“Many are asking the same question. So what, you had a troubled childhood, does that mean you aren’t responsible for the things you do?”
In our experience, the more you understand the influence of past trauma on your life, the better equipped you can become to change the behaviours that formed as a response to the trauma. Our survival behaviours, what we might do if faced with something that threatens us, are reactions more than decisions. In a heated argument we tend to say things and do things we wouldn’t say or do at other times. Faced with violence we rarely have chance to think through our options, instead we react to the situation. If the danger is repeated and often, the brain-body learns the responses that work best in the moment. These are usually responses that don’t serve us well in the normal everyday moments of life.
For Simon, understanding the impact of trauma is important.
“I believe it is important to remember these people. And from our places of relative comfort, not to forget that it’s not their fault. You know alcoholism is nobody‘s first choice of lifestyle.”
All of this is a way of introducing his own story. There are two themes, his parents relationship and the feeling that he was, for his dad, something to study rather than to love.
“I knew the C word before I was two years old. It was what my father called my mother, especially when he was in that mood.”
“My early years were characterised by disinterest and neglect, although I certainly didn’t think that at the time. Whatever I experienced I thought was the norm, after all I was a child. My father’s diary entry for the time around my birth was “16th September 1959 first child arrived - take library books back” Now my birthday is August 29th, so my father got the date of my birth wrong and was not interested in the gender of his first born or indeed the fact that I was a very healthy baby. All he was really interested in was how soon he could make me bilingual in French and I can hear my mother now saying to him ,”oh for God sake Jon he’s your son it’s not some sort of laboratory experiment” He took no notice of this or indeed any of her opinions.”
“I have always kept quiet about this for the simple reason that it feels wrong to even talk about it. I have always been aware that many people are worse off than me, after all I had a comfortable middle-class background with no financial worries, never went hungry, had no educational disadvantages, in fact quite the reverse. So, who was I to complain about adverse childhood experiences? Well, I have come to realise that I would rather have been poor and needy but loved than largely ignored. Indifference is so tough to deal with.”
“In adolescence I fell in with the wrong crowd. I didn’t attend school as much as I should have but I met some wonderful people. At a very early and impressionable age I encountered drugs, marijuana, alcohol, tobacco and all the rest. Sex was also a problem as I was raped by a predatory homosexual older boy who was 15 and this event strangely did not traumatise me at all. I wanted to be extremely naughty with girls and I still do. I am a sexually addictive person and I have no idea whether that is down to childhood influences or whether it is something within me?”
The link between the adverse experience of his home and the behaviours he developed remain a question for Simon and yet, at the same time, he answers them.
“It was precisely because I was spending so much time away from home and wishing to grow away from what my parents were that I became the sex addict.”
And when he was at home, his parents relationship shaped the way he spoke and made him do things he thinks aren’t naturally who he is. He considers that he isn’t a violent person but he had to stand up to and threaten his dad.
“My parents’ arguments seemed to be incessant, pointless and vicious and I became habituated to conflict, looking for peoples mistakes, indeed never missing an opportunity to point out somebody’s mistake. I was a big strapping lad and I could handle myself physically, especially when the adrenalin was flowing, which was often. I told him he had to stop calling my mother a c###; stupid c### lazy c### and ignorant c### and all the rest of it. ….. I made him aware that if his verbal and psychological abuse of my mother escalated whilst I was away at university then I would come back and deal with him”
Simon is a survivor and for most of his adult life he has earned a decent income and remained employed. But that doesn’t mean he thrived.
“Despite not going to school as often as I should have I did okay… although I always under achieved in formal examinations, I did actually make it to Oxford University to study law. I didn’t finish that degree and had to leave shortly before finals as I was experiencing the first of what was then called nervous breakdowns. In fact, it was bipolar syndrome. We know now that it describes swinging between highs and lows and not being able to cope with that. At 19 the label hadn’t been invented so I was given another label, I was called a serial underachiever and this one has stuck to the present day.”
Simon ends with a plea to us to look at homelessness as an illness. He asks us to think about the empathy we feel when we know someone is suffering from a terrible illness and wonders why we don’t feel the same when we see people homeless on the street.
He says, “there is little or no difference between the obvious physical elements which attract empathy and the less obvious underlying traumas which give rise to mental conditions”.
