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Category: Child abuse

Categories
Autobiography Child abuse

Consumption, 16

Editor’s 2 cents:

In chapter 14, we read that the father said the following to his son:

“I don’t know what you have to complain about, Benjamin; you’ve never suffered!” He has repeated this mantra several other times over the years. It was the final nail in the coffin.

This sentence perfectly portrays what a “schizogenic” father is: he who “schizophrenises” his son. The father’s repeated statement—which reminds me of what my mother used to say to me after my parents and a psychoanalyst crucified me at seventeen (and I could no longer pursue a career)—not only denotes a colossal lack of empathy towards his son, but also a complete reversal of the facts (in real life Ben suffered a maddening hell)!

Anyone who wants to understand why narcissistic parents are capable of these maddening inversions of reality could watch Richard Grannon’s videos on narcissism. However, Grannon, like other YouTubers, focuses on adults who have a narcissistic partner. In my opinion, all these channels are cowardly because the adult can easily cut off the narcissistic partner. On the other hand, as Alice Miller tells us, the child doesn’t have that option! He (or she) has to stay at home and put up with the schizogenic behaviour of the narcissistic parent (who, due to his infinite sin of pride, is unable to see the beam in his eye) until the abusive behaviour blows the child’s mind, as happened to Benjamin.

I am currently in a serious predicament because, after my siblings sold our parents’ mansion, my financial situation has become precarious. Even so, I believe I must continue translating my work on this subject although of course, instead of using Benjamin’s life as the basis for my explanation, I use my own.

Categories
Child abuse Pseudoscience

Consumption, 14

Those familiar with Jeffrey Masson’s work know that he is a critic of psychoanalysis and misnamed psychotherapies. Although this series has focused on psychiatry, as I have said in my books so-called “therapy” is the little sister of big brother: the psychiatrist. Both operate within the family and social dynamics of blaming the victim and exonerating the perpetrator: usually the victim’s parent.

In the following pages of Consumption, from those already cited in the previous instalment, I read about a shameful case that exemplifies this. In a “family therapy” session, a psychotherapist sided a hundred per cent with Benjamin’s father—the perp!—and, in the days that followed, when Ben no longer wanted to go to “therapy”, the therapist officially turned against Ben through an insulting psychoanalysis, in a letter addressed to his parents and even an academic article.

Normies have a wildly distorted idea of psychotherapy: the fantasies with which Hollywood and television brainwash us. In reality, siding with the perpetrator is extremely typical of the so-called mental health professions, whether it be psychiatry or all kinds of “psychotherapies” in talking sessions.

Unlike what I did in the previous post, here I won’t quote long paragraphs about how the female therapist only added insult to injury to the already victimised son. I have experienced something similar to what happened to Benjamin with the therapists hired by my mother more than once. What it takes adult children years to understand is that the therapist acts as a professional whose client is a kind of mobster who hires the services of a lawyer. Just as the Corleone family’s lawyer never, ever sides with the law but with the mobster, the therapist always serves the person who pays him.

Those of us who like Jeffrey Masson, Benjamin and I, know that all the therapies offered by the System are iatrogenic (counterproductive) can be counted on the fingers of one hand. Psychiatry is iatrogenic through its neurotoxins, and “psychotherapy” is iatrogenic through its continued campaign of insulting the child-victim, as happened to the author of Consumption (pages 224-234 of the copy I own).

Categories
Child abuse Film

Consumption, 12

Regarding the sixth chapter (five pages) of the second book of Consumption, I would like to quote this passage:

Mum was patient with me in her response, a brief irritation crossing her face as she considered Dad’s encouragement of atheism in me. She paused for a second, thought hard, and then replied, “you can believe whatever you want, Benjamin. I’m not stopping you. But I’d say to pray tonight and ask God to help you come to terms with things.”

“He’ll [his father] hate me, Mum.”

“No, no, it’ll be ok, son, he’s a patient person, and he loves you boundlessly; I think he’ll listen to you, provided you’re polite and respectful. Just see if this helps, ok?”

The big problem with “poisonous pedagogy” is that it idealises the figure of the father to the point of considering him a kind of God the Father in his relationship with his son. The quoted paragraph reminds me of a scene from LOTR, which also appears in Peter Jackson’s movie, in which Gandalf lies to Faramir, claiming that his father loves him when in fact he wants him dead (five years ago I talked about the lie of the “sage” Gandalf here).

