Emotional Detachment Disorder and its impact on my life

Looking out to the horizon

Two years ago, I had never even heard of Emotional Detachment Disorder (sometimes called Emotional Deprivation Disorder). I came across this little known mental health condition while looking on Google one day in April 2019 to try and find answers to the confused questions going on in my head at the time. What I learnt was nothing short of an epiphany. As I began to browse the first article I came across, I noticed that my most common personality traits as well as the symptoms for which I was seeking redress, were being described to some degree of accuracy. 

I went on to research as many articles about EDD as I could,  and I realised, perhaps for the first time in my life, just how different my feelings and emotions were in relation to a normal person's. It finally dawned on me just how significantly my life had been impacted by this condition. That is what eventually led me to the conclusion that I was going to need some therapy to try and sort my head out. The psychological damage that had been inflicted on me was so long ago that I had long since wiped all memory of it from my mind. But what had happened to me in my early childhood to have caused such a trauma? How had it been manifesting itself? I didn't fully know the answers to these questions, although I did have a slight inkling as to what had happened because my adoptive parents, Pamela and Gerry, had spoken to me about it on more than one occasion. I remember Pam telling me that my mother Christine had mental health issues and was not well at the time. She knew that Pam and Gerry could provide a better life for me and so she was happy enough to entrust me to their care. She had also apparently told them that I would end up a genius. I'm not sure she got that part right. I'm already 44 years old, and that is one prophecy that doesn't seem anywhere near close to being fulfilled. My cognitive functions are unlikely to do anything but slowly decline from here on in.

A second clue to unlocking my past was the evidence from my adoption statement. Now, I have had a copy of this statement for years and over the course of my life, I have had occasion to read it and reread it countless times. There is one line from it which has always made me a little sad. It is an indicator of something sinister. It's possible it was an isolated incident, but I doubt that very much.

Out of the six kids that my biological mum, Christine Mendenhall gave birth to, five of us are known ended up with mental health issues to varying degrees while the sixth child has still never been traced. The two eldest chidren  are my half-sisters Caroline and Susan who were born during the time my mother was married, and the ones born afterwards were conceived out of wedlock, including myself. I was an illegitimate child, or to use the correct but now obsolete term that was once commonly used to describe little boys like me, a bastard. Liverpool was a city with a large Irish Catholic population, and even though attitudes were getting more and more liberal, a child conceived out of marriage would have still raised a few eyebrows back in those times. The fifth sibling who has yet to be traced, is called Gabriella Medenhall, unless she has changed it since then? I think about her occasionally and wonder where she might be. But chances are she has not escaped completely unscathed. This is the adoption certificate I was telling you about.

The writing is small, but perhaps you can make out the penultimate paragraph on the first page? No? Well let me blow it up a little and highlight the sentence in question.

As I said before, I have read these lines many times without thinking too much about them. But in the spring of 2019 when I was seriously pondering many questions such as: Why was I so emotionally numb? Why did I have problems maintaining relationships? Why did breakups not seem to affect me like they affected most other people? That adoption statement came to mind again and put me on a path to seeking the truth.

I had been entertaining the idea of tracking down my mother for some years now, but although I had made a few tentative overtures, I had not followed through with them with any seriousness. I knew the risks involved with such a venture and knew full well that if I did find my biological mother, the story wasn't guaranteed to end well. She may in fact not want anything to do with me. Then what? It would be like being rejected for the second time.

