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Category: Benjamin (commenter)

Categories
Benjamin (commenter) Child abuse Psychiatry

Consumption, 8

The volume I have of Consumption comprises two books. Today, I read from chapter 19 to the end of the first book: the narrative of what happened to Benjamin at the age of seventeen, when, alarmed by what I quoted in the previous instalment of this series, he was admitted to Brookside, a psychiatric unit for adolescents.

It is vital to understand the real cause of the psychosis, as it is very rare to find someone who knows that psychiatry is as pseudoscientific as, say, parapsychology or ufology. For example, it is curious that Ben’s father, the person most responsible for his son’s mental catastrophe, was as clueless about his role as my mother was when she destroyed my life, also at the age of seventeen. Ben’s father even gave his son a book to read during the year he was hospitalised in the Brookside clinic, The Noonday Demon: a book that promotes the accepted pseudoscience (and about which I wrote a review that can serve as an introduction to debunking the medical model in favour of the trauma model).

But back to the final chapters of the first book of Consumption. It is very impressive to read, in Benjamin’s prose, that some of the other teenagers who were admitted to Brookside also told terrible stories about their pasts that would easily validate the trauma model for anyone with a minimum degree of empathy. But that’s not what the orthodox psychiatrist sells us to understand these young self-harmers committed in Brookside, some even in their early or middle teens. In the words of Ben’s father:

“See, you might think that,” my Dad said, “but no, the science is clear. You see, there are such things in the brain as monoamine neurotransmitters. Little grouped rings of amino acids which control the regulation of emotions, for example, dopamine and serotonin. In your case, you were born with the genes that put you at risk of producing too little serotonin, which in turn leads to your adolescent Depression, which is where your tablets come in. You take daily SSRIs, which stands for Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors. The medications in the tablets increase the amount of serotonin in your brain by limiting its reabsorption, thus keeping your mood stable. It’s important that you keep taking them, as the doctor says. They’ve studied this area and are professionals, and they know what’s best for you.”

One of the things Benjamin recounts in these chapters is that, after he left Brookside at the age of eighteen, he kept in touch with the teenage friends he made there and, to his dismay, even though they used to take their psychiatric meds several of them committed suicide, one as late as 2005.

As had happened to me on the other side of the Atlantic, no one had wanted to listen to them: something that results in a devastating panic of the inner self that sometimes leads to dire consequences. I have said it before and it is worth repeating ad infinitum and ad nauseam: the psychological havoc that abusive parents cause to their offspring is the greatest taboo of the human species. We can already imagine why a profession that shares this universal taboo can only be iatrogenic, in that its “treatments”—drugs, electroshock or even lobotomy—only victimise the victim again. This absolute lack of empathy, even to listen, prompted Benjamin to write retrospectively about his seventeen years: “…the new world I was gradually being exposed to proving far darker and more horrific than I had ever realised, far from the idyllic countryside of my early years”.

Making friends at Brookside and, in a way, recognising himself in them began to serve Ben as a form of therapy, although not in the sense that the professionals expected (the doctors made him take antidepressants) but because of the similarities with these teenagers’ family tragedies. Alas, this healthy coexistence with other teens was brutally interrupted when his parents visited him at Brookside bringing with them… the Pakistani lad who had molested Ben! Although his parents’ intentions in bringing Tariq weren’t malicious, their lack of empathy reminded me of an anecdote related to a school where I was tormented. Although it was not sexual abuse in my case, what is striking is the absolute disconnect between both families in terms of the most basic communication with the affected person.

The visit proved fateful. Not long after, in a psychotic episode triggered by Benjamin feeling betrayed for having brought Tariq along, instead of hating the perpetrators, in Brookside he re-directed the rage towards himself inflicting terrible self-harm. The ultimate cause of such pathological transference is that society doesn’t allow the victim to speak out his or her emotions (i.e., blame the guilty parties) and the rage is redirected.

In front of his father during one of his visits, Benjamin collapsed because of the horrific things he had done to his body. I will refrain from detailing them, but it was something like a pressure cooker that society, with its Fourth Commandment to honour one’s father, puts a lid on. If that pressure cooker had an escape valve instead of the horrendous repression that caused the psychoses of the Brookside teenagers, we would have common neuroses. But since it is the most potent taboo of the human mind, society insists on its lid until the pressure cooker explodes, dirtying the entire kitchen and even leaving a hole in the ceiling due to the tremendous force with which the metal lid was thrown.

Ben’s self-harm was this time so severe that he had to be taken from Brookside to an emergency hospital, where, in the operating theatre and under general anaesthesia, the surgeons had to remove flesh from one of his legs in a desperate attempt to avoid amputating an arm that had become gangrenous due to his self-harm. The curious thing is that right before the operation, when the doctors told him he could lose his arm, Benjamin didn’t care at all about it: he only cared about the (paranoid) guilt that his family and the System had instilled in his mind (cf. the final words on page 136 of the March 2025 edition). That sense of abysmal guilt is why he had self-harmed.

By then, Benjamin was allowed by the Brookside staff to visit his parents on weekends. If mental health professionals were run by proponents of the trauma model that would never, ever be allowed because his parents would go back to their old ways and that would ensure a relapse (think of something similar to taking Tariq to Brookside but every weekend)! And although I won’t recount the anecdote that was exactly what happened. To boot, after his father abused his son again the iatrogenic profession re-victimised him in the most humiliating and hurtful way:

“Thank you for arranging this [meeting]. Well, it’s my Dad; he’s been making my life really difficult at home. He keeps patronising me and getting at me like he doesn’t like me very much, and my Mum’s not stopping him…”

“Stop right there”, the doctor said with an incredulous expression, interrupting me, “So are you saying to me that you think your father is responsible for your selfinjuring behaviour recently?” to which I replied, “Um, yes, to a degree, I mean, it’s other stuff I’m sad about, but he’s not helping, and he keeps shouting at me and bossing me about, and he bins my stuff” […].

“You see, Benjamin. Listen to your father and mother. They know what’s best for you, and try not to be difficult at home, ok? Sometimes, when we get ill, we can think people are persecuting us, when they really aren’t, and it can feel very real at times.”

Remember what I said not long ago, that according to Tom Szasz psychiatry is a kind of pediatrics because it treats adults as if they were children? What the doctor did is precisely what Alice Miller called “poisonous pedagogy”.

To which, horrified, I responded with “but… but… I’m not lying to you, doctor. It’s true; he does bully me in the house. Please, Mum, Mum, say something!” The doctor appeared put out at this point and a little flustered. Evidently, he had not been expecting my interruption. “Benjamin, keep your voice down, please. Don’t get excited!”

My mother spoke up at this point, in surprising solidarity, “Well, sometimes, you know what it’s like with two men in the house; they come to loggerheads with each other, and Benjamin’s Dad isn’t always the most patient with him…” to which my father gave the sharp retort, “Mary!” and the doctor himself, keen to get on with the meeting, brushed this new response aside, as if he hadn’t heard, and did not pause to write it down as he had done with my own responses.

He went on, “Ok, let’s keep on the point now, as it’s easy to drift off topic. I think what we’re going to do is re-evaluate Benjamin’s diagnosis from now on. It seems Borderline Personality Disorder may not be the whole picture. Just as a preliminary hypothesis, I suggest a co-morbidity of Paranoid Personality Disorder. It’s clear from what Benjamin’s saying about his father that he’s suffering from at least some paranoid symptoms.”

Note that the shrink doctor never witnessed what was happening at home. Only by living with them would he have seen the family dynamics! He’s diagnosing paranoia simply because he sides with the father, like a lawyer with his corrupt client. This is what happened to me at seventeen on the other side of the Atlantic.