In real life, unlike in fairy tales some parents not only love but hate their children at the same time: that’s why they have broken minds. As Ronald Laing once said, despite the claims of biological psychiatry, those who are labelled schizophrenic do have broken minds: their psyches are divided by this Jekyll-Hyde behaviour of the abusive parent.

What I have been quoting from Consumption gives an idea of the nightmare Benjamin lived through.

But for those looking for Hollywood-style entertainment, I would suggest watching Shine, which Ben and I saw yesterday (albeit separated by the Atlantic). Like Consumption, that film, which won an Oscar for Best Actor, gives a fairly good idea of how an abusive father can schizophrenise the son he loves most!

Categories
Child abuse

Consumption, 10

Book 2

Chapter Two

Though I hoped I would have learned from these incidents, I am afraid to say that (to my mind) I had cause to fight with my father a third time in these cold, desperate weeks. My father does not learn or change. Of all the incidents, it was the most severe. It lingers with me even today in a mind that has by now forgotten most of my childhood and adolescent pain, blotting it out over long years of blood and agonising tears, if only for survival, and to the point that most of my anecdotes are hard to recall, and require concentrated thought to recount, even when the vague circumstances of them are still intrusive enough psychologically, and as if on the tip of my tongue.

I was in the car with my mother and father this time, being driven back from Chelmsford one Saturday afternoon, where we had attended the shopping centre. Due to my leg length, I sat in the front seat of the family Škoda and my mother in the rear on the right, behind Dad’s seat. My friend Ami was in the back seat behind me, and Dad was talking with her at the time, discussing her troubles. For once, he seemed empathetic in a manner that he would never have been with me if I had mentioned my own misery to him.

“So why do you think your own life isn’t going well, Ami? What’s getting you down?” my father said, asking her about her problems openly and in a warm manner that disguised the forwardness of his statement. She had been in his company a few times before, but he did not know my friend well, bar to know that we had both been in Brookside together. Ami had now moved back to her parents’ home in Loughton.

“Well, Billy,” she replied, more openly than I would ever have been able to, having been given a chance I never had to open up already in the hospital, and thus perhaps more used to intimate life discussions, talking to him as matter-of-factly as to a familiar therapist, lines that she had said out loud many times before, “I’m afraid I’ve had problems since I was a child. My mother was an alcoholic, and my father didn’t deal well with this. Aside from that, I was raped when I was younger. It shattered me. I’ve got OCD now, and Depression, as well as Dissociative Identity Disorder. I share my head with a woman named Anna and a couple of other people, and she talks to me with them, and in my own voice at times, too.”

Dad gasped a little and then nodded understandingly. Unused to psychiatric ideas as I knew he was, I was taken aback by his patience, as if Ami had announced the most normal and straightforward thing in the world. Embarrassing to my conscience, a brief stab of jealousy shot through me as I realised then that if I had said something similar, Dad would have scoffed as he always did or given me a quizzical look. Then, a sudden irritation entered his tone, bordering on great anger, “That’s awful, Ami. Who was it? Who did this to you? Tell me his name; I’ll kill him! I’ll kill him!”

Dad continued his gesture of rage all the rest of the way down the road until we reached the front door of number 44. The vengeful promise on his part seemed genuine and unforced. I sympathised with Ami very much, already aware of her life circumstances and to far greater detail, but I was silently annoyed at my father by then, and very much. He would never have responded the same way had it been me reporting to him. Later that day, this thought was pressing on my mind, so I mentioned it to Ami, hoping she would not take my worries as an offence. Thankfully, she seemed to understand me and said, in a small yet supportive voice, “Ben, I know what you mean. I’m really sorry to hear. To be honest, please don’t get upset, but I think your Dad is a real arsehole to you… so many times I’ve seen him picking on you, and he speaks to you like total sh*t…”

A great tide of emotion welled up in me then. I thanked Ami profusely for what she had said. It was the first time someone had ever mentioned Dad’s long conduct towards me openly. Then she said, “It’s probably because he doesn’t know what happened to you; perhaps you should tell him. I know it’s hard, but when I told my father, it helped me a lot, and then I found I could open up to Mel and the rest of the unit staff back at Brookside… tell him in your own time. But definitely open up. At the moment, he’s cold and rude towards you because he doesn’t understand.” I nodded. It seemed she was right.

