Meditation helps Claire emerge from a dark place

I know so many people who are suffering and suicidal,” says Claire Gormley who hopes that sharing her amazing life’s journey from attempted suicide to a place of peace will help others who are in pain. Despite her protestation that she isn’t a writer she has penned an engaging and wise debut publication.

The Divine Spark: A Miracle of Human Transformation is both a personal story and a collection of knowledge and wisdom drawn from a wide range of sources.

“I wanted to have it so that it would be simple to read, especially because of people’s attention span these days,” she explains, adding that “when I was back there suffering, I couldn’t read very heavy texts”. 

Meeting the softly spoken Claire now it’s difficult to believe that she spent a good portion of her youth drinking and taking drugs. Or that, after a suicide attempt, she was a patient in a psychiatric hospital, where electric shock treatment was given to her when medication had failed.

It’s only when she says in passing that the aggressive electric shock treatment has had an impact on her short-term memory that you realise the enormity of what she has gone through.

Being depressed was like being “shrouded in negativity and lack of hope”, she says now. “It’s like a darkness – you are consumed by negative thinking and trapped in some sort of heavy state. Mostly it’s lack of hope and living in a meaningless world with very little drive or optimism.”

It’s difficult to know what causes depression, she adds. “Some people are prone to melancholy by nature, but a lot of the way we are is conditioned by our upbringing.”

Claire was born in England to parents from the West of Ireland, each of whom had endured a difficult childhood. Not surprisingly the dysfunction and pain continued through to the next generation.

They returned to Ireland in 1973 when Claire was four and bought a pub in Athenry, where they had a thriving business. But it was at the expense of family life. That fact, combined with a violent teacher at school, and later on, abuse at the hands of a Catholic priest had a profound effect on Claire.

Her descriptions of her childhood in the book are far from melodramatic and she is not in the blame game, but the confusion and pain she felt as a lonely youngster are vividly and painfully evoked.

She did the Leaving Cert at 16 and then spent a year in Paris before returning to college to study art and design. But she was carrying deep unhappiness and distress. One night, following a heavy drinking session and a row with a friend, she attempted suicide. She ended up in hospital, but as she says “nothing could shift the pain”. Not talking, nor medication. That was when she was given three sessions a week of electric shock therapy. She knew enough to pretend it was working in order to stop it.

Still, Claire was drawn back to a crazy lifestyle, fuelled by drink and drugs. She went to America to escape it, and didn’t. That was a period of life when she lost several friends because of their lifestyle. There were also good times, when she worked for wealthy people and while she enjoyed that experience, she realised that despite being rich, many of these people were not happy.

For more, read this week's Galway City Tribune.