Child Abuse
Moving on - Part 3 - My greatest lessons
21/10/08 12:12
This will be my twelfth post on coming to terms with, recovery and healing from child abuse. I feel I have only a little more to say. That may change; often the interaction with others causes me to remember feelings and issues that have been important to me.
This has been a very personal account. In some ways, I was fortunate, in other ways, less so. Everyone is different.
By the time I was at the healing stage I had to take a good long look at my behaviour. I’ll say more, but I should have done things that I didn’t properly understand or know about at the time. I was in and out of therapy. Since I had an involvement in mental health through my work I also had ready access to others working in mental health, both therapists and psychiatrists. This was a mixed blessing. On reflection, my own knowledge of issues around child abuse now far exceeds that of most professionals I knew then.
On the face of it, at the time, I had many positive behaviours that had value in my life. I had excellent social skills. Similarly, through my work, I had competences in assertiveness, listening, communication, decision-making, negotiation, conflict resolution and leadership skills. Those things came with the territory that was my work. I was chief executive of one organisation and chairman of the board of another. I was used to functioning in public. I gave media interviews, appeared on radio and television, I could get on my feet and engage and hold the attention of over a hundred people in a talk or presentation.
If only life was that simple.
A lot of my behaviour, although it appeared charismatic sometimes, was flawed and had its roots in dysfunction and coping mechanisms that I had learned in early life.
I had good social skills but I was frequently a “pleaser”. I would behave unconsciously in a way so as to strike agreement and accord with others, despite my own feelings, beliefs and values. I wanted to be liked, to be popular, but my inner self still held the memories of abuse that I was a freak, unlikeable and even repulsive. I looked like a competent leader, but I was solitary and heroic. I was forever struggling with feelings of deep inadequacy I had within myself. I was a perfectionist. I was wresting with words from my father that went, “Not good enough! Not good enough! Not good enough!” over and over.
Heroism and perfectionism combined meant that I would make hoops to jump through, ever higher and higher, until such time as I fell flat on my face. Then there was no one there to catch or support me and I would start over again.
I had big problems in setting boundaries and limits in personal relationships. I entered abusive relationships by the score.
There are many more examples I could cite, but those are sufficient to make the point. Many of the personal traits that others may have regarded as positive in me were not. They had their roots in my early life experience of abuse.
This gave me a truly massive problem. My life was a nexus of hundreds of relationships both through my work and personally. Being bad at setting limits, I had no privacy. Whenever I wanted to retreat and have quiet time to myself, others would come clamouring to my door or call me incessantly on the phone. Through my coping mechanism of taking responsibility to free me from the dependence on others so that they could not harm me, I had created no end of unhealthy dependencies on me, mainly from those unable or unwilling to take responsibility for their own life. I cannot begin to describe how horrific this was. I had a married female colleague who had accidents every time I withdrew from her dependency on me. At first, I thought it was accidental and unfortunate. Then I noticed the same behaviour over and over. If I moved away then she would break her leg or crash her car. Her accidents were always succeeded by cries for help. I tried to help, but I needed her to try to help herself too. She never did, nor did her husband. She had married a much older man who treated her as a child. She was an abused child and had married a new daddy. She wanted me to be her daddy too.
This was a nightmare. People at my main place of work would rail at me for what they feared would be my imminent desertion of them. Predators who were jealous of me saw my withdrawal as an opportunity to take things from me. So-called friends would call me up and scream hysterically down the phone. One particularly nasty piece of work, a psychiatrist, saw his opportunity to use some of the most manipulative behaviour I have ever witnessed, in order to sleep with my girlfriend at the time. He tried to convince her and others that I was going mad and should be certified for my own protection. He failed. I had stronger allies than he could handle. Subsequently, he was struck off and I celebrated. His little plot was seized upon by another senior colleague and a professional adviser of mine, who speculated that they might be able to take control of my personal assets that included a controlling interest in a profitable business. They failed too. I fired them both. These are a few examples to make a point. There were many, many more.
Not all therapists and psychiatrists are good people. I knew two who drew much of their own sense of self-worth from the power their profession gave them over others. Needless to say, they fought my recovery too. They told me I had a fragmented personality, that I was disordered and split. I let this have a profound effect on me. What they were suggesting were symptoms I associated with a schizoid disorder. This was a complete nonsense but it influenced me to behave in a way that I now know to have been very misguided.
Now here’s the point: What I should have done is taken stock and made an inventory of all the problem areas in my life. It would have been a big list. So many areas of my life were causing me to feel downright miserable and unhappy. There were a few glimpses of light here and there, but my work, social and personal relationships were in the main unhealthy and founded on a legacy of problems from my early life.
Looking back, as frightening as it may have seemed at the time, I should have taken the sheet of paper that was my life, screwed it up, chucked it in the bin and started again. I should have refocused on pursuits and friendships that would have brought me happiness. Instead, I sought to maintain some level of continuity in answer to those critics who had called my life and me fragmented.
I got it badly wrong.
Instead I struggled on through. I tried to hold it all together as untenable as it was. Slowly, all the parts of my life I had tried to hold onto crumbled and fell away. Far from a celebration of self-determination, I spent my time clasping at straws and emptiness, trying to piece back together that which I should have let go.
This is my biggest mistake and my biggest lesson. I wasted years of my life, more than twelve years, dealing with its consequences. I continued to work in an area I disliked, when I could have given others and myself so much more by being true to myself. I could have had better and more positive close relationships. The only consolation I have is that I know that now, and I work to change. It is as if the burden of some ten-ton load has been lifted from me.
Finally, I want to say something more about healing. I wrote earlier:
“True healing involves seeing and knowing what is wrong and having the compassion to call it into change.
…It…means that you don’t beat yourself up mercilessly for your past mistakes. Love also means finding responsibility and compassion.
To heal means that you have to see your life for what it truly is. It is being honest about your emotional pain and all the dreadful mistakes and errors that you have made in trying to hide from your despair. Then you have to listen to that despair with compassion and tenderness and let it tell you its own whole story. Only then will your heart be transformed.”
I have talked to a couple of readers here about this already. It’s so very important. I know both these readers extend tenderness, love and compassion to others, but rarely to themselves. They also beat themselves up mercilessly for the suffering of their past. They indulge in self-blame that is so characteristic of abuse. I understand and I have done that too. Beating yourself up will never work. Healing need not be so painful. It is a release too. If you beat yourself up over what has been done to you by others, then sooner or later, you will give up. You cannot change what they did. The suffering will go on. Giving up is not an answer.
My training therapist was a wonderful man. At one time, he was beaten out of my life by the bad guys. In parting I’d like to share some of his words with you. They were in response to my endless questions about what I should do with my life:
“Listen to your heart and hear its message, only then will you discover your own truth…Be true to your heart and to yourself. Keep writing your story, the story of your own life. It may be time for the next chapter…”
I finished writing my first novel in the summer. It’s overlong and needs a lot of editing, but it occurs to me that so many things I say here first emerged in the process of writing that story. It was liberating. The theme of listening and being true to one’s heart recurs over and over in that story. I have heard my own heart’s message. Finally, a few weeks back, I decided on a title for my book. It’s called, “Love’s Passage.”
I’m working on a second book too. This one is a children’s story. It’s a celebration of playfulness written by the now happy small boy who lives inside me. It’s not based on the deep philosophy and psychology of “Love’s Passage”. It’s called, “The Dustbin King”. It’s very funny. It could even be a story for a film, an animated cartoon most probably. More about my books on Farrago later.
This has been a very personal account. In some ways, I was fortunate, in other ways, less so. Everyone is different.
By the time I was at the healing stage I had to take a good long look at my behaviour. I’ll say more, but I should have done things that I didn’t properly understand or know about at the time. I was in and out of therapy. Since I had an involvement in mental health through my work I also had ready access to others working in mental health, both therapists and psychiatrists. This was a mixed blessing. On reflection, my own knowledge of issues around child abuse now far exceeds that of most professionals I knew then.
On the face of it, at the time, I had many positive behaviours that had value in my life. I had excellent social skills. Similarly, through my work, I had competences in assertiveness, listening, communication, decision-making, negotiation, conflict resolution and leadership skills. Those things came with the territory that was my work. I was chief executive of one organisation and chairman of the board of another. I was used to functioning in public. I gave media interviews, appeared on radio and television, I could get on my feet and engage and hold the attention of over a hundred people in a talk or presentation.
If only life was that simple.
A lot of my behaviour, although it appeared charismatic sometimes, was flawed and had its roots in dysfunction and coping mechanisms that I had learned in early life.
I had good social skills but I was frequently a “pleaser”. I would behave unconsciously in a way so as to strike agreement and accord with others, despite my own feelings, beliefs and values. I wanted to be liked, to be popular, but my inner self still held the memories of abuse that I was a freak, unlikeable and even repulsive. I looked like a competent leader, but I was solitary and heroic. I was forever struggling with feelings of deep inadequacy I had within myself. I was a perfectionist. I was wresting with words from my father that went, “Not good enough! Not good enough! Not good enough!” over and over.
Heroism and perfectionism combined meant that I would make hoops to jump through, ever higher and higher, until such time as I fell flat on my face. Then there was no one there to catch or support me and I would start over again.
I had big problems in setting boundaries and limits in personal relationships. I entered abusive relationships by the score.
There are many more examples I could cite, but those are sufficient to make the point. Many of the personal traits that others may have regarded as positive in me were not. They had their roots in my early life experience of abuse.
This gave me a truly massive problem. My life was a nexus of hundreds of relationships both through my work and personally. Being bad at setting limits, I had no privacy. Whenever I wanted to retreat and have quiet time to myself, others would come clamouring to my door or call me incessantly on the phone. Through my coping mechanism of taking responsibility to free me from the dependence on others so that they could not harm me, I had created no end of unhealthy dependencies on me, mainly from those unable or unwilling to take responsibility for their own life. I cannot begin to describe how horrific this was. I had a married female colleague who had accidents every time I withdrew from her dependency on me. At first, I thought it was accidental and unfortunate. Then I noticed the same behaviour over and over. If I moved away then she would break her leg or crash her car. Her accidents were always succeeded by cries for help. I tried to help, but I needed her to try to help herself too. She never did, nor did her husband. She had married a much older man who treated her as a child. She was an abused child and had married a new daddy. She wanted me to be her daddy too.
This was a nightmare. People at my main place of work would rail at me for what they feared would be my imminent desertion of them. Predators who were jealous of me saw my withdrawal as an opportunity to take things from me. So-called friends would call me up and scream hysterically down the phone. One particularly nasty piece of work, a psychiatrist, saw his opportunity to use some of the most manipulative behaviour I have ever witnessed, in order to sleep with my girlfriend at the time. He tried to convince her and others that I was going mad and should be certified for my own protection. He failed. I had stronger allies than he could handle. Subsequently, he was struck off and I celebrated. His little plot was seized upon by another senior colleague and a professional adviser of mine, who speculated that they might be able to take control of my personal assets that included a controlling interest in a profitable business. They failed too. I fired them both. These are a few examples to make a point. There were many, many more.
Not all therapists and psychiatrists are good people. I knew two who drew much of their own sense of self-worth from the power their profession gave them over others. Needless to say, they fought my recovery too. They told me I had a fragmented personality, that I was disordered and split. I let this have a profound effect on me. What they were suggesting were symptoms I associated with a schizoid disorder. This was a complete nonsense but it influenced me to behave in a way that I now know to have been very misguided.
Now here’s the point: What I should have done is taken stock and made an inventory of all the problem areas in my life. It would have been a big list. So many areas of my life were causing me to feel downright miserable and unhappy. There were a few glimpses of light here and there, but my work, social and personal relationships were in the main unhealthy and founded on a legacy of problems from my early life.
Looking back, as frightening as it may have seemed at the time, I should have taken the sheet of paper that was my life, screwed it up, chucked it in the bin and started again. I should have refocused on pursuits and friendships that would have brought me happiness. Instead, I sought to maintain some level of continuity in answer to those critics who had called my life and me fragmented.
I got it badly wrong.
Instead I struggled on through. I tried to hold it all together as untenable as it was. Slowly, all the parts of my life I had tried to hold onto crumbled and fell away. Far from a celebration of self-determination, I spent my time clasping at straws and emptiness, trying to piece back together that which I should have let go.
This is my biggest mistake and my biggest lesson. I wasted years of my life, more than twelve years, dealing with its consequences. I continued to work in an area I disliked, when I could have given others and myself so much more by being true to myself. I could have had better and more positive close relationships. The only consolation I have is that I know that now, and I work to change. It is as if the burden of some ten-ton load has been lifted from me.
Finally, I want to say something more about healing. I wrote earlier:
“True healing involves seeing and knowing what is wrong and having the compassion to call it into change.
…It…means that you don’t beat yourself up mercilessly for your past mistakes. Love also means finding responsibility and compassion.
To heal means that you have to see your life for what it truly is. It is being honest about your emotional pain and all the dreadful mistakes and errors that you have made in trying to hide from your despair. Then you have to listen to that despair with compassion and tenderness and let it tell you its own whole story. Only then will your heart be transformed.”
I have talked to a couple of readers here about this already. It’s so very important. I know both these readers extend tenderness, love and compassion to others, but rarely to themselves. They also beat themselves up mercilessly for the suffering of their past. They indulge in self-blame that is so characteristic of abuse. I understand and I have done that too. Beating yourself up will never work. Healing need not be so painful. It is a release too. If you beat yourself up over what has been done to you by others, then sooner or later, you will give up. You cannot change what they did. The suffering will go on. Giving up is not an answer.
My training therapist was a wonderful man. At one time, he was beaten out of my life by the bad guys. In parting I’d like to share some of his words with you. They were in response to my endless questions about what I should do with my life:
“Listen to your heart and hear its message, only then will you discover your own truth…Be true to your heart and to yourself. Keep writing your story, the story of your own life. It may be time for the next chapter…”
I finished writing my first novel in the summer. It’s overlong and needs a lot of editing, but it occurs to me that so many things I say here first emerged in the process of writing that story. It was liberating. The theme of listening and being true to one’s heart recurs over and over in that story. I have heard my own heart’s message. Finally, a few weeks back, I decided on a title for my book. It’s called, “Love’s Passage.”
I’m working on a second book too. This one is a children’s story. It’s a celebration of playfulness written by the now happy small boy who lives inside me. It’s not based on the deep philosophy and psychology of “Love’s Passage”. It’s called, “The Dustbin King”. It’s very funny. It could even be a story for a film, an animated cartoon most probably. More about my books on Farrago later.
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Moving on - Part 2 - A matter of trust
20/10/08 14:53
In my last blog, “Moving on - Part 1”, I talked about trust in perhaps what was a rather ingenuous way. I’d like to explore trust a little more, and hope you might join with me in doing that! Writing for me is often about exploration of thoughts and feelings rather than the presentation of firm ideas. It’s a journey with lots of diversions en route!
I’m always curious about etymology; the word trust probably came from a number of Germanic roots that meant comfort, confidence, consolation, faithful and help. Its origins go back to the twelfth century and before. The word, “trustworthiness” did not appear until well into the industrial revolution in the early nineteenth century.
