CPTSD

“It will be over sooner if you stop fighting” are the words that haunt my psyche. They prowl in the shadows, never intentionally brought to mind; just always there- waiting; hunting! They were said to me by a girl called Janine, who was in my primary school class, whispered as we were both being abused by her much older brothers. While I fought, and pathetically lashed out with all my insufficient might, she was resigned.

Her brothers James and Duncan were absolute bastards, terrifying to all the other kids. We all feared them, and they knew it and wielded it indiscriminately. James, the slightly younger of the two had massive burn scars mapping half his head. A young man whose outer outward ugliness matched the grotesqueries of his soul. A slab of haunted ham and hate, whose harshest critic was his bathroom mirror. A face that not even a mother could love*, looking as it did - like he moisturised with haemorrhoid cream. Neither would be first pick candidates to act as ambassadors for human kind. But James was the worst. They had no other friends, only ever seeming to hang out with each other.

During the summer holidays, I usually wandered up to the local woods, hoping to spot some local wildlife and a bird of prey or two. Unfortunately, the only predators I saw were James and Duncan. As usual I tried to ignore them, willing that for once they wouldn’t notice me and I’d be spared the traditional, bullying and violence I normally received. As was usually the case, I was shit out of luck. But instead of the hurled abuse of problematic terms like “spazzer” and "retard" they acted like they were suddenly my best friends. Encouraging me to come over and join them, to play a game with them and Janine. She was lying down in the long summer grass just out of sight. This was so alien, so unexpected and out of the ordinary, it was like hearing a cat bark. This was a good as my day and life was ever going to get.

Being autistic I'm not good with people touching me anyway (unless it’s a trusted, safe person and it’s a bear hug that could throttle a horse – in that case bring it on),** but this was the sort of physical contact that didn’t feel safe. For years after, I never wanted anyone to touch me at all. James's leering face still haunts my nightmares', his burned skin, yellow teeth and stale breath flashback to me all the time. Future girlfriends would wake me up to calm me down as I was demonstrably screaming and fighting in my sleep. More recently, I'm haunted by Janine and what become of her. She was in my class, and while I was wary of most people, particularly her brothers, she herself was always nice to me. But I couldn’t look at her again after that afternoon, even though I know she wasn’t complicit. But the gnawing thought of her life, being one of probable constant abuse troubles me.

This wasn’t even the first traumatic memory that I remember. That happened while I was still a toddler. My Mum and I were living with my Gran while my dad was finishing his service with the Royal Navy. I was pottering about in the living room of my Gran’s bungalow, while her and my mum were taking the bins out for collection. Then the screaming started. And it was immediately apparent that it wasn’t only them exercising their lungs but a choral effort including most of the neighbours.

I toddled over to the front door to see what all the gosh-darned, hullabaloo was about. I wish I hadn’t been so inquisitive. Perhaps then, I may have been spared the sight of the legs dangling out the back of the bin lorry, which had effectively bitten one of the bin men in half. The bin lorries in the 1970’s used to have giant mechanical teeth that compacted and crushed the garbage as it hurled into the back by hand. Witnessing what these could do to a human, at that age, fucked me up. It took years before I could watch anything on TV or film that involved the sight of blood, let alone anyone dying violently. I would meltdown hysterically at the merest hint and be re-traumatised all over. I was a student before I was able to overcome this.

Growing up in the highlands in a family with more hidden stockpiles of weapons than the average Colombian Cartel, it wasn’t too long after this, that I saw my first bullet wound. This was my older cousin suffering a hunting accident after getting hit in the leg. He was and remains a lovely, if unlucky guy, missing as he is, two fingers from his right hand after his sister chopped them off with an axe (a childhood dare, I shit you not). I think we all learned a valuable lesson that morning.

While I’m still squeamish I’m not reduced to a quivering wreck anymore – now I realise that I just have a better frame of reference for the blood and gore effects used in movies.

Some years later when I had finally hit my late teens and full adult height and weight, I had the pleasure of the first shotgun being pointed at me in anger. The local farmer, was the culprit, a notorious permanently furious bastard. He was famous for shooting people's dogs if he ever caught one straying onto one his fields, and warning shots into the air to stop the kids having a childhood game of football in an otherwise empty patch of grass. Since he owned nearly all the land surrounding the village, this gave him plenty of opportunity. This land provided most of the barley and grains used to produce the local, world famous brand of Single Malt Whisky. This inevitably made him a very wealthy and economically important local figure. And a peak bastard, the first amongst bastards, the sort of bastard other bastards measure themselves up against. This success managed to ensnare him an extremely attractive and youthful wife for a man with the face and complexion of a disappointed armpit, and the personality of a hand grenade. This is what led him to pointing his infamous dog-killing shotgun in my face.

One evening I was walking round the village with the family dog, doing "the Fearn lap" as we called it locally. Then his old Land Rover Defender slowed down, wound down the window and the gun came out! Pointed directly at me and said, “I’ll give you a ten start Son”. While I would like to claim that I suddenly transformed into an Hollywood action hero, and wrestled the gun from him, in an act of such awe inspiring testosterone fuelled magnificence that all who witnessed it grew an extra testicle, (including the ladies). But alas, I took the ten start and just immediately ran into and through people's gardens, reasoning that while he may be a psycho, he surely wouldn’t shoot at people's houses. He didn’t. But it did scare every type of shit out of me. At the time I had no clue why he would even want to threaten me like that. I found out why a couple of days later. He thought I was having an affair with his young, preposterously attractive wife. I wasn’t of course, my romantic relationship skills were so underused that they were still under manufacturers warranty. In those few seconds, it certainly seemed like I had more chance of being laid to rest, than laid. But I was the only guy in the village with long hair. It turned out to be a guy from the neighbouring village who was preventing the farmers wife from perpetual vaginal disappointment. The only other guy who wore a leather jacket and had long brown hair in a 50 mile radius. We must all look the same to farmers'.

Trauma is often misunderstood as an awful event that someone has experienced or witnessed, that they lack the testicular fortitude to get over. Usually said by the kind of people whose biggest difficulty in life, is deciding which brand of shampoo to buy.

I think it’s more nuanced than that. It evolves, or more accurately, mutates as time goes on. Initially it was the physical aspects of the abuse that affected me the most. Now it’s more the resigned way that Janine urged me to stop fighting. The horrible realisation that this repugnant event was probably a constant part of her life. She had already gone through that initial battle and now knew that “if you stop fighting, it will be over sooner”.

Footnotes

* and I hope his mother’s womb twitched in eternal regret at what she birthed.

** Deep pressure contact is incredibly soothing, anything less feels like barbwire.