Time stopped for Miss Havisham or shall we say she was frozen in time. Miss Havisham is a character in a Charles Dickens novel, Great Expectations. The novel is written in first person narration and Pip is the narrator as well as the main character. We therefore experience the story through Pip’s own perception of events.

Miss Havisham is a wealthy spinster who got jilted at the altar and insisted on wearing her wedding dress for the rest of her life. She stopped all the clocks in the house at exactly the time she learnt that her fiancé was gone. She now lives in a rotting mansion and the first time Pip laid eyes on her, he “saw that the bride within the bridal dress had withered like the dress, and like the flowers, and had no brightness left but the brightness of of her sunken eyes“. He also goes on to say that she wore one shoe because she had only put on one shoe when she learnt that her fiancé was gone. With her great expectations shattered, Miss Havisham morphed into a corpse bride.

Miss Havisham has adopted a young girl called Estella whom she intends to use as a weapon to wreak havoc on men’s hearts. Pip, a young boy from a poor family becomes the target of Miss Havisham’s machinations. The story has all the undertones of a tragicomedy, funny and yet sad.

Our worldview colours everything

Experts define worldview as,  “a collection of attitudes, values, stories and expectations about the world around us, which inform our every thought and action”. Our worldview is rooted in or influenced by culture , religion, environment etc ”. Our worldview is what will also make us judge other people’s beliefs, values and behavior as abnormal.

Take Miss Havisham, we see her through Pip’s eyes or how he has chosen to describe her. We see a mad woman who has not taken off her wedding dress. We see a reclusive rabid, vindictive and vile woman bent on destroying people. We see a rich and entitled woman who takes advantage of poor people and uses them as her pawns. We sympathize with Pip and then Estella to some extent for innocently falling into her evil clutches.

I believe our worldview does not remain rigid. It can be shifted by exposure, experience and openness to learning. I read Great Expectations a couple of times, as a student and then about 2 years ago when my son and I selected it as part of our reading challenge. As a student I remember how much Miss Havisham revolted my sensibilities, she was a mad and vengeful woman. The older and the more experienced I got, that naivety about Miss Havisham fell away. I began to perceive her differently, she was a woman dealing with the pain of heartbreak in the best way she knew albeit with grievous consequences. When I realized that she was a badly wounded individual, my dislike for her turned to empathy. There are so many ways of looking at Miss Havisham’s case depending on what is informing you. Today I choose to look at Miss Havisham from a mental health perspective and with women in mind since March is women’s month.

Time can stop for us all

Experts define a crisis as a dramatic emotional or circumstantial upheaval in a person’s life. A stressful event can precipitate crisis. According to Taylor (1982), it is “a state of disequilibrium resulting from the interaction of an event with the individual’s or family’s coping mechanisms, which are inadequate to meet the demands of the situation combined with the individual’s or family’s perception of the meaning of the event”. Crisis situations can be triggered by sudden death, an accident, abandonment, job loss, diagnosis of a chronic or terminal illness, armed robbery, house catching fire, floods etc.  Most crisis situations being a result of sudden losses catch us unaware and thereby paralyzing us including the strongest amongst us. The trauma we experience as a result of the event creates a picture that remains vivid and frozen in our memory. Time just stops.

Miss Havisham, initially a character of ridicule had experienced a major loss which left her traumatized. Imagine what could have been one of the happiest days in your life suddenly taking a 360 degree turn into the darkest day. Miss Havisham did not only lose a fiancé, she suffered multiple losses. She lost a future husband, love, the title and respectability of being a Mrs. Somebody, her pride and dignity. If art does imitate life, the story is set in 19th century English society where women were born and raised for nothing else but marriage and spinsterhood was perceived as a curse. Can we then blame Miss Havisham for emotionally jumping off the cliff? She saw her life coming to naught.

“The agony is exquisite, is it not? A broken heart. You think you will die. But you just keep living. Day after day, after terrible day.” – Miss Havisham

Miss Havisham now looks like, “the witch of the place” because she had changed from a blushing bride into a picture of a distorted human form. In actual sense, she is a caricature of pain.

People change for two main reasons: either their minds have been opened or their hearts have been broken.

– Steven Aitchison

Stress and the modern day Miss Havisham

Some years back there used to be a mentally ill woman who roamed the streets in the city centre. She was not the only one but this one struck me because she would monologue in fluent English and would ask for, “two cents please” from anyone she met. I want to believe that she had been well educated and may have had a good job. I used to wonder what had caused her to be in such a state. If there was any truth to it, I later heard that some man had pulled a “Miss Havisham” stunt on her and so time stopped for her leading to a distress that eventually spiralled out of control. Rejection and humiliation turned her into a “mad black woman”. By the way, I have lost count of the times I have watched Tyler Perry’s movie, “Dairy of a Mad Black Woman”. There are many facets to the story and am still trying to figure them out. Just saying……….shrug shrug!