Trust exists on a number of levels. At its most basic level, it might mean belief in the honesty of another. On the next rung up the trust ladder, it might mean a sense of faith or belief in another’s honesty, reliability, competence and benevolence. This is elementary trust.
Trust is not a virtue, since criminals might trust each other and there may be, “honour among thieves.”
I do not believe that anyone is wholly trustworthy or honest in this way, either to others or themselves. We are all faulted and fallible.
Without the notion of trust, ideas of betrayal and forgiveness could not exist.
Betrayal is also a central motif of Christian religion. God allowed his son, Jesus, to be put to death on the cross, where he uttered the words, “father, father, why hast thou forsaken me?” Is that not the ultimate betrayal? Jesus was betrayed by Judas, by the denials of Peter, and by his sleeping disciples. I’m not a Christian, but I do nevertheless believe that Christianity, like all religions, contains powerful archetypical images that uphold its wide appeal. Is not the story of the crucifixion about the ultimate untrustworthiness of humankind? Perhaps the power of that story is not about the absurdity of the resurrection and the ascension, but in Jesus’s return to those who he loved without rancour or bitterness, that he rose above that unfaithfulness without blame. Perhaps one might extend a notion of the crucifixion to signify not physical death, but the pain of human frailty as manifested in primal betrayal.
I am not sure if there is any greater betrayal than that experienced in child abuse. It is the ultimate crime and the ultimate betrayal. It is an exercise of brutal power by an abuser over an innocent and helpless child. It is corrupt and corrupting. In the last resort, the child may feel that their powerless complicity is an act whereby they betrayed themselves. The weight of guilt and shame carried by the abused victim often causes them to betray themselves over and over again through self-harming behaviours that may include their engagement in other abusive relationships later in their adult life.
I have no difficulties in extending elementary trust to anyone. I am not paranoid and I extend that trust to others freely in the course of my adult life. As one of my friends commented, if I am let down by that trust, it is the failure of the other, not me. Trust of this type is at the centre of all human relationships, including those at work. It is empowering of others too.
What moved me to tears in “Moving on, part 1” was not any issue around elementary trust, but a deeper feeling about something that I might call intimate trust. Intimate trust is the deepest act of human understanding. The work of creating intimate trust is, as I wrote earlier, “realising and expressing our inmost self in relationship with others, and supporting them in expressing their inmost self with us. Expressing our inmost self can mean revealing our feelings and needs, our dreams and hopes, our fears and joys and worries, our creative insights, our secrets and our pain . . . all the inner, personal aspects of ourselves. It does not matter at all, for the purpose of intimacy, whether we express "positive" aspects of ourselves such as joy, love, attraction and excitement, or "negative" experiences like fear, sadness, shame or anger.” Intimate trust is the loving act of entrusting someone else with your feelings, your inner being and your emotional and physical welfare. It is knowing that another will be there for you at a time of your deepest need, that they will not walk away and leave one suffering when their loving care matters most. Intimate trust carries with it no judgments either. It is accepting of mortality. It is the deepest form of trust, I believe.
In some ways, intimate trust has less to do with honesty that is the most common connotation of trust. Perhaps, it has more to do with the etymological root of the word, something that is a faithful, loving and accepting helpfulness. Intimate trust is an act of love, but not all that is taken as love in our world carries with it that sort of trust. A love without intimate trust is one that I would find very difficult to sustain. I have never found this intimate trust in my life so far; I have experienced love of sorts, but I doubt that I have yet known true love. I recognise that there are people who care for me very deeply nevertheless.
I have made great progress in healing. I am, at least, able to extend intimate trust and love to myself. I know I could extend it to others too. That may be the biggest step in my journey. It may be the only one. I don’t know. To develop intimate trust completely means that one experiences it through positive reinforcement in a way where it becomes an experience that overwhelms one’s earlier experience of abuse. I may be crazy but I remain hopeful…I am also cautious and watchful, as I have no desire to experience primal betrayal again.
I’m always curious about etymology; the word trust probably came from a number of Germanic roots that meant comfort, confidence, consolation, faithful and help. Its origins go back to the twelfth century and before. The word, “trustworthiness” did not appear until well into the industrial revolution in the early nineteenth century.
Trust exists on a number of levels. At its most basic level, it might mean belief in the honesty of another. On the next rung up the trust ladder, it might mean a sense of faith or belief in another’s honesty, reliability, competence and benevolence. This is elementary trust.
Trust is not a virtue, since criminals might trust each other and there may be, “honour among thieves.”
I do not believe that anyone is wholly trustworthy or honest in this way, either to others or themselves. We are all faulted and fallible.
Without the notion of trust, ideas of betrayal and forgiveness could not exist.
Betrayal is also a central motif of Christian religion. God allowed his son, Jesus, to be put to death on the cross, where he uttered the words, “father, father, why hast thou forsaken me?” Is that not the ultimate betrayal? Jesus was betrayed by Judas, by the denials of Peter, and by his sleeping disciples. I’m not a Christian, but I do nevertheless believe that Christianity, like all religions, contains powerful archetypical images that uphold its wide appeal. Is not the story of the crucifixion about the ultimate untrustworthiness of humankind? Perhaps the power of that story is not about the absurdity of the resurrection and the ascension, but in Jesus’s return to those who he loved without rancour or bitterness, that he rose above that unfaithfulness without blame. Perhaps one might extend a notion of the crucifixion to signify not physical death, but the pain of human frailty as manifested in primal betrayal.
I am not sure if there is any greater betrayal than that experienced in child abuse. It is the ultimate crime and the ultimate betrayal. It is an exercise of brutal power by an abuser over an innocent and helpless child. It is corrupt and corrupting. In the last resort, the child may feel that their powerless complicity is an act whereby they betrayed themselves. The weight of guilt and shame carried by the abused victim often causes them to betray themselves over and over again through self-harming behaviours that may include their engagement in other abusive relationships later in their adult life.
I have no difficulties in extending elementary trust to anyone. I am not paranoid and I extend that trust to others freely in the course of my adult life. As one of my friends commented, if I am let down by that trust, it is the failure of the other, not me. Trust of this type is at the centre of all human relationships, including those at work. It is empowering of others too.
What moved me to tears in “Moving on, part 1” was not any issue around elementary trust, but a deeper feeling about something that I might call intimate trust. Intimate trust is the deepest act of human understanding. The work of creating intimate trust is, as I wrote earlier, “realising and expressing our inmost self in relationship with others, and supporting them in expressing their inmost self with us. Expressing our inmost self can mean revealing our feelings and needs, our dreams and hopes, our fears and joys and worries, our creative insights, our secrets and our pain . . . all the inner, personal aspects of ourselves. It does not matter at all, for the purpose of intimacy, whether we express "positive" aspects of ourselves such as joy, love, attraction and excitement, or "negative" experiences like fear, sadness, shame or anger.” Intimate trust is the loving act of entrusting someone else with your feelings, your inner being and your emotional and physical welfare. It is knowing that another will be there for you at a time of your deepest need, that they will not walk away and leave one suffering when their loving care matters most. Intimate trust carries with it no judgments either. It is accepting of mortality. It is the deepest form of trust, I believe.
In some ways, intimate trust has less to do with honesty that is the most common connotation of trust. Perhaps, it has more to do with the etymological root of the word, something that is a faithful, loving and accepting helpfulness. Intimate trust is an act of love, but not all that is taken as love in our world carries with it that sort of trust. A love without intimate trust is one that I would find very difficult to sustain. I have never found this intimate trust in my life so far; I have experienced love of sorts, but I doubt that I have yet known true love. I recognise that there are people who care for me very deeply nevertheless.
I have made great progress in healing. I am, at least, able to extend intimate trust and love to myself. I know I could extend it to others too. That may be the biggest step in my journey. It may be the only one. I don’t know. To develop intimate trust completely means that one experiences it through positive reinforcement in a way where it becomes an experience that overwhelms one’s earlier experience of abuse. I may be crazy but I remain hopeful…I am also cautious and watchful, as I have no desire to experience primal betrayal again.
Moving on - Part 1 - new lessons
17/10/08 14:20
It’s time to move on. I came to terms with child abuse. I made it past the painful recollections, and re-experiencing past pain and anger. I made some sort of forgiving peace with myself. I had good support, help and guidance to do that. I had not prepared myself properly for what followed, nor did I know how to do that. I was in uncharted territory and knew not where to go from here.
Living with a legacy of abuse has so many harmful consequences. One pays scant regard to one’s own welfare. One does not care properly for oneself. One engages in self-destructive habits and abusive personal relationships. One, perhaps, uses work in an unhealthy way. The consequences of all these behaviours take a mass of unravelling. I’ve been doing it for years and years it seems. I still am. I have realisations, even today, that my behaviour now can be based on negative or potentially self-harming or destructive instincts. I’m beginning to see much more clearly now and writing about it here has helped. It’s helped me to put a structure on what was a large amorphous mess.
Today, I’m going to write about another aspect of the journey of recovery and healing. There are many more, but I need to write about this to articulate and understand my feelings about healing better. My voyage of healing beyond the point of confrontation has been an experiential and sometimes, experimental journey. I wished I had had more help and guidance, but there is scant understanding of these issues out there. I have even seen adaptations of the recovery programme from alcoholics anonymous being made for child abuse sufferers. While laudable in some respects, that doesn’t quite cut the mustard for me. There are far too many differences in the nature of the difficulties and the issues one has to face. Child abuse and alcoholism bear no relation one to the other, although one can be consequent upon the other. That’s the only real parallel I see.
I felt having got through remembering, recognition and the first phase of reconciliation that my healing would proceed on its own. How wrong I was! Suddenly, I got a very rude shock. I became very depressed and I did not properly understand why. I don’t mean that I felt routinely fed up either. I felt the black, bleak overwhelming darkness and lethargy of depression.
I couldn’t find myself anymore. It was like I had suffered a profound loss but did not understand what it was. I even took myself off to the doctors and was prescribed anti-depressants. They didn’t help much either, so I stopped taking them.
It was hell. Subsequently I made a discovery. Part of the recovery from abuse is about experiencing a profound loss, loss of part of oneself, loss of the childhood I never had, loss of the parents I may have once falsely idealised. Loss is written everywhere and I did not understand. I simply did not understand, but went coasting along expecting to get better. It didn’t happen.
This loss is like real bereavement. In some ways it can feel worse than that, since one is bereft of parts of oneself, parts of one’s own inner being. Like with any bereavement, one needs to mourn the loss. Mourning this loss requires a great deal of patience and self-compassion. It cannot be rushed either. One may feel better having moved through the first phase of recovery, but there is still the process of healing. I, like many, didn’t understand this stage at the time, and I suppose I believed I could skip over it. By then, I was convinced I was a survivor after all.
What was true was that when I surfaced from depression, I did feel better. That’s for sure. There was another factor in play here that I know did not help me. I’ll talk about that now.
To survive, I had developed an aggressive independence. I stood my own ground absolutely on my own. Others may have experienced me as a caring, loving man. I know that to be true. It’s who I am. But deep down, I allowed no one to get close to me. No one at all; what’s more I distrusted everybody. This is one hell of an admission, I can tell you. I saw any form of dependency as being dangerous and unhealthy. It didn’t matter if it was healthy or not, I regarded dependency as the same irrespective of who else was involved or how trustworthy they were. I doubted my ability to tell the difference as well. Basically, I did not know how or who to trust. I had never learned that lesson. I made my way entirely on my own.
Of course, if one doesn’t trust, one cannot sustain intimate relationships. That is an absolute fact. I’ve written all about the importance of trust here. I know it to be important too. There is a big difference between knowing and knowing how to do it. This is giving me a real shaking up this morning. I’m going to stop writing now for a while as tears are rolling down my face and steaming up my reading glasses. I can’t see what I’m typing anymore.
Back! I wrote somewhere down the page a quote from James Hillman although I believe he was quoting someone else. I don’t have the book to hand. It went, “In all trust are the seeds of betrayal”. I went on to argue that love supplanted and subsumed trust since I believed that if one trusted, one would inevitably be betrayed, but if one loved, one would not. I’ve changed my mind. I believe that love and trust go together, and neither one implies the other. In short, one needs both to sustain an intimate relationship.
There’s something of a catch 22 here. It’s this: If one is unable to trust then inevitably one builds untrustworthy relationships. I should write that out like a schoolboy writing lines.
To really get past and get over the block of mourning, one needs to be able to share the most vulnerable parts of oneself with others. It is only this act of trust that can transform one’s fear of being hurt and betrayed. To get through this stage, means that one has to allow oneself to experience healthy dependency. I’m not sure if I have ever done that in my life. Even when I almost died last year, I resolved to nurse myself back to health independently. I made it too, but at what cost? I wonder now. The word “dependency” still sticks in my throat even now. To heal properly, one needs to feel the care of others. Not only does one need to be able to accept that care, but one needs the caring of others in order to heal.
I hope I can find my way to trust now. I feel an awful empty space inside.
In my next posts I will share more of what I believe the process of healing from child abuse entails. These are my new life’s lessons. My reservations about trust are profound. In doing what I’m doing now, someone close to me will tell me soon that I’m wasting my time here self-indulgently. I doubt that I will trust them, nor will I allow them to care for me. Also, and here's the rub, I doubt if they trust me either.
Living with a legacy of abuse has so many harmful consequences. One pays scant regard to one’s own welfare. One does not care properly for oneself. One engages in self-destructive habits and abusive personal relationships. One, perhaps, uses work in an unhealthy way. The consequences of all these behaviours take a mass of unravelling. I’ve been doing it for years and years it seems. I still am. I have realisations, even today, that my behaviour now can be based on negative or potentially self-harming or destructive instincts. I’m beginning to see much more clearly now and writing about it here has helped. It’s helped me to put a structure on what was a large amorphous mess.
Today, I’m going to write about another aspect of the journey of recovery and healing. There are many more, but I need to write about this to articulate and understand my feelings about healing better. My voyage of healing beyond the point of confrontation has been an experiential and sometimes, experimental journey. I wished I had had more help and guidance, but there is scant understanding of these issues out there. I have even seen adaptations of the recovery programme from alcoholics anonymous being made for child abuse sufferers. While laudable in some respects, that doesn’t quite cut the mustard for me. There are far too many differences in the nature of the difficulties and the issues one has to face. Child abuse and alcoholism bear no relation one to the other, although one can be consequent upon the other. That’s the only real parallel I see.
I felt having got through remembering, recognition and the first phase of reconciliation that my healing would proceed on its own. How wrong I was! Suddenly, I got a very rude shock. I became very depressed and I did not properly understand why. I don’t mean that I felt routinely fed up either. I felt the black, bleak overwhelming darkness and lethargy of depression.
I couldn’t find myself anymore. It was like I had suffered a profound loss but did not understand what it was. I even took myself off to the doctors and was prescribed anti-depressants. They didn’t help much either, so I stopped taking them.
