If You Play With Monsters...

If you play with monsters, there’s always a risk of becoming one. Having played with too many monsters, for too long in my childhood, I developed the fear that I was infected in some way, with something nasty and lurking. Just waiting, to spring out some time later. Alien the movie scared me in ways I never quite understood afterwards. These days I understand.

As a child grows, he will move through three stages of developmental morality. Pre-concrete, Concrete, and Post-concrete morality. In the first stage, a child will obey an adult’s rules that define the notion of good and bad, purely for the sake of pleasing the adult or avoiding their wrath. If they break the rules and feel shamed, they will lie to avoid that shame and the displeasure of the significant adults involved. Mostly it’s the adults that make up and hand out rules, they have the power to corrupt that process to their own needs.

By 14 concrete morality begins to develop, a child will follow rules, simply because they are rules – and rules are meant to be followed – or chaos will ensue. If the rules that are given to a child are corrupt, the risk of corrupting the child is high. Discovering that these rules are corrupt can have a terrible effect on a child’s moral compass and leave him untrusting of anyone.

In the later teenage years as the child’s sense of self grows, as his emerging adult tests his powers of rebellion, a child will come to follow rules not because they are rules but because they believe in them. This gives rise to the late teenage and early adult activism in passionate causes and groups. Those rules that no longer make sense to the questioning mind, will be rejected – or at best, tolerated, because of the punishment for breaking them.

I believe that this mechanism is the route by which the predatory abuser grooms the child to become his or her victim. If any tutor of mine today wanted to physically cane my hand for a reason not agreed to by me, I doubt any words he could say today would make me do it. But back then, I did so, even though I was terrorised by apprehension, fearful of the coming pain and the possibilities of damage – I still put out my hand. I was 10, shamed and publicly beaten in front of the school by a huge bully of a teacher because a snowball of mine went astray. Not only me but my friends as well. All for the crime of skylarking.

I had seen the beatings mum had handed out to other older teenage brothers, so clearly this was how it was, and when Mum said, ‘I had better do as I was told or get a taste of what Stan got’ - I did what I was told.

Therefore when an adult told my thirteen year old to drop his pants – he did. Just like that. Anything to stop them making noise, drawing attention. What if my school mates find out? The dreadful fear and consequences of exposure for such an overburdened catholic teenager.

Abusers were my monsters. I know now, they’re not monsters. They’re people. People who made bad or careless choices. They surely did become my masters and my hated beings. To become one, would be unforgivable by God, surely. After all masturbation is a sin, and homosexuality a mortal sin. That’s why, I did as they instructed for fear of people finding out and thinking of me - as Dad colloquially described  “a dirty stinking poofter.” God knows it was hard enough being heterosexual in a such a sticky position. To catch homosexuality as well, or for people to think you were homosexual. That would have you taking a first class train ride to hell, or purgatory at the best if you were lucky.  All ready you were up to Fifty men, that was a lot of sinning you had to make up for later on - when you were old enough to slip away from them. When you were bigger and could thump them to make them stop.

By the time I was old enough to resist I was a serious sex addict, and more afraid of them than ever – especially afraid of there not being a “later on.” More afraid of than the degradation I was in. I was in long dissociative states when I went into that world to get my dose of shame.

Escape came as I came into my physical power to choose. I pined for the girls I loved but whom were unapproachable with this stain. I escaped to London, tortuously sabotaged my “Polytechnic” studies in Electronics and ended up thankfully in the company of some wonderful young entrepreneurs in a Back-packer hostel in London’s West End.

I was finally in the company of the world I wanted. 500 miles from Doncaster no-body touching me that I didn’t want to. No men and plenty of women. I was scared by having a man take his penis from my bum and stick it in my mouth. It was always in toilets and there was always the smell of human waste. This homosexuality thing that these monsters were playing had traumatic smells for a young child. I went to other places when things got bad.

In the company of my new friends, it was Sex in the City, back there in Doncaster, it was Sex in the Sewer. When I finally got the choice and courage to escape, I went for it with gusto and intensity. And my heart sang.

In the company of these wonderful people from overseas, (Where clearly this s*** doesn’t happen) - the skills I had developed to navigate my safety through about 150 different men, lonely locations and more than one or two who glowed hotly with danger to my supersensitive empathic skills. (I read body language well. Had to, to stay alive). The guile, the charm. Reading what people wanted. What they felt safe with, comfortable with, dependent upon. My quick wit and mind made me a likeable character that people came to trust. I went back to being a good boy, began making money, falling in love and feeling clean and real for the first time in my life. There were nowhere near the amount of women as men, yet every precious love affair, romance, and casual acquaintance is indelibly treasured in my heart, I cherish every one. They have been the happiest moments of my life. To feel real “normal love” that was infinitely more than just a physical f***. I loved being “in love” and loved the women of my life passionately. Everyone I sabotaged - I mourned, and blamed myself for the pain I caused.

