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Tag: Trauma model of mental disorders

Categories
Psychiatry

Shine

N.B. On the fifth of this month, I had said I wouldn’t translate any more passages from my book. But yesterday something happened, which I don’t want to confess, that shook me greatly and encouraged me to translate another passage. Keep in mind that I wrote the first draft of this text a decade before I woke up to the Jewish Question:

 

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Shine: A dad more devastating than Mengele

‘Thus, it may well be that the plight of a little child who is abused is even worse and has more serious consequences for society than the plight of an adult in a concentration camp.’

—Alice Miller[1]

Mental illness in the biological sense is a myth. But obviously, insanity isn’t. Insanity exists, but it is a psychological catastrophe, a dysfunction in a person’s ‘software.’

Millions have seen this phenomenon on the big screen. The film Shine was based on the life of David Helfgott, who rose to fame after Geoffrey Rush portrayed his tragic life and won an Oscar for Best Actor. I will sketch his life so briefly that the story will lose its poignancy.

David, a sensitive child with a talent for the piano, was not only Peter Helfgott’s eldest son but also his spiritual heir. He used to run into the street to hug his father when he returned from work, to whom he dedicated his piano career. But Peter did something very wrong. As a child, he had been the victim of terrible humiliation from his own father, Rabbi ‘Djadja,’ as David called his grandfather. Peter’s repressed and buried hatred for Djadja needed an outlet, and he found it in his beloved son, David. The emotional violence toward the boy lasted for years. David was devastated. His story is the story of the murder of a soul.

This is a real-life case. At the time of writing, David Helfgott still lives in Australia and continues to play the piano, although under the care of his wife, Gillian, as he has never fully recovered his sanity. In her biography, Gillian testifies that ‘David always believed’ that his father ‘caused his illness.’[2]

The tragedy of the Helfgott family is a classic example of Theodore Lidz’s ideas, cited in my first book, about a ‘skewed family,’ although in this case the passive role came from the mother. It also exemplifies what Alice Miller has written about how a parent takes revenge on his child for what his own parent had done to him. A new psychology would study parents like Peter instead of treating the brain of the victim of those parents, as psychiatrists do.

Now I would like to mention another real-life case, the young Yakoff Skurnik whom I saw, already an old man, at a presentation of his book in Houston. Based on Yakoff’s testimony, Gene Church wrote one of the most disturbing books I’ve ever read: 80629 (the number is the digit engraved on his forearm).[3] I had seen several documentaries on the subject, but not one about what daily life was like for prisoners, especially Jews, at the Birkenau concentration camp, about two miles from Auschwitz.

Yakoff Skurnik is not only a survivor of the so-called holocaust, where his entire family was murdered, but also of the medical experimentation on children by Josef Mengele. Immobilized by assistants, a doctor named Doering castrated him with minimal spinal anaesthesia. The vivid images of the operation impressed me so much that I had to lie down on the floor for fear of fainting. It is remarkable that Yakoff and other survivors, including other castrated prisoners, were able to rebuild their lives after 1945.

Now, Yakoff didn’t go mad in the concentration camp. But David did with his father. How was that possible? Following the Sullivan-Modrow model, the Nazis somehow encountered greater resistance in reaching Yakoff’s inner self and injuring it than Peter did with his son. A passage by Silvano Arieti sheds some light on these different cases. According to Arieti:

First of all we have to repeat here what we already mentioned […], that conditions of obvious external danger, as in the case of wars, disasters, or other adversities that affect the collectivity [my italics], do not produce the type of anxiety that hurts the inner self and do not themselves favor [insanity]. Even extreme poverty, physical illness, or personal tragedies do not necessarily lead to [insanity] unless they have psychological ramifications that hurt the sense of self.[4]

Studies like Arieti’s were taken seriously in the 1950s, 60s, and even the mid-70s. Although Arieti devoted considerable space to organic studies of madness in his treatise, he revealed that since there was no progress in that model, he never pursued that line of research, but rather, his work ‘will pursue chiefly the psychological approach.’[5] Ideas like Arieti’s were often heard before the giant step backward that psychiatry took when it returned to the 19th-century medical model of treating young people whose egos had suffered an all-out assault by their parents.

But back to what Arieti said. Since the victims of the Nazis were a collective, Yakoff Skurnik’s ego wasn’t assaulted exclusively and to the exclusion of his peers, so they had a better chance of psychological survival than the single victim of parental assault. Arieti wrote:

Even homes broken by death, divorce, or desertion may be less destructive than homes where both parents are alive, live together, and always undermine the child’s conception of himself.[6]

These passages answer one of the favourite arguments of psychiatrists in their attempts to refute the trauma model of mental disorders.

For example, in a critique of his colleagues, psychiatrist August Piper asserts that the claim that childhood trauma causes insanity is fatally flawed. If the claim were true, Piper argues, the years of abuse of millions of children must have caused many cases of insanity. Piper uses as an example the children who suffered unspeakable treatment in ghettos, closed boxcars, and concentration camps in Nazi Germany, adding that despite this abuse, they neither went insane nor dissociated or repressed their traumatic memories. Piper then discusses case studies of those who witnessed the murder of a parent and studies of abducted children. These victims, Piper concludes, neither repressed traumatic events, nor did they forget them or go insane.[7] The case of Yakoff and his companions, who also didn’t go insane, exemplifies what Piper meant.

It is clear that Piper hasn’t read, carefully, the researchers he criticizes. I personally know one of them, Colin Ross, whom I visited in March 1997 at the Ross Institute for Psychological Trauma, a psychiatric clinic north of Dallas. I wrote to Ross because I had read one of his books, and he admitted me to his clinic for a full day as a visiting researcher. In therapy, I saw many women devastated by domestic abuse. Below I quote a passage from a text that, in a thin binder, is given to newly admitted patients:

The problem of attachment to the perpetrator is a term invented by Dr. Ross. It provides a way of understanding the basic conflict in survivors of physical and sexual abuse by parents, relatives, and caretakers. The conflict exists in all of us to some degree, since we all had imperfect parents, but is much more intense and painful in abuse survivors. Ambivalent attachment may not be such a core problem when the perpetrator was not a family member [my italics] or an important attachment figure.

The basic driver of [insanity] is simply the kind of people mom and dad were, and what it was like day in and day out in that family.

The focus of therapy is not on the content of memories, processing of memories as such, or any particular thing that happened. This is because the deepest pain and conflict does not come from any one specific event.

Because children are mammals, they are biologically constructed to attach to their parents. There is no decision to make about attachment. Your biology decides for you and it happens automatically. In a halfway normal, regular family this all works out relatively well with the usual neurotic conflicts. The problem faced by many patients is that they did not grow up in a reasonably healthy, normal family. They grew up in an inconsistent, abusive, and traumatic family. [8]

This is the cardinal distinction that Amara refused to acknowledge in our 1988 meeting when he told me that the thesis of my epistle to my mother ‘was short-sighted.’

The very people to whom the child had to attach for survival, were also abuse perpetrators and hurt him or her badly. One way to cope with the abuse would be to withdraw, shut down one’s attachment system, and go into a cocoon. This would be psychological suicide, and would cause failure to thrive. Your biology will not let you make this decision—the drive to attachment overrides the withdrawal reflex. You must keep your attachment system up and running in order to survive.

The basic conflict, the deepest pain, and the deepest source of symptoms, is the fact that mom and dad’s behavior hurts, did not fit together, and did not make sense. It was crazy and abusive.[9]

What Ross says complements what Arieti said: the person to whom we are vulnerable is the one to whom we have been attached since childhood (at the end of this quintet, I will explain the phenomenon through my relationship with my father). If my summary of Piper’s erudite article could refer to someone like Yakoff Skurnik, the latter could refer to a David Helfgott. Ross speaks of the abusive relationship of a minor with someone who represents something very special to him or her: someone who formed his or her intimate universe. The abuse and crimes Piper speaks of don’t lead to the kind of panic that Modrow and I suffered: the sense of betrayal by the universe.

They are entirely different things.

For example, I have been kidnapped twice in Mexico, a city with one of the highest crime rates in the Americas. Now, I would say that having a machine gun blasting my face during the first kidnapping in 1980, or a gun to my temple for an hour in a car during the second kidnapping in 1992, where they even made me pull down my pants and underwear, didn’t even come close to one percent of the ineffable trauma I felt with my beloved dad’s Jekyll-Hyde transformation, as I describe in the Letter (as David surely felt with his father).

I know what it hurts. I know what hurt me: that the person I loved most and who built my universe betrayed me so inexplicably and sordidly. Neither Piper nor any other psychiatrist can tell me what I felt or has the right to make ‘comparisons’ for the simple reason that they don’t know what they’re talking about.

This is one of the problems not only with psychiatry, but with psychology in general. With their positivist complex of imitating the exact sciences, psychologists aim to objectively study the subject at the level of mere behaviour. This is tantamount to denying that universes of experiences exist within us. It is impossible to study a mind exclusively from the outside: individual testimonies and autobiographies of survivors are lacking. Despite Piper’s erudition—his article has a hundred bibliographical references—his cases have nothing to do with me, Modrow, or David Helfgott. As Robert Godwin wrote in Lloyd deMause’s journal, if your only tool is a hammer, you will treat everything as if it were a nail, and if your only method is ‘empirical science,’ your conclusions are hidden in your method: the self is reduced to another objective fact, no different from rocks or planets.[10] This doesn’t mean I am a dualist. As Ross wrote in The Trauma Model: ‘The trauma model is itself biological. It must be, because in nature, mind and brain are a unified field.’ Recall my software/hardware analogy in the introduction (for a more academic study of the mind-brain relationship, see the work of Roger Penrose).

The Helfgott case answers another favourite argument of biological psychiatrists, an argument that Amara himself used when I was writing the epistle to my mother. He reproached me:

‘The question is why one gets sick and the siblings don’t.’

I still remember Amara’s frank tone when he said that! This was a doctor convinced of the truth of his science, certain that the fact that there are ‘invulnerable siblings’ invalidates any attempt to blame any parent for a child’s emotional downfall. But if there’s one thing I testified to again and again in the epistle, it’s that my parents’ emotional beating was directed almost exclusively at me, not at my siblings: just as Peter’s beating was directed at David, not at his other children; and exactly the same thing can be read in John Modrow’s autobiography.

In my comparison of the Jews David and Yakoff, one victimized by his father, the other by Mengele, there’s something more. The Nazis’ dynamic toward Yakoff didn’t consist of a mixture of cruelty and love like Peter’s toward David—the ‘short circuit’ caused by ‘Jekyll-Hyde’ oscillations I spoke of in the Letter. This dynamic results in an ‘attachment to the perpetrator’ that, according to Ross, is terribly ambivalent. There is a world of difference between being a victim of the Nazis, who appeared in the mind of the Jew Yakoff as strangers, and being a victim of the one who, with all his love, shaped David’s inner universe as a child. In David’s words to his wife: ‘It’s all daddy’s fault. It’s all daddy’s fault […]. ’Cause father had a sort of a devil in him, and an angel in him, and all my life was like that. Dad always had a devil and an angel all his life. It’s a sort of a dichotomy, a split of scale.’ [11]

‘Father’ doesn’t seem to be the same person as ‘Dad’ in poor David’s split mind. That this dichotomy produces splitting was precisely what I saw in the Dallas patients. (My fourth book, The Return of Quetzalcoatl, contains a few pages where I explain in more detail the trauma model underlying Colin Ross’s Dallas clinic.)

Resilience is the ability of an object subjected to stress to recover its size and shape after the deformation caused by that stress. The resilience of elastics is well known: if a rubber band is stretched beyond its point of resilience, it will break and won’t be able to return to its original shape. Based on this comparison, I would say that the assault Yakoff suffered, however infamous, was within the limits of his mental resilience. This was not the case with David. The emotional ordeal he was subjected to exceeded the limit, and he suffered a permanent psychotic breakdown.

In short, the parameter for measuring trauma should be the psychological breakdown resulting from the assault, not the presumed level of the assault for an external observer (like the authors Piper cites). A father who loves his Jewish son can break him more easily than a Nazi who hates Jews. David’s breakdown occurred because Peter’s aggression was relatively greater than that of the Nazis. It came from the least likely source: the one who had formed his soul.

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[1] Miller: For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence (Farrar Straus & Giroux), 1985.

[2] Gillian Helfgott and Alissa Tankskaya: Love you to Bits and Pieces (Penguin Books, 1996), p. 268.

[3] Gene Church: 80629: A Mengele Experiment (Route 66 Publishing, 1996). Upon emigrating to the United States, Yakoff Skurnik changed his name to Jack Oran.

[4] Silvano Arieti: Interpretation of schizophrenia (Aronson, 1994), p. 197. I substituted the word ‘schizophrenia’ for ‘insanity’ in the brackets.

[5] Ibid., p. 5. On page 441, Arieti says that, even at that time, there had been no progress in the medical model of madness.

[6] Ibid., p 197.

[7] August Piper Jr., ‘Multiple Personality Disorder: Witchcraft Survives in the Twentieth Century’ in Skeptical Inquirer (May/June 1998). This author is not referring to insanity in general but to so-called ‘multiple personality.’ However, I use the generic word, insanity, because of the problem of comorbidity in psychiatry.

[8] [Colin Ross]: Dissociative Disorders Program: Patient Information Packet (Ross Institute for Psychological Trauma, undated). I haven’t used ellipses between uncited paragraphs.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Robert Godwin, ‘The End of Psychohistory’ in The Journal of Psychohistory, 25:3, 1998.

[11] The two passages separated by the bracket come from Love You to Bits and Pieces (op. cit.), pp. 42 & 104. The relationship between David Helfgott and his father is recounted in chapters 5, 11, 12, 21, 22 and 28.

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):

 

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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
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
Consumption, 1
Consumption, 2
Consumption, 3
Consumption, 4
Consumption, 5
Consumption, 6
Consumption, 7
Consumption, 8
Consumption, 9
Consumption, 10
Consumption, 11
Consumption, 12
Consumption, 13
Consumption, 14
Consumption, 15
Consumption, 16

—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.

 

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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.