He turned to specifically address me. “What we’re going to do now is keep you on your 60mg of Citalopram daily, but in addition to that we’re starting you on a course of Olanzapine, it’s one of the newer atypical antipsychotic mood stabilisers. We’ve had very good results from the clinical trials, and we think it’ll help sort out your paranoid delusions. You take one tablet a day, at 10mg, just as a starting dose, and we’ll see if we should increase it from there.”

“But why are you doing this?!” I called to the psychiatrist, “I’m telling you the truth!” Momentarily, he paused again, taken aback, then turned, as if personally insulted, and motioned to the nurse next to him, saying, “Nurse, it seems Benjamin is becoming agitated; please could you ask him to leave the meeting room” and, before I could say anything else to defend myself, or to contest the decision, and in front of both my parents, I was motioned again to my feet, and boldly escorted out of the room, back to my bedroom to “calm down”.

It was as if a rug had been pulled out from under me. How could my Dad lie like that, right in front of my face? Why couldn’t he just acknowledge it and be more patient around me? After all, my room was hardly untidy [his father’s claim to constantly intrude in his room—Ed.], and, if anything, he was just finding something to do since retiring, himself the obsessive one. And why did the doctor side with him when I told him Dad had been hurting my feelings and side with him from the get-go, really? Why wasn’t I allowed to say my piece? Why was it his word over mine, automatically?! And was I really paranoid?

I didn’t think so, pleased a little that at least my Mum had come to a partial defence of me, impotent though it was. And curse that doctor for not listening to me, the arrogant swine! I hated him. I hated all of the staff. And, more than anything, a deep humiliation settled over me, peaked and incensed, insulted to my core…

Benjamin’s reaction was brutal. Not long after, he began biting his arm like a rabid dog, tearing off pieces of living tissue that had not yet healed from the operation, in such a horrible way that “an experienced surgeon… vomited on the floor, excusing himself from the scene in panic”.

“My forearm wound twenty years later, November 2024” [page 151 of his book. Consumption, by the way, has been dedicated to… yours truly!].

One might think that after such volcanic outbursts of psychosis, a sane father might begin to become a little more humble and listen to his son for the first time in his life.

But that doesn’t happen with narcissistic parents: a form of self-righteousness to the nth degree (the unforgivable sin of pride in Christian terms)! That’s why these parents are so destructive. In fact, if my trilogy were ever to be published under a single cover, I would love for the publisher to use the title of the first volume, Hojas Susurrantes, as I explain there that the title refers to a dream I had in which, at last, the adolescent I once was was able to communicate with his dearest dad…

Categories
Benjamin (commenter) Psychiatry Psychohistory

Consumption, 7

Editor’s note:

I have said that understanding individual psychoses might provide the key to understanding the folie en masse, also called “mass formation”, which currently affects virtually all Westerners. In short, if a child named Ben is treated like shit by his parents, schoolmates and even mental health professionals throughout his formative years when his brain is still malleable, his inner self will internalise it (“I am Evil”) and, out of self-hatred, he will self-harm. I am oversimplifying an extremely complex process of erosion of the inner self that takes years, but that’s basically what it is.

The point I am trying to make is that this can also be done to an entire society. If, since 1945, virtually every Westerner has been brainwashed with propaganda that paints the Nazis in the blackest possible light, over time millions of Aryans will internalise the propaganda with such violence (“we whites are Evil”) that their ethnosuicide will become as natural as self-harming. That is why to save the West it is so crucial to un-demonise Hitler: the goal of this website.

Today, as I was resuming the reading of Benjamin’s book, I had to pause because of a serious episode of self-harm when he used to go to school, so much so that his parents had to take him to the hospital in an emergency. I tend to faint at graphic descriptions of blood, to the extent that I cannot watch images of surgeries in operating theatres. So I felt dizzy while reading chapter 18 of Consumption and I had to stop immediately to tidy my room (I am using a new wardrobe that the carpenter built for me yesterday and today) before continuing with my reading.

Remember that I was born in a place where half a millennium ago millions of Indians still practised ritual self-harm. If studying the Mesoamerican world is shocking, even more shocking is the absolute stubbornness of family members, friends, loved ones, and even mental health professionals in grasping the most basic fact: the problem of millions of children like Ben has been purely existential, not biomedical.

Priests performing a ritual of self-harming with bone awls (Codex Tudela, drawing by Fernando Carrizosa).

The Mesoamerican Indians belonged to a lower psychoclass than the Iberian conquerors. But that doesn’t mean that these conquerors were already the overmen Hitler dreamed of. Compared to him, the 16th-century Spanish and Portuguese belonged to a lower psychoclass. So the criticism that a conquistador might make of the psychologically dissociated indigenous people can also be made by me of the contemporary Westerner, insofar as I have developed more empathy than most of them. Otherwise the average Westerner would understand boys like Ben (see my Day of Wrath to better understand the concept of psychoclasses: it has to do with the historical development of empathy in a process that Lloyd deMause calls psychogenesis).

The boy Ben, for example, should have been helped with the most basic empathy, but that could only have been done by a “helping witness” (I explained that concept by Alice Miller a few posts ago). In a case like Benjamin’s, it was as surrealistically idiotic to treat his body with antidepressants as, say, prescribing Prozac to you if your child has been kidnapped and no one wants to help you rescue her!

It seems unbelievable but in this crazy world that is basically how psychiatry works!, although there are notable psychiatrists who have detected the madness of their profession and have dedicated their lives to debunking it. Although I am not one of them, I contributed to this debunking with my original article on the “irrefutable hypothesis” in biological psychiatry: a violation of the principle of falsifiability devised by Karl Popper to distinguish between science and pseudoscience.

Benjamin wrote:

 

______ 卐 ______

 

Chapter Eighteen

By the summer of 2001, my overt depression had not lifted. In the house, Dad was increasingly bad-tempered. As with Gerald, he could not understand why I would not pull together, seeing as I had been awarded my tablets by the psychiatrist, which I would still take daily. More and more, I would be tearful and morose, and more and more, he would become snappy with me or overbearing, criticising my choice of fashion or that I had not changed my clothes often enough and excessively reminding me to do my homework, even as I struggled to get homework finished in good time, and frequently left it until the last moment (though in English and Philosophy, I was still top of the class and received steady A-grade marks).

In Philosophy I would learn about Socrates’ moral and ethical dialogues and the theory of virtue and knowledge in the pursuit of eudaimonia (happiness), the epistemology of Plato and his theory of Forms, and Aristotle’s teleological causes and his works on the soul, followed by the writings of Thomas Aquinas and his arguments for the existence of God, moving on into John Locke’s evaluation of the self, David Hume’s empiricism and the theory of compatibilism the takes causal determinism as fully compatible with human free will, the metaphysical idealism of Bishop Berkeley and the mind-body dualism of René Descartes, the utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, and then Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative and his distinguishing between phenomena and noumena, and Arthur Schopenhauer’s transcendental idealism and the arguments on morality, finishing with Richard Swinburne’s substance dualism and Christian apologetics, and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz’ theory of the best of all possible worlds, addressing theodicy, the problem of the existence of evil.

My mind was filled with complicated philosophical ideas, dwelling on ethics, good and evil, and ways to define and delineate the world around me, and indeed myself. My study of English literature complemented this intensity with an evaluation of the Romantic poets Coleridge, Shelley, Byron, Blake and Keats, with an emphasis on contemplations of nature, imagination, and the sublime, and an often-melancholic display of open emotion weaved through beautiful natural world similes and metaphors for the changing seasons and life and death. Later, I would study the poetry of Thomas Hardy and other poets writing on the First World War, the mystical symbolism of William Butler Yeats’ later work and the modernist desolation and despair of T.S. Eliot in The Waste Land and The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, and, particularly, Philip Larkin, in detail, dwelling on his often-ironic depictions of everyday life, a sad fatalism at a changing world now unfamiliar to him, his colloquial lyricism displaying a great, mournful discontent at the loss of an England he once knew.