It wasn't until well into the first lockdown, begun on March 23rd, that I finally found out what had happened to my mother and got the answers I was seeking. A former friend of mine in the Philippines had managed to trace my elder sister Susan on Facebook, and so it was that I finally made contact with her on the 12th May 2020. After a somewhat emotional phone call, Susan gradually filled in as many of the jigsaw pieces as she could. The long search for my mother Christine Marie Medenhall was finally over. It seemed that I shouldn't have waited this long to start my search. She had passed away over 3 years ago on Tuesday 9th January 2018 in the Toxteth area of Liverpool; not the most salubrious of areas to say the least. She died peacefully and alone in her flat from a heart attack, although this is maybe not surprising given her unhealthy lifestyle of cigarettes and booze. I don't know at what point my mother went off the rails. But I do know that her former husband Jim was in the armed services and had been posted abroad to the Far East. Naturally, Christine went over there with him. In the early days of their marriage, my mum would be left to her own devices a lot of the time and I think she used the opportunity to her full advantage, possibly having trysts with other men over there. At some point, Christine returned back to the UK with the two girls. Whether the marriage was on the rocks at that point, I do not know. What I have been told is that Christine was volatile and could fly into a rage with little to no provocation, regularly beating her two daughters (my half sisters) from her marriage. My mother was unemployed at that time, I think, and the welfare state was pitiful in those days. Liverpool was going through a period of poverty and stagnation and my mother seemed to be prioritising herself over her children. She would indulge her smoking and drinking habits whilst Caroline and Susan were merely secondary concerns. She would often leave the children at home while she went out to meet fresh faced young guys in town and bring them home. She really seemed to like younger guys for some reason, and she didn't appear to have any difficulty picking them up. She would have been in her thirties by then and an attractive woman in the prime of her life. However, she was also quite destitute. So much so in fact, that she didn't even have a fridge, television or washing machine; those everyday household electrical appliances that many people would take for granted nowadays. The two children would often go hungry, or at least not eat proper meals. My mother also smoked like a chimney so I imagine that she would have reeked of cigarette smoke a lot of the time.

Sometime later, when I had been able to process all this information that Susan had given me, I initiated contact with my elder sister Caroline after Susan gave me her last known address. I sent her a letter with my own details, and she replied via email. We eventually chatted on the phone for 3 hours. Caroline talked non-stop and I had a hard time taking in everything she told me. But when she was recounting her and Susan's childhood, either during that conversation or via Whatsapp messages, it was clear to me that she had been very embittered by her experience. She told me about how Susan had run away from home at fourteen, how Susan had once made some toast for mum and that mum had gone into a rage, grabbed her by the hair and slammed her into the wall, all because she had put marmalade on the toast. She even told me that she herself had once taken an overdose of painkillers after she had not been fed for three days. Caroline then said that her dad, James or Jim as he was more often known, would beat her after both girls went to live with their dad. Caroline expressed her utter elation over the death of our mother. Her exact words to me were "That woman should have swung from a gibbet in Tyburn until her screams died; the screams we were not allowed to have!" Caroline (I still refer to her as Caroline even though she has since changed her name to Emma Louise) even had some choice words to say about her ex husband Patrick Latchford, who according to her, had gone on a wild spending spree after being injured in a road traffic accident, running a 20k overdraft with the bank.

Some time later, when I spoke to Susan about all these things Caroline had told me, she looked puzzled, and then said that Caroline had somehow come up with her very own version of events that were not necessarily grounded in reality. I knew at that moment that I would have to take Caroline's words with a pinch of salt.

 I think the resemblance between me and my mother Christine is quite striking; especially the mouth, nose and eyes.

                       

Some years earlier, when the two girls were still young and had not yet reached their teenage years, my mother became pregnant again with another child, my half brother, Thomas, who also ended up back with his biological father Gerry Fieling. After Thomas was removed from her care, my mother started dating a university Maths student; the one who is mentioned on my adoption statement (though not by name) and whom Susan likened in appearance to the actor Brian Blessed because he was well built and had a big, bushy beard. My father had made it clear to Christine that he didn't want any children. But Christine was looking for a replacement for Thomas and so, whether through error, or defiance, I was conceived in the spring of '76, just before one of the hottest summers ever on record. Consequently, when the pregnancy became apparent, my dad broke off the relationship and scarpered, leaving my mother to cope with me on her own. 