In the evening, Dad was kind enough to drive Ami back to Loughton and drop her off at her father’s luxury property. Saying my goodbyes to her on the front step of our house as I was exhausted from the day, I lingered at home nervously, waiting for him to return. My mother was still in the kitchen, preparing his evening meal. She didn’t know what I had in mind. She was busying about out of my way as I sat on the futon in my room preparing myself, unsure of his response but having taken what Ami said seriously and knowing it would help me, in the long run, to have this chat with him about my abuse, and as soon as possible.

Just under an hour and a half later, Dad returned to our house. From my corner bedroom, I heard the familiar sound of his engine pulling up and switching off, the car door slamming as it always did, and then him hurrying up the steps and the key in the front door. He was panting a little as he entered the house. I gave him a chance to get his breath back, but then, perhaps too soon, excited from all the thoughts welling up in my mind, I went over to him as he was again sat in his chair in the corner, waiting for his dinner to arrive, having been in the house about twenty minutes, and stood beside him on the new laminated wood-effect floor, and in a quiet, polite voice said: “hello Dad, can I have a word with you please?”

His voice was harsher than I expected and snappy, replying, “What? What is it? Can’t you wait? I’m tired tonight”, to which I replied, “I’m sorry, Dad, but it’s important, do you mind if I speak to you?” and heard him say again, in peeved agitation, “OK. What then? Come on. Get it over with!”, words which did nothing for my confidence. But I went on, plucking up all my courage, “Dad, I wanted to tell you about Tariq.” “Well, what about him?” “He abused me, Dad. When I was at school at the Prep school, he beat me up a lot, and then he touched me, and tried to have sex with me, and did other things…”

I was tailing off, not knowing how to continue. My father was still glaring up at me, motionless, not providing a very comfortable atmosphere at all. Instead of surprise, or supportive words, like those he had offered Ami, all he said to me was, “Look Benjamin, I’m very tired tonight. Can this not wait till some other time? I haven’t been in long, and I want to have my tea.”

He got up out of his chair and went out of the room, blundering down the unlit hall to the toilet to freshen up. I was in shock. More than this, I was very hurt. I followed him, still trying impotently to speak in his ear. “Dad, listen to me; this is important! Tariq hurt me! Tariq hurt me very much! Listen to me, Dad!” but all my father could say, distractedly over his shoulder, was, “Look, leave it now. I’m tired, and I need to get ready for tea. Stop getting yourself in a state.” I was heartbroken then, but there was nothing I could do. Clearly, he did not want to listen to me and was not taking me seriously. Anger erupted in me again, a great, huge, coruscating anger.

As he left the bathroom, I thrust my hand out and pushed my father until he stumbled, his body almost falling over, stopped only by bashing into the wall of the hall. He stopped for a second, in shock of his own, not knowing what had happened, and then turned on me with a yell and grabbed out at me. I, too, was snarling at this point, and again, we grappled on the floor, me squeezing his wrists and him trying to subdue me and knock me to the floor. More and more I squeezed, as I called out, in broken, incandescent rage, “Believe me! Believe me! You c**t, you f**king c**t! I hate you! Believe me!” and he ignored my impassioned voice, unclear than I was hurt more than just ‘behaving badly’, and instead managed to free one of my hands from his right arm, giving a little gasp as I squeezed my hardest, trying to cause him pain.

In a second, his right arm free, he screwed up his fist and punched me full-on in the face, his knuckles landing on the bridge of my nose, snapping the soft tissue of the tip to the side with a horrifying crunch as blood started to trickle in a painful nosebleed. I screeched at that point in fear, surprise, and pain and dropped my other hand also, going to cradle my nose, trying my hardest to slide my busted nasal cartilage back into place, in sharp, terrible pain, stinging ferociously, and with the cold, choking drip of blood. Using this opportunity, he stepped backwards and moved back into the light of the living room away from me. But anger was upon me, and I did not stall for long.

Despite my broken nose, I howled as I powered into my bedroom, barrelling over to the shelf to pick up the grip of my spring-powered BB pistol, making sure the magazine was full and slid into place. Then, taking the weapon in my right hand, I charged back into the hall as my Dad had just entered the living room, going across to talk to my mother, who was by now in a fluster, asking him, “What is it? What’s happened?” to which Dad replied, “Get this f**king maniac away from me!” and, on hearing this, I exploded, and shouted, “don’t call me a f**king maniac! You attacked me, you c**t, you f**king bast*rd!” and, to my mother’s horrified gasp, hoisted my arm, and pointed the gun at my father, aiming for in between his shoulder blades.

