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Tag: Benjamin (commenter)

Categories
Racial right

A thorn

by Benjamin

A boy extracting a thorn from his foot.

It’s interesting that no one [among mainstream racialist forums] acknowledged Alex Linder’s death properly on those sites. I wasn’t aware until now [click on the above link]. I find it quite disrespectful and petty of them actually… we’re meant to be on the same side! But the second he’s dead and OD is criticising him…

I take it they saw him the way I assume they see you/us, as a thorn in their side—as opposed to the truth: a better source of information and inspiration on Aryan survival.

By their own stubborn, head in the sand cowardice, these supposedly pro-White sites have made themselves our enemies (they’re a lot more unreasonable with you than you are with them). It’s good that you’re starting a radio show again, albeit solo. It will give you greater reach (against them).

Categories
Psychohistory

Three-eyed

On the ethnosuicide of the white man, in my post two weeks ago I wrote:

Although it is universal and not individual, the psychosis that currently covers the West… can only be understood through a psychohistorical variant of the trauma model of mental disorders.

Then I added:

Anyone who assimilates the content of Day of Wrath—and even better, its more detailed expansion in my trilogy—will understand not only the self-harming Aztecs but also the… disorders that contemporary Aryans suffer from.

The case of Benjamin, a self-harmer, whose autobiographical book I recently summarised—:

Consumption, 0
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—is, in individual psychosis, analogous to the mass psychosis that the West has suffered since 1945: horrible self-harming! And just as Benjamin had to confront his past in his attempts to heal himself, Westerners will have to confront their historical past, specifically their unacknowledged traumas: the criminal history of Christianity and, more recently, the Hellstorm Holocaust (see the featured post).

Without this basic psychoanalysis—unlike William Pierce’s Who We Are I don’t see this analysis in the contemporary racial right—the Aryans will never heal. They will remain as psychotic as Benjamin was before he began to digest his extremely painful past. Both the criminal history of Christianity and the Holocaust of Germans in WW2 are as buried in the Aryan collective unconscious as Benjamin’s hellish past was before he began his healing process.

In other words, for the Aryan to stop ethno-suiciding he must face his past, and the best way to do that is to start digesting didactic essays on how the Judeo-Christians murdered the Greco-Roman world, such as Eduardo Velasco’s essay and Tom Goodrich’s books on the Hellstorm genocide.

Just as it helped Benjamin to discover his past through a profound retrospection and introspection into where the trauma causing his symptoms lay, the Aryan won’t regain his sanity unless he goes, like Bran the Broken, into the cave of the three-eyed raven to see the historical past of Westeros—not as the System tells us the story but as it really happened…

The three eyed raven

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
Autobiography

Consumption, 15

My father and mother have never accepted their responsibility for the trauma they caused me in childhood and adolescence. I don’t think they ever will. They are too proud by far to accept the truth of gross personal error. What my father did and what my mother did not do. As only consolation for what has been a hellish life, I look back with warm reminiscences on that one instance – that tiny spark of hopeful joy – where she did come to my defence in the sharing of truth, sad only that she, in turn was abused by cold professionals on account of their hubris, and arrogance, and industry gaslighting, the fundamental – unfalsifiable – tenets of bio-reductionist psychiatry, a pseudoscience of ignorance and blind dogmatism. I have covered the evils of psychiatry more comprehensively in my other books, though, so I will not repeat myself here.

Beyond all the pain and heartbreak, I still love my parents. When read by them, I hope this book will go some way towards redeveloping our relationship together before their deaths. They raised me as only they could, damaged themselves from their childhoods in 1940s Ireland, where I am aware my father was psychologically brutalised daily by the sadism of his harsh Christian Brothers schoolmasters and further tormented by his emotionally neglectful mother and a crowd of elderly aunts (as my grandfather was often away at sea for long stretches, and fighting in the Second World War), for whom nothing he ever accomplished or achieved academically was ever good enough, and where my mother and her large family lived in constant fear of hunger and deprivation, coupled to a terror of her father, and his endless shouting and rows with her mother, and (I think) some physical violence. The great hurt has been passed down through generations, from parents to children and then to their children. It is understandable, at least. It is a shame I cannot write their own stories yet, as they deserve to be heard.

I wrote this book as official self-therapy, in final resolution, to unlock the repressed sadnesses I have never been able to recount otherwise and to come to terms with myself and with my family, to heal. To know myself again. It has been a painful journey, but I hope some small understanding can be gained from these lines. Mental illness is an expression of family trauma, not brain abnormalities, chemical imbalances, or genetic defects. For this reason, its aetiology is sadly taboo in our society. After all, the Christian commandments to honour our fathers and mothers have long saturated Western thought, shared by parental introjection down many centuries, subconsciously shaping our morality and credulity and inspiring our decision-making. To hold them to account instead is to transgress this unwritten assumption. One can see why the psychiatrists and their industry act as gatekeepers and parental defenders, in cahoots with abusive parents over any genuine healing treatment of their victims. To admit otherwise would destroy the claimed legitimacy of their profession.