It was hell. Subsequently I made a discovery. Part of the recovery from abuse is about experiencing a profound loss, loss of part of oneself, loss of the childhood I never had, loss of the parents I may have once falsely idealised. Loss is written everywhere and I did not understand. I simply did not understand, but went coasting along expecting to get better. It didn’t happen.
This loss is like real bereavement. In some ways it can feel worse than that, since one is bereft of parts of oneself, parts of one’s own inner being. Like with any bereavement, one needs to mourn the loss. Mourning this loss requires a great deal of patience and self-compassion. It cannot be rushed either. One may feel better having moved through the first phase of recovery, but there is still the process of healing. I, like many, didn’t understand this stage at the time, and I suppose I believed I could skip over it. By then, I was convinced I was a survivor after all.
What was true was that when I surfaced from depression, I did feel better. That’s for sure. There was another factor in play here that I know did not help me. I’ll talk about that now.
To survive, I had developed an aggressive independence. I stood my own ground absolutely on my own. Others may have experienced me as a caring, loving man. I know that to be true. It’s who I am. But deep down, I allowed no one to get close to me. No one at all; what’s more I distrusted everybody. This is one hell of an admission, I can tell you. I saw any form of dependency as being dangerous and unhealthy. It didn’t matter if it was healthy or not, I regarded dependency as the same irrespective of who else was involved or how trustworthy they were. I doubted my ability to tell the difference as well. Basically, I did not know how or who to trust. I had never learned that lesson. I made my way entirely on my own.
Of course, if one doesn’t trust, one cannot sustain intimate relationships. That is an absolute fact. I’ve written all about the importance of trust here. I know it to be important too. There is a big difference between knowing and knowing how to do it. This is giving me a real shaking up this morning. I’m going to stop writing now for a while as tears are rolling down my face and steaming up my reading glasses. I can’t see what I’m typing anymore.
Back! I wrote somewhere down the page a quote from James Hillman although I believe he was quoting someone else. I don’t have the book to hand. It went, “In all trust are the seeds of betrayal”. I went on to argue that love supplanted and subsumed trust since I believed that if one trusted, one would inevitably be betrayed, but if one loved, one would not. I’ve changed my mind. I believe that love and trust go together, and neither one implies the other. In short, one needs both to sustain an intimate relationship.
There’s something of a catch 22 here. It’s this: If one is unable to trust then inevitably one builds untrustworthy relationships. I should write that out like a schoolboy writing lines.
To really get past and get over the block of mourning, one needs to be able to share the most vulnerable parts of oneself with others. It is only this act of trust that can transform one’s fear of being hurt and betrayed. To get through this stage, means that one has to allow oneself to experience healthy dependency. I’m not sure if I have ever done that in my life. Even when I almost died last year, I resolved to nurse myself back to health independently. I made it too, but at what cost? I wonder now. The word “dependency” still sticks in my throat even now. To heal properly, one needs to feel the care of others. Not only does one need to be able to accept that care, but one needs the caring of others in order to heal.
I hope I can find my way to trust now. I feel an awful empty space inside.
In my next posts I will share more of what I believe the process of healing from child abuse entails. These are my new life’s lessons. My reservations about trust are profound. In doing what I’m doing now, someone close to me will tell me soon that I’m wasting my time here self-indulgently. I doubt that I will trust them, nor will I allow them to care for me. Also, and here's the rub, I doubt if they trust me either.
Coming to terms - Part 9 - the confrontation
25/09/08 22:09
I had steeled and becalmed myself for days or weeks before that night. I was as calm as I could be. My pulse raced and I could feel it beating in my temples. I had worked out the words to say to my father. At first, the words were a little cold and abstract like enquiring about the weather on a wet afternoon. I would simply ask him calm direct questions and let him know my feelings. I knew I had to remain calm. One sign of fear or anxiety and he would jump through that chink in my armour faster than I could deflect him.
It was early autumn. I remember behaving in a way that was out of character. I raided my parent’s drink cabinet and poured myself a glass of scotch strong enough to anaesthetise a skunk. I drew deep breaths.
My mother already knew that something was wrong but she had never imagined hearing what followed. My father talked on and on about himself as he always did. I drew a deep breath and told them both that there was something very important I needed to talk to them about. Silence in the room. Eyes focused on me. Their interpretation was probably that I was about to confess a terrible misdemeanour or say something like I had been diagnosed with a terminal illness.
I stayed calm to the last. I spoke softly in silence. I talked about what had happened to me at the hands of my father. Something that had really stuck in my gullet was his allegation of how I had committed a sexual assault on my brother, transferring the blame for what he had done to me. I talked of the miserable consequences the abuse had on my personal relationships, a whole series of broken intimate relationships.
He replied, “I thought all I did was to bring you up to be the very successful person you are now.”
I almost bit a chunk out of the whisky tumbler. I still felt anger and I could feel it rising inside me.
“So is that your formula for bringing up children?” I responded. “Beating me senseless until I was unable to function, let alone feel or think. Locking me in rooms, sticking your penis in my face then telling me I had venereal disease. I WAS TEN YEARS OLD! Connecting me to the electricity…I thought I would die. Telling me I was unfit to mix with other children, that I was scum…on and on and on…then going to the doctor and telling him what you did to me, I did to my brother. I was thirty-two when I found out about that. How do you think that felt? So are you going to sit there and lie to me now?”
Those are not the exact words, but a loose paraphrase, but by god was I angry.
He denied it all again. I stayed silent. I remained silent for minutes, seething.
He denied it all again.
I calmed myself and slumped back in the chair.
My mother spoke, “You know Geoffrey is speaking the truth Joe, so do I.”
‘Shit mum!’ I thought. This was support from unexpected quarters.
I watched him carefully, studied his body language, anticipating a violent outburst. I had no need to be afraid. I was very much stronger than him and could restrain him easily.
Begrudgingly and sullenly, he acknowledged that I was telling “my version of the truth” pointing out that he believed that all he had done was for my benefit. After all, “look at him now.”
Once more I went through the consequences of his violence and harming behaviour. This time I didn’t stop there. I talked about what he was doing to my mother. I demanded that he stopped.
“Or else, what will you do?” he replied aggressively.
I didn’t go there that night to engage in some sparring contest or threatening exchange, but I knew I had to turn up the heat. There was no regret, no remorse, no contrition in him.
“Or else, I’ll go to social services, your doctor and the police,” I replied, “and if I have to challenge you physically, I’ll do that too. You don’t frighten me now. You have no hold over me or my mother. It’s the end. It’s over. Now you choose.”
Epilogue
I left soon after that. I’m certain that my mother was never beaten by him again. Sadly she died five years ago from Alzheimer’s. I wondered about the connection of being beaten round the head with heavy objects and that illness. I do believe that in his own way, my father got better too. I talk to him two or three times a year. We salvaged a relationship of sorts. It’s not that friendly but in some ways I care for him. Don’t ask me how. I simply don’t know.
After that night, although I checked on my mother from time to time, my parents didn’t speak to me that much for a couple of years. I feel that in their own way, they too were coming to terms with guilt and shame.
Some time after this event, I made it to the point of acceptance and forgiveness.
It was early autumn. I remember behaving in a way that was out of character. I raided my parent’s drink cabinet and poured myself a glass of scotch strong enough to anaesthetise a skunk. I drew deep breaths.
My mother already knew that something was wrong but she had never imagined hearing what followed. My father talked on and on about himself as he always did. I drew a deep breath and told them both that there was something very important I needed to talk to them about. Silence in the room. Eyes focused on me. Their interpretation was probably that I was about to confess a terrible misdemeanour or say something like I had been diagnosed with a terminal illness.
I stayed calm to the last. I spoke softly in silence. I talked about what had happened to me at the hands of my father. Something that had really stuck in my gullet was his allegation of how I had committed a sexual assault on my brother, transferring the blame for what he had done to me. I talked of the miserable consequences the abuse had on my personal relationships, a whole series of broken intimate relationships.
He replied, “I thought all I did was to bring you up to be the very successful person you are now.”
I almost bit a chunk out of the whisky tumbler. I still felt anger and I could feel it rising inside me.
“So is that your formula for bringing up children?” I responded. “Beating me senseless until I was unable to function, let alone feel or think. Locking me in rooms, sticking your penis in my face then telling me I had venereal disease. I WAS TEN YEARS OLD! Connecting me to the electricity…I thought I would die. Telling me I was unfit to mix with other children, that I was scum…on and on and on…then going to the doctor and telling him what you did to me, I did to my brother. I was thirty-two when I found out about that. How do you think that felt? So are you going to sit there and lie to me now?”
Those are not the exact words, but a loose paraphrase, but by god was I angry.
He denied it all again. I stayed silent. I remained silent for minutes, seething.
He denied it all again.
I calmed myself and slumped back in the chair.
My mother spoke, “You know Geoffrey is speaking the truth Joe, so do I.”
‘Shit mum!’ I thought. This was support from unexpected quarters.
I watched him carefully, studied his body language, anticipating a violent outburst. I had no need to be afraid. I was very much stronger than him and could restrain him easily.
Begrudgingly and sullenly, he acknowledged that I was telling “my version of the truth” pointing out that he believed that all he had done was for my benefit. After all, “look at him now.”
Once more I went through the consequences of his violence and harming behaviour. This time I didn’t stop there. I talked about what he was doing to my mother. I demanded that he stopped.
“Or else, what will you do?” he replied aggressively.
I didn’t go there that night to engage in some sparring contest or threatening exchange, but I knew I had to turn up the heat. There was no regret, no remorse, no contrition in him.
“Or else, I’ll go to social services, your doctor and the police,” I replied, “and if I have to challenge you physically, I’ll do that too. You don’t frighten me now. You have no hold over me or my mother. It’s the end. It’s over. Now you choose.”
Epilogue
I left soon after that. I’m certain that my mother was never beaten by him again. Sadly she died five years ago from Alzheimer’s. I wondered about the connection of being beaten round the head with heavy objects and that illness. I do believe that in his own way, my father got better too. I talk to him two or three times a year. We salvaged a relationship of sorts. It’s not that friendly but in some ways I care for him. Don’t ask me how. I simply don’t know.
After that night, although I checked on my mother from time to time, my parents didn’t speak to me that much for a couple of years. I feel that in their own way, they too were coming to terms with guilt and shame.
Some time after this event, I made it to the point of acceptance and forgiveness.
Coming to terms - Part 8 - blame, acceptance and forgiveness
25/09/08 18:47
I want to say something about blame. I have used the word here in different contexts. I have never said, “I blamed my father”.
Blame is one of the most unhelpful phenomena I know.
I have written about it before:
“The guilt and blame games are played on such a wide-scale that it is hard not to be drawn into them. The notion of 'He did it me' is everywhere. We all know the feelings. They go 'we are in this bad place because of all these bad things you did to me. I hold you to blame for my difficulty.' Maybe this is defensiveness, maybe it is fear. But it is fear of responsibility that causes blame and true growth in intimacy can only thrive where there is an acceptance of responsibility for love's growth without blame.
Blame and assertiveness do not co-exist. Blame distorts, harms and even destroys. It is self-destructive as well as destructive of others.
So I hear the cynics say 'Blame is a natural human response to threat or injustice, to wrongdoing or loss.' I am sure that is true too. It is all too easy. But what I would ask the proponents of blame is 'When did you last solve a personal problem with blame?' 'When did blame last improve your life?' 'When I blamed what did it help me to understand anything about me or the other?' 'Where has blame helped you to achieve the outcome you wanted?”
I realised having worked through all the emotions associated with abuse and having emerged from the dark shadow it cast over my life, I needed to do more.
I had a very wise older friend, someone who had acted as a parent figure in my life since before university. She had been one of the co-founders of “the Samaritans” in the UK along with another remarkable man called Chad Varah. The Samaritans is a nationwide organisation set up to provide a lifeline for the suicidal and despairing. She was also a teacher and training therapist. I owe a lot of my recovery and healing to her. She was also the one to whom I turned every time I got into a problem with personal relationships. There were a lot of those. She was always there for me. I talked to her about the confrontation. She had said, “the only way you will truly get through this is to be able forgive him what he did to you.” She never used the “blame” word either.
I’m not totally sure about all aspects of forgiveness, even now. Nor am I sure it is right for everyone. Accepting that the abuse occurred and putting it all behind you once and for all may be the only resolution that makes sense and feels right. Deciding whether to forgive or accept is one’s own choice and no one else's.
I got through on a compromise. I was able to forgive my father as a perpetrator of child abuse, as a man suffering from a particular kind of sickness. I had to accept some of his particularly sadistic acts of violence.
But whether its forgiveness or acceptance, the point is that it is a transformational experience of one’s self. It’s not about condoning or rejoining a family in which one suffered. It’s a compassionate acknowledgement of what happened. For me it was an empathic step in recognising the sickness of my father, and a desire to leave bitterness, resentment, hurt and pain behind. The true compassion is that which extends to oneself. It is through finding that compassion that one is able to move towards a place of healing. The inner-work of forgiveness is, I believe, finding a place of true self-reconciliation.
I did go on to confront my father since I wanted an acknowledgement of the truth from him. I wanted him to see the truth of the pain he had caused me, but more importantly to see that he was still inflicting that pain on my mother.
Forgiveness and acceptance went on for a time well beyond the confrontation. It took months. Sometimes I can still become angry and frustrated when I realise that this age-old wound is affecting the way I behave now. The anger never lasts now. I always move on to a better place.
Blame is one of the most unhelpful phenomena I know.
I have written about it before:
“The guilt and blame games are played on such a wide-scale that it is hard not to be drawn into them. The notion of 'He did it me' is everywhere. We all know the feelings. They go 'we are in this bad place because of all these bad things you did to me. I hold you to blame for my difficulty.' Maybe this is defensiveness, maybe it is fear. But it is fear of responsibility that causes blame and true growth in intimacy can only thrive where there is an acceptance of responsibility for love's growth without blame.
Blame and assertiveness do not co-exist. Blame distorts, harms and even destroys. It is self-destructive as well as destructive of others.
So I hear the cynics say 'Blame is a natural human response to threat or injustice, to wrongdoing or loss.' I am sure that is true too. It is all too easy. But what I would ask the proponents of blame is 'When did you last solve a personal problem with blame?' 'When did blame last improve your life?' 'When I blamed what did it help me to understand anything about me or the other?' 'Where has blame helped you to achieve the outcome you wanted?”
I realised having worked through all the emotions associated with abuse and having emerged from the dark shadow it cast over my life, I needed to do more.
I had a very wise older friend, someone who had acted as a parent figure in my life since before university. She had been one of the co-founders of “the Samaritans” in the UK along with another remarkable man called Chad Varah. The Samaritans is a nationwide organisation set up to provide a lifeline for the suicidal and despairing. She was also a teacher and training therapist. I owe a lot of my recovery and healing to her. She was also the one to whom I turned every time I got into a problem with personal relationships. There were a lot of those. She was always there for me. I talked to her about the confrontation. She had said, “the only way you will truly get through this is to be able forgive him what he did to you.” She never used the “blame” word either.
