This blog post discusses the impacts of sexual abuse. If you are affected and need to speak to someone, please contact us via our helpline.

This book recounts episodes from my life, a life of intermittent complex post-traumatic stress-disorder caused by severe early childhood trauma. My earliest memories first came back to me in my early 40s as two isolated flashbacks. In one of these, I re-lived the experience of being violently sexually assaulted by my father when I was a baby, a few months old. This book describes in detail the two flashbacks and how I came to have them.

I also describe in detail a memory, more generalised, which told me that sexual abuse continued, routinely, for about 10 years. For half my life, all memory of this childhood trauma had been completely suppressed. I describe how these flashbacks occurred, and the light they shed on my later mental health history. I discuss the question of whether one can “believe” the content of flashbacks like these, whether their content is true, or just some kind of retrospective hallucination or delusion, the product of a deranged imagination.

I have been told, by members of my family, that I am harming my family – brother, sister, uncles, aunts, cousins – by revealing the content of these memories. “I hope you have some empathy left to see the harm you are doing,” said one. The number of individuals who might be hurt is quite big, well over 20, but none of them will be harmed. Once they have got over the shock, they will know, or at least have been exposed to, a piece of family truth, that’s all. They are free to deny it or call me a liar or deranged. If it is the family’s reputation they are concerned about, let them disown me. Let me be the second uncle James in the family that nobody mentions.

My purpose in writing this book is to help me remember and understand my life, its three major crises, the calm decades between the crises, and the trauma caused and triggered those crises. My purpose in making this information public, chapter by chapter, is to raise awareness of trauma. If more know about it and understand it, this might prevent further abuse, possibly even saving a life. Reading it might be of some help and support to survivors of abuse, to carers and friends and partners, and to psychiatrists, therapists, and the health services generally. The sexual abuse of children occurs almost always in secret. Physical and emotional abuse is more open, but just as little understood in the effects it has on children as they grow up, and on their later adult lives, and is often not acknowledged or recognised as abuse. To maintain that secrecy, to keep quiet about, is to collude with the abuser. If a potential abuser thinks their victim might grass on them, they might think twice before going ahead with the abuse, and possibly, a victim would be spared the experience. There would be that much less suffering in the world, and less pressure on the health services. No one is going to be harmed by the kind of truth I’m going to disclose and discuss in this book. And I’m writing this for my fellow survivors, who are considerably more numerous than my family. My family will get over it. They can deny, they can sit in judgement on me, call me deranged, disbelieve my story, and so on if it makes them feel better. I am not worried about my family. It is abuse that harms families, not knowledge and understanding.

In this book, I will also explore what I have learned and unlearned – what I had to learn and unlearn in order to survive from year to year, in order to make friends, to live with partners, to enjoy walking and nature, to hold down a job, to recover from 3 major crises, aged 23, 43, and 69, two of which required treatment with antidepressant medication and a stay on a psychiatric ward, and to reach the cheerfully creative phase on which I’m now embarked. This phase began in 2018, age 72, and continues as I write these words in 2020, age 74.

As I learned, I began to see that I was not unique, that most children, perhaps all children, are traumatised in childhood, some more severely, some less. The normal upbringing all children go through from babyhood on, a relentless process of reward and punishment, is in itself traumatising, and has nothing whatever to do with love. If you love your children, you don’t do that to them. If you love your children, you will find that you don’t need to do condition them, to frighten them into obedience, to bribe them to make them be what you call good. With the help of Peter Ffitch, a friend and for 6 months my employer, I began to see how trauma, including childhood trauma, has played a central role in the history of the human race. No other species is driven by trauma in this way. This too is explored and discussed in this book.

These kinds of trauma can kill or maim the intelligence and the love in an individual, especially if that trauma is inflicted in childhood by primary carers or family members or people close to the victims and their family. And the consequences of lack of love upon those individuals can be devastating and far-reaching. Not only are human beings destroying each other, we are destroying the earth’s ecosystem, we have initiated and are driving an era of mass-extinction comparable with those which have been discovered to have occurred billions of years ago, thought to be caused by mass volcanic eruption or the impact of a meteorite.

There are wars, there is conflict, there is wasteful competition, there is over exploitation of resources, there is overpopulation. Many people with money care more about making more money than they do about the future of the ecosystem on which their own children’s and grandchildren’s lives will depend. If you have established a connection with nature, if you love life, all life,* you don’t destroy, you won’t destroy, you cannot destroy. It is not that you erect a principle and adhere to it. Destruction and cruelty have simply become impossible for you.