However, maybe now more will be inspired by this document to share their home lives, and our society, finally, after more than three hundred years of exposure to this punitive and fallacious pseudomedical torture, will begin in turn to knit together again and recover. It is at least a hope. We all owe ourselves that. In general now, given this main autobiographical account (among an expanding group of others), it has become clear that psychotic patients are not born but made.

 

______ 卐 ______

 

Benjamin’s book can be obtained here.

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
Autobiography

Consumption, 13

Book II
Chapter 8

One morning, I walked into the kitchen to prepare breakfast for myself. Just a piece of cucumber; I ate sparingly in those days to compensate for the nagging desire for food stimulated by the Olanzapine, where no meal was ever filling enough, and where my metabolism was negatively affected, leading to more tiredness atop the already exacerbated lethargy on account of the emotional dulling and cognitive impairment that accompanies psychotropic antipsychotic drug use. My parents were already awake. My father stood with his back to me as if dressed for work, chatting to my mother, laughing about something. As I came in, I caught the tail end of his words, “…and it’s a shame he’s not creative either. What could I do with him? It’s clear he’s a bit of an idiot, haha. Not much going on.”

I quickly realised, to my horror, that he was talking about me. My mother was silent, listening politely. Her opinion was hard to gather from her, although I had seen her nod as he spoke. As I heard his words, a withering shame took hold of me, and I made my presence known to them, tears forming at his betrayal, “Dad! I heard you! How can you say that?!” to which my Dad turned suddenly, embarrassed to be caught out. He stared open-mouthed at me, mumbling “Oh” but not giving me the desired answer.

By this point, tears were streaming from me, and I was sobbing audibly and very upset. As if the recent weeks (and longer) had not been awful enough, this was the final straw. Instead of comforting me, my mother stood there watching, saying, “Oh, come on now, Benjamin, he didn’t mean it…” to which all I could say, through painful sobs, was, “No, Mum, he did! He knew what he was saying there!” She repeated her platitudes to me, and Dad started to speak also, adding that he was “only talking, don’t take it seriously”, but by then, I was in an awful state. All the years of hurt welled up in me; all the times he had said as much to my face when she was annoyed or just in an idle comment as if it was an obvious statement. He had mocked my abilities and my very person on hundreds of occasions. And to think recently, only a day or two before, when I had asked Mum what Dad thought of me, she had said, “he loves you very much, and he’s very proud of you and your creations. He particularly likes your drawings at the moment.” I was torn now, unsure how to process the blatant mixed messages beyond being very upset. This wasn’t love; this was an abuse of my mind in a regular stream of matter-of-fact put-downs and snappy below-the-belt remarks.

My thoughts were overpowered with grief and rage, and before I could help myself, my eyes glazed over, and my head started to dip down. And then, quick as a flash, I grabbed out at my right arm with my mouth and proceeded to bite my teeth firmly onto the skin, still crying, tugging at a healed area, trying to prise more flesh off in that familiar agonising pain.

Dad was relatively quick to notice this, although my mother was shocked. “No… Benjamin!” he called, “No! No! Don’t do that! Stop doing that!” He reached out for me, in my feral daze, and started to try and pull my clenched jaws off my arm. But I was locked tight and tearing. Blood was beginning to form now around the creases of my mouth as I continued to pull away at the skin (and self-biting is a strenuous process), as Dad, taking my head in both his hands, tried to lever me off the wound, in some strain. He could not do it, though; so tight was my mouth lodged, trickling gore.

He proceeded to hit me on my upper arm, again and again, trying to dislodge me from my grisly exercise of pain and anguish, and at this, under his blows, I came away from my arm and, howling in nineteen years of pent up rage at him for effortlessly breaking me, a piecemeal homicide of words alone, I flew at him, and we exchanged a flurry of blows there on his floor by the kitchen door. He backed up against the dining table, swiping at my face and upper torso with hard slaps, knocking my head sideways, and I punched out at his shoulder with my bleeding right arm. He snarled now at me in rough exhales, his teeth clenched.

After more long seconds of pitiless violence, I drew back from him, the tears still exploding from my eyes, and returned to my arm, lunging at it again, more desperate in the first place to wound myself than to defend from him after all, despite his out of control desire to fight with me. I leaned back crouched down, cowering before him like a wounded child, pathetic given my height, fearful then and in misery, just wishing he could see me and see that I was hurt and that forever he would stop his incessant jibes, breaking my heart. That he would recognise his own wounded son there pathetic before him. With a final desperate pull, I tore a big piece of rubbery skin off my arm, dragging it up with a ripping yank, blood splattering all over my mouth and in flecks onto the floor and the dining chair next to me, and sucked up a mouthful of hot blood with it, and raised my head again to his height, his blows still impacting me, and spat the chewed off piece of flesh into his face, impacting him on the cheek, with my blood – the same as coursed in his veins – splattered over his eyes.

