EDGES MAGAZINE Issue 19

October 1999





My

Abused
Sebastian made contact with Edges. He lives in London.

As I was growing up there was a lot of abuse. From my mother this was sexual, physical, and emotional. From my father it was more or less the same, but I’m not so sure about the sexual.

The abuse led to emotional difficulties for myself as an adolescent. I was always distant from others at school. I couldn’t concentrate in lessons, I was always feeling afraid.

At seventeen I had a nervous breakdown. I felt annoyed that teachers and an educational psychologist did not do more than they did. I remember the headmaster telling me that I did not have to come to school if I didn’t want to. I think any other child would have jumped at the chance of not going to school. I said that I didn’t want to go home, but that I didn’t want to be in class either – I felt afraid of being with others. At thirty-eight nothing has changed. So I went to school and played the Bechstein piano all day. People were aware there were difficulties, but did nothing. I could have been moved into foster care, for example, which I would have loved, because now and then I feel there’s a hole in me, not having a family.

There were two times when I was home that I had a safe feeling inside me. Once was when a man who worked for the BBC came to the house to collect his wife. I was about six. There was no reason for it: I just felt instinctively safe with this elder man and I crawled onto his lap. He put his arms round me. Children don’t have the same sense of time as adults do they, but I feel like I was in his arms for about one and a half-hours. He put his arms around me. He kept smiling at me, not saying anything. There was no violence and I felt safe. I didn’t want him to go. When he did I felt bad. I used to watch Dr Who every Saturday evening just to see his name in the subtitles at the end. Just to remind myself of that safe experience.

The other time was when I went to stay with a family in France that was known to my family. They wouldn’t have anything more to do with my family after they sent their son to stay with us. He didn’t like the way they treated me. They made me feel very welcome. Very loved actually. That was great. Jean was in the air force and I used to wait by the fence at about four o’clock for him to come home every day. I used to help him in the garden. During the day I used to help Michelle in the kitchen and around the house. It was not expected of me to do this, in fact at one point they were concerned and told me to relax. But it was as if I had to earn their affection, or do something to prevent being rejected. Besides, I loved being part of it all. When I left, Pascal who was nine then got up at five in the morning to say good-bye. He was crying because he didn’t want me to leave. We all felt very good about each other. When I was twenty-one I went to see them when I lived in France. Jean made me tearful when he said that I was like his third son. Everything changed when they found out that I was gay. That was in the early 80’s.

I went to university in 1979. That was when things really started to get bad. Really bad. I was seeing the student counselor. There are few people who should be in that profession, including this counselor. As I tried to understand my anxiety problem I just became more and more involved in the memory of the incidents of abuse by my parents to the point where I was thinking of nothing else night and day. The counselor didn’t know how to handle it. It’s not really the memory; it’s the emotion of terror that was attached to the memories. I was paralyzed with fear. I was crying all the time. I couldn’t even watch the TV because of my inability to concentrate.

In October 1981 I went to live in France. People ask me if I have experienced any happiness since I broke down in 1979. I always say the month of October 1981. It was a new start. More importantly, it was distant from the emotion of terror that was attached to those memories. Then my father sent me a note on the back of an envelope. It said ‘You lack sensitivity, tolerance, humility’. That was the beginning of the end. I ended up seeing a therapist as an out-patient at a local psychiatric hospital. I battled for six months trying to understand the note from my father. It culminated in my being admitted into hospital. I won’t talk about hospital. It’s too frightening. Just think Midnight Express.

My parents had always tried to steer me away from people who might be concerned about me. In retrospect I know this was because my mother was afraid the social services would find out and take me away. This had also discouraged me from contact with relatives, including my Grandmother and my Uncle in the US. In 1979 I did visit my relatives in California, despite protests from them. We got on, and in 1982 following my stay in the psychiatric hospital in France, I called my Uncle John in California. I really needed to belong to a family. I asked him about moving to stay with him, as he had once wanted me to come and live with his wife and family. Now it was a different story. He just said that he would not want me with them as I had emotional problems. In 1989, my Grandfather died. I had been very close to him. Nobody told me about his death or his funeral. I met my brother, by accident in Camden Town tube, not even knowing he lived in London. In fact he had been living just twenty minutes walk away from me for some time. He told me that Granddad had died and that they’d had the funeral. When I began to cry he walked off. I didn’t see him again for two years.

During the 80’s there were constant admissions to psychiatric hospitals and clinics. And they all, until 1985, were an effort to rid myself of an overwhelming emotion of terror which was still crippling me. I did the talk therapy, the prescribed drugs, the occupational therapy, the group therapy, the relaxation therapy, and it all brought me back to where I was trying to get away from: Terror.

Lying on my back in a clinic in Birmingham trying to ‘Just let go and relax’ and it wasn’t working at all, it just came to me that I had to do something very radical to shift the terror connected to these memories. I began to think about Germany. There was no association to my family with Germany. I also began to think about changing my name. I also had to cut off contact with everyone who knew my story and me. And I thought about finding a family that would befriend me. That was the plan to replace the emotion of terror that was attached to these memories. That was the most important constituent of the plan. On the 25th August 1985, I got a one way ticket to Frankfurt and Landed with my new name. I took £500, which was all I had. I spoke no German. I got my German up to scratch, then moved on to Munich. I changed my name officially at the British Consulate in Munich on 11th April 1986 – my birthday. Nobody knew. Just Me. Actually, this is the first time I’ve said anything about it. I finally worked in the mail dispatch department of a Rudolph Steiner shop. One of the features of this illness is that I’ve rarely been able to do anything but unskilled work, despite a degree in French and Italian.

