BEYOND BETRAYAL, BEYOND BELIEF 1- who’s to blame

An actual account of toxic childhood & religion, dedicated to all adult children who have had similar childhood experiences, to health professionals Drs Lorraine Bell & Judy Staley, the various 12 Step fellowships, including ACOA (adult children of alcoholics), & to Richard P for encouragement.
Not every woman is instinctively meant for motherhood & being maternal doesn't come naturally to all women. My biological mother was such a woman. She gave birth to 3 children, me a boy, & my sister from my biological father, & another boy from a ‘one-hour-stand’. I say this, because I can remember sitting on the sire’s motorcycle, as my step-brother was being conceived in the ‘family home’ whilst my father was out at work. This would be one of countless betrayals of my mother to her husband, my father, her children and to the concept/notion of the ‘family system’, which would later sow the seed in creating primal betrayal/abandonment issues in my life. As a child for some reason I would intentionally memorise incidents, details of the abuse, in much the same way someone would take mental notes observing a crime-scene or in the way that a car crash victims’ perspective widens recalling past memories in slow motion, maybe in order that closure/justice could eventually be served, or in this case- an account to be written!. Being the eldest of the 3 children, my cognitive processes were also more established, resulting in more concrete memories. It needs to be remembered that it is a childs’ perogative to be self-centred about its survival, & will become overly sensitive to their environmental security, especially if a parent knows this, and uses it as a parental mechanism of control. My mother knew this, and used this threat of abandonment as one of her methods of control. Abandonment to a child is death. 2This fear will continue into adulthood if self-parenting & healing have not taken place, which is the great unfortunate truth and the premise of this book.
The childs’ ego/psyche needs to feel it can exert a measure of control over the mother, I could never achieve this, mother was uncontrollable, a banshee!. Under psychological test conditions, where a mother leaves a child alone/abandoned for a period of time, on return, the mother is greeted with silent scorn/indifference by the child. I remember that this form of sulking(anger turned inwards) was the predominant feeling of my childhood. Another one of mothers parenting techniques would be to put the child who had not carried out her orders to the letter, into coventry, that is, would not look or talk to the child for up to 2 days!. My energies were consequently subdued by shame & anger, so becoming more controllable to mothers egocentric energies.
In my own life, I can see how the slow car crash of childhood & subsequent post traumatic stress disorder(PTSD), & a ‘fear of abandonment’ has resulted in the same kind of hysteria that my mother had, & this hysteria has influenced and governed my existence at all levels, including romance & business, resulting in the bounty of fear & destitution to which religion harvests. My worst fear in adulthood, in a ‘relationship’, is to feel again this primal abandonment/betrayal, which would always manifest itself, if there is a sense of rejection/betrayal, real or imagined, to which I would then be metaphysically transported back to my childhood rejection/ abandonment; these are called issues (negative mapping). All my instincts would then go into overdrive to hold onto the ‘relationship’, even if it was not a happy one, so as not to feel the original pain of childhood abandonment. My hidden agenda was never to go near the issue of abandonment & rejection, or do the original pain work. I would also courtesy of unresolved subconscious emotional/cognitive injury, actually create the very scenarios which would provide the necessary opportunity/circumstances/ material to re-experience the original pain &/ resolve or avoid it!. I became hard-wired for betrayal/abandonment. Scott Peck calls this mapping, where memories become non-negotiable/imprinted in the subconscious conscious mind, similar to the PCB of a radio receiver.
One very simple example of this imprinting, would be when I eventually went to live with my grandmother, I painted my bedroom the same colours from the childhood ‘home’, primrose yellow and chocolate brown on the woodwork, it was what I’d known!. On another level, I have one friend who is similar to my father in having a loud powerful voice, strong hands, whose father could also be violent. The chemistry between us is such, that I take some enjoyment in, on occasion, play-acting the character of my mother when we are together, thus creating the once familiar parental dynamic of my parents!. Interestingly, I can discern in some adults who might have been been to boarding school, in that, there is a melancholy slant in their personality derived from ‘why the fuck did you send me there!’. 3One such example was my friend Oliver, who also had a similar mother in terms of hysteria. I could really see as a fellow sufferer of the same, the legacy of his childhood in his character. He also had the same attachment to property, to provide the security that was missing in his childhood. Sadly he died young, I believe from trying to play catch-up from his childhood dis-stress. RIP Olly. The film White Mischief, Alastair Simms plays the role of the aristocratic class, who goes abroad to farm, to pay for the maintenance of his English estate. He marries a young beautiful woman, but his low self-worth & the boarding school syndrome(abandonment of motherly investment) turns what is a respectable man, into a doormat, who on some level believes he has no right to receive love, instead seeing it, as a ‘favour’ from his wife!. He has to standby whilst his young wife betrays him to a confident other, & on one occasion asking the lover of his wife, to bring her home before midnight!.  He mean’t nothing to his wife. He took his life sincerely deluded & codependant. Great film.
