and baby Kyle, but it was miserable at best. Bob invited some friends to share it with us but we both knew after we would have to face each other and I simply did not want to.
There is such a feeling of unreality about it all. By rights Lauren should be there and this disgusting man I had been married to should have been gone. I had turned away from him eons before and by now we were just going through the motions. But I kept up with the counseling, sometimes just holding on for the time when I could once again speak of her.
Bob said 6 weeks after she died, I was not to speak of her. I said
"I had for her twelve and a half years, how can I not talk of her?"
But at that time his word was law and the girls and I had to comply.
The day when the counselling really began to help was when Debbie spoke up. She had fought with a friend and attacked her 3 weeks after Lauren died. The friend had wanted to leave a party with a guy who was pissed and stoned and Debbie would not let the friend go. And they had a vicious fight and Deb ended up hurting the friend quite badly. This came as no surprise to the Counsellors. They knew Deb was angry and frustrated and asked her who was she really angry at.
"My Dad", came the reply.
"Why?", they asked.
"Because he acts like nothing is wrong and he has just continued on with his life as if nothing has happened ", Debbie replied.
The Counsellors then explained they had met Bob the once and realised he had significant anger issues, they had written to him personally ( a fact he did not relay to us ) and asked him to return to see them. He didn't.
I will let you in on what Bob is like, I think he is probably a sociopath or similar. He has no idea of what it is like to be a human being. He is quite extraordinarily unsympathetic to any one else's plight. When the girls and I were with him it was always what we called "The Bob Hancock Circus". he would like some of us one day and then take a sudden and intense dislike to others. There was a period in Alena's life where he mostly didn't talk to her at all. She was naughty kid, rebel. He possibly didn't recognise her or talk to her for a bout 3 years. She tried to overdose herself on Valium, aged 12. He couldn't have cared less and said so.
No, it was all about Bob.
His girls were screaming out for attention and Bob was in a phase at that time where he only wanted to relate to 2, 19 year old females, who were his "friends", even though at that time he had a 19 year old daughter who he hardly spoke to. Yvette was 18 when Lauren died and 2 weeks prior had given birth to her first baby. Bob considered Yvette a "slut", her boyfriend a "loser" and so on and so on and so on. He hated everybody pretty much, his parents who were to blame for his anger and rotten life.
He talked often of how cruel his parents were to him. Poor little me type stories, How he was made to shoot his own dog on the farm, how he was sent to school wearing a nappy, because he wet his pants. How his Mother painted his nails and sent him to school like that so he would stop biting his nails. How his Mother led him by the hand to the wood heap and threatened to chop off his old fella if he didn't stop wetting his pants. That she actually had the axe on the swing before he sobbed. All these stories, Gwen, my adored Mother In Law denies. But he told us those stories endlessly, and at first I had believed them, so convincing is he.
Bobs Mum and sisters denied these stories. He always wanted us to be unwaveringly loyal to him and we were but no matter what we did, he didn't like us and now that he was back home to be of comfort to the family, he started keeping lists of what we did to him.
The counsellors gave me tapes to listen to and upstairs in the darkened office I would listen to them. People were so kind and I had literally hundreds of cards and letters from people. One day I went home and Yvette eagerly offered more cards to me. One was from Joyce my half sister in London. I grabbed the cards after opening Joyce's and pushed them off the bench and on to the floor.
I went outside and kicked the dog, Grunt, who was in my way. Yvette yelled out to me,
"What are you doing"
I've had enough" I yelled back.
"What?", she replied
"I've had enough, I repeated
"People keep saying they know how I feel, they have no idea how I feel. They have no idea how I feel"
Yvette came out with the cards in her hand.
"We lost a sister and we now have to put up with you"
I felt bad but I still grabbed the cards and stuffed them in the bin. Yvette rescued them once again and took them away.
I was glad she did as later I found them great comfort. But at that time I just wanted to people to go away and leave me alone and they wouldn't because they thought I was going to commit suicide.
Christmas was over and the Summer heat arrived and with it came Jackie and Winn, for a week, I by now had moved into the spare bedroom as I didn't want to be any where near Bob and in those dark and desperate nights I was alone and burning up with grief and anger. The pain was incredible, even my eyebrows hurt, everything hurt or was meaningless, trite. I wanted them all to go and leave me and I promised them I wouldn't kill myself. Like my Mother had done. I thought a lot about my Mothers suicide then and I knew what she had been going through.
The counsellors talked of my brothers death and my Mothers and said I had grown up in a grief situation and I was what they called a "Coper". So even though I was churning away on the inside I would never let the emotion take me over and I would just keep soldiering on. I told them how we were never allowed to talk of Jamie, my brother, after he died. They told me that was the way it was back in the 50's. But that nowadays we were to talk of Lauren and talk of her until we could stop and leave room in our brains for something else.
Then they gently probed my relationship with Bob. I told them I felt sorry for him. That I had a good childhood and was loved and cared for and he wasn't. That somehow it was my duty to make him happy, and I said that sometimes I felt like I was the only person that kept him connected to the world. I did all the negotiations at work, I negotiated with the workers on Bob behalf, suppliers, bank Managers, debt collectors. I will never forget what they told me then.
Trevor spoke very softly,
"Bob is a grown man. he is not interested in your pain, but takes your sympathy. Why do you feel sorry for everyone else and not sorry for yourself?'
This was a revelation, that I should feel sorry for myself. I always wanted to make others happy, placate, be the little peace maker.
That phrase began to go around and around in my head and would not stop.