Germany worked in that I lost the attachment to terror in these memories. But something came along in its place. I just couldn’t stop feeling guilty about everything I said and did. I was either saying it wrong, talking too much, or talking too little. The guilt was more to do with speech and how I expressed myself more than anything else. There were weeks together when I could not say anything as a child. It’s similar now. It’s the only way I can protect myself from the obsession of feeling guilty. It’s a real shame because people say I have a good sense of humor and that I do get along with people, it’s just that I have no faith in myself and cannot believe that I am OK as a human being. As a consequence of other difficulties there then followed more therapy in Munich and more admissions to hospital.

On 29th August 1995 a psychiatrist assessed me. He said if I had tried many things to overcome my difficulties. He asked me if I had any further suggestions that might be helpful. I said I had been looking for a family since 1984. I told him that four boroughs in London operated an adult fostering scheme whereby you went to live with a family as part of the family. He said he’d look into it. 15th November the psychiatrist wrote back to me to say there was no such thing in my borough. In January 1988 when I had the strength, I got an independent organization to look into it for me. They found that there was such a scheme.

Someone from an independent organization advised me to think about suing my parents for the damage that they have caused me. They told me to go to the police and report the incident as ‘historic abuse’ to the Child Protection Unit. I did this. They treated me as if I was reporting a traffic accident. I had to tell them with my face covered with my arm, looking at the floor, pretending there was nobody else in the room. I was crying and crying. They asked me for evidence. I told them that the evidence was at the solicitors. It worries me most that the most vulnerable are made targets for more abuse. Haven’t they suffered enough already? One therapist has told me that I am not special, another has sexually abused me.

When you’re confused because of abuse it is often difficult to distinguish between what is abuse and what is not. At one place of work I had been bullied over about eighteen months because of my sexual orientation. Even when I was kicked in the back of my leg I didn’t recognize myself as being abused until someone told me I was being abused. I just thought in an odd sort of way that this was normal behavior. It’s almost as if somewhere in your history your perception of events and how you process them becomes distorted. After all it’s hardly surprising when your parents tell you that what is happening to you at home is what happens to all children. Violence comes on a daily basis, emotional, sexual, physical – and when you’re terrified and ask for the reassurance that you are loved and Mom says ‘Yes’ you begin to equate love with violence. So when someone kicks you, you think that this is an expression of something positive in the way that they feel towards you.

I cannot tell you the details of the violence in case it puts me back in hospital. I’m frightened in case it triggers the terror again, you see. What I can do is give a global picture involving violence, a place where I got myself up in the morning at six, walked my dog, got my breakfast, took my mother a cup of tea in bed and went to school. I would come home and wait on the lawn for her to come home from work. My father would put me outside in the street in the middle of winter for no reason at all with nowhere to go. My brother didn’t understand why they would take him on holiday to the Canary Islands and leave me at home with the dog. He asked once. He told me that ‘Dad doesn’t want you with us’.

When I was nineteen my father told me to commit suicide.

Shortly after finishing my degree I asked my mother why she never had any compassion for me. I distinctly remember the word compassion. Her response was that boys didn’t get compassion.

I feel like I’m in a lonely spot. I still feel like I belong nowhere. When I arrived back from Italy in 1989 I lived in a squat. On the strength of an office job I did, from 92 – 95, where I was able to work as an interpreter, I managed to save the money for a deposit for a house, and get a mortgage. Having a house and becoming physically sheltered changes nothing regarding the feeling of being ‘emotionally homeless’. At the end of thirty-eight years of abuse and subsequent Post Traumatic Stress Disorder I have no family contacts and have isolated myself because I bought into the idea that my parents were right in their message to me: that I was a bad person. I am frightened to socialize in case I feel I say it wrong, in case I feel I do it wrong. The subsequent feeling of guilt is unbearable. It’s like expecting to be executed. I shut the world out because of the fear of what it might do to me, what I might do to myself.

I have hope. I feel fairly confident that EMDR therapy will help me put back together a fractured life. I am also hoping that I find the family I have searched for all these years. I have thought long and hard about that one. I need to find an older couple that would befriend me. I need to be allowed to show them what I can offer and make as my contribution to our well being. I believe that when I can do this in return for some warmth and affection I will truly feel I belong. I won’t feel this ‘hole’ that goes with emotional homelessness. I have had experience working on farms in France, Italy, and Great Britain and the idea of working voluntarily on a farm appeals enormously because I really get along nicely with animals, there being no fear. I honestly wouldn’t mind, geographically, I lived. Whether here or abroad. The important factor being the kind of people I found myself living and working with. Initially, I feel that it would be best to build the friendship over a period of time before making a more personal arrangement. That way nobody feels under pressure.

If there is any interest in the above I would appreciate hearing from you via Edges Magazine. References from my contact at Victim Support can also be supplied via the same route.

My name is Sebastian




Life

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