It is plausible that what identifies Man & separates him, either through choice or injury, are actually his memories, which then shape his character, providing a disposition to either joy or depression!. The Victorians sometimes treated hysteria & depression with electric shock treatment, whereby the memory would be subjected to electrical shock, thus ’displacing’ it. My grandmother was prescribed this treatment for her hysteria/depression. This ‘practice’ has since been replaced with therapy & pharmaceuticals. Maybe the future could be de-magnetism & then re-magnetism as Manly P Hall describes in some of his work..   
I remember one situation which exemplifies these issues.  I was in a ski resort town, on a trip to look at purchasing a home, an apartment. I had with me my ‘girlfriend’. We had a falling out, my ‘infancy needs’ were not being met, I needed a mothers love & reassurance, & a fathers wisdom & strength, all vitally missing from this  ‘relationship’ & from my subconscious tapes; the tapes which can replay any childhood messages of wisdom/love (positive mapping).  I did not know they were missing or how to reimburse them into my adult character/psyche. I could only chose partners who would ultimately abandon/reject me, as my mother had done. I was beside myself with ‘grief of abandonment’ because of the argument between us. I felt like I was going to die, just like I had felt in childhood, when my mother was leaving the ‘home’ for the thousandth time, slamming the front door loudly behind her, or in front of her, as only one out of three times she would actually leave, the other two times she would creep back upstairs. It was terrifying either way. Or when she pretended to die on the lounge floor on a weekly basis, on ‘coming round’ saying ‘who are you, I don’t know you!’. 4I now needed something to give me security. It has been the bain of my life, trying to compensate & create the missing security of home & relationship. Property has always represented the epitome of security- the home I never had.  Any business acumen had now left me in the apartment purchase, due to the ‘abandonment stress’ that I was now in, from the argument with my ‘girlfriend’. I had earlier, made a decision to not buy the apartment for good reasons, but now ‘naked & abandoned’ I signed up and completed the sales contract.  It did work on some level, I now had the ‘notion’ of security in an off-plan apartment!; it took the edge off the pain I was feeling, even provided a little strength. But a poor knee-jerked property purchase decision anyway, & another consequence of abandonment issues which I had to live with!. 
I had read that John Lennon was also similar in his motivation to own property, to provide the unconditional security that was missing from his childhood.  Yoko recalls ‘John wanted to buy homes everywhere!’  As a child I would dream of having a shed in a wood away from everyone. I understand the origin of this insecurity was rooted in when my mother would on a daily/weekly basis would pretend to die on the lounge floor, or pack her bags & leave or pretend to leave the house, or engage in sex with a man in front of us, or threaten to have us put in a home/orphanage, or sent us to go & stay with my grandmother, which stopped, when I told my mother I enjoyed it!. My grandmother’s home was safe & warm where I felt secure!. 
My mother pursued her base appetites to honour her ‘hard-wiring’ & repeat possibly the emotional landscape & episodes of her own childhood. She was like a promiscuous schoolgirl & evil elder sister all in one, who would find men to act as her doberman in the ‘family home’. These men would become violent, when my mother would play her mind-games. The men couldn’t always cope with her hysteria. I can remember going to hospital with head wounds from having a bunch of keys thrown at me by one of her dobermans, & another time when she threw one of her stiletto shoes at me. Mother, of course issued me with verbal scripts to give the nurses, of having tripped over & hit my head on the grandmother clock!.  I remember the hospital cleric questioning it with suspicion, as this was not the first time that I had been admitted to Epsom hospital. 
I can identify with Davina McCall, the TV host who stated on why her late mother dying was 'a relief'. I quote ‘I still clearly remember being let down by my mother when I was a child’. She has previously said that she was left in a nightclub by her, aged 12.  "It was almost a relief when she was gone and I could stop asking her to be something that she just couldn’t be.  Davina continues ‘Motherhood is about being selfless, to some degree, and she just needed to be the centre of attention’.  Her attempts to rebuild a relationship proved futile and her mother couldn’t bring herself to offer her daughter any affection. "That’s all I ever wanted from my mum," McCall told The Telegraph. "To be held tight in a protective cuddle. To get out of the bath and be wrapped up in a towel, in her arms’.  5This maternal instinct was missing in both Ms McCall and my mothers emotional make-up.. The low regard with which my mother had for me, is proportionate to the low self worth and lack of self-love & acceptance which I have for myself.
