Stan: Tackling My Demons - Stan Collymore

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cannot tolerate human inconsistencies and ambiguities. He cannot reconcile good and bad qualities with a constant coherent understanding of another person. At any particular moment, a friend is either good or evil. There is no in-between. No grey area. People are idolised one day, totally devalued and dismissed the next.

       ‘When the idealised person finally disappoints, the borderline must drastically restructure his one-dimensional conceptualisation. Either the idol is banished to the dungeon or the borderline banishes himself to preserve the all-good image of the other.’

      I fit these descriptions like a hand fits a glove. I have heroes who can’t do any wrong. Martin O’Neill would be one. And there are men who I have come to regard as sworn enemies and devil figures. John Gregory and Ray Train would fit that part of the equation. I recognise it all so clearly that it is unsettling in itself. But it was only earlier this year that I was diagnosed with it. It coexists with the bouts of depression that I have been sinking into for the past six or seven years, but it predates my depression, too. I think it’s always been with me.

      Let me try to give you an idea of how my thought process contrasts with the way someone deemed to be normal might think. Let’s say somebody tells you they love you. A normal reaction would be to process that thought and assimilate the normal, positive benefits that come with it. But somebody like me hears ‘I love you’ and the reaction sets off on a thousand different routes through my mind. Suddenly, I’m asking myself a billion questions. I have that reaction to every single thought, every single day.

      I was talking to someone on the phone recently and they told me they loved me. I got aggressive with them and they became exasperated. They told me to accept it for what it was, a simple statement of affection. ‘But that’s the whole fucking point,’ I said. ‘I can’t.’ I know I should be able to react appropriately but I can’t. I’m unable to express myself emotionally. I can’t deal with my emotions. My connection between thinking something and reacting to it is all to cock.

      Sometimes I get so tired trying to analyse all the thoughts that are racing around inside my mind, that I have to go to bed for a day to sleep it off. It’s always like the thermometer in my brain is about to reach boiling point.

      A lot of the personality disorder, I’m sure, is rooted in my childhood. The army of Richard Littlejohns out there will say that this personality disorder mumbo-jumbo is just another way of evading personal responsibility for what they like to see as my sick sexual depravity and my failure to knuckle down for a succession of managers. It’s almost as if they think I want to be like this. It’s as if they think I want my life to feel like one long fucked-up day.

      If my neuroses had a radical effect on my career, they also distorted my personal life into a litany of flings that were usually devoid of real feeling and affection. I have been out with people such as Kirsty Gallagher for around a year, and yet I never felt I was in a proper relationship with them. I have maintained several girlfriends at the same time. And through all of it, I have continually feared abandonment and remained obsessed with being loved.

      Maybe, at the root of it all, it comes back to the fact that there has been no dominant male figure in my childhood or my youth. That’s a classic cause of BPD, often accompanied by the possibility that the mother was depressed in the first year of the child’s life. If my mother had had petticoats when I was a kid, I would have been clinging to them. I spent all my formative years in her company and with her female friends. I didn’t have any exposure to adult men. Perhaps that was the basis of the gnawing distrust that distanced me from elements of football’s aggressively male world.

      The inevitable corollary of that was that I craved the affection of women. I had, and I still have, an insatiable desire to be loved and to have women tell me that they love me. In the context of my disorder, when celebrity brought me as many women as I wanted, I made the mistake of thinking I could use sex as a kind of selection policy. I confused sex and love, not exactly an unusual error, I know. I thought that if I had sex with enough women, sooner or later I would find the solace and the reassurance and the love that I was searching for.

      It didn’t work, of course. There was a time when I was sleeping with four or five women a day. Terrified of loneliness, I had them coming to my house in Cannock on something approximating a rota system. One would arrive, we would have sex and then she would go. Another one would arrive, we would have sex and then she would go. The ones I wanted to leave would stay. The ones I wanted to stay would go. It was all fucked up.

      When that cloying neediness that was the legacy of my disfunctional childhood collided with the pop-star celebrity that Paul Gascoigne’s tears and Rupert Murdoch’s billions had conferred on Premiership footballers, it turned me into the prototype for a new generation of players where everything, particularly sex and money, came easy. Suddenly, I found myself in a world where fame fed upon fame. If two celebrities started going out with each other, a relationship turned into a media monster.

      Some people thrived on that. David Beckham and Victoria Adams seemed to relish the double helpings of attention. They lived their lives at the heart of a media circus of magazine front-covers, newspaper splashes, sarongs and hairstyles and an OK! wedding where they sat on matching thrones. Both their careers benefited from the sky-high profile and they took all the attention in their stride.

      I felt uneasy with that kind of scrutiny. It exaggerated my insecurities and shone a light on the agonies that were darting around my mind. I didn’t have a solid-enough background to carry it off. At first, I just liked to go out, have a few beers and get a bird at the end of the night on the back of my so-called celebrity. I knew that girls were coming at me for the wrong reason, but when I was a young lad just starting out in football there was a novelty to that. Soon, though, I began to feel uncomfortable with the amount of girls I was having casual relationships with. I didn’t stop, I didn’t even rein back, but I didn’t really like myself.

      My mates in Cannock all told me I was living the dream. They got exasperated with me for moaning about how I couldn’t meet anyone real, but deep down I knew that because it was so easy for me as a prominent footballer to get girls, it was damaging my ability to form a proper long-term relationship. It’s funny, isn’t it: I was shagging girls for fun, which is every bloke’s idea of the model of machismo, and yet, emotionally, I remained a desperately insecure person who couldn’t deal with his feelings.

      From time to time, the emptiness of it all would hit me. When I was at Villa, I went to London one weekend and invited a girl I had met the previous week in Birmingham to come down with me. I’d booked a room at the Halkin hotel, just off Hyde Park Corner, which was a favourite haunt of Premiership footballers down in the capital for a weekend on the town. We spent most of the weekend in there shagging. When she fell asleep, I sat on the end of the bed and began writing things down. I’d just finished my treatment for depression at the Priory hospital in southwest London and they encouraged us to put our thoughts down on paper. I scribbled out two or three pages of thoughts. I was berating myself, asking myself what the fuck I was doing.

      I was sitting on the end of a bed in a hotel room having just shagged a girl. I had absolutely no interest in her, and, apart from what I did for a living, she had absolutely no interest in me. I didn’t feel dirty but I just felt it was all a futile exercise. What I wanted was intimacy, not just sex. I wanted someone I could cook dinner with and have a laugh with, but all I was doing was sending myself further and further away from what I was looking for.

      When I look around me now at the way the new generation of young footballers behave, I see so many of them falling into the same trap. I wonder, behind the gory stories of roasting and group sex and scandals in nightclubs and hotels, how many lonely young men there are in the game now, cut off from their own background by their wealth, haunted by hangers-on and armies of false friends who will slither away when the player’s fifteen minutes of fame is exhausted.

      Perhaps I led the way for this new generation of debauchery, but I think it has got even more difficult now for players to do the right thing, even if they want to. Shagging a Premiership footballer seems to have become an art form now. They are objects of desire for a new breed of groupies whose ambitions do not end at sleeping with them. Now, being a football groupie is seen as a legitimate

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