That’s how a boy from Edlington finds himself on a roll-out mattress in the breakfast room of a down-at-heel-but-friendly hostel in the flashier parts of Ol’ London town. I’ve done many jobs, and night-porter in a back-packer hostel in London was one of them. One of the responsibilities being to keep guard on the till in reception, next door, while snoozing and watching late night TV. (The till, was a cash-box – bolted to a desk drawer, reception a hallway – and the T.V. room an open space with tables and chairs, much like the patio furniture of an ardent garage sale frequenter.

On one particular quiet night our brand new fourth T.V. channel, cunningly named Channel 4 showed a program about sexual assault on boys, and the general subject of paedophilia. It was the first time I became aware that what happened to me - happened to so many others. It was a terrible and life changing night. To this day I don’t know whether I filtered what I saw and heard or whether they did actually draw the statistical conclusion that 70% of victims go on to be abusers. But that news affected me deeply. I was in a highly triggered state already and to hear those odds spoken out loud was like being given a diagnosis with only a 30% survival rate. In the moment, I could rationalise the notion. I’m not turned on by the thought of sex with a child and I don’t abuse children, I’m cool I’m fine.

But the fear was born, and I had seen what people could do. They don’t start off that way. And it’s hard to imagine anyone choosing that way of life. What makes them change? Could I catch it too?

Like the fear of flying the irrationality resists reason, and these particular statistics maliciously whisper in the ear that free will and choice are myths – it’s all in the odds. I had to resist that at all costs. I did that by driving myself to be the most honourable person I could be. Honourable is the opposite of abuser in my world. Abuse is a dishonour on the soul.

Even to this day, I react with anger when statistics are used in this way to scare the people into noticing the problem. I rejected the option, and chose to be the “honourable man,” to put others always before me. An honourable man can’t be an abuser. An honourable man can’t exploit people to get his needs met – because he denies his own needs for the good of others. He is the opposite of an abuser. And I have spent the years in between driving myself towards an impossible version that denies my own humanity. “All else before me.” That’s the Chris motto.

It was that fear that triggered again many years later, with the news of my sons impending arrival. For years, my history had been silent, I lived the life of the blessed. Happily married and deeply in love my wife and son were my only family and my only priority.

As flashbacks and nightmares troubled my days - I began to worry that madness might be what drives predators to abuse. Hannibal, my shark, gnawed at the worry, making me moody and sullen. Alcohol and dope dulled the memories of past victimisation and kept me functional to a degree. But, I was on the slippery slope. At some point, I decided it would be better for my wife and child to be away from me in case anything nasty emerged from my head. It felt like a growing eruption, an alien–like creature about to break free from my brain. My response was to promptly dismantle the marriage through sabotage.

I couldn’t just leave and reject my wife. That wouldn’t be fair. It had to be her choice and all because I was at fault. I was the terribly depressed and useless husband. It’s not you dear it’s me. After all, if she hated me, it would be easier to get over. I hated me, so all I had to do was show her a glimpse of the internal hell that occupied my thoughts. She would hate me too.

The thought of my basic wrongness preyed on me, and I got stuck in a terrible day-mare where I appear before a bewigged judge, not accused but strangely still having to assure everybody I was not a danger. Having to justify my existence against the full and final expose of my secret history in front of a packed court-room.

18 months later, after creating that horror fantasy I brought it into existence, right down to a wig on my wife’s QC. (An unusual participant at the early stages of an access battle). I never saw it at the time but I engineered quite perfectly, and subconsciously, the worst of all tortures for both myself and my wife. And in that act she and her family became the latest of the victims of my wounding. Pain can blind a mind to some obvious patterns. The clarity of distance and hindsight delivers a lesson in embracing your inner dick-head.

Today, some 13 years later the kindest act that I am currently trying to deliver to my hyper vigilant adult; is freedom from this irrational fear. The evidence is in at last. I am forty-seven, and I have been tested and trusted and I can say with evidence that I have stuck to Sister Wendy’s precept that Children are people too.

I have not transformed, I was not infected, I have the responsibility and the opportunity to choose, and I have chosen well since those dark and dismal days. If ever my shark tries to gnaw at that certainty and relief, I simply consider my son. In him stands the most honest and trustworthy evidence that I have done the best I could with what I had. I have been the honourable man. Maybe not quite Gandalf, my childhood hero, but as good as Chris Davies needs to be to keep his promise to his inner kids. Corruption is not certain for those abused. Survival itself draws upon that element of us that is our inner spark, our will to live, our simple and natural desire to grow and be happy. At times, this can be the only clean and honourable thing in a toxically polluted life. My hope is that it’s enough to get me through this healing, to the “best” that is “yet to come.”

Chris Davies © 2008 (June)