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As the Child of a Narcissist, I Didn't Think I Could Change – Therapy Proved Me Wrong

Establishing and maintaining boundaries has to be one of therapy’s key tenets. In Lily Allen’s recently released album, West End Girl, she gives a superior masterclass in what can happen if agreed boundaries in a relationship, specifically a marriage, are transgressed.

West End Girl is an autobiographical album though, she says, ‘not gospel’. It details the break up of the singer’s marriage to the actor David Harbour. Who is, coincidentally, on a promotional tour for the final series of Stranger Things in which he stars. But West End Girl with its wonderfully catchy, sing-a-long tunes is not just a revenge album with which we are all familiar it is also a heart breaking appeal to her ex to have been more careful with her, more respectful and to prioritise the marriage and not just his own desires.

It is released just as the new order of sexual freedom is meeting its first real challenges. Young people have spearheaded this new revolution. Not wishing to be confined by gender and sexual conformity the revolution has embraced polyamory, kink, trans and non-hetero normative couplings and thruplings. If asked to define the revolution it would probably be to call it ‘open’.

I have witnessed in the consulting room and the world beyond how openness has given some people a sense of inhabiting their true selves. Like all revolutions it is partly a revolt against what went before and a desire to be different and ‘right’ even. However, the same thing that has given some people a sense of legitimacy, belonging, a feeling of relief that what seemed to work for others and has never worked for them, has also led others to feel under pressure to turn away from the contract they felt all parties had made and which might well have suited them just fine.

Lily Allen tells us the openness in her marriage was imposed upon her in a unilateral way by her husband. This is not uncommon. It’s not just those who feel less sexually inhibited who can rather steamroller over their ‘uncool’ partner’s feelings, but also those who would rather act out their fantasies with others rather than have, often difficult, conversations with their partners (single or plural) about what might turn them on and enter into consensual agreements about sexual adventure.

What West End Girl’s narrative tells us in a raw, angry and poetic way is that it is so easy in an open relationship to lose sense of boundaries even when ones have been agreed. Allen sings, “We had an arrangement/Be discreet and don’t be blatant/There had to be payment/It had to be with strangers.” Not unreasonable I imagine the large majority of listeners are thinking, or shouting at their speakers. 

Allen’s whole album is a juxtaposition of ugly emotions and beautiful tunes. She has us singing along with her experiences of broken trust, self-abasement in order to try to make her marriage work, the pain of what to tell the children, the feeling of being a fool, and very publicly shamed. Hers is a particular experience had by someone who is wealthy and famous, but somehow she makes the entire album completely relatable.

Whilst a lot of media attention has been given to who is the real ‘Madeline’ – the significant other woman of Allen’s anguished lyrics – I believe the psychological importance of this remarkable album is to give voice to the feelings of women in marriages, or any other relationship contract, that have been abused. To allow those women to stop feeling embarrassed and invisible. It’s also a wake up call for couple therapists and other counsellors to be mindful that even the most open of relationships in front of them might be prone to the most ancient and painful of transgressions. 

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