As the school year ended, I returned to my house and bedroom. I now moved downstairs into the craft room full-time. I would barely leave my room, sat sadly in the corner, trying to read, or write a poem inspired by the Romantic poets I had read at school, lonely and without company. Often, I would self-harm, making less effort than I once did to shield myself from discovery, increasingly morose and fatalistic, having given up on trying to hide how I felt and forgoing the efforts I once made to bandage myself, then only to ward off the attention of others, now simply letting the blood soak into my clothes, or wiping it onto my bathroom towel.

It was a cold, wet summer for that time of year, and I had no cause to be outside, barely communicating, bar once in a brief phone call from Ali to the blocky blue mobile phone I now carried, sitting in silence most days on my painting desk. My father had become bossy with me, impatient, frustrated by tears, and somehow embarrassed by me and my lack of enthusiasm, and, as my mother said to me later, “he doesn’t understand illness.” As for the nature of my self-harming itself, I took less caution now and would press deeper with my craft scalpel, running furrows into myself where once there had been scratches, re-opening sealing wounds, and often approaching the same spot again and again until the skin was split wide, in agony, damaged beyond all repair. As an adult now, my body is wrecked, almost all of my body at one time or other attacked by me, crisscrossed with multiple pink and white lines of rubbery scar tissue from some appalling wounds and insensate, courtesy of the depth and regularity of my injuries, and the protracted loss of nerves, some taking many years to grow back partially. These days, feeling obliged for other’s sake as much as to ward off inconvenient questions, knowing the gist of them far in advance, I wear long-sleeved shirts exclusively and often have recourse to pull my sleeves right down to further mask the many black ink tattoos I added in foolishness as an adult to try and hide the extent of the injured skin (tattoos do not settle well on scar tissue) themselves garish mutilation, fading into a maze of jaded lines and mounds and other patches of traumatised tissue. I will never look the same again.

And so it was, finally, in terrible sadness (‘Depression’ is an ugly, barren word) that, feeling the pain of loneliness had reached its nadir, and seeing no future for myself, despite my first-year grades, and holding no past life of any quality or wholesomeness, that I took the pair of taxidermied Tiger Shark jaws that I had bought as a souvenir on my last diving trip, and, snapping the crescent-shaped maxilla in half with a pair of hobby pliers, took the piece of cartilage, filled with rows of razor-sharp serrated teeth, curved into squat ‘s’ shapes, and pressed them to my throat, on the inner right-hand side of my neck above the jugular vein and carotid artery, and began to saw, slicing into my sensitive tissue until the blood trickled in gleaming rows down my shoulder and onto my chest, in swift, precise repetitions, not to wound myself away this time, but quick and resolute in my desire for oblivion. My parents were in the house, but I could not care, and I knew I could act swiftly if I wanted to (or so I thought). But, as the wounds began to open, and sting, and as more blood emerged, I began to panic, the biological tool slicked in my hand, and hard to manoeuvre, and the wound grisly, little thick pieces of skin coated in my neck hair clogging against the teeth of the instrument, some snapping off at the tips from my angle of attack, and falling to be lost on the floor. I called out, in a loud moan of pain, and collapsed into my chair, nauseous and dim in my head, and my mother, hearing suddenly a great noise from next door, rushed into the room and gasped in abject horror.

“Benjamin!!! Oh God, Oh God, what have you done?!” and then to my father, “Billy! Quick! He’s cut his neck, and he’s bleeding badly! Get him in the car, quickly! We need to take him to the surgery!” and my father, impatient as always, but genuinely shocked too, moved into the room, and announced sharply, “sh*t! f**king hell!” (I had never heard him swear before), seeming very angry, but also concerned, as he picked me up, my mother rushing to apply gauze from her medicine cabinet to my neck and to stop the bleeding, as my head lolled limp to the side, my mouth dribbling slightly and my tongue poking out, and eyes closed, in despair at the world as much as in fading consciousness, the tool dropped from my hand now, and sitting on the floor red and gleaming, in a pile of bloody droplets.

I was sped down to the surgery in my father’s Favorit, and I do not remember the journey nor being there, but when next I felt clear again, I was at home, the same evening, and my neck was bandaged, the blood scrubbed from what was now in these years a laminate wood-look floor. All I felt was stiffness from bruising and a sharp, stinging scratch every time I moved my head from the thick bandages coating the surgical sutures and steri-strips all across my inner neck. I cannot remember what my parents said or what I replied with. Still, my mother sat with me that evening in my room, and, later, before bed, a priest was called to visit me, Father Brian O’Shea, who sat and chatted with me a while, asking what was on my mind (to which I could not reply) and saying prayers together, giving me a blessing before leaving, his face and manner kind but concerned.

It was not long before my psychiatrist was made aware, and I was soon called to a meeting with him with my mother by my side. “It’s a shame, but it’s clear what we’re doing isn’t quite enough so far,” he said, his tone distant and clinical and not particularly sympathetic, as if dealing with the return of a defective piece of machinery and not an innocent teenager in some emotional distress, “Benjamin will need a more intensive service. Now, I’ve contacted The Linden Centre, but currently, they don’t take on adolescents. I recommend Brookside Child and Adolescent Inpatient Unit to you. It’s a residential unit based in Goodmayes, in East London. I don’t know it personally, but the recommendations say their care is very effective. I’ve made some phone calls with the staff there, and you should drop Benjamin down this weekend, if possible. He may have to be there for over a month.”

My mother, not knowing any different and perhaps keen to have me out of the house for a little while (a tacit suspicion on my part), agreed, thanking the doctor and busying us out of the room, and for my part I remained silent, unsure now of what to say, finding the doctor useless and unempathetic to talk to (it took me over twenty years of interactions to fully understand that psychiatrists are not therapeutic listeners [emphasis by Ed.], and one should not expect from them what one would hope to receive from a compassionate psychologist), and fearful now, knowing I was to be taken somewhere completely new, where I would be away from my parents and my schooling, terrified that I would be in trouble for missing my lessons, having never skipped even a whole day before in my life, sad that I would not get to complete what I was studying, and prepare appropriately for my A2 exams, and that my hopes of university would be jeopardised on account of it. When I got home, I cried even more, in abject misery and worry, but I had no choice. The doctor had decided for me, and my mother (and later father) agreed. “It’ll be ok”, they said to me, “It’ll only be for a couple of weeks, and then, before you know it, you’ll be all better, just like the doctor says.”

Categories
Benjamin (commenter) Hojas Susurrantes (book)

Consumption, 6

My brief optimism in those weeks did not last. Soon enough, my mood plummeted back into its soft, sad hole, and my scalpel was in my hands again. This time, I did not tell my parents. I also tried my hardest to be more careful at school, wearing a long-sleeved underlayer and bandaging my arms with elasticated crepe bandages from my mother’s medical cabinet. Though still relatively containable, the damage I was inflicting increased, as did the frequency.

In between, I drifted in moody silence, occasionally breaking into vast floods of tears, up in my bedroom, soaking my pillow, or in the downstairs’ craft room’ sat in the corner on a wooden kitchen chair, the dining room long turned over to my burgeoning library, my computer, and a table of fantasy lead figures with a painting desk to one side. Contained, or so they thought, in my historical reading habits or my miniature painting, much time was still spent by myself, my parents “giving me some space”.

However, sometimes my Dad would come in and tell me to go to bed, his tone more irritable than usual, impatient with me in conversation, and his face grim, exhausted from his gruelling work, and less inclined to talk about our usual spread of cultural interests, or indeed my feelings, curt and prescriptive, asking me simply, “have you self-harmed today?” and accepting my denial at face value, then stomping out. In the evening, murmurs came from their bedroom. Occasionally, voices were raised, and my mother would appear on the stairs in tears. […]

Here we see not only that Benjamin’s parents lacked empathy for what was happening to their son, or rather, what they had been doing to their teenage son in conjunction with the abuse at school. As if that weren’t enough the parents used psychiatry: a fraudulent profession that, without medical evidence, makes big business with Big Pharma by claiming that all mental problems are biomedical. On my Spanish-language website you can read a section in which I expose how Giuseppe Amara, the psychiatrist my mother wanted to use to break my teenage will, had a sort of unspoken slogan: “Family problems, medical solutions”.