In a split second, grabbing his key, he pushed past me, knocking my barrel to the side, and fled out into the hallway again, and from there, through the front door and off down the steps around the corner of The Shrubberies and away down Chequers Road, with me following hot in pursuit, screaming my hatred at him, and taking time to stop, aim, and discharge the BB gun at him, aiming close, but making sure always to miss by a little, in ferocious anger, but still held back by something, knowing what the impacts of the weapon felt like from having been shot at with it by Tariq previously, and not wishing similar on my father as much as to frighten him, and ‘teach him a lesson’.

Soon, about halfway down to the Chequers Pub on the corner, I broke off my pursuit and turned back to the house, blood pouring down my face, and went up the steps into the toilet just to the left of the front door and, fetching as much toilet paper as I could unwind, stuffed it around my face and held it there, feeling that ultra-sensitive sting once more, and the first bruising around my right eye.

Not much later, as I was still in the toilet, I heard Dad’s feet on the steps and the door swinging back once again as he re-entered our home. There was silence in the hallway, and he did not call for me or attempt to open the door, though he would have known I was there. Instead, he brushed through into the living room to speak to my mother. Distracted and with my ears ringing, perhaps from his blow, I do not know what words passed between them, but I did not emerge for a long time, and I know they talked in my absence.

When I did step out of the downstairs toilet, I was no longer so angry. I dumped the BB gun back in my room. Then, tentatively, I peeked around the corner to the living room and saw Dad sitting back in his familiar chair. He was eating the dinner Mum had prepared for him as if nothing had happened. There was silence as I entered the room. Then I spoke, my voice affected by the stiffness and pain in my face. “I’m sorry I shot at you, Dad. And I’m sorry I fought too. I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

Tears were forming in my bruising eyes. Dad got up out of the chair slowly. I winced a little, but then he spoke, “That’s ok, son. We know you’re not well.” And, tired of warring with him then, I went to him, my head down again, in clinging sadness, ashamed of myself, and put out my hands in a hug, and, for the first time in my life, my father reciprocated and came to me. I felt him put his big, bony arms around me and then the press of my upper chest beneath his red pullover, and so we hugged, there on the floor, in front of my silent mother. “Thanks, Dad,” I said. “I love you”, and he replied, “And you too, son” Then, exhausted and overcome, and not really knowing what to think, I filed quietly back into my room, my broken nose still unaddressed, though spotted by my mother.

In time, my nose healed, although even these days, it has never re-set fully and still hangs off to the side slightly, lending the centre of my face a disquieting asymmetry, the subtle scar tissue bulky just beneath the bridge, and regularly, I experience slight breathing difficulties and prolonged sinus infections.

 

______ 卐 ______

 

If this, at ultimate conclusion—the 4 words—(the 14 words is a given) is not why they’re fighting as the final beautiful goal, why are they fighting at all? —Benjamin’s email to the Editor.

Categories
Child abuse

Consumption, 9

Book II

Chapter One

I returned home from Brookside Child & Adolescent Inpatient Unit a changed boy. By then, I was an adult, having just passed my 18th birthday, and was considerably heavier, on the borders of obesity, a consequence of the antipsychotic medication I had been placed on without consent (for supposed paranoia towards my father’s enervating hostility). I was nursing a tender, wounded arm, the tissue not yet healed atop the wracked site of my unsuccessful skin graft, pink, sore, and ugly to behold.

But more than this, I was changed in character. The morose, tormented inner nature remained as it always had. Still, my incapacitating passivity had been broken down and disintegrated, turned instead to moody defensiveness. I was already more worldwise and weary for it, tired out by death and misery, and from the recent loss of some of my friends, either by suicide or geographical dislocation, and cynical, my grief mixed with simmering anger at the outright betrayal of their parents. Of the staff employed to tend to them – and to myself – eyes opened to a bleaker, crueller world.