The 1970’s was a violent era for children, there seemed that there was no legislation against it at home, or in school, where the Jesuit priests had their own particular methods of correction, from a right open slap to the side of the head, or the utilization of household implements to be used as instruments of correction, such as being struck bent over, on the bottom with the back of a solid dustpan brush!.  I remember one priest in adminstering six- of- the- best, when on raising his cane on stroke number 4, took-out the fluorescent tube light from the ceiling. It was a welcome distraction, that cut the punishment short!.
My mother when angry, which was most of the time, would often throw hot cups of tea, which included the cup, at whichever child was upsetting her.  I remember the task of having to wash the sugar & china out of my hair, hot water was not always available!. The lounge walls would be covered with circular tea stains. Mother did not drink coffee!. On the subject of hot water, I remember seldom bathing, & my skin would be covered in blocked up pores, which took years to eventually dissipate, post-home environment. 
As a child, the ‘love-dynamic’ between my mother & me was on one hand, like a boyfriend rather than a son, which my mother encouraged through reciprocation, and showed itself in the kind of romantic ‘love’ letters that I would later write home from boarding school.  The other dynamic was full-on rage against her which expressed itself in me drawing posters stating “I hope my mother dies with a knife in the back”. I would have been about 10 years old!. I took out my anger on my pet rabbit, who I would poke with my finger, to hear it squeak every day until it died. I remember taking the rabbit back to the farmer, who had given it to me, to be told ‘every bone is broken’. Understandably he wouldn’t give me another!.
The worst fear of someone like my ‘mother’ is to be found out & exposed for what she did as a mother. Mothers god were the neighbours. She would say “the neighbours, the neighbours”!. She was & is highly skilled in manipulation & operated a ‘divide & rule’ regime between her children, through order/control out of her engineered/created chaos. Ordo Ab Chao. She made sure that we the children, hated each other, so that she could be in full control.. There still remains today, a subconscious residual negatively between the siblings, for no other reason, than this historical echo, of what it was like living in the childhood ‘family home’. 6It took decades before I could really come to some understanding of what both my ‘parents’ had done to us, their children - psychologically, emotionally & sexually. In order to sit down & write this account I had to hit what they say ‘rock-bottom,’ in terms of emotional & material well-being. My ‘childhood’ was still costing me, in how I thought & behaved in all my affairs.  I really did not want to write this account/book, the thought of & having to relive the past, to suffer again, in order to retrace the memories & chronologicalize events & experiences.  I just wanted to live & get on with life’s distractions, & be somehow ‘successful’ in overcoming/escaping the toxic shame that I had ‘invested’ in me as a child from both my parents.  As gathering wood for the fire, the writing of this book extracts the same energy- wiping the hard drive to make room for new data.     
However, even when I did have some success in adult life, the hardwiring of childhood disappointment & failure, as well as my fathers continual critisism, would sabotage the success, through thinking, that it could have been better. One example of this was when I bought my first new car in a blue colour, which my Gran who I was living with, had to encourage my father to take a look at!. His only comment was ‘why blue?’ Small remark, but indicative of what my sister had shared once with me saying ‘when are you going to realize that you were never good enough for him’, and explains why any cultivated confidence & pursuit in ‘what I like’ has been missing in my life, undermined by the echo of my father’s disdain, and his brutally imposed criteria of what he valued & wanted.  This has resulted in a non self-acceptance, as well as episodes of a strange kind of self-harming, through destroying what I value, and not appreciating the possibility of any good in my life. My own worst critic etc. We clip the wings of our children in order to satisfy the dogma of our forefathers. I sometimes consider the alternative to having a tyrannical father, for example the father of F1 driver Jenson Button, who was always encouraging & allowing his son’s character to form freely, & develop into a unique person, rather than an extension of the fathers ego and value system, & also without the baggage of a misplaced disappointment, for not having lived up to the fathers’ selfish aspirations and criteria.  An experiment of a group of people that had their immune systems monitored, when they were given chocolate cake to eat. The result was, that the people who felt no guilt about eating the chocolate cake had increased immunity levels. Whereas those who felt shame had reduced immune function.  In my own life I can see how my fathers’ ‘deadline hysteria’ of missing the boat, had caused me to drown many times, whether its having a lie-in, or listening to music, fathers' background music of hysteria prevails!.