Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire really isn’t my favourite book in the Harry Potter series (although my least favourite is Chamber of Secrets) but there are so many quotes in it which are genuinely insightful and really helpful from a mental health perspective so I’m trying to channel some of them at the moment in an attempt to lift the horrible vacuum that’s currently sucking out my insides like an internal Dementor.
I really, really want to be excited about the release of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child on Saturday and I know that there is a part of me that is mega hyped about it even if I can’t feel or connect with it, and I really want to try to access it so I can really feel the emotion and absolute high of a new extension to the Potterverse- it’s been NINE YEARS since there was last an official ‘book’ extending the story (not including Beedle the Bard or Pottermore which are extensions of the Potterverse rather than the actual ‘story’) and I really should be excited about it! It reminds me a bit of when the Half Blood Prince was released and I was in a similar vacuum of nothingness, and I hardly processed reading it. I still finished it on the day it was released but I didn’t feel the same connection to it as I had done with the previous books and it took several re-reads to actually ‘feel’ the story even when Dumbledore died!
I really don’t want a repeat of that this time especially as it’s been nine years since Deathly Hallows and NINETEEN YEARS of HP obsession, and it’s changed my life so much in that time that I really, really want to experience the full excitement and emotional intensity (in a good way) that only comes with literally growing up along with characters that you connect to and learn from throughout your life. I know I’m incredibly lucky to have been exactly the same age as Harry with every book release and not many people have had that experience (or the experience of waiting a year or two between each book release while trying to guess what’s going to happen- I still can’t accept that Snape was ‘good’ because I had ten years of hating him before DH came out), so I’m going to use my version of Harry Potter therapy to try to reignite those feelings again…
This extract has always made me feel a bit weird and uncomfortable, and it took a few years to fully process it. It’s from the end of Goblet of Fire when Harry’s just seen Cedric die and Voldemort return which is obviously an incredibly traumatic experience, and when I first read it I hated Dumbledore for making Harry recount it. I’m still not fully comfortable with it but the reason I’m sharing it here is because of the quote “Numbing the pain for a while will make it worse when you actually feel it.” It’s one of Dumbledore’s wisdoms that is so painfully true even though most people try not to admit it. I’ve never experienced anything near as traumatic as Harry but when I was a teenager, I lost a lot of close friends through being ‘too intense’ (I’ve written about this a lot in other blog posts so won’t go into it now- see Friendships and mindfulness) and my way of dealing with that and the obsessive thoughts around it was to lose enough weight that my emotions ‘switched off’ completely. It worked at the time but wasn’t sustainable and I had to eventually go into inpatient ED services which meant regaining weight, and the cycle repeated several times and with each weight regain, the emotions came back stronger and more intense. I’m learning now that emotion regulation strategies are a much better and more effective way to manage and try to accept the emotions rather than ‘get rid’ of them but it’s bloody hard!! (If you’re interested in DBT emotion regulation skills, have a look at TOO MUCH EMOTION which also links to Harry Potter).
I know that part of the vacuum-y nothingness feeling I’m experiencing at the moment is because I’m still trying to process the loss of a very close friendship eight months ago and I’m still getting very strong urges to contact her even though I can’t, and it feels like my insides have been sucked out which has left the space for the Dementor-like vacuum inside. I can’t think or talk about it properly without crying and feeling like someone’s twisting a salted knife in my chest, and avoiding that is definitely adding to the nothingness. I’m taking Dumbledore’s advice though and writing about it indirectly through blogging or creative writing, and hopefully that’ll make a difference…
“Understanding is the first step to acceptance, and only with acceptance can there be recovery.” WOW. I know Dumbledore’s wisdom is pretty well infinite but this is absolute truth. When I first read GoF, I didn’t really appreciate just how true it is but fifteen years on, I’m starting to understand what Dumbledore meant. I’ve been trying various approaches to ‘recovery’ (whatever that means) over the last 17ish years but it’s only now that I’m realising that you need to actually understand and ACCEPT what it is you’re experiencing in order to be able to recover. As a teenager, I didn’t like how I was feeling and tried to ‘get rid’ of it in any way I could (usually food or weight-related) but because I didn’t think there was a real issue, it ended up making it worse until I was admitted as an inpatient. After that, I started to accept that there might be a problem but I still didn’t really believe or understand it fully and the last ten years have been a mix of semi-recovery, relapsing, semi-recovery again, relapse again and kind of spiralling into feeling like there’s actually no point really and maybe I just need to accept that this is how I am. But having recently re-read GoF, this quote really hit me and I’m trying to put it into practice…
For me, understanding is the hard part because what I’m experiencing at the moment (obsessiveness, feeling ’empty’ or vacuum’y, paranoia, intense neediness and anxiety etc) doesn’t fit into any ‘box’ or mental health category so it’s hard to actually understand what it actually IS. Asperger’s covers part of it- the obsessiveness, need for routine, anxiety in social situations, meltdowns and feeling ‘weird’, but it doesn’t explain why I fixate on specific people, ‘need’ to contact people or they’ll forget I exist, can become very paranoid or the intense vacuum which really is like my insides have been sucked out. But I’m still trying to apply Dumbledore’s wisdom and even though it doesn’t have a ‘label’ or ‘reason’, it’s still something I want to change and (this is the important part I’m trying to hang on to) it ISN’T PART OF WHO I ‘AM’. That’s really important because up till recently, I thought I was just a horrible, weird, obsessive person and that’s why people didn’t want to be friends with me but weirdly I’ve got some really positive relationships at the moment which I really, really don’t want to mess up and they’ve lasted a few years now which is pretty unusual so I want to try to manage or change the obsessive intenseness so I don’t lose them. So even though I don’t fully understand what causes it, I’ve got a pretty good understanding of my experience of it, and I think that’s enough to be able to accept it…
So, acceptance! It’s kind of ironic that I’m coming from this perspective considering a psychologist I saw for a while last year used an ACT approach (accepting obsessive thoughts and urges without judging them) and I didn’t like it because I didn’t want to accept that the ‘horribleness’ was a part of me but I’m starting to realise now that you can accept that you’re experiencing something without actually accepting it as an intrinsic part of you, and that’s what I’m trying to focus on. It’s the bitch in my head, not ‘me’, and that makes it a lot easier to accept and process. And Dumbledore’s right- that does make it a lot easier to even contemplate recovery even if I don’t know fully HOW to yet. But I think I’m in a much better place to be able to try now than I’ve ever been before because the understanding and acceptance really are essential for recovery to even be an option… So thanks, Dumbledore- really needed that reminder!!
Anyway, back to the Cursed Child excitement! Having thought a lot about understanding and acceptance, I’m starting to realise that the vacuum-y ‘nothingness’ is going to be there whatever happens but it doesn’t exclude the possibility of being actually excited or looking forward to the Cursed Child release even if it’s not full hyperness which maybe isn’t a feasible but that doesn’t matter. I AM excited about it and I know I am, and even writing this blog post is helping to reconnect with that feeling even a little bit. There’s so much to learn from Dumbledore and Harry, and it’s so important to remember that. I’m practising my Patronus every day and that really does help to connect with a positive, ‘real’ part of you that sometimes doesn’t feel like it still exists but it does, it’s just clouded by other experiences sometimes.
Throughout Dumbledore’s life, he was affected by his feelings of guilt and loss about Ariana but he learned ways to manage that and to stay connected to his real ‘self’ even though sometimes it felt like it wasn’t possible and Harry learned from him that even though he had a part of Voldemort inside him, it didn’t make him VOLDEMORT and that wasn’t an intrinsic part of his personality. I’m trying to see the bitch in my head as a sort of Horcrux that sometimes has access to my thoughts and feelings in a way that I don’t like but it’s not ‘me’ and I can learn to manage it and ‘close my mind’ through Occlumency (see Mental Health Awareness Week 2016, Part One: HARRY POTTER and Occlumency for more about ‘Harry Potter therapy’), and I’m trying really hard to keep practising it until I’ve found a way to get rid of the Horcrux for good!
Thoughts from an Iridescent Starfish 