I’m not totally sure about all aspects of forgiveness, even now. Nor am I sure it is right for everyone. Accepting that the abuse occurred and putting it all behind you once and for all may be the only resolution that makes sense and feels right. Deciding whether to forgive or accept is one’s own choice and no one else's.
I got through on a compromise. I was able to forgive my father as a perpetrator of child abuse, as a man suffering from a particular kind of sickness. I had to accept some of his particularly sadistic acts of violence.
But whether its forgiveness or acceptance, the point is that it is a transformational experience of one’s self. It’s not about condoning or rejoining a family in which one suffered. It’s a compassionate acknowledgement of what happened. For me it was an empathic step in recognising the sickness of my father, and a desire to leave bitterness, resentment, hurt and pain behind. The true compassion is that which extends to oneself. It is through finding that compassion that one is able to move towards a place of healing. The inner-work of forgiveness is, I believe, finding a place of true self-reconciliation.
I did go on to confront my father since I wanted an acknowledgement of the truth from him. I wanted him to see the truth of the pain he had caused me, but more importantly to see that he was still inflicting that pain on my mother.
Forgiveness and acceptance went on for a time well beyond the confrontation. It took months. Sometimes I can still become angry and frustrated when I realise that this age-old wound is affecting the way I behave now. The anger never lasts now. I always move on to a better place.
Coming to terms - Part 7 - dealing with toxic emotions
25/09/08 10:22
I’m going to say only a little about the toxic emotions that are a legacy of child abuse here. I have no need or wish to revisit, remember or re-experience them now. I have moved beyond that a while ago, thankfully.
There was another step that for me, and I suspect for others too, that was critical in the process of recovery. I have alluded to it briefly here in passing but that’s all. I never recovered fully as a result of the process of recalling and allowing myself to feel the toxic emotions I had inside me. I needed to feel these emotions in order to understand and release them. There was another step for me beyond confrontation too, that as I will explain later was right for me, but it is not right for everybody since sometimes confrontation can present appalling and unacceptable personal risks. The final step was to forgive my father the abuse he committed against me. Only after I had moved through forgiveness was I finally free. It was forgiveness that finally relieved the burden of suffering I carried within me.
It wasn’t such a very neat parcel. I must say that too. Some of the legacy of abuse persisted in how I lived my daily life. There was a part of me, which wanted to see continuity in my life, which chose to build upon an existence founded in dysfunction. I should have made greater and more fundamental changes especially in my working life. I know that now. I made a mistake at the time.
Anger: I had a real difficulty in expressing anger. First, I had associated it with my father’s aggressive abuse, and second as an abused child it was never safe to express anger. Anger was connected to the things that hurt me too.
Suppressed anger is dangerous. Many survivors turn their anger inwards. Introjected anger may become depression, anxiety and self-loathing. Others may express it in inappropriate aggressive behaviour or withdrawal from social or personal relationships.
One of the great lessons in recovery is the release of anger, to do it safely and to direct it at where it belongs, to the perpetrators of abuse. Anger can be expressed safely and need not be overwhelming. We can turn it on and turn it off. We can also learn to control anger and express it appropriately.
All adults have feelings that are rooted in childhood development. Those left over from abuse may be very powerful, and sometimes destructive.
Fear and anger are both very natural responses to the threat or act of violence. Anxiety is related to fear and comes from not knowing what to expect within the family.
Shame and guilt are terrible demons and coming to terms with these may present the adult survivor with real problems, however, their presence should tell you that you still hold yourself responsible for the abuse in some way. You are not responsible, and you were a powerless, innocent child. Put these feelings back where they belong and that is with the abuser and not with you.
Adult survivors internalise shame when they identify with or idealise parents who abuse them, abandon them and fail to confirm or value them as people. Shame becomes part of a package of self-blame, self-destructive thoughts and self-sabotaging behaviours. During the childhood years this bundle of negative feelings evolves into a major part of the survivor's sense of self.
There may be other feelings of alienation and hopelessness that may result from too many disappointments or a sense that you are resigned to life and have lost any belief in its ability to be better. These feelings will always tell you something about yourself, do not try and ignore them; only when you have heard their message will they go away.
I don’t believe there are any shortcuts here. If you don’t reconnect with these feelings and see them for what they are, they will continue to haunt your adult life.
Whatever anyone says, I don’t believe you can skip this step either. I, and others survivors I have known, have used a number of harmful mechanisms to “numb out” these feelings when they get too strong. Some adopt a workaholic lifestyle in order to block out the feelings. Others try to “self-medicate” and anaesthetise their pain and strong emotions by using drink and drugs. Stifling anger and rage may simply mean that the victim expresses it as aggressive, anti-social and abusive behaviour.
I’m going to make a recommendation here. I don’t often do that. It’s about therapy. There are therapies and therapists I have known where they encourage their clients to engage in endless reflection. They don’t work! You get mired up in all that pain and it’s the therapist’s job to facilitate your finding a way out. But I’ll make one positive recommendation and that is that an appropriately qualified therapist can be of immense help. Dealing with all these feelings can be very confusing. Often they arise in an untidy and messy way. Often it is difficult to work out where they come from, what they mean and what belongs to where.
So here it is, I would recommend cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) provided by an appropriately qualified therapist who has an understanding and knowledge of child abuse. I like CBT and find it immensely helpful. CBT maintains that the meanings that one attaches to one’s emotions, no matter how incongruous they might be, are within common sense and are accessible to one’s own cognition and understanding. I agree.
Very simply described, CBT is about discovering emotions, understanding them, their meanings and their context, and discovering where or to what they belong. It acknowledges that emotions and the meanings we attach to them may be sensible or not. It is also non-judgemental.
As the man who developed CBT, Aaron Beck, wrote, “(For the cognitive behavioural therapist)… eliciting a person’s cognitions (meanings) becomes important when we attempt to understand their relationship with incongruous emotional reactions. It is about discovering an individual’s emotions based on that person’s peculiar appraisal of an event or experience.”
What is great about CBT, in my view, is that it is entirely focused on healthy and constructive outcomes, on recovery, and that its administration usually covers relatively short treatment courses and time-scales.
Please note: Psychotherapy and psychotherapists are a matter of personal choice and selection. Should you be in or be considering psychotherapy it is best that you find the therapy most appropriate to your needs and personal situation. The views here represent only the opinions of the author.
There was another step that for me, and I suspect for others too, that was critical in the process of recovery. I have alluded to it briefly here in passing but that’s all. I never recovered fully as a result of the process of recalling and allowing myself to feel the toxic emotions I had inside me. I needed to feel these emotions in order to understand and release them. There was another step for me beyond confrontation too, that as I will explain later was right for me, but it is not right for everybody since sometimes confrontation can present appalling and unacceptable personal risks. The final step was to forgive my father the abuse he committed against me. Only after I had moved through forgiveness was I finally free. It was forgiveness that finally relieved the burden of suffering I carried within me.
It wasn’t such a very neat parcel. I must say that too. Some of the legacy of abuse persisted in how I lived my daily life. There was a part of me, which wanted to see continuity in my life, which chose to build upon an existence founded in dysfunction. I should have made greater and more fundamental changes especially in my working life. I know that now. I made a mistake at the time.
Anger: I had a real difficulty in expressing anger. First, I had associated it with my father’s aggressive abuse, and second as an abused child it was never safe to express anger. Anger was connected to the things that hurt me too.
Suppressed anger is dangerous. Many survivors turn their anger inwards. Introjected anger may become depression, anxiety and self-loathing. Others may express it in inappropriate aggressive behaviour or withdrawal from social or personal relationships.
One of the great lessons in recovery is the release of anger, to do it safely and to direct it at where it belongs, to the perpetrators of abuse. Anger can be expressed safely and need not be overwhelming. We can turn it on and turn it off. We can also learn to control anger and express it appropriately.
All adults have feelings that are rooted in childhood development. Those left over from abuse may be very powerful, and sometimes destructive.
Fear and anger are both very natural responses to the threat or act of violence. Anxiety is related to fear and comes from not knowing what to expect within the family.
Shame and guilt are terrible demons and coming to terms with these may present the adult survivor with real problems, however, their presence should tell you that you still hold yourself responsible for the abuse in some way. You are not responsible, and you were a powerless, innocent child. Put these feelings back where they belong and that is with the abuser and not with you.
Adult survivors internalise shame when they identify with or idealise parents who abuse them, abandon them and fail to confirm or value them as people. Shame becomes part of a package of self-blame, self-destructive thoughts and self-sabotaging behaviours. During the childhood years this bundle of negative feelings evolves into a major part of the survivor's sense of self.
There may be other feelings of alienation and hopelessness that may result from too many disappointments or a sense that you are resigned to life and have lost any belief in its ability to be better. These feelings will always tell you something about yourself, do not try and ignore them; only when you have heard their message will they go away.
I don’t believe there are any shortcuts here. If you don’t reconnect with these feelings and see them for what they are, they will continue to haunt your adult life.
Whatever anyone says, I don’t believe you can skip this step either. I, and others survivors I have known, have used a number of harmful mechanisms to “numb out” these feelings when they get too strong. Some adopt a workaholic lifestyle in order to block out the feelings. Others try to “self-medicate” and anaesthetise their pain and strong emotions by using drink and drugs. Stifling anger and rage may simply mean that the victim expresses it as aggressive, anti-social and abusive behaviour.
I’m going to make a recommendation here. I don’t often do that. It’s about therapy. There are therapies and therapists I have known where they encourage their clients to engage in endless reflection. They don’t work! You get mired up in all that pain and it’s the therapist’s job to facilitate your finding a way out. But I’ll make one positive recommendation and that is that an appropriately qualified therapist can be of immense help. Dealing with all these feelings can be very confusing. Often they arise in an untidy and messy way. Often it is difficult to work out where they come from, what they mean and what belongs to where.
So here it is, I would recommend cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) provided by an appropriately qualified therapist who has an understanding and knowledge of child abuse. I like CBT and find it immensely helpful. CBT maintains that the meanings that one attaches to one’s emotions, no matter how incongruous they might be, are within common sense and are accessible to one’s own cognition and understanding. I agree.
Very simply described, CBT is about discovering emotions, understanding them, their meanings and their context, and discovering where or to what they belong. It acknowledges that emotions and the meanings we attach to them may be sensible or not. It is also non-judgemental.
As the man who developed CBT, Aaron Beck, wrote, “(For the cognitive behavioural therapist)… eliciting a person’s cognitions (meanings) becomes important when we attempt to understand their relationship with incongruous emotional reactions. It is about discovering an individual’s emotions based on that person’s peculiar appraisal of an event or experience.”
What is great about CBT, in my view, is that it is entirely focused on healthy and constructive outcomes, on recovery, and that its administration usually covers relatively short treatment courses and time-scales.
Please note: Psychotherapy and psychotherapists are a matter of personal choice and selection. Should you be in or be considering psychotherapy it is best that you find the therapy most appropriate to your needs and personal situation. The views here represent only the opinions of the author.
Coming to terms - Part 6 - a personal episode
23/09/08 17:54
I was a bright child. I loved books.
My first memory of paternal difficulty was about books.
I loved those young boy’s classics from way before I was born, Just William and Jennings and Darbyshire, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn too. I was younger than eight years old, perhaps five or six when I started reading those. We lived in a two-up, two-down house in a run-down “slum-clearance” area of London. Often I found my emotional life in books. My home life had never been rich in affection, although my Gran lived downstairs and she may have been one of the first adults to give me the love and affection I never knew at home…upstairs, as was.
One night I had been reading happily. I read fast. That particular night, I had been reading one of those “William” books borrowed from the library to which a kind-hearted neighbour took me. I was devouring this book. Maybe I’d read eighty or a hundred pages that night. My father came to turn off the light. He quizzed me about what I had been reading. Proudly I told him. He questioned what I had read in disbelief. It’s when the trouble started. He snatched the book from me and whipped through pages asking me questions. I answered each one. I had read the book after all and I was enjoying it. He refused to believe my reading speed. I was puzzled. "I was only reading, Dad." As I answered more and more of his questions, he became more and more angry. He threw down the book on my bed and struck me hard across the head before casting the room into darkness.
My father felt ambivalence about my brightness. It was his trophy but he was also jealous. I didn’t understand his jealousy then, not till much later. By the time, I was eight, I was like a performing seal jumping ever and ever higher into the air to catch the fish that would win his love and praise. Some said I was a “gifted child”. All I knew was that I got stuffed in rooms doing numerous things like IQ tests and calculus when I would have rather been climbing trees and playing football. I longed to be a “normal boy” from a “normal home” with a “normal family”.
The hoops of achievement were set higher and higher. I managed to jump through most of them. When I didn’t, I was beaten, humiliated and tortured. My father was tough. He was a real man! He had been a member of the royal marines. He knew about killing. He had fought at the siege of Crete, fought against Hitler’s crack parachute squadrons. He had sat in a hole for days shooting men coming from the sky. Some time during my recovery when I was talking to my mother, she had said, “It was there he killed his first man…many men. From then on, I knew he was marked as a man forever.” He escaped from Crete. Many British soldiers died there. I have sat alone in their graveyard at Souda Bay reflecting on his life.
I got royal marine training too, aged four. My father held me below water until I inhaled it, choking, suffocating, wanting to vomit and feeling terrified. At age 13, before I was “rescued” from home, I lost my best school friend in a drowning accident at a school swimming class. I blamed myself for that too. Is it any wonder that to this day I am hydrophobic? I still am and I would love to swim. Maybe one day…
Sometimes doing something exceptional at school won his praise. I won a national essay-writing prize for a story about the feelings of a boy stranded in a cave cut off by the rising tide of the sea. The adult judges didn’t realise I was writing about me.
My childhood experience equated achievement with love but also with pain. In adulthood I continued the same habit, all on my own. But I never did it for myself. In my heart, I did it for him in a strange sort of way. I set the hoops of achievement ever higher, never taking any credit or reward for what I did. After all I didn’t feel I deserved anything, only shame and guilt. By the end of my twenties, I was doing pioneering in computing. I even sat in the think tank where the first PC was conceived.
In my quest for love, I did the “first of that” and the “biggest of this” in world technology terms. I always pulled it off at great personal cost. My insides were empty. They were so full of pain and grief. I never took proper rewards either. I never felt I deserved them. I was an empty hollow shell. It hurt like hell. It never got any better. I was left with nothing. I told myself it was my fault.
My first memory of paternal difficulty was about books.
I loved those young boy’s classics from way before I was born, Just William and Jennings and Darbyshire, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn too. I was younger than eight years old, perhaps five or six when I started reading those. We lived in a two-up, two-down house in a run-down “slum-clearance” area of London. Often I found my emotional life in books. My home life had never been rich in affection, although my Gran lived downstairs and she may have been one of the first adults to give me the love and affection I never knew at home…upstairs, as was.