Naturally! If someone wants to profit from the pain of others, children included, they will never, ever side with the affected party. They will always side with those who can pay for their services, no matter how surreal it may be to drug a victim of, say, school bullying instead of rescuing the child from the insulting environment. In my trilogy I call this “psychiatric revictimisation”.

In biological psychiatry the environment is never questioned. All the blame is placed on the victim: his brain or genes. That is why Benjamin’s doctor simply prescribed him SRI antidepressants without making the slightest inquiry as to whether the problem had an existential cause, as was the case.

In my case, as I recount in Letter to mom Medusa, shortly after I tried to tell the psychoanalyst in his office what my parents were doing to me at home, Giuseppe Amara prescribed that they bombard my brain with the most incisive neuroleptic (even though I had no psychiatric symptoms)! Although it may seem incredible to unsuspecting readers, this is precisely how psychiatry works: the client, the father or mother, who requests his services is always right, and “he who pays the piper calls the tune” (children can never pay the so-called mental health professional).

But Benjamin did have symptoms. I don’t want to go into the details of how he self-harmed because it is very disturbing. Anyone who wants to find out can obtain a copy of his book. I just want to reiterate what I recently said in the comments section: We explain the internal process of the self-harmer on page 40 of my book Day of Wrath, and anyone who wants to delve deeper into the subject should read the entire chapter, not just page 40. Benjamin’s story continues:

A useless, stupid form, I had no reason now to look for justifications, settled into my pattern. I was simply a sinner, a wretched waste, and each new lunge at myself, conducted with fierce, black hatred and the coldest rage, cemented my necessity to continue. After all, I was evil now, and I had disappointed my parents, let down all around me, and betrayed the words of God. And the only cure for that weakness and that criminal lack of decency was to cut it better, however long it took, to redeem myself through pain, a pain I did not, at any point, enjoy, a terrible sensation wracking my pale, sensitive skin.

I shouldn’t be allowed to escape unpunished, I thought, clear to me; it was only right. I had upset them, scared them and hurt their feelings. My poor parents. What a monster I was. My head filled with rude swear words, names for myself, “the c**t”, “the bast*rd”, “the f**king idiot”. And so the blades went in, one by one then in tandem, clasped between fingers, in wincing gasps of agony and falling skin, and the days went on. “Please”, I pleaded with myself, “mercy”. “F**k you, you pathetic bast*rd”, I answered myself silently, “you did this”, “now shut up!”

This sort of Gollum’s warfare against the healthy part of his self denotes, according to our point of view in Day of Wrath, what Colin Ross calls “the locus of control shift”: something closely related to “the problem of attachment to the perpetrator” whom we are conditioned to love as children. Benjamin then includes another disturbing paragraph about the details of his self-harm, which I will also refrain from quoting. He then writes:

“Benjamin!” my father said in snappy annoyance. “Sit down here now and stop being so antisocial.” So I sat on the black leather upholstery of the sofa for a while and tried to smile a little more, listening to my aunties tell their jokes, pretending I couldn’t feel the detestable sensation under my clothes, an ever-present sting perched there, legs together, quiet and reserved, and riddled with hundreds of sharp little scratches, my burning surface partially skinned and my clothes slightly damp, distracted and cloudy in mind, just waiting to head upstairs again. […]

Shame had become guilt, and I was fused with self-hate, my rigged moral perfectionism inverting the reality of my historical situation, inculcated from such a young age with steady doses of mental poison that I was now at a critical threshold, as if in toxic shock.

In between these bouts of auto-sadism, I was still cogent and in full cognitive clarity, my intellectual faculties otherwise unaffected, and, provided they did not persist in making inquiries or watch me like a hawk (which did not become apparent to them until much later), I found other people did not notice anything was wrong. Though the pupils had heard of my first injuries from Josh, they had no idea of the scale, and I gather most considered it an isolated incident, a ‘fad’ that I would soon grow out of.

When I returned from Ireland in the new year, binning two of my shirts before leaving, washing out the stains from my jacket lining in the sink, and packing my suitcase, I was able to blend straight back into the school environment, continuing my lessons in the commencing term, with a little SSRI tablet a day, and nothing really to add to that, to all intents and purposes getting slightly better, or so everyone thought. Much as it was well understood that “he’s got Depression”, “he did this…” and “he’s ill now”, no one, curiously, had ever paused to ask me how I felt or to inquire what actually was wrong. […]

One day, near the end of the Spring term, not long before my AS exams, I was sitting in the dorm study room with another boy named Gerald, a half- Malaysian pupil whom I had a mild friendship with […] Gerald had caught me crying also, in the dorm and various quiet parts of the school, and soon after began to distance himself again, considering me “nuts” and “a bit of a head case”, disapproving of my distress, and frustrated that I didn’t just “snap out of it”.

Psychiatry is just the tip of the iceberg. The whole problem has to do with a society that wants to know nothing about existential problems—unless they are presented in theatrical tragedies, as the Greeks did, or in modern movies where the plot can be understood even by housewives. But if someone in real life wants to communicate that she suffers from a maddening dynamics with her mother, like the self-harmer woman in the film La Pianiste, she is generally ignored not only by those close to them, but also by so-called mental health professionals.

For example, in my trilogy I recount how my mother, who really was the crazy one in the house, projected her evil onto me and sent me to various professionals over the years. None of them wanted to listen to me. But the most shocking thing is something I confess in the third volume.

Only a very traditionalist priest, whom my mother suggested I go to on the advice of Mrs Eva Grimaldi, listened to me! The reason for this wouldn’t be understood in the least unless the reader is familiar with the critical literature on all mental health professions, whether pseudo-medical like psychiatry, or mere therapy with psychoanalysts or clinical psychologists. (See, for example, Against Therapy: Emotional Tyranny and the Myth of Psychological Healing by Jeffrey Masson, with whom I exchanged a brief correspondence several years ago.)

Categories
Benjamin (commenter) Psychiatry

Consumption, 5

Chapter Seventeen

My mind finally gave way a little way through the school year 2001. I had lasted as long as I could. My entire life was not one of much pleasure; it was just brief bursts of love in an otherwise barren tableau of shaming and shame. My pride in myself had never been able to develop, my confidence never given a chance to bloom, held back by cruel hands and eyes, sharp mouths, and the dispassion and dismissal of arrogant, narcissistic parents. But I did not think like that. All I could see, all of a sudden, and obsessively so, was my own fault and my own failings. My fundamental inadequacy was clear to me, and the only conscience that recognised an ‘I’ at all anymore exacerbated to a punishing inquisitor, sceptical of my abilities, suspicious of my every action, and with no pity for mistakes or petty misdemeanours.