There was a long pause. He stared at me then, drawn back, a haggard statue before me, motionless. I gazed into his deep blue-grey eyes with orange cores, as blue as the winter waves, and saw the look on his face, a piercing, harrowing expression of mournful incomprehension, the saddest sight. I realised then that he could never understand me. The image of his face then has locked with me all these years. He breathed heavily and said nothing.

The piece of torn flesh was still lying on the floor as I left the room sombrely, exhausted by tears, blood trickling all down my arm and over my hand and palm, falling in droplets to the floor all across the living room, through the hall, and into my bedroom. As I entered my room, I slammed my hand against the white emulsion-painted wood of the door, leaving a bloody handprint gathered in blobs at the bottom, like wet paint, dripping down the gleaming surface. And then I sat down on my futon bed, calling fiercely to my mother not to disturb me, and, with my fingertip dipped in my blood, scratched a poem quickly onto some sheets of A4, my mind racing, but my heart dimmed, all soul destroyed. It was not the first poem I had written in my blood, but it was the most bitter and abject in sheer misery. I titled it “Flush”, like a panic-stricken bird driven from its hidden safety into the air, or just like excrement to be disposed of, very much like I viewed myself.

Flush

Nineteen long years on the cutting-room floor
I told you there were tears, and you got bored
There’s blood in my gullet
And my fingers scrape a hole
And outside in the hallway you’re still polishing the cold
[…]

After finishing my poem, I tossed the papers aside and emerged from my room. An ambulance was not involved, as I resisted official treatment, telling my mother not to contact anyone, which I think she held to. I would not let her dress my wounds either, and simply snatched a fresh pink towel and held it under me until the flow ceased, making sure this time that I cleaned my blood off the floor myself.

Much later, I approached my Dad’s chair. His words to me were simple as I spoke to him, with him sat there staring into space still, no more expression of discomfort and sadness on his face, or indeed of anything at all. “Dad…” I told him, looking for some reconciliation perhaps, or at least to judge his thoughts, to know where I stood. His reply was immediate and cold. “F**k off.”

Never again after this did my Dad physically push me about or hit me, but as if this intense altercation had meant nothing to him, soon – and as always, for he cannot change – the belittling insults continued. Broken and in clinging disappointment, I hoped only that Family Therapy might assist me, and I looked forward to it, counting down the days until I could finally share all of this and be listened to.

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
Psychology

Consumption, 11

In these years, my dreams started to play on me again and horrify me. Always from childhood, I had had regular nightmares, tossing and turning in the sheets and sobbing out […]

However, one particular recurring dream motif pushed to the surface around my 18th year (although I had nightmares involving it one and off rarely since at least the age of eight). By one point in my ‘home year’, it had come to me almost every time I slept. I would just be drifting off, and, suddenly, in black and white, and with internal sound, huge, spined, skeletal slugs would push into my vision out of the perceptual blackness, often coming from the right of my view, circling in front of me, all feelers and demonic faces of jutting bone and bloody teeth, but still basically giant black slugs beneath the macabre inventiveness. They were an almost infinite array of them […] tugging off chunks of skin […] engulfed in hellish molluscs, in a cold spray of my blood.

After what felt like long minutes of this, I would wake in horrified agony, leaping up out of bed screaming. I would often urinate in fear or otherwise scrabble back and forth […] Having the light on as I slept, as I had been accustomed to doing my whole life, made no tangible difference. Every single night, for days on end, I would be left run down and exhausted, terrified to return to sleep, a pronounced somniphobia and artificial insomnia developing in me […]

Over the years, I have tried many times to assuage this fear and shift the dreams by taking them out into the waking reality, drawing these devilish alien slugs, or designing them with computer art programs.

The abstract beginning of a slug dream

One of the slugs preparing to bite me

Bony slugs clambering into my vision

More demonic slugs emerge

A terrifying toothed slug gets up close to my face

Eight months after my return from Brookside, my nightmares started to get to me, no doubt aided by Dad’s continuing stress-inducing rows and an inability to relax at any moment when awake, conscious only that my door would be flung back, and Dad would storm into my room to find some new, insignificant, niggling excuse to wear me down.

Editor’s interpolated note: To escape the living nightmare, Benjamin attempted suicide at the age of eighteen.

I awoke partially in the ambulance and again on a hospital gurney, feeling the sharp scratch of a needle on my inner arm and hearing voices around me […] I had first been given a 5-pint emergency blood transfusion in the evening. […]

I had been taking both of my tablets [psychiatric meds - Ed.] for over a year now. Why was I feeling like this? I had long decided that that was a foolish question. These tablets were a sham. […]

Past all these faded symbolic worries, there was always Dad. I approached each new conversation with the hope of warmth and basic human respect, but that was rarely, if ever, the case. I realised one thing, at least. I loved him, but I was afraid of him. As for my mother […] at least she did not mock me.

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.)