One time Bob brought home some male workers and friends for a game of cards and a big drinking session loomed. They began talking about the Philippines and child prostitutes and I went insane and yelled at them all to go, to get out. Bob was livid and I couldn't have cared less. I was angry, toweringly so and I wanted him gone as well.
I screamed at them all
"You are talking about girls of 12, I just lost a 12 year old girl, you are a bunch of disgusting pigs"
"get out"
Bob let me throw them out and then turned his anger on me. I ignored him and went out to the garage where we had decked it all out as a room for Debbie. I lay on her double water bed and just lay there, my eyes burning but not shedding any tears. I had cried myself out weeks before and I began to take action. Bob had to go and I had no idea how I was going to do it seeing as he had come home to be of "comfort" to the family but I knew I could tolerate him no longer.
One time he was in the shower and I went through his pockets and found a cheque from the business to his paramour in the Phillipines. $400 a month he had been paying her. I confronted him with it and he flew into the most enormous rage and started hitting me around the head. Suddenly Debbie broke in,
"Leave her alone", she screamed. We were both shocked as we thought somehow we kept his violent behaviour hidden.
Bob told her to get out but she entered anyway. She was standing head to head to him and looked at him straight in the eyes. deb was tall like him.
"hit me instead you fucking bastard"
Bob raised his arm to backhand her and he didn't. His arm dropped and he backed away.
We limped on and I kept going to counseling. In April I refused to go back to the factory and Debbie went on her own. She relayed all and sundry as to his behaviour and the counsellors continued with their advice and I at last started to listen. The phrase still singing in my head for a month, "Why do you feel sorry for him, why not feel sorry for yourself". They told me they had continued to write to Bob, asking them to come see them, but he wouldn't. Bob had never believed there was anything wrong with him. It was all me, I was 99 percent in the wrong. he tried to get the girls on side but they began to keep their own counsel. We helped Yvette with the baby and tried to ignore Bob as much as possible.
At the second visit and just before Christmas the counsellors had said,
"we believe you have a beautiful new Grandson"
Kyle was with us in the room, a month old and lying in his bassinet. I thought they were crazy talking about Kyle. to me he was a little blob in a basket and I didn't know him. I was there to talk about Lauren. They carefully explained there was nothing I could do for Lauren but Kyle was our future. I remembered then all the little notes in her school diary as to how many days there were to wait before her sister, Yvette, had her baby. Lauren was still alive when he was born and he was 2 weeks when she died.
Kyle became a reason for Debbie, Alena,Yvette and me to keep going. Yvette was lost in a world of her own, suffering post natal depression and grief she just flipped and we began to take care of Kyle a lot more. Rising in the night and feeding him and making sure he was Ok, the rest of the time. That time was madness for all of us. People came around constantly, for the girls, for me, for Bob, too. We went to Tasmania as Bob was in the Blackjack championships. I remember nothing of the trip except when we told people our daughter had just died. There was a complete hushed silence. That was a great conversation stopper, right there.
we flew home early and discovered Yvette had taken one of the work cars out of the driveway and driven to Glen Innes where Simon her boyfriend was. She thought he was with another girl, discovered he wasn't and let him drive the car. He flipped it and wrote it off. It wasn't insured. Bob went ape shit and threw all the girls out on to the street. Debbie, Alena, Yvette, and Mara. they begged to come home but Bob would not let them.
I took a trip to Queensland with Kerry, Lauren's best friend. I remember basically nothing of that trip. I was still lost in my own world and cared for nothing or no one. I look at photos and I am there in them, but can't remember any of it. Bob was there to greet me when I got back and the girls had been allowed to come home after 2 weeks of living on the streets, sleeping at friends. They were angry at Yvette with valid reason. Bob had blamed Debbie unfairly, reasoning she was the oldest and should have known what was going on. Debbie disagreed violently as Yvette had stolen the car out of our driveway in the middle of the night and was beside herself when she realised what had happened. The damage to the car was $12,000.
One Saturday morning Bob roared up the driveway in his GT falcon and came in the door in a fury. He had run over the hose in the driveway. He started yelling at the girls, calling them, his own daughters "sluts" I was sweeping the floor, slowly. The moment was frozen in time, a tableau I was to remember forever. Debbie was at the stovetop cooking lunch. The other girls sat at the bench.
"You don't seem happy, Bob " I said.
He began yelling again about the hose.
"If you don't like it, why don't you just leave". I said quietly.
Bob looked like he was about to explode and reached up to the wall unit to get out his two written sheets of what we did wrong to him. the dreaded "list". You could hear a pin drop, the girls were tensed up ready for another battle and I just kept sweeping and sweeping.
Bob hesitated and looked at me, I raised my head and looked back. Whatever was in my face at that second was enough to make him falter.
He suddenly left the room and started packing his bags. None of us said a thing. he made 5 trips back and forth to the car and no one stopped him or said a thing. Then he was gone and we all sagged in relief and ate lunch.
And he was gone and I will be perfectly honest I never missed him for even one split second. Never. we were done, we had been done from day one. You miss someone because of the love, the affection, the times shared together. I couldn't remember a day with out rancour. I couldn't remember a day that we had agreed on anything or had not been at war with each other. And all that was left was the blissful feeling of relief. I cut up tomatoes the next day and there was no Bob standing over me saying I was stupid for cutting tomatoes my way. His way was the only was. And I guess that says it all about our marriage. I had allowed him to become a tyrant and if he was an abuser, I wondered what that made me ? I was full of self loathing for a while.