This also brings me to the label, “mad woman” and the negative connotations it carries. You see a picture of dishevelled woman, hair standing on end like someone who has just had an electric shock, clothes riddled with holes like buildings in a war zone, an unmatched pair of shoes and a big filthy bag full of collectible nothings! Evidence of mental illness is not only found on the streets, there are also those of us mentally suffering in the privacy of our homes.

Complicated grief

We may experience the same loss but because we are unique individuals we grieve differently. Grieving is a natural way of coming to terms with our loss and therefore it is important to go through the process so that we can find closure and move on.  There are also losses where we may never be able to find closure, we just hobble on somehow. They say bonds of love are not severed by death. Experts say that  with normal  or healthy grieving we experience various feelings that come with the pain of loss, like anger, confusion etc. These feelings gradually ease making it possible to accept the reality of the loss and to move on. For some the feelings of loss are debilitating and do not improve as time passes. Complicated grief is where one has trouble recovering and resuming their own life. Miss Havisham’s grieving is of a complicated nature.

I once worked with a lady who had tragically lost her husband in an armed robbery. They were a young couple when tragedy struck and I got to know her almost 7 years after the loss. She was very unpopular with workmates because more often than not she would descend into very dark moods and for days on end. If she was not giving the silent treatment, she would be biting off people’s heads and being downright nasty. There came a point when no one felt sorry for her anymore and we ended up giving her names behind her back. Then I had no knowledge of the inner workings of grief and loss.

The role of crisis intervention

Experts describe crisis intervention as the methods used to offer immediate short term help to an individual who experiences an event that  produces emotional, mental, physical and behavioural distress or problem. A similarity would be a situation where someone is involved in an accident and then loses consciousness. People may try to resuscitate the individual by performing CPR while waiting for paramedics and further medical help. Short term help can save a life and those that offer help are the support systems.

Short term support

Short term support is like the First Aid  kit. In terms of emotional distress ,crisis intervention helps decrease stress , protects the individual from further stress and helps them come up with resources that can meet the needs of that particular situation. Without this  kind of buffering, the individual can develop serious long term problems.  Support systems can be in the form of family, friends or community members. These are the people that will quickly pick up the broken pieces of an individual’s emotional state and try to put them back together.  You see, shock as an immediate response to a traumatic event has a way of creating an out of body experience in us . The presence of support systems can help an individual come back into their bodies, make them feel human and help them realize that what is happening to them is real. It is my thinking that, Miss Havisham had out of body experience and continued to roam in the wilderness of her mind because she did not get enough support.

The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.

– Ernest Hemingway

Long term support

Therapy: Apart from being in an environment where an individual can safely empty out, therapy can help one realize that the feelings they are experiencing are normal given what they are going through. Therefore they are not “mad”. 

I once had a couple in therapy, that was experiencing marital problems. The husband had had an extramarital affair that produced a child resulting in so much pain for the wife. She fervently tried all she could the to stop the affair, from secretly tracking his movements to putting recording devices in his car and much more. In one session the husband described the wife’s actions as a sign of madness and paranoia in that she was imagining things that did not exist. The wife had also come to believe that her husband could be right, she was mad! I helped them understand that the wife was not mad, she was in pain. It then dawned on them that with continuous pain and the toll of stress, if not dealt with can make one go “crazy”. Therapy sessions helped to gradually shift the husband’s perception of his wife ‘s mental state and afforded the wife a platform to deal with her pain without judgement.

Support groups: These are systems that provide further help and are made up of groups of individuals that come together because they share the same challenge and help each other to deal with it. Support groups also help an individual realize that they are not alone and what they are experiencing is not unique to them alone. They also provide psychological security and a sense of belonging. An example can be Alcoholics Anonymous (A.A).

Method in madness

In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, when his  father is murdered by his uncle who shortly marries his mother, Hamlet’s  emotional pain spirals out of control. His grief and thirst for revenge are perceived as madness. Sometimes what people deem as  “craziness” is only a cry for help.

‘‘Though this be madness, yet there is method in it.”

  -Shakespeare’s’ Hamlet

Judging:  Using only one type of lens means that we are going to be hasty in judging another person’s actions. We need to learn to be broad minded so that we think in terms of possibilities.

Empathy : There is also need for us to put ourselves in the other person’s shoes. If I was in a similar situation would I not do the same thing if not worse?

Providing support: When we are broken, we do not become strong on our own, rather it is other people in our lives that provide “a shoulder we can lean on”. The support we get family and friends is the glue that holds our broken pieces together. It is important to build healthy relationships with them where possible. We should also be in a position to offer support to others in times of need. 

Healing: Kintsugi is a centuries old Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with gold and lacquer. It is the philosophy that something broken can be remade into something even more beautiful. We are all bound to experience life shattering events in this lifetime. It is human and normal to experience a myriad of feelings associated with the pain. I believe that pain is unavoidable but healing is a choice. Choosing healthy ways of dealing with the pain mean that we will be able to come out beautifully scarred and stronger.

Choose to care; for yourself and for others.