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Category: Child abuse

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Child abuse Hojas Susurrantes (book)

Children’s tales

The videos I recently embedded about Snow White and Hansel and Gretel—and I’ll embed more about other stories—make me think.

One of the reasons I don’t belong to Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW), even though I’ve been an incel my whole life, is because it’s made up of effeminate men. Real men try to take power to win back their white women by changing the treacherous laws (like Nick Fuentes advises his Groypers to infiltrate institutions, or like I advise them to read The Turner Diaries).

Something similar could be said about child abuse. One baby step toward solving the problem is to point out that the tales of the Brothers Grimm and Charles Perrault contain great wisdom on the subject, but were censored by changing the original word “mother” to “stepmother” due to the Christian commandment to honour our parents (Greek tragedies, written before the Christian upheaval, depicted horrible mothers without needing to transfer their image to a stepmother).

The pages from my autobiographical book, Hojas Susurrantes, published yesterday in The Occidental Observer, are just the tip of the iceberg of the problem (the “mental health” professions actually side with the perpetrators). These devouring mothers continue to exist today. As I confess in one part of my trilogy, after reading my Letter to mom Medusa a female friend told me that, although infanticide is no longer practised in the West, parents are still allowed to murder the souls of their children (producing broken minds, so-called “schizophrenias,” etc.).

This topic clearly relates to the sacred words, not just the four, but all fourteen. I’ve already mentioned that William Pierce’s problems with his son, Don Black’s with his, and even David Irving’s with his daughter who developed schizophrenia, are—my educated guess—related to having mistreated their children. We can only imagine what would have happened without that mistreatment! Instead of betraying the cause, Pierce’s and Black’s sons, for example, could now be a great force for good; and Irving’s daughter would be alive and able to help safeguard her father’s legacy.

The psychological devastation caused by parental abuse is an infinitely more taboo subject than the most radical racism. The US, for example, allowed George Lincoln Rockwell to flourish (one of his own group assassinated him). This doesn’t happen with the trauma model of mental disorders. There isn’t a single academic department in the world that addresses this topic! That’s why I believe I must continue translating my trilogy.

Ultimately, the goal of this site is to show that the four words are the other side of the fourteen. For example, our friend Tyrone Joseph Walsh, who used to comment here, is now in a UK prison. Before his sentencing, when he wasn’t yet incarcerated, I suggested he flee to Mexico. He refused because Joseph idealised Charles Manson and others who had been imprisoned (Manson was also horribly abused by his mother as a child).

If our friend had written a trilogy like mine, he would be free now (it’s easier to damage the System from outside prison than from inside). The fact is, Joseph didn’t internally process the damage inflicted on him at home when he was a teenager.

Children’s fairy tales, once a literary detective discovers they were altered due to the Fourth Commandment, are very wise. They are a coded language of what I now write in a way that is more understandable to our time. But I seriously doubt that the readers of The Occidental Observer, who are now reading those few pages of my Hojas Susurrantes, can conceive of the size of the iceberg that lies beneath such a small ridge of ice.

Categories
Child abuse Literature Videos

Hansel and Gretel

This topic is related to my work in Spanish, which deals precisely with parents who devour the souls of their children.

Categories
Autobiography Child abuse Literature

Snow White

The true story

Wow. What a find. I’ve always thought that fairy tales reflect realities that illustrate what I want to say in my trilogy of books I’m translating into English—and look what I found today!

In the real Middle Ages, not in fairy tales, some mothers—who we would now say suffered from malignant narcissism—killed their most beautiful daughters for reasons of power, if we understand the dynamics of the noble classes. (I couldn’t help but think of the infanticide campaign that my mother subtly unleashed during my puberty and that virulently culminated in my adolescence. But that’s another story.)

Categories
Child abuse Welfare of animals

Sacred words

The 4 words (ethics)

Eliminate all unnecessary suffering

These words are my invention and could only be fully understood after reading the autobiographical trilogy I wrote in my mother tongue. However, here I can illustrate what I mean with a couple of examples. The first thing the Nazis did when they took power was to ban cruelty to animals. And for those aware of how abusive parents murder the souls of their children, the Hitler Youth offered them a window of escape. So eliminating the unnecessary suffering of children and animals is the priority in my fight against human Neanderthalism.
 

The 14 words (aesthetics)

We must secure the existence of our people and a future for White children

These are the words of David Lane (1938-2007), evoking an 88-word paragraph from Mein Kampf (it is always good for a cause to have a slogan with few words). The American anti-white establishment put Dave Lane in jail, where he died. Although his words are self-explanatory here we could over-explain them as follows.

Unless Aryans wake up, due to mass immigration throughout the West, white North Americans, Europeans, Australians and New Zealanders will become a minority in their own countries, facing subsequent extinction.

Categories
Autobiography Child abuse

3rd edition

by Benjamin

Editor’s note: This is one of the new segments from the third edition of Ben’s autobiographical book (for context, see here):

 

______ 卐 ______

 

In time, my Mum ceased trying to defend me. Perhaps she changed her mind and began to doubt herself. More likely, she gave up in nervous strain under the force of Dad’s charming dishonesty and intellectual manipulations of the dialogues. I know around thispoint she had to start taking antidepressants herself, and, though she had put many complaints in to the doctors over their written words and their professional treatment of her, none were ever listened to. Part of me wonders if she turned a blind eye to my suffering in the house, desperate for her own sanity that it was not true.