I was also angry at my own parents for having abandoned me there for so long and for having closed their eyes and ears to my self-reported psychic pain and to my explanations of what hurt and what could and would help that. The things they should have done (or not done) immediately to assist me, instead of throwing me to the wolves, as I saw it, by subjecting me to intensive psychiatric treatment that did nothing for my crippling sadness and self-hate, having never broached the root cause of my problems, and that served only to humiliate me, and laden me down with pejorative labels, my body already brutalised and made shameful by pharmaceutical drugs and by official neglect. […]

To balance this out, I watched The Blue Planet nature documentary and various smaller nature and history recordings, aware suddenly, once I was home, that I had a vast expanse of time to kill, and with no real plans for the future. When I was at school, I had always looked forward to university, if only to escape my then environment. Still, a whole year spent in a psychiatric unit had thrown me sideways and put me off course, and though I had completed my A-levels long distance from inside, despite the initial low expectations of the unit’s supply teachers and with the necessary grades to be able to apply for bachelor’s-level study, I was psychologically detached, and had fallen to bad habits, lethargy getting the better of me, and besides, was too low in confidence to make the next move, unsure even of what to apply for to study. […]

[…] my school acquaintances having become a thing of the past, who never contacted me in any way once their own more regular education had finished, or indeed throughout my unit stay. Any lingering acquaintances from my sixth form years, whom I had thought could have even been seen as friends given our proximity, I now realised were not loyal to me and had no affection for me or concern for my plight once it was broadcast to them that I was ill at all, and perhaps even from long before. The others from the unit – those who were still alive – were either still in intensive treatment at Brookside or had been moved on to medical assistance at other units, sometimes far from our location. […]

My father, himself a recovering alcoholic from many years before, abstained totally from drinking, having realised it as a problem, as with his former heavy smoking, both habits picked up in his preadolescent childhood […]

It never occurred to me then as being irresponsible that it was my father providing me with the money to purchase these beverages, at about £20-30 per weekend, and I simply saw him as I always had in that regard, as a very generous father. Neither did it occur to me to question the ease with which he settled on giving me money for that purpose, especially given that he had his own prior experiences with regular intoxication and addiction, all before I was born. All I had to do was ask, and I did not get annoyed then or put any pressure on him for the cash.

As for the effects on me themselves, I found myself happier drunk. Not a euphoric happiness, but a sustaining, sedative calm, blotted out of reality, and chemically divorced from my mental pain, made somehow stupid, and cut off from all higher thought, whether painful or merely academic. Still self-harming regularly and with no habit of readily reporting this to medical staff, as I knew the consequences of such action would have adverse complications for me. Besides, I was conditioned not to expect genuine psychological aid in the long run. I also found, bizarrely, that the alcohol, the K Cider in particular, functioned as a very effective physical pacifier for my flesh-tearing wounds, acting almost as an unofficial painkiller […]

[…] sometimes sleeping for almost twenty-four hours, awakening late on the following evening with a fresh, pressing hangover that never felt any easier, much as my tolerance for alcohol had swiftly shot up to outrageous levels.

My father also purchased cigarettes for me, in big, blue twenty-pack cartons of Richmond Superkings, noticing that I had picked up the awful habit from the middle of my stay in Brookside, and I smoked daily and smoked more when I drank, often getting through almost two packs a day. All the terrible ideas I had shied away from in childhood were manifested in me, and I saw nothing wrong with them. After all, what was something as ‘innocuous’ as a cigarette, or an eight-pack of Budweiser or Red Stripe, compared with the knowledge that your parents had betrayed you emotionally every day for over a decade, and were continuing to, or to the sting of rape, or the distant, buried agony of hands and mouths between dark trees, never acknowledged but never entirely forgotten?

What was a bottle or two of whiskey compared with red human teeth gnawing at a broken, burning arm? My life had already been destroyed.

Editor’s Note:

In the following pages, Benjamin tells a couple of heartbreaking anecdotes that happened to him with his father: anecdotes that reminded me of my life, except that in my family the roles were reversed. (The passive or “facilitator” was my father, who psychotically shared the crazed mother’s vision of her eldest son.)

Categories
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
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 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
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.’

__________________

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

Categories
Alice Miller Child abuse

Remarkable

sentences of Alice Miller’s
Breaking Down the Wall of Silence:

 

______ 卐 ______

 

“…the wall of silence behind which society has sought to protect itself from the truth about cruelty and abuse in childhood”. (Foreword, page 5)

“Parents are indeed capable of routinely torturing their children without anyone interceding”. (Chapter 1, “Eve’s Initiative”, page 14)

“…remained completely repressed in me for almost sixty years. As a result, I betrayed that little girl [the inner girl that still inhabited in Miller’s heart]… There was no one to help me condemn cruelty”. (Chapter 2, “Out of the Prison of Confusion”, page 20)

“Hard as it is to believe, in the entire world there is not one single faculty in which a degree is offered in the study of psychic injuries in childhood”. (Ibid., page 25)

“So psychiatrists have… chosen not to know how psychoses develop”. (Chapter 3, “The Psychiatrists’ Campaign Against the Act of Remembering”, page 32)

“…that voice [of Miller’s inner wounded child], because it has taught me more than all the books I have ever read”. (Ibid., page 33)

“My justifiable anger makes me strong and aware. I can see through the lies because I have stopped forgiving, stopped praying or speculating, stopped laying the guilt on myself” (Ibid., page 35)

“…how damaging it is to preach forgetfulness and forgiveness. Isn’t that just what your patients have done their whole lives, and is that not why they have remained disordered?” (Ibid., pages 36-37)

“…what was previously regarded as a sin—criticism of our parents—is, in reality, our only chance of becoming healthy”. (Ibid., page 38)

“Psychoanalysis does not distort the truth by accident. It does so by necessity. It is an effective system for the suppression of the truth about childhood, a truth feared by our entire society. Not surprisingly, it enjoys great esteem among intellectuals”. (Chapter 4, “Blindman’s Buff and the Flight from the Facts in Psychoanalysis”, pages, 42-43)

“…fear of the truth about child abuse is a leitmotif of nearly all forms of therapy known to me”. (Ibid., page 48)

“Hate that we have experienced is not a poison, but one way out of the trap…” (Chapter 5, “The Media and the Wall of Silence”, page 61)

“To dismiss such people as ‘self-pitying’ only says something about one’s own early experiences…” (Ibid., page 71)

“And why, anyway, do human beings go on worshipping such horrific gods? (Chapter 6, “Child Sacrifice as ‘Tradition’”, page 77. Miller is referring to the god of the Jews. See also pages 193-199 of my book Day of Wrath.)

“The danger does not lie with individuals, however criminal they may be. Far more, it lies in the ignorance of our entire society… Teachers, attorneys, doctors, social workers, priests, and other respected representatives of society protect parents… Even the child protection agencies insist that this crime, and this crime alone, should go unpunished”. (Chapter 8, “The Monstrous Consequences of Denial”, page 87)

“The majority of therapists fear this truth. They work under the influence of destructive interpretations culled from both Western and Oriental religions, which preach forgiveness… they offer traditional morality… Forgiveness does not resolve latent hatred and self-hatred but rather covers them up in a very dangerous way”. (Chapter 9, “The Liberating Experience of Painful Truth”, page 131)

“By refusing to forgive, I give up my illusions. A mistreated child, of course, cannot live without them. But a grown-up therapist must be able to manage it. His or her patients should be able to ask: ‘Why should I forgive, when no one is asking me to? I mean, my parents refuse to understand and to know what they did to me. So why should I go on trying to understand and forgive my parents and whatever happened in their childhood, with things like psychoanalysis and transactional analysis? What’s the use? Whom does it help? It doesn’t help my parents to see the truth. But it does prevent me from experiencing my feelings, the feelings that would give me access to the truth. But under the bell-jar of forgiveness, feelings cannot and may not blossom freely’. Such reflections are, unfortunately, not common in therapeutic circles, in which forgiveness is the ultimate law”. (Ibid., page 135)

“This ideology is indivisible with the command ‘Thou shalt not be aware’ [of the cruelty your parents inflicted to you] and with the repetition of that cruelty on the next generation.

”But the demand for forgiveness that I often encounter can pose a danger for therapy, even though it is an expression of our culture. Mistreatment of children is the order of the day, and those errors are therefore trivialized by the majority of adults. Forgiving can have negative consequences, not only for the individual, but for society at large, because it can mean disguising erroneous opinions and attitudes, and involves drawing a curtain across reality so that we cannot see what is taking place behind it.

”The possibility of change depends on whether there is a sufficient number of enlightened witnesses to create a safety net for the growing consciousness of those who have been mistreated as children, so that they do not fall into the darkness of forgetfulness, from which they will later emerge as criminals or the mentally ill”. (Ibid., pages 135-136)

“How much unnecessary suffering [emphasis by Ed.] would I, my children and their future children, have been spared if I had been able to read this book when I was young…” (Ibid., letter to Miller, page 157)

“If one day the secret of childhood were to become no longer a secret, the state would be able to save immense sums that it spends on hospitals, psychiatric clinics, and prisons maintaining our blindness. That this might deliberately happen is almost too incredible a thought”. (Ibid., page 143)