Web diary

When I returned from South Africa in September 1989, I suffered three months of severe post-traumatic stress. I kept most of the effects and impacts of this from my mother, but I did seek psychiatric help for both of us as a way of finding out why she was so constantly angry with me. We learnt from the therapist, that she had required more empathetic responses from me, more expressed understanding of the effects of her trauma, and, particularly, for me to acknowledge that her face HAD changed after the attack. I loved my mother, and so for me, the changes to her face were not that much of an issue and were no longer noticeable to me. I had accepted her new face and still loved how she looked. But she needed me to say she looked different otherwise it felt like I was negating the extent of her trauma. I understood this and apologised, and she understood why I had done it. We both acknowledged that we had learnt something from this and it has certainly helped me to understand the importance of empathetic responses when a person expresses distress, no matter how large of small you regard the distress to be. When my daughter fell over and grazed her knee, I never said "oh that’s nothing". I always said "that must have really hurt" and her tears would stop straight away, and together we could look for something to make it better.

This breakthrough helped enormously to heal my relationship with my mother, but my own distress continued. For the next two years I continued to demonstrate the after-effects of trauma – nightmares, emotional inbalance, dysfunctional behaviour - which culminated in severe physical illness - melangitis and glandular fever - for which I was hospitalised. This is the only time in my life I have ever been in hospital for an illness. I was having counselling for post-traumatic stress throughout this period. I kept this from my mother because I did not want to implicate her or make her condition worse. When I proposed making the film and going back to South Africa, I think that perhaps I was also looking for a way of dealing with my own post-traumatic stress.