One night I had been reading happily. I read fast. That particular night, I had been reading one of those “William” books borrowed from the library to which a kind-hearted neighbour took me. I was devouring this book. Maybe I’d read eighty or a hundred pages that night. My father came to turn off the light. He quizzed me about what I had been reading. Proudly I told him. He questioned what I had read in disbelief. It’s when the trouble started. He snatched the book from me and whipped through pages asking me questions. I answered each one. I had read the book after all and I was enjoying it. He refused to believe my reading speed. I was puzzled. "I was only reading, Dad." As I answered more and more of his questions, he became more and more angry. He threw down the book on my bed and struck me hard across the head before casting the room into darkness.
My father felt ambivalence about my brightness. It was his trophy but he was also jealous. I didn’t understand his jealousy then, not till much later. By the time, I was eight, I was like a performing seal jumping ever and ever higher into the air to catch the fish that would win his love and praise. Some said I was a “gifted child”. All I knew was that I got stuffed in rooms doing numerous things like IQ tests and calculus when I would have rather been climbing trees and playing football. I longed to be a “normal boy” from a “normal home” with a “normal family”.
The hoops of achievement were set higher and higher. I managed to jump through most of them. When I didn’t, I was beaten, humiliated and tortured. My father was tough. He was a real man! He had been a member of the royal marines. He knew about killing. He had fought at the siege of Crete, fought against Hitler’s crack parachute squadrons. He had sat in a hole for days shooting men coming from the sky. Some time during my recovery when I was talking to my mother, she had said, “It was there he killed his first man…many men. From then on, I knew he was marked as a man forever.” He escaped from Crete. Many British soldiers died there. I have sat alone in their graveyard at Souda Bay reflecting on his life.
I got royal marine training too, aged four. My father held me below water until I inhaled it, choking, suffocating, wanting to vomit and feeling terrified. At age 13, before I was “rescued” from home, I lost my best school friend in a drowning accident at a school swimming class. I blamed myself for that too. Is it any wonder that to this day I am hydrophobic? I still am and I would love to swim. Maybe one day…
Sometimes doing something exceptional at school won his praise. I won a national essay-writing prize for a story about the feelings of a boy stranded in a cave cut off by the rising tide of the sea. The adult judges didn’t realise I was writing about me.
My childhood experience equated achievement with love but also with pain. In adulthood I continued the same habit, all on my own. But I never did it for myself. In my heart, I did it for him in a strange sort of way. I set the hoops of achievement ever higher, never taking any credit or reward for what I did. After all I didn’t feel I deserved anything, only shame and guilt. By the end of my twenties, I was doing pioneering in computing. I even sat in the think tank where the first PC was conceived.
In my quest for love, I did the “first of that” and the “biggest of this” in world technology terms. I always pulled it off at great personal cost. My insides were empty. They were so full of pain and grief. I never took proper rewards either. I never felt I deserved them. I was an empty hollow shell. It hurt like hell. It never got any better. I was left with nothing. I told myself it was my fault.
Coming to terms - Part 5 - recognition and remembering
23/09/08 10:42
I talked about remembering abuse; the word "remembering" may be misleading. I had never forgotten what had happened to me but I had made my memories safe. They were like a set of dissociated, abstract events that I had disconnected from my feeling self.
Psychology textbooks often write about “remembering” and “re-experiencing” abuse. I am not sure about the “re-experiencing” word either. What I did was to allow my past emotions to gain their expression in my conscious self and re-connect with my sensory (how my body felt) and behavioural reactions (how I responded to abuse) at the time. It was painful and often confusing. Both the pain and the confusion passed. I did not wish to get mired down in it. In hindsight, I have seen others who use partial recollection as a form of self-destructive behaviour. What looks like an effort to come to terms with abuse has become a masochistic, self-punishing engagement with it. I suspect, and this is very hard for me to say, that they feel their engagement with abuse or emotional neglect gives their life meaning without which they might feel lost. These poor souls may be so mired down in the pain that they are unable to see beyond it. Perhaps because they have become so accustomed to living the pain in their daily lives, they fear what they might feel is an emotional void beyond it.
I have touched on aspects of pain here in earlier posts. I have no need or desire to go back and recount the circumstances in which that pain arose. Pain hurts and I needed to move beyond it. This first part of recovery, the re-engagement with the emotional and physical suffering of abuse carried with it so much pain, but there was not a void beyond it. What I felt was a personal liberation; a liberation into conscious realisation, emotional potential and a reconnection to my own humanity as an entire person.
An abuser will generally try and attach blame to the victim in the abuse. They will say they are inflicting pain because you are bad, unworthy of their love, abnormal, stupid, corrupted by the devil, a freak, a pervert, someone who should not mix with others. The intensity of these assertions increases as the abuse increases. The abuser frequently maintains that his or her acts of violence are a punishment for the manifestation of the child’s behaviour or even its existence (“My life was a whole lot better until you came along. You have taken everything from me. You don’t deserve a life!” ) These abusive behaviours are cruel and insistent. The abuser may demand that the child sanctions their being deserving of punishment. Like in sexual abuse, he may say, “You’re a filthy, disgusting little pervert. You don’t deserve my love. What are you?” I heard that one often enough in bouts of ritual humiliation.
All of these assertions and justifications of the cruelty of abuse erode the child’s identity and its positive sense of self. They undermine its ability to grow into a whole, integrated, loving adult. Worse still is the inversion of the abuser’s destructive assertions into the victim’s self-beliefs. The victim, who is dependent on the parent for its survival, comes to believe that is they who are responsible for the abuse that has been inflicted upon them. The child will frequently believe that what they have experienced is simply a normal part of growing up. They will believe that whatever happened to them, they deserved.
Recognising abuse for the child is impossible. Children (generally) do not have the emotional and intellectual capacity to understand what is happening to them. For the abused child this inability to understand is further compounded since the abuse itself will frequently arrest, disrupt or disturb their normal emotional development.
I lived with high degrees of fear in my childhood. I can remember the dread I felt about going on a family holiday when I was eight or nine years old. My fear was such that I could barely eat and frequently I shit my pants. This was no holiday. It was one or two weeks open exposure to terror and humiliation. My incontinence stopped as soon as the holiday ended. My father’s working days were the best for me. Spending two weeks with him was a horror.
Why I mention fear is that is that fear is more often than not the block to remembering. My first attempts at remembering came with massive rushes of fear, fortunately with remembering came recognition and realisation too. Three thoughts carried me through the fear. They were about recognition. They almost became a sort of mantra to me. They went:
1. I understand and believe that I had no power over my father’s abuse of me. I recognise and hold him completely responsible for that abuse.
2. My abuse belongs to my past and I fear it no longer. My memories of abuse while painful can do me no harm. Memories have no power over me.
3. I wish to claim myself back as a whole person. I no longer fear my father, as I know he is powerless to hurt me now.
Remembering, recognition and re-experiencing are only the first steps in coming to terms with child abuse. They are also the most important and difficult stages of recovery.
Next: Dealing with the aftermath of abuse…understanding toxic emotions.
Psychology textbooks often write about “remembering” and “re-experiencing” abuse. I am not sure about the “re-experiencing” word either. What I did was to allow my past emotions to gain their expression in my conscious self and re-connect with my sensory (how my body felt) and behavioural reactions (how I responded to abuse) at the time. It was painful and often confusing. Both the pain and the confusion passed. I did not wish to get mired down in it. In hindsight, I have seen others who use partial recollection as a form of self-destructive behaviour. What looks like an effort to come to terms with abuse has become a masochistic, self-punishing engagement with it. I suspect, and this is very hard for me to say, that they feel their engagement with abuse or emotional neglect gives their life meaning without which they might feel lost. These poor souls may be so mired down in the pain that they are unable to see beyond it. Perhaps because they have become so accustomed to living the pain in their daily lives, they fear what they might feel is an emotional void beyond it.
I have touched on aspects of pain here in earlier posts. I have no need or desire to go back and recount the circumstances in which that pain arose. Pain hurts and I needed to move beyond it. This first part of recovery, the re-engagement with the emotional and physical suffering of abuse carried with it so much pain, but there was not a void beyond it. What I felt was a personal liberation; a liberation into conscious realisation, emotional potential and a reconnection to my own humanity as an entire person.
An abuser will generally try and attach blame to the victim in the abuse. They will say they are inflicting pain because you are bad, unworthy of their love, abnormal, stupid, corrupted by the devil, a freak, a pervert, someone who should not mix with others. The intensity of these assertions increases as the abuse increases. The abuser frequently maintains that his or her acts of violence are a punishment for the manifestation of the child’s behaviour or even its existence (“My life was a whole lot better until you came along. You have taken everything from me. You don’t deserve a life!” ) These abusive behaviours are cruel and insistent. The abuser may demand that the child sanctions their being deserving of punishment. Like in sexual abuse, he may say, “You’re a filthy, disgusting little pervert. You don’t deserve my love. What are you?” I heard that one often enough in bouts of ritual humiliation.
All of these assertions and justifications of the cruelty of abuse erode the child’s identity and its positive sense of self. They undermine its ability to grow into a whole, integrated, loving adult. Worse still is the inversion of the abuser’s destructive assertions into the victim’s self-beliefs. The victim, who is dependent on the parent for its survival, comes to believe that is they who are responsible for the abuse that has been inflicted upon them. The child will frequently believe that what they have experienced is simply a normal part of growing up. They will believe that whatever happened to them, they deserved.
Recognising abuse for the child is impossible. Children (generally) do not have the emotional and intellectual capacity to understand what is happening to them. For the abused child this inability to understand is further compounded since the abuse itself will frequently arrest, disrupt or disturb their normal emotional development.
I lived with high degrees of fear in my childhood. I can remember the dread I felt about going on a family holiday when I was eight or nine years old. My fear was such that I could barely eat and frequently I shit my pants. This was no holiday. It was one or two weeks open exposure to terror and humiliation. My incontinence stopped as soon as the holiday ended. My father’s working days were the best for me. Spending two weeks with him was a horror.
Why I mention fear is that is that fear is more often than not the block to remembering. My first attempts at remembering came with massive rushes of fear, fortunately with remembering came recognition and realisation too. Three thoughts carried me through the fear. They were about recognition. They almost became a sort of mantra to me. They went:
1. I understand and believe that I had no power over my father’s abuse of me. I recognise and hold him completely responsible for that abuse.
2. My abuse belongs to my past and I fear it no longer. My memories of abuse while painful can do me no harm. Memories have no power over me.
3. I wish to claim myself back as a whole person. I no longer fear my father, as I know he is powerless to hurt me now.
Remembering, recognition and re-experiencing are only the first steps in coming to terms with child abuse. They are also the most important and difficult stages of recovery.
Next: Dealing with the aftermath of abuse…understanding toxic emotions.
Coming to terms - Part 4 - making it safe
22/09/08 13:59
Recovery, why bother? Isn’t it simply too frightening? After all one is moving to an “unknown”, might that not be worse than living in one’s present state? What’s to be gained by dredging up the past again? You should pull yourself together, buckle down and get on with life! How could you show such disrespect for the people who brought you into the world? Isn’t recovery simply a choice?
I could make a list of at least a hundred remarks and questions like the ones above. I’ve heard all those and more, those and others which have been said to me, some very recently.
I suppose recovery may be a choice, but it’s not much of one. It’s a little like saying “sickness is a choice”.
I’ve touched on a few of the problems and difficulties arising from a legacy of child abuse. Here’s a longer list: Anxiety; depression; self-sabotage, self-destructive behaviours that may include addictions, compulsions, and suicidal ideation; relationship problems; sexual difficulties; social alienation; low self esteem and numerous physical ailments.
There is some pain in recovery. Perhaps what is important to remember is that having survived abuse, one has already dealt with the worst aspects of that pain. There can be no pain greater than the experience of abuse itself.
Remembering the abuse and re-experiencing all the feelings that went with it are only the first two steps in a very long process of recovery and healing. Recovery may feel like a risk too. Everything is a risk and the balance to be made is one between healthy and harmful risk.
When I started writing about child abuse, I hadn’t intended to talk about this at any length, only to reflect on my own experience. My messages and e-mails have caused me to reconsider and say a little more.
To approach recovery, it’s important to feel safe in doing so. Child abuse is about being and feeling unsafe. If you don’t feel safe then you won’t progress in your recovery.
Recovery might mean facing painful memories, powerful negative feelings, and possibly self-destructive behaviours. To withstand those reactions, you need to feel as safe and strong as possible. It is essential to have supporters and allies who will give freely of their time to you, and that they understand what it is you are doing. I had a therapist too. I was, after all, undergoing training in psychotherapy, and training therapy was a mandatory requirement of my educational course. Dealing with this issue in the middle of my course may have added a year or so onto the time it took me to qualify. But it really was worth it.
My therapist helped me only a little. The fact that he was non-judgemental when I experienced some very difficult feelings was the greatest help he gave me. The real help came from elsewhere. Sometimes the sources of that help and support were a surprise to me. I even made new and lasting friendships as a result of the experience. I made a plan. I alerted my doctor too. She was very positive and supportive.
I chose a time when I could absent myself from work if I didn’t feel up to it. I suppose in total I needed to take somewhere between four and six weeks off work in a period that ran over about a year that covered the initial phases of recovery, mainly the remembering and re-experiencing phases.
On the odd few occasions, when my feelings seemed overwhelming and out of control I made a point of making no decisions. I tried to take myself off to somewhere quiet and safe at such times. The comfort of knowing that someone else was around if I needed them helped me a lot.
Timing is important, as is setting the pace and structure for recovery. I felt strong enough when I approached recovery although at times going through recovery, I did experience doubts as to whether I’d actually make it.
Although I got through the process, I didn’t do well at every stage. One area where I did very badly was in resolving potentially abusive relationships first. I had a very public life. Directly or indirectly I was responsible for several hundred people in my working life.
One coping mechanism that I had developed was that I took responsibility for many people close to me. It wasn’t healthy. It was avoidant behaviour too. It was a survival mechanism that I learned somewhere along the way. Its rationale went that if I took responsibility for someone else then they couldn’t harm me as they might if allowed to act of their own volition or if I depended on them. So I had a hyper-responsible, independence that was impossible to sustain. Only in the aftermath of recovery did I realise that this is what I did.
Of course, (and what I hadn’t seen at the time as I could not see it), this drew damaged and abused children to me like a magnet. So when they picked up that I was attempting to recover, I didn’t tell them but they sensed it, they flew at me from everywhere with infantile rage and destructiveness as their weapons. There is nothing as terrifying as infantile omnipotence since it knows no mercy or compassion. It's simply terrifying!
A short while into recovery, I had to change all my personal telephone numbers to make a distance between these damaged people and me. Sorting out this mess alone took me about four years following my first round of recovery. It was a living nightmare that cost me dearly in so many ways.
This issue can be so very complicated. It is also very important. The experience of abuse in childhood can determine not only how we shape our adult relationships, but also our perceptions of how we might be treated by others. Our perceptions may become self-fulfilling prophecies or they might influence our ability to distinguish between what is happening to us now and what happened to us in childhood.
If one has never resolved one’s childhood abuse, research has determined that one stands a very high chance of repeating it with a spouse, colleague, partner of friend.
Resolving abusive relationships as part of recovery from abuse is, in my view, one of the most critical and important steps in achieving a successful outcome.
What else? It’s a good idea to look at one’s life and get help in areas where one is exposed to crises. Many child abuse survivors live lives that are characterised by constant crises in all areas. These can relate to money, work, jobs, accommodation as well as personal relationships.
I’m still dealing with the aftermath of the messes I made. My life used to go from soaring highs to crashing lows. I have known what it is like to be an entrepreneurial multi-millionaire to someone struggling to keep out of the bum’s night shelter. All of my feelings about myself have changed, as have my values and beliefs. Having had an experience last year, perhaps it was a wake-up call, where I almost died from a bacterial infection, my values, beliefs and how I want to spend time in this world came into sharp focus. There may be a little disjoint in my life now as I work on it. I realised not that long ago that I should have made some big changes rather than what I did which was to try and salvage, build on a life that had its roots in dysfunction.
Some lessons take longer to learn and I’m still working on them.
Okay, last point. In recovery, be good and kind to yourself. Find ways of gaining sensory, emotional and intellectual nourishment. I have a whole host of these. I love art and music and make my own version of both badly! I love cooking, writing, the countryside, walking and cycling too. I love my friends most of all as my real friends allow me to be me and like me for who I am…what’s more I even love writing in this blog. Even writing here I make self-discoveries all the time that are enriching and satisfying. Anyone for a cuddle? (I love those too!)
I could make a list of at least a hundred remarks and questions like the ones above. I’ve heard all those and more, those and others which have been said to me, some very recently.
I suppose recovery may be a choice, but it’s not much of one. It’s a little like saying “sickness is a choice”.
I’ve touched on a few of the problems and difficulties arising from a legacy of child abuse. Here’s a longer list: Anxiety; depression; self-sabotage, self-destructive behaviours that may include addictions, compulsions, and suicidal ideation; relationship problems; sexual difficulties; social alienation; low self esteem and numerous physical ailments.
There is some pain in recovery. Perhaps what is important to remember is that having survived abuse, one has already dealt with the worst aspects of that pain. There can be no pain greater than the experience of abuse itself.
Remembering the abuse and re-experiencing all the feelings that went with it are only the first two steps in a very long process of recovery and healing. Recovery may feel like a risk too. Everything is a risk and the balance to be made is one between healthy and harmful risk.
When I started writing about child abuse, I hadn’t intended to talk about this at any length, only to reflect on my own experience. My messages and e-mails have caused me to reconsider and say a little more.
To approach recovery, it’s important to feel safe in doing so. Child abuse is about being and feeling unsafe. If you don’t feel safe then you won’t progress in your recovery.
Recovery might mean facing painful memories, powerful negative feelings, and possibly self-destructive behaviours. To withstand those reactions, you need to feel as safe and strong as possible. It is essential to have supporters and allies who will give freely of their time to you, and that they understand what it is you are doing. I had a therapist too. I was, after all, undergoing training in psychotherapy, and training therapy was a mandatory requirement of my educational course. Dealing with this issue in the middle of my course may have added a year or so onto the time it took me to qualify. But it really was worth it.
My therapist helped me only a little. The fact that he was non-judgemental when I experienced some very difficult feelings was the greatest help he gave me. The real help came from elsewhere. Sometimes the sources of that help and support were a surprise to me. I even made new and lasting friendships as a result of the experience. I made a plan. I alerted my doctor too. She was very positive and supportive.
I chose a time when I could absent myself from work if I didn’t feel up to it. I suppose in total I needed to take somewhere between four and six weeks off work in a period that ran over about a year that covered the initial phases of recovery, mainly the remembering and re-experiencing phases.
On the odd few occasions, when my feelings seemed overwhelming and out of control I made a point of making no decisions. I tried to take myself off to somewhere quiet and safe at such times. The comfort of knowing that someone else was around if I needed them helped me a lot.
Timing is important, as is setting the pace and structure for recovery. I felt strong enough when I approached recovery although at times going through recovery, I did experience doubts as to whether I’d actually make it.
Although I got through the process, I didn’t do well at every stage. One area where I did very badly was in resolving potentially abusive relationships first. I had a very public life. Directly or indirectly I was responsible for several hundred people in my working life.
One coping mechanism that I had developed was that I took responsibility for many people close to me. It wasn’t healthy. It was avoidant behaviour too. It was a survival mechanism that I learned somewhere along the way. Its rationale went that if I took responsibility for someone else then they couldn’t harm me as they might if allowed to act of their own volition or if I depended on them. So I had a hyper-responsible, independence that was impossible to sustain. Only in the aftermath of recovery did I realise that this is what I did.
Of course, (and what I hadn’t seen at the time as I could not see it), this drew damaged and abused children to me like a magnet. So when they picked up that I was attempting to recover, I didn’t tell them but they sensed it, they flew at me from everywhere with infantile rage and destructiveness as their weapons. There is nothing as terrifying as infantile omnipotence since it knows no mercy or compassion. It's simply terrifying!
A short while into recovery, I had to change all my personal telephone numbers to make a distance between these damaged people and me. Sorting out this mess alone took me about four years following my first round of recovery. It was a living nightmare that cost me dearly in so many ways.
This issue can be so very complicated. It is also very important. The experience of abuse in childhood can determine not only how we shape our adult relationships, but also our perceptions of how we might be treated by others. Our perceptions may become self-fulfilling prophecies or they might influence our ability to distinguish between what is happening to us now and what happened to us in childhood.
If one has never resolved one’s childhood abuse, research has determined that one stands a very high chance of repeating it with a spouse, colleague, partner of friend.
Resolving abusive relationships as part of recovery from abuse is, in my view, one of the most critical and important steps in achieving a successful outcome.
What else? It’s a good idea to look at one’s life and get help in areas where one is exposed to crises. Many child abuse survivors live lives that are characterised by constant crises in all areas. These can relate to money, work, jobs, accommodation as well as personal relationships.
I’m still dealing with the aftermath of the messes I made. My life used to go from soaring highs to crashing lows. I have known what it is like to be an entrepreneurial multi-millionaire to someone struggling to keep out of the bum’s night shelter. All of my feelings about myself have changed, as have my values and beliefs. Having had an experience last year, perhaps it was a wake-up call, where I almost died from a bacterial infection, my values, beliefs and how I want to spend time in this world came into sharp focus. There may be a little disjoint in my life now as I work on it. I realised not that long ago that I should have made some big changes rather than what I did which was to try and salvage, build on a life that had its roots in dysfunction.
Some lessons take longer to learn and I’m still working on them.
Okay, last point. In recovery, be good and kind to yourself. Find ways of gaining sensory, emotional and intellectual nourishment. I have a whole host of these. I love art and music and make my own version of both badly! I love cooking, writing, the countryside, walking and cycling too. I love my friends most of all as my real friends allow me to be me and like me for who I am…what’s more I even love writing in this blog. Even writing here I make self-discoveries all the time that are enriching and satisfying. Anyone for a cuddle? (I love those too!)
Coming to terms - Part 3 - meeting the truth
19/09/08 11:18
Before I go on to talk more about confronting my father, I’ve a little more to say about the process of coming to terms up to now.
The recognition of abuse is no easy matter. The abuser will generally always act in a way that makes one feel that the pain of abuse is deserved. To get through abuse frequently one accepts the abuser’s condemnation of oneself. I know I came to believe that I truly was bad, sick, unworthy, undesirable and less than human. I really felt that I was this ugly stinking maggot I was told I was. This is made worse, since abuse generally begins at an age where one’s affective feelings for the abuser are often already developed. Put simply, I loved my father before he started abusing me. I continued to love him through the period of abuse too.
I’m sure as a young child I misbehaved. Often I misbehaved because I craved the loving attention of my father. What I got was something entirely different. Sometimes as a child I transferred my affection to things. I stole too. I stole other children’s toys and pretended they were my own, that my father had given them to me as a gift of his love. The toy object I had stolen took on the guise of an expression of love from my father that I never received. All I ever felt were his fists colliding with my head or stomach or some other part of my body where he felt I was less likely to bruise…but that was only some of the time.
I got out of my parental home by writing a diary about the abuse. I was a very literate child. Books were another place I found to hide. One day at age thirteen I took my diary to my family doctor and gave it to him. I was taken from home immediately.
This rescue, and I was transferred to a “special” school, made life no better. My crushed self-belief caused me to feel that this was now the end of my life; that I was doomed a life of misery and failure from here on. I cried in bed for days. A doctor was called who prescribed anti-depressants. I felt awash in the world. Where was I to go now? I felt cast into a social dustbin of hopelessness. The act of transferring me to this strange environment brought no love or succour, only safety from a different sort of pain.
I had a younger brother. Social workers were alerted and crawled everywhere over our home, my diary in their possession. My father asserted to them and my doctor that I was mentally sick, that I had lied, and had made the contents of my diary up. I am not sure how well he convinced them. They maintained vigilance over my younger brother’s welfare for a long time thereafter. I am mentioning this point, since this is the abuser’s common tactic on discovery. It was also linked to an incident, another discovery I made in my thirties:
I had been working overseas in the United States, and on my return to England I felt very unwell. I did not feel anything terribly bad was wrong with me, but I felt ill enough to consult a doctor. I returned to our family doctor, the one to whom I had given the diary. He was an Austrian Jew, a wonderful man in his own way, who had also taken a psychiatry qualification in Austria. I told him of my illness and got the usual prescription for antibiotics. He started to question me about my sex life. His questions seemed bizarre and oddly out of context. They were touching on the nature of my sexuality too. I was puzzled and very bemused. My sexuality was straightforwardly heterosexual. There was nothing very unusual there. So I asked my doctor to say what was on his mind, to pay little regard to my sensibilities, but tell me why he was asking these questions, since I didn’t understand what was behind them.
He told me and I recoiled in horror. My father had come under a lot of pressure following my removal from home. He was challenged about abusing me in a very serious way. What he had told my doctor was that I had perpetrated homosexual assaults on my brother. He had made up worse lies than this, but this one really struck me to the core. I’m not sure what exactly went on between my brother and my father. I knew my mother had acted in silent collusion and had said she had no knowledge of the abuse.
The acts that that my father had committed against me, he had claimed I committed against my brother. There were lies, lies then more lies. I must have sat in that doctor’s office for an hour talking about it.
I felt shaken, sick to the stomach and for the first time, I felt the most enormous repulsion towards my father. Not that long afterwards, I took myself off into therapy, my first bout of many therapies.
What was worse still, I questioned myself as to whether my father’s allegations were true. I knew in my heart they were false, but the legacy of child abuse had cast its black magic of selective forgetfulness. The damage of child abuse lurked in me, and the demons that told me that I got what I deserved were the ones that held my conscious attention.
It’s far more difficult than one at first realises to recognise the truth of an abuser’s behaviour, to accept that this person who inflicted a mass of abuse was the person who one held in love and esteem, to recognise the profound sickness of the abuser.
Life’s events brought me to a reality check suddenly. My first realisation was that my father had never stopped his violence to others but he had transferred it to another more compliant and dependent subject, that he was beating my mother. This was two or three years on from my meeting the doctor. Accidentally during a visit to home, I had wandered into the bathroom, not realising that my mother was in there bathing. Her body was covered with bruises.
I made time to catch my mother outside home. I asked her about what had been happening. She complained of dizziness and feeling unwell. I had to press her hard to tell me what was happening. Eventually, she did. My father was beating her mercilessly, often striking her around the head with heavy objects. I knew this had to stop, and I resolved to confront the brute of my father there and then. My mother’s admission had brought about the conscious recognition that my father was a pathological abuser. I decided to put an end to it, and subsequently I did. I had reached the next stage. I had recognised my father for the very sick man he was.
Before I go on and talk about that confrontation itself, I want to say a few more things about the process of coming to terms with abuse.
If you are reading this as someone who has been abused, my heart goes out to you.
Dealing with the aftermath of abuse is excruciatingly painful, shockingly disturbing and difficult.
For that reason, many abused people do not do it. It is simply too frightening.
There’s a post down the page here, it was based on an article I wrote originally for publication in 2002. It’s called “What is intimacy?” I’ll quote from it later because I cannot emphasise the points it makes enough.
Coming to terms with abuse is very tough. Failure to come to terms with abuse may frequently mean that the abused child in later life goes on to become an abuser. It is for this reason, that the perpetuation of child abuse is often inter-generational. There is a comment on my first post in this series pointing to me to a link to the story of another. I clicked on that link last night. The first words I read were something like, “Child abuse is hereditary, I’m convinced of it.” I had to stop reading at this point although I will go back and read what that person has to say. Hopefully she will join in reading this too. Her statement is I believe both true and false. I will say more too after this quote from an earlier post of mine:
“There are people, and I know I have been one of them, who resist intimacy for fear of being rejected or deserted. Many of us have been betrayed by someone we love or trust. Physical, mental, sexual and emotional abuse teaches us to build huge insurmountable walls of defence around ourselves. Sometimes the loss of another has simply been too painful to risk repeating the experience, to be that deeply hurt again. These are all hard lessons but, and it's a hell of a 'but', if we allow these experiences and feelings to block our capacity for intimacy, we exclude all of life's deep possibilities. We become isolated, non-functioning, walled off and unfulfilled as people. We live in some stagnant backwater where it may be 'safe' (although I would question that as I believe we are more likely to signal our hurt and damage in some unconscious way and attract those people whom we wish to avoid.) but it is in a way a living death.
When we close out the pains of the past from our conscious minds, they inhabit our unconscious and influence our actions without our understanding why. Unlocking the unconscious to know and understand the cause of the difficulty is problematic. Perhaps therapy is the answer, perhaps it is not. I am inclined to believe that a lover or loving, understanding and patient friend or partner is more likely to provide the safe haven for the discovery and healing of past pain rather than the infrequent attentions of a therapist.
Fear of rejection and desertion are most often the bogeymen left behind from a difficult and painful childhood. More frequently than not the child will be conditioned to believe that their badness, abnormality or simply their individuality is the reason for their rejection. Only when the child has yielded or conformed for the sake of survival to the adult's view of them will they suffer the pain of rejection. Alice Miller, the renowned Swiss psychoanalyst, wrote 'The child is always innocent'. But society invariably takes the side of the adult and blames the child for what has been done to him or her. In turn the child betrayed by society has no choice but to repress the trauma and idealise the perpetrator. This repression leads to neurosis, psychosis and delinquency. The perpetuation of new crimes can only be prevented by the victims, seeing and being aware of what was done to them. A welter of discomforting feelings of rage, anger and unbearable pain often accompanies the discovery of childhood trauma. It is not a comfortable place to be.
It is no surprise that the abused will often go on to be an abuser.
Confronting this trauma feels to me (having done it) to be the easy part. The question is 'what then?' Only time, love and self-understanding holds the key. The adult will often feel powerless but these are the feelings of the damaged child. The adult is not powerless and only they hold the key to change through awareness and building love for themselves in themselves. Believe me, this is easier said than done. The abused child will often have been told that the reason for their abuse is that they are not worthy of love or are bad, abnormal or evil. This is the abuser's excuse. But I know the key for transformation lies in self-awareness and love.
Is this a diversion? A small diversion perhaps since I believe that in this dark place, the discovery of love and intimacy is true liberation. Intimacy and acceptance can provide the life-force of love - its re-generation and rebirth and an escape from the trauma of abuse.”
QUOTE ENDS
During the big wave of realisation of abuse in training therapy, one of the greatest fears I experienced was that having been abused, meant that I was tainted by the devil and I would go on to be a child abuser too.
No, I don’t believe child abuse is hereditary, although it may often appear to be that way in people who have failed to “come to terms’” with their damaging early life experience. There is a personal price in coming to terms with abuse, but it’s a small price to pay for not becoming an abuser. In my recovery, I broke free of this cycle of abuse. This is so important to me.
If you have been abused then I want you to know that it is possible to recover yourself as a loving whole person and a wonderful caring parent too. Moreover, your realisation and coming to terms with abuse may, I believe, make you into a better parent. There’s nothing inevitable about the victim going on to be the perpetrator…nothing at all!
I’m going to write a little more about abuse and some popular prejudices in my next post. I have heard and experienced a lot of prejudice.
I have recovered, and recovered fully, although I am often haunted by demons of self-doubt and sometimes, negative self-beliefs, that come from my childhood. Most times I recognise and see them for what they are. Sometimes I make mistakes too, that much is human.
I should end this post here. It’s already too long. I want to share some more experiences here before getting to the point of talking about the confrontation with my father. I need to talk about dealing with anger, guilt and shame too. Also I want to talk about blame and forgiveness.
More soon…
The recognition of abuse is no easy matter. The abuser will generally always act in a way that makes one feel that the pain of abuse is deserved. To get through abuse frequently one accepts the abuser’s condemnation of oneself. I know I came to believe that I truly was bad, sick, unworthy, undesirable and less than human. I really felt that I was this ugly stinking maggot I was told I was. This is made worse, since abuse generally begins at an age where one’s affective feelings for the abuser are often already developed. Put simply, I loved my father before he started abusing me. I continued to love him through the period of abuse too.
I’m sure as a young child I misbehaved. Often I misbehaved because I craved the loving attention of my father. What I got was something entirely different. Sometimes as a child I transferred my affection to things. I stole too. I stole other children’s toys and pretended they were my own, that my father had given them to me as a gift of his love. The toy object I had stolen took on the guise of an expression of love from my father that I never received. All I ever felt were his fists colliding with my head or stomach or some other part of my body where he felt I was less likely to bruise…but that was only some of the time.
I got out of my parental home by writing a diary about the abuse. I was a very literate child. Books were another place I found to hide. One day at age thirteen I took my diary to my family doctor and gave it to him. I was taken from home immediately.
This rescue, and I was transferred to a “special” school, made life no better. My crushed self-belief caused me to feel that this was now the end of my life; that I was doomed a life of misery and failure from here on. I cried in bed for days. A doctor was called who prescribed anti-depressants. I felt awash in the world. Where was I to go now? I felt cast into a social dustbin of hopelessness. The act of transferring me to this strange environment brought no love or succour, only safety from a different sort of pain.
I had a younger brother. Social workers were alerted and crawled everywhere over our home, my diary in their possession. My father asserted to them and my doctor that I was mentally sick, that I had lied, and had made the contents of my diary up. I am not sure how well he convinced them. They maintained vigilance over my younger brother’s welfare for a long time thereafter. I am mentioning this point, since this is the abuser’s common tactic on discovery. It was also linked to an incident, another discovery I made in my thirties:
I had been working overseas in the United States, and on my return to England I felt very unwell. I did not feel anything terribly bad was wrong with me, but I felt ill enough to consult a doctor. I returned to our family doctor, the one to whom I had given the diary. He was an Austrian Jew, a wonderful man in his own way, who had also taken a psychiatry qualification in Austria. I told him of my illness and got the usual prescription for antibiotics. He started to question me about my sex life. His questions seemed bizarre and oddly out of context. They were touching on the nature of my sexuality too. I was puzzled and very bemused. My sexuality was straightforwardly heterosexual. There was nothing very unusual there. So I asked my doctor to say what was on his mind, to pay little regard to my sensibilities, but tell me why he was asking these questions, since I didn’t understand what was behind them.
He told me and I recoiled in horror. My father had come under a lot of pressure following my removal from home. He was challenged about abusing me in a very serious way. What he had told my doctor was that I had perpetrated homosexual assaults on my brother. He had made up worse lies than this, but this one really struck me to the core. I’m not sure what exactly went on between my brother and my father. I knew my mother had acted in silent collusion and had said she had no knowledge of the abuse.
The acts that that my father had committed against me, he had claimed I committed against my brother. There were lies, lies then more lies. I must have sat in that doctor’s office for an hour talking about it.
I felt shaken, sick to the stomach and for the first time, I felt the most enormous repulsion towards my father. Not that long afterwards, I took myself off into therapy, my first bout of many therapies.
What was worse still, I questioned myself as to whether my father’s allegations were true. I knew in my heart they were false, but the legacy of child abuse had cast its black magic of selective forgetfulness. The damage of child abuse lurked in me, and the demons that told me that I got what I deserved were the ones that held my conscious attention.
It’s far more difficult than one at first realises to recognise the truth of an abuser’s behaviour, to accept that this person who inflicted a mass of abuse was the person who one held in love and esteem, to recognise the profound sickness of the abuser.
Life’s events brought me to a reality check suddenly. My first realisation was that my father had never stopped his violence to others but he had transferred it to another more compliant and dependent subject, that he was beating my mother. This was two or three years on from my meeting the doctor. Accidentally during a visit to home, I had wandered into the bathroom, not realising that my mother was in there bathing. Her body was covered with bruises.
I made time to catch my mother outside home. I asked her about what had been happening. She complained of dizziness and feeling unwell. I had to press her hard to tell me what was happening. Eventually, she did. My father was beating her mercilessly, often striking her around the head with heavy objects. I knew this had to stop, and I resolved to confront the brute of my father there and then. My mother’s admission had brought about the conscious recognition that my father was a pathological abuser. I decided to put an end to it, and subsequently I did. I had reached the next stage. I had recognised my father for the very sick man he was.
Before I go on and talk about that confrontation itself, I want to say a few more things about the process of coming to terms with abuse.
If you are reading this as someone who has been abused, my heart goes out to you.
Dealing with the aftermath of abuse is excruciatingly painful, shockingly disturbing and difficult.
For that reason, many abused people do not do it. It is simply too frightening.
There’s a post down the page here, it was based on an article I wrote originally for publication in 2002. It’s called “What is intimacy?” I’ll quote from it later because I cannot emphasise the points it makes enough.
Coming to terms with abuse is very tough. Failure to come to terms with abuse may frequently mean that the abused child in later life goes on to become an abuser. It is for this reason, that the perpetuation of child abuse is often inter-generational. There is a comment on my first post in this series pointing to me to a link to the story of another. I clicked on that link last night. The first words I read were something like, “Child abuse is hereditary, I’m convinced of it.” I had to stop reading at this point although I will go back and read what that person has to say. Hopefully she will join in reading this too. Her statement is I believe both true and false. I will say more too after this quote from an earlier post of mine:
“There are people, and I know I have been one of them, who resist intimacy for fear of being rejected or deserted. Many of us have been betrayed by someone we love or trust. Physical, mental, sexual and emotional abuse teaches us to build huge insurmountable walls of defence around ourselves. Sometimes the loss of another has simply been too painful to risk repeating the experience, to be that deeply hurt again. These are all hard lessons but, and it's a hell of a 'but', if we allow these experiences and feelings to block our capacity for intimacy, we exclude all of life's deep possibilities. We become isolated, non-functioning, walled off and unfulfilled as people. We live in some stagnant backwater where it may be 'safe' (although I would question that as I believe we are more likely to signal our hurt and damage in some unconscious way and attract those people whom we wish to avoid.) but it is in a way a living death.
When we close out the pains of the past from our conscious minds, they inhabit our unconscious and influence our actions without our understanding why. Unlocking the unconscious to know and understand the cause of the difficulty is problematic. Perhaps therapy is the answer, perhaps it is not. I am inclined to believe that a lover or loving, understanding and patient friend or partner is more likely to provide the safe haven for the discovery and healing of past pain rather than the infrequent attentions of a therapist.
Fear of rejection and desertion are most often the bogeymen left behind from a difficult and painful childhood. More frequently than not the child will be conditioned to believe that their badness, abnormality or simply their individuality is the reason for their rejection. Only when the child has yielded or conformed for the sake of survival to the adult's view of them will they suffer the pain of rejection. Alice Miller, the renowned Swiss psychoanalyst, wrote 'The child is always innocent'. But society invariably takes the side of the adult and blames the child for what has been done to him or her. In turn the child betrayed by society has no choice but to repress the trauma and idealise the perpetrator. This repression leads to neurosis, psychosis and delinquency. The perpetuation of new crimes can only be prevented by the victims, seeing and being aware of what was done to them. A welter of discomforting feelings of rage, anger and unbearable pain often accompanies the discovery of childhood trauma. It is not a comfortable place to be.
It is no surprise that the abused will often go on to be an abuser.
Confronting this trauma feels to me (having done it) to be the easy part. The question is 'what then?' Only time, love and self-understanding holds the key. The adult will often feel powerless but these are the feelings of the damaged child. The adult is not powerless and only they hold the key to change through awareness and building love for themselves in themselves. Believe me, this is easier said than done. The abused child will often have been told that the reason for their abuse is that they are not worthy of love or are bad, abnormal or evil. This is the abuser's excuse. But I know the key for transformation lies in self-awareness and love.
Is this a diversion? A small diversion perhaps since I believe that in this dark place, the discovery of love and intimacy is true liberation. Intimacy and acceptance can provide the life-force of love - its re-generation and rebirth and an escape from the trauma of abuse.”
QUOTE ENDS
During the big wave of realisation of abuse in training therapy, one of the greatest fears I experienced was that having been abused, meant that I was tainted by the devil and I would go on to be a child abuser too.
No, I don’t believe child abuse is hereditary, although it may often appear to be that way in people who have failed to “come to terms’” with their damaging early life experience. There is a personal price in coming to terms with abuse, but it’s a small price to pay for not becoming an abuser. In my recovery, I broke free of this cycle of abuse. This is so important to me.
If you have been abused then I want you to know that it is possible to recover yourself as a loving whole person and a wonderful caring parent too. Moreover, your realisation and coming to terms with abuse may, I believe, make you into a better parent. There’s nothing inevitable about the victim going on to be the perpetrator…nothing at all!
I’m going to write a little more about abuse and some popular prejudices in my next post. I have heard and experienced a lot of prejudice.
I have recovered, and recovered fully, although I am often haunted by demons of self-doubt and sometimes, negative self-beliefs, that come from my childhood. Most times I recognise and see them for what they are. Sometimes I make mistakes too, that much is human.
I should end this post here. It’s already too long. I want to share some more experiences here before getting to the point of talking about the confrontation with my father. I need to talk about dealing with anger, guilt and shame too. Also I want to talk about blame and forgiveness.
More soon…
Coming to terms - Part 2 - the realisation
18/09/08 18:43
One of the painful things about growing up without a real family is that one has so many bits missing. I’m not sure how many social skills I lacked, only that there were lots of them. One of the few benefits of growing up in a place where personal survival is paramount is that one learns very quickly.
I had an awkwardness about me on every social occasion. I hated large social groups. I learned how to cope. I learned social skills of sorts. All aspects of my life were difficult in those early days, all except my career. But even my career was erratic. I could experience great success followed by terrible slumps of fortune. I had no love inside me. I felt no love for myself either.
I was fortunate at first. After university, I met a lovely young woman, an art student. I fell into my own incomplete version of love with her. Her parents were big small-town people who were against me from the outset. I endured so much talk from them about being worthless, useless and a failure. I was well used to that by then. It was life as usual, until my lover overdrew her bank account and her parents held me responsible. They turned up one day at our flat and demanded we put an end to our relationship there and then; all for the sake of a £60 ($108) overdraft. By this time I was working. I had bought her dresses, clothes, food and even paid for her accommodation with me. We were in our early twenties. Her parents tore us apart. She left college and went to work as a primary school teacher. I remember to this day how wonderful it was to watch her work with small children. She had a natural gift for her work. I saw in her a sort of uncorrupted womanly beauty. I felt sullied to the core.
Intimate personal relationships were a big problem to me. Child abuse does that. I made a mess of every one. I didn’t know how to love or be loved, so I made error after error. At first, I hid from my pain in sex.
Later in my twenties, I married another very lovely woman with whom I am friends to this day. Sadly and perhaps inevitably, she had a lot of personal problems too, problems that had prevented her from discovering the true nature of her sexuality. Eighteen months into our marriage, she was liberated into the realisation that she was attracted to women more than men. She was a lesbian. We separated and eventually divorced. She has been living happily with the same woman partner for more than twenty years. Now I love her as a very close friend. In times of difficulty we have often helped each other.
After these two women, my personal relationships got worse. In some ways, I was fortunate in that my early life had given me some acute sensitivities that provided a strong desire to understand my own and other’s feelings and emotions. What I didn’t understand was that subconsciously or even unconsciously I may have had this emotional beacon flashing inside me shouting out, “Come and get me! I’m an abused child!”
In my damage, I attracted some very damaged and dangerous people to me.
I’ll skip some time since this was not meant to be a chunk of autobiography. By the time I was in my thirties, I was a total mess. My relationships always went awry. I ran a company that employed damaged children from everywhere…they were drawn to the business like a magnet, and we were sixty strong. I knew something was very wrong in me. Frequently I would work flat out in the day then escape into drink by night. The bottle had become my best friend. Fortunately I may have been spared an addictive gene. I never made it to alcoholism, but on many of my bleak, dark, lonely nights, I numbed my emotional pain by drinking to excess.
I was a workaholic too. My workaholic life took a useful turn and by happenstance I ended up running a mental health project in addition to my day job. I could work all the hours god sent if I wished and never have to face myself, or so I supposed. I knew I had profound problems. Often in the murky drinking hours, suicidal thoughts would come to haunt me. I had planned my own death so many times, more than I would ever care to admit.
There was worse too, the feelings of unworthiness lurked inside me all the time. I even developed my own personal relationship complex that I nicknamed the “Cinderella Complex.” It was only some other self-destructive way of doing relationships. If I found “Cinderella” the woman who I really wanted, I would do everything in my power to put her off me. I felt I was only deserving of the ugliest of ugly sisters, even if ugly meant destructive of me. I never deserved Cinderella.
I decided to study psychology (analytical neo-Jungian psychotherapy). My “social” rationale was that it would enable me to support the staff of the mental health project better. My personal agenda was to try and cast out those demons of child abuse.
I did it. But I almost went mad in the process, literally insane. In my training therapy all my energies were directed at coming to terms with child abuse, and how I might live as a functioning loving adult.
When the child abuse dam burst inside me. I experienced all the emotions that I had denied and repressed. I use a "dam" analogy, which is an interesting choice of words. I had a sense of having built all these coping structures on top of my memories of abuse. The child in me had done it to protect a young child. My child was sometimes my caring parent too. I had piled layer on layer on layer of emotions without foundation above the pain and hurt. In doing realisation and recognition of child abuse, these protective layers crumbled. At first, there were small cracks, through which my child's feelings escaped. Then they rushed fast through the cracks bursting the dam, the blocks that I had put there to cope. The strength and intensity of those childhood feelings were alarming, absolutely terrifying.
I can’t say how many nights I begged people to be on call, be close, and be with me while I coped with the most frightening feelings. My whole head felt as though it might implode in a rush of emotions. I felt unimaginable rage, I felt murderous hate, I felt utter fury…and I felt the most desperate grief. At one point, when I really felt I was going crazy, I rushed off to the local Catholic Monastery and asked if they could lock me up there for a couple of nights. They were kind and benevolent, but not that understanding. The feelings were so intense that I went into manic rushes. I wasn’t manic, but I felt like I was. I would often walk for miles and miles with these terrible emotions pounding and rushing inside me. I would walk until the skin on my feet was raw and bleeding. On one occasion, I can even remember blood seeping through my shoes. That’s how powerful my feelings were.
During all of that I couldn’t function; I could barely work. I held my life together in public. Abuse had taught me how to put on a brave face when I was falling apart inside.
I had accomplished the first stages of coming to terms with abuse. I had started to recognise the abuse for what it was, I had allowed myself to feel the massive anger and grief that the abused child feels. I’m not entirely sure if recovery from abuse comes in neatly packaged or progressive stages. Mine didn’t. My father’s judgment and condemnation of me had lost its power. He could harm me no longer. Eventually most of these strong emotions played themselves out, and then I found myself struggling with what to do next. I simply did not know how to cope. Psychotherapy training did not help me that much.
I had an awkwardness about me on every social occasion. I hated large social groups. I learned how to cope. I learned social skills of sorts. All aspects of my life were difficult in those early days, all except my career. But even my career was erratic. I could experience great success followed by terrible slumps of fortune. I had no love inside me. I felt no love for myself either.
I was fortunate at first. After university, I met a lovely young woman, an art student. I fell into my own incomplete version of love with her. Her parents were big small-town people who were against me from the outset. I endured so much talk from them about being worthless, useless and a failure. I was well used to that by then. It was life as usual, until my lover overdrew her bank account and her parents held me responsible. They turned up one day at our flat and demanded we put an end to our relationship there and then; all for the sake of a £60 ($108) overdraft. By this time I was working. I had bought her dresses, clothes, food and even paid for her accommodation with me. We were in our early twenties. Her parents tore us apart. She left college and went to work as a primary school teacher. I remember to this day how wonderful it was to watch her work with small children. She had a natural gift for her work. I saw in her a sort of uncorrupted womanly beauty. I felt sullied to the core.
Intimate personal relationships were a big problem to me. Child abuse does that. I made a mess of every one. I didn’t know how to love or be loved, so I made error after error. At first, I hid from my pain in sex.
Later in my twenties, I married another very lovely woman with whom I am friends to this day. Sadly and perhaps inevitably, she had a lot of personal problems too, problems that had prevented her from discovering the true nature of her sexuality. Eighteen months into our marriage, she was liberated into the realisation that she was attracted to women more than men. She was a lesbian. We separated and eventually divorced. She has been living happily with the same woman partner for more than twenty years. Now I love her as a very close friend. In times of difficulty we have often helped each other.
After these two women, my personal relationships got worse. In some ways, I was fortunate in that my early life had given me some acute sensitivities that provided a strong desire to understand my own and other’s feelings and emotions. What I didn’t understand was that subconsciously or even unconsciously I may have had this emotional beacon flashing inside me shouting out, “Come and get me! I’m an abused child!”
In my damage, I attracted some very damaged and dangerous people to me.
I’ll skip some time since this was not meant to be a chunk of autobiography. By the time I was in my thirties, I was a total mess. My relationships always went awry. I ran a company that employed damaged children from everywhere…they were drawn to the business like a magnet, and we were sixty strong. I knew something was very wrong in me. Frequently I would work flat out in the day then escape into drink by night. The bottle had become my best friend. Fortunately I may have been spared an addictive gene. I never made it to alcoholism, but on many of my bleak, dark, lonely nights, I numbed my emotional pain by drinking to excess.
I was a workaholic too. My workaholic life took a useful turn and by happenstance I ended up running a mental health project in addition to my day job. I could work all the hours god sent if I wished and never have to face myself, or so I supposed. I knew I had profound problems. Often in the murky drinking hours, suicidal thoughts would come to haunt me. I had planned my own death so many times, more than I would ever care to admit.
There was worse too, the feelings of unworthiness lurked inside me all the time. I even developed my own personal relationship complex that I nicknamed the “Cinderella Complex.” It was only some other self-destructive way of doing relationships. If I found “Cinderella” the woman who I really wanted, I would do everything in my power to put her off me. I felt I was only deserving of the ugliest of ugly sisters, even if ugly meant destructive of me. I never deserved Cinderella.
I decided to study psychology (analytical neo-Jungian psychotherapy). My “social” rationale was that it would enable me to support the staff of the mental health project better. My personal agenda was to try and cast out those demons of child abuse.
I did it. But I almost went mad in the process, literally insane. In my training therapy all my energies were directed at coming to terms with child abuse, and how I might live as a functioning loving adult.
When the child abuse dam burst inside me. I experienced all the emotions that I had denied and repressed. I use a "dam" analogy, which is an interesting choice of words. I had a sense of having built all these coping structures on top of my memories of abuse. The child in me had done it to protect a young child. My child was sometimes my caring parent too. I had piled layer on layer on layer of emotions without foundation above the pain and hurt. In doing realisation and recognition of child abuse, these protective layers crumbled. At first, there were small cracks, through which my child's feelings escaped. Then they rushed fast through the cracks bursting the dam, the blocks that I had put there to cope. The strength and intensity of those childhood feelings were alarming, absolutely terrifying.
I can’t say how many nights I begged people to be on call, be close, and be with me while I coped with the most frightening feelings. My whole head felt as though it might implode in a rush of emotions. I felt unimaginable rage, I felt murderous hate, I felt utter fury…and I felt the most desperate grief. At one point, when I really felt I was going crazy, I rushed off to the local Catholic Monastery and asked if they could lock me up there for a couple of nights. They were kind and benevolent, but not that understanding. The feelings were so intense that I went into manic rushes. I wasn’t manic, but I felt like I was. I would often walk for miles and miles with these terrible emotions pounding and rushing inside me. I would walk until the skin on my feet was raw and bleeding. On one occasion, I can even remember blood seeping through my shoes. That’s how powerful my feelings were.
During all of that I couldn’t function; I could barely work. I held my life together in public. Abuse had taught me how to put on a brave face when I was falling apart inside.
I had accomplished the first stages of coming to terms with abuse. I had started to recognise the abuse for what it was, I had allowed myself to feel the massive anger and grief that the abused child feels. I’m not entirely sure if recovery from abuse comes in neatly packaged or progressive stages. Mine didn’t. My father’s judgment and condemnation of me had lost its power. He could harm me no longer. Eventually most of these strong emotions played themselves out, and then I found myself struggling with what to do next. I simply did not know how to cope. Psychotherapy training did not help me that much.
Coming to terms...the beginning
18/09/08 12:52
These next posts are about exorcising a ghost from my past. They are talking about something which I have never talked publicly before.
They are about child abuse, my own experience of abuse.
Up till now, I have only talked about this in private. Even then, it has frequently had emotional consequences that I found difficult to handle. I can remember recounting the nature of my abuse to two close, sensitive and highly educated friends. They both recoiled in disgust and horror. Neither was able to deal with what I had told them. One was unable to speak with me for days afterwards. I felt simply terrible, as though I had confessed to suffering from some terrible contagion, like leprosy.
I’m not going to talk about the nature of my abuse here other than to say it was extreme, severe and encompassed every form of abuse imaginable, including massive violence, sexual and emotional abuse. It started at around age eight and had left me emotionally crippled by the time I was thirteen.
I survived.
Human beings are remarkable and resilient organisms sometimes.
My own survival was, perhaps, based on two factors initially, then more later.
The first of these was like the operation of a pair of weigh scales.
Sometimes when you suppress the development and existence of one side of a person, another aspect comes into play to compensate.
For me, this meant that my emotions shut down completely, the pain was too great for any child to bear. It was even too great for my loving adult friends to bear. I believe that what happened to me in the short term is that I became completely focused on survival; I developed a kind of formidable “black” intelligence. I was thought to be “gifted”. Some gift that was! My second survival mechanism was that I was able to identify and latch onto good non-abusing adults who helped me. These were so important as I didn’t have a family to help from a very young age. I got pocket money from my parents sometimes, that was all, and often, that was more about public display than any real concern for my welfare.
I was mainly lucky or perceptive in my choice of adult helpers. Predominantly they were good people.
My intelligence was formidable. It was also a very dark force. I was like a jungle animal sometimes. I did not bully, I was never violent and after my early life experience, I was not that physically strong either. The abuse had taken its toll on my body. If threatened, I could outrun almost anyone I met intellectually. I had no compassion either. My black intelligence was ruthless. It’s how I survived.
But my intelligence was something about which I felt totally equivocal. Every time I exercised it, I felt emotional ruin and desolation inside. I craved love and affection. Generally I found neither. I craved it so badly that my sex life started at a very precocious age, at 13. I wanted to experience the human physical warmth that had been denied to me in childhood. I felt those infantile cravings for love, physical warmth and attachment that I had never felt. I wanted to find out about touching and being held.
Having been removed from home aged 13, my life went up and down like the Himalayas. I flunked all my early education then in a bout of fury, I gained university entrance qualifications that would take me to anywhere I chose in 5 weeks. The course was 2 years long. I completed it in 5 weeks.
I worked for a while then took myself off to a very good university where the pattern started repeating. By the end of my first year, I had been offered a research fellowship. I hit the doldrums in my second year because my achievement was so caught up with feeling so bad in my heart. It was a habit. To “achieve”, I closed myself up emotionally. In the void of achievement, all I felt was emotional pain and emptiness. I felt totally empty and desolate inside. No achievement could ever make up for that.
This account is all in hindsight. I can make some sense of it now.
But the legacy of child abuse haunted me for a very long time.
There was much more…all manner of strange, unpleasant, unhealthy, hostile and painful experiences.
Perhaps, the worst of these was being very bright and working class.
Social workers had thought it a good idea for me to take a scholarship to attend an English, upper class, public (elite private) school. I passed the scholarship entrance exams. I lasted only about four years at that school. I was bullied because of my working class accent at the time (I now speak impeccable “BBC” English). I was beaten, bullied and called a “wog” and a “nigger”. I was neither. I am white. But I learned what it was like to feel like an outcast there, like an untouchable.
Ironically, I was expelled from that place for persistent “delinquent” behaviour, mainly for answering back and defending myself. The reason given for my expulsion was “academic under-achievement”.
To complete my pre-university entrance studies, I went to a state (sixth-form) college. It was like heaven by comparison. Study with sex, drink and cigarettes.
I had not recovered.
It was only the beginning of the next chapter.
They are about child abuse, my own experience of abuse.
Up till now, I have only talked about this in private. Even then, it has frequently had emotional consequences that I found difficult to handle. I can remember recounting the nature of my abuse to two close, sensitive and highly educated friends. They both recoiled in disgust and horror. Neither was able to deal with what I had told them. One was unable to speak with me for days afterwards. I felt simply terrible, as though I had confessed to suffering from some terrible contagion, like leprosy.
I’m not going to talk about the nature of my abuse here other than to say it was extreme, severe and encompassed every form of abuse imaginable, including massive violence, sexual and emotional abuse. It started at around age eight and had left me emotionally crippled by the time I was thirteen.
I survived.
Human beings are remarkable and resilient organisms sometimes.
My own survival was, perhaps, based on two factors initially, then more later.
The first of these was like the operation of a pair of weigh scales.
Sometimes when you suppress the development and existence of one side of a person, another aspect comes into play to compensate.
For me, this meant that my emotions shut down completely, the pain was too great for any child to bear. It was even too great for my loving adult friends to bear. I believe that what happened to me in the short term is that I became completely focused on survival; I developed a kind of formidable “black” intelligence. I was thought to be “gifted”. Some gift that was! My second survival mechanism was that I was able to identify and latch onto good non-abusing adults who helped me. These were so important as I didn’t have a family to help from a very young age. I got pocket money from my parents sometimes, that was all, and often, that was more about public display than any real concern for my welfare.
I was mainly lucky or perceptive in my choice of adult helpers. Predominantly they were good people.
My intelligence was formidable. It was also a very dark force. I was like a jungle animal sometimes. I did not bully, I was never violent and after my early life experience, I was not that physically strong either. The abuse had taken its toll on my body. If threatened, I could outrun almost anyone I met intellectually. I had no compassion either. My black intelligence was ruthless. It’s how I survived.
But my intelligence was something about which I felt totally equivocal. Every time I exercised it, I felt emotional ruin and desolation inside. I craved love and affection. Generally I found neither. I craved it so badly that my sex life started at a very precocious age, at 13. I wanted to experience the human physical warmth that had been denied to me in childhood. I felt those infantile cravings for love, physical warmth and attachment that I had never felt. I wanted to find out about touching and being held.
Having been removed from home aged 13, my life went up and down like the Himalayas. I flunked all my early education then in a bout of fury, I gained university entrance qualifications that would take me to anywhere I chose in 5 weeks. The course was 2 years long. I completed it in 5 weeks.
I worked for a while then took myself off to a very good university where the pattern started repeating. By the end of my first year, I had been offered a research fellowship. I hit the doldrums in my second year because my achievement was so caught up with feeling so bad in my heart. It was a habit. To “achieve”, I closed myself up emotionally. In the void of achievement, all I felt was emotional pain and emptiness. I felt totally empty and desolate inside. No achievement could ever make up for that.
This account is all in hindsight. I can make some sense of it now.
But the legacy of child abuse haunted me for a very long time.
There was much more…all manner of strange, unpleasant, unhealthy, hostile and painful experiences.
Perhaps, the worst of these was being very bright and working class.
Social workers had thought it a good idea for me to take a scholarship to attend an English, upper class, public (elite private) school. I passed the scholarship entrance exams. I lasted only about four years at that school. I was bullied because of my working class accent at the time (I now speak impeccable “BBC” English). I was beaten, bullied and called a “wog” and a “nigger”. I was neither. I am white. But I learned what it was like to feel like an outcast there, like an untouchable.
Ironically, I was expelled from that place for persistent “delinquent” behaviour, mainly for answering back and defending myself. The reason given for my expulsion was “academic under-achievement”.
To complete my pre-university entrance studies, I went to a state (sixth-form) college. It was like heaven by comparison. Study with sex, drink and cigarettes.
I had not recovered.
It was only the beginning of the next chapter.