Either way, despite the strain of defending me, my mother betrayed me in the end by this cowardly abandonment of her duty towards me, much I do see how tough it would have been for her. These days she has gone back to her familiar patter of, “oh, his life has always been good, nothing ever happened” and “I simply don’t remember those days you mention”, if an outsider inquires after my home life, or if I turn to her and demand she account for Dad. Perhaps it is easier on her to exist in complete denial. Either way, it drives me to intolerable rage, knowing that there was a time once when she did stand up for me, only to have her spirit crushed out of her again by the cold, dispassion of idiotic medical staff. I pity her very much, but I cannot forgive her. She was my only hope.

For her part, the young therapist did not seem to mind so much that I was not in the family meetings. She noted down my “hostile and aggressive” manner, and continued with Dad, ladling pejorative labels on me, and mischaracterizing my “poor” behaviour, with me never there to defend myself, or to correct Dad’s second-hand reportage each week. The sessions continued weekly for over six months. Why on earth did she think I might be upset?! Was she stupid?! If she didn’t have the natural compassion to take my side as her patient and sole charge, why was she even working in psychological healthcare?! I cursed the day I had ever been put forward for them. By now though, the constant shaming I was subjected to, and the faulty opinion-making was beginning to take its toll, and my mind was indeed starting to come apart, my ego shattered, and my sense of cognitive calm fracturing at the edges. I felt divorced from the world, hanging in the cold, dim edges, like in fog, teetering on the abyss of something vast and deep. Most days I would cover this over, but the heightened anxiety was persistent, and, eventually, one day, I just cracked

Sitting again on the chair by my computer desk, in the middle of a dull, clouded afternoon, during a light rain storm outside, once more I took a strange fascination in my healing, much-abused right arm. Long-accustomed as I was to bending down and biting away at the area when in my lower moods, this time I approached from a far odder, more mechanical angle. To this day, I cannot remember what might have stressed me, if anything, worryingly. I think in general my life around that point was more than enough, even without anything specific to obliterate my mental wellbeing.

I had just finished eating my lunch for the day, an oven bake pepperoni pizza of the kind I had begun to consume on a regular basis for ease of preparation, and still had a sharp kitchen knife on my plate; one suitable for severing the crusts of my pizza, as well as a standard fork, and a teaspoon I had been using to gently separate the melted cheese (which I had never been much of a fan of long-term) from the base. Upon finishing my meal, something drew me again to my arm, not feeling any great distress, but somehow preoccupied, as if enticed.

Taking the relatively-sharp kitchen knife, I pushed down until the flesh popped, and carved deeply into my forearm skin, feeling little pain, perhaps on account of the severed nerve endings from long before, or maybe just from my daze itself, continuing in long grooves to shape out a rectangular ‘box’ around the outsides of my main healing area. When I had finished my ‘masking work’, blood trickling a little down my arm as it always did, I began to partition the flesh inside into cubes, cutting the little squares of epidermis into neat blocks, like a piece of raw tofu, but still attached to my lower dermis layers, and to the muscle underneath. No one came to disturb me that day, and so I worked slowly, for what felt like well over an hour, delineating the rectangle’s contents into neat parcels of meat, all in a line.

Once I had finished this task, I took the point of the knife again, and slit the hypodermis under my closest blocks away from the muscle layer, releasing little globs of subcutaneous fat – a grisly process where much pressure and repetition was required, and where I was obliged now and again to stop so I could snap down and suck up any excess blood. Eventually, the skin still sticking to the muscle in various places, I was able to stick my teaspoon under the excised flaps, and lever each cube up and off my arm, sometimes with a terrible tugging, and a fresh new splatter of blood.

Eventually, I was left with another wide hole in my arm – not desperately deep, but dark and bloody, in an expanse of ravaged veins, and ripped hair follicles, and otherwise the white strands of mangled flesh and fat – and beyond that, a heap of around forty small, soft, pinky-coloured guerdons, each just under 1cm x 1cm, sat on my plate in a pool of blood and clear-yellow bodily fluids.

With my fork, I proceeded to pick up each morsel of severed skin, and, in grisly auto-cannibalistic fashion, popped them one by one into my mouth, chewing for a long time on the gristle of each lump, like a mixture of pork rinds and stale bubble gum, and sucking the sweet, wet, sickly flavour out of the pieces of my own arm. Cooling blood trickled down past my chin. I don’t think I was thinking anything at all.

True, I had bitten my arm before, many times, but never had I stooped to actually consuming my own body, preferring instead to merely leave bite wounds or otherwise allow the skin to fall away unaddressed, and thankfully, this particularly gory and disturbing incident was never to be repeated.

When my mother did come in later and discover me, I cannot remember what was said. I can guess my parents’ reactions would have been total horror, an alien sensation. All I do remember is that I was taken down to the local surgery for an examination, and from there swiftly to Broomfield Hospital again, almost a second home to me by now, and of a similar surgical quality. Sitting in a waiting room to be examined by the doctors, it was as if in a surreal film. “So, why is the patient with us today?” I heard one of the ward staff say to another. “Oh, he cut off and ate a bit of his arm, apparently” was the seemingly unconcerned reply. Perhaps they too found it hard to register.

In the end, I was dressed, and sent home again (without psychological evaluation), and further notes made for my case-file, but, bizarrely, despite the severity of this hideous personal action, nothing was ever said of it to me in aftermath, and I do not remember my then psychiatrist ever taking any particular interest. There are a great many ‘blips’ like this in my record; times I would have thought pertinent to make at least brief mention of, if not to scrutinize intently. I can only assume they too would like somehow to brush them under the rug, surely some niggling opposition to their ‘it’s a brain disease so just take your meds and you’ll be fine’ argument. As it stands today, my prior history of extreme autophagia is never mentioned by any new psychiatrists I come into contact with, and certainly not by any of their day-to-day care workers. It’s as if they’ve purged it from my history, and like none of this ever happened. I find that a great, telling, frustration.

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.)