Synopsis-of-Chapters

Introduction

On a business flight, management consultant Stephen Francis experiences a panic attack, fuelled by alcohol, and comes to realise that his life is on a downward spiral. Having achieved the middle-class dream, a first-class degree, a beautiful intelligent wife, a highly paid job and a mortgage, Stephen can no longer cope.

PART I DECONSTRUCTING STEPHEN

1 Losing My Soul

A mature student of 25, it is the end of Stephen’s second term of his first year at university. Returning to Jersey he meets his fiancée Ella, soon to be his wife, at the airport and returns home to his parents, where he makes the devastating discovery that he is adopted. He also finds out that his adoptive sisters Anne and Jan also knew that he was adopted and even his fiancée had been told. The only person who didn’t know until now was Stephen himself.

2 Denial

Understandably shattered by the news, Stephen’s immediate reaction is to go into denial. He buries himself in his university studies, and receives support and comfort both from Ella and Dave, his brother-in-law, who has always been a kind of surrogate father to him. However, realisation of the implications of the lie that his adoptive parents have fed him throughout his life precipitates a breakdown at the end of his second year at university.

3 Breakdown

Stephen’s life at university falls apart. He cannot study, has panic attacks and bad dreams. Finally the Head of School allows him to postpone his studies with a sick note from his GP. Meanwhile, perversely, far from taking a rest to recover from nervous exhaustion Stephen takes up an IT job in the Midlands – to help him deal with the stress caused by anxiety about his and Ella’s financial problems. The job involves huge amounts of travel but he has a supportive boss, Mike, and it also allows him a certain amount of flight from his inner demons. However, he soon finds himself in a state of collapse, living in a fold-up bed behind the sofa in his sister’s flat. The GP prescribes vitamin D and Prozac, which will eventually deny him the ability to feel any kind of depression. But on a flight back to Jersey, the anger begins.

4 Anger

With the help of Prozac Stephen completes his final university year while Ella works to support them both. But as he comes off the Prozac his anger returns and also a sense of injustice. He returns to working for Mike, which involves a lot of travel. He is drinking more, developing irrational phobias and his behaviour towards Ella is becoming abusive and argumentative, even though financially they are now much better off. Stephen now realises he is out of control and needs help.

5 Confused and Needy

Stephen goes to the Post Adoption Centre, in Kentish Town, London, which offers counselling services for adoptees. During the nine week course he comes to understand that he is undergoing the various natural stages of grief, namely: Denial (shock and isolation), Anger, Bargaining, Depression and Acceptance. He also comes to understand the pain he is experiencing: ‘not only is an adopted person apt to feel pain at being given up by the one person in the world they have a close bond with, a bond nurtured in the womb, but the feelings associated with that event were experienced before you are able to articulate them’.

6 Sibling

Stephen is posted to Boston on business. On a visit to him, Ella tells him that the search for his birth parents that he has initiated with the Jersey Children’s Service has yielded an amazingly synchronous result: his half-sister Debra, at the same time as he did, also launched a search for her birth parents in the sister service in the Channel Islands where she grew up. They correspond and discover their lives have taken similar paths, even down to frequenting the same pubs and clubs when they both lived in the UK mainland. They eventually meet, develop a caring relationship and set the wheels in motion for an initial contact with their birth mother.

7 You Don’t Exist

Stephen rings his adoptive parents to inform them he intends to get in touch with his birth mother. Their reaction is negative. Even more painful is the news from the adoptive consultant that ‘Paula’, their birth mother, does not want to open ‘old wounds’ and therefore does not wish to meet Stephen and Debra. Stephen breaks down in tears.

PART II RECONSTRUCTING STEPHEN

8 Desperate

The wound dealt by abandonment is a narcissistic one. In the wake of Paula’s rejection, Stephen feels ugly and unwanted, and though he is occasionally aware of female interest in him, he cannot believe he is attractive. A wonderful consolation, however, brings him back to life and to new hope, when Ella gives birth to a son Joe. To his shame there are still times when he continues to be angry and abusive to her, but he receives support through another councillor, Mary, to whom Stephen bares his soul. The birth is difficult due to Ella’s obstetric cholestasis, a liver dysfunction, and Joe is induced. His birth weight is low. Meanwhile Stephen decides to try and get in touch with his birth father.

9 Starting to Gain Control

Continuing to have counselling with Mary, Stephen’s relations with his adoptive parents reach a nadir when he rings them for information about his birth father. To his horror, his adoptive mother tells him they have taken matters into their own hands and against his express wishes have made arrangements to meet his birth father. While Stephen finds solace in playing with his new son, he is increasingly realising through his counselling sessions the loss he has experienced through his life, both of a sense of identity and also through the death of the one person in his family he had loved and trusted, his brother-in-law Dave. But even more, he sensed that he had buried the memory of many issues in the past surrounding his adoptive family.

10 Before

Stephen looks back on his early childhood and remembers all the incidents involving his adoptive parents, of being bullied at school, and the suffocating control exercised on him in his home life by his adoptive parents.

11 We Exist

Stephen comes to realise the hold on his life drink has during a wretched evening with friends in a lap-dancing club in Glasgow. Deeply depressed, he resolves to change his life and rings Debra to discuss the possibility of a renewed approach to his birth mother. They meet up in Jersey and impulsively decide to ring Paula on his mobile phone. Although suspicious, she agrees to meet them the next morning. She arrives with her husband but her manner is extremely guarded. She reveals that she had an ultimately unsatisfactory relationship with Stephen’s father, that Debra’s birth was the result of a one-night stand; that her own childhood was unhappy, and that she was also abandoned by her drunk Irish father. As the conversation proceeds Stephen becomes increasingly angry as he realises that he and Debra are constantly having to reassure Paula, whereas they, her children, are simply regarded as an ‘old wound’. The meeting ends. In subsequent sessions with Mary, Stephen’s anger continues to surface but as he works through his feelings, things slowly begin to change for the better.

12 Who Am I?

Stephen concludes by looking back at the journey he has been on, and how, with the help of his councillor, Mary, his own wounds are beginning to heal. He still has bad dreams – about bodies buried under floorboards. But whereas in the past he feared that he would be tried as a murderer, he now knows that this is no longer the case: the bodies will be exhumed and reburied – put to rest – which he takes as a sign that he is beginning to succeed in reconstructing Stephen.