The house my mother was living in at the time, 9 Cromarty Road in Old Swan, had barely any furniture. There wasn't any running electricity because my mum was so poor at the time. A kindly delivery man donated an old suite of furniture out of pity and some other family relative came round with some purple coloured carpet. My mum was my sole carer. There was no one else, not even one other child to play with; just my mother and I, alone together in a squalid prefab house. That was my reality for about a couple of years. Now and again, Christine would palm me off onto her relatives and I would be crying my eyes out every time, such was the bond between us.

I eventually contracted pneumonia in those harsh living conditions in that house on Cromarty Road, and my gran finally had to persuade my mother to take me to hospital. I was very poorly and the doctors discovered that one of my lungs had collapsed. My mother washed her hands of me the day I was taken away to Alder Hey hospital. She never visited me once, and that was the last time I was ever to see her again. I was abandoned to the mercy of the medical staff tending to me in hospital. I had been inseparable from my mother and now I was in a ward surrounded by strangers and probably not far from death's door. Somehow I clung on to life, and somehow my tiny mind learnt to process and deal with this maternal rejection. But I would never be the same after that. The damage had been done.

Soon after my ordeal had ended, I ended up in the care system. I was placed in the famous children's home Strawberry Field, which had been under the care of the Salvation Army since the 1930s and at that time, was managed by a certain Captain David Botting since arriving there a few years earlier. Until its demolition in 1973, there had been a rather grand and imposing manor house built in gothic revival style, at the end of the leafy driveway and just beyond the famous red painted iron gates. It had sadly deteriorated to the point where it was no longer safe or fit for occupancy, and so it was pulled down and replaced by three smaller family units resembling maisonettes, each one able to house twelve children. That was how I would have known it. Unfortunately all my memories of that place have long since faded.

The Old Manor House at Strawberry Field with the famous red entrance gates

Meanwhile, my mother Christine was now pregnant with another girl. This was Gabriella and she was born in 1980. Finally, the last girl, my youngest sister Selma, was born on the 4rd October 1982. She has long since changed her name to Claire O'Donoghue. Even then, Christine continued to smoke and drink. And not one of the fathers seemed to stay too long on the scene. I have often tried to understand why my mother was living this hedonistic lifestyle and why she never seemed to find a stable relationship. Were these men and others taking advantage of her? Something I remember my sister Susan saying to me previously, helped me to rationalise her behaviour. She had mentioned that as a little girl, Christine was effectively treated like the runt of the litter by her dad, Oskar. He would force her to eat her sister Helga's leftovers and would also beat her; this one person who should have shown love. This abuse must have contributed significantly to her mental health problems later in life. At the time of her death in 1977, she had disowned all her family and was telling all her neighbours that she was an orphan. I think it was maybe a blessing in disguise that I never got to meet my mother. I think I would have been very sad to have met her in that state.

My story has a happy ending because of course, I was eventually adopted. I am too late to speak to my mother to try and get answers to the many questions in my head. I will not judge her any longer because she too was a victim. Her cruel father had shown her violence instead of love and caused her a raft of mental health problems in her later life. She must have felt so unloved as a little girl. There is no doubt in my mind that my mother simply copied that same behaviour she had learnt from Oskar; behaviour that caused me and my siblings a lot of psychological damage. It will take time for me to completely get over the past and move on. But once I can fully do that, I will have forgiven my mother whatever shortcomings she had, and at that moment, I will finally be able to feel good about myself again, and to learn how to put my complete trust and unconditional love in another human being.

Interestingly enough, I am not as English as I thought I was. My mother's maiden name is Lindblad. Her father, Oskar Ferdinand Lindblad, was Swedish which makes me one quarter Scandinavian. Her mother, my own grandmother, Alice Young, married Oskar, a ship's greaser from the Swedish Navy. My mum, Christine, married in turn, and her husband's name was James or Jim Medenhall. Mendenhall is also the name of a small town just outside Delaware in the USA, and maybe there are a couple more somewhere?

So going back to Emotional Detachment Disorder, the impact my early childhood experience had had on me was much greater than I ever knew until now. It's only relatively recently that I have begun to realise just how much my personality had been shaped by my past. From the earliest age I can remember, I have always felt a loner. Like someone who doesn't really fit in anywhere. Even when I was invited to my school friends' birthday parties, I sometimes felt a bit overwhelmed by all the games, fun and laughter and wanted to be on my own. I'm not saying I didn't socialise. I did have fun too. But eventually there came a point where I would just feel exhausted with it all, and long to go home.

This feeling of emptiness or emotional numbness is pretty awful, but not having had the experience of a loving family, which most of the other kids took for granted, I had no bench mark with which to compare my feelings. For me, they were normal. I felt like a ghost or an empty shell at times. I felt like someone on the outside looking in. Let me visualise that for you. Imagine a solitary lonely figure on a bitterly cold night, peering through the windows of a well lit house and watching a family enjoying themselves. The person looking through the window knows that this is an experience they will never experience for themselves because they just don't feel that they belong in that happy scene.

Another aspect of Emotional Detachment Disorder is having low confidence and self esteem and not taking criticism well. I can be overly sensitive and thin skinned when other people criticise me. I know I am overweight, especially around my abdomen, and that being a size 38" waist measurement is certainly not good when you are 44 years of age. I have body dysmorphia and can't stand looking at myself in the mirror. I hate my fat belly and I hate myself for having allowed myself to get this overweight during the lockdowns of 2020 and 2021. 

I constantly daydream about being in a mutually loving relationship. And yet I am wary of falling in love because I have not yet met that person I can completely trust. Falling deeply in love means exposing my heart to the possibility of pain and hurt for the second time in my solitary unfulfilled life. Even when I have managed to lower my guard a bit, that trust has nearly always been broken. I am afraid because somewhere in the forgotten recesses of my subconscious mind, the trauma is there; the heartbreak that only someone rejected by their own mother could know. That to me is the ultimate betrayal. I am scared of getting my heart broken again and reliving that painful trauma I went through as a baby. I cannot bear to face that ever again. The feeling of emptiness and emotional numbness it has left behind is enough to bear. And so I mentally push people away when they start to lose my trust or if I start to doubt their sincerity. My survival instincts kick in and stop me from lowering my guard any further.

Psychologists talk about self affirmation. Self affirmation is key to everyone's healthy development as an individual. That is something I have been missing. I know it's something I can work on. A daily routine of self adulation, telling myself just what a fantastic, talented person I am, how proud I should be of myself and the total sum of all my achievements would eventually change my mindset over time, were I disciplined enough to stand in front of a mirror every morning and tell myself those things when I climbed out of bed. I just haven't managed to make this part of my waking routine yet. Maybe one day, I will and then I'll have finally cured myself of this condition.

EDD has probably affected me the most in my interpersonal relationships. I have gone through life as someone happy with own company a lot of the time. Even living on my own for 10 years didn't bother me that much.  I sometimes feel suffocated when I am among people for too long and I often need my own space and privacy where I can be alone.  I am not incapable of love of course. But for me, the act of falling in love requires trust, and placing my trust in someone will take time.

I have been seeing a woman called Zara who describes herself as a spiritual healer and a Heyoka empath. She has been encouraging me to connect with my inner child through mediation, imagining myself meeting the young Peter, and stepping into the role of that loving protecting parent he never had but so desperately needed to heal his broken spirit. Because of the fact I have buried all the memories of whatever happened to me all those years ago deep inside my mind, I cannot remember the feelings and emotions I had as a baby, but they are there somewhere in the deepest recesses of my mind. 

Zara says that she can give me the tools but I have to do the work. I wonder if I believe sufficiently in any of that stuff to actually stick with it. I'll just have to see. I can barely look at myself in the mirror right now, let alone whisper words of love to my reflection. I am at the halfway point of my life and I am losing hope day after day. To fill the void, I have put my love and affection into material objects like CDS, DVDS, Blu-Rays, 3D movies and books instead of people. I have plenty of collections which threaten to take over my home if I don't rein them in. Oh what joy I would have if I could eventually exchange all my material gains for that one elusive special person missing in my life.