So it was that, quietly, unannounced, and – perhaps unexpectedly and unbelievably – with no external prompting or copycat inspiration, purely of my own isolated volition, that I took the thin, technical craft knife, sharp as a scalpel, from my Games Workshop hobby kits, and began to scrape at myself, in the evenings late on after school, always careful to layer my toilet tissues first and to clean myself thoroughly so no one would know, a long superficial slit at a time, across my inner thighs, or my chest, or down to my private area, and my feet, and then back onto my right arm above the cuff of my school shirt, padding the tissues until the blood had ceased to trickle, tears in distant eyes, open and unblinking, and the softest mists inside. Gone. I wasn’t playing sports that year and was not required to undress for any school gym or athletics field, so I could always pass unseen. Plasters were a luxury, and I preferred the process to hurt. All because I was nothing, a bad nothing. In the head, the me that was Benjamin became an “it”, sensing myself in the third person, dehumanising myself, and no longer in recognition of the need to protect my body, wishing more than anything to whittle it away, this stuff, a piecemeal unravelling into oblivion, knife cut by knife cut, expressing how little and worthless I was in a more suitable presentation, red and inconsequential, and so what for the sensation? I was just meat. For all the terrible things I was and had done (which I liked to search for at length, with some imagination, writing down in my textbooks to assist, in case I ‘got off the hook’ and forgot). It was not that I was compelled nor impulsive. Still, slowly, methodically, and regularly, I knew what had to be done, as if a dark duty, the best I could do by moral choice to make up to the world, taking all this stupid, idiotic flesh and damaging it beyond repair. If I did not keep to this, I assured myself it would be worse for me later. A frigid discipline, I was a sadist to my trembling form. No one else was involved in this disgraceful, unrepented error, so no one else needed to know.

Still, it was impossible after a while to hide. A boy at school in my senior dorm, I forget which one (perhaps Josh, my roommate) spotted that my shirt was sticking to me one day and that I seemed stiff and laboured in breath, as if disguising discomfort, and uncovered the fact that I had been, as the popular idiom goes ‘cutting myself’. The clear fluids leaking from the infected wounds on my arm worried him terribly, and he encouraged me in horror and distaste to tell one of my parents, or he would have to tell someone.

So I told them, discussing the matter with my mother in the car one day, as best I could, downplaying the extent of my wounds and how long I had been pursuing this action. I told her I was sad, though, very sad. I didn’t want to show her at all. Still, the expression on her face, a gasp of total horror when she saw my skin underneath, rendered it too late to brush her aside or claim that the situation was not serious, much as I wished I could have kept my act up with more subtlety, and continued to fade unopposed, pulled apart into darkness. I’m not sure what she said to my father. He did not discuss the matter with me in person, his workload heavier in those years, often away for longer at weekends, and distant in the house, drained and tired by a massive joint effort with the European Space Agency to contribute to the NASA Mars probes, a final project with his Nortel workmates before his retirement, and based now in Maidstone, Kent, an even longer drive away, the latter company running into financial difficulties internally, and much stress in the office.

I was informed by my mother the day after that an appointment had been made for me with the local GP to examine my body and have a word with me. I felt dead as I filed into the familiar Writtle surgery. Nothing was clear to me anymore. In my own words, I stated to the doctor, “I’ve been hurting my body. And crying a lot, too.” And then I proceeded again to try and minimise, putting on a false smile and attempting to tell a joke, repeating to him, “It’s not that bad” and “I don’t know why I’m upset, must just be tiredness”, desperate not to have to speak any longer. Doctor Bailey, a long-term friend of the family who had treated me since I was an infant, did not seem so easily pacified, though. That same day, a referral was made to psychiatric practice on Broomfield Road, at the Child and Adolescent Service building (now Community Health Services), just down the road from the King Edward IV Grammar School and not far from the nursery I had briefly attended many years before. I was to meet with the doctor there as soon as possible, so how to best help me could be decided. Politely, I thanked the doctor and his assistant for examining me, for patching up my many wounds, and for providing antibiotics, and then I left again. I was unsure all of a sudden, finding myself in too deep and wishing more than anything that they would forget about me. […]

The meeting with the psychiatrist was brief and uneventful. He sat in a chair opposite mine on the upstairs floor, the room otherwise empty and forgettable, and asked me what had been going on. “I don’t know,” I said, “I’m just very sad, that’s all” He nodded. “And how long have you been doing this for?” […]

“Oh, I haven’t been cutting myself long,” I told him, “just for a while”, leaving my answer vague, unsure as to what he might do and if I would get in trouble for answering him. “OK,” he said, making another note. “The GP told me it’s superficial. It’s a common enough problem these days. Some people just get the urge to draw a bit of attention to themselves. It’s something that can be worked on. Anyway, go on…” […]

I told him, “I don’t like the Winter weather either. It’s so dark and cheerless, and it rains all the time. I wish it were Spring again. I was happier in Spring.” “Is that right?” he said, looking up at me suddenly from his notepad. […]

Presently, the interview ended. “I’ll tell you what’s going to happen”, the doctor said, “I think you need some medication to make you better. It sounds like you’re suffering from what might be Depression with a Seasonally Affective Disorder component. I’m going to write a note to your GP, and he’ll provide you with some tablets which will help you. The medication is called Citalopram. It’s a recent development and is very effective for your symptoms. Take one 10mg tablet daily with a glass of water as soon as you wake up, and we’ll continue to monitor your progress every few months.” He finished speaking and motioned for me to rise.

Not knowing what else to say, I thanked the doctor and headed out the door to my mother’s car outside to pop home quickly and change into my school clothes so as not to miss afternoon lessons. Later that day, my mother went down to the pharmacy on Writtle Green and handed in my prescription, and soon enough, the carton was in my hands. Knowing something had been done, I felt a little happier and shrugged regardless. It was a busy school year, and my AS levels demanded much attention. If the tablets could help me, all for the better. At least, I thought, they can’t do any harm. From then on, dutifully, my father would hand me a small tablet every morning, and I would swallow it straight down with water, this tiny white pill, slightly sweet on my tongue.

 

______ 卐 ______

 

The book of Benjamin can be obtained here!

Categories
Autobiography Benjamin (commenter)

Consumption, 4

Chapter Fifteen

In 1999, my mother was diagnosed with lung cancer. She had been suffering from a chest infection, and though the usual treatments of antibiotics had been administered, her condition did not improve. […]

This was of no consequence to my bullies, though. By that age I was living between lessons in a dormitory, the pupils separated into independent ‘houses’ that competed with one another in sport and singing competitions […]

Naturally, free from adult condemnation or reprimand, they continued to mock her to my face, telling me that “it would be funny if she died” and reminding me as if in sincerity and the vulgar slang of the day that she was “still fit though” and thus “shaggable.” The worst culprits for this were Chris and Tim. Their horrible words left me shaken to my core and weary, damaged, appalled that they would be so weak and so feral as to, in effect, pass above me to insult my mother long distance, a sadly all too common line of child-on-child abuse that I have always considered extremely below the belt. […]

“Hello there! I’m Ben’s mum; I’m a fat, ugly Irish c**t!” My mother was still in her acute phase of healing in real life at this point, having just left the London hospital following her two-week window and in recuperation in Chelmsford’s Broomfield. It was not the worst insult I had heard from one of them over the cruel months, but it was enough. Something I had never felt before welled up in me, a piercing column of dark flame and red-hot rage filling my consciousness.

I slammed out of my desk and stared at him with pure hatred, not saying a word. Never before had I tackled a bully, but I knew my body was stronger, and I was now well over six feet tall, and besides, I was angry. Without a second passing, I reached out, grabbing him by the throat with my right hand and squeezing, and picked him up a little by the neck, pinning him to the wall of the cubicle. My fingers squeezed tight around his windpipe, feeling the warm flesh in my hand, that physical connection, his stiff surprise, and all the pounding intensity of full on contact aggression. Then, pushing him to one side, him yelping, his eyes wide in shock, spluttering and choking, I glanced over at the first-floor window, motioning that I was going to throw him out of it. “What the hell did you say!” I shouted at him, gritting my teeth, snarling in inchoate rage, “You’re the f**king c**t!!” and his struggling face writhed in panic, in total surprise and fear. Only then did I let go and heard him immediately say, and in fluster, “I’m sorry, Ben! I’m sorry, okay? I’m sorry!” I had no more trouble with him on the matter after that.

By now, my anger had faded, still more melancholic by nature than aggressive enough to be able to defend myself adequately in the long run, a painful consequence of the years of torment and sorrow before. I felt awful that I had felt compelled to use swear words, especially words of that calibre, and, despite the circumstances of the incident, I remember taking what I had said to Confession with me at Our Lady Immaculate and what I had done, re-wording it to the priest a little to downplay Tim’s words, and the context of our fight, embarrassed and torn, feeling myself morally culpable, despite being in defence of my mother. […]

Knowing of this incident, the other boys ignored me instead of directly confronting me with their mockery and put-downs. They were never really my friends, and I knew then that I was never well liked, not even by the quieter, less popular pupils who could tolerate my company. I had shown them something in me that they had never seen before, and, perhaps unfairly, they distrusted me for it and considered me above all “really weird”, if not “a psychopath”, words of ignorance and judgement which have always hurt me. I never again had the personal necessity to physically engage a pupil at that school with my newfound rage. However, I was no better in confidence despite my defensive act, too used still to my long years of passively suffering violent attacks before that, and a sad, shy boy.

Time paced on slowly, and I moved on in my emptied, silent spaces, always lonely, watching happiness from the sidelines, already missing a world I had never been privy to. I just did my work when I could and slipped away, looking to the sky and the woods and the fields and pacing out alone down the bleak countryside tracks to the side of the river a mile off to lie by the soft banks of the water and cry, returning in the twilight, with no expression on my face.

 

______ 卐 ______

 

Editor’s Note:

In the first instalment of this series, I mentioned that a mudblood migrant raped Benjamin when he was six years old, the age at which he appears in this photograph. In that instalment, I didn’t include the photo because I posted another one: the location of the rape, which Benjamin visited many years later as part of his introspection and self-therapy.

On the 27th of last month, I moved from Yautepec to the neighbourhood where I spent the best years of my childhood and early adolescence and, alas, also my middle teens: when my parents began to treat me psychotically. My intention to return here was also self-therapeutic. In the photograph on the right I appear during the last year when I was very happy: the overt abuse at home hadn’t yet begun…

Categories
Benjamin (commenter) Islamization of Europe

Consumption, 3

Chapter 13

There are things I’d rather not mention in this post out of modesty; at the very least, I won’t include passages from this chapter with graphic details (let those interested purchase the book!). Suffice it to say that when Benjamin was eleven and twelve years old, a Pakistani boy, the son of very wealthy parents and a schoolmate, tried to initiate him sexually: something that naturally disgusted and horrified the White boy. I was also horrified, but for other reasons as well.

In 2017, in the context of the Harvey Weinstein scandal, actor Anthony Rapp stated that in 1986 he had been sexually harassed by Kevin Spacey during a Hollywood party when Rapp was fourteen years old. When the Spacey scandal broke, I told myself that I couldn’t differ more in my morals than these scandalised Americans, who, as good Christians and neochristians, focused solely and exclusively on Spacey’s behaviour (even atheists have internalised the infinite nonsense that “life is individual”).

It seemed obvious to me that Spacey was only the last link in a chain of degeneration: degeneration initiated by Rapp’s parents, who allowed the beardless teenager to go to a degenerate party; the vices surrounding Hollywood, and Western culture in general, which has been in a downward spiral since the 1960s and continues to fall. (Compare, for example, the 1956 film about Van Gogh that I recently linked to on this site with the crap that contemporary Westerners smear on their brains every day.) In other words, the POV of those who were scandalised by Spacey eight years ago focuses solely on the actor, as if everyone else were innocent, including Rapp’s parents.

This comes to mind when commenting on what happened to Benjamin with the Pakistani because it is similar. Who was the Saruman who brought those Orcs to Middle-earth? I recently said that our passion shouldn’t be to study the infinite universe, but rather the infinite Aryan stupidity. Hard science—in fact, almost everything studied in universities—is for madmen who fall into the well, like Thales of Miletus. The mind must be used in this Age… to understand the mind! Only if the Aryan race passed that test, and reached a world that resembled Maxfield Parrish’s with no one on earth whose skin was the colour of poo, would it make sense to think about the stars.

Well, when I read chapter 13 of Consumption I boiled with rage when I realised that the Pakistani’s obscenities were only the last link in a chain that began in the second half of the 1940s, when after WW2 the British government began, very gradually at first, to import Orcs to the island of beautiful English roses. And Benjamin’s parents, according to the anecdotes the writer recounts in the chapter, behaved in a pretty similar manner to the UK government. The nauseating thing that happened to the autobiographer, perpetrated by the Pakistani Tariq, was nothing more than the last link in a perverse chain in which even the school, the teachers and the other pupils were involved because of the anti-white zeitgeist.

It makes me so mad to imagine the possibility that this Orc of very rich parents could have seduced English roses that I don’t want to quote a single line from that chapter. It should be obvious to racialists who are not crazy—that is, those who don’t subscribe to monocausalism, attributing all evil to the Jews—that the corruption of the Aryan spirit has reached astronomical levels to allow such things (recently, there has been much talk in racialist forums about the rape of English pubescent girls by Pakistani gangs).

If the white man fails to look himself in the mirror, for only by looking it would he see the monster that Dorian Grey saw in the painting, his race will perish. The sad thing is that many sectors of white nationalism share the self-serving myth that only Jews are responsible for our misfortunes as if we had no autonomy or will to rebel, say, against the pestilent merde that is currently seen in virtually every Hollywood film, on Netflix, on mobile phones and even taught in schools and universities.

Categories
Benjamin (commenter) Neanderthalism

Exchange

Editor’s Note: My recent exchange with
Benjamin this morning is worth a post:

 

______ 卐 ______

 

Benjamin said: The most offensive comment I ever get from anyone in my life on anything creative or meaningful (presenting books, paintings, articles, whatever…) is ‘oh, that’s interesting’. One knows the person couldn’t give a damn about you at that point. It’s simply filler, as they never, ever elaborate why. I’m still thinking about presenting Consumption to my eldest aunt – one of my mother’s surviving sisters, and the closest to me growing up – but I know it’ll either be ‘oh that’s interesting’ or ‘that’s very sad you write that’, and ‘ I’ll have to give it some thought’, or stub words to that effect, cutting off all further emotion, discussion and commitment.

I should say, I think the only reason my mother wanted to read my book at first was to humour me, then increasingly to prove me wrong (I was critically examined over many sections), and finally in tears when she realised she couldn’t, she kind of softened towards me. I find it a tragedy she died so soon afterwards, and I never got to discuss it with her. All I know is she agreed (or if she still didn’t on anything she’s taken it into the ground with her).

Dad will never read it, that’s for sure. If you forced him to, his response would be to tut and call it fantasy, and then if I persisted, to shout at me, and to cut me off forever in rage and social embarrassment. I wrote a spurious book many years ago briefly mentioning Dad’s conduct and he did read a few lines of that one, and I remember all he said was “you don’t make me look very good in this”, and laughed a little, as if what I had written was hysterical nonsense, or a big neurotic running joke, unable always to twig that he simply wasn’t ‘very good’ to me, no. It’s not even denial.

I’m sorry for your tragedies, and for your uncle’s death. I’d like to hope that what happened to Corina and Octavio (and his daughter) cannot happen again. But how does one change society on this taboo issue if no one is prepared to read these books – or always too little too late? I suppose one can still put them out there, and hope. I always wanted psychiatry destroyed in my lifetime. I don’t think that’ll happen though, although I see it as a major gatekeeper to the (parental) trauma model being understood by the public.

I think I use you as my witness personally. I hope it isn’t an imposition. Ideally, I would have had a family or local friends to go to, but their silence and standoffish ignorance on this matter is galling. I’m not used to being asked what’s wrong.
 

I responded: That’s precisely why the encounter in my life of someone like Paulina, the first person who took pity on me, was so important even though it happened more than twenty years after my teens (what Miller calls an “enlightened witness”). Ideally, someone should appear when you’re being abused as a child. That and only that could have saved us (what Miller calls a “helping witness”). The sad thing is that many didn’t have either…

And when it comes to the mental health professions, psychiatry is the way the System defends itself; like the Inquisition defended the Roman Church against the dissidents of the time. Thomas Szasz wrote a book comparing psychiatry to the Inquisition, and he said something that stuck with me: “An Inquisition [like psychiatry] cannot be reformed, only abolished”.

Indeed, and this shows that even people like Colin Ross, the current proponent of the trauma model, are still lost on this point—like John Read et al., who believe that change is possible within academia. They’re like white nationalists who believe that voting for Trump can bring about change. In fact, WN is another variant of country-club conservatism as Michael O’Meara put it, an American who knows French.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
 

Benjamin said: So it seems, as with the other issues we discussed recently, that it’s come down to this again: the necessity of a (violent, it’s obvious there is no other sort) revolution, in this as in all areas… what we really mean by bringing down the System, across all its entangled branches and avenues. Everything has reached a multi-faceted dead end otherwise… science, technology, academia, health, family wellbeing… the race itself is long-stalled biologically, at least since the Cro-Magnon era. I suppose the only thing to do now is to school would-be revolutionaries and auxiliary radicals on why they’re fighting (or will be fighting), which I suppose is what this site functions as, beyond your autobiographical space.

Personally, from what I note, the 4 words ["Eliminad todo sufrimiento innecesario" —Ed.] seem far harder for people to latch onto and assimilate than the vaguer, more generalised concept of the 14, even though I see both as to some degree synonymous, or semi-symmetric perhaps.

Eventually we’ll have to go somewhere else for those sorts of conversations. I’m not sure of the prudence of me continuing to type this even, right out in the open. The stepping stone from the theoretical to the practical is the hardest for me to strategize, the point where mutual internal jihad had reached its zenith, so to speak, and there should then instead be organization, and such, etc.

Anyway, I’m getting ahead of myself. I know I’ve found it very frustrating for decades, where no one has really taken the slightest bit of interest (care) in my history, and yet have still professed to being my friends… ‘twigging’, and realising in clarity the scale of this problem across our race drives one to want to act, and as soon as possible (even though there is no way to do that currently).
 

I responded: No: there’s no way to do it, and you can see what happened to our friend Tyrone for even suggesting it on podcasts (although years ago his parents put him in a psychiatric hospital for a while, now the System has locked him up for seven years!).

Mauricio liked my Paths of Glory metaphor. Kirk Douglas’s soldiers couldn’t go out to fight because of the hail of bullets. It was a time of staying in the trenches in a state of exasperation, but necessary…

The degenerate Aryan I recently saw in Europe is still in “happy mode”. Several sociopolitical, economic, and especially energy catastrophes will have to converge for him to enter “angry mode”; eventually a defensive “combat mode” and finally “killing mode” (bloody revolution). In the meantime, they’re behaving like lobotomised eunuchs.

Unlike Europeans, racialist Americans are no longer lobotomized: they’re beginning to think. But they’re still eunuchs. Otherwise they would already be talking about how to bring Turner’s diaries into the real world.
 

Benjamin said: P.S. I just re-read the, as you say, epistolary scold from Corina. I was particularly struck by the lines (and can only imagine how much they hurt and infuriated you):

“The damage is done and only you can fix it.”

and

“…not all people in the world are therapists or psychiatrists or psychoanalysts and we don’t want to hear about problems, let alone such serious ones. We are normal people who run away from problems. We are not interested and cannot do anything about it.”

Both directly echo things my partner has said to me before when I raise the issue of my childhood with her, the first being the equivalent of ‘just let it go’ (which is impossible naturally short of developing dementia, and translates literally as ‘repress yourself again’), or ‘get over it’ (a callous statement in itself indicating their lack of patience/empathy more than any psychological insight – they don’t realise you’re trying to do that, and can only do that if listened to). And the second a terrible misunderstanding – you are at first not looking for change, just to be listened to at all: as another example, in my case I didn’t want to be taken out of my environment when I emailed my Tyrolean penpal Harald about latter-day trauma, nor would it have been possible for him to do so, I just wanted to be listened to long-distance… also, as if one needed a license or a professional qualification to be a compassionate listener! Their ‘we’re not therapists’ line is simply a cop out to avoid them of their responsibility.

I can see why Corina wrote why she did then, as it’s all too common to, as you say, see things backwards, putting again all responsibility for both the experiences and the healing process onto the victim. People are so quick to give this prescriptive black pedagogy ‘advice’, or otherwise to act non-committal with the silent treatment, or wash their hands of the matter. Another reason I’d like vast swathes of the population exterminated, as by your 4 words doctrine – if they really can’t develop empathy for these matters then they’re simply a liability in general.
 

I responded:

Corina was the only one who saw what my parents were doing to me when I was a teenager, but she didn’t confess it to me because she was fourteen years old, and when she tried to tell my mother, she only received a slap in the face, which ended the argument for decades, until Corina herself developed paranoid symptoms, although in her lucid moments we were finally able to communicate.

But when Cori wrote that letter she was acting as an agent of the System, what Miller calls “poisonous pedagogy”. Szasz hits the nail on the head when he said that psychiatry is like paediatrics: instead of listening, they try to lecture the victim (although Szasz never fully grasped the trauma model).

All these people giving advice don’t realise that what they’re doing is similar to telling the messenger who has just escaped the clutches of someone like Jeffrey Dahmer, and wants to alert his neighbours that there’s a serial killer in the block to calm down; to seek professional help, to forgive and forget, to not suffer from self-pity but take a stress pill instead, etc. The result of this insane deafness? Another victim of the serial killer!

This crazy example is not a false analogy.

If my grandmother Yoya had listened to me during the anecdote I tell at the beginning of “Nobody Wanted to Listen” she could have acted as my helping witness, intervened to the best of her humble ability (my parents had the power), and prevent my crucifixion and, in the years to come, prevent Corina’s psychological catastrophe too. But we lacked a helping witness.

All this explains, in effect, why I have developed an exterminationist philosophy. The current version of Homo sapiens remains a kind of Homo sapiens neanderthalensis in the sense that it still needs to be greatly ennobled.

Categories
Benjamin (commenter) Child abuse

Consumption, 2

Chapter Eleven

Public education, in general, was a nightmare for me at Felsted Preparatory School and then at the senior school. My first steady experience of terrible loneliness and a source of daily fear and sadness; I was bullied relentlessly for almost ten years, day in and day out, never accepted by the other pupils, and always an ostracised outsider, quiet, timid, and increasingly morose… [page 65]

Most of my school days were spent alone, hiding from bullies and ignoring specific routes and chokepoints through the expansive country public school, always scared, sad and low, expecting the worst, and often getting it, still ambushed outside, mocked daily, and beaten up at times…

Ten years experienced in social silence, bar the routine shaming and fear and embarrassment, I’m surprised I lasted it at all, very used to tears and harrowing isolation, always sad, and shielded in my thoughts, hidden away with no one to talk to, knowing I had no one to back me up or to console me. Anything I thought, found interest in, or was moved by was forever off-limits, unsaid, and unacknowledged. It’s as if I didn’t exist there.

I would occasionally tell my parents, but nothing was ever done, and they barely noticed my intense suffering and sadness. I learned to keep it all inside and that it was not worth commenting on to them, as it would bring me no comfort in the aftermath. My mother continued to socialise with the mothers of my many bullies. She remained in friendly contact with them for many years afterwards, sending me occasional cards and letters telling me how those parents’ offspring were doing and the successes they experienced as they got older and began to attend and then graduate from university, getting married and having children, winning awards, and establishing lucrative careers. Having naturally assumed I was ok without consultation and having not paid any attention back then, they never asked me how things were, maintaining firm historical blindness and deeply selective memories, and their historical narrative now is that my childhood was happy, safe, and blemish free, totally oblivious to the entirety of that torture, a great insult to me, and the most frustrating sense of terrible, damning betrayal, brushing me off, a stiff upper lip, and a natural lack of all concern. My mother was interested only in preserving her social status, any adult conversations touching on her behaviour swiftly developing into a relentless doubling down of “Benjamin! Look…” and “I think you’re misinterpreting me”, and “I think you’re imagining me misbehaving,” and “think of all the good things I do for you”…

I’ve never once heard either of them volunteer of their own free will to apologise to me. My Dad can occasionally capitulate, as if put out, in deadpan emotionlessness or snappy anger, to shut me up, a sharp, empty “fine! I’m sorry, I’ve said it, can we move on now?” where one knows he does not feel remorse in the slightest and is merely exasperated. My Mum cannot even reach this level… [pages 68-69]

I sometimes wonder if my grades could have been higher were I not always so set-upon and scared and low, distracted, hurt, and worried. Accustomed to this treatment and with no other, better experience to compare it to, I carried on in quiet, emptied melancholia, longing impotently for friendship, company, and warmth… [page 71]

Categories
Autobiography Benjamin (commenter) Child abuse

Consumption, 1

“The stars are not for man” —Karellen in the novel Childhood’s End.

As I said in the comments section of my previous post today, it is foolish to be a cosmologist when your race is being actively destroyed. This is not the time to fantasise about space travel, but rather to travel into inner space; that is, to fulfil the mandate of the Oracle of Delphi. A quote already cited in this blog (and on a page of my Day of Wrath) sheds light on the subject:

Only a ripe artist, one thoroughly acquainted with the workings of the mind, can be successful here. This is why psychological self-portraiture has appeared so late among the arts, belonging exclusively to our own days and those yet to come. Man had to discover continents, to fathom his seas, to learn his language, before he could turn his gaze inward to explore the universe of his soul.

We are commanded to know the universe of our own soul! I iterate: it is madness to start planning interstellar travel without first knowing oneself, knowledge that implies knowing what causes the darkest hour of the West. That is why it is worth quoting some passages from Benjamin’s book, Consumption, whose blurb I quoted a couple of days ago.

The key to understanding psychosis is what Colin Ross calls the problem of attachment with the perp, a concept explained in my Day of Wrath. Well into the book, Benjamin wrote:

I love my father. It is the deepest, most intrinsic love and one I could never shift or diminish, even if I wanted to. It brings me to tears as I think about it… But then I remember (and how could I forget?) these terrible childhood tortures on my father’s part…

One of the things Neanderthals don’t want to understand is that the mind is like the body: it has a breaking point. Primitive people, whom we revile as “Neanderthals”, seem to be saying—so alienated are they by their work ethic—that despite all mistreatment the human mind is infinitely resilient. The truth is that, just as it is not the same for the body to fall from one metre, three metres or from an aeroplane, the same is true of the mind: there are orders of magnitude in which the self can, literally, break.

In Benjamin’s life, and I am not only referring to his first trauma with his father when he was just five years old (the “apple episode” that I won’t recount here), there was also trauma at school. I am referring not only to bullying but also to the rape by a traitorous government that imported non-whites, including teenagers, due to the self-hatred that the English have suffered since 1945: a madness, alas, shared by the entire West.

I would like to quote a passage from Consumption after the rape of a mudblood that the author experienced at the age of six:

…I cannot remember as she [his mother] drove down the long evening lanes, the sun reddening in a haze over the yellow fields, and I sat way down in the seat, the seatbelt pulled down over my stomach, my legs curled up tight in the lock of my forearms, foggy, and faint in mind, with soreness all over, and with nothing I could have been able, or, tragically, allowed to say.

I never mentioned this incident to my parents afterwards, not once, for at least twenty-eight years, though I knew of it the while, even when they were, in some way, aware that I had had bad times at school. They still have no real clue, and I was brushed aside with an “Oh, that’s terrible. Oh, did that happen to you? How awful!” of polite disbelief when I did mention it to my mother, crying and raging down the phone, her reception the same as if it were a coffee morning anecdote in passing, or a fanciful tale for inadvertent amusement, as narrated by my aunt in one of her drunken outbreaks of hysteria. Each new time I tried, periodically over years, I’d hear an “Oh? Really? That’s not good to hear” from her, as if her memory too was missing over the occurrences, and she was instead hearing for the first time, and, dogmatically, she has always been known to tell others that “his early life was good” and “no, nothing ever happened to him, he had a good life with us” and words to that effect, all a further torture for me, as if she was honest, and as if it were her place (and her place alone) to say…

The gulley where I was molested

I did not blame my mother at the time for not helping me, and was unsure even how she could have. I could not register the pain myself and, bizarrely, forgot soon enough as times moved on, relegating it to a small corner pocket of an otherwise full and engaged mind, but as an adult, I raged mercilessly at her for her disbelief and was more than wounded.

This is where the soul murder only begins, plunging the child into a spiral of amplifying abuse until his mind collapses. When parents without empathy don’t understand, or do not want to understand, why their child no longer wants to get along with their schoolmates, instead of blaming the environment they blame the child: courtesy of biological psychiatry, although there are still professionals who realise that the fault did not lie with the child. Benjamin tells us:

Indeed, my thorough lack of interest in football was one of the prime reasons that my parents, in some heightened suspicion of me, took me at this age [seven years old] down to the village surgery to request an autism evaluation…

…given that I was used to being heavily bullied, “he dislikes noisy groups of children.” Though the GP listened to their unfounded complaints, did a few simple tests on me, and gave me the all-clear almost immediately, telling them quite bluntly to go away and stop speculating, I was left upset by this lack of faith on their parts, and the initial zeal of their incorrect sentiment offended me a little, acknowledging to myself that, for some frustrating reason, they had been swift to pathologise my innocuous – and totally normal – childhood behaviours, and still somehow, despite capitulating outwardly, could not entirely take the doctor’s firm “no” for an answer, confident in thinking themselves equipped to know my health better.

In the coming days I will continue reading Consumption. For now, the above quote provides a clear idea not only of the literary genre that Benjamin and I want to inaugurate, but also of why studying inner space is infinitely more important than studying outer space. The first may save the white race from its ongoing self-destruction; the second may not.

The stars are not for man.

Categories
Benjamin (commenter) Child abuse

Consumption:

Memories of my Childhood (back cover)

by Benjamin

 
A candid psychiatric autobiography on the guilt, shame, fear, and long-term trauma instigated by parental emotional abuse in a toxic environment of schoolyard bullying, medical malpractice, molestation, and harrowing physical violence, and the spiralling personal consequences for a wounded childhood.

Beginning when Benjamin was not yet a toddler, this heart-wrenching account tracks his sad dissolution across his early life, up through school, and into the climax of the depression that engulfed his late teenage years, culminating in a terrifying and destructive psychosis and the effective murder of his soul.

Inspired by the writings of Alice Miller, César Tort, and John Modrow, this two-book life history seeks to create a new literary genre, that of vindictive autobiography, where the painful abuses of Benjamin’s parents are spelled out in full detail, and, contrary to the ‘wisdom’ of most modern psychological therapies, they are held to account and not forgiven.

As Benjamin explains:

I love my Mum and Dad, but forgiveness is not a one way street, and they have never assimilated their responsibility, apologised, or tried to make things right, instead foisting me with further trauma on the cynical, pseudoscientific victim-blaming of the orthodox psychiatric industry.

Though I was raised as a strict Catholic, my writings seek to repudiate the fourth commandment, remembering the words of Friedrich Nietzsche in Twilight of the Idols: ‘When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one’s feet.’

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Editor’s note: Benjamin’s book is available here.