Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love

RITUAL ABUSE AND OTHER ACTS OF LOVE BY ELSPETH LIBERTY The front cover art is by kind permission of Rebecca Arman an...

Author: Liberty Elspeth

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RITUAL ABUSE AND OTHER ACTS OF LOVE

BY

ELSPETH LIBERTY

The front cover art is by kind permission of Rebecca Arman and is copyright. This is the picture I refer to regularly throughout the book. Many people were gracious enough to allow me to use their real names in the telling of my story. Some names have been changed and some people are a composite in order to protect individual privacy. The poem “I Built My House By The Sea” is by Sr. Carol Bieleck, RSCJ. I was unable to contact her to ask permission to use this poem. Please contact me if you have an address for her. Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love by Elspeth Liberty is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivs 3.0 Unported License. For more information go to www.creativecommons.org.au

ISBN: 978-0-646-55065-7

For more copies or to download this book in pdf please go to elspethliberty.com.

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love

To Susan, John, Annette and Pushkin. Each of you has shown me love and enriched my life in your own unique way. My deepest thanks.

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The Los Angeles County Commission for Women defines Ritual Abuse as: A brutal form of abuse of children, adolescents, and adults, consisting of physical, sexual, and psychological abuse, and involving the use of rituals. Ritual does not necessarily mean satanic. However, most survivors state that they were ritually abused as part of satanic worship for the purpose of indoctrinating them into satanic beliefs and practices. Ritual abuse rarely consists of a single episode. It usually involves repeated abuse over an extended period of time. The physical abuse is severe, sometimes including torture and killing. The sexual abuse is usually painful, sadistic, and humiliating, intended as a means of gaining dominance over the victim. The psychological abuse is devastating and involves the use of ritual/indoctrination, which includes mind control techniques and mind altering drugs, and ritual/intimidation which conveys to the victim a profound terror of the cult members and of the evil spirits they believe cult members can command. Both during and after the abuse, most victims are in a state of terror, mind control, and dissociation in which disclosure is exceedingly difficult.


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CHAPTER ONE

On

the wall of my sun-room is a wonderful, moody, abstract

seascape. It is made up of layer upon layer of paints. A wild abundance of shapes and colours. Sometimes these colours merge together, other times there are squiggles and squirts of paint that rise above the general height of the painting. Some parts are enhanced by a thick glaze and in other places the paint has been scraped back to the canvas. These layers, and the light of the room, adds to the everchanging feel of the work. It has been a metaphor for me over the last couple of years as I have worked on my manuscript, adding texture and depth, scraping back, allowing memories to emerge higgledypiggledy, some blending with existing colours while others stand bold and distinct. I try to make sense of them all. I've written them all down, these memories of mine, and have them lined up in chronological order like a row of beans, waiting to be topped and tailed, to be part of an exciting, exotic and flavoursome dish. I am proud of this work, the time I have put into remembering, writing, going back into the extremes, the drama of my life. The view from my window never ceases to thrill me. I overlook Bass Strait so the seascape outside has even more moods and colours than the one inside. The sky's colour ranges from the dramatic, vibrant red and gold of the bursting sunrise; to the myriad muted mauves, pinks, lilacs and silvers of evening; to the heavy, oppressive grey of imminent rain. The sea changes from scintillating in the sunlight; to a smooth surface that looks as if it should issue an invitation for ice skaters to twirl, swirl and dance; to tumbling, roaring, troubled and wild.


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Today is a crisp autumn day, the smell of salt comes in through the open window and the park and surrounding hills are returning to verdant green now that summer has almost let go her hold. The fruit trees and weeping cherry have not started to lose their leaves but there is just enough hint of autumn for my spirits to rise. There is a joy that moves into my hips and legs, the cooler weather promises long walks along the beach, windswept hair, salt spray, a wild ocean and two dogs, heads bowed against the sand and wind, wondering why on earth I have taken them away from their warm and comfortably cushioned chairs. Autumn in rural Tasmania, my favourite time of year. Ten years I've been here now and I thank the breakup of my second marriage for prompting my escape from inner-western Sydney with its pollution, busyness, humidity, barrage of advertising, and bigness. A population here of six thousand including the hinterland suits me just fine. How strange it is to be content with this idyllic life, the bright lights of the city hold no allure – they broke their promise to me long ago. My move from Wollongong to Kings Cross was both a running away from and a being drawn towards. Running away from a failed marriage, my parents, and friends who were becoming increasingly concerned about my drug-taking. I was drawn towards the promise of bright lights: excitement, a bohemian existence, philosophical conversations, bars that stayed open until dawn and a whirlwind of social activity that would keep me spinning above my heartache and loneliness. I had married at eighteen to escape from home, having no idea it was possible to get a job and a flat by myself. My parents saw themselves as upper-middle-class. My mother viewed herself as a cut above most people she met, my father considered the majority of the population stupid. Marrying a wharfie's son who was on an invalid pension was my rebellion.


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I met Steve at a party. He was sitting in a bamboo chair that hung from the ceiling, he was climbing up the wall and back down again. I thought he looked lonely. He was stoned. I was fifteen, he was twentyone. Steve was my first boyfriend. To begin with we had a lot of fun together. He had a great sense of humour and we went to many interesting parties where there was an eclectic mix of people, wearing some of the most amazing clothes I had ever seen. I remember a guy who would swan in wearing the most stunning dresses made up of all different coloured patches of soft and shimmery fabric. He made the dresses himself and they had a train, or varied hemline or dramatic sleeves that he swished and swirled all around him. He wore masses of silver filigree jewellery, and usually waved a lace handkerchief around as he moved in a cloud of patchouli oil. That was Jeremy. I thought he was utterly gorgeous. Everyone was older than me, many were at university and there were always discussions on philosophy, literature, fashion as art, the meaning of life and religion. Not long after Steve and I consummated our relationship I was worried about pregnancy and my parents' reaction. Steve said that if I was pregnant he would marry me. Unfortunately, neither of us knew how to get out of that proposal once there was no pregnancy. I could not believe he wanted to marry me and acted out in all sorts of ways, trying to prove he didn't love me, didn't care, didn't want to be with me. I would frequently burst into floods of tears that left us both bemused, confused and guilty. I would throw my engagement ring back in his face and walk away saying it was all over, I was leaving him before he could leave me. He did his best to reassure me but it was impossible. Since becoming a teenager I had struggled with life. I would cry or curl up in a ball of depression and despair wishing my life would end, that the earth would open up and consume me. I constantly thought of death, hated my life and considered myself fat, ugly and unlovable. I was sure my friends secretly hated me and could never trust their friendship or loyalty. Earlier that year my parents sent me to see the


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school counsellor and when that failed they took me to see a psychiatrist. He prescribed Stelazine, an anti-psychotic medication also used for non-psychotic anxiety. It didn't help. My parents opposition to our marriage was a source of pleasure to me. I would do anything to hurt and upset them. I also wanted to escape from them. Steve was my ticket to freedom, I knew no other way. My parents had insisted we wait until I was eighteen before we could marry. As the time drew near I knew I was making a huge mistake. Our sex life had dwindled to non-existent. There was more angst and arguments than good times and I did not want to marry him but had no idea how to stop the wedding. It was a big white wedding with all the trimmings. It seemed to have taken on a life of its own. As I was agonising about this my parents suddenly went into panic mode. They had stood back for a while knowing opposition would fuel my determination but now they started to fear I really would marry him. My father took me aside and told me I was killing my mother by planning to go ahead with this marriage. My mother took me aside and begged me to see sense because it was such a scandal, I was embarrassing my father, and how would he ever be able to hold up his head again. That was all it took for me to become determined to go ahead. The marriage lasted three years during which time Steve trained as a metallurgist and got a good job with BHP. I was working for a bank, my second job since leaving school. There were some fun times, great holidays and firm friendships. And my crumbling emotional and mental health. I had an insatiable need to know I was loved while being completely incapable of believing anyone could care for me. Steve was a good, kind man without a shred of violence in him. My emotional fragility and mental instability were way beyond his ability to understand or deal with. I was desperately unhappy with no idea why. I was disintegrating. I consistently tried to make Steve responsible for my life and happiness.


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As the marriage fell apart I started drinking heavily. Steve worked shift work and I developed separation anxiety. I would beg him not to go to work, to not leave me. I would ring him at work sobbing for him to come home because I was going crazy, convinced he was going to leave me and I would die without him. How could anyone stay with someone as revolting as me? We sought marriage counselling. Her advice was that we separate. The counselling itself was unremarkable. However, in one of life's strange twists, this woman was to play a role in my life at a later date. Steve was broken-hearted when I left. He had done nothing wrong but had been unable to take away my pain. He did his best, but there was no way it was going to work. I moved back to my parent's place. That was a mistake of gigantic proportions. If I had been unhappy there before, returning was now a total disaster. My drinking was steadily increasing and I was consumed with sadness and guilt over my failed marriage. I went to see the mother of a friend of mine. Yvette worked at the local drug and alcohol clinic. I didn't want help to stop drinking, I needed a supportive, listening ear. Something she offered me on several occasions. The home situation was untenable and could only be endured with the anaesthetising effects of alcohol and hash. I now had a boring job at a finance company. This too, could only be endured if stoned. Breakfast, morning tea, lunch and afternoon tea were always hash, in the evenings it was mixed with alcohol. I went out drinking every night. If I arrived home and the lights were still on I would drive off and find another bar. One result of this behaviour was I had sex with a lot of men I had no interest in. I was trying to prove to myself that the lack of sex in my marriage to Steve was not my fault. All I proved was my ability to have sex with a variety of men, contributing to my growing self-hatred and despair. My parents, understandably, were not happy with my lifestyle. I would often arrive home with no idea where I had been or where my car was. Many was the time my mother would open the door to a


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complete stranger who was returning my car and keys. It is amazing I was not raped or my car stolen. I found a bar where I felt comfortable and got to know the staff. They started to watch out for me, driving me home when I was too drunk and protecting me from my worst excesses. Many of the staff were gay and they would go out partying at the end of their shift. They invited me to come along too. This was my introduction to the Wollongong gay scene. I loved both the high drama of being with a bunch of queens and dykes who were always in ecstasy or despair about their relationships, and the glitz and glamour of the drag scene. I'm a drama queen from way back so thrived on the exuberance, intensity, humour and melodrama. There was something about a screaming queen in full flight that warmed the cockles of my heart. It was at one of these parties a queen first introduced me to barbiturates, a relationship that blossomed. As far as blotting out the pain went they were quick, cheap and effective. It was 1978 and a hundred Seconal cost $2.50, courtesy of the Pharmaceutical Benefit Scheme. Some of the gay guys loved nothing more than getting all glammed up in stunning evening gowns and strutting their stuff, a pastime that found little acceptance in the rural/urban municipality of Wollongong. It amazed me just how stunningly beautiful these guys could look. They would spend hours on their hair and make-up. They would shave their legs, manicure and paint their nails, and tuck a box full of tissues into each bra, back then no one had heard of using chicken fillets for a more natural look. They had the figure, style and grace to enter a room and turn heads. They looked magnificent. I was the ugly step-sister; no make-up, hairy legs and wearing Indian skirts and cheesecloth tops. Glamour was never my style. Often at the weekend we would head up to Sydney's Oxford Street with its gay bars, or hang out around Kings Cross. It was through this I made friends in Sydney. One night three of us decided to go to Les Girls, the famous, or is that infamous, all-male revue theatre


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restaurant. As we walked up the stairs a couple of plain-clothes detectives were walking down. They made some disparaging remark about the guy in my company, he replied in kind. Next thing he was thrown down the stairs, bashed and shoved into the back of an unmarked car. I was gobsmacked. Appalled. What was going on? I did not understand. I asked the woman I was with. Her explanation “he's gay”. That was my first experience of someone being victimised purely on the basis of their sexual orientation. I was outraged. Furious. All set to make a complaint. To report the police involved. Tell the story to the newspapers. Do something!!! Anything!!! This, my friend informed me, was part and parcel of being gay. There was no point in making a fuss, that would just ensure more abuse. You just had to cop it sweet. Up to this point I'd not given any thought to the fact that some of my friends were gay. It was just how it was, it made no difference to me at all, except I felt safe around gay guys. In the light of this incident I made a decision. I chose to have gay friends, to see them as my equals in every way and just accept them for who they were. This was a political decision. I considered violence against people on the basis of their sexual orientation to be wrong. I was prepared to stand up and be counted. I expected life in Sydney to be one long party, every night would be a Friday or Saturday night. Drugs and alcohol were my social lubricants. Barbiturates, amyl nitrite, speed; I was willing to try anything and everything but my natural inclination was towards things that slowed me down and bombed me out rather than sped me up or intensified my reality. Reality certainly was not to be intensified; by combining barbiturates and Southern Comfort I could reach a state of blackout. That was my preferred condition. In that state there was no pain, no thinking, no asking all the WHY? questions about my life. On a busy night Kings Cross and Oxford Street would be bulging at the seams. Nothing and no one was out of place. Tourists gaped wideeyed at prostitutes, pushers and pimps. People came in from the


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suburbs by the beer-soaked mini-bus load. There was every possible sexual orientation and expression, some wildly exotic, others sad and unconvincing. Most people were out to have a good time. Many were looking for drugs or sex of many varied kinds, or both. Free or paid for. The bars were packed and the coffee shops buzzed with philosophical conversations and discussion. Sex, drugs, art, theatre and music pulsated through the streets with vibrant life, colour and diversity. This was why I was here. On a quiet night, or during the day, it was easier to see the Cross's seedier side. The women standing on corners waiting for a trick so they could earn enough money to buy their drugs. The pushers selling heroin and speed, and the addicts strung out. The older men cruising for boys and the drag queens and transvestites looking for love, or at least acceptance. I would sit in a coffee shop or bar and watch the workers, timing how long it took them to be back on their corner after leaving with some guy, to fulfil whatever sexual fantasy he wanted to enact that day. I would watch the young gay guys work the wall at Green Park and check out glamorous women trying to figure out if they were actually men. I wandered these streets in various states of consciousness and with greater or lesser ability to stay upright due to the barbiturates which made me belligerent and prone to falling over. What I wanted was to be part of the bohemian lifestyle, the intelligentsia. In reality I was an opinionated twenty-one year old whose world was spinning out of control. I was falling apart and had no idea why. I rented a bed-sit in Orwell Street. It was in the back streets of Kings Cross. There was always garbage in the streets and empty bottles and drunks. I feared discovering a body slumped in a doorway, either overdosed or stabbed, with rats feasting on it. The bed-sit was two doors up from the Venus Rooms, with its tawdry lights, promises of sexual gratification and sale of many and varied accoutrements that came out in plain, brown envelopes or paper bags. The flat was small, grimy and dingy. It was also unbearably hot and humid. It offered


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accommodation to giant cockroaches. I would walk in at night, turn the light on, and the kitchen bench and stove-top would be heaving; a seething mass of black life, scurrying away from the light. It was a dark and depressing place that mirrored something deep inside me that I didn't want to see. I was there as little as possible. There was something about being in a bar, by myself, on a Monday night. It was flat, empty and stale with lingering smells of alcohol, semen, vomit and urine. It was like a ghost town. All the excitement, the buzz, the noise, were nothing but a shadow, a memory, with the music turned down. There were only a few desolate people propping up the bar and I suspected that only those sad and lonely souls who couldn't stand being at home alone were out, desperately searching for something or someone to fill the gnawing emptiness inside them. They had admitted me to their ranks. This was not how it was meant to be. A gaping black hole opened before me. If there was a God he certainly didn't hang out in this neighbourhood. This was hell. I sat at the bar feeling miserable and dejected. In two weeks Christmas would be upon me with all the expectations of children, families, laughter, belonging and love. Christmas carols started to play. The reality of my life broke in on me. I was twenty-one, did not get on with my parents, had no one who knew and understood me, was living in a hovel in Kings Cross, using a shitload of drugs and alcohol and was facing Christmas alone. What a woeful summing up of my life. Tears began to flow. Having a customer sitting at your bar sobbing is not good for business, especially at Christmas. The drag queen who ran the bar did her best to comfort me but basically she was saying: “Laugh and the world laughs with you, cry and you cry alone”. It was fine for me to be there, out of it on drugs, being the life and soul of the party, telling funny stories and dancing the night away. But drop the façade and I was bad for business. I left the bar about 2.00 a.m., collected my car and headed for


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Wollongong. That was the place I still called home. Driving, I continued to think of everything that was wrong with my life. How I had walked out on my marriage to a good, decent guy. I could no longer stay, not because of him, but because of me. I was unhappy, empty, lonely and running away from myself and my demons as fast as I could but had no idea where to run. Life was bleak and empty. I put my foot on the accelerator. And drove through the deserted streets of Sydney at breakneck speed feeling wired, as if a current was running through me; I was going to explode any second. If I did there would be shit everywhere. All that was foul, putrid and wrong with my life would splatter all over me and everything around me. I tried to outrun it. One option when driving between Sydney and Wollongong is via the National Park. I took this road seeking solace from nature, wanting to escape the blare of neon lights and advertising along the Princes Highway. I was too far gone to allow any healing to seep into my soul that night. I drove fast to avoid exploding. I felt pursued. The faster I went the hotter the breath on the back of my neck. Faster and faster; not caring which side of the road I was on. Screaming around a tight bend on the wrong side of the road the oncoming car was doing the same thing. Had we collided death would have been instantaneous. I burst into tears of angry disappointment. At the other side of the National Park there is a steep descent to the coast, Bulli Pass. It is advisable to go down in low gear. I went down in top, all the way and arrived at my old place about threequarters of an hour after leaving Sydney. To my bitter disappointment I was still in one piece. The demons caught me. I fell apart.

Sunlight glitters on the panes of glass, dazzling me like the city lights did on that wild, suicidal ride all those years ago. Shards of shadow, like the broken dreams of Kings Cross point across the floor to the


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afternoon sun, reminding me of where I sit. The sudden release of my breath filling my ears, I push my chair back and gaze around me. The seascape is full of the chaos of shapes and colours, of tumult and wildness. Looking closely I find demons hiding in those pounding colours. Slowly they recede as I engage with the tranquillity of my present day life. Through my window is a breathless, calm day; there is not a puff of wind anywhere. The trees are perfectly still. The ocean a sheet of glass. Not a skerrick of movement, no sign of wind, wave or swell. It is one of the many times my heart fills with gratitude for the beautiful safe haven that is now my life.


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CHAPTER TWO

It is dark outside. Tonight I cannot see the ocean, or even hear it. There are no stars, no moon, just the blackness of the sky after a sunfilled autumn day. But there is promise. The promise of a blank, empty canvas stretching across the heavens. It has been a clear day, the stars will come. The suicidal drive from Sydney the night before had shaken me, my life was careering out of control and I needed help. I decided to talk to Yvette, see if she could help me sort things out and get back on track. I headed to the drug and alcohol centre engulfed in darkness and despair, searching for any sign of hope or promise. The centre was located on the fringe of Wollongong's CBD, in an old house with high ceilings. There was a large backyard with a shady tree with a table and chairs underneath. It was a pleasant place to sit. The receptionist looked up as I walked in, drew in her breath and said, “Oh my God!” She picked up the phone, buzzed through to Yvette and said “Elspeth is here to see you. I think you'd better get out here, NOW.” Obviously, I was not looking my best. Yvette came out, took one look at me and said “What on earth have you done to yourself?” I must have looked as bad as I felt. Yvette turned to the receptionist and said “Call Gary, tell him to get here as soon as he possibly can.” Gary was the doctor attached to the centre. I was beginning to feel scared. Yvette looked at me again and her eyes brimmed with tears. “Oh, my dear friend, what on earth has happened?” she asked as she took me in her arms and held me. That was a mistake. The tenderness in her voice and touch undid me. I


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started to cry, and cry, and cry, and then cry some more. In fact I was still crying some forty minutes later when Gary arrived. He examined me. I was a mess. A big mess. I was covered in bruises. Had burns over my fingers where I hadn't noticed my cigarettes burning. My heart was racing. I had a dreadful cough and I was malnourished. And that was just my physical condition. I was also hearing voices. Yvette came up with a plan. First and foremost - detox. There were two choices: the psychiatric ward of the local hospital, or a nursing home where the centre had access to a couple of beds. Yvette suggested the nursing home. She thought the psych ward might be reluctant to let me go. After detox she would arrange a move to a residential counselling centre. I was willing to do whatever she suggested. I was shattering into thousands of pieces. My heart was breaking, my mind was bending, and there was a cast of thousands issuing a running commentary inside my head. I had no idea of the way forward, what was wrong, or why. I was desperately disappointed at having arrived back from Sydney in one piece but would not have described myself as actively suicidal. I felt achingly empty, misunderstood, different; I had no right to exist. Yvette decided to take me to the detox centre personally. She knew my parents and felt we should call there first to let them know what was happening. They were both horrified by the sight of me. My father came towards me with his arms outstretched, saying “Oh my God, what have I done to you?” I started to scream, then cowered behind Yvette whimpering “Don't let him touch me, don't let him near me”. My father looked shattered. I was appalled. Why did I react like that? That scene haunted me for years. If you had asked me about my childhood when I was twenty-two I


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would have assured you it had been OK, not great, but OK, unaware that a broken marriage and problems with drugs and alcohol were indicators all had not been well. Then as truth and memory started to break into dissociation and repression something other than a happy childhood started to emerge. It was time to commence the journey of healing. If I'd had the vaguest inkling of what was in store for me, the intense darkness I would have to plumb, the reasons for my behaviour and mental instability, I would have run screaming off to the nearest bottle or pill determined to avoid it at all costs. But we cannot afford not to know our past... however evil it may have been. The nursing home, with a small detox section, was located in Thirroul, north of Wollongong. It was perched on top of a hill overlooking the suburb, the shopping precinct and the ocean. It was a forty-two bed hospital. When I walked in forty of these beds were occupied by people over seventy. I was given a private room. If detox was hard, stopping running was even harder. My head swirled with words and images. There was a chasm inside me. It wanted to swallow me whole; if it did I would go mad and never reemerge. Its siren call was ceaseless. There were voices which taunted me with accusations about my worth, my body, my mind and my right to exist. I was inhabiting my own particular version of hell. I longed for silence and would have welcomed death. The forty-first bed was occupied by Dave who was coming off long-term heroin addiction and had been using methadone for many years. He was struggling too, yet somehow he seemed to be less fragmented, more at peace. We spent a lot of time together. It turned out he was a Christian – he offered Christianity as a solution for my life. My first reaction was scorn and derision. “Yeah, right. I don't think so.” But I was in no position to bargain. I had no idea about my direction or purpose. I knew a bit about Christianity. I'd had a teacher in primary school


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who had been a Christian - an active, evangelical, try to save you, ram it down your throat kind of Christian. I'd become a Christian in selfdefence but it didn't stick. However, the youth group I'd been a part of as a teenager was run by people who were kind and fun and the group was somewhere to go that wasn't home. Some of the leaders had teased, stirred and cracked jokes; they had made fun of me but in a way that left me feeling OK. There were leaders who had given me a hug and that was all. Just a hug. Nothing sleazy, slimy or complicated. God didn't seem to play a huge part in any of my involvement with Christians but there were enough positive memories for me to be willing to give it a go. And now? What else could I do? I couldn't come up with a better option and something had to give. I told God about the awful mess of my life and how I needed help, and lots of it. It was the honesty of desperation. And things changed. The depth of my darkness lightened a little. My incredible despair lessened slightly. The huge dark hole wasn't as black, deep or overpowering. I wasn't quite so unbearably, unutterably alone. I felt there was something other than me that was there to stop me from being overwhelmed, to prevent me from drowning. None of my problems were solved, nothing was miraculously changed but sometimes I sensed God in the midst of it all. Instead of the future being endless despair and blackness I now felt I might be able to figure out where the next step was. There was a glimmer of hope, of light.

In the corner of my eye it winks at me, the evening star, the first star of night. With tired eyes I stare at my work, the too-bright screen telling me where it all started, the great religious conversion that changed the course of my life. Two twenty-somethings in a home for the aged. That willingness to open up to God, to ask for help, was to become the background colour, no, the dominant colour of my life, everything was influenced by that decision. When I asked for help God entered my life.


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To this day I believe that without that decision, without God, I would have killed myself, overdosed or died of despair.


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CHAPTER THREE

It was a glorious dawn this morning. It seemed to explode with joy. An unabashed strip of gold streaked across the horizon, the clouds tumbled with delight in their vivacious shades of crimson, scarlet and vermilion. The colours intensified to a point of uncontainable, exuberant brilliance. Then, as the sun rose above the sea, they started to fade and recede into their everyday beauty. I was in the nursing home over Christmas which was depressing and lonely. Yvette came to visit me a few times and would encourage me to stay and continue to detox. She understood how difficult this was and knew the despair I felt about my life. When I told her I had become a Christian she dared to hope this would make a difference in my life, that it would provide me with something to hang onto which would make my life seem worthwhile. We talked about the options that were available once I left the nursing home and decided I would go to a Christian rehabilitation centre on the Hawkesbury River. My detox was under medical supervision with medication to help the withdrawal process. After ten days the physical withdrawal was complete and the staff encouraged Dave and me to go into town for an outing. We ended up at the pub, got pissed and arrived back at the nursing home in high spirits, laughing, joking and creating a disturbance. The staff were not impressed. It was time to leave. When I left the nursing home I had completed the physical withdrawal from drug and alcohol but now I had to face life without the help prescribed by the doctor or the drugs and alcohol I had been using to medicate myself. This was a challenge. I was still psychologically in need of mood altering substances. My mind would


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not stay still and I pulsated with pent-up energy that I had no idea how to control. I felt an electric current of discontent pulsate through me. The counselling centre was way out in the bush and I was the only resident. I spent my time reading, thinking and listening to tapes but found the isolation difficult. The people who ran the place decided I needed significantly more help than they were able to give me and said they would investigate different options. I rang Yvette and asked her to do likewise. She suggested two possibilities. One was Ward One of Rydalmere Psychiatric Hospital, an experimental ward with a selfreferred, live-in programme. The other was a Christian counselling community, at Maraylya on the Cattai River north-west of Sydney. While Yvette was concerned that sending me to a psychiatric ward was not a good idea, Ward One was reputed to be very different from mainstream psychiatric institutions. I decided to check them both out. The centre was owned and run by a couple named David and Marie. David was a charismatic man with an obvious love of people. He was tall, about six foot, deeply tanned and solid. He had long, grey hair and laughing eyes. He wore stubbies, blue singlet, an Akubra hat and his feet were bare; his hands were big, strong and dirt-encrusted. He showed me around the seventy-three acres of the property. His love of the place was obvious. We chatted easily, although at times he probed in ways I found personal and intrusive. I told him about becoming a Christian and said I had many questions. He infuriated me by saying we could talk about them once I was staying there. That was an arrogant assumption on his part! I hadn't decided to come as yet. In fact, by the time we had finished the tour, I was pretty sure this was not the place for me. The appointment with Ward One would be kept. As I left I wound my car window down to say goodbye, David kissed his thumb and placed it on the tip of my nose, saying “See you soon, honey-child”. How dare he!!! I was outraged... and enchanted. I was not going there! It's hard to describe what that farewell did to me. It certainly


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opened up a place in my closed and aching heart. There was obvious love in his tone, manner and action. I was shit-scared of love but that kiss on the nose bypassed many of my defences. It went straight to the heart of the lonely, lovelorn child within. For reasons I could not fathom I felt an inexplicable warmth, a flicker of joy and hope. “Honeychild” he had called me, that was new. As much as I tried for disdain I couldn't do it. I had caught a glimpse of something I liked. And I liked him. As I drove away a battle raged inside me. This did not seem a safe place. My internal voices warned me to have nothing to do with David. “Don't go there!!” But that farewell kiss played over and over again. “He seems like a nice guy.” “Don't go there!” “He's a Christian, that will be good.” “He's not safe, not to be trusted.” “Don't be an idiot, you can't possibly trust someone like him.” “He's a counsellor, counselling would be a good thing.” “Don't go there!!” Into my battling mind dropped what I believed was the voice of God. “That's where I want you to go”. I struggled against that voice yet wanted to obey. It was an hour's drive back to where I was staying on the Hawkesbury River and by the time I returned the battle was over. I was going to Maraylya. The centre at Maraylya was an old church camp. It was in the bush and on the side of a river. The main buildings were on the top of a hill, separated by outcrops of sandstone. There was a track that led through the bush, down to the pasture where the cattle grazed alongside the river. The property relied on a generator for its electricity. Water for showers and toilets was pumped up from the river, hot water was supplied by wood stoked into a furnace and drinking water was collected in tanks. A big hut served as the dining


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room, lounge room, group room and David and Marie's living quarters. Next to this was a smaller hut that contained a simple kitchen. There were another three buildings: one was the counselling room and office and the other two were each divided into three residents' rooms. The showers and toilets were separate from the living quarters, about fifty metres, not far, but inconvenient at night or when it was cold or wet. David and Marie were in the process of building a house for themselves. For the first four weeks I was the only resident and got a lot of individual attention. Initially David didn’t do any formal counselling, I was too fragile. He spent hours getting to know me, gaining my trust, talking to me about God, Jesus and the Bible. We would sit up till all hours of the night having long discussions. I wanted to understand God's love, forgiveness and the purpose of Jesus' death. These were concepts I had heard before but had not paid particular attention to. I found church services contained language I did not understand, words like grace, redemption, salvation and sanctification seemed to be clichés I could not fathom. I felt sure they were words that contained deep truths but I was unable to unlock them. And then there was eternal life, all I could ever manage to envisage was a continuation of my miserable life here on earth. If Christianity was offering eternal life I would pass, thank you. I needed to tussle with everything. Just because it was in the Bible didn’t make it right. There were things I strongly disagreed with - the teaching on homosexuality for example, that was obviously wrong. I also wanted to know why I was here. What was God like? Who was Jesus? How did this whole Jesus as the Son of God thing work? Was God some kind of sadist who put us here to suffer? Why was there evil in the world? What was my purpose? Why was I so crazy? So unhappy? What were all the voices in my head? Did God have a plan for me? I bombarded David with all these questions. Some he answered, others he referred on to God saying God and I would have to work that out together. Counselling with David was intense. My previous experience with


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the school counsellor and psychiatrist at fifteen felt light-weight compared to David. I felt he was plumbing the very depths of my soul. I tried to protect myself from David's intrusions, at the same time knowing I needed his skill and help. I was vulnerable, in pain and had no self-awareness. David offered hope. It was at Maraylya I first discovered Transactional Analysis (TA). This was the therapeutic approach David used for counselling. Here were tools to make some sense of my life. It was exciting. It helped answer some of my why questions and taught me skills to look at myself, how I related with others and how to take some responsibility for myself. I wasn't quite so powerless. I devoured all the books David had on TA. One of the things TA partially explained were the voices in my head. TA divides the personality into Parent, Adult and Child ego states and describes how each ego state has its own coherent system of thoughts, feelings and behaviour patterns. The Parent ego state stores all the information we have received about how to be in the world, what the rules are, how we are meant to behave. It contains both critical and nurturing messages and I would often hear these played loudly, clearly and in contradiction. The Adult ego state is the rational, thinking part of the personality that assesses data and makes reasonable decisions. The Child ego state is the feeling part, it responds with freedom and delight, or anger and fear. This ego state learns how to adapt to the world in order to survive. The voice of my Child ego state was heard in my needs, fears and insecurities, and in its response to the often vitriolic attacks from my Parent ego state. This knowledge helped me make sense of the fights that so often raged inside me. It didn't stop the voices but it did normalise them. I began to understand that everyone had voices inside their head, that these were made up of the different parts of us: the messages we had received from our parents and other authority figures; the logical, rational part of us; and the words that attached to the intense feelings of the child part of me. These parts of me battled each other


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relentlessly. There was extreme abuse going on inside my head. Coming to understand this helped me to trust my sanity a little, to take some responsibility for my thoughts and my life, and examine where the messages came from. I made some decisions about whether these were messages I could choose to live my life by. I felt empowered. One session David asked me to describe my Mum and Dad. Mum was a snob, clever, an alcoholic, vicious, mean and arrogant. Dad was brilliant, aloof, cold, dismissive, intimidating and loving. David then invited me to say my name followed by “I am Elspeth and I am a snob, clever, an alcoholic, vicious, mean, arrogant, brilliant, aloof, cold, dismissive, intimidating and loving.” I was furious and hurt. Was this a trick designed to make me feel bad? How dare he suggest I was anything like my parents, there were no similarities whatsoever. It took many years for me to accept that description of myself. David was a hugger. He hugged everyone. I would watch as visitors arrived and he would always greet them, man, woman or child, with a hug. He was genuinely pleased to see them, he enjoyed people. There was a constant stream of visitors at Maraylya, mostly church people. Their lives had been very different to mine and as they asked me questions about my life experience I saw myself as some kind of alien who had inserted herself into their nice, comfortable, middle-class world. Some of the regulars had the patience and generosity to tentatively offer me their friendship. As soon as anyone arrived I would hide in my room, or take off to some isolated part of the property, only to appear at meal times and then disappear again as soon as possible. I was scared of people, had no ability to make small talk and was sure they would judge me and find me lacking. David assured me many of them were praying for me and the work he and Marie were doing at Maraylya. The thought of anyone caring enough to pray for me was incomprehensible. I resented visitors, and the amount of time David spent with them, because this was time he wasn't spending with me. I had come to


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enjoy our time together and would take as much of it as was on offer. Sometimes Marie got annoyed at how long David and I would talk to one another, especially when it went on into the small hours of the morning. I was wary of Marie. She was always kind to me but she didn't have David's natural warmth and she was much more likely to see who I really was. David saw many positive things in me, things I couldn't see myself, and I felt sure Marie didn't see them either. Early in my stay at Maraylya David told me he loved me. That was terrifying. I didn't want that, didn't want anybody that close. What did he want? What would be the cost? The demand? A Simon and Garfunkel song ran through my head: “I am a rock, I am an island”. It reinforced my comforting isolation. The people who got close were the other residents when they arrived. They were more like me. Battered, bruised, traumatised by life and screwed up. Much more comfortable to be around than good Christians. Some people came to Maraylya for a few days just to get some respite from the world, others, like me, came to stay for quite some time. Someone who came for a long time was Brian. He had the ability to convince people he was terminally ill and to get an enormous amount of care and support from them. He was a gay man, so someone I was comfortable with. He had the room next to mine and we became friends. At a residential counselling centre the residents spend a lot of time together. The up side of this is they can understand one another in a way the counsellors can't. The down side is the sharing of pathologies, the competitiveness of suffering – my life has been worse than yours and the ease with which they can manipulate one another. At their best residential centres support and encourage new behaviour, at their worst they reinforce negative behaviour and residents can teach each other a whole new range of unhealthy activities. Maraylya was a combination of both. Brian was a manipulator and used people


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shamelessly and I needed to be needed. It was a match made in heaven. David and Marie were traditional in their beliefs but life at Maraylya was also earthy, practical and focused on personal growth. People were not expected to be perfect or have all the answers. It was OK to be vulnerable and admit your insecurities and doubts. God was someone you could be yourself with, be honest with, tell it how it was. The relationship with God that was encouraged at Maraylya wasn't about pretending and being holy. If you were scared, hurt, angry or happy it was OK to say so. Most of the time I had no idea what I felt except it was big and intense. David began the process of teaching me to recognise my feelings. While initially he accepted “blerk” as a description, he felt that some nuances to that would be helpful. For the first couple of months he also let me get away with “ouch” as a way of saying his questions were too painful or intrusive. I look back in wonder at how emotionally inarticulate and illiterate I was. I was a bundle of pain, what else was there to know? Except perhaps why? That was unfathomable. David and Marie lived by faith. By this I mean they had no income and no government backing for their counselling centre. All funds came from generous donations, anything David made from preaching or running workshops and the meagre amount the residents were charged. I found the kind of faith that could keep going while bills were unpaid awe-inspiring. David was clear God was dependable and would provide all their needs and at times give abundantly for treats or holidays. Marie found it much harder. Often they would be waiting for the mail to arrive or hope someone would turn up with the money so they could pay a bill on time. Marie believed this was God testing her faith and she found it wearying. I didn't blame her. David started a Friday night group which was a combination of study, self-awareness, and experiential learning. It became an important part of my life. The group taught that self- awareness and


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personal growth were an intrinsic part of spirituality. This is a belief I hold dear to this day. Often there were tears, anger, fear or excitement as people looked deep into themselves and their motivations, and opened their lives and hearts to the power of God's healing. Residents were encouraged to attend church. David and Marie were involved locally with both a mission church and the Anglican parish. These churches always seemed staid and controlled compared to the Friday night group, but I attended all three weekly, constantly searching for a deeper relationship with God. I would hang onto every word of the sermon hoping to hear God speak to me. The whole concept of God's loved confused me. I didn't trust love. In my mind it was never given freely, there were always hooks and conditions, or it just plain hurt. But as I listened to the sermons and the stories of how God acted in people's lives I got glimpses of a love that was very different to the one I grew up with. Residents were also expected to help out with various jobs around the property such as milking the cow, fencing, helping out in the kitchen, lighting the fires for hot water and many other chores. Part of the reason for the work was to keep us occupied and develop selfdiscipline but another was that while working alongside David we had conversations with him that could be more revealing than the ones held in counselling sessions. Milking the cow was my favourite task. It was about a fifteen minute downhill walk to where the milk cow and her calves were grazing. We would boil water and pour it into the milking bucket so we had warm water to wash down the cow's udder. My trust in David was growing, he was reliable and safe. His hugs were wonderful, he would give big, strong, bear hugs that could be returned without fear of crushing or breaking him. There were times I would relax into David's hugs seeking warmth and understanding. I felt a comfort that relieved some of my aching emptiness. The bush was magical in the early morning. The crispness of the air, the smell of eucalypts fresh and clean, the crunch of leaves and


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twigs beneath our feet and the aroma of fresh earth and decaying plant matter delighted me morning after morning. Spider webs were everywhere, spun between grass blades, twigs and leaves; dew caught, scintillating in the sunlight, myriad diamonds, refracting lights. They were breathtaking in their beauty. The quiet of the bush befriended me, held me. I could think and be alone there. I would often sit on a rock and merge with it or seek its wisdom. Sometimes songs would come to me; tunes and words flowed from the rocks to my head. I heard words of prayer, or praise, songs of desperation or desolation, tunes that would surprise me with their beauty and joy. The bush gave to me without asking anything in return. There were no conditions; maybe it understood I had little to give. Some mornings David and I talked as we headed down the track, other times we walked in silence, enjoying the crispness of the air, the smells and the noises of the bush. Once we got the cow in the milking pen we would take it in turns to milk unless David was in a hurry for some reason and then he would do it all himself. The rhythmic action of milking a cow and the sound of milk splashing into the metal pail encouraged conversations. This was a place where no one would intrude, no phone would ring or visitor arrive. It became a sacred time and place for me where I revealed my heart and risked giving voice to some of my fears and questions. We often talked of God. David had a lively relationship with God who was the boss of David's life. But I also felt David was familiar and comfortable with God and vice versa. I envied this. David would describe Jesus as his best friend. My Bible in those days often seemed to have an electric current that ran through it underlining certain passage or verses and speaking to me in powerful ways. We would discuss these passages. Here, in this less formal setting, David encouraged stories from my past. I told of my mother's heavy drinking; her constant disapproval and criticism; her snobbishness; my sense I could never get anything right or be good enough. Then I spoke of my father's aloofness; the


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ivory tower he inhabited, only coming down to visit me occasionally, when it suited him; my fear of his disdain and disapproval; and his disappointment in my total lack of interest and ability in sport. Alone here as we milked, David first talked to me of some of the pains of his heart, his loneliness. How hard it was to be placed on a pedestal by people; how difficult it was to live up to expectations, and the heavy responsibility of revealing God to others. I was honoured by his trust and felt our relationship changed when he opened his heart to me. We were still resident and counsellor. There was no doubt whatsoever that I still had him on a pedestal that was so high I could barely see his feet, let alone his face, but we had moved towards friendship. He trusted me, was prepared to be vulnerable and show himself as frail and human. I was deeply honoured. On our return we would boil the milk, skim off the cream and leave the milk to cool before putting it in the fridge. The bucket had to be washed and put away ready for milking that evening. One day as we finished David kissed me lightly on the nose as I was heading out the door, a heartbreakingly endearing habit. “I love you” he said. “I love you, too” I replied. Once outside there was an explosion of voices inside my head. “What did you just say?” “Love!! You can't say love!! You're not allowed to love him.” “For goodness sake, what on earth are you thinking of?” “Now you're in for it, now he will want to fuck you.” I was berated by my internal voices but another part of me was giving a little skip of delight. The words were out there. They had been said. All those times when he'd said he loved me and I'd not been able to respond and today I'd just said it. It had slipped out unannounced, unheralded, unpremeditated. “I love you, too”. Yes, that was true. Later that morning I, oh so casually, asked him if he had noticed what I'd said as I walked out the door after milking. His eyes sparkled. “Oh yes, I wouldn't want to miss anything as monumental as that,”


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he said. “Why didn't you say anything?” I asked. “I wasn't sure you'd noticed and I didn't want to scare you. I'm honoured.” He grinned. “Honoured? Honoured? That I said “I love you”. Holy shit! What the fuck?! Honoured?” That was far beyond my comprehension, way too scary and yet somewhere way down deep inside there was a tiny wiggle of joy; right next to where my bowels were churning in fear.

Today the weather has alternated between rain and glorious sunshine, dark ominous clouds and clear blue skies. Now there is a rainbow arched across the bay. It begins right in front me, less than two hundred metres away. It seems to emerge from the water, this majestic arc of colour that traverses the sky. Encompassing the bay, creating halos and mists of magical colour. Then its curve descends once more to the water, shimmering, hazy, translucent light reminding me of God's promise to never again wipe out the world by deluge. This glorious arc of colour holds promise, portent and omen.


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CHAPTER FOUR

The variety of shapes and colours in my seascape remind me of the different textures of the people in my life. These varying shapes and hues represent the diversity of beliefs, opinions, ethics, values and ways of being in the world. There are short, sharp splashes like the people who passed through my life adding colour but moving on. There are pockets of intense vibrancy, always my favourite kind of person, but sometimes they burnt me with their intensity. Then the occasional dab of beige, necessary but conservative and the blue that provides the solid, sure foundation, those people who have been there to support and care for me, whose friendships have endured over time. All contribute to the whole. One day Marie announced a new resident was arriving. We were told he had been in jail for murder. Murder?! I didn't want some hardened criminal coming in, making us all unsafe. I didn't ask any questions about him. I reacted. I didn't want him there. Marie criticised my selfishness and informed me it wasn't up to me to decide and, had I bothered to ask some questions, would have learnt there was a story about this man and the injustices he had suffered. I felt lower than low but also angry and scared. We were told this at Friday lunch time and that afternoon Brian and I took off to the pub. Alcohol was not encouraged at Maraylya, nevertheless, I got very drunk and staggered back just in time for the Friday night group. Both David and Marie were furious. I kept saying “I couldn't help it”. David informed Brian and me he would talk to us about our behaviour the next day, for now, he had a group to run. That night, anyone who wanted prayer could sit on the chair in the


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middle of the circle and people would lay on hands and pray for them. People were asking for healing of physical conditions, help in conceiving a child and the ability to let go of anger and resentments. I felt people's lives were changing as a result of these prayers. About half way though I felt a strong pull to sit on the chair and ask for prayer. I felt an even stronger pull not to. I didn't want to draw attention to myself. I was in the bad books and a long way off being sober. The pull to sit in the chair grew stronger and stronger. So did my resistance. Others took their turn on the chair. I had no idea what I needed or wanted, or what to say, but the compulsion to sit in the chair grew. I felt as if there was a hand on my back pushing me towards the chair and I heard a voice inside my head that kept saying “get up and go and sit in the chair NOW.” Finally, David asked one more time if anyone wanted prayer. There was no one else who came forward. I burst into tears. Bugger!!! That was not a good way to avoid attention. David invited me to sit in the chair. “I can't, I can't” I said and started to regress into a terrified child. It felt as if it was more than my life was worth to sit in the chair, yet I felt God was compelling me to do so. However angry David might have been he didn't allow it to influence how he dealt with me. He crouched down beside me and said gently, “What can't you do?” “I can't let you know they are here. I can't let you see them. I'll get into really BIG trouble” I sobbed without any idea of what I was saying. My terror was rising by the second. David instinctively knew what was happening. He called to Brent, a retired, ordained minister and a member of the group, and asked for his help. They didn't make me sit in the “hot seat”. They dealt with me where I was. Brent knew I had arrived home drunk that evening. Even if he hadn't known, my breath would have told him. He asked why and all I could say was “I couldn't help it. It was not my fault. I know I have to take responsibility for myself, but I couldn't help it, couldn't stop myself.” As these words came out of my mouth I waited to be


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confronted. David viewed taking responsibility for myself and my actions as an intrinsic part of healing. Surely he was going to come down on me like a ton of bricks. Here I was making such a fuss at the end of a very powerful group. I was out of control and saying things I recognised as unacceptable. Yet, somehow it was these words that told David and Brent what it was they were dealing with. What happened next can only be described as an exorcism. David and Brent worked together. They claimed both protection and authority through Jesus and demanded that the demon within me name itself. The part of me that was watching all of this freaked out. “The what? You have got to be kidding. This is way too weird. I'm out of here.” Except I couldn't get up to leave. Couldn't speak. These two men were speaking to me, or into me, with such authority. I knew people were praying for me. I could sense it all around me. I was terrified yet felt safe. I wanted to stay and I wanted to leave. I felt ripped in several parts. I burst into tears. Again David demanded the demon name itself. Out of my mouth came a torrent of abuse. He commanded it to stop and with breathtaking power and authority demanded, in Jesus' name, that the spirit name itself. The word “alcohol” came out of my mouth but I did not feel it was me who had said it. Again abuse spewed forth from within me, screaming at David and telling him it had no intention of letting me go. What happened next wasn't a struggle and wasn't violent. David and Brent together quietly informed this spirit that it would leave, now, that it had no power or authority in my life and had to go. It was done with gentleness yet great strength. The spirit left. I knew the instant it had gone. I felt different, stone cold sober, empty and spent. The entire group prayed asking the Holy Spirit to protect me from any more spirits entering into me and for healing. I was surrounded by love, understanding and compassion. I didn't have another drink for over a year. I do not deny the reality of what happened that night. Do I understand it or have an adequate theological explanation for it? No. Both David and Brent said it was something to do with me saying “I


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couldn't help it”. They knew it was different from me refusing to accept responsibility for myself. They knew it was the truth. Within their frame of reference the only explanation they had for that was possession. They dealt with it accordingly and it was highly successful. As a result of that experience I don't dismiss the possibility that exorcism is real. There are things done by so called exorcists that are nothing short of abuse. Exorcism can be a diabolic form of claiming complete power over someone. I have heard from people with multiple personalities (dissociative identity disorder) that they have had exorcism inflicted upon them when it is not demons that were present, just different parts of themselves moving in and out of consciousness. All I can say of my exorcism was that it was positive. I felt loved, supported and cared for. David and Brent knew what they were doing. I was different as a result. The people in my life in those days were good, caring, committed Christians who believed they had a responsibility to support David and Marie in their work at Maraylya, and who did their best to understand and support me. Two of those people are still friends to this day – some thirty-four years later. Despite growing as a Christian, my self-esteem was low, and I felt inferior to everyone else, especially anyone I saw as being “good” or “holy”. I saw others as more confident in their beliefs and understanding of the Bible, certain of what was right and wrong. To my eyes the Christians I knew appeared to have no doubts at all that they were loved by God. For me there were many times when surviving the day was a challenge. Finding the words for my questions was impossible. Believing that God loved me felt unobtainable. I knew there was still a whole heap of stuff festering inside that wasn't good. I knew I was bad: a deep-down, black, evil, putrid, poisonous kind of bad and if people saw who I really was they would run, screaming in horror. It was to be many years before I plumbed the depth of these


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beliefs and discovered the darkness they were born in. In those early days of my faith I developed a relationship with the Gospel figure of Mary Magdalene. Here was someone who understood the reality of my life. I couldn't talk to God about my badness or about woman's stuff or sex. I couldn't talk to God the Father about that! I didn't talked to David about sex either. But Mary Magdalene understood. She had been a prostitute, had been used and abused and had seven demons cast out of her. I imagined her as real and gutsy and earthy. I needed someone to talk to at the shame-filled level. All the Christians I knew seemed too good and clean; they wouldn't understand. I would talk to Marie about my faith and listen to her experiences of God. Her faith was not as showy as David's which made it feel more achievable. She believed they were obeying God's call by being at Maraylya, but it was obvious there were times she wished they had been called to something else. I liked Marie but was scared of her. She would call a spade a spade and was often the one who assigned jobs. I could not get out of work by starting a deep and meaningful conversation with Marie. She was practical and efficient, and knew just how much work it took to keep the place running. As time went on David's importance in my life increased. Having told him I loved him I then developed a complicated mixture of a crush and wanting him as my Dad. In my mind I often called him Poppa but didn't tell anyone this, it felt too intimate. My need for him became intense. I would miss him dreadfully if he was working somewhere else on the property. If he was away for the day or weekend, running a training course or leading worship, I would go into withdrawal and pine, and my body mourned his absence and did not stop aching until he came home. I was scared he wouldn't return, that he would run away from my need or some dreadful accident would befall him. I was embarrassed by the depth of my longing and would take care to


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appear calm and laid back about his absence but would be listening for the sound of his car and would quiver with anticipation as he strode from his car into the hut. Always on his return there was a hug. David represented so much of what I had wanted from my own father. He was loving and demonstrative, he gave praise easily and was approachable and friendly. He was comfortable with himself and power sat well on his shoulders. He did not use his strength to either abuse or diminish me. He was ready to see the best in me and to find something to love and believe in. David encouraged me to think I was OK and that it was all right to be alive.

I focus on a particular shade of blue that makes its appearance many times in the painting. Sometimes it is dominant in the midst of many other tones and colours. Some patches of this particular blue catch and hold the eye and create a unique oasis of colour. In other places it just hangs out with the other colours, one of the gang. What I learnt at Maraylya is like the blue of the painting. There are some beliefs and ways of being I learnt from my time there that are still distinct and dominant. Yet many have now melded in with the rest of my life's learning and knowledge.


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CHAPTER FIVE

I walked along the beach this morning. The sand slanted steeply towards the water and I had to weave in and out of piles of seaweed, trying to stay sure-footed on the pebbles and rocks that littered the beach, or pick my way round rock pools. The smell of salt water and seaweed was strong and fresh, and I inhaled great gulps of the tangy air, pulling the good-to-be-aliveness of it into my lungs. Clouds were gathering, piling up on top of each other, casting a shadow over the day and giving notice of a coming storm. My stay at Maraylya didn't fix all my problems, but it provided some basic tools that have been of value throughout my life. My ability to examine myself honestly and name my issues had their foundation stones laid there. This framework was provided by TA with its easily understood language that described the structure and function of our personalities in a way which helped me understand myself and begin to take responsibility for my life. On leaving Maraylya I boarded with a woman in Parramatta. It was uncomfortable living in someone else's home but I needed somewhere to live and to figure out what to do next with my life. I missed David with an intensity that was breathtaking; constantly thinking about him, wanting to be with him all the time, to talk to him, phone him, be hugged by him. It was awful. My whole being was wracked with aching and longing. Fortunately for David, I would only allow myself to ring him twice a week, unless of course there was a crisis. There often was. My attendance at the Friday nights group continued but now I was just one of the many people who wanted David's time and attention. I


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couldn't just sit back and wait knowing my turn would come after everyone else left. I would be leaving too. I was obsessed. I started attending the same church as Brent and his wife. Both were kind and supportive, helping me settle in to Sydney and their church. They looked out for me at church knowing how crowds overwhelmed me and how likely I was to either try and blend into the wall or run away. They often invited me for meals and Brent was always ready to discuss Christianity with me and to give me a hug. They were generous and I was ungrateful. Brent wasn't David and their home wasn't Maraylya. Brent was more dogmatic in his beliefs than David. He would tell me what to believe which was a sure way to get my back up and engage my rebellious streak. He would give trite, clichéd answers to my questions about God. I often felt Brent was defending God from my lack of faith, as if this would wound God in some way. Or I was too much for God, God had to be protected like a frail, ailing grandmother. David would always let me be myself. He would let me rant and rave. He never defended God and he trusted me to develop a relationship with God based on honesty. David knew that would not happen if he intervened. Brent tried to smooth out the rough bits. I got angry, belligerent and went to extremes. If Brent told me what was appropriate behaviour for a Christian I would embrace the opposite. He told me Christians shouldn't smoke; my smoking increased. Then he told me Christians shouldn't swear, so of course “fuck” and “shit” studded my conversation more liberally in his presence. I made up tests to challenge him, to prove he was not perceptive, that, in fact, he was stupid. He would give me hugs. I always felt the hugs were for him rather than for me. That he didn't truly know who I was. His hugs lacked sincerity. I hated them. I had no idea how to stop him hugging me. I started a job in Green Valley, a large Housing Commission estate in Sydney's south-west. David had some connections with the Sydney City


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Mission and with his help I started as secretary for their first Vocational Employment Training Scheme, which was designed to teach unemployed people some basic skills in woodwork, typing or nursing in order to increase their chances of finding a job. It was a pilot programme that spread to other parts of NSW and Western and South Australia. My enthusiasm for the job was high to begin with but quickly dwindled as it became boring and routine. I knew this was a worthwhile project and it would change people's lives but answering the phones and typing out worksheets didn't fulfil my desire to change the world for the better. One of the people who worked on the programme offered me accommodation with his wife and three kids. Their house was closer to work and they were offering me support and encouragement while I tried to establish myself. This arrangement wasn't particularly successful. Sharing with a family was difficult. I felt like the poor relation but was terrified of the idea of finding a flat and living on my own. For three months I searched for a flat, but there was always something wrong. Eventually, my host pointed out that the reason I couldn't find a suitable flat was that I saw everything through the eyes of my fear. Nothing was going to look right. He told me it was time to take a big breath and move out on my own. I found a small garden flat in Cabramatta, which was much closer to work, hired some furniture and set up home. For the first time in my life I alone was responsible for my own cooking, cleaning, shopping and finances. I was twenty-three and found living by myself terrifying and lonely. Friends from Maraylya visited regularly and I joined a nearby church. I always expected miracles during the services. Hoped there would be answers. Tried to wring personal messages out of the sermon. I was consumed with doubt about what I should be doing with my life. I didn't want to keep doing secretarial work, it was boring and unfulfilling. I wanted more friends and to be in a relationship. Wasn't


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this what God was meant to bring to my life? I always felt I had done something wrong during the week and I found myself fervently confessing my sins and asking forgiveness. Communion was important because it gave me a clean slate, a new start. Each week would see me doing my best to wrestle some kind of blessing out of the service. The minister and his wife knew I was struggling with life. They were supportive. They would invite me for meals, check up on me during the week and make themselves available to talk and listen. I was high maintenance. Some months after leaving Maraylya a friend and I attended a weekend workshop on TA. The workshop was led by Bernard, a powerful, dynamic man in his late forties. He knew his stuff and was an interesting combination of confrontation and compassion. He had excellent intuition and beautiful eyes. Much of the weekend was experiential and I threw myself into it with gusto, shed many tears and learnt lots. We enrolled in the follow-up workshop. A move Bernard seemed to approve. The first weekend had been introductory TA. The follow-up weekend was about Life Scripts, our unconscious plan for our lives in response to the world around us. TA teaches that this plan, or script, is pretty much in place by the time we are five. One of the exercises was a questionnaire designed to reveal our early decisions. What parts of life we had permissions for and what were our restrictions. The questionnaire covered topics such as being ourselves, trusting people, our right to exist, our sanity and whether we felt it was OK to belong. We recorded our answers on a chart and at the end of the exercise it was possible to see how many permission we had and in what areas. As I looked at my results Bernard caught my eye and without seeing my piece of paper he commented “Not a lot of permissions, huh?” “Shit! How does he know that?” And a further “Shit!” as I looked at


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my piece of paper and recognised all the restrictions there were in my life. I felt unsettled, off balance, a victim of my past. The next exercise was a life script questionnaire. Once again this was a series of questions designed to reveal information about the unconscious decisions we had made and the ways we had figured out how to survive in the world. I felt a little safer as we started this exercise having done one of these with David at Maraylya. I happily answered questions like “What is the myth of your birth?”, “What was your favourite story as a child?”, “What was the dominant feeling in your home?” Then we got to “Where do you imagine you will be in fifteen years' time?” and “Imagine yourself on your deathbed. Where are you? How old are you? What are you dying of?” We had time alone with the questions and then shared the answers with another participant. However, when it came to answering the questions about how and when to die Bernard just happened to be there. Thinking that six months counselling at Maraylya meant I had new answers to these questions I confidently said “Once upon a time I would have answered 'in the two weeks after my twenty-fifth birthday, by drug overdose', now it’s different.” “What's the answer now?” asked Bernard. “Um, err”. Oh! Bernard was waiting for an answer. I hung my head. “Where did you picture yourself in fifteen years' time?” asked Bernard gently. “Nowhere, I couldn't see anything.” My confidence started to tilt. Fear filled me. Bernard sat down opposite me, looked me full in the eyes and in a voice full of compassion and strength said “Will you state clearly that you will neither harm nor kill yourself?” I couldn't do it. I felt pinned to the wall. It was impossible. I desperately wanted to say it. To lie if necessary. Anything to get out of the place. To get away from Bernard and his disturbing questions and his piercing eyes. There was silence for a long time. “I can't.” Tears slipped down my face.


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“Then you need to take responsibility for yourself and stay alive long enough to make some new decisions” said Bernard in a voice that brooked no contradiction. No one had ever spoken to me like that. I don't know which was more shocking; that he held me responsible for my life or that my choosing to stay alive was important to him. He was serious. He insisted I stay behind at the end of the workshop in order to get information from him about my options. At Bernard's recommendation I went to see a psychiatrist, Bob Russell, who had a private practice in Parramatta. He used TA. Bob was a gentle man, with sandy hair and a psychiatrist's diffidence. In those early days I felt he lacked both warmth and humour; I was wrong. He didn't have the charisma of either Maraylya's David or Bernard. It was slow, plodding, once a week work. It all seemed very polite and wasn't getting anywhere at all. We spent two whole sessions with me trying to explain to him what it meant to me to be a Christian. This was frustrating. Why did I have to waste time trying to explain it to him. I can only assume that having named prayer as one of my coping strategies he wanted to understand how this worked for me; or he was checking for God delusions. Apart from the slowness of the sessions, I was dying of boredom. We were not getting anywhere and taking a damn long time about it. If this was meant to deal with my suicidal thoughts, I was going to die of old age long before we got there. Without Maraylya's supporting people or the anaesthetising effects of drugs and alcohol, my coping abilities were being stretched beyond their capacity. Just staying alive and living alone was bloody hard work. I didn't want to live any more. There was nothing to live for, no meaning or sense of purpose. I was in constant mental pain, living with incessant hyper-vigilance, always expecting danger or attack, with stress levels that meant every muscle in my body was held tight and I would leap out of my skin at the slightest, unexpected noise. I ached all over. I was exhausted and just


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wanted a rest. If I tried to relax I feared going mad. I would give up the control that kept me operating at some level of sanity and the voices would take over. If I let myself go mad, I knew I would not be able to come back. The temptation to madness was a constant seduction. One day I asked Bob Russell if there was anything we could do that would move things along a bit. He informed me that as well as being a private practitioner he was the team leader of an experimental unit at Ward One, Rydalmere Psychiatric Hospital. He explained it was a unit that he and Bernard had started together where they used a combination of TA and Gestalt Therapy. He thought it would be helpful. Hhhhmmmm. This was the place I had decided not to go to when I went to Maraylya. Now I had a job, a place to live and was attending a local church. Going to Ward One would involve giving up the job and the place to live. That was two marks in its favour. Attending church and the Friday night group would still be possible. I headed up to Maraylya to discuss it with David and Marie. It was a huge decision, a crossroad. I had been out of residential counselling for over a year. David and Marie understood why Bob Russell had suggested Ward One. It had become obvious that my problems were more deeply entrenched than David and Marie first thought and that I needed ongoing psychotherapy, not just counselling. However, they had some major concerns about me going into a psychiatric institution. They knew how I could be sucked into the issues of other residents, believing everything they said and supporting them in ways that were not helpful or growth-promoting. My instinctive protection of the underdog and passion for justice, coupled with my rebellion against those in authority, had led to some less than helpful interventions on my part while at Maraylya. There had been times when I passionately defended someone against David's authority only to discover I had been sucked in badly. They also knew my ability to absorb other people's pathologies. We prayed about it together. I decided to go for the admissions interview and see if Ward One was willing to accept me.


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The promised storm came and I was in the mood to embrace it. I walked back to the beach and strode along the sand, clearer now after high tide, with the wind whipping at my hair and the sand stinging my eyes. The roar of the waves were wild percussions, reaching a crescendo and crashing on to the shore. Their white caps were decapitated by the wind and blown back out to sea. The rain beat a steady staccato, pock-marking the sand. It was wild and fabulous.


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CHAPTER SIX

This morning was cold, grey and misty. The heavy, rain-filled clouds blocked out the sun. The horizon and ocean blended into the same nondescript grey. I set out on a walk hoping to return before the rain arrived. But it was a wonderful, surprising, transformative day. The air started to warm, the clouds burnt away and there before me was another perfect autumn day, full of delectable sunshine, dancing blue ocean and the green of the hills becoming lush after recent rain. There is always joy when what appears to be dark and gloomy transforms into clear, blue delight. Life at Ward One was like that – I dreaded the darkness of a psychiatric institution but discovered a community full of hope and life. Rydalmere Psychiatric Hospital was a huge, rambling affair. The buildings were old, some magnificent, some stark and institutionallooking, others starting to rot and crumble. It had been an Institution for the Insane since 1849. Just opposite Ward One was the three-storey Female Orphan Institution building which was built in 1813, and is now recognised as the oldest three-storey brick building in Australia. It has recently been refurbished and is part of the Whitlam Institute within the University of Western Sydney. Ward One was situated towards the back of the hospital which meant I had to to drive past patients walking around the grounds in various states of attire and degrees of medication. Ward One was housed within the old medical superintendent's house. It was a splendid old, white, two-storey building with verandas around two sides of the ground floor and balconies outside three of the upstairs


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bedrooms. The rooms were spacious with twelve-foot-high ceilings and casement windows through which the sun poured. Ward One overlooked the Parramatta River on one side, and a beautiful ornamental tree was on another, with its leaves beginning to show the first hint of autumn. The third side was an old brickworks, a long since abandoned part of the hospital, and the fourth was next to busy James Ruse Drive. Just finding the place the first time was a major undertaking and then I had to enter the building and survive the interview. It was a daunting process. On my arrival there were several people sitting outside on the veranda, drinking coffee and talking. I was scared as I walked past these people who were inmates in a psychiatric institution and therefore, I believed, scary and potentially dangerous. Bob met me and took me into the staff meeting room. It was a huge room, with a beautiful bay window that overlooked the grounds and the Parramatta River. There were six people sitting around in a circle waiting to assess me. I didn't know if I was meant to be together enough, or crazy enough, to be allowed admittance. During the interview the staff explained that the unit, as it was called, was voluntary and residents could leave any time but were expected to commit to a minimum stay of six months. The maximum allowable stay was two years. They also explained there was minimal medication prescribed, diagnostic labels were not given and residents were encouraged to take responsibility for themselves and their therapy. They were also expected to support one another and to this end any resident who felt they were in crisis, could call a group day or night and attendance was compulsory. No doubt there was the usual talk of commitment and motivation, and questions about what I hoped to achieve by coming. I don't remember anything. I'm sure the fact Bob had recommended I come meant that my interview was less rigorous than others. Even so, I felt overwhelmed by the seriousness of it all. There were bound to be deeply disturbed people here. This was heavy stuff. The staff said they


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would let me know by the end of the week. I left not knowing if I wanted admission or not. This would be therapy at an intensity I had not yet experienced. The call came two days later. They had accepted me and would admit me the following week. I decided to give it a go. It felt like the right thing to do. David and Marie offered me the option of staying at Maraylya at weekends. It could be my home base. I was delighted. It was a generous offer. They were concerned about such a new Christian going into the psychiatric system, and, even though they knew it was an experimental ward, they were troubled about negative influences. They both knew I needed what Ward One could offer but they also wanted to provide a less institutional place for me to escape to, if needed. With relief I relinquished my job and my flat. Ward One was staffed by Bob, the head of the unit; the hospital chaplain, who spent a great deal of his time at the ward; two social workers; and at times welfare or social work students doing their placements. There was also the nursing staff; during the day there were two or three nurses, plus the charge nurse, then two nurses for afternoon shift and one for night shift. Given there was a maximum of sixteen residents at any one time the staff/patient ratio was high. It was an expensive unit to run. However, it did achieve results; the readmittance rate was very low. The basic philosophy of the ward was that people were responsible for themselves and were not to be given a diagnosis. The staff believed that referring to someone as a schizophrenic put them into a box and set up expectations of behaviour and encouraged other people to make assumptions rather than get to know the person as an individual. Medication was kept to an absolute minimum, with psychiatric drugs being used as a last resort and in minimal quantities. Even such things as Panadol were limited and if you complained of a headache you were expected to figure out why you had one. At times


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this was painful and people tended to have their own illicit supply of minor painkillers. Taking responsibility for yourself was one of the core beliefs of the ward and transgressions were taken seriously. It was perfectly acceptable to call to account anyone, resident or staff. It worked well because we knew this was no holiday camp. If we wanted drug therapy or someone diagnosing us and making decisions for us there was plenty of that on offer elsewhere in the hospital. Life at Ward One was intense. Although you had to be a voluntary patient in order to be there, for many of the residents this was their last chance. These were people who had been in back wards for a long time; patients the system had given up on. Many of them had been diagnosed as schizophrenic or with borderline personality disorder and had not responded to traditional treatment. Each morning there was a communication group to deal with the everyday running of the ward. There was a Communications Book where requests for leave or medication were recorded as well as any interpersonal problems or perceived breach of rules. The duration of the group varied depending on what was in the book. There were times the group was fraught and went on for hours. Once this group was over there was an half-hour break, and then a therapy group. Residents were encouraged to participate in one another’s work. While the staff were excellent, many of the residents had finely honed bullshit detectors and gut instincts that had developed over many years of struggling to stay alive and/or sane. In many ways they were better therapists than the paid staff. They were more likely to get straight to the point and confront anyone they thought was bullshitting. Living together twenty-four hours a day we got to know each other, we could tell when someone was being dishonest or engaging in the same, old, negative behaviour and that person would be confronted. It was like living in a hot house. I lived in a permanent state of fear and anxiety. I sat next to a door in the group room, needing to know there was a quick exit. I fought the desire to curl up in a foetal position and tune out from life


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and was exhausted just from the effort it took to engage with the world. At the same time I could be loud, vociferous and gregarious; the life of the party, laughing, joking and telling stories against myself. Other times I would pray that the ground would open up beneath me, and devour me, ending my struggle to stay alive. One night while I was sitting in the day room, Andrew, another resident, came looking for me. “Come with me,” he said “I want to show you something.” He led me into the kitchen where there was a tiny kitten. It was terrified and starving, there were a few residents trying to be kind to it but it cowered beneath the sink, timidly lapping at the milk someone had placed before it. Andrew pointed to the kitten and said to me “Look, here is another creature every bit as terrified of the world as you are”. It was an amazing moment, intense and intimate. Andrew had previously been diagnosed as having paranoid schizophrenia. He had intense paranoid episodes. I learnt from him that in every paranoid episode there is an element of truth. He would often have episodes triggered by what he saw as the staff talking about him behind his back, or them discounting his reality. It took very little for him to be in a full blown paranoid state. He always sounded incredibly angry. But what appeared to be rage was actually terror. He was terrified of going mad and when people denied his reality it triggered this terror. If I could find the grain of truth within the paranoia and get the person responsible to acknowledge it, this would defuse the situation. It wasn't always easy, Andrew was scary and to have him screaming abuse and accusations at you was daunting. I understood why people denied they had done anything to upset him. It was easy to believe that if you acknowledged what you were accused of, then the consequences would be violent. In reality, the acknowledgement brought about calm. After a time Andrew's paranoid episodes decreased because we all learnt how to help him defuse them. He learnt to trust that no one at the unit was trying to make him crazy.


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I first began to suspect I could become a good therapist while I was at Ward One. I would watch other people’s therapeutic work with great interest, often anticipating the interventions the therapists would make. All residents were encouraged to contribute to one another's therapy. I took this responsibility seriously and would contribute if I felt I had something to add. Bob praised my intuition and perception. I took it to heart. Maybe this was something I could do. Being able to call a group any time of the day or night gave me a sense of security. I felt my sanity wasn't totally my responsibility. There was help and support close at hand. Although many of the residents had great difficulty in functioning in ways that general society would consider acceptable we had a deep commitment to one another. Never since have I felt such a sense of love and community. Nor did I feel I had to be anything other than myself. While change was encouraged it was not demanded. And, because for so many this felt like their final chance, we had a level of honesty and commitment to our therapy, that although exhausting, was rewarding and life-giving to be a part of. TA gave people the tools to change their lives but it was the love and support that made it possible. There was never any judgement about the things people needed to work on. People remembered abuse, neglect, violence, betrayal, craziness and horror. We all knew that we hadn't ended up in Ward One as the result of a happy childhood. Pathology was understood as a necessary survival mechanism, whether that was self-mutilation, suicidal behaviour or fragmentation. Extremes of feelings were seen as either protection or catharsis. It all made sense. We all had serious issues, struggled to survive and had excellent bullshit detectors. Raw honest need, no matter how dysfunctional, would get enormous support. Manipulation, on the other hand, could be confronted quite brutally. If someone was suicidal because the pain was too great at that particular time, or they had been triggered, the residents would offer support in whatever way they could. However, if someone was manipulating for attention they would get short shrift


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indeed. The therapists would not have got away with such harshness because it was all too easy to think “they don't understand”, but with the residents you knew they did. There was no use trying to pull the wool over their eyes because they had been, or still were, there themselves. Sometimes this got complicated. It was far easier to spot and confront lies, deception and bullshit in someone else rather than face the behaviour in yourself. While the residents played a significant role in people's healing, it was Bob who had final responsibility and if someone was a threat to themselves or others, then even though it was a voluntary unit, they would be scheduled. Scheduling a patient was done under the mental health act and required the signature of a psychiatrist. The schedule could only be for a brief period of time before being reviewed, longterm involuntary admissions required the decision of a tribunal. I was aware of three different categories of scheduling. D category meant you were in day clothes and were allowed to walk around the hospital grounds. B category meant you were in pyjamas and had to stay on the ward and an A Category patient was in pyjamas and had to be within sight of nursing staff at all times. If Bob scheduled a resident it was at his discretion what category they were. They would be sent either to Ward Twelve, an Admissions Ward, or, in extreme cases, to one of the locked wards. Caitlyn was twenty-four when she arrived at the unit and wore thick Coke-bottle glasses that distorted her eyes. She was not present in her body and was clutching a small teddy bear. She was dissociated, regressed, suicidal and she heard voices. One Friday she called a group because she felt too scared to go on living. Because it was during the day all staff were obliged to attend. The staff had assessment interviews that afternoon and Bob was anxious the group not go on for too long. It was obvious that nothing was going to happen quickly. Caitlyn was in deep distress and needed time and nurturing to come to a place where she could make a tentative, temporary commitment to staying alive. We understood that. Bob did not have time for it. He


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closed the group saying that he and the staff had interviews. We were angry at such treatment and were concerned for Caitlyn. The next thing we knew one of the nurses came to get her, saying that Bob had scheduled her, and she was to be taken to one of the locked wards for her own safety. The news spread through the unit like wildfire. This was not on, this was peremptory and high-handed, being sent to a locked ward was to be avoided at all costs. Too many of the residents knew their horror and were willing to fight to stop Caitlyn being sent to one. We called a group; the staff did not attend. They explained they were interviewing a potential resident. Bad luck!!! I was nominated to go and knock on the door. I did, informing all those in the room there was a group on and the residents wanted them there “Now”. Bob, with a deep sigh, asked what the group was about. I informed him “None of us feel safe!” He came. We told him that we did not appreciate his autocratic way of dealing with the situation and that, given this was a voluntary unit, it was most distressing to realise that someone could not only be scheduled, but sent to a locked ward, without the resident having any power. Bob, who always appeared a meek, gentle man, told us that ultimately the safety of people in the unit was his responsibility and in the end it was his call. Caitlyn was to spend the weekend in a locked ward. There was no discussion to be entered into. He left the group and returned to his interview. It was a level of authority that rocked us. It provided much substance for both the communication and the therapy group for weeks to come. I found something comforting in Bob's authority. It felt like being held. As much as the unit was an intense place to live it was also a lot of fun. The humour was black, sharp and funny. There were many philosophical conversations that took place in the wee small hours of the morning, over cigarettes and copious cups of tea. People had many and varied understandings of God and spirituality and these discussions were linked to their own suffering and the evil they had experienced and saw continuing in the world. There were a couple of


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nurses who requested permanent night shift at Ward One, to the amazement of other nurses who avoided the place at all costs. They were an integral part of these conversations offering perspective, challenge and humour. We had a diversity of backgrounds, life experiences, beliefs and philosophies. We were the people the rest of the world had given up on. We had a wisdom born of pain that contained profound truth and knowledge. We residents were intelligent and articulate. We read widely and thought deeply in our search for answers and meaning. We did not accept easy answers or platitudes because they never spoke to our condition. They always felt like an insult, as if the people uttering them failed to see the reality of who we were. We may have been residents in a psychiatric hospital but we were neither stupid nor of little account. While I was at Ward One we had a student come to do her final welfare work placement. Susan was tall, centred, had beautiful blue eyes, a warm smile and was a natural. She didn't seem to be fazed by the intensity or pathologies of the ward. She accepted people for who they were and had genuine respect and compassion for the residents. She fitted in and became a popular choice as a support person while doing cathartic, therapeutic work. She was a superb therapist. Some of the techniques used at the unit were based on Jacqui Schiff's work with schizophrenia. Jacqui and her husband, Morris, took people diagnosed with schizophrenia into their home and allowed them to regress and re-experience childhood. They were given all the permissions and physical nurturing that should be part of growing up. This was ground-breaking, controversial work. It was intense and there were some disasters along the way. This was re-parenting, and a version of this was incorporated into the therapy offered at the unit. Anyone walking into the day-room while a therapy group was in full swing would see about twenty-four people. Some were sitting in chairs, others in bean bags, some on cushions at the feet of others having their head stroked or their back rubbed. There would be people on mattresses being held and people doing intense face to face work


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while others watched. The first questions Bob would ask at the beginning of a group was who wanted to work that day, on what and with whom. There would be people who wanted to work on things such as their suicidality or their sense of worthlessness. Perhaps they would want to process the feelings and consequences of abuse or neglect. This work was always done in the centre of the room. It would often start with the person talking about how this problem was currently affecting their life. The therapist would ask questions that would take them into the event and, once there was a high level of engagement, they would ask questions like “What's happening?”, “What can you see?”, “Who's there?” and encourage the resident to tell the story of what they were seeing in the present tense. For example: “I'm at home with Mum and Dad. We're in the lounge room. I'm on the floor colouring in. Dad is really angry, he's yelling at everyone. I just want to keep colouring in. I hate it when it's like this. Dad's face is getting red and shiny and his eyes are bulging. I'm feeling really scared 'cause he's going to start hitting soon. Oh no!” When someone is this deeply into a memory you can see what is happening. You are looking at the child as they experience the situation. The role of the therapist is to listen to the story and be there as support but also to find out what decisions were made. This is done by asking questions like ”So what did this mean about you?”, “What does this tell you about the world and how to survive?” “What did you figure out about anger?” “So becoming invisible was a really smart thing to do, wasn't it?” The idea is that we make clever decisions in the face of overwhelming circumstances. The trouble is we don't update those decisions. This is called redecision therapy and is designed to get us in touch with the original decisions and provide the opportunity to make new ones and live life differently. Often strong emotions are expressed as part of this work. Residents expressed their anger, fear or sadness and were encouraged and supported by staff and residents alike. Anger work was done on a mattress, with the resident imagining


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who they were angry with sitting on a cushion in front of them. They would put words to their anger and were allowed to use whatever language or images of violence they found useful. Once they were in touch with the anger it was important to express it with the body and they would pound the cushion or hit it with a rubber hose or rip up telephone directories. Other times the person would be surrounded with lots of cushions so they could punch, kick and flail, this was the intense rage of a small, inarticulate, uncomprehending child. Often residents needed to be held so they could experience safe, non-sexual, non-abusive, nurturing touch. Sometimes this was support while they cried or were in touch with their fear, other times it was purely a new, positive experience. This would be done with a therapist or another resident. Re-parenting was always negotiated with the therapist. The resident would pick who they wanted to work with and what messages they needed to hear. A mattress would be set up so the therapist could have their back against a wall and the resident would then lie across them, being held. The therapist would give permissions such as “It's fine for you to be here. I'm very happy to hold you and to care for you. I will not hurt you and I want nothing from you. It's great that you are alive. There are wonderful things in the world for you to explore.” Often re-parenting would trigger strong emotions and the words would change to “It's OK to have feelings. It's fine for you to feel whatever you need to. You don't have to look after me or not have your feelings around me. I am here to take care of you.” It was powerful stuff and it changed lives. I found re-parenting powerful and addictive. This was what I needed to heal my pain and fill my emptiness. I wanted to suck every last bit of care and nurture from the person providing it. At the same time my body was defended against letting any love or care in. It would go rigid and the therapist would keep reminding me to relax, to let my full weight rest against them and allow them to support my head as they held me. I would only receive a small amount of what was being


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given and it used to frustrate me because I wanted and needed so much more. Often memories would emerge during a re-parenting session. What started off as being safe, secure nurture would move into a nightmare of remembered abuse and trauma. It was during a session with Susan I first remembered being sexually abused by my father. I was six years old and he anally raped me. Susan was gentle and compassionate, she helped me face the memory and held me as I sobbed. This was the mid-1970s, nobody talked about sexual assault in those days. To their very great credit all the members of staff believed and supported me and other residents told me of similar things having happened to them. Bernard ran a therapy marathon. This was a weekend where a group of twelve people came together to do therapy. Part of the power of a marathon was its intensity. People could either gain from or be triggered by other people's work. I wanted to work on being raped by my father. Bernard looked horrified. “What on earth are you talking about? When did this happen? Where is your proof? Was there any blood? Were you hospitalised?” I was devastated, I felt he didn't believe me. I felt bad, dirty, wrong and didn't have answers to any of his questions. Maybe I had imagined it. Or was making it up. Traumatic memory never emerges with the kind of clarity or detail that can answer Bernard's questions. My memory first and foremost was of agonising pain in my anus. Then the feeling of my father's hands all over me, touching my vagina and bottom, and him whispering in my ear that he loved me; I was his good girl; he needed to do this because it made me his special girl. I felt pain, filthy, confused. And special. This meant he loved me more than he loved Mum. That was a good feeling because Mum was mean and cruel. If Dad loved me more than her then maybe he could protect me. If this


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awful thing he was doing was part of that, well ... at least he loved me; he said so. While I was able to talk of the abuse at Ward One and be believed, the fact it had been anal rape was unspeakable. I felt so filthy about this, so ashamed. Somehow it was my fault and it proved I was utterly disgusting. For years after this I wanted it to be known, yet was unable to speak it out. I have no idea if those working with me knew and just didn't spell it out, or whether it was the hideous, filthy secret I thought it was. I also remembered my mother trying to suffocate me when I was two. She lived in an age when women were expected to have children. There was no choice. My mother made no secret of the fact that she neither liked nor understood children. She should never have had them. She was not a patient woman and she found small children difficult and tiresome. The memory in question is of me lying in a cot, crying. I don't know why. Mum was yelling at me to be quiet, I continued to cry. In sheer frustration she grabbed a pillow, rammed it into my face and held it there. For days after remembering this I could feel the pillow over my face, the force with which it was held there and the words “she tried to kill me” running through my head. I don't know why or how the pillow was taken off my face, whether she changed her mind, I passed out, or my father entered the room. Years later when my brother and I discussed this memory he told me of the times Mum had slammed his head against a brick wall or tried to choke him. He was not surprised by my memory.

Clouds have been building up all afternoon. Darkness layering upon darkness. Ominous green-tinged clouds banking up over the hills. Air becoming oppressive with the heaviness of moisture. And suddenly it hailed. Completely unexpected. Rain yes, but not hail. I was sitting working, occasionally watching the sky, when I heard ching ching ping noises as hail bounced off the roof. I looked out the window and the ground was covered with balls of ice dancing, bouncing, ricocheting …


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and melting. And then the sun returned. The depth of personal work at Ward One was like that. It would build up, gathering momentum, threatening and ominous and then it would burst out of my unconscious, often with a flurry of noise and emotion. I would deal with it and my load would be lightened, and life would go on.


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CHAPTER SEVEN

One of the great delights of my seascape is how the colours and shapes can maintain their identity and integrity, even though there are so many different blocks and splashes of colour. They touch each other and build on one another and the perception of colour is influenced by the adjoining hues. In the creation of the work the artist has prevented the paints from blending together, has stopped the muddy, murky brown of indiscriminate mingling. Even as the paint piles one on top of each other, building up layers and depth, supporting one another, it hold its own. Each colour is true to itself, its head held high with a gentle pride. David and Marie were right. I picked up on other people's pathologies. There were a couple of people in the unit who used self-mutilation as a way of relieving pain. These were not suicide attempts, rather a release of the build-up of unendurable pain. It was not something I had ever thought of doing but hearing about it, it made sense and offered an alternative to drugs and alcohol. When the pain inside became unbearable I would take off in my car and just drive, with no idea where I was going. The containment of the car helped me to feel a little safer and more in control. The car became a womb. No one could reach me there. I learnt to create this womb-like safety in my head. I formed a mental bubble around myself that no one could penetrate. It was at least three feet thick, sometimes deep black, other times clear. I would haze out as if in a thick fog. My brain would be numb and floaty and everything would be a long way away. I would curl up and close in on myself knowing no one could find me. The lights might have been on


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but there was no one at home. I would stay in one spot rocking my pain. Or, like an animal, withdraw from the world; waiting... hoping to die. It was a very crazy space, skating right on the edge and if I toppled over I might not be able to make it back. Cutting provided the way back. I entered the bubble when the pain was unbearable. I had to be invisible. I always felt no one had any idea how intense my pain was. If I cut myself and there was blood then some of my pain was on the outside, it was visible. The blood was proof of my pain. If there was enough blood then I could return to my mind and body. The cutting never hurt and the sound and feel of the skin being jagged open by the knife or piece of glass was satisfying. As I sat and watched the blood dripping I would feel the fog lifting and see reality breaking through. Because there was such a high staff to patient ratio the unit was the obvious choice when cut-backs were ordered at the hospital. We were told Ward One was going to be closed down. My first reaction was to feel overwhelmed; then I despaired, then I got angry. Many of the residents were terrified. They knew this place was their only chance of getting well. We wanted to do something. The staff were not allowed to express their opinion or encourage us to take action. It was a measure of their creativity that they managed to stick to the letter of the law while providing us with a huge amount of support. Those restrictions did not apply to Bernard who was no longer employed by the hospital. He came and talked to the residents and we organised a fighting campaign. Bernard had a lot of contacts and he was a strategist. He organised for the story to be covered by A Current Affair; a nightly TV programme. I talked to Caroline Jones on ABC radio. Several of us were interviewed by Adele Horin of the National Times, a weekly newspaper with a reputation for uncovering the facts behind the stories of the day. This interview resulted in a two-page article with photos. Bernard also knew a solicitor who was on our side and we threatened to sue the hospital for breach of contract. We had entered the unit on the understanding we could stay for a maximum of two years and the


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hospital was reneging on this agreement. We imagined the possible headlines. “Hospital threatens to make psychiatric patients homeless!” “Psychiatric patients threaten to sue government.” People rang the unit to let us know they supported what we were doing. They phoned the ABC and the A Current Affair office and there were letters in the papers. We won; the Health Commission decided to keep us open. It was an intoxicating victory for people who had little experience of making a difference. The Unit was closed 18 months later when the whole hospital was shut down. During my time at Ward One my parents went overseas for six months. I entered the unit before they left and my mother was horrified her daughter was going into a psychiatric hospital. “What on earth do you expect me to tell my friends?” she lamented. I didn't give a damn. Being at a counselling farm was fine because my mother could mutter vague things about convalescence; the nut-house was more confronting. One Saturday morning I was sleeping in. It was one of the few weekends I was not at Maraylya. One of the nurses came upstairs and told me there were two visitors for me. “Who?” I asked. “No idea, a couple of older women,” the nurse said. “I don't know any older women.” I grumbled, crawling out of bed. “Well, they know you. You'd better get downstairs quickly, I've put them in the day room but they look rather out of place.” Five minutes later I walked into the day room to find two friends of the family sitting sipping tea out of thick hospital cups. They looked extremely uncomfortable. “What are you doing here?” I stammered. My mother would have been horrified at my manners, surely a “hello” first. It turns out they had seen a large photo of me in the National Times and were concerned I was in a psychiatric hospital, especially while my parents were overseas and not there to support me. I was


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not gracious, telling them I was pleased that Mum and Dad were overseas because they were not supportive when they were around. I loved it here and received far more support from the other lunatics than I could ever imagine receiving from my parents. I was cruel, rude and ungrateful. I am sure they had come out of genuine compassion but I resented them intruding into my world. The more I talked to the other residents and watched them do their work the more my admiration for people's tenacity and courage grew. People were capable of surviving the most horrendous childhoods. Terry was in his early twenties, thick-set, pugnacious. Rage pulsated out of him. He had already served time in prison for violent crimes. He was in the unit because he felt his violence was uncontrollable. The staff were very clear that it was not uncontrollable and he was to obey the same rules as everyone else: “no violence to self, others or property”. These were the rules. They were, of course, broken by people harming themselves. One time I damaged property when my level of frustration was so high the only way I could relieve it was to collect several plates, take them outside, and hurl them against the side of the building. They made an intensely satisfying noise as they smashed. That particular piece of behaviour met with mixed reactions from the staff as it was the closest I had come to expressing anger, something I was being encouraged to do. I got a very light rap over the knuckles and was told to pay for the plates and asked, if I was going to do it again, please let people know so I didn't frighten anyone. Terry was the first resident whose breaking of the rules could well mean harm to one of us. I was terrified of him, as were other residents. It was difficult having a resident by whom we felt threatened. While others could show anger and violence, it was either directed at themselves or at the people in their past, with Terry we knew it could be directed at us. As Terry started to do work on his childhood we learnt that he, too, was terrified of his violence. For him it felt like a volcano that


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erupted with no warning, leaving devastation in its wake. The staff insisted he was responsible. In situations like this Bob showed an impressive authority and was non-negotiable on the rules. It helped us to feel a little safer. We could also see that Terry wanted to take responsibility for his rage, he just didn't know how. He started to recognise the cues. Instead of dissociating and pushing down his rage he began to learn the early signs of rage building up. He learnt to recognise and understand feeling vexed, then irritated, then annoyed. He longer moved from saying, and believing, he was fine to being engulfed by murderous fury in one blinding flash. As he continued to work he discovered that anger was what his father had taught him. As a small boy if he had shown any sign of sadness or fear his father had belted him until he lost consciousness, all the while berating him and telling him not to be a sissy, real men didn't cry. Terry learnt to cover every feeling with rage. In what was a magnificent piece of work he finally managed to get in touch with his terror. Vibrating with fear he imagined his father in front of him and told him he was no longer going to do as he was told, he was no longer going to lie about his feelings, he was going to be true to himself and that meant being more of a man than he had been up to now. There was hardly a dry eye in the place, it took incredible courage and we all witnessed how terrified that small boy had been. I felt he deserved a standing ovation. Another resident who taught us all was Roseanne. She was nearly catatonic when she arrived at Ward One, having withdrawn almost completely from the world. Her therapy was painstakingly slow while she began to trust the staff and residents. The story of her intelligent, dominating father emerged. His expectations of Roseanne were unrealistic and her failures to live up to them were met with brutality. As she began to claim her own life and intelligence she no longer needed her thick glasses or the many protections she had from the world. She emerged as a beautiful, loving, articulate woman. Roseanne had been in mental institutions for a very long time. She


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had an enormous file full of damaging diagnoses and records of many symptoms of her distress which were often viewed as disordered and pathological. One day her file went missing. The unit was searched and a group was called, there was no sign of it. It was many years later I discovered what had happened. Two people had decided the existence of her file would be a great hindrance to Roseanne's future. They had stolen it from Bob's desk and thrown it into the Parramatta River. My time in Ward One convinced me the decisions we make as children, in the midst of relentless abuse, neglect or trauma are incredibly smart ways to survive the world as we see it. All of us at Ward One, in the midst of what at times felt like unendurable pain, could reach out and support one another in ways I had never encountered before. I learnt about and experienced more love and acceptance there than anywhere else. My time at Ward One was one of enormous growth. Christianity, psychology and philosophy came together, to inform and to challenge. It was there I started to believe that no matter how damaged we are, it is possible to heal. In the midst of that healing, in the struggle to create a new life, God meets us and gives us the strength and courage to embark on this sacred journey, together. I developed an unshakeable conviction that we ultimately know what we need in order to heal. No matter what evil we have endured, or how incomprehensible it may be, within us there is a quest for life that impels us towards fullness of being and lightness of spirit. The God within us calls us into wholeness. I decided to leave Ward One before my parents returned from overseas. Staff and residents confronted me over this decision because they could see I was nowhere near ready. I, of course, knew best and left anyway, grateful for the time I had spent there but eager to face the world. I rented a bedsit in Glebe. Bob wrote me an excellent reference. I would turn up to job interviews, hand them his reference and explain I had been in a psychiatric hospital for the last nine months. I did not get any of the


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jobs I applied for. I was naïve to think there would not be discrimination against people with mental health issues. My belief that they would value my honesty was misplaced. Lying proved a better option. At the next interview I said I had been travelling for the last year. I got the job. I don't remember that job. It didn't last long. I got bored really quickly. I was trying to establish a life. It took a lot of energy and work added stress to the equation. I continued therapy. Susan, from Ward One, had completed her welfare work training and had a small private practice. She was living in the Blue Mountains and I would travel up twice a week. Many of my sessions with Susan started with my constant fear. In the manner of Ward One Susan's therapy room contained a couple of arm chairs and a mattress on the floor with lots of cushions. Time and time again I would cower in the corner, trembling and terrified, protecting myself with the cushions. Sometimes new memories of my father sexually abusing me would emerge. Other times I would remember either of my parents giving me messages or instructions that were impossible to obey. My parents discounted my reality, telling me what I experienced and felt was neither real nor valid and I was being stupid and ridiculous. They set up double-binds and I could never get anything right. Their continual changing of the rules and moving the goal posts were crazy-making. My parents gave me no messages that encouraged me to be alive, to think, to be myself or to be sane. Needs were not to be articulated because that gave my parents the power to taunt, ridicule and refuse me. These memories and their consequences had been uncovered with Bernard at his weekend workshop and now Susan and I continued to work on them with a combination of re-parenting and redecision work. This was hard, intense work and holding the pain these sessions brought up was heavy going. I was neither drinking nor taking drugs but I smoked heavily and tried my best to anaesthetise myself with chocolate, fat and sugar.


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For a part of each session Susan would hold me gently and lovingly as she sought to overwrite many of the destructive messages bestowed on me by my parents. As she held me she would say over and over again that it was OK for me to be here, it was OK to be alive, to think, to feel, to have needs and to ask for what I want. Wonderful, necessary stuff and I did my best to soak it all in. At the same time my fear continued to block much of these messages. I longed to let go, but held myself rigid and battled the voices in my head that were sabotaging Susan's messages, only partially accepting her love, believing she did this because I paid her (an incredibly small amount). She was clear that I paid for her expertise; her love she gave freely. I saw Susan for therapy until she dropped a bombshell and told me she was going to study in America for six months. One of the social workers from Ward One lived near me in Glebe and she asked me to look after her two children, pick them up after school and stay with them until she got home around six. I'm not great with children but she was willing to pay me. At first it was OK but being smart kids they soon realised I was way out of my depth. One afternoon the eight-year-old was misbehaving and I told him to go to his room, and he stood there, put his hands on his hips and said “Make me!” I felt powerless, with no idea how to handle the situation, and horrified by the violence that swept through me and the urge to grab the child saying “Right, you little shit!”, belt him and then hurl him into his bedroom. I decided it was time to stop babysitting. Apart from my brief stint in Kings Cross this was the first time I had lived in inner-city Sydney. A friend from Ward One was into folk music and we used to attend the Folk Club upstairs in a pub in Elizabeth Street then finish the evening at Oddy's café in Paddington. It was the only café I've known to have the Moonlight Sonata as one of the options on their Jukebox. I also frequented The Toucan Club in Glebe Point Road, where everyone sat around on the floor, stoned, drinking


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wine and listening to live music. I thought I was so cool. Surely a bit of grass and some wine wasn't going to do me any harm. Living in Glebe was lonely but it thrummed with life; a bright kaleidoscope of colours, cultures and cuisines. I loved wandering around breathing it all in. This was 1979 and the yuppification of the inner-city suburbs hadn't begun. Glebe was full of uni students, junkies, artists, the unemployed and mentally ill as well as low income workers, people who had lived there all their lives and those who worked on the boats at Blackwattle Bay. I felt safe there. I would walk around the streets at night watching people, listening to the music that spilled out of the pubs, breathing in the aromas of pizzas, pasta and pide as they blended with incense, patchouli oil and marijuana. Often there would be an addict overdosed on the footpath. I would always ring 000 from a phone booth and time how long it took for the ambulance to arrive. They were fast. I volunteered at a drop-in coffee shop in Kings Cross that was run by the Sydney City Mission. It provided meals, counselling and somewhere to hang out. This was to be my opportunity to give back and to find some meaning for my life. I worked there two evenings a week chatting to the people who came in, playing cards or dominoes and helping serve the meals that were provided. One of the other volunteers and I developed a friendship that was also an attraction. I had not the faintest idea how to deal with this or how to take responsibility for my attraction. It was the first time I had felt like this since my marriage break-up but my Christianity told me that sex outside of marriage was not OK. I went up to Maraylya and talked to David about it. I don't remember what he said at the time but after the inevitable happened, which was me going out and getting drunk, sleeping with the guy and then going into a meltdown of crazy selfaccusations and remorse, David told me he knew that it would happen. When I asked him how, he told me that during my conversation about how attracted I was to this man I had said nothing that showed I would take responsibility for myself or the situation. David also commented


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that me working in a drop-in centre in the Cross was an exceptionally bad idea. He felt it was guaranteed I would end up drinking or using drugs. I gave up being a volunteer. A modern furniture company employed me to work in the office that supported their showrooms. I worked the switchboard, was responsible for placing orders and monitoring stock. Initially, it was hard work and interesting. I couldn't get it all done in the hours provided so I would work back for an hour or two each night. This suited me because living alone in a bedsit was lonely. Loneliness contributed to my undoing. My social skills were negligible and starting conversations without alcohol as a lubricant was impossible. Mixing folk music and alcohol and going to pubs alone started to be the order of the day. My ability to take care of myself was zero. It didn't matter who came up to me and started a conversation or what they wanted from me, I went along with it. “No” was beyond my comprehension and ability. My total lack of self-respect invited a similar response from others. I was sucked up, spat out, discarded and despised. Bernard ran a weekly therapy group which I decided to join. My struggle with suicidal thoughts and madness continued. No matter how much therapy I did, madness continued to invite me to escape from the world. It offered relief from my psychological pain, exhaustion and the despair and loneliness that were part of my everyday existence. I just wanted to hand over responsibility for myself and have someone take care of me, hold me, look after me. There were times I let go of the struggle to stay sane and the pain would stop, but each time I would feel myself falling into insanity and would pull back ... and the pain would start again. Bernard, in his effort to support me, allowed me to phone him once a week in between sessions. I wanted him to take care of me, take responsibility for me. One night I was visiting friends who had been in Ward One. I got very drunk, regressed and could not tell the


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difference between the present and the past. I was caught in a memory of abuse and violence and was doing my best to implicate my friends. I cast them in the role of my abuser and alternated between terror and hurling abuse at them. They decided to call Bernard. Talking to me he realised what a state I was in and said he would organise an ambulance to come and take me to a psychiatric hospital. I felt relieved and victorious. Ten minutes later he phoned back. On second thoughts he would not take responsibility for me. I could ring an ambulance myself. I most certainly needed to leave my friends' place and stop causing them so much distress. He told me to phone him the next morning at ten, either from Glebe or hospital. I rang from Glebe. He made it abundantly clear that no matter what I did, he would not take responsibility for me and he was not impressed with having his evening disturbed. I felt humiliated and ashamed.

It works, you see, all those little bits of colours, the shapes, the changes in thickness. It works because together they make something that can be identified. A picture. A painting. Not everyone appreciates it; too bold, too abstract, too blue, too wild, but it exists. It is a fact. And I love it! And it works as a metaphor for my life, all those things have been said about me, but I have come to love and accept myself. All the different pieces, colours, textures, combinations represent all the myriad people, places and events of my life. The wildness and intensity of the painting resonates within me.


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CHAPTER EIGHT

It's a glorious day, white fluffy clouds scudding across the blue sky and masses of foaming, frothy peaks chopping up the surface of the ocean. The only slight drawback is that it's blowing a gale. The house is groaning with each onslaught, the outdoor furniture rolls and tumbles across the deck. Trees are bending and the fronds of a palm tree are being whipped into a frenzied and exotic dance. The radio issues a severe weather warning for winds strong enough to cause major damage and serious disruption. Glorious yet causing major damage and serious disruption. That was Barry. I decided to visit Ward One. A few of the residents were going to the pub and invited me to join them. One of the group was a new resident, Barry. He had a savage wit, a great sense of satire, loved being the life and soul of the party. By the end of the evening Barry and I were knocking back triple shots of OP rum trying to drink each other under the table. When the staff at Ward One heard we had met there was a collective groan and deep concern, they knew us well enough to know we would be dynamite together. Barry was one of the most brilliant people I ever met. He devoured books: philosophy, comparative religion, theosophy, psychology, art, movies, literature and poetry. He questioned everything; thought deeply; had an outrageous sense of humour; was gay; at times was an over the top drama queen and was deeply unhappy. He would plunge from the heights of extroverted, flamboyant mania to the depths of darkest despair. One of the people in Bernard's therapy group offered me a room


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in a share house in Balmain. It wasn't long before Barry left Ward One and joined me there. We became regulars at the pub around the corner where we would drink and have long, intense discussions and play pool. I was barely holding down my job at the furniture factory and it was starting to interfere with my social life. We supplemented our drinking by smoking dope and then quickly progressed to our drugs of choice: Mandrax and barbiturates. I'd been off drugs for two years. Within two days I was using more than ever before. My tenuous hold on my job slipped. My boss spotted me staggering down Glebe Point Road, stoned. I had phoned in sick. He was not impressed. He had given me the job partly because I was a Christian. He told me he was disappointed in me, he didn't feel I was living the life Christ would want me to, and, with reluctance, he was letting me go. Woohoo!! More time to party!! Life with Barry was intense; he had enormous mood swings. At times his depression was a dense black cloud that engulfed us both, other times he would be wildly high and we would go out and do the rounds of the gay bars in Oxford Street and Surry Hills, dancing into the early morning and, in Barry's case, having lots of anonymous sex. We used mostly prescription drugs obtained through the Pharmaceutical Benefit Scheme so didn't need much money for them, but we did need alcohol. Barry was great at getting people to buy us drinks. He was a stunningly good-looking man, with flair and style. He could be charming, entertaining and an outrageous flirt. He was searching for a relationship that offered intellectual stimulation as well as sex, but settled for encounters that left him dissatisfied and angry with himself. He was often suicidal, and many was the time he wouldn't come home for a couple of days and I would discover he had been in hospital, having his stomach pumped, or his wrists stitched and bandaged. Or, he had been dragged out of the ocean yet again. He had walked into it in his desire to commit suicide with dramatic flair, following in the footsteps of James Mason or Virginia Woolf. Janet sometimes accompanied us on our nights out. She had been


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in Ward One at the same time as Barry and they had become close friends. Janet moved into our house when a room became available. She had questions about her sexuality and fell in love with me. I was infatuated with and consumed by Barry and he was looking for love and sex anywhere he could find it, as long as it was male. We were a fun trio. We nicknamed ourselves slut, whore and tart – all were terms of endearment, though other people sometimes seemed shocked. We were all trying to sort ourselves out, we were looking to belong and we wanted to be loved in our own particular way. There was a lot of love between us, and we had some amazing times together. As my drug taking increased I, too, ended up in hospital having overdosed. I used to the point of blackout and mornings would find me in bed with a stranger with no memory of who? where? Or how? Barry and I would do the rounds of different charities and churches in order to get food and money. The local pub was great at giving us credit until benefits day and we had enough sense to always pay them back straight away. There were times when we had no money at all and I would encourage Barry to go and sell himself on a nearby corner. Far better him than me, he had done it before, he was more attractive than me, and therefore more likely to make money. Off he'd go, returning within an hour with money for us to head out for the night. He didn't like to do it too often, “a girl's got to have some morals” he would say with a tarty toss of his head, “far better to give it away than sell it”. I still considered myself a Christian. I had been taught to take the Bible literally, to believe God was in control of everything. I did my best, but it just didn't work. There were way too many contradictions and being told to just have faith or to hold the perceived contradictions in creative tension didn't work. I always thought there were things I wasn't being told. I figured if God was worthwhile then I needed to encounter him in the struggles and contradictions of life. God had to be found on the cutting-edge not in pious platitudes. Barry nicknamed me Prudence Pureheart. He hated my


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regurgitated statements of faith or simplistic answers to his deep searching about life, suffering and God. He challenged my thinking and railed against anything that was shallow. His favourite philosopher was Nietzsche and he would read out great slabs of “Beyond Good and Evil” demanding I stretch my brain and my beliefs. He insisted I read Herman Hesse. He would confront me with questions about heaven and hell, other religions, and what the Bible said. I loved and hated these conversations. It was in such contrast to church and being told by the minister what to believe and how to behave. We would go and see art house movies, especially anything by Warhol, and he would pressure me to read books that blew my mind. We had intense discussions but Barry could cut through my arguments and annihilate my logic. Nothing was sacred; everything could be questioned. There was much about life with Barry I loved. It was wild, exciting, flamboyant and fun; and a complete mess. God was right in the centre of it and also relegated to the sidelines. I would do my best to offer Barry understandable and believable explanations of God and Christianity. Prayer was a daily part of my life but when I went out partying God was left at home for fear of his disapproval. I would apologise to him the next morning and ask for help to get my life back into some sort of control, often as I headed out to the pub. I decided to detox so went into Langton Clinic. After a few days Barry came to visit; he thought I might be hanging out so he brought me some drugs. I was grateful - the staff were not. I was kicked out. My aggression while on barbs was starting to cause trouble. I was banned from various bars and nightclubs, including French's in Darlinghurst. This was quite an achievement and I was proud of being banned from such a hell hole. My world was a roller-coaster of trying to get straight and using. I was in the middle of a battle for my soul. My Christianity knew I could not continue life with Barry and stay off drugs. What I needed was to return to a life where God was a constant, conscious part of each day. Life with Barry was intense, vibrant, exciting and challenging. But I


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didn't want to do drugs any more, not because I disliked the drugs, I loved them, but the lifestyle that went with them was getting out of hand. If life had just been intense and fun it would have been great but drugs for me meant blackouts, screwing around, picking fights, having a body covered in bruises and ending up in hospital. Nor was I mature enough to enjoy the challenge of Barry's attacks and critique of my belief system. I was back on a path of self-destruction and wanted to get off. It was time to return to Ward One. I was not prepared to stop my friendship with Barry and I sabotaged my efforts to get straight. Ward One had a strict rule about drug usage: it was not allowed and the consequence for breaking the rule was to be put out of the ward for a week. This meant, of course, that I would catch up with Barry for the week and resume our life together. I was constantly using and getting straight. While at Ward One I could see my behaviour clearly but whenever Barry said come, I went. I begged God to help me say “No” to no avail. Following Barry around meant finding out which hospital he was in, assuming we were not in hospital together. The staff at Accident and Emergency were never impressed with drug overdoses and they became seriously pissed off with us, especially St Vincent's, which served both Oxford Street and Kings Cross, our main stamping ground. It soon became apparent to the staff at Ward One that putting me out of the unit for a week was counter-productive. It was decided, in consultation with me, that the consequence for my drug usage was to be sent to the Admissions Ward for a week. That was a serious consequence, admissions wards are hideous. They are where everybody and anybody gets put when they first arrive at the hospital whether through police, family or self-referral. People in Admissions Wards are often in the midst of psychotic episodes or in the acute stages of their illness and the staff have to do their best to maintain order and control until medication, treatment and placement are sorted out. This is often done with the use of strong tranquillisers and


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anti-psychotic medication, rarely in consultation with the patient. The emotion in the Admission Wards was a mixture of anger, turmoil, fear and despair. They were crazy-making places and everyone was treated as if they were mad. They fostered ill-health and insanity and were the complete antithesis of Ward One. The first time I broke the rule and had to go to Admissions at Ward 12 I threw a major hissy fit. “I'm not going, you can't make me! Those places are hideous, inhuman! If you make me go there I'll be so distressed I'll have no choice but to cut myself. I'll be so depressed I might kill myself.” Bob took me at my word and scheduled me! He made me an A category patient which meant I was under constant surveillance. I could not be more than an arm's length away from a nurse even while on the toilet and had to stay in my pyjamas the whole time. I shrieked, tantrumed and was pissed off. I implored my fellow residents to stand up for me. “Are you kidding?” was their response. “You're being a fucking pain in the arse and you deserve it”. So, off to Ward 12 and, just to prove I could, I managed to cut myself, using my watch, while under constant surveillance. A small moment of triumph. I am sure the staff gave me many chances because they remembered my previous stay when I had treated the unit with respect and had contributed to it in many positive ways. Felicity, a Ward One resident, was a bright, vivacious woman with bouncy, curly hair and personality to match. She was always ready to laugh and to tell a story. We shared a bedroom. One night when we were the only two there she told me about life in prison, a place she had spent most of her adult life. She explained that a prison sentence was called a laggin; that there were more drugs inside jail than outside and when drugs on the street dried up people would come to the jail to score. She told me that prison officers were called “screws” with the explanation “you have to be fucked to do the job.” She explained that on arrival at the jail you had to hand over everything: clothes, money, cigarettes and jewellery. You were strip-searched and then had to have


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a shower while a screw watched you. The nasty ones would make comments about your body, either insulting or sleazily flattering; either way you had to cop it sweet. Felicity explained the rules of prison life: see nothing, hear nothing, say nothing. Remember them and you will probably survive. She recounted stories of fights in the prison dormitories and how no one would ever press the emergency bell because it was more than their life was worth. When a prison officer entered the dormitories after a fight and tried to find out what had happened, no one ever said a word. If you did, you could be certain a serious accident would befall you. She spoke of the friendships within jail and of the many lesbian relationships that developed; these arose from a need for love, sex and comfort rather than anything to do with sexual orientation. She explained that cigarettes and drugs were prison currency. There was a moral code in jail and women who had committed crimes against children were kept in the high-security, solitary section of the jail in the same building as the hospital. During Felicity's last time in jail a woman who had been convicted of murdering the three children she babysat was in solitary. It was a matter of honour to swear and spit at her if you caught sight of her. She would never be allowed into the main section of the jail because there would be no way of protecting her. Drug offences, crimes against property and crimes of passion were all acceptable. People who were in jail because they refused to pay fines or were on weekend detention were looked down upon as insipid weaklings and fun to bully, but if you had committed a crime against a child you were considered the scum of the earth. Felicity spoke of jail affectionately. She knew the rules, both silent and stated, and how to survive. She had learnt well the lessons about feelings; fear and tears were not to be shown, anger was OK because it was tough, and loyalty was prized. Betrayals would be punished. She was at Ward One in the hope of undoing some of this training and to break the dependency she had on jail. While this was another


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institution she hoped it would be a stepping stone to living in the outside world. It was this kind of conversation that was the life blood of Ward One for me. I often got feedback that I listened well and I always felt enlivened by these kind of conversations, where people told their story at depth. Felicity must have talked about jail for at least three hours that night. I was fascinated and kept asking questions that encouraged her to continue her story. She told me afterwards it had helped her put some things in perspective. I was glad. It turned out she did me the greater service. Barry decided he wanted to get straight, well, off drugs anyway. He asked to return to Ward One; he was refused. There was a policy residents could not return within six months of discharge. This was to prevent the place being taken for granted and to maintain stability. Nor would the staff allow both of us to be there at the same time; they said we would be far too disruptive and damaging to the place. We were incensed. We decided to leave Sydney together and go somewhere where we could get off drugs and start a new life. The staff made it clear they saw this as an extremely bad idea and I would not be allowed re-admittance until my six months was up. If Barry was there before me I would not be allowed back in. I knew they meant it but left anyway.

Lightning forks through the night sky. A blue-white, silver, incandescent flash. I count: one...two...BOOM. The thunder crashes then rumbles and rolls, the heavenly bowling ball must have scored a strike by the sounds of that last clap. Another ragged bolt of lightning flashes across the sky. It illuminates the night, unbearably bright – I tense, waiting for the next clap of thunder, it crashes overhead. The landscape is revealed in a dazzling brilliance of white and black. The thunder continues to assault my senses. I am in the middle of the storm.


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CHAPTER NINE

It is cold, wet and miserable. The rain is steady, constant, relentless. Rain without let up, with no light, no sign of the sun, no chance of a walk. The cold is the kind that chills you to the core, that oozes off the walls and emanates up from the floor – even with the heater on the cold seeps into my feet and travels upwards. The dogs and I huddle miserably together. There must be snow somewhere near. Not close enough to brighten the world with its beauty, but near enough to make me bone-achingly cold. Barry and I moved to Katoomba in the Blue Mountains, a two-hour train trip from Sydney. We took over the flat of one of the nurses at Ward One. It was near the Three Sisters Lookout and Cliff Drive, about a thirty-minute walk from the station. The flat was in a brick building, built in the fifties. It was at the back of the building, with views of trees. It was a dark flat, bitterly cold, except for the small kitchen which caught the afternoon sun. We had little money so went to the various charities around town in order to get food, clothes and a voucher to get the electricity connected. It was early June and freezing. While we were waiting for the electricity to be connected we sat at the kitchen table wrapped in blankets, catching as much of the pale sunlight as possible. We played backgammon for hours. We had no power to cook but we did have some candles. I felt sure that a fry pan held over a candle flame for long enough would manage to fry us a couple of eggs. It didn't work. Nights were bitter, below freezing. We would put on as many clothes as we could then pile blankets, sheets, coats and towels on top


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of the bed and spend the night shivering and freezing together. This idyllic lifestyle paled rather quickly and Barry found an excuse to go to Sydney for the day. He had a doctor he needed to see. I went with him and he got a prescription for Rohypnol. This, according to Barry, was not busting because they were not barbs. We still managed to overdose. The nurse whose flat we were staying in came around and saw what state we were in and called an ambulance. That was our introduction to Katoomba hospital. At least it was warm. Katoomba is a scenic, tourist destination. The town has some grand old hotels, guest houses and homes as well as an Art Deco café and shop fronts. The Three Sisters rock formation that towers above the Jamison Valley is over nine hundred metres above sea level. A giant stairway of eight hundred steps takes you to the valley floor. Katoomba has magnificent scenery and wonderful, strenuous walks. We returned to the flat with renewed promises of staying on the straight and narrow and decided on a fitness campaign that meant walking all around Katoomba and appreciating its beauty. This didn't last long and by the time our benefit cheques arrived we were ready to party. We went to the pub and had several drinks and brought some spirits to take home with us. The next day we went to Sydney and both scored scripts for barbiturates, Mandrax and Serepax. It's a boring trip back up the mountains so we whiled the time away by popping pills. We managed the long walk from the station to the flat and then settled in for some serious drug taking. I have no clear memory of the next couple of days. Barry overdosed. I managed to strip him off and get him into the bath and then went through the usual routine of splashing cold water over him in an effort to bring him round. This was something I had done successfully on previous occasions; this was not one of them. Barry was a solid man, he was too heavy for me to get him out of the bath without his co-operation. I went around the corner to the nearby motel to ring for an ambulance. Waiting for the ambulance to arrive I took more drugs and continued my attempts to revive Barry. He was turning


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blue. I have a vague memory of going back round to the motel and yelling at the ambulance people to hurry up and them telling me that they were sick to death of us and they were not coming. I have no idea if this is true or was one of my weird barbiturate dreams but the ambulance didn't come. It was freezing cold. The next thing I remember is waking up in Katoomba hospital with a drip in my arm and a soreness in my throat that told me my stomach had been pumped. I kept asking “Where's Barry?” Evidently I had asked the question many times in the preceding twenty-four hours. The nurse left the room to get the matron. The radio was on and the local news reported that a man had been found naked and dead in a bath, police were investigating, his name had not been released. Even then I didn't understand that it was Barry. The matron had to tell me and then she had to tell me again and again. Then the police turned up. They were kind and polite and asked a lot of questions I didn't know the answers to. They kept saying “That's not what you said yesterday”. I had absolutely no recollection of them interviewing me the previous day. The only possible explanation is having used drugs to the point of blackout I was still in that space when the police first interviewed me. Once I had slept it off and was out of blackout I had no memory of what had happened after I got Barry into the bath. I was discharged from hospital in police custody to be interviewed at Katoomba police station. I had just learnt Barry was dead and was recovering from a major overdose. I had been in blackout for quite some time and was in a thick, dense fog. Any answers I managed to find came from a long way away. The police asked me if I wanted a solicitor present. I asked whether I needed one? They called the local legal aid guy. He asked me if there was any likelihood of charges being laid. I said “No”. He advised me to tell them the truth and then left. The police interviewed me for three hours! They kept telling me the answers I was giving were different from the answers in the hospital the day before. There was


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nothing I could do about that. At the end of the interview they told me they had to go and talk amongst themselves to figure out what to charge me with. As naïve as this may sound it was not until that moment that the thought of charges even entered my head. Up until then I was just helping them to understand what had happened to Barry and about his drug usage and his suicidal behaviour. There was no way they would hold me responsible for his death. Sometime later the policemen re-entered the room and told me I was charged with manslaughter and possession and selfadministration of a restricted substance. “What?” I was given a bail form to fill out. I sat there stunned, I could not believe it, there had been a mistake. I looked at the form, it may just as well have been in Hebrew for all the sense it made. I was numb, couldn't even remember my name and address. The policeman told me I needed to fill in the form to be able to go home. I had enough sense to know that going back to the flat was a recipe for disaster. I told him so; if I went back there they would have me dead on their hands within a couple of days. No question about it. I was naïve enough to think there would still be a shit-load of drugs there. He asked me where I could go. I asked to go back to the hospital? That was not an option. Then I suggested Ward One? The police rang to see if that was possible. How awful for the staff to learn of Barry's death that way. Did the police break it to them gently? They refused the request. They were sticking to their policy of no re-admission for six months. The police officer then suggested I go home to my parents. “Ah, I don't think so, that would not be a good idea, besides they wouldn't have me.” I was sent to Silverwater Women's Prison.

There was no colour or glory, just an unheralded slipping from day to night. Now it's dark. No stars. No moon. Just black. Deep, dark,


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black. The kind of darkness where you can't see your way, can barely place one foot in front of the other. All you can do is wait and pray.


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CHAPTER TEN

The rain continues to fall from grey, sodden, skies. A penetrating rain. A rain that washes away the topsoil. I watch as the brown of good, rich earth stains the water where the creek meets the ocean and dumps its precious cargo without care or remorse. Water streams down the walls. Windows fog with condensation. I am trapped indoors, imprisoned by the foul weather. It feels endless, relentless, with no sign of remission or reprieve. I travelled from Katoomba to Silverwater in the back of a police van, alone. I was terrified. I wondered why my life was such a mess and why I couldn't seem to sort it out. And I prayed. There was nothing eloquent about my prayers; I kept saying “Oh fuck, please help.” I remembered my conversation with Felicity and knew I was about to be strip searched. My terror increased. The police at Katoomba had been kind and polite, admittedly they had charged me with manslaughter, but they had been polite about it. The admitting officer at Silverwater was officious and efficient. The admissions process was degrading, humiliating and cold. I was admitted to the jail hospital in order to detox. Detoxing in jail is as good a place as any, at least you can't walk out when it gets too hard. But it is not the place to deal with grief. I was incapable of sleeping and would wait till two or three in the morning and hide myself under the blankets in order to sob. Even at that hour it was a dangerous practice. During those early morning hours I longed to follow Barry into death. I had no desire to be alive and my life was spiralling ever more dangerously out of control. At times I burned with fury at him for dying and leaving me the blame. However, there were times Barry's presence


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could be felt. It is hard to explain that sense of Barry. It was his energy – but without the negativity. He hadn't become all sweetness and light and fluttering angel's wings but somehow he convinced me to stay alive. I sensed he was OK, happy and without all the soul-searching. He seemed to hang around in order to see me through, to support me. He told me I had to stay alive. That seemed most unfair but also offered a small amount of solace. In later years I questioned whether this had been Barry or my subconscious playing tricks to keep me alive. I have no idea – whatever it was it worked at the time. I made two friends in the hospital. One was there because her mental health was such that she couldn't survive in the dormitories but she wasn't ill enough to be sent to a locked ward in one of the psychiatric hospitals. She was a gentle soul, very fragile and frayed around the edges but we formed a connection and she talked to me. I was always fearful she would disintegrate and jail would be a very bad place for that to happen. The other woman was in the hospital for a gynaecological condition. She was a tiny, feisty woman who had been in jail, on and off, for a long time. During one stretch of freedom she got pregnant and now endured the heartbreak of her young daughter visiting her weekly. She hated her daughter seeing the bars that kept her mother imprisoned, and the limited influence she had on her daughter's life. Being in jail in no way diminished her love for her daughter or her desire for her to be well cared for. Despite her diminutive size she was a force to be reckoned with and had a reputation for extreme violence. She had hospitalised both screws and inmates. For some reason she looked out for me. She did me one disservice though. I was a very large woman and I was on a manslaughter charge. This offered me a certain amount of protection, or at least it did until she nicknamed me “the gentle giant”. While I was still in the hospital the prison psychologist came to visit me. In one of life's weird coincidences this woman had been the counsellor my ex-husband and I had been to see a few years


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previously when we were trying to save our marriage. She had recognised my name and came to see if it was really me. She was a God-send, here was someone who knew me when I wasn't a total mess. Someone who had met me before I started taking drugs. She made herself available to me and became my life raft. Accommodation for those on remand and those with a prison sentence was the same; all were housed in a large, old, two-storey brick building. Downstairs were two dormitories while upstairs was the TV lounge, the linen cupboard and clothes room and another dormitory. On my release from hospital the downstairs section was full. I was put upstairs – alone. Some of the prisoners protested the inhumanity of this. It was a large, open dormitory many claimed was haunted by the women who had suicided there. They said it was cruel to put me there by myself. I thought it the kindest thing that had happened since my arrival, and fervently thanked God for it. It was somewhere to be alone, locked in, where no one could get to me and I could cry in safety. Being alone only lasted a week, then I was moved downstairs. I was taken to Katoomba for a bail hearing, handcuffed and seated between two police officers, like a criminal. What did they think I was going to do? Jump out of the car as it sped along the highway? They told me I would be surprised to know what some prisoners had attempted. My efforts to keep the conversation going were unsuccessful, they were not in the mood for a cosy chat. I was relieved to be out of jail and felt sure bail would be granted. Bail was refused. The grounds given were I was unsafe to myself, unsafe to the general public, had been refused admission to a psychiatric hospital, was a drug addict, had no fixed address and my parents refused to have me live with them. An impressive list but who did it belong to? Who on earth was this person they were talking about? It couldn't be me, I didn't recognise myself at all. I had become a psychopath, a criminal and an outcast. At the next hearing bail was granted with a surety of $3,000. I


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didn't have $3 let alone $3,000. I rang my parents who said they would do whatever they could to support me, except that under no circumstances whatsoever was I to return home. That suited me fine. As hideous as jail was it was a better option than home. My mother said she would organise bail, I kept ringing her and she kept promising but not organising anything. Eventually she told me they couldn't borrow that much money from the bank because the bank wanted to know why. She did not want the bank manager or any of her friends to know her daughter was in jail. She was pleased my name was no longer the same as hers, hopefully no one would know. It was not a pleasant phone call. I told her not to worry about bail. I would organise it myself. Her final words, before I hung up, were “well, don't think you can come home, because you can't”. “I love you too, Mum.” My father came to visit. That was hideous. We had nothing to say to one another. He wanted to know why I was taking drugs. I didn't know, couldn't explain it to myself let alone to him. He looked so hurt – like this was a personal insult, an attack on his good name. As he left he said “You know we love you.” That was such a complicated sentence. In some ways it was true, at least of him but... it was just too hard to understand or accept. A friend came to visit. Being visited in jail was humiliating. Everyone was in full view of the screws who were watching to make sure no contraband was being passed in either direction. Both my father and my friend brought me cigarettes not knowing this was forbidden. Cigarettes were not allowed to be taken in from outside in case there were drugs or weapons hidden within them. Even cigarette packets still wrapped in cellophane were not permitted. It was permissible to smoke the cigarettes of visitors, but only under the eagle eye of a screw. My poor friend, who did not smoke, ended up pretending she did. She coughed and spluttered so much it must have been obvious she was not a smoker, but equally obvious was the fact that this was all way too clumsy to be a drug-smuggling exercise. Each prisoner was thoroughly searched after a visit. It was amazing so much


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stuff went in and out of jail. I felt guilty for putting my father and friend through the discomfort of being searched and supervised. Normal conversation was impossible because simple questions like “What have you been up to lately?” really don't work as an opening gambit. My friend was distressed; she had befriended me at Maraylya even though I was different to the people she usually made friends with. Our friendship had grown over the years and now she asked in anguish how she could help, saying “Sometimes I think love is not enough.” I was damn sure love, as I knew it, wasn't. As I wended my way through the red tape of trying to organise bail I fought with God. I wasn’t angry that Barry was dead but was furious with him for dying. I knew he'd wanted to die, the countless overdoses were evidence of that. I wanted him to have found some peace. My Christianity informed me Barry would be in hell because he was gay. That was intolerable, if it were true then God could go fuck himself. In some ways I found it impossible to believe that God would condemn homosexuality, but it was certainly what the Church, as I had experienced it, was teaching. The manslaughter charge was tough. It filled me with guilt, remorse and self- hatred. I was charged with killing Barry; it must be true. I fought and fought with God. It was unfair, unjust, unloving and intolerable. Barry being in hell. Me being in jail. My life, everything. Life in jail meant living with the constant threat of violence. Fights would erupt, sometimes small and personal, other times escalating into a form of gang warfare. There were also bullies and stand-over women ever willing to intimidate or blackmail you for cigarettes or any perceived advantage. As tough as these women were, many of them had children and they found the disconnection from their children's lives heartbreaking. The screws would make cruel and vicious comments about the women's mothering abilities. Comments that were designed to rip away defences and leave emotions raw and exposed. Every kind of guilt and remorse would come crashing down


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on these women as they wept or raged for their children. The daily stress of being in jail was tearing away at my still fragile mental stability. Jail terrified me. Despair, violence and hate seemed to drip from the walls. It was like living with a time bomb. I wondered how much more pain the walls could contain, surely they would either shed tears or crumble … or I would. Visiting the prison psychiatrist twice a week was compulsory. His view of drug addicts was that they were all pieces of shit. “Once a junkie, always a junkie” was his stance and he believed there was no possible hope of rehabilitation. The fact that I been off drugs for two years before Barry came on the scene was of no interest to him except to prove his “once a junkie” theory. The fact that I had spent time in Ward One only proved my instability. I challenged his theory and his pathologising of me, demanding he treat me with respect. He laughed in my face. I hated him. The feeling was mutual. The psychologist was on my side. She was the one person I could be myself with, without fear; she treated me with respect. I spent a great deal of my time in jail planning to go mad, believing it would be far better to be in a locked ward at Rydalmere Hospital than in jail for any prolonged period of time. I knew without any shadow of a doubt I could go completely mad. I had serious doubts about being able to return. It was the promise of that escape and the support of the psychologist that helped me survive.

It rains without ceasing. Night is falling. Huge, dark clouds are rumbling across the sky disgorging their burden of rain. The ocean is as dark as the sky: cold, remote. On the horizon is a light, a small flickering light, piercing the grey all around. Offering hope.


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CHAPTER ELEVEN

On the corner of my street, just by the traffic lights, is an Anglican Church which was built in the early 1900s. It has seen better days. It is in need of repair and a coat of paint. It has a shingled roof that needs replacing. The Heritage Council says it must be replaced with shingles even though there is only a small, elderly congregation and it is an expensive renovation. A combination of the local council, the wider church and the community have come up with the funds. The shingles are being replaced. As I work I hear the doof, doof of the bass from the workers' radio, the shouts one to the other, and the beep, beep of the cherry picker as it raises the workers and their equipment up to the roof or on to the scaffolding. Then there is the clatter as old shingles are thrown to the ground and the petchoing as they staple on new ones. On and on it goes. Today I have to lure the words I need out of the ether and seduce them onto the page. The doof doof of the radio seems to scare them off. Every time the workers yell out to each other my precious words go scurrying for cover. I watch them go unable to call them back. Bereft at their departure. This afternoon the workers decide to check the church bell – several times. The bell is loud, clangy and insistent. It does not peal out as a call to worship like a muezzin calling the faithful to prayer; it just clangs – on and on. Assaulting my senses, jarring my body. Disturbing the peace. Every time it starts something deep inside cries out: “Please, for the love of God, STOP.” The daily threats of violence and abuse never ceased. The downstairs dormitories were partitioned into cubicles containing four beds each


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and six-foot high partitions, and windows along the front. They provided some level of visual privacy but no audio privacy at all. Often at night you would hear the sounds of sex, at times non-consensual. One night a group of women came into my cubicle. They motioned the other women to leave. They informed me it was time I was initiated into prison life. I went cold with fear. I knew protest would be futile and that there would be no rescue. Two women pushed me down on the bed and held me there while another woman cut my pyjamas. She sliced them all the way up one leg to the waistband. She ripped my top open – buttons flying everywhere. Then came the lascivious comments on my size, the perceived voluptuousness of my breasts, what they could insert into my vagina. They said there was enough of me to be shared amongst them all. Many hands started to grab, prod and poke. My legs were pushed inexorably apart. They reduced me to a state of snivelling terror. Then they started to laugh and told me they were only joking. They left the room. The ghosts of rapes past encircled me.

I have to get out and walk. Walk away from the memories of back then and those circling ghosts. I stride out along the beach, going as fast as I can, concentrating on my body, reclaiming it with each step. I hear my breath starting to come fast from the exertion, I feel both the warmth of the sun and the chill of the breeze on my body. With each breath and each step I enter more into the now and the past starts to trail behind. On my return home the words come, the words I have been searching for all day. They dance through my mind and across the screen, wanting to tell their story, give their take on the events of my life. They want to form a song, an anthem, a shout of triumph, to let the world know I have survived. I attended my first Narcotics Anonymous meeting. Despite the


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psychiatrist's insistence I was a junkie and only a junkie I resisted this limited definition of myself. I saw myself as more than that. Dawn, who ran the weekly meeting, described herself as an addict and had spent time in jail. She was down to earth, understood what jail life was like and had a good sense of humour. I also thought she had courage. It could not have been easy coming back into the jail once a week after having spent a couple of years there as a prisoner. She was connected to Westmount, a detox and rehabilitation centre in Katoomba. We agreed my bail application was more likely to succeed if I was willing to enter a rehabilitation programme. I went to the meetings, partly for safety, partly so it would look good on my bail application, unconvinced that NA had anything to offer me. Church services were also offered and I went along to check them out. They were putrid. To my eye the chaplain running them was a condescending wimp who thought he was being big and brave coming into the prison. He had no warmth or rapport. He was patronising and seemed to believe that if only I would turn to Jesus all my problems would be solved. I had and they weren't. I discovered that applying for bail was no easy matter. There seemed to be endless court appearances. Often I wouldn't know when these were or if I would be taken to them. Some happened without me and some were sprung on me out of the blue. I would be taken to Katoomba police station, sometimes in a car, other times in a paddy wagon, and placed in the cells. The police station was old and from the outside it was a beautiful building made of sandstone blocks. Inside the cells were bitterly cold and damp. Winter in Katoomba lasts a long time. There was a small, narrow bench to lie on, with a thin, plasticcovered mattress; one threadbare blanket and a toilet with no seat, just bitingly cold stainless steel, in full view of anyone walking past. I would be put in the cell with no idea how long it would be till I had to go into the court, or, if my case would even be called. However, the


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police attached to the station continued to be friendly and would joke with me before placing me in the cells and always made sure my handcuffs were removed, something my prison escort didn't always remember. It was a courtesy I was most grateful for. While my parents had not managed to find the money for bail they did retain a QC, something I had not asked them to do. He was to meet me before court at Katoomba. My mother said all I had to do was whatever he told me and everything would be fine, he would get me out of jail and it would all be over. Sounded good to me. I was taken out of the cell and led to an interview room. I took one look at the QC and terror struck strong and hard. I lost it. “Don't let him touch me. Get him out of here. Now!! Please, help me!!” I screamed and backed myself into a corner. I was rocking in terror, unable to breathe. The QC stalked out in disgust. The police locked me in the cell again. The QC returned to Sydney. I travelled back to Silverwater and jail. My mother was not impressed. I had no idea what my reaction was about. I was left shaken and perplexed. In jail one day drags by very much the same as another. Same routine, people, conversations, violence and high razor-wire fences keeping us in, protecting society. The routine is strict – line up for meals, file in, eat, file out. Nothing changes – if today is Tuesday it must be meatballs. Lots of little things let you know you are a prisoner. You can't have a cup of tea when you like; only at meal times and when you are locked in for the night. You are limited to three phone calls a week and have to explain to whom and why. Everyone is in the same clothes and sandals – prison issue. No choice of who you share a room with, or socialise with. No choice of what you watch on TV. You can't get out, can't go for a walk, go shopping or catch up with friends. You are locked in and people are watching over you the whole time, and you know they do not wish you well. You have become an outcast, rejected


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by society, branded pariah and you believe it of yourself. You are locked into the dormitory building at night and locked out of it during the day. And, just in case you still think you have any rights or dignity, you can be moved around the dormitories at random. What's more, you can't even vote. I wanted to get out. The battle for bail and with God seemed to go hand in hand. I had been in jail for three long months that felt like years. I continued to console myself with fantasies of going mad and ending up in a locked ward. I'd had it with God. If this was God's way of looking after me then forget it. I couldn't get it out of my head that God had condemned Barry to hell and that was unforgivable. I kept praying for God to get me out of jail and to organise my bail. Then I would tell God to fuck off out of my life. I felt I had to surrender, to hand over to God. No fucking way. I had to stay in control. I thought God wanted to punish me by keeping me in jail but I was not handing over. These thoughts wore a groove and went round and round of their own accord requiring a huge amount of energy and wearing me down. I continued to do everything possible to get bail but my application kept being knocked back or the hearing postponed. Every time that happened I railed more at God, and every time I railed I heard God tell me to let go control and to hand my life over to him. “No way!” The battle continued. I was moved to another part of the dormitory, a cubicle with three older women. I knew nothing about them but they looked hard and mean. Being moved was always scary because you had to figure out the rules and your new cell mates always had to show you that you were a worthless piece of shit, right at the bottom of the pecking order. You couldn't just say “It's OK, I know my place”, it had to be established. Always a terrifying process. Once again a bail hearing hadn't happened. I felt utter despair; finally in the wee small hours of the morning I gave in. I just knew that as long as I told God I wanted him to have nothing to do with my life I


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was going to be stuck in jail. I was furious with God and still could not cope with the thought of Barry being in hell. However, my life was such an unmitigated disaster I had to give in. The next day while I was having lunch, one of the screws came up and told me bail had been granted. “What?! I didn't even know there had been a hearing today.” She told me I had half an hour to gather my stuff and say my goodbyes. Dawn was meeting me and would take me up to Westmount at Katoomba. I was delighted and furious! Furious with God! How dare he get me out the instant I gave in. What a complete and total bastard - but I wasn't game to go back to fighting. I wasn’t making a success of my life so I'd better take whatever help was on offer. I said a terse thank you to the screw and declared a reluctant and ungracious truce with God. Dawn met me just outside the jail walls. I stood there not understanding why the whole world didn't change. Nothing happened. It was just a cold winter's day in Sydney. “Kind of disappointing isn't it?” she said “At the very least there should be trumpets heralding your freedom”. Absolutely.

Peace comes with the setting sun. The workers leave for home. No more clanging bells. Beyond the church the town is tinged with silver, mauve, tangerine and pink. The ocean is breathtaking in its gentleness, its muted tones soothe away the discordant clamour of the day, a gentle breeze blows away any residue of the assault on my senses. Once again this idyllic place applies the balm of its beauty.


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CHAPTER TWELVE

As I ventured out for my walk today the sky was blue and the wind was gusting, challenging but pleasant. Within five minutes the sky was black, needle-sharp rain was hurled at my face by gusts of wind which swirled around attacking from every direction. I huddled under a tree for protection. The sun returned luring me out to continue my walk. But then the wind again, this time so strong I struggled to stay upright. Bracing myself and clinging onto fences as I went, I returned home. Westmount was like that. A constant bracing myself against unpleasant conditions. Returning to Katoomba was difficult. The police station and courthouse were at the very beginning of Katoomba so trips from jail had not extended to the main street or the area Barry and I had lived in. Our great effort in leaving Sydney and going straight had lasted eighteen days. It was a complete failure. Westmount Detoxification and Rehabilitation Centre was in a large, rambling house five minutes' walk from the main street of Katoomba. It had been started by a recovered addict and a recovered alcoholic and they prided themselves on the fact the place was run by addicts, for addicts. It did not employ counsellors or social workers, although it had access to them and to doctors, nor did it receive government funding. The detox unit was staffed by the residents and the drugs used to assist in detoxing were given out by the staff. It housed about twenty people. On our arrival Dawn took me into the office and introduced me to Alan, the manager and an ex-speed-freak. He was in his mid-forties


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with long hair and beard. He appeared laid back and easy going but I also got the sense that it would not be a good idea to cross him as there was a sense of power about him that unsettled me. Dawn showed me to the room I was to share with four other women and then took me into the dining room and introduced me to some of the residents. They seemed friendly enough but it was daunting to be in a new place with new people and new rules to learn. There were some very definite rules. Rule One - No drug or alcohol usage or knowledge of it. If you were caught using drugs or it was discovered that you knew someone else was using drugs the consequence was instant eviction, no questions, no arguments. Rule Two – Attendance at five NA meetings a week. Rule Three – no sex with other residents. My conditions of bail were to report to the police three times a week and to stay at Westmount until the staff deemed I was sufficiently rehabilitated or my court case was resolved. In effect I was still in prison but the bars were further apart. Knowing I had to be there did not sit well with me, in fact it got right up my nose, because it was used as a threat. If I disagreed with, or expressed a different opinion to, staff members they would remind me that if I didn't like it I could leave...and return to jail. I seethed at this as I saw it as unfair and abusive. There was lots of work to do at Westmount in order to keep it operating: cleaning, cooking, gardening and office work as well as staffing the detox centre. The idea was to keep us busy to help keep our minds off drugs. There were regular house meetings where problems between residents or with the running of the house were discussed. This was also the forum to ask for leave. Once you were detoxed and had been there for a week you were allowed to go up the street in the company of other residents. After another fortnight you could go unaccompanied and after a month you could have weekend leave. Alan had an uncanny ability to know if someone had used drugs


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while they were on leave. He said it affected the whole energy of the house. Once his suspicions were aroused he was like a terrier after prey. The place was awful until he discovered the culprit and sent them packing. I wondered if he was always right. The general atmosphere of Westmount was very different to Ward One. Lots of people were there because, as in my case, the courts had ordered it. Others were there on their umpteenth attempt to get straight. There was a much higher turnover of residents than Ward One and the revolving door seemed to positively spin as people got straight, left, used drugs again, returned to Westmount, got straight, left – on and on it went. Ward One always had a high level of honesty and introspection and a looking out for one another. Westmount did not have that. Alan told us that he knew junkies were a pack of lying, thieving bastards who would sell their grandmothers to get a fix. He also told us that he had used every trick in the book while he was using therefore there was nothing we could do that he wouldn't be on to. I hated this. He expected us all to be the same – all bad. He reminded me of the psychiatrist in jail and he took no account of the fact that I had been drug free for two years and had gained many insights and made important changes while at Ward One. Alan consistently mocked both my introspection and my Christianity. My anger about this simmered under the surface. The main help in figuring out how to stay straight came from NA meetings. I would attend six a week, many of them in Sydney. There was a minibus or a couple of cars that would travel down. I soon discovered that different meetings had different energies and some were more helpful than others. I made friends at the meetings and learnt who were the good speakers who had valuable things to say and who were total bores. The good speakers often had a spirituality and embraced the NA idea of a power greater than themselves restoring them to sanity. They had wisdom and showed me a different facet of God. They accepted they could do nothing without God's help. These people showed me a spirituality that was a combination of humility,


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surrender and responsibility. The inherent spirituality of NA soothed some of the anger I felt towards Alan and his ridicule but I felt there was hypocrisy in his stance. He bagged me out constantly, appeared to have no respect for my spirituality, yet insisted that the Twelve Step Programme was the only way addicts and alcoholics could get straight. There were times Alan did his version of counselling. This was brutal and confronting and full of put downs. Any suggestion that drug and alcohol addiction might have its root cause in childhood was scoffed at as psycho-babble. As far as Alan was concerned addiction was a disease and rehabilitation was achieved through NA meetings and will power. I begged to differ. I couldn't just keep my mouth shut which would have made life so much easier. I hated the way Alan treated people and said so, arguing that gentleness was a far more effective way of dealing with people than ridicule. He always pointed out that I was the one who had to be there, the one on drug charges. “Yes,” I would scream “but that's not the point, that's not the whole story.” He wouldn't listen, he was right and I was wrong. I writhed and cringed with the frustration of being disagreed with. I hated it. I knew what he was doing was not helpful. Most weekends I chose to stay at Westmount rather than go to Sydney, it was safer. Occasionally friends from Maraylya would come and visit. The main street of Katoomba always brought back memories of Barry, and walking into the police station three times a week was a frequent reminder I had a court case hanging over my head. At times it was difficult to take the manslaughter charge seriously; it had to be a mistake. Anyone who knew Barry knew he had been so suicidal. I found it incomprehensible that I was charged with his death. That didn't stop me from feeling immensely guilty about his death, but to be charged with it, no, that couldn't be real. One night, when I was being particularly uncooperative and had expressed my displeasure at being at Westmount yet again, one of the staff came into my room and told me a few home truths. He explained succinctly that manslaughter was a serious charge and it was likely I


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would end up back in jail and would be looking at a minimum sentence of one year, possibly as much as ten. My only chance was to stay in rehabilitation, prove I was serious about mending my ways and “earn” a good report to take to court with me. None of this would happen if I continued to behave like a total arsehole. If I didn't lift my game I could piss off. I wanted to piss off, with all my heart I wanted to tell him to get fucked and to pack my bag and head on out of there...but...that would mean back to jail and I had enough sense to realise that the jail of Westmount was better than the jail at Silverwater. I lifted my game, begrudgingly. With the Committal Hearing coming up the staff at Westmount sent me to see a counsellor at the local community health centre in order to get a court report. She thought I was there for counselling and started asking a lot of very boring and tedious questions which I answered as minimally as I could. My boredom and disdain were apparent and she had the good sense to realise I was ten steps ahead of her and there wasn't anything she could do to help. There was something about the way she said this that made me think that just possibly she actually wanted to help. I told her what I really wanted was to be able to see my previous therapist. I told her about Susan, who was now back from America, and about Ward One and explained it would be far better for me to see someone who knew all about me. She achieved what I had been unable to. Gaining permission for me to see Susan – weekly. Not because staff at Westmount thought it was a good idea but because it might help my court case. Susan and her partner, Georgia, were living in Faulconbridge, a thirty-five minute train ride away. My time at Susan's became the highlight of my week. It was so good to escape the negativity of Westmount and enter the loving, healing feel of Susan and Georgia's home. Here I could talk about the coldness and harshness I experienced at Westmount. I could also talk about my insights, my insecurities, the things I still needed to work on. It was also the place I could deal with my grief over Barry's death.


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Much of my time with Susan was spent dealing with the terror that still permeated my life and always seemed to come to the fore in a therapy session. This was often the lead into memories of my childhood. Memories of Dad sexually abusing me were part of it but at more insidious and crazy-making levels were the memories of never getting it right, never being good enough, of the rules constantly changing. What was considered good and cute behaviour one day would be greeted with anger and displeasure another. Memories of my childhood seemed to be full of my parent's disapproval and rejection of me and believing I should die. Susan's constant love and compassion were a balm to my wounded spirit. She treated the small, distressed child within me with consistency and love. She would spend a large portion of each session holding me, stroking me, caring for me and giving me messages of her love and her conviction of my worth and right to exist. She encouraged me to recognise what my needs were and ask for them to be met. She became the mum I never had, my good mum, the mum inside my head who said kind things and counteracted the maniacal messages of my flesh and blood mother. I started to believe her. I had a choice. When the messages in my head started up telling me I was useless, hopeless and a piece of shit I could choose to listen to Susan's messages instead. Georgia was an effervescent, warm and gregarious woman. She was also a musician who composed her own songs and played piano and dulcimer. Georgia's songs came from her heart, speaking of both the joy and pain of life. In her teens she had spent time in a psychiatric hospital so she was full of care and empathy for Susan's work and her clients. There was a grand piano in their lounge room and often after a therapy session Georgia would sing some of her songs for me. Listening to her singing or losing myself in her music provided me with a small period of escape from the intensity of my life at that time.

Sometimes the bad weather can last for days. On and on it goes, tiring


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me out, wearing me down. But if I'm on the alert I can take advantage of small breaks in the weather, when the rain eases and the wind drops. As I scurry out to get some air and exercise I smile conspiratorially with people and dogs who are out doing the same.


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CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Today I am drawn to the dark places in my seascape. The black holes that suck me in, down into the depths of the painting, into the chaos and the deep beyond. Today I imagine myself trapped under the surface, below the life, colour and texture. Caught in a cold, dark place; breath held, nervously waiting for what will come. Waiting for court was like that, there was part of me that lived a separate, anxious, below-the-surface kind of life. The day came for the committal hearing, when the court would decide if there was enough of a case against me to stand trial. My father and a solicitor friend of his were in attendance. I don't know if my father was there to support me or to make sure I didn't send this solicitor packing. There was also a staff member from Westmount, someone I felt was on my side. I had reports from Westmount and Susan and a perfect record of reporting to the police three times a week. I hoped it would all be over that day. The content of the committal hearing was awful. There were all sorts of witnesses: the people from the motel where I phoned the ambulance, the ambulance officers explaining what a nuisance Barry and I had been, doctors and nurses from the hospital and Barry's uncle. There was also a report from Ward One. Barry's uncle stated that Barry had been suicidal for many years and his death had not come as a surprise. The report from Ward One also talked of his suicidality. These things were difficult to hear but I felt sure they would work in my favour. Then came the photos. They had taken photos of Barry, naked, dead, in the bath. Colour photos. He was lying in the bath, blue from


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the cold. I knew he was dead, but he still looked like Barry. No one had warned me there would be photos. I felt as if someone had taken hold of my heart and my stomach and stretched them out as far as they could go then tied them in knots and let them go flying back into place. I thought I was going to go mad with the pain of seeing those photos; instead I went numb and far, far away. A recess was called. I was expected to have lunch with my father, the solicitor and my support person from Westmount. We all sat around, no doubt making polite conversation, while the police prosecutor and his assistant ate their lunch at a nearby table. I sat there in an impenetrable fog oblivious to them all, hoping that if I didn't move the pain would go away. After an hour and a half we all filed back into court and the proceedings continued. By three-thirty it was decided, I had not done all that was reasonable to ensure and protect the life of another human being. I was committed for trial. I left the court in a daze. I returned to Westmount and crawled into bed. A few hours later my support person came in to see if I was all right, dragging me from another world, on a different planet. I didn't want to come back to earth. He insisted. He needed to make sure I wasn't stoned or overdosed. I wish. He made me get up and walk around. Once he left I returned to my other planet. While in jail I had fought the guilt associated with the charge of manslaughter. I reminded myself of how suicidal Barry had been and how much he had wanted to die. Now it was official. The criminal justice system believed that there was enough evidence to convict me of manslaughter. They were saying I had killed Barry and they had the photos to prove it. I wanted to die. The pain was unbearable, the guilt relentless. And I was scared. The images in the photos kept going around and around inside my head. I could end up back in jail. Suicide became a stronger temptation; I would not survive jail again. And then the rage came; I was furious with Barry. How dare he do this to me? I was consumed with anger. In my head I was screaming and swearing


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at Barry for dying and leaving me the blame. I had to learn to live with the trial hanging over my head. I still had to report to the police, live at Westmount and attend at least five NA meetings a week. I couldn't stand the thought of having to stay at Westmount until the trial. Over time I managed to convince Alan I could leave. He said he only agreed to prove I wasn't ready to make it on my own. I moved back to Glebe to a bedsit two minutes walk from my previous one. This was a mistake as I knew where to score drugs and I was familiar with the pubs and felt comfortable walking into them alone. For a period of time I would use, get straight, use, get straight, always turning up at NA meetings when I wanted to get straight, but sometimes also turning up at meetings when I wanted to score. Somehow or other I always managed to hold it together when reporting to the police. For a while I used lots of drugs and went out drinking every night. I ripped people off and got ripped off. I was aggressive and picked fights with people, friends and strangers. I turned up at NA meetings and disrupted them. I screwed around and I tried out some of the things I had learnt at Westmount, like shooting up barbs and scoring narcotics from doctors. Friends offered me acid and mushrooms but I didn't have that much faith in my mental stability. I heard enough voices smoking dope without risking hallucinogens. I was visiting a couple of friends in the Cross when another friend arrived with some heroin. We had all been together at Westmount. Out came the needle, candle and spoon and they prepared to shoot up. “I want to try it,” I said. “Have you used it before?” one of them asked. “No, but I want to.” “No way – I'm not going to be responsible for giving someone their first hit of heroin.” “It's not your responsibility,” I said. “It's my choice.” It wasn't a very long argument. He cooked up some heroin and


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injected it into my arm. If I close my eyes I can still feel the glorious rush of that first hit – it was exquisite, superb, fantastic. It was warm and euphoric, a well-being spread throughout my body. I sat on the couch gently nodding, knowing this was heaven. I used heroin a few times. I loved it – it was the most fantastic feeling and that scared me – it was too good, way too good. I knew well my addictive nature and, by some miracle, had enough sense to stay away from it most of the time. Whenever I went on a binge the people in NA were supportive. They would turn up at my place, encourage me and take me to meetings where lots of wisdom and support was available. Often I felt there was a vast, painful hole inside me that longed to be filled. I discovered other people felt as I did which made me a little less lonely and not quite so different from everyone else. A good meeting or conversation with a group of NA members was reminiscent of conversations at Ward One. There was sometimes a rawness and honesty about NA as people struggled to find the necessary skills and motivation to stay alive. I came to depend on meetings. If I was struggling to stay straight I would tell myself to wait until after a meeting. If I still felt like it I could go out and score then but often after a meeting the need had passed. My twenty-fifth birthday loomed. I became convinced that my life script, which I had uncovered at the TA workshop, was going to come true. I would overdose in the two weeks after my twenty-fifth birthday. I felt I had no choice in the matter, no power, no responsibility. When death was staring me in the face I ran screaming from it all the way to Rozelle Psychiatric Hospital and admitted myself to McKinnon, the hospital's detox ward, and then voluntarily transferred to the Admissions Ward until the two week danger period was over. It was time to stop piss-farting around and get serious. Georgia pointed out to me one day that the problem with twelvestep programmes was you defined yourself as an addict and an


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alcoholic and therefore problem-solved as an addict and an alcoholic. You used drugs and drank, to excess. “Have you ever had any other way of defining yourself?” she asked. “Yes,” I said “as a Christian.” “How do Christians problem-solve?” was her next question. “By praying.” Well, that was it. Those words of Georgia's were like a lifebuoy thrown to me as I struggled in a raging sea. That was the turning point. At NA meetings instead of introducing myself as an addict and an alcoholic I would say I was a human being and a Christian. It was an introduction that got up the noses of some people and I was accused of being a smart-arse and a wanker. I'm sure I was an obnoxious shit. But it worked, it made all the difference in the world. I no longer defined myself as an addict therefore I no longer behaved like one. I prayed heaps in order to stay straight. There were times I begged God to take away the longing for drugs, times I literally hung onto the bed-head to stop myself going out and scoring. Often the prayers were as simple as “please help me” other times they were as desperate as “for fuck's sake, do something, NOW”. I longed to be free from the cravings. I was determined to stay straight, not because I hated drugs, I didn't. I still loved drugs but had come to hate the lifestyle that went with them. The lying and cheating, the sleazy sex, being ripped off by people, having so-called friends steal from me and coming to and discovering my flat had degenerated into a pigsty. I had also seen what a mess long-term drug usage made of peoples' lives and how many times people would turn up at detox. I didn't want to be like that. Before I knew it, it was the anniversary of Barry's death. I went out and completely trashed myself. I used barbs, heroin and alcohol to the point I couldn't stand up and was in blackout. I was picked up in the gutter at Bondi Junction bus interchange and ended up in the cells at


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Bondi with some policemen who were nowhere near as pleasant as those at Katoomba. The NA member who came to bail me out told me I was very lucky the police knew someone was coming because when he arrived they were showing every sign of wanting to beat the living crap out of me. I was being difficult. How unusual! I was charged with possession and self-administration. I had to report this to the solicitor my father had organised. He sent me a letter stating he was most disgruntled. I returned to Westmount for a month. This time I felt I was serious. I felt I'd had enough, it was time to get it right. One month was all that was needed to convince me I didn't want to do this any more. I was sick of the drug scene, of my life being a mess and of having God as a part of my life I felt embarrassed about. I returned to Sydney as a Christian not as a junkie. I moved to Concord, an inner-west suburb, which was far enough away from my previous stamping ground to make a difference. I rented a two-bedroom unfurnished flat on Parramatta Road above a restaurant. The bedrooms and lounge room were spacious with atrocious floral wallpaper peeling off the walls. The bathroom and kitchen were each the size of a telephone booth. I stuck the wallpaper back up with toothpaste and furnished the place with milk crates. I started work in the city with a company that provided aluminium cladding for houses. My main duties were reception, switchboard, processing and placing orders and extending invoices. It was deathly boring. My direct boss was an older woman with a history of being in relationships with alcoholics and addicts. She had children my age. She recognised the telltale signs of addiction in me and we became firm friends. She provided support, understanding and encouragement. She was someone to talk to on a daily basis. Once I had been working for a while I stopped seeing Susan. It was time to manage on my own. I continued to attend NA meetings. The hardest thing to deal with was my intense emptiness and loneliness. I would walk home from Strathfield station, after a day at work, with


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tears pouring down my face, not wanting to go home to an empty flat. I prayed for someone to come along and take away my loneliness. I joined a charismatic church in the city. At first this was fantastic because the ministers had answers and rules for everything so I didn’t have to think. The musicians and singing were terrific, not so the dancing and praying in tongues. It seemed to me the music was manipulative. It started softly then got louder and more intense. The perceived presence of the Holy Spirit always seemed to increase in intensity right along with the music, people would be yelling out, singing in tongues, dancing in their seats or in the aisle, or falling to the ground. It didn't sit comfortably with me. I didn't feel the Holy Spirit needed this much help. This church was big on Satan. As far as they were concerned many personal problems and the dire state of the world were due to Satan. We were told to resist Satan and to claim victory in Jesus. Often the preacher would perform dramatic “healings” where he would renounce the spirit of lust/addiction/drunkenness within a person or situation. I always felt myself take several steps back from this. It seemed very staged and was a long way from the quiet authority of that exorcism at Maraylya. I wanted to be happy and this church promised it had the answers. Follow their teaching and relationships, prosperity, joy, peace, happiness and freedom were promised in abundance. However, I didn’t have an answer for the longing within me which I still wanted to fill with drugs. They told me I needed to fill it with God but they didn't tell me how. I wondered if the reason it couldn't be filled with God was it was already filled with Satan. I was too scared to suggest this to anyone because I didn't like the hoopla that went on when the pastor thought Satan was involved and to my mind he thought Satan was involved far more than I felt reasonable. The pastor thought there were demons everywhere. I prayed, begged and claimed in faith, I read books on how to get


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prayers answered, and still the emptiness persisted. When the pastor yelled out “Isn’t it great to be in the house of the Lord, is everybody happy?” I used to quietly say “No”. I felt guilty for not being healed or happy, as if I were tricking him by not saying maybe I was possessed by demons. But if I was, surely he should know. Wouldn't God tell him? I wasn't going to pretend to be healed when I knew I wasn't. I went to church twice on Sundays, each service lasted two to three hours. I hoped to fill up enough on Sunday to see me through the week. The sermons were Bible-based and told me what to do, how to be and what to think. Fabulous, for a while. The trouble was I could never manage to be as good as anybody else. I was never as certain. I always felt there was something wrong with me. The pastor would call forward anyone in need of prayer and lay hands on them telling them to be open to being “slain in the Spirit”. Being slain in the Spirit involves falling over backwards. There were people who would stand behind me waiting to lower me to the ground. The only problem was I was big, really big, and was sure that if I fell backwards the person behind me was going to fall backwards too and we were all going to end up in a large, ungraceful heap on the floor. So, I would stand there and the pastor would place his hand on my forehead praying for healing and he would push and I would stand, and he would push harder and I would stand firmer, he would push harder, hard enough to push anyone with the slightest inclination to fall backwards over. I did not have that inclination, I was staying upright. He would mutter about my lack of faith and I would think about his manipulation. If God wanted me lying flat on my back at the front of the church then God would have ways of doing that that did not involve being pushed. There were three pastors at the church, a father and two sons. The elder son went on to establish Hillsong which is now a mega-church in Sydney with over 20,000 people attending services each week. I soon discovered that the younger son was nowhere near as gung-ho as his father or brother. His services were lower key and when he preached


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he seemed to have humanity and humility. His sermons went for fortyfive minutes to an hour and I found them real, nourishing and grounded in the Bible. There was a gentleness about him that soothed my aching spirit. The church had lots of house meetings, all over Sydney. I joined one and tried hard to fit in. Nice, good people attended but that was the problem. I was not comfortable in a room full of nice, good people. I felt like an impostor, an alien and found the studies trite. We were expected to come up with the right answers rather than struggle with the questions. This was completely different to the Friday night group at Maraylya. As much as I wanted to be easy and comfortable and to just accept the answers, I couldn't do it. I always had questions, I struggled and I was difficult and different. After a year I could no longer tolerate the clichéd answers or being told not to think, to just have faith. I left and joined the local Anglicans. Eventually, my court case was “No Billed” on the grounds I had rehabilitated myself and it was considered unlikely I would commit a similar crime in the future. That was not a declaration of my innocence but a decision that it was not worth the expense of proceeding to trial. The possession and self-administration charges attached to the manslaughter charge disappeared into the system, the others were viewed as a first offence and I received an $80 fine. The nightmare was over. I heaved an enormous sigh of relief and I stayed straight. Surely the worst part of my life was over, from here on in everything would be smooth sailing, wouldn't it?

What a loyal companion my seascape has been. Reflecting my moods, filling my life with colour, taking me back into wild and chaotic places in my life, giving me the courage to go deep and to scrape off the surface detritus as I search for truth. The ocean too, has mirrored mood and memory, filled me with fear, anticipation and delight. As I've looked out across Bass Strait,


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memories, that first emerged as stick figures, have gained flesh and substance, finding courage and voice as I immerse myself in the beauty of the ocean.


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CHAPTER FOURTEEN

It took me thirty seconds to decide to buy my seascape. I walked into the exhibition and the painting was hanging in the far corner. It grabbed me. My gaze slid over all the other pieces of work and my soul rose up in sheer delight as soon as I saw it. I had to have it. It was meant for me and I knew where to hang it. Every so often, amongst all the stuff of consumerism, I purchase something whose beauty brings me constant joy and I view as a gift from God. Certain people enter my life who I also view as gifts. Dominic was one of them. The Anglican church was across the road from where I lived in Concord. Peter, the minister, was a down-to-earth guy in his early fifties who had been a professional boxer in his youth. He had a hearing aid he used to turn off when he was in meetings that bored him. He was laid-back, approachable and took people as he found them. I liked him but did not feel I could talk to him about my past. The church had a morning congregation of about sixty and an evening congregation, the same people just fewer of them, of about twenty. There were a few people of my age including two women, Cheryl and Deirdre, who shared a house together and we became firm friends. Returning to the Australian Prayer Book after the spontaneity of a charismatic church took a bit of doing. The services only lasted an hour and it was all a predictable but pleasant change from the hype of Pentecostalism. I valued being part of a congregation of sixty rather than six hundred. It meant I grew to know people and would often stay after church for a cup of tea and a chat. The people who attended the


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church all lived locally. I felt like I was a part of the community. One day early in 1982 a young man came to church. He was from England on a year's working holiday before returning to study for the Anglican priesthood. He stayed for a cup of tea and Peter, the minister, introduced Dominic and explained he was looking for somewhere to stay. I offered him my spare room. I could not believe I had done it, the words were out of my mouth before I knew it. What on earth was I thinking? I had no idea who he was, or what he was like. I was very nervous for the first few days until I established he was neither a rapist nor a thief. Dominic, in fact, was a breath of fresh air. He was nineteen, I was twenty-six. He was upper-class English, forthright, dedicated to his Anglican faith and in pain due to his parents' recent divorce. I had spent a year in England with my parents when I was five and another year when I was thirteen so I provided him with a connection to home. We spent many a long hour discussing Christianity and our different perspectives. I told him my story and found him understanding and supportive, or at least willing to ask questions when he did not understand. It was through his support I reduced my attendance at NA meetings and grew in both my faith and identity as a Christian. He was positive and encouraging. He embraced life and seemed to enjoy it. I longed to do the same. Dominic had a voracious appetite for life and people. He wanted to understand himself and his relationships so I introduced him to TA. He would get me to teach him all I could and then would use that knowledge on himself to further his self-awareness. TA helped him make some sense of his relationship with his parents and to deal with his grief over their divorce. He needed someone who would listen to his hopes and dreams for the future, something I was more than happy to do. We got to know each other in depth; we were willing to share some of our secrets, our dreams and the parts we preferred to keep hidden from the rest of the world. An intimacy grew between us


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which was at least partly due to Dominic's determination to meet life full on and extract the most out of every moment and situation. We fell in love. Because we knew our time was limited we gave all we could to the relationship, determined to enjoy its riches and learn about life and love from one another. This was a wonderfully happy time. One issue that was difficult for us both, but in different ways, was sex. Dominic had always accepted the Christian teaching that sex outside of marriage was wrong but he wanted our relationship to be sexual. Even though there were quite a few young adults at church, the subject of sex was never brought up. There was nothing said about what was and what was not OK, and, therefore, there was nothing said about how to deal with temptation or how to make moral decisions. It was something Dominic took very seriously. For me the issue of sex was like the issue of homosexuality, something I had been taught about since becoming a Christian but a teaching I disagreed with. When I was fifteen my mother had said “If you're going to have sex go on the pill, if you get pregnant you will have an abortion, there will be no choice”. This had been augmented once I was married with her advice and rules on conducting an affair. My own morality said it was fine to have sex with someone you loved. Marriage was irrelevant but commitment was important. Affairs, in my opinion, were wrong. However, the reality of my life was many sexual encounters that had nothing to do with love or commitment. They had been sordid grapplings I had taken no responsibility for. I had been drunk and stoned and they just happened. Now I was with someone who had never been in a sexual relationship before and was treating the whole issue with integrity. This was just as much a part of his faith journey as his call to the priesthood. I was having to take responsibility for my actions, decisions and sexuality. This was new to me and I didn't know how to do it. I also felt a sense of responsibility for Dominic, not wanting to talk him into something that was wrong for him. We didn't have anyone we felt we could talk to about this, who would understand


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and not condemn us. We worked it through with as much honesty and integrity as we could. We decided we would consummate the relationship and it was a beautiful and joyous thing. This was the first loving relationship I had been in since my marriage ended five years earlier. Dominic enjoyed sex and he wanted me to as well, which meant I needed to have some idea of what felt good and what didn't and to be able to talk about it. That was excruciatingly painful because I didn't know. Part of me felt guilty for being in the relationship. What if the church was right and God hated what we were doing and would punish us? I was also terrified Dominic would die because of this relationship. I felt I was poisoning him in some way; that loving me was a dangerous business, life-threatening in fact. I was contaminating him because of my many previous liaisons. I had felt that way before we consummated our relationship, but after was convinced of it and didn't know what to do to protect him. Dominic, on the other hand, had no problems about sex at all. For him it was about love, enjoyment, closeness and spirituality. This countered some of my fears and there was much in our sexual relationship that was enjoyable and healing. Dominic had the ability to honour sex in a way that was counter to anything I had ever known. Unfortunately, after six to eight months I found myself becoming less and less interested in sex, less willing to participate, and felt I had no choice in the matter. I lost the ability to see sex as a loving act and started to experience it as brutal. I was unable to communicate this to Dominic. He would have been horrified to know that was how I felt and I denied myself the right to refuse him. This was my issue, it was all in my head; the same thing had happened in my marriage. Then or now I had no idea what to do. As much as I dreaded our time together coming to an end there was part of me that looked forward to it as a release from a situation I could neither understand nor fix. Most of our time together was enriching. Dominic filled some of my emptiness and took the edge off my loneliness. While I was with


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him drugs and alcohol became a thing of the past. I no longer used them at all. I learned how to live without them. We enjoyed each other and had similar senses of humour. We were both passionate about Christianity and thrived on having deep and meaningful discussions. Our backgrounds were miles apart and our dreams for the future were vastly different but this added to the breadth of our conversations. Dominic was an extrovert. He loved people, loved spending time with them and he needed to be with people every day. This was what gave him life and energy. He had a missionary's zeal and planned to work in the slums of the world once he was ordained. Dominic and I spent a lot of time with Cheryl and Deirdre from church. We were all trying to figure out what it meant to be Christians, how this should change our lives and in what ways we experienced God. When we came together we would talk of our experiences and questions with one another. We made a commitment to each other to share as honestly as we could, so we talked about the truth of our experiences, the bad times and the struggles, never just the good times or how we thought it ought to be. Often I would lead a prayer and worship time that had its roots in Maraylya's Friday night group. We would also celebrate Eucharist. This was an important part of our faith. The Holy Communion service we attended each Sunday morning was not meaningful to us. Peter's consecration more closely resembled the calling of a horse race than the celebration of a sacrament. Sharing communion together was something that nourished our faith and strengthened the friendship between Dominic, Cheryl, Deirdre and me. Cheryl, who came from a Catholic background, and Dominic, who was high-church Anglican, had misgivings about us doing this in the absence of a priest, but we talked to Peter about it and he had no qualms at all and encouraged us to continue. He did not see it as a slight against his Sunday morning services. Peter sometimes talked with us about how he could make his services more interesting. We suggested sometimes having a play instead of the sermon. He thought this was a great idea and asked us if


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we would be willing to do them. Us? Really? Absolutely!! We had a ball. We would brainstorm what we wanted to say and how we would say it. We scripted the plays ourselves and rehearsed several nights a week. Peter would call in to see how we were going and to offer any support he could but he left us with a free hand as to content. One day he came in as we were having an argument about whether we could say “fuck” in church; we thought it best to ask him. He understood why we wanted to use it in this particular drama but overall he felt the use of the word would inhibit people's ability to hear our message, “Best not.” he advised. However, he encouraged us to be provocative in other ways as he felt we would get away with being far more confronting than he could. One of the plays started with Cheryl walking in from the back of the church wearing an incredibly short dress, screaming out ,“Are you in here God? Those Christians say you are.” Several members of the congregation jumped with shock. She walked down the aisle then collapsed in the sanctuary sobbing. The play evolved to show she was a prostitute who was desperate about her life but felt bad and unable to change. She was convinced good, clean people would not accept her. It was a rewrite of the Good Samaritan. It was also an expression of how I felt in the presence of the majority of the congregation. Our plays always confronted the safe and comfortable. We took on social justice, poverty and peace and did our best to challenge people to think and ask themselves questions about their life and values. We got a lot of positive feedback and some grumbles; we were thrilled with the response. It strengthened our friendship. We always prayed together as part of rehearsals, and the co-operative script writing meant we learnt how to be honest with one other, giving criticism and encouragement. Cheryl was a natural actress. We had no choice but to give her the best parts as she brought them to life. God was right in the middle of my life and I was in the middle of God. I felt alive. At times I even felt happy and safe. We became involved in the Bible study and prayer group that was


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an essential part of the church. These meetings were in the home of a couple who had been attending the church for a long time. The wife believed it was her responsibility to have answers for any questions or problems people might have. I always seemed to be questioning God, life and faith and she found it difficult to deal with me because I would not accept easy answers. They didn't work for me. I always dressed down for church. I would turn up in my old, torn, wrap-round Indian skirts, t-shirt and thongs. I sat up the front and was a few minutes late so made an entrance in front of all these welldressed people. They were kind and tried to include me but somehow I felt if they knew who I was they would not want anything to do with me. I felt an alien amongst them. Peter asked if I would lead the Bible study one week. I knew I had to do something that was real for me so thought long and hard. Then one morning as I was having my shower the words “I know you are Christians but who are you as people?” kept going around and around in my head. I got out of the shower and wrote a few pages that expanded on this theme. It was searingly honest. It spoke of how I did not belong, how I had done many bad things, including using drugs and screwing around, how I feared if they knew the truth of my past they would not want to know me. I talked about my constant doubts and how everyone else always seemed so sure, so certain. Did they know the questions I had? The thoughts that went around inside my head? Would they still want to know me? I had no idea who they were, I saw their goodness and generosity but who were they underneath? Did they have questions? Did they have doubts? Again and again I repeated the refrain “I know you are Christians but who are you as people?” The night of the study I was very nervous indeed. What on earth would they think of me? Would I be kicked out? Would they understand what I was trying to say? I read it out, there was total silence. I was standing before them naked...and asking them to join me in my nakedness. For the most part people didn't get it, or they wouldn't let it


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in. Once I finished they gathered round me, hugged me and reassured me, reminding me I had been forgiven therefore it didn't matter what I had done; it didn't matter who I was. I felt they missed what I was trying to say. I was trying to get a sense of who they were underneath their goodness, underneath their Christianity. I was trying to bridge the divide I felt separated us. I didn't believe I was either forgivable or loveable. I was desperate for a sense of identity and to know that who I was did matter. I also wanted to know I wasn't so very different from them. I noticed two of the men in the group having quite profound reactions. One had tears in his eyes and at the end of the night he came up to me, squeezed my hand and said “thank you”. He never spoke about it to me but I knew I had touched something deep within him. The other response came from the husband of the household where we met. His wife was foremost amongst the “you are forgiven” crowd who were telling me of course I was OK. He came up to me and whispered “round about now I imagine you feel you are surrounded by Job's comforters”. It was magic. We just exchanged a glance that said it all. Later he told me his story; he was an alcoholic and he had done many things he was not proud of, that he continued to feel bad about. He wasn't able to accept God's forgiveness either. He became a little haven of comfort within the church. He didn't have the ability to talk to me about all I had been through but somehow he was often just there. He was a big man and I could lean up against him for a couple of seconds and that would give me encouragement. I often felt his wife wondered why I shunned her wisdom but would listen to her husband whom she so obviously saw as inferior. The church needed to raise some funds so they decided to have a fashion parade. They were to have clothes ranging in size from small through to extra large. Fashion shows are not my thing, and, as I have said before, I did my best to dress down for church. But because it was a fund raiser, I agreed to participate. Mine was the job of modelling the


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extra large size clothes, which included having my hair done and makeup applied. I hated it. With a passion. But it was for the church so I put up with it. What I hadn't bargained on was how delighted everyone was with how I looked. There were numerous compliments, countless people told me how lovely I looked, how much better I looked with nice clothes and make up. They told me I was attractive and if I would only go to a little effort, would be able to attract a nice man. I received more compliments in the couple of hours of the fashion parade than in the rest of my time at the church. I was hurt, invalidated, devastated. I started to cry. People were distressed. What had they said? What had they done? I couldn't find the words to explain it, the very fact they didn't get it added to my wounded isolation. I went home and sobbed and sobbed. They hadn't allowed me to be me; they liked this madeup, dressed-up fake. They liked what I wasn't more than who I was. I was heartbroken. I was NOT going to become some nice, neat, welldressed, middle-class Christian. They could get fucked. If they liked this pretence so much, this false, respectable me, what on earth would they think if they discovered how much of a façade I was putting on so they would not see the seething poison that lurked beneath the surface. I took several steps backwards after that. I no longer hoped that one day I would feel safe enough to be myself with these people.

I was right about where to hang my seascape. It is close to the window on another wall and both the view and the seascape give me ongoing pleasure. Each has its own integrity, authenticity and life. Both can draw me into their beauty and mood and encourage memory and creativity.


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CHAPTER FIFTEEN

It's easterly weather today and I'm feeling flat, achy and have no energy. When the easterly blows (they say) river fish won't bite, roo go hiding, the kids are cranky, bread takes longer to rise and meringues won't harden.1 It also coats the windows with a salty, misty film that diminishes the view. It is weather that descends and settles in an oppressive manner and it takes all the shine out of the day. Visiting my parents was always oppressive. I was living a more predictable life so started visiting my parents on a regular basis. This I did out of guilt and duty. I felt as if I was still tied to my parents, unable to escape and live my own life without them in it. I no longer had a car but Mum would pay for a hire car for the day and we would go out for lunch and a drive. I dreaded visits. The very thought of them was stressful. I would start feeling ill on the drive to my parents' place. By the time I arrived a migraine would have wrapped its tentacles around my head and stomach and be squeezing me tight. I would wear my worst or most outrageous clothes and look as dreadful as possible. An Indian skirt with a dinner jacket was a particular success. My theory was Mum was going to criticise me no matter how much trouble I took over my appearance, I may as well make it easy for her. Besides, this took away a small amount of the disappointment of never being good enough. Two minutes after I arrived Mum would start criticising my clothing, moving onto my hair, my weight, my life, me. Nothing about my life or my interests ever met with her approval. I was never good 1 http://catalogue.nla.gov.au/Record/418385?lookfor=mesibov %20spider:%27s&offset=1&max=1


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enough. Mum would use words like silly, stupid, dope, ridiculous and asinine to describe me. Anything I said that she didn't agree with or approve of would be denied. It wasn't true; it did not exist. It did not matter if I had all the facts at my disposal, she would say in her most haughty voice “It is not true. I do not believe you”. She always messed my head, made me feel I was made of marshmallow or was trying to negotiate my way through a sea of molasses. My brain would turn to mush, I would be incapable of thinking and would become fuzzed out and confused. I always lost myself. Mum would tell me who I was meant to be and what to think but it was never anything near who or what I wanted for my life. I also knew from bitter experience that if I tried to become what she wanted, somewhere in the process, the goal post would move. My sobriety was a source of great embarrassment to her. She would always ask what sort of wine to order for lunch and yet again I would tell her I didn't drink any more. She found this deeply shameful and acted as if my sole intention was to humiliate her. However, she did approve of Dominic, or at least the sound of Dominic. I did not take him to meet them. No one deserved that. Dominic had two things in his favour: he was English and he was upper-class. My mother insisted we marry. It didn't matter that he was only in Australia for a year and was returning to England to train for the priesthood, without me. She made it clear that if I did not marry him this would be further proof of my complete ineptitude and moral failing. There was no way to win, she had the ability to make my head spin and my sanity slip. My father would play Mum and me off against each other. He would pay me more attention than her. He would take my side in any argument Mum and I were having and he would criticise Mum and praise me. It never felt good because it never felt real. Mum would get upset, she would get jealous and I would rub salt into any wound I glimpsed in her. Dad listened to me more than Mum, and he took more of a genuine interest, for small stretches of time. It was mind-


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bending to realise this was the man I remembered sexually abusing me. There was nothing about him to indicate he had ever done this or ever would again. Had I made it all up? Imagined it? At the same time, if there was any physical contact between us I would shudder and feel ill. The only way to stay grounded and sane around my parents was to spend a lot of time in the toilet. Every time I started to feel overwhelmed, invaded or invalidated I would escape there. It was the best I could do. The people at church were always pleased when I was going to visit my parents. They thought this was a good thing to do. They did not want to hear how much I loathed my parents. I mentioned this hatred to a woman at church, and was told no matter what my parents had done to me, there was nothing they could have done that was not forgivable, and it was my Christian duty to love them. I was furious. How dare she? What did she know of my parents? She didn't want to hear what it was they had done. I believed I had every right to hate my parents! Now I felt she was telling me I was wrong and bad for hating them. And, not only did I have to love and obey them but forgive them as well. That was way too much to ask. I came home ranting and raving and calling this woman everything under the sun. Dominic listened and then, to my surprise, told me how much he hated it when I visited my parents. He said I was difficult to live with leading up to a visit and was always ill when I came home. Often bedridden for a day or two with a migraine, not to mention nausea and diarrhoea, and my moods were disgusting. He informed me I was always disinterested in sex for a couple of weeks and was angry, bitchy, super-sensitive and not nice to be around for at least a week. I was flabbergasted; I had no idea my parents had such a profound effect on me. Dominic made a huge difference in my life. I knew that he loved me even though I couldn't understand why. He filled some of my


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emptiness but I continued to struggle, trying to fill the bottomless pit within me that devoured everything I poured in and then would scream out for more. The fact the emptiness would not go away reinforced my belief that at my core I was so bad and evil God could not love me. As a Christian I was meant to be forgiven but I knew with all the surety of my being this did not apply to me. I was too wrong for forgiveness. It wasn't just what I had done, it was who I was. I was black, poisonous and evil. I both hid from God and prayed to be transformed by God. Out of my desperation to know and serve God I convinced myself God was calling me to be a missionary in China. To my way of thinking you had to be holy to be a missionary. This could be my path to sanctification. It was also an attempt to match Dominic's missionary zeal, to try to be as good as him. There had been times in my life, like when I moved to Maraylya, when I had heard God. Now there was a resounding silence. I was desperate for a sense of call and to hear God's will for my life. I decided God needed some help. I would walk to the station and say, “If the train is there when I arrive I am meant to go to China” or “If the lift doors are open when I arrive at work I am meant to go”. The problem with this method of discernment was sometimes the train or lift door would be in the yes position and other times in the no. Arriving at work to a closed lift door could plunge me into despair for the rest of the day. I would interpret it as proof God couldn't possibly love me. I would beg God to please let me serve him, please give me some purpose in life. I went on a Whitsuntide weekend retreat where a New Testament scholar was giving a series of talks based on the book of Romans. He was a man whose life was being torn apart. He was struggling with decisions he needed to make and was battling with his conscience. The result was he was profoundly human in what he said and he acknowledged his sinfulness and his struggles. He spoke to my heart. He talked of how Christians put on a pretence of perfection and how


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alienating this can be to those of us who are aware of our flaws and failings. He talked about his own emptiness and deep sense of failure. He appeared to be in agony. My heart went out to him and I felt understood by him. He was the first Christian I had met with whom I could identify. As well as bringing the book of Romans alive he talked about the messages Christians so often gave to the rest of the world, about bumper stickers and signs outside churches and what they said to people who had no knowledge of the Christian faith. One in particular was “Christians are not perfect, just forgiven”. He asked us to think about what that would mean to a prostitute who could not entertain the concept of forgiveness but was desperate for a different life. He asked us to imagine how much that sign would alienate her and make her think that Christians were superior to her and she would not be accepted by them. It took all my self-control to not stand up and applaud. Yes, Yes, YES – that's it exactly. It was a powerful experience of hearing my truth spoken by a person in a position of power within the church. My spirit soared with delight. After that weekend he was teaching a course on the New Testament for six Tuesday nights. It was held at North Parramatta at the ELM centre. He drove past my place to get there so offered me a lift. The course was good but even better were the conversations we had in the car. I talked to him of my questions, of how much of what I had been taught about God and the Bible didn't make sense to me and how frustrated I got with thought-terminating clichés and glib answers. He thought perhaps a theological education would help. He taught at the United Theological College and suggested I talk to the Principal.

The easterly weather rarely lasts more than a couple of days. The wind has swung round to the west and is blowing the debilitating consequences of the easterly out to sea, the air is clearing, the heaviness lifting and meringue shells will once again be crisp.


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CHAPTER SIXTEEN

From my deck I have views to the creek with its resident platypus and waddling, quacking ducks. Beyond this, the church stands facing Bass Strait, a beautiful building whether viewed from land or sea. Beyond the town are the nearby hills and hinterland, houses dotting some hills, but further on cattle, sheep or an occasional horse. Colour and movement forever calling my eyes beyond the small domain of my home. Today I shorten my gaze and rediscover the apple tree in my backyard. It grows four different kinds of apples: two red, one yellow and one green, each with a different taste and texture. Each apple has its season. They don't all fruit at once, they take it in turns, making space for one another, yet for a time co-existing. I take delight in the fact one tree can supports diversity like this. My view offers such an abundance of choice. So much beauty to observe, sink into, and marvel at. Opinions and points of view can be like this, a source of interest, excitement and challenge. The Principal later described our interview as enchanting; that was generous of him, I was naïve. He explained to me that the doors for missionaries to China had been closed for quite some time and there were no signs of them opening again in the near future. China was closed, and anyone seeking to do any kind of missionary work there would be risking death. I was not to be daunted, I told him if that was where God wanted me then he would work out the details. He suggested that perhaps, while God was working them out, I could study at United Theological College. I could train to be a minister if I


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chose. I had never heard of a woman minister; it was such a foreign concept I didn't even consider it. UTC was at Enfield and consisted of three buildings. The twostorey Victorian-style principal's residence was built between 1883 and 1886. It was a magnificent building with high ceilings, a grand staircase and formal dining room. The theological college was a neo-Georgian revival building consisting of classrooms, staff and administration offices and a common-room. In 1927, when the whole campus was Leigh College, belonging to the Methodists, a memorial chapel was built. UTC taught liberal theology; my background was conservative. UTC was a shock. I had been asking questions and struggling with answers before I arrived at UTC. Now I was discovered that most people on campus did the same and this was considered a good thing. I had never heard of liberal theology. No one had ever even suggested the Bible not be taken literally, let alone that it was not the inerrant, inspired Word of God. My Old Testament lecturer talked about the creation myth and how it was similar to the creation stories from many other civilisations. I was shocked and shaken - and intrigued. I enjoyed college, especially worship in the chapel every Friday. Each student was in a support group that met weekly and one of the responsibilities of these groups was to take a chapel service. Vast amounts of ideas, energy and creativity were poured into them. Within our group we would start with the wildest, over-the-top ideas and refine them down to something that was confronting, topical but still worshipful. Services varied from traditional to avant garde, from contemplative to exuberant celebration, from flamboyant and multicultural to deeply ritualistic and stylised. Services were alive, creative, exciting process that could adapt themselves to many moods and forms. Conversations at UTC were challenging and diverse. Students and lecturers had different understandings of God, Jesus and the Bible: different from mine and different from one another's. Diversity of


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opinion was encouraged. That in itself was shocking, disturbing and wonderful. I went to my Anglican prayer meeting and asked them to pray for me, to help me discern the truth. This was a sincere request for the abundance of opinions at times was quite terrifying and I didn't want to go down the wrong path. Part of my relationship with God was still based on terror and I clung on for dear life, fearful of tumbling back into the excesses of drugs and alcohol. I had no concept of God rejoicing in my exploration and questions. I asked for prayer in discerning truth, wherever truth might lie. My time with Barry had not been wasted. I did know there could be many different opinions and versions of truth. My Anglican friends prayed my lecturers would see the error of their ways and teach God’s truth, meaning teach what the Anglicans believed. I was not impressed. I didn't want to be limited to their way of thinking. There were things I heard talk of at college that were liberating, exciting and different. It was during my first term at UTC that Dominic returned to England. His leaving was hard but we had always known it would happen. That didn't stop it hurting like hell. Dominic and I corresponded for many years, and it was exciting to hear of his dreams coming true. He did become a priest and he worked in the slums of London and Manchester as well as spending time in Haiti and India. Cheryl and Deirdre missed Dominic too. We would often meet at their place to support each other in our grief and remember all the great times we'd had together. Sometimes I handled my pain well, other times an achingly deep chasm would open up inside me and threaten to overpower me with pain, longing and loneliness. One night as I sobbed Cheryl put her arms around me and said “Life's a shit!” It was complete acceptance. Yes, at that moment that was how I felt. She wasn't trying to make it better, to take away my pain or to justify God, she just named my truth in a way that gave me far more comfort than any reassurances of Dominic's departure being God's will. It probably


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was – but at that moment life was a shit. Dominic's leaving did not send me back to drugs and alcohol. My older brother, Bruce, came over from New Zealand for a few days. He thought it would cheer me up. Bruce had left home when he was seventeen and at twenty he had hitch-hiked his way from Sydney to London, through Asia and India. He worked in bars and restaurants. He based himself in York and travelled around Europe as much as possible. He claims to have introduced the Turks to instant coffee and English markets to Turkish puzzle rings. He set out to return home via Russia and Japan and then to New Zealand. There he met and married a woman but I never could quite figure out why. It didn't last, of course. My brother was gay. He stayed in New Zealand believing that was far enough from Mum and Dad. Occasionally he would travel to Australia and catch up with me. Even more occasionally he would visit our parents. This was one of those rare occasions. Bruce was an alcoholic and there were definite signs of him having had the same struggles with his mental health as me. It was a long time since he had seen Mum and Dad. His line was, “How bad can they be?” My answer – “Very.” Visiting was a stupid, stupid idea. After six hours with Mum and Dad we ended up in Kings Cross on a three-day bender, consuming copious amounts of alcohol and with me trying to score drugs and Bruce stopping me. His comment afterwards was “Now I know why I live in New Zealand”. Lucky him. The good news was that once he left I returned to my life as a church-going, theology-studying Christian. Even a three-day bender was not enough to return me to my former life. That gave me a level of confidence in my sobriety I had not previously had. With Dominic gone and my studies taking up so much time we stopped producing plays for the church. We did not have the heart for it any more. On a couple of occasions Peter asked if I wanted to preach, an opportunity I grabbed with both hands. For all my


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insecurities and lack of self-worth there was a part of me that loved an audience and the opportunity to put my world view across. Next Peter asked if I would be his representative on the Parish Council. People had to be nominated and voted for by members of the congregation but there was also a place on the council the minister could fill at his discretion. I was astounded. Why on earth would he want me on the Parish Council? He was very clear about it. He wanted someone who would shake the others up and challenge them. He said I was to be the devil's advocate. I found Parish Council meetings unbearable. We could spend hours on whether to fix the door to the outside toilet or how much milk was needed for morning tea. I felt like screaming. After a few meetings I was itching for something to get my teeth into. The issue of the 40 Hour Famine came up. Would we support it? Unlike agenda items such as the milk issue, there was no discussion about this at all, it was just assumed we would participate. Tact never being my strong suit I let loose with “Why on earth would we support the 40 Hour Fake?” I noticed Peter cringe a little, but I figured this was what he wanted my input on. Someone asked me why I called it a fake and I was off. How on earth could any of us in the West understand the relentlessness of grinding poverty? How dare we go without food for forty hours, knowing there was food in the fridge, that we could choose to eat at any time, that at the end of the forty hours we could gorge ourselves on anything and everything we wanted? How could we even begin to think this would give us the slightest inkling of understanding for those who were starving? It was tokenism, it was patronising and it was obscene. I then launched into an attack on World Vision's way of operating. I thought sponsoring a child pandered to the West's desire to feel warm and fuzzy and did not consider what a sponsored child would do to village life. What happened to the children who were not sponsored? What kind of competitions or jealousies were created? Where was the political analysis and consultation with the villagers to figure out what changes needed to take place that would bring about


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systemic change rather than offering a hand out? There was a rather stunned silence once I had finished. After a little while the chairperson asked if anybody else had anything to say. I looked at Peter who made sure not to look at me. The chairperson said it was a complex issue and perhaps we should just leave it to people to make up their own minds. This, of course, meant they were not going to think through any of the issues. My disgust, especially with Peter, was obvious. That was the beginning of the end of my Anglican days. I left theological college, not because of the challenges to my faith, but because it was not what I was looking for. It was an academic course and I was looking for something more heart-centred and spiritual. I gave up on going to China. I was grateful for the way college had broadened my thinking even though my foundations had been shaken to the core. In some ways college had been far more challenging than Barry's barrage of questions, because it was systematic and structured in its teaching and questions. I never had accepted simple answers, but now I knew it was OK to question and that there was far more to God, Jesus and the Bible than I had been taught in church. In my two terms at theological college the foundations of my faith were ripped away and the scaffolding for a new faith shakily erected. Those two terms of college changed my relationship with God. I felt a new freedom to think, read and question as widely as I liked.

As well as my apple tree I have a peach, an apricot, a pear and a cherry tree. All drawing nourishment from the earth. Each requiring the co-operations of another tree and the birds and bees in order to be pollinated and bear fruit. At their best different ideas and opinions provide the cross-pollination necessary for human thoughts to bear new fruit.


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CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

When I went to bed last night the wind was howling and rain was pounding on the roof. The dogs huddled close for warmth and protection. When I first opened my eyes this morning there was a small, furry head on the pillow next to mine with the white parts of her coat glittering silver in the sunshine. Colour was splashed across the sky, the left-over clouds providing abundant canvas for an effusive outpouring of joyous creativity – a new day had burst into life. Life after Dominic and Theological College consisted of work, home and spending time with friends. More days than not I would see Cheryl and Deirdre and they provided me with much support and some protection against my loneliness. Cheryl seemed to have a sixth sense about how I was and often on days when I was struggling she would ring my door bell and say “I just felt you needed a hug.” or “I just knew you were having a hard time.” I saw these visits as gifts from God, believing God had prompted Cheryl's “knowing”. One day followed the next. Time passed and I grew stronger within myself, my faith and my sobriety. I started to look outward and take an interest in the world around me. The arms race was sweeping us towards destruction. Marcos was in power in the Philippines and the CIA were involved in Nicaragua and El Salvador and apartheid was the rule of law in South Africa. The world seemed like an awful place. I decided to do something about it. I became a volunteer at Action for World Development and joined People for Nuclear Disarmament. As a teenager both my father and I had participated in Vietnam moratorium marches. As a result of my volunteer work I once again attended peace marches, meetings for peace, peace vigils and


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consciousness-raising groups. I was both passionate about peace and overwhelmed by terror and despair. Convinced we were facing imminent annihilation, or, far worse, slow agonising death from radiation poisoning. Why couldn't everyone else see the urgency of the situation and join me in working towards peace? I became obsessed, fanatical, rabid and, according to my friends, a pain in the arse and a bore. One day my uncle, my father's brother, rang me. We were not a close family so I was surprised to hear from him. He was ringing to let me know my parents were going into a nursing home. I knew they were unwell. I had visited them in hospital. He told me he was selling their unit and asked me if there was anything I wanted. They had some beautiful pieces of antique furniture. I didn't want them, besides I had nowhere to put them and didn't want to live with a constant reminder of my parents. My uncle told me this was my chance to escape. He encouraged me to break all ties with them, assuring me that my father was “a mad bastard, always has been” and I owed them nothing. “Get them out of your life” said my uncle. I was surprised by this conversation. I was fond of my uncle, he had always been good to me on the rare occasions we met. A mad bastard he reckoned. Given my uncle's propensity for driving home with a string of sausages wrapped around his neck, or chasing any number of his five children around the yard with hot barbecue tongs, mad must cover quite extreme behaviour. Being given permission to walk away felt amazing. Freedom beckoned. I backed away from my parents but could not break contact. I still felt tied to them. I attended a weekend Group Life Laboratory. There were ten participants and two facilitators. There was no agenda and no explanation of the process. The idea was to all meet together in a room and without any direction from the facilitators allow the group to develop its own direction. The idea was that people would talk about problems they were having in their life but there was none of the


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structure of a therapy marathon. I talked about wanting to be free from my feelings of guilt and responsibility towards my parents. One of the workshop leaders was a Uniting Church minister who invited trust and also a bestowal of priestly power and authority. Given my limited experience of priests I was surprised by this way of viewing him but there was something about his relationship with God and his surety about issues of faith that encouraged me to see him as a positive authority figure. I talked about my need to let go of responsibility for my parents and of my desire to be free of my sense of duty and guilt. Realisation dawned; what I needed was permission and absolution. I asked the minister if he was willing to give it. He felt uncomfortable in this role. He did not feel he had invited it in any way. I didn't care whether he had invited the role or not. I needed to feel the permission to have nothing more to do with my parents came from God. This man felt like someone I could trust to be God's representative. Once he agreed to the role he fulfilled it brilliantly. He spoke in God's name freeing me from my parents and explaining that the biblical command to honour my parents had been broken by their abuse and they had not fulfilled their responsibilities, therefore I was not bound by the Bible. He acknowledged there had been wrongdoings on my part but I was free and forgiven. He anointed me with oil then prayed for me and pronounced me free to go and live my life to the full. This was exactly what I needed. I felt free. I wrote to my parents telling them I would not be visiting them again, thanking them for all the good things they had done for me - clothes, housing, an education - but saying the bad far outweighed the good and I was no longer prepared to pay the price of being their daughter. A year later I went on a three-day, silent retreat. I joined the religious community of the retreat house for meals and the rest of the time I spent alone except for meeting with a spiritual director each day. He listened as I spoke of my experience of the silence and offered direction and Bible readings designed to deepen my experience and


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help me be open to God. The director was also a priest and a singer/songwriter and he gave me some of his music to listen to. His songs were personal and moving. His lyrics spoke with honesty about his relationship with God and others and his efforts to live a good life. Something in the openness of his struggle touched my heart. If a priest could struggle like that maybe I wasn't so bad after all. I left wishing I had stayed longer and feeling seen and understood. Some months later I returned but this time had a different spiritual director. She wanted me to focus on God's love for me. She could not have picked a worse topic. I still did not believe that God loved me. I wanted to believe it, felt guilty for not believing but the reality was I did not and could not accept that God loved me. The retreat leader gave me a hard time for being so stupid and stubborn. I wanted to scream at her, to tell her I was desperate to believe God loved me but I just couldn't. I did not believe it and there was no point pretending. I felt bad. Bad that I couldn't accept God's love. Bad because I didn't believe in God's love for me and bad that there was something foundationally wrong with me. Surely, if God did love me I would know it, feel it. Somehow God would be able to get the message through. I felt nothing, except guilt and emptiness. After several months of voluntary work at Action for World Development I applied for a job as secretary for the Mission and Justice Education Programme run by the Catholic Church. Perhaps it was a combination of proving my interest in development and peace issues and AWD providing me with a good reference – I got the job. It was wonderful! Fantastic! This was social justice, mission, development, peace and feminism. I loved this teaching with a passion because it gave breadth and depth to my understanding of social justice. Dominic had prepared the way with his talk about the importance of a social gospel. That is a gospel that demanded equity. Now I had access to books, videos, talks and religious who committed their entire lives to this. A whole new world opened up to me.


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The team was generous in their teaching of me and encouraged me to take home videos and books and arranged for me to attend a couple of their workshops. Even without this I would have been immersed in their world. These people ate, drank and slept social justice. This was their work, vocation and passion. They focused on Jesus' teaching in the gospels and did their best to live their lives based on gospel values. They showed me another form of Christianity with a different way of understanding God and reading the Bible. I worked there for two years, by far the longest time I had ever stayed in a job. I stopped going to church because I felt more nourished by my work than by church on Sunday. Liberation Theology was wonderful, inspirational, challenging teaching. It was a theology that cared passionately about the poor and oppressed. For me, this was Catholicism at its very best: an exciting combination of intellectual stimulation and an understanding that a commitment to justice required conversion and transformation. If I truly engaged with these teachings I could not stay the same. I was stretched both intellectually and emotionally and a whole new dimension was added to my faith. I thrived. One day one of the team came back from lunch saying he had just bumped into a fellow Christian Brother who was about to run a tenweek Enneagram workshop and he was most insistent I attend. So I did.

So much of this time of my life was new beginnings. Bright and shiny new dawns. The sun pouring in on my life. There were many new pathways to discover and explore. My life had colour: intense, bright and vibrant. I was joyful.


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CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Scattered along the beach are rock formations. Some form small rock pools filled with sand, flora and fauna: myriad miracles from the ocean. At the end of the beach some of the rocks rise up over three metres high. My dogs love to scramble up them and will stand proudly at the summit, king and queen of all they survey as they enjoy the different perspective. The wind ruffles their fur giving them the look of intrepid adventurers. I always smile looking at these two small animals standing on a rock that sinks deep down into the earth that is as old as time itself. I wish I could hear its wisdom and the tales of formation, erosion, changing sea levels and varied vegetation. I wish I could listen to the earth and hear a perspective that spans millennia. John was in his fifties, greying and with intense brown eyes. He was contained and focused. John gave an overview of the Enneagram, telling us how the Sufis had developed it but it had fallen from use and been rediscovered by Catholic teachers a few years previously. John had learnt about the Enneagram at a spirituality centre in Chicago. He used it as a tool for people to understand themselves, spiritually and psychologically, and for awareness and growth. The Enneagram is diagrammed as a circle with nine different points. Each point is connected to two other points, one being the way of growth, the other the least productive way a person can live. Each point has a detailed description of the strengths and weaknesses of that personality type, what motivates them and how they operate in the world and whether they function predominantly from the heart, head or gut. It is not meant to be used to give yourself a hard time or point out your failings, rather it is an aid to self-awareness and


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acceptance. In order to get some idea of where people were on the Enneagram, John handed out worksheets for each point. Each sheet contained a series of statements and he encouraged us to tick which statements we resonated with. The more ticks you had on a particular sheet the more likely this was your position. On the first sheet I ticked some and left some blank because, while some statements sounded like me, overall I did not feel the statements provided an accurate description of me. The second sheet was nothing like me at all so there were very few ticks. However, the third sheet felt as if someone had looked inside my life and knew my deepest and, I had hoped, well kept secrets. That first evening John described the Two, Three and Four personality types. As he talked about the Four he spoke my life. He talked about how this type finds it virtually impossible to accept God’s love and grace. He just said it as a statement of fact, no judgement, no condemnation. Waves of relief and gratitude washed over me. He talked about the need to be special and the feelings of superiority and melancholy that were part of my life. There were certain statements such as “sometimes I feel like an aristocrat in exile” that were so accurate I squirmed with embarrassment. Other statements such as “I have a vague sense of loss and abandonment in my childhood” made me chuckle with the sheer understatement of it and reference to “drama queens” left me in no doubt this was me. I had to speak to this man. Three days later I was sitting in the visitor's room of the Christian Brother's monastery, in Burwood in Sydney's inner-west, telling John of my struggles with, and search for, God over the years. I felt listened to and understood. Whatever I had to say was honoured and then returned to me without judgement. It was a profound and wonderful experience. As we had a cuppa together afterwards I asked him what else he did apart from run Enneagram workshops. He said he was a Spiritual


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Director and explained that he met with people on a regular basis, listened to where God was and was not in their lives and went more deeply into the God moments. Instantly I knew this was for me. This was what I had been looking for. There began a spiritual direction relationship that lasted eighteen years and a friendship that has survived my move to Tasmania. Spiritual direction was perfect for me. It dealt with my relationship with God on a one to one basis. John did not impose teachings, nor did he imply I had to conform, or be good enough, or have the same relationship with God everyone else did. I could be honest about my search for God, my fears, doubts and insecurities. I always had to understand things. They had to make sense and I needed to be in control. In direction John taught me to listen to my body and value the truth it would reveal. I started to open up to God and experience God in ways I never had before. I discovered there is a place beyond rational thought, beyond both the head and the heart where truth lies. As I began to trust my body more and more, so my trust in God grew. Direction taught me discernment, how to check out if my perception of the voice of God was indeed God’s voice; again by listening to the resonances of my body. While I didn't have total success with this it was a vast improvement on such things as praying, opening my Bible and stabbing my finger on a verse, any verse, or seeing if the train was in when I got to the station. John always encouraged me to just turn up at sessions with my life. I didn’t have to be good enough or holy enough, or arrive with special sacred moments to talk about. We always found God in the midst of living. I would talk about the major events of my week and John seemed to know what moments to focus on and enter into and to ask the question “Where was God in that?” At first I didn't have an answer but soon learnt to be open to the Spirit who surprised and delighted me. God was revealing himself to me in wonderful, new ways. After direction we would have a cuppa together and talk for an


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hour or two. During these times John would listen to the day to day living of my life and would he talk about his life and his understanding of God. We became friends within the structure of these sessions. This time was every bit as important as direction. I felt love, care, compassion and enjoyment of me and it was of incalculable value. As my trust grew I started telling John about my parents, Dominic, my time in therapy and Ward One, my drug usage, Barry's death and being in jail. I told him of my fights with God over Barry being in hell and, without resorting to doctrine, he got me to question if this fitted with the God I was developing a relationship with. No, it didn't. I started to fully believe that God had no qualms about a persons' sexual orientation. I had always asserted that being gay was OK but since becoming a Christian fear and guilt had been nibbling around the edges of this belief. These fears began to fade. John and I could discuss anything and everything. We talked about Dominic and how much I missed him. We spoke of my sexual attraction for a woman friend of mine. We explored where I found God in novels, films and nature. John never told me to read the Bible or go to church or become a Catholic. We explored my emerging relationship with God. A relationship John both honoured and stretched. We revisited many of the major traumas of my life in order to bring about a greater depth of healing, the healing of my spirit. For all my hunger for God it was a confused relationship. I still had a lot of fear. I found God difficult at times. Yet, God was able to challenge me without me feeling condemned or belittled. If God pointed out a particular behaviour which was unhealthy the challenge always felt clean and light, an invitation to change, not a condemnation. For years I had been obsessed with doing. If I had a problem or was stuck I would yell at God, or at John, or both, “Just tell me what to do and I'll do it”. While I was obsessing over and worrying at an issue not only did I stay stuck but I felt like I was entwined in an ever-tightening net of my own making. Letting go and being was not an easy lesson to learn. John often reminded me


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that God loved us into letting go, we were loved so we could change, we didn't have to change in order to be loved. Because direction was relational and experiential my relationship with God developed unencumbered by appropriate language, theology or doctrine. I found the image of God Almighty problematic. This was a God to be terrified of. A God who knew everything, saw everything and would judge and condemn. I was learning new ways of seeing God. God would not bombard me, or violate me. I came to know that God would never enter into any part of my life through force. God treated me with the utmost respect and only ever entered into the dark places of my life by invitation. Never as Almighty or All Powerful or as a shining light that burns. This was the God of shadows and gentle candle light. The God who invited change but never insisted. This was a God I could trust and feel safe with. At the beginning of direction I was still pretty messy and fragmented and it provided cohesion in my life. John's was the place I could go every week and be myself and talk about all that was happening in a context of God. The relief was enormous. I came to trust that God wanted to be in relationship with me.

I'm sitting here with a big smile on my face. One of the joys of writing is I discover new things about my life. I have realised what an amazing foundation was formed through my time with John. It makes me think of those rocks my dogs climb, the ones that go deep down into the earth. John and I never got waylaid by dogma or creeds or right beliefs. Direction was all about experience, relationship and heart connection. There have been times since then that people have tried to coerce me into their idea of right belief and I've lost my footing for a while, but the depth of those foundations have been there for me to return to, to scramble up again like my dogs on the rocks. Tonight I've got a sense of how far down into the earth, into God, those foundations go. And from the depths of them bubbles joy.


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CHAPTER NINETEEN

The colours in my seascape swirl, tumble and twist. There are times I can almost hear the roar of the ocean, the pounding of the waves, sense the surging power within them. Storm clouds are gathering. Thick, heavy, blue-grey-black with an ominous tinge of green, rolling in. There is a sense of electricity in the air, that special charge when there is an impending storm. The ocean is roaring, announcing the change in the weather. Far off in the distance I hear a noise, the rumble of approaching thunder? I started to think about what to do with the rest of my life. Although I loved the atmosphere at the Mission and Justice Education Programme being a secretary did not give me job satisfaction. I was told of a Marist Brother and two lay people who were practising as rebirthers at a Marist monastery. I went along to check them out and was impressed. They were well-trained in spirituality and Jungian theory as well as rebirthing. Rebirthing is a form of continuous breathing and meditation that helps you enter your unconscious. It often results in connecting to long suppressed emotions which are then released. Sometimes you will connect to your birth trauma and then a more positive birth experience is facilitated. Rebirthing was developed by Stanislav Grof at the Esalen Institute in the US. A typical session involved the client lying on a mattress, music playing, the rebirther sitting at her head encouraging her to focus on a particular issue as she starts to breathe deeply in the prescribed fashion. People would yell, shout and sob as they released intense feelings and energetic blocks. The practitioners offered containment and encouragement. My rebirthers were involved and in tune with the


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work I was doing and well able to follow where my work went. They provided me with a sense of security and of being held within a safe environment. Even though I expressed intense feelings I never feared I would lose control. At the end of a session I was given crayons and paper to draw my response to the session before I tried to put words on my experience. Then I would talk about what had happened during the session. I did a five-day retreat at the monastery. It was full of rebirthing, dream analysis, sandplay therapy, painting and spiritual direction. It was a very busy retreat, but I found the opportunity to delve into my unconscious and express what I found therein a range of creative options. It was enriching and fun. I decided to become a rebirther. I left the Mission and Justice Programme and attended a three-month residential course in order to get my Associate Diploma of Rebirthing and Transpersonal Psychodynamics. I wondered how impressed future employers would be with this addition to any résumé. The course was not run by the people with whom I had been doing rebirthing. I did not enjoy the course because the staff provided little containment. I was floundering in an amorphous fog of intensity and feelings without purpose, direction or insight and with no structure at the end of a session to help process or understand what had taken place. No feedback was given by the rebirther. Just being able to express feelings without a framework for understanding them was not helpful and did not facilitate change or self-responsibility. Healing needs to engage as many of our faculties as possible. We were expected to do a few hours of what was called Hatha Yoga each day. This was, in effect, housework or gardening. Given that the course was expensive I resented this. One of my jobs was cleaning the toilets, this took me back to my Westmount days. Surely I had paid my dues by now. One afternoon the training centre held an open day. This was an opportunity for anyone interested in rebirthing to come and ask


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questions. Wine and cheese were provided. It had been quite some time since I'd had a drink, surely one or two wouldn't hurt; I could stop after that. After considerably more than one or two I started having auditory and visual hallucinations. I wanted a rebirthing session to deal with whatever was going on. I don't recommend rebirthing sessions while drunk and, in hindsight, am staggered that a member of staff was willing to rebirth me while I was obviously drunk, but rebirth me she did. I still remember the feel of that session. I became powerful and evil. I soared above the world and drew a huge amount of energy into me. I was in the middle of a forest. Under a full moon. Dressed all in black and howling and crowing with power: “All power is mine. I will destroy you. I have the power to kill, to maim and to banish,” I screamed as I swirled my black cape around me. I was drunk and crazed with power; murderous and invincible. I was connected to the earth. Dark and evil power was pulsating through me, filling every part of my body, overflowing, spilling out onto everything around me. This was how it should be. This was right and familiar. My destiny. Once the session was over I was exhausted, shocked and shaken. What on earth was all that about? It felt evil; satanic in fact. The woman who rebirthed me wrote it off as a past life experience. I was not impressed. It felt too real to be a past life and I was horrified by the power and evil at my command. I had no idea how to process this session, so it was left to rattle around in my psyche, which it did for years. On completing the course I didn't want to set up practice as a rebirther; with such limited training I could do damage. I wanted to train as a therapist but didn't want to go to university and study either psychology or social work. Academia was the pathway my father had wanted for me so I had avoided it at all costs and I was not about to change my mind now. I got a job with a counselling agency as an administration assistant. I hoped working close to what I wanted would be enough. It wasn't.


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I imagine if I could enter my seascape I would experience power that could bring death. It is such a heaving mass of boiling ocean that I doubt survival would be possible. Yet in capturing this image the artist has created an image of great beauty. Power still pulsates through it, still lives and breathes within it, but without the ability to maim or destroy. The very heartbeat of the universe calls forth creative power; full of energy, full of life. It is humans who seek to control this power and use it to bring about death.


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CHAPTER TWENTY

Within my seascape there are places where the paints are piled one on top of each other, layer after layer. There are other places where the colours get their beauty from the contrast of being next to one another. Sometimes the paints blend together, co-operating and new colours and shades are born. The soul of the painting continues to enchant. A friend of mine worked at the local Pregnancy Counselling and Support service and believed I had what it took to be a counsellor there. She encouraged me to apply for the position of co-ordinator which was mostly administration but also carried a small case load. I got the job. While I enjoyed the job I chafed against the restrictions. Our mandate was to only deal with the issues of pregnancy, not to go into anything else that may have contributed to why the person became pregnant. We were a pro-life organisation so, according to the constitution, we were not allowed to refer for abortions. However, we did not believe we could do our jobs ethically without giving people full information about their options. It was a tightrope to be walked with great delicacy. I became an expert at saying things without actually saying them. Over the years my brother and I stayed in intermittent contact. I received a letter from him telling me that he now understood what I was talking about when I had written to him of my Christianity. He had become a Christian and believed God had healed him of his alcoholism. After this we wrote to each other regularly. Bruce was off the booze and had joined the Anglican Church in New Zealand.


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He wrote telling me of his struggles with his sexuality. God had certainly cured his alcoholism but for some unfathomable reason was not curing his homosexuality. At this time the laws concerning homosexuality in New Zealand were changing and it was a divisive topic. My brother was going to a church that believed homosexuality was a sin. He felt incapable of telling them that he was gay. I was sure God didn't think homosexuality was a sin and sent him some books with that point of view. To my regret, what I didn't do was listen to the struggle he was having, I just tried to make him feel better. Bruce ended up in a vicious cycle of trying to be straight, finding it too difficult, so going out and having a fling. Then he would feel guilty and would start drinking which inevitably led to more sex. He would have benders and then would try and sort himself out again. His letters were full of guilt and anguish and the constant cry to know why God wouldn't heal him. Slowly his letters became incoherent and then stopped. I got the occasional drunken phone call and put together the pieces. He had left New Zealand and moved to Papua New Guinea where he was working for a company that flew into the highlands and worked with tribal people. Papua New Guinea was experiencing a great deal of unrest at the time. My brother drunk and actively gay in that situation sounded like a recipe for disaster. It was sixteen years until I heard of him again. Fourteen years after his death the Public Trustee finally managed to track me down. My brother had died alone in Wellington Hospital, New Zealand. He had died of an AIDS related illness. I was his sole beneficiary. That broke my heart. Was there no one of significance in his life? Greg was tall, slender and introverted. I met him through Deirdre. He was her boyfriend's best friend. For a while he went out with a friend of mine. This was a relationship that concerned me because I felt she was using him and Greg didn't strike me as the sort of person you should use. I thought he would get hurt. Out of this concern a friendship developed and we often went out to dinner together, or to


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movies or out of Sydney at weekends. Greg was a kind, gentle man with not an ounce of violence in him. I was attracted to his gentleness and grew to love him. It took quite some time until Greg reciprocated, but eventually he did and we married. It was never a passionate relationship and Greg did not share my commitment to spirituality but we were good friends. For our honeymoon we went to Singapore and Hong Kong. This was Greg's first time overseas; I had travelled as a child with my family. We both revelled in being in different countries and cultures, surrounded by unusual and interesting people, smells, foods, languages, religious artefacts, and new and exciting scenery. We decided we wanted to travel overseas again, this time to Europe. Shortly after our return home from our honeymoon I started having back pain. My GP diagnosed a urinary tract infection. Her treatment did not ease the pain. I saw a physiotherapist who put me in traction twice a week, this didn't help either. The pain increased and spread down my leg. I went to see an orthopaedic surgeon who told me I needed to lose weight. While this was true it was not helpful, especially as any kind of movement was becoming increasingly difficult. I had to stop work. Eventually I went to see the doctor of a friend of mine who took one look at me and said “Why on earth aren't you in hospital?” He rang a neurosurgeon, pulled some strings, and got me an appointment for two weeks time. By this stage I was bed-ridden and any kind of movement was excruciating. One night, struggling out of bed to go to the toilet, I lost my balance, fell backwards onto the bed and heard a nasty snap sound. Agony comes nowhere near it. I convinced Greg that it was serious enough to warrant calling an ambulance and got taken to the local hospital where I begged for painkillers. I was admitted and, after a couple of days, the doctors decided surgery was needed. As far as I was concerned being operated on in the local hospital was not an option. Thank goodness I had private health insurance. The neurosurgeon I had the appointment with operated at St. Vincent's; I requested they transfer me. After three


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days of not being transferred I got fed up and asked for the papers to sign myself out. It was only then they took me seriously. Within two hours I was transferred. The next day I had a myelogram, an unpleasant procedure where dye that can be seen by an X-ray is injected into the sac around the nerve roots. This showed that a piece of my disc had splintered off and was impinging on the sciatic nerve. No wonder I was in pain. The surgeon performed a lumbar laminectomy. The reduction in pain was wonderful. It didn't all go away and I had to have various procedures over the next couple of years and then another laminectomy. This resulted in nerve damage. My foot is now partially numb and I have little ability to control its movements. But eventually I ended up with pain that I could live with and was able to get around reasonably well most of the time. A vast improvement on being bed-ridden. All up I was off work for eighteen months. Between my two lots of surgery I felt my pain was tolerable. Travelling with a small pharmacy of painkillers and anti-inflammatories Greg and I went to Europe for three months where we leased a car. We had worked out an itinerary before we left but after four weeks we were tired of major cities and big buildings and we ditched the itinerary and took to the minor roads and by-ways and explored the countryside. We stayed in B&Bs, ate in small restaurants, bought local wine, bread and cheese and had a fantastic time. Returning to Australia I had my second lot of surgery. I was still searching for the right career. I had enjoyed working as a counsellor for Pregnancy Counselling and Support and had applied for other counselling jobs but did not have enough qualifications. Greg encouraged me to get them. So, while recovering from surgery, I started the Institute of Counselling's two-year course. It was a highly respected course which provided good basic listening and counselling skills as well as tasters for a variety of different counselling modalities and genres. The combination of doing the counselling course and being a


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survivor of sexual assault helped me get a part-time job with a nongovernment sexual assault agency. It was a feminist-based agency with a commitment to caring for their staff. A generous training budget was provided, supervision was compulsory as was stress leave. We had to take a week off every thirteen weeks. We could add this onto holidays but stress leave was not cumulative. The whole idea was to take the leave in order to be able to continue doing the work. The agency was in Sydney’s outer-western suburbs, a low socioeconomic area with many single-parent families. There was a lack of services and infrastructure to meet the needs of a rapidly growing, mostly unemployed, predominantly female population. It was not a place where people minded their Ps and Qs, what you saw was what you got. People talked about their lives with a rawness and openness that I admired and found life-giving. I was very comfortable with raw and gutsy people who called a spade a fucking shovel. It was a fabulous place to work. Without any formal qualifications and only my own personal experience and my time at Pregnancy Counselling and Support I felt daunted by the responsibility of my position. The other staff and the management collective were supportive and encouraged me to get as much supervision as I needed. At its best supervision deals with the way your work impacts on you: what buttons get pushed and personal issues arise, as well as giving advice on how to work with your client. I discovered I had a gift for going into people’s pain and was comfortable going into the depths of their memories. I was also willing to allow their pain to have an effect on me and to name that to my clients. My own therapy proved to be fantastic training and I remembered with deep gratitude all Susan had given me and the tears she had shed on my behalf. I attended a myriad of short courses on working with sexual assault but needed some kind of foundational course. I was still reluctant to attend university. One evening at the Institute of Counselling a woman spoke on Transactional Analysis and my love of,


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and respect for, this modality was re-ignited. I decided to train as a Transactional Analyst. This involved four years of training: a mixture of clinical work, supervision and theory. Our trainer challenged us to think. She told us that in the thirty-eight essays we were required to write we would get good marks for showing our understanding of the theory but better ones for original thought and creativity in applying the theory. We had wonderfully heated discussions. Did we agree with what we were being taught? Was it relevant? How would we use it? What did we disagree with? What would we do instead? We were never expected to just learn the theory and regurgitate it. I discovered I loved writing essays and would do my best to critique the theory and offer alternate positions when I thought them appropriate. We also did role plays where we used material from our clients, and did our own personal work. It was rigorous, extensive and exciting training. Life was full. I was married and had a demanding job I thrived on. I was completing the Institute of Counselling course and my TA training, and I continued to be in spiritual direction. Life was great. Once I finished the first part of my TA training, the thirty-eight essays and accumulating the necessary clinical, supervision and training hours, and had only my oral exams to go, I decided to attend university and study psychology. The results gained for my TA essays convinced me university would be easy and I would enjoy the mental stimulation. I applied as a mature-age student and was rejected!! I was devastated. Australia was in the middle of a recession and unemployment was high and places at university were at a premium. Nevertheless I could not believe I didn't get in. Not going to university had always been my choice and an act of rebellion against my father. I was hurt, rejected and very angry. No one seemed to understand that – so I was also lonely, unsupported and misunderstood. Friends suggested I apply again next semester. Absolutely not. I would NEVER go to university. They'd had their chance and they had rejected me. They could go to hell. I would not apply next semester, next year or ever. They had


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missed their chance and they could wear the consequences. I had been working in child sexual assault for a while and decided I needed a different supervisor. My first two supervisors were helpful and encouraging. They taught me how to work with children, how to write Victim Impact Statements and how to prepare a child for court. However, the more I worked in sexual assault the more my passion was for adult survivors. My work with children was adequate, especially children under five, but my work with adolescents was woeful; I had no rapport. I was passionate about working with adult survivors and the feedback I got from my supervisors and from clients helped me have faith in my ability to do good work. I met up with Susan at a workshop on Psychodrama and was amazed to find the old connection and spark was still there. I wanted Susan as my supervisor, as the person I saw fortnightly to talk through my work. Susan would be excellent at spotting if my own sexual abuse was hindering my work. It had been eleven years since I had seen her and I still felt a strong connection to her. I felt like I had gone home to my roots. Many of my skills as a therapist came from her. A large part of her philosophical and psychological underpinning and her way of understanding the personality came from TA - as did mine. Having Susan as my supervisor reminded me of all that had been most valuable in our previous time together and showed me how much my therapeutic style was based on Susan. I still had enormous respect for her. If my work in sexual assault triggered any of my issues, then I would do whatever personal work was necessary. If that meant going back into therapy for a period of time, that was fine. Greg and I understood this was the underpinning of me working in sexual assault.

My seascape has hung on my wall for over three years now. I have spent hours gazing at it from different parts of the room, in different lights, in all sorts of moods.


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Today two faces emerged. One is of a mythic beast: old, deep-set eyes, pug nose and face covered in fur-like hair, moustache and long beard merging together. The face frowns, scowls. The other face is beautiful. It is in profile. Accentuating the high cheek bones is a filigree pattern and radiating out from the eye are circles and lines of blue increasing the eye's intensity. The nose is snub and the mouth and chin refuse to be pinned down as somehow they change between soft, gentle smiling lips to a firm and determined chin and jaw line. These two faces are staring at each other, looking into each other's eyes, in the midst of the riotous abundance of colour and movement. They represent different parts of me. That scowling hirsute face contains the wisdom gained through pain while the beautiful face with her intricate markings shows the freshness that can be birthed out of a life reflected upon and transformed. Both emerge from the amniotic fluids of my unconscious. I can feel them rooted in the depth of my being. How easily I embrace these different parts of me knowing they come out of all that has been before me. They will give me power, wisdom and creativity to face all that is still to come.


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I built my house by the sea. Not on the sands, mind you; not on the shifting sand. And I built it of rock. A strong house by a strong sea. And we got well acquainted, the sea and I. Good neighbours. Not that we spoke much. We met in silences. Respectful, keeping our distance, but looking our thoughts across the fence of sand. Always, the fence of sand our barrier, always, the sand between. And then one day, -and I still don’t know how it happenedthe sea came. Without warning. Without welcome, even Not sudden and swift, but a shifting across the sand like wine, less like the flow of water than the flow of blood. Slow, but coming. Slow, but flowing like an open wound. And I thought of flight and I thought of drowning and I thought of death.


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And while I thought the sea crept higher, till it reached my door. And I knew, then, there was neither flight, nor death, nor drowning. That when the sea comes calling, you stop being neighbours, Well acquainted, friendly-at-a-distance neighbours, And you give your house for a coral castle, And you learn to breathe underwater. - Sr. Carol Bieleck, RSCJ From an unpublished work


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CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Our winters here on the coast are milder than the word Tasmania conjures up for most people. We have our share of storms, rain, wind and cold, but not the extremes people expect. So when we do have a patch of truly nasty weather it still manages to surprise, shock and even scare people, locals included. My time remembering ritual abuse was like that for me. I already knew bad stuff had happened to me. I knew worse existed in the world. But I was not prepared for the storms and tempestuous seas I had to navigate. It's wild out there today. The rain is pounding on my roof and windows and the clouds are so dark I feel it should be evening. It's not even 9 a.m. yet. I can barely hear the sound of the waves over the wind and rain but I can see them, tumultuous, pounding, surging, rising above the containment of the breakwall and splashing onto the pathway – threatening to pour onto the road. It is a day when rising sea levels show their ominous and destructive potential. But this wild, bleak weather makes me think today might be the day for writing about ritual abuse. It seems to create the right mood. Brooding darkness. Sometimes life prepares us for what is to come. During a spiritual direction session with John I felt God asking me to do something that was huge, time-consuming and extremely painful. I saw an image of an enormous concrete room without any windows. The room was below the ground but had none of the dankness of a dungeon. Was I prepared to enter the room? I had no idea what I was saying yes to, but said yes, nonetheless.


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Saying yes was easy. I felt content with my life and happy in my marriage. I was secure in my faith and believed all the trauma and drama of my past was behind me. Greg and I were paying off a unit in Bankstown in Sydney's south-west. This was further from the city than our previous flat but we were buying, not renting, and were excited about owning our first home. We went away for weekends regularly and had great holidays. We ate out regularly at a mixture of first-class restaurants and fabulous cheap and cheerful places we delighted in discovering. We led the life of many dual-income-no-kids couples. At long last life was a good thing. Being alive was no longer a struggle and I was enjoying the challenge of working as a sexual assault counsellor and training both at the Institute of Counselling and through the International Transactional Analysis Association. I was in my late thirties and had reached a place of calm seas and smooth sailing. I was confident that everything that lay ahead was going to be great. I had been developing an interest in feminine images of God. Over the years my view of my womanhood as a tragic accident of birth had changed, now it was a cause for joy and celebration. I thought having some images of God other than a bigger version of my father or an octogenarian benefactor might be helpful. My first encounters with feminine images were tentative. Was I was wrong and sinful to even contemplate these images? I feared they were unbiblical and I should have nothing to do with them. However, I was a feminist and participated in a Women's Theology Group which was liberating. It was wonderfully exciting to listen to biblical interpretation from a feminist perspective and to explore the old stories from a new slant or hear unfamiliar stories told by women of scholarship who engaged in an “hermeneutics of suspicion”: they asked different questions of the text than had been asked up to this point. I started reading books on the feminine face of God. They were the next stop forward from my relationship with Mary Magdalene. I needed feminine images but these books didn't do it for me. I tried


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using feminine pronouns for God and was wracked with guilt. Was I indulging in Goddess worship or a barbaric, pagan understanding of God? It felt wrong, bad and sinful yet I knew there was life in these ideas. I remembered all the novels I had read about matriarchal worship and priestesses and their reverence of the earth, or about Asclepieian dreaming and healing centres and how these books had always resonated in a way I couldn't understand. The spirituality, both matriarchal and pagan, and the healing and magic would enter my psyche in a way that called me home to truth, to where I belonged. My work environment encouraged me in my pursuit. We were a feminist collective. Staff and management were committed to a feminist analysis of power and abuse. This created a rewarding and challenging environment stretching me to think about issues of power and gender in new ways. I began to see how viewing God as male fed into the patriarchal structures of the church which saw priests as God's representatives on earth but often barred women from these positions. This was justified by interpreting scripture from a male perspective and viewing male experience as normative. Many parts of the church were not willing to listen to the experience of women, people of colour, the poor and homosexuals. Nor were they open to see examples of God's life-changing power within these groups. For a long time God had been viewed as the prerogative of male, middleclass, western, heterosexual men. A friend of mine told me of a woman who was training for the ministry, was a lesbian and collected feminine images of God. I decided to go and speak with her. Sonia was a big woman in size, personality and energy. She invited me to her home. In her lounge room were sculptures of feminine faces that were serene, holy, beautiful, and one of a woman's body, voluptuous and sensual. These images were infused with the feminine spirit of God and I felt this spirit started to melt my resistances and entwine herself around my heart. Sonia told me of the work she did helping those who were caught up in the covens and cults that abounded in inner-city Sydney. She


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talked about the dark energies that were at work in the world and the black magic that was practised with its powerfully dark consequences. I thought her language a little extreme and florid, but I got what she was doing. One day, a couple of months after being knocked back from university, I was having supervision with Susan when I started to sob. Over and over I sobbed “Why did you leave me? Why did you go?” I had no idea where this sadness came from or what had triggered it. It came from a deep place and had been brooding there for a long time. This was not appropriate to deal with in supervision. I made an appointment to see Susan for a therapy session. Again the tears came and we followed them back through time. I was on the mattress and I had backed myself into a corner and surrounded myself with cushions, clutching onto them for dear life, trembling and sobbing in terror. I kept shaking my bowed head and saying “No”. With exquisite tenderness and compassion Susan said “Tell me what's happening. What is it you don't want to see?” I kept sobbing and shaking my head, but eventually, over an eternity, sobbed out my story. I was in a dungeon ... underneath a castle ... in England … it was cold and damp … there were manacles and stocks ... there was an altar ... on it was something/someone living ... there were three men in black robes ... priests ... each took their turn with the being on the altar... then one cut its throat … the blood ran into a groove carved into the altar for that purpose ... the blood was collected in the chalice – held high above the priests' head as powerful, booming words were spoken ... the dead body was hacked … the chalice and flesh were handed to the third man who passed them around the assembled people … we were expected to drink and eat “in remembrance” … the man who had collected the blood was looking straight at me ... I feared for my life. Throughout my telling Susan had known when to encourage and


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when to wait and give me time. Now as I looked into the face of that priest I was vehemently shaking my head saying “no! No! NO!!” With gentle strength Susan inexorably took me to the point where I looked at that face and in an almost inaudible whisper said “It's my father.” When I was able to look up there were tears pouring down Susan's face. How desperately I wanted that memory not to be true. How gently Susan told me that only a mad woman would make up something like that and I wasn't mad. What I remembered was true. It had happened and she believed me. I left that session feeling the need to be hospitalised. I felt battered and bruised. My body ached and I felt there should be visible signs of my pain; blood and bruises. I was in shock and kept saying to myself , “It can't be true. It just CAN NOT be true. What was all that robes and dungeons stuff? What on earth am I remembering?” Oh, how I longed for these memories not to be true. Goodness only knows how I managed to drive the hour home from that session. My body felt it had been slammed up against an enormous stainless steel freezer over and over again. It hurt to breathe. Even my hair follicles ached. An avalanche of grief towered over me. Inside was a five year old child rocking backwards and forwards, sobbing, shaking her head and saying “NO, NO, NO, not my Dad, my Dad is a good Dad. My Dad loves me. Not my Dad. It's NOT true.” Except it was. I arrived home, dragged myself up the stairs and collapsed into a chair. Greg asked how my session had been. I was incoherent, shattered and exhausted. I managed to stammer it out through a fog of pain, grief and my own disbelief. Greg looked pale but didn't doubt me for a minute. Susan rang. That penetrated the fog swirling around me for in all the years I had seen Susan as a therapist she had never rung to see how I was. It was not something she did. Many years later


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she told me how disturbed and distressed she had been by that initial session.

The rain is pelting on the windows. Huge, noisy drops. The storm continues and it has been frightening to watch the waves crash into, and then leap high above, the containment of the breakwall. There is a break in the weather, I walk along the foreshore beside an exceptionally high tide. The wind is blowing the ocean into shore. The waves pound against the breakwall, almost at its top where it meets concrete opposition. Surging back the water smashes into the next great swell heading inwards. They meet with an enormous crash, forcing each other upwards, high into the air. Most of the water collapses back down into the huge expanse of ocean but some is gathered up, and dashed onto the pathway and the grass beyond the breakwall. The noise is deafening. The great roar of potential and power scares me. It would only take a freak wave in these extreme conditions and I could be swept off the pathway and into the clutches of the tempestuous sea. That is how memories were for me. Crashing into one another as they tumbled out. I was scared I would be swept away by them.


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CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Clouds

mass on the horizon in their darkening shades of grey

through black, blown there by gale force winds they are a disordered, jumbled pile. No joyous sunset tonight. The only colour a steely battleship grey. Cold, hard, frozen. No sign of warmth; or hope. The adjustment required in my life to accommodate remembering this kind of abuse was enormous. To start with I had no name for this abuse nor knowledge of it. I knew nobody who had been abused in this way and I wanted my memories to go away. They wouldn't. The memories tumbled out. I saw them as extreme, bizarre and evil. Working with those memories demanded massive amounts of time, energy, support and money. Right from the beginning Greg was prepared to offer me as much of those as was necessary. I felt him stand by my side as if to say “we will get through this together.” It was to become the major focus of our lives for the next five years. Everything else paled into insignificance. Shortly after my first memory John, my spiritual director, left to spend five years overseas. This left me without a director at a time I needed someone to help me maintain balance. Someone to help with all the questions that whizzed around in my mind. How could such things possibly exist in God’s world? How could God allow little children to suffer? Why didn’t God answer my prayers? Why had this happened to me? I needed to talk to a Christian. Susan offered enormous support and I had great respect for her spirituality but her background was Sufism. I needed someone who spoke a similar spiritual language to my own and who would pray with me and stop me being swamped by


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my confusion and questions about God. I rang Sonia. She understood and said she was willing to provide support. I decided to face these memories full on and to deal with them quickly, cleanly and get them over and done with. To this end I organised an eight-day retreat where Sonia came and gave direction every day and I went to Susan for therapy every second day, determined to deal with it all in that time. I spent much of the retreat feeling very young and praying I would die. I cried buckets and spent a vast amount of time sitting under a tree pouring my heart out to a sympathetic cow in the next paddock. I have no idea if she was the same cow who came up to the fence each time, but those beautiful, deep, brown eyes were one of the threads I hung onto as I tried to find a way out of my labyrinth of memories and emotions. More memories came. One therapy session there was ringing in my ears and I was having trouble hearing. My body was vibrating with terror. Again I was five years old. In England, in the same dungeon. Again there were men in robes, and a man showing me a gun. “Do you know what a gun is? Do you know what a gun can do?” he asked. He fired the gun close to my head. Into the stone wall and then again. I got the idea of what a gun was and the damage it could cause. Next, I was tied up on the altar and was raped by one of the men in robes as my father watched. Once he had finished my father went over to the man with the gun and spoke to him. The man came over and stood by the altar where I lay, my whole body suffused with the violence of the rape that had just taken place. He inserted the gun into my vagina and asked me if he should pull the trigger. I was incoherent with terror. I soiled myself. The trigger was pulled. There was no bullet. He removed the gun from my vagina and walked over to my father who gave him money. My father then cleaned me up and carried me home all the time saying “You don't remember. It didn't happen. You know that I love you.” Mind fuck!!


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How could I make room in my life for a memory like this? This was the father I loved, who said he loved me. Yes, I had remembered sexual assault, but had kept hold of my belief in a father who loved me and treated me better than my mother did. What was this? Had he risked my death? Had he truly paid to witness my rape and to have a man insert a gun into his five-year-old daughter's vagina? I felt completely overwhelmed at the thought of expressing the anger that went with this memory. Surely it would consume me. It would consume the world. Much of the anger turned inwards. I wanted to die. Some of the anger slipped out sideways, in small doses. Throughout the retreat I was overwhelmed with my fear and impotence. With the awfulness of it all. With questions about God. How did I make sense of God? How on earth was I meant to believe God loved me when God allowed this to happen? What kind of fucking bastard was God anyway? I was terrified of what was to come. I had worked on my sexual assault for years and I knew what a profound effect it had had on my life. That abuse was chicken shit compared to what I was facing now. How was I going to survive? Where would I find the strength? Who would support me? I didn't trust God because God had let the abuse happen. Rage and terror battled within me. I missed John. I wanted someone to rescue me and to take the pain and memories away. To make it all better. “Please, don't make me have to remember and deal with this. Will someone please come and pick me up and hold me and keep me safe.” I felt small and vulnerable. No one came. Obviously I wasn't going to be all better in the eight days of the retreat: not in eight days, or weeks, or months. I was bitterly disappointed and I was angry, but I swallowed it as best I could. I was scared of my anger at God. John had always encouraged me to be honest with God no matter what was going on in my life. But this felt huge. Was I safe to be this angry? Would God punish me? Abandon me? I was hanging onto him because I had no idea how to survive.


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My anger seeped out towards Susan. I blamed her for the fact I hadn't managed to deal with it all within the eight days of the retreat. Blamed her for not rescuing me. She became the mother I hated for not protecting me. For the first time I projected my anger and fear onto Susan. She had always been my good mother, the mother of love and nurture and new and positive messages. Now I was furious at her because I saw her as the mother who had not protected me. So began my demand that she protect me and save me – back then. The retreat finished and I felt unsettled, incomplete, squirmy. I no longer seemed to fit my body or my life. I had no idea how to proceed. Sonia was willing to have another session with me and she drove me to the lookout over Tamarama beach. We walked around for a while watching the wildness of the ocean and the waves breaking against the rocks. On returning to her car she suggested she take me through a guided meditation. I couldn't see how this would ease my distress but after her generosity in leading my retreat I felt it would be churlish of me to say no. So, reluctantly I closed my eyes, followed her instructions to still both my breathing and my mind, and found myself on a path leading up a mountain. Many years previously, during a meditation with John, I had climbed this same mountain searching for guidance and wisdom. High up was a ledge where there was a crystal clear pool. Behind the pool was the entrance to a cave. Standing on the ledge looking out at the world below stood a caped woman holding a lantern above her head. She was archetypal, similar to the hermit figure in the tarot deck, only female. She was holy wisdom. I had returned to this image often when needing guidance. When I entered the cave my wisdom figure was within. She had deep, brown eyes brimming with compassion and there were crinkles around the edges, the memories of laughter. She was taller than me, solid, in a safe, dependable kind of way. She embraced me. A safe embrace that accepted me as I was. The cave itself was in muted tones of pink and purple, warm,


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womb-like and secure. It wrapped itself around me, surrounding me with healing. The cave felt safe, impenetrable, inviolate. Sonia suggested asking Holy Wisdom why she had allowed the abuse to happen. Sobbing, I asked my question. Tears poured down her face as she told me she did not have the power to stop it, she was not an all-powerful God. She told me her heart broke when such things happened in the world and all she could offer was to walk with me and support me on my journey of healing. The cave became my Healing Room, my safe place. The woman my sanctuary and refuge; she was Woman-God. They became central to my healing. She was the embodiment of nurture and compassion. This is where I took all the bruised, battered and shattered parts of my life. Over the years that small cave housed magical baths where the water kept running till it ran clean. Comfortable chairs and beds furnished the cave as well as an abundance of toys and books. The cave was able to adapt itself to whatever was needed at the time. Woman-God never seemed to worry if she was hanging out with a terrified two-year old, a blood-and shit-covered eight-year old or an articulate, angry, Bolshie teenager or any combination of the above. She always dealt with them with gentle wisdom and compassion. This was the God who suffers with us in the midst of our sorrow. This was the gift of God who was there every step along the way.

I sit quietly, steady my breathing and visualise the darkness I feel inside me. I imagine myself breathing in white light and breathing out the darkness of these memories. Breathe in light, breathe out dark. Breathe in light, breathe out dