Tag Archives: Adverse Childhood Experiences

My Family – part 4

Links to PART 1, PART 2, and PART 3

The most significant person in my childhood was my dad. He had the biggest impact on me. He was highly abusive but I don’t want to go into what he did to me. This is more a little bit about who he was, and a little bit about why he was. My mum wasn’t around after the age of about 7, so she didn’t have as much as an impact on who I am, unless you count the effect of my mum’s absence – but to be honest I’m still working that one out myself. For now, here’s my dad.

Dad swiped at anything that tried to control him. He ran head first, screaming, deep into his inner forest without a map to find his way out. Maybe he was troubled from the beginning. I grew used to hearing, ‘Well, you know what your dad’s like.’

Dad sulked a lot as a child. When driven to see Big Nan (his great Gran) the car would pull up outside the house and he’d refuse to leave it under any circumstances. He sulked until Big Nan came to coax him into the house. Little Nan told this story to demonstrate Dad’s inborn stubbornness. To support the ‘Well, you know what your dad’s like’ attitude. Dad told the story to demonstrate how hard done by he’d been his whole life. To support the idea that his “resilience” had remained strong.

Dad was the middle child of three brothers. His older brother was Jez, his younger brother, David. Jez and Dad shared a bitter hatred for each other. They fought often, yet at times they fought alongside each other as allies. Family first, as they say. Dad was anti-authoritarian and violent. He learned violence from his mentors. His uncle Robert was notoriously violent, Big Grandad was violent. His mother’s lovers were violent, including his own father who Dad never knew. Little Nan was violent. She’d use her wooden Scholl sandals as weapons when he or Jez earned a significant scolding. Dad told me many times, almost with glee, about the wooden Scholl. Maybe he felt the beatings he got as a child were an initiation. A ritual he’d survived that had made him a harder person. Beatings can become a rite of passage in the hindsight of those traumatised by receiving them.

I think Dad’s whole attitude to life was formed in his early years and he never looked back. For a lot of my upbringing he acted like that child sulking in the back of the car. Dad’s stories of rebellion against the schools he was regularly expelled from were always told with a sense of accomplishment, virility, and dark reminiscence. As though he received a source of power from reciting them. They were like little spells he kept locked up inside himself.

There was a certain story he loved to tell, and it caused me particular emotional conflict. It was the story of the cello-playing English teacher. Dad had been in English class with his head down, doodling in the exercise book he should have been working in. Doodling was something he was good at, English wasn’t. The teacher’s desk was at the front of the room on an elevated little platform. Next to her desk was an upright cello on a stand. The cello was the teacher’s pride and joy, and she’d sometimes play it at break times rather than going to get a cup of tea or some fresh air. The ghostly music would be heard echoing down the halls.

She was walking around the room checking that work was being done. Dad was oblivious. When she got to Dad she pulled hard on the spiky, gelled hair just above his ear. This was the seventies so this type of assault, and worse, wasn’t uncommon in classrooms. Dad yelped, spun around and snarled. He was a punk. He had safety pins in the lapels of his inside-out blazer, a tie with the end cut off, and an attitude to match. He even had drawing pins pointing up through the shoulder pads of his blazer so if a teacher grabbed his shoulder in a kind of ‘caught yer now, laddy’ way, they’d regret it.

The teacher told him to get on with his work. He told her sternly not to pull his hair. She smirked and went and sat back behind her desk. Dad watched her get on with whatever she was doing then got his head down to doodling. A few minutes later, back in his own little world, he felt the shooting pain of his hair being pulled. Vexed, Dad told the teacher she’d be sorry if she did again. They stared at each other. Dad began to doodle in his book, an invitation for her to try it. She did. Dad launched himself to his feet, knocking the teacher backwards, and sprinted down the aisle of chairs. Dad jumped, the teacher screamed, Dad flew through the air and smashed feet first through the cello. Leaving it in splinters on the floor. He stood up, brushed himself off and walked out, leaving the teacher shocked and in floods of tears. She had to take time off work. When she returned she brought no cello, and the students no longer heard the beautiful eeriness of the cello from behind her door.

This story has always left me conflicted. I suppose they were both wrong in their actions. I can feel the burning anger Dad felt at being humiliated and abused, and the terrible loss of the teacher who watched something that meant so much to her so utterly destroyed. I could never resolve this conflict and still can’t.

The stories Dad usually told were about man vs the world. It was him against everybody else. He’d tell me how I had to fight for what I wanted in this life, not take any shit from anyone. He wanted to teach me to be a wolf and not a sheep, how to assert my masculinity by having lots of female lovers. How to be feared. All things he wanted for himself. Unfortunately for me he inadvertently taught me that the world is a scary and violent place. That it didn’t matter who I wanted to be, I was going to have to be hard. A big hard manly man. But I wasn’t hard, and I secretly thought girl’s stuff and the colour pink were quite nice.

Dad’s whole persona was built around being visually and verbally intimidating. He adopted the punk persona, snarled at anyone who stared. He knew how to fight using the energy and anger he was full of. He looked up to Sid Vicious and Johnny Rotten. Their music, their image. He rebelled against the systems of authority that were trying to oppress him. And I don’t blame him. The support he truly needed for his healthy development was never there, and he didn’t want to be scared, he wanted to be the scary one. So when school tried to intimidate him into learning he fought back, like he was taught to.

Dad did have a creative side. He could draw. When I was little he’d spend hours drawing using pen or pencil to create amazing pictures of deformed faces and bodies with intricate, almost tribal patterns swirling about the page. I now know he did this when he was on speed. Speed gives a person bountiful energy, and when alone, spectacular focus. People who take drugs often recall how spotlessly clean their house would be after a speed binge. On some occasions when speeding he sat from late at night into morning and sketched until his pictures were immaculate.

He’d had the pursuit for creativity killed by school. One time, in design and technology, he was set homework. The task was to write something creative about technology. Normally he’d never do homework, but he was interested in this so he gave it a go. He wrote a poem about nuclear war. Decades later he could remember it off by heart and would recite it to me. It was simple but effective, and clever. The last line was, ‘Four minutes to be precise, before they fire the nuclear device.’ It was about eight lines long and rhythmic. The teacher was so impressed by the poem that he believed Dad couldn’t have possibly written it himself and couldn’t have a mark for his homework. Dad didn’t write any more poems after that.

In stories forests can be representative of dark emotions, the unknown, the unconscious, new challenges and acquiring new knowledge from the past. In the forest a fool can start his journey to become a knight, someone lost can find colourful companions, they might even meet the wolf. If they’re not careful they might become the wolf. We all have our forests, we all travel to them from time to time. Some more than others. Some use the forest as a place to settle scores, a place to battle ogres and bring back gold –  the gold of artistry, the gold of knowledge, the gold of wisdom.

Dad never left his forest. His past shaped him in ways he could never acknowledge and his resentment of the past became him. He ran in circles with no pen in hand to scrawl a map of the thick woodland. Uninterested in addressing what might lie behind his hurt and his fury he lashed out at anything he saw as a threat, or prey. King in his forest. To leave his forest would mean giving up his throne, and there was nothing Dad disliked more than feeling vulnerable. To be part of his life I had to live in his forest, under his reign. Sometimes he took me under his wing, sometimes I was his prey. His insignia is forever branded within my bones.

Just another aging, traumatised millennial. Exploring trauma, mental health, addiction and "recovery" through the voice of lived experience.

My Family – part 3

Links to PART 1 and PART 2

Now for my Little Nan, the only girl of the five siblings.

Little Nan was just as tough as any of her four brothers. A toughness that carried with it a code of conduct that she learned growing up “old school”. The code, which becomes a story passed down from generation to generation, is a story to live by. It goes; if something hurts you don’t show it; you never grass; you keep your business to yourself, but most of all, there’s nothing more important in this world than family. Nothing. Not virtue, not justice, not money, not happiness. Your family comes first, always.

Little Nan’s first job was in a jeans factory, sewing jeans, which meant she was a dab hand at alterations and clothes repairs. She could knit too. She always knitted woollens for the new-borns in the family; cardigans, jumpers, little hats and booties.

When she got a bit older she started working in pubs, and she did that all her life, eventually becoming a landlady in some well-known Liverpool haunts.

Little Nan had three boys to three different men. One of these boys is my dad. He’s the middle one. My real grandad, who I’ve only ever met once, was violent; as all my Little Nan’s husbands, apart from Grandad Dave, have been. The 1970s was a time when these things were seen as normal, but you didn’t talk about them. Family first.

My real grandad pushed my Little Nan down the stairs when she was pregnant with Dad. He wanted to try and make her miscarry the baby. This is a story that my dad told me, and it’s stayed with him his whole life, as it would anybody.

Beating your children was also not seen as out of the ordinary in the 1970s. In fact, you didn’t even have to beat your own children, teachers were often doling out physical punishment to school children for your convenience. Little Nan was no different. She didn’t know any other way. We learn from those we grow up with, and from those around us, and she’d had plenty of schooling in violence.

After Little Nan’s divorces, and after her children had grown up, she met a good man. His name was Dave. Dave was Jamaican-Chinese. He was a fantastic cook, especially when it came to cooking meats. His curry was out of this world and as spicy as you like it. He’d apparently learned to cook when he was younger and then he cooked in the Territorial Army. He had his own grown up children too, from a previous marriage.

Dave and Little Nan were very happy together. They were both strong headed, hard-working people with a deep, sometimes dark history behind them. They decided to open a business together. It was a café bar called Mr Magoo’s on Lawrence Road, Wavertree, named after Mr Magoo, the near-blind cartoon character now considered highly offensive by the blind community. The café did well. I remember it slightly. I was very young then, maybe two or three. Dave cooked the food while Little Nan worked the bar. Dad later told me how somebody tried to rob Mr Magoo’s one evening.

Two men had been sitting there all day, drinking. When it was time to close, Little Nan, who was on her own and finishing the cleaning, asked the people to leave. They wouldn’t. They got up, threatened my nan, and tried to force her to give them the money from the till. They hadn’t banked on Little Nan being Little Nan. She didn’t take shit from people like them, and she fought back with the broom she was holding. They took the broom and smacked her in the face with it. She was left needing stitches in her forehead.

Her brother Robert wasn’t happy about this. He tracked down the men and, with help, got his revenge in a way that perhaps wouldn’t be out of place in a Scorsese scene.

Eventually Mr Magoo’s had to shut down, and Little Nan and Dave moved onto pubs. I loved going to Little Nan’s pubs and sitting upstairs. The pubs always seemed to have vast living areas. I have mixed feelings about the memories I have of Christmas and New Year in the pubs. On the one hand is the Christmas songs, the laughter, the lights, the people piling out of the pubs along Wavertree Road to hold hands in a circle in the road to sing Old Lang’s Syne. People got out of their cars and joined in. But it made me anxious as well, all that noise, screaming. Was someone being hurt? I was always worried a fight was about to break out any moment, but I can’t remember anything bad ever happening that I was aware of.

Pubs are where I believe Little Nan really found a role in society. She was cut out for the pub game, and radiated landlady authority and wit. In Little Nan’s landlady heyday she reminded me very much of a scouse Peggy Mitchell, the classic landlady from the TV show Eastenders. The effect was magnified by the fact that, just like Peggy’s, two of her sons were bald and gruff.

In the end, pubs turned out to be Little Nan’s downfall. Dave became an alcoholic. He had open access to all the spirits he would ever need, vodka being his favourite. He got worse and worse. He was so bad that at one point he was putting up the Christmas tinsel and couldn’t get down from the ladder. It wasn’t that he was weak or off balance, it was that he had reached the stage where was suffering from delirium. In reality he was only a few rungs up, but the ladder was his Everest in that moment, and vertigo terrified him to the point of tears. At other times he would chase rabbits that weren’t there, and mop up leaks from a bone-dry floor.

Little Nan would eventually give the pubs up to try and help Dave. They thought that if he was away from the alcohol he’d stop drinking and they’d live happily together again. Tragically, Dave and Little Nan eventually split after years of struggle.

Dave died a few years after they split up. The autopsy found he had three tumours on his lungs. Little Nan and Dave never divorced, she couldn’t bring herself to do it and they were still married when he passed away. Apparently, after the autopsy the hospital asked his children if they wanted to keep the tumours, a formality I think, something to do with disposing of body parts with the family’s consent. I always thought it strange that people would be asked such a question. What did the hospital suppose they might have done with them? Put them in a jar on the mantel piece to remind them of what killed their father? Surely, they could just visit one of many local off-licences for a reminder of that.

Not long ago my Little Nan also died. She had COPD from years of smoking twenty a day. She found out she had it about 18 years ago I think. I remember I saw that she had steroid inhalers and when I asked what they were for she said because she kept getting chest infections. I suspect she had the diagnoses at the time but didn’t want to tell everyone. She carried on smoking until the last six months or so of her life, but by then it was too late.

Just another aging, traumatised millennial. Exploring trauma, mental health, addiction and "recovery" through the voice of lived experience.

My Family – part 2

Link to PART 1

Here, I’ll explore the next generation of my family, the kids of Big Nan and Big Grandad. In particular the people who had a pretty big influence on my dad, and by proxy, on me.

Big Nan and Big Grandad had four sons and a daughter, all of whom ended up leading very different lives. These are my great uncles and my Little Nan. The eldest, Paul, was in a Mersey Beat band in the sixties and has his band’s name on the wall of fame on Matthew Street. He ended up moving to France to become a well-known local radio DJ, where he met his wife, the love of his life. He moved back to Liverpool after many years in France. He was an alcoholic and wanted to try and sort his head out, get better, give himself a chance of living longer with his COPD – a pulmonary disorder that inevitably finishes you off at some point if you don’t stop smoking. It didn’t happen. Everybody desperately tried to help, most especially his wife. Even after he developed emphysema he continued to smoke and drink. I remember him always on the cadge for a spare ciggy or a couple of quid. He had the gift of the gab. He was a blagger, but the person he blagged the most was himself. He died too young, breathless and grey in the Royal Liverpool Hospital, surrounded by his family.

Little Nan is the second eldest, my dad’s mum. But more about her in the next post

The third eldest, George, is the great-uncle I know the least about. This is partly due to somewhat of a distance from the family as he got older, though he seems to have led a relatively normal life. He has a long term wife, grown children and grandchildren who make a loving family unit.

The fourth eldest, John, joined the Irish Guard, and served tea to the Queen Mother once. He tells the story of how the Queen Mother asked him to pour her tea whilst he was on guard, and at first he refused because they were not orders from his superior. On the second time of her asking he did pour her tea, and got a bollocking later for not pouring it the first time she asked as the Queen Mother apparently outranked his direct superior. He now lives in the countryside with his wife and children. He wears a Barbour coat and a farmer’s cap. He has a no-nonsense approach to life and language. John will tell you what he thinks in as few words as possible. His wife, Joan, is a breast cancer survivor. They’ve had to adopt their own grandchildren due to their daughter’s drug addiction and chaotic behaviour, which was stressful and traumatic for everyone involved, especially the kids.

And last but not least it Robert. Robert is the youngest of Big Nan and Big Grandad’s five children, and probably the most like his dad – aka Tommy the Safe. Robert made his living as a criminal. My dad has told me stories of boxes full of brand new leather boots, sheep skin coats, and electrical goods stacked in the rooms of dad’s childhood homes. Respected on the streets as Robert was, he had quite the impact on my dad.

Robert made a name for himself as a hard, savvy, professional criminal. He was sentenced to thirteen years jail in the 1980s for armed robbery. It wasn’t his first armed robbery, but it was the one he didn’t get away with. The place he held up, with a shotgun, was the fruit market on Edge Lane. It’s still there today. Robert and his associates waited until the end of the week when they knew the takings would be at their highest, and went in to grab them before they were banked. He served nine years of his sentence.

When he came home, Little Nan put specially made banners up in her pub. It was a big event. It was like the homecoming of some mythical character. Odysseus comes home to Ithaca, a changed man. He has been on his night sea journey, battled a giant, resisted the sweet music of the sirens, lived with a goddess. See how much he has changed, the strength he has gathered from his trials. Robert’s return wasn’t like that. His journey had changed him, but not for the better. The years in prison had turned him to drugs, which would be his Nemesis. There was no reformed character, only a person who had suffered nearly a decade behind bars, locked away from anything he ever really cared about.

Robert had a friend, Gav. Gav was a milkman. That isn’t some criminal code word for a get-away driver, or torturer or something. He was actually a straight forward, up and out at 4am milkman. Gav went to visit Robert in prison regularly, without fail, for nine years. Gav once drove me, my little brother Anthony, and my dad to see Robert in a countryside prison. It was a long drive for a fidgety kid like me. And the car was small. Affordable cars in the nineties were bad. When you see the cars we have now, it makes the cars of past decades seem like experiments in minimal comfort.

Prison visits are awkward. You’re going into a place which is normally painted a neutral, non-stimulant colour; beige, grey, cream. And there’s this person who you just want to go and have a drink with or take home. There’s all these other people around too, doing the same thing. Cheap plastic tables and chairs are planted around on a floor made of hard-wearing carpet tiles. Locked steel gates. Big metal doors that have little thick windows in them. Prison guards, who you hate and fear with an equal gut instinct, scrutinise any move in case it’s used to slip something to a prisoner.

In a prison visiting room there are mothers with new babies seeing fathers who can feel nothing but guilt, the sexual frustration of young lovers unable to touch, the hidden truths, the concealed emotions, the forced conversations.

Going to see Robert in prison was similar to visiting my mum in her mental hospitals. Or the visits my brothers and I would have with her when she’d be driven the four-hour journey to Liverpool from Kings Lynn just to spend a few hours with us, before she was driven back to the hospital again. We’d go to McDonalds, under the supervision of two mental health nurses she had with her, and were told we could order whatever we wanted. The McDonalds visits were just as plastic and dismal as any prison visit. These raw, private and desperate moments of connection between people who loved and cared for each other would shape my early emotional landscape.

It was weird to me that I was going to see someone I had only ever heard stories about. But as great as those stories were, or at least they felt like stories about a great man, there he was locked up like an animal. It was a poor end for this legend of the family. I watched him and I noticed how he didn’t look great at that moment. He could only look at the green and pleasant land that surrounded the prison through the dirty windows of the concrete complex he was locked up in.

At that point Robert had been in prison for about six years, and Elly, the mother of Robert’s two children, had started seeing somebody else. We all knew. Everyone on the outside knew, but Robert didn’t. Gav and my dad had been talking about this on the drive there. Gav was strongly considering telling Robert about it.

Not long after we’d sat down with uncle Robert and said our hellos, my brother Anthony, who was around six, blurted out, ‘Auntie Elly’s seeing someone else, you know.’ I think he thought he was doing everyone a favour. Me and Anthony were told to go to the naffy (tuck shop) to buy some hot chocolate and biscuits while Gav explained things to Robert.

After Robert got out of jail he went back to a life of crime. He would snatch cash boxes from security guards picking up money in their white armoured vans. He also had his fingers in other pies. The tops of the cupboards in Big Grandad’s bungalow were stacked with boxes of Valium. I was about fifteen at the time and I’d been smoking weed for over a year. I wondered what it was like to take one and came close to pocketing a box or two, but never did.

By this time Robert was smoking crack, and probably heroin, something he’d never done before he went to prison. I should have known there was something wrong with his head when I was sitting in Big Grandad’s shed using nail varnish remover to get rid of red dye from hundreds of twenty-pound notes. It didn’t work very well as it tarnished the little hologram, but he insisted I keep at it and salvage what I could.

He got caught when one of the guards he was robbing managed to grab the baseball cap he had on. They got his DNA from it, and he served another eight years in prison.

Just another aging, traumatised millennial. Exploring trauma, mental health, addiction and "recovery" through the voice of lived experience.

My Family – part 1

Like a lot of people, but not all, I have some interesting stories about people in my family.

I think discussing where I come from in terms of family is interesting in that it points to patterns. Patterns of behaviour, patterns of trauma, patterns of meaning and importance that we assign to different parts of ourselves and others. It can answer some questions about why I don’t feel I fit in. It can also shed light on the humanity of the people who have had such a huge influence on me growing up. For better or for worse.

My family history was told to me mostly through the eyes of my father, though details have been supported and added to over the years by my grandmother, great grandmother, and my mother. The stories my father told though, more specifically the details he chose to elaborate on, say something about him, and how he wanted to fit into and shape my story.

Generally I come from a working-class family background, but at home I grew up in what is called the under-class. Which, I suppose, can translate as the out-caste.

But going back before all of that, my great-great grandfather, Lewis, was Jewish and from London. He was born within earshot of the Bow Bells of St Mary-le-Bow church in Cheapside, which meant he was a proper cockney. He moved to Liverpool to help his dad run a horse and carriage service in Clayton Square. This was when there was no public transport, and a horse and carriage business could do well in a busy city like Liverpool. He met my great-great grandmother through driving the horse and carriage; she was a customer. Her name was Ellen, and she was an Irish Catholic living in Liverpool. Her family came from an obscure little place in Ireland called the Vale of Avoca.

When they were courting, Lewis would bring Ellen a single yellow rose, called a tea rose, every time they went out. Eventually Lewis converted from Judaism to Catholicism to marry Ellen without the marriage being taboo.

Lewis and Ellen’s daughter, Olive, was my great grandmother. We called her Big Nan. She’s was a proper Liverpool FC woman. Red through and through. Big Nan started going to watch Liverpool play when she was fifteen, and at 89 years old still held a season ticket. Though at that age she only attended the home matches, and a younger friend attended the away games. Big Nan grew up listening to Glen Miller, dancing in music halls, and perming her hair.

Big Nan was tough. She lost a brother in World War II, and she gave birth to five children. She had the most energetic personality and wit I’d ever seen in an 89 year old. And her eyes held wisdom and experiences she never told me about. I think it was a private thing for her. Some things aren’t for the ears of any but your closest. She had an image to uphold, and she wouldn’t let that image be changed in my eyes.

When she was young Big Nan worked in the legendary Meccano factory on Binns Road, off Edge Lane. She worked there for years. Before that she’d move from job to job. She said you could do that back then. You could leave a job and walk into one the next day as long as you had a reputation as a good worker.

She used to have a novelty teapot collection, one hundred or so teapots of different shapes and sizes were scattered around her small back room in a terraced house in Kensington, a rough and lively Liverpool suburb. One pair of teapots that particularly stick with me are a pair of Laurel and Hardy ones. They were creepy looking, those pale disembodied heads of Laurel and Hardy, grotesque grins on their faces, and little dead eyes. Big Nan loved them.

She also used to keep little yellow budgies. She had her last budgie around 23 years ago when she still lived in Kensington. She’d let it fly around the living room sometimes so it could stretch its wings, occasionally leaving little birds shits dotted about the place. When she went out she’d leave the radio on for it so it wouldn’t feel lonely. After that budgie died she never got another, she said it was too sad having them die on her.

My great grandfather, Big Grandad, was in the navy. He was called Big Grandad through being married to Big Nan, and he was a big man. A character who commanded family tradition and respect just with his presence. When he left the navy he turned his hand to various professions. One of those being a safe cracker. “Tommy the Safe” they used to call him. When he left all, well most, of that world behind he would sell fruit and veg, and packets of bacon and chops from the back of his blue transit van. From the back of the same van, at Christmas time, he would dress as Father Christmas and hand sweets to children with the help of his elves, who were his nieces, nephews, and grandkids in full elf get up. The children loved it, and looked forward to Big Grandad sounding his Christmas bells. He also made small arm chairs, foot rests, and sofas for toddlers, which he’d upholster in a choice of material from blue corduroy to something pink and fur-like. They were very popular. Big Grandad was good with his hands.

I imagine he also sold and moved other things in that van. Big Grandad knew how to make a living doing business on the streets, and everybody knew him. He harboured a dark streak that grew more obvious when he’d been drinking.

In the mid-nineties my Great Grandad was caught smuggling cannabis in France. He was in his late fifties by then. He was convicted and served four years in a French prison in the mountains. He was never the same after that.

Though I rarely went on days out or holidays as a child, Big Grandad used to drive me and my brothers and cousins to Camelot – a multi coloured medieval themed park with giant spinning teacups, roller-coasters, jousting, and candy floss. I was eight or nine at the time. Even though Camelot was a tacky, run down theme park, I loved the place. Six children or more would cluster in the back of Big Grandad’s transit van, gripping for dear life as he spun around sharp corners, smiling to himself. We’d duck down when he said to, so the police wouldn’t see us and ruin our day out. Little Nan (daughter of Big Nan and Grandad) would be in the front with my auntie Elly. Elly was Little Nan’s sister-in-law and one of Little Nan’s close friends. In bags and cooler boxes there would be lunches made and packed by Little Nan and Elly. Sandwiches, sausage rolls, crisps, sweets, fizzy drinks.

Camelot was an amazing place to me as a child, a medieval fantasyland full of rollercoasters, like two eras coming together. I particularly remember the jousting knights and the excitement and frustration of waiting for them to do battle. Skipping around on their horses to the jeering of the crowd. It all looked so real to me. I loved this mythical little place, and I was sure the knights could get seriously hurt. My dad never came with us to Camelot. And at that point my mum had suffered her mental breakdown and was locked away in a mental hospital, on the other side of the country in Norfolk.

Camelot was somewhere imagination could come alive. I would imagine what it would be like to be a knight of the court, saving the land from dragons and fighting off dark knights or rescuing princesses. I didn’t know anything of the Grail legends then. I know now that at that point in my life I was wounded, like the grail legend’s Fisher King, whose wound drained his vital energy and made his land a wasteland. The only cure to this wound would be someone who’d found the Fisher King’s castle asking a question. The question being “what ails thee”.

I think in large part the wound I harboured was the realisation that there was no way I could rescue the ultimate damsel in distress, my mother. I didn’t have the power to bring my mum home from the institution to which she was committed. It was a gut-wrenching realisation that I wasn’t the brave hero I wanted to be. I’d moved from the innocence of my inner and outer worlds united, to separation; the duality of my subjective fantasy and the objectivity of my environment.

No one would ask me the question, ‘What ails thee?’ I would have to ask myself, many years later, and with help, to come to conclusions. Still, it was cathartic watching those knights topple each other from their horses in a fashion reminiscent of TV wrestling. It was true theatre to me.

When I look back at the photographs of Camelot I can see the place is only a poor simulacrum of a garish American-made medieval aesthetic. A lax plastic attempt at King Arthur’s Camelot, plonked in the middle of a motorway wasteland. It was only my imagination that took me elsewhere.

Just another aging, traumatised millennial. Exploring trauma, mental health, addiction and "recovery" through the voice of lived experience.

Detox Paradise: Being Seen and Listening to Sheep

It was 2011. I was about to enter what they call recovery. I had no idea it was called recovery. If someone had told me I was going into recovery, I might have asked, ‘What is it I’m meant to be recovering?’ I wasn’t recovering anything, I was finding things I’d never had. It was discovery. I packed everything I owned into a small suitcase and my trusty old, cider-stained rucksack. I said goodbye to the people in the hostel I lived in. Marcel, my wide-eyed and lost next door neighbour was very sincere in his goodbye. Even a little puzzled. The underpaid staff wished me luck. I handed in my keys and off I went, wearily pulling my material life behind me for the thirty minute walk to the Basement on Parr Street.

When I got to the Basement there was a white mini bus waiting, with a little steel trailer attached. Waiting next to the trailer were seven nervous men, all smiles and darting eyes, about to spend the next two weeks with each other. I tried to accept what I’d got myself into. I wasn’t going to fit in, I knew that. It was about getting somewhere other than the barrel full of shit I was in. And I looked like I’d been in barrel full of shit for a while. We all did. We loaded our stuff and were gone, a van full of Walking Dead extras. Guiding us through our sobering extravaganza was Donna the woman who ran the Basement detox and was a recovering addict, Sue a holistic therapist, Jimmy a support worker who was recovering addict, and Tommy a volunteer who was a recovering addict.

We drove to a big cottage near Berwyn, Llangollen, Wales. We were in the middle of nowhere not just because it was peaceful, but because there was nowhere to get any mind-altering goodies. Even the local pub, The Sun Inn, had been advised against serving any thirsty, desperate looking Scousers. Being on a detox didn’t mean we weren’t allowed to drink though. For the first few days we got pissed. It was a reduction detox, a method which weans alcoholics off the drink for the first few days so as not to shock their system. The liquid menu for the first full day was half a litre of sherry and a can of Skol Super four times a day – breakfast, lunch, dinner and supper. The amount was reduced over the next three or four days depending on how much a person regularly drank, and how long they’d been drinking.

We were happy, the first couple of nights everyone was pissed. It was when the ale reduced to next to nothing that things got tough. The others were decent though, there were no real problems. Other than the obvious ones we were all carrying in our wounded bodies.

I was a quiet, trying-to-be-stern-looking, pasty, inward-facing loner with no social skills to speak of and a chest full of quivering earth. But I was determined that they were the first days of the rest of my life, and I was spending them with a mish-mash of people who’d all been through similar things in different ways. Many of us had lost people we’d loved in sad, tragic, even horrific ways. We’d all been taught that being hard was best. We all had skinheads, they were easy to look after, no combing or washing needed. Our haircuts were also better at making us appear as though we might snap if looked at in the wrong way.

Getting pissed the first couple of days gave me something to hide behind, but there was huge anticipation at what would come next. It was like knowing that imminently I’d be shot into space but first I was having a nice spa day with plenty of food and muscle relaxants. Jimmy, the gruff support worker, and Tommy the hyper-surrealist, keen fisher and volunteer, said that once the ale was taken away it was likely we’d feel the need to cry. Cry? Nah, mate. Not a crier me – the group oozed that sentiment. I think some of us were curious and scared about the magic of tears without a substance to bring them on. I know wanted it. I wanted tears. I wanted that feeling, the one I’d been trying and conjure by cutting or burning myself.

The day came, my last drink. Anxiety, racing brain, fear, mania. I hadn’t slept properly because sharing a room made me paranoid. I didn’t like the early mornings. Up at 7:30am, breakfast at 8am. To me that was practically army routine. Thank fuck the army knocked me back on the basis of mental health when I’d applied a few years before. I thought the army would be good for me, away from the world, away from drink and drugs. I now know it would have probably fucked me up more. When not being ordered around by a man who looks like a screaming, veiny penis, all there is to do in the army is drink, snort coke, and be uber-masculine (to the point where it all seems a bit violently homo-erotic). It would have made a mess of someone like me.

I wish I could say my last drink was a single malt aged twenty years. That I’d drunk it from a crystal glass, swirling it, inhaling the aroma of my near demise. Unfortunately, my last drink was a can of lukewarm Carlsberg I drank while I sat thankfully alone on top of a picnic table on a chilly early-afternoon whilst listening to the sheep bleat in the field next to me. It really did sound like they were talking to each other, or maybe me. What would their message be if they were talking to me? Maybe they were asking me to stay, to live in the relative safety of the towering Welsh hills. Or maybe they were telling me to fuck off with my shit lager. I hate Carlsberg, so inoffensive and unchallenging to the senses. It sickened me. I was used to drinking things that made me gag on the first swig, or set my belly on fire. Carlsberg was just shit lemonade. Totally non consequential. But I tried to make the most of it. And as I slowly sipped that can I became all philosophical and thought about the insignificance of a man drinking his last beer in a world that hustles and bustles and gets on with it regardless. I was insignificant in it all, didn’t matter to any of it. I only mattered insofar as I made myself matter, and if I wanted my future to be a better one I had to be the one willing myself through it. I was the part of the universe that would make my life better, the rest of existence didn’t give a shit. Maybe that was what the sheep were telling me.

I sensed time around me ticking away as normal, I tried to hold the moment close to me like I’d never done before. Moments that normally stuck with me were bad ones – moments that’d shocked me, embarrassed me, or traumatised me. Memories froze in time to haunt me at their will. But that moment, the last drink, I wanted to grab and pull in. Make it a setting to revisit in my mind’s eye. I started to think about what had brought me there. About the deep hate I had for the world, and how I couldn’t really hate what I didn’t know. I tried to think concretely about what the future might hold and drew nothing but fear and anxiety. I moved on. I was going to break the chain. The me I knew existed in there, the artist, the thinker, the friend, the lover. I wanted them to be real. An empty, green, lager can was the start. The sun was low, it was breezy, the hills made me feel safe. The city was waiting. That’d be the real test, but for the next ten days the green hills were there to hide me. I crushed the can in my hand, took one more look around me, and went inside.

A day or two after, we were all sober. That’s when the work began. There was no telly allowed, there was time for films in the evening, but daytimes were for workshops, cooking, going for walks, talking, getting the wood fires going. The workshops were normally based around dealing with emotions, how to help others, what our triggers for relapse might be. Eight men who could blag, fight, steal, and generally bungle our chaotic way through the miserable world were lost for words when it came to sharing how vulnerable we might really feel. Some were in downright denial. Two of them said there were no triggers, nothing made them the way they were, it is what it is. One of them in particular went as far to deny he ever felt sad, his conclusion was that he didn’t even have emotions. Another one clammed up for a long time, never going further than saying he was struggling. Then one day he burst into tears talking about how he was worried for his son, who was three or four at the time, and was unwell. All he wanted was to help his son through life and was scared he wouldn’t be able to. Two others were distant, but down to earth. They said anything they were feeling wasn’t going to be shared at the table. There was a small, skinny man who seemed quite confused. I knew he was scared to share much of what went on beneath the surface, because I felt the same. I saw a reflection of myself in his hunched, shifty, body language.

I couldn’t share my real feelings at first, it felt completely alien to share feelings without banter, ale, the safety net of being able to walk away. But after a day or two of workshops I did it. I told how I felt scared, vulnerable, like I didn’t know what the world had in store for me. I felt like someone or something was out to get me even though I was far away from any danger. I was probably the safest I’d been for a long time, but actually feeling safe wasn’t something my head would afford me.

As the days went on my panic and sense of impending doom, weakness, and utter despair had the top soil removed and roots were exposed. Sitting at the dinner table one evening I stared out of the windows, acting as if I was looking at something in the darkness. Really I was going over and over scary scenarios, confirming to myself that everyone hated me. I was worthless, all I’d ever done with my life was fuck it up. Fuck me! Fuck, why? Die, just die. Don’t even think. It hurt. Chest pains. Head gone. Messed up. No one else felt like me. Everyone was better than me. The little outcast, alien, hermit. Chewing through my skin. Sweating. I couldn’t run to the offy or to the dealer. I couldn’t stuff my face with cake and sweets and crisps. I was fucked.

Even when distracted by my constant fear I heard a lot when people thought I wasn’t listening. I saw a lot when people thought I wasn’t looking – it comes from a childhood of always being on high alert. And something happened which pulled me out of the window-staring act, I heard Donna whisper to Sue, the holistic therapist, ‘He’s trapped in his head.’ Hearing that was a revelation. Someone had seen me. Someone had done what very few people had ever done, they noticed. They saw inside, beyond the act. I didn’t flinch. Didn’t move a muscle. Had to stay in character.

The cottage we stayed in had something to do with the families of the Tate and Lyle sugar company. One day this foppish, handsome, Hugh Grant-but-a-farmer type came and planted apple trees with us. He brought the saplings, the manure, the feed. Those of us who were fit to do so went to work digging and planting these little fellas on the grass bank along the drive at the side of the cottage. We loved it. We had pick axes to break the soil, shovels to dig. We whacked in the support logs for the saplings to be tied to. It was hard work, but I found an abundance of physical energy for it. If I could go to the ends of the earth to get a drink or a weed, then planting some trees was a piece of piss. It was a transfer of motivation and reward. Mentally, it was hard. Every time I spoke to this lovely Hugh Grant guy I felt like he hated me. My perception was all askew, I’d interpret any body language or vocal communication that wasn’t explicitly positive as a sign of extreme dislike for me.

A few days later Hugh Grant man came back with a brass placard screwed to a big, grey rock. On it was engraved the name of the people who’d planted the trees, and the date they’d been planted. The trees are still there today. It was a lovely thing for Hugh Grant man to do off his own back.

The van ride home to the big city was surreal. I’d had an experience I’d never had before, with people I still didn’t really know. We’d shared our space, cooked for each other, smoked, laughed, and silently fumed together hidden amongst the sheep for two weeks. When I’d needed to I’d went and listened to the little brook by the cottage. I felt small and safe focusing on the sound of the trickling water amidst the vacant greenery. At night I’d stared at the magnificent stars and remembered that at the end of the day we’re all a bit miraculous, but never the less ultimately fucked, in the big soup. I didn’t want to leave. I could have lived out the rest of my days there, I thought.

As far as I know, four of the people from the residential have since died. Three detoxees died due to drug related illnesses or accidents. And Jimmy, the support worker, passed away due to a sudden cardiac arrest. Others relapsed but are now back in recovery and getting some time under their belts.

Just another aging, traumatised millennial. Exploring trauma, mental health, addiction and "recovery" through the voice of lived experience.

Beware Nostalgia

At this time of year nostalgia is strong. Nostalgia can often be a fantasy, a yearning for something we never actually had but feel we need in a very strong part of us. Something we might fool our selves into believing we nearly had. Yes we do deserve it, we just can’t get it from the past. As counter intuitive as it sounds, it can be really difficult staying away from a person who has/does hurt you. Especially at this time of year. Ultimately, I think, we can want an abusive person to accept and validate us. And in some cases the longer the hurt goes on, the more we want to fix it. For me, I struggle with the idea that the trauma was all for nothing. That I was hurt, abused, and scarred for life and that’s it. Done. Live with it. No do-overs, no backs, no nothing. The desire to go and fix it, make it better, make them see, is really strong. Especially as through the work I’ve done on myself I’ve come to understand so much more about my abusive parent and their own pain, trauma, and underlying motivation.

But it’s a fantasy really isn’t it? A desire for something that has gone. A wish to concentrate those good moments I might have had, or could still have, with my parent into some blurry, glowing nostalgia dream that leaves out all the mess and reality. I understand why I want it. I also understand that sadly it’s not mine to have. Yet somehow I feel I can never escape what could have been.

Maybe the nostalgic desire to go back is a desire to be hurt more, reminded of the pain in a very vivid way. It’s weird how trauma can find ways to keep reminding you it’s there. Or maybe it’s a desire to heal – if I heal this relationship, this thing that should have been safe for me, then maybe I can heal. Going back and trying to work with my parent, even though now, a decade after beginning my journey to move on, they have “mellowed with age” would itself be traumatic. Fortunately, for various reasons, it’s relatively easy for me to stay away physically. Staying away mentally is a whole different challenge, and this time of year particularly is triggering. At this point nostalgia around my childhood home is just traumatic in itself. Nostalgia and C-PTSD are kind of living in the same place – memory, emotion, sensory experience, loss.

For many there is no closure, or separation. Maybe you are having to see abusive people at this time of year and it isn’t as simple as just staying away. And added with all the pressure around fitting into a nice, tidy little Christmas narrative it can just become a horrible time of year all round. In that case, it’s just shit isn’t it? Just remember it’s not you, it’s them. 

A friend of mine recently shared with me their acceptance of Christmas as a turning on of the lights in the dark. A distraction from the bleakness of mid-winter. I thought that made sense, and it made me think about what turning the lights on in the dark means for me. What does it mean for you?

And if there is no light in the dark for you at this time of year, then I wish you the best in just getting through it and into the new year safely, intact, and prepared to move forward.

Just another aging, traumatised millennial. Exploring trauma, mental health, addiction and "recovery" through the voice of lived experience.

The bio-psycho-social: Gabor Maté

Gabor Maté is a Doctor Medicine with expertise in addiction, the effects of stress on the body and mind, and ADHD. He is also a renowned speaker and bestselling author.

His book, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, explores his over 20 years of experience working with the most severely addicted and mentally ill, predominantly homeless, people in Vancouver’s Downtown East Side. Along with his experience of the people he has worked with, he provides scientific and social science evidence to support his, and others’, theories that addiction is a mostly a developmental and social issue.

Maté proports the idea that addiction is a bio-psycho-social phenomenon. He believes that addiction has its roots mostly in trauma and alienation, and that biology, psychology, and society all play their part in the development of addiction and interact with each other in inseparable ways.

In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts is a fascinating read and was a real eye-opener for me. Learning how development and trauma effect your biology in very solid ways is supported with scientific research. There is also an element of the storytelling of experiences his clients have had over the years.

I would say it is on of the most comprehensive books on addiction theory and really captures how many different factors play a role in what a human life will become.

Below is a video of Maté talking about his book.

Just another aging, traumatised millennial. Exploring trauma, mental health, addiction and "recovery" through the voice of lived experience.

Reading List

Below is a list of books that you might find useful if you’re interested in reading about addiction and/or trauma.

Addiction Memoir 

Running with Scissors – Augusten Burroughs

Dry: A Memoir – Augusten Burroughs

Addicted: Notes from the Belly of the Beast – Lorna Crozier

Memoirs of an Addicted Brain – Marc Lewis

How to Stop Time: Heroin from A to Z – Ann Marlowe

Confessions of an English Opium Eater – Thomas de Quincy

Permanent Midnight – Jerry Stahl

Addiction Theory

The Globalisation of Addiction – Bruce K. Alexander

Recovery from Addiction – Robert Granfield & William Cloud

Chasing the Scream – Johann Hari

The Biology of Desire: Why Addiction is not a Disease – Marc Lewis

In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts – Gabor Mate

Drugs, Addiction, and Initiation: The Modern Search for Ritual – Luigi Zoja

Trauma

The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind and Body in the healing of trauma – Bessel van der Kolk

In an Unspoken Voice: How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Goodness – Peter Levine

Childhood Disrupted: How Your Biography Becomes Your Biology – Donna Jackson Nakazawa

Expressive Writing: Words that Heal – James Pennebaker and John Frank

Fiction

The Mighty Angel – Jerzy Pilch

Trainspotting – Irvine Welsh

Other

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas – Hunter S. Thomspon

Glue: The Extended Remix – Louise Wallwein

Just another aging, traumatised millennial. Exploring trauma, mental health, addiction and "recovery" through the voice of lived experience.

Childhood Development: ACEs

Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) play a huge role in adult health of all kinds. Starting over two decades ago, with the largest study of its kind at the time, ACEs were identified as having an impact of the trajectory of different aspects of adult health, such as mental health, heart health, gut health, and behavioural health. The idea is that the more ACEs an individual has the more likely that the trauma the ACEs caused the will result in ill-effect to their development through changes to the way their brain develops. As well as changes to the way their body responds to, and processes, stress.

There are many resources to discover regarding ACEs and their effetcs, but the blog Aces too High is an excellent resource. You can even take the ACEs test yourself to see what you score. There are ten questions, each one asking about a potential traumatic experience you may have had as a child. But please beware, it can be triggering, it was for me (I scored eight out of ten).

The video below, featuring Dr Nadine Burke Harris, discusses the lasting effects of childhood trauma and questions why more isn’t being done to alleviate it.

Science journalist Donna Jackson Nakazawa‘s book Childhood Disrupted: How You Biography Becomes Your Biology, is an extraordinary read on how your experiences growing up effect the biology of your body. She draws on research into ACEs, trauma, and adulthood illnesses, both physical and mental, to find the connections between them. Nakazawa also uses the stories of people who have suffered childhood trauma and live live with adult illness.

She particularly focusses on the effects of ongoing trauma in childhood, like the effects of an unpredictable toxic parent. It’s interesting to explore the different levels of trauma and how they have effected the individuals in adult life. There’s also a surprising amount of evidence linking childhood stress to autoimmune and inflammatory diseases in adult life.

Below is a video of Nakazawa discussing her area of research and what she found in the writing of Childhood Disrupted.

Gabor Maté is a medical doctor who specialises in the field of addiction (he also equally specialises in the field of ADHD). Over two decades of working on the front line with those who suffer from the most severe forms of drug addiction, as well as his deep sense of empathy and understanding, led him to a bio-psycho-social approach to the social phenomenon of drug addiction. He uses a mix of scientific and social research mixed with deeply compassionate understanding of human experience to explain what he believes are the main causes of drug addiction – mainly pointing to issues during childhood development. He makes robust points that, for me, really hit home in powerful, sometimes painful, ways.

Below is a video of Maté discussing the ideas in his work regarding addiction.

Just another aging, traumatised millennial. Exploring trauma, mental health, addiction and "recovery" through the voice of lived experience.

Me, addiction, and recovery: an introduction

In 2011, when my drinking and drug taking had long ceased to offer me any comfort from emotional turmoil, I decided that I was going to stop once and for all. Actually, I’d decided to stop many times before, but it was 2011 when I would enter what they call recovery.

I didn’t know what recovery was. I still don’t I suppose, it means different things to different people. But the one thing that all those who are in recovery have in common is the desire to finally stop whatever damaging thing it is they’ve done for years.

For me, the damaging thing was drink and weed, for a few years it was cocaine too, but I kicked that when my supply, and my sanity, ran dry. I’d smoked weed since I was thirteen. Weed, when I first smoked it, was like some kind of magic ailment for all the anxiety and stress I felt. It was bliss, like suckling at the teat of the cosmic mother. That blissful high in the early days was a romance. Thing is, my relationship with weed soon went sour, a toxic partner I couldn’t escape.

As I aged my mental health worsened due to varying factors: the lasting effects of untreated trauma caused by a series of prolonged adverse childhood experiences, the continued effect of a toxic parent, repressed sexuality, and addiction. Added to that is the fact that I, like many of us, live in an environment that constantly alienates, belittles, and scares us. It is even said that anxiety, depression, and addiction are natural responses to the toxic and abusive systems around us ( for info on those ideas see links in Useful Stuff).

My ability to adapt to, and grow with, life as it happened was severely stunted. I was anxious, paranoid, angry, scared, and at times delusional. Socialising or building any type of connection with people was painfully impossible. I tried, but I never fit in, could never relax or be myself. And to my horror, weed, the only thing that had ever at least alleviated my pain, began to add to it. When I was eighteen, I met alcohol, which started a new escape-drive for me. A legal, but much more dangerous journey opened to me with the discovery of the pain relieving effects of alcohol.

But recovery, what is it really? The word recovery suggests that you can recover that which was lost through whatever damaging habit you formed, i.e. to recover what was lost you must quit the damaging, compulsive habit.

The first thing that really confused me about recovery was the word itself. Recovery? Recover what? There was absolutely nothing about my life up to that point that I wanted to recover. I didn’t have, had never had, anything. What was I expected to recover? I didn’t know, but people sure did want to tell me.

I’ve had infuriating, stifling, abusive experiences with the recovery community, particularly with professionals within the recovery community who champion a certain way of thinking. However, I’ve also had some inspirational, empowering, and life affirming experiences with others in the same circles.

What I had to do was find my own way, and I decided that it wasn’t recovery I wanted, I wanted discovery.

Just another aging, traumatised millennial. Exploring trauma, mental health, addiction and "recovery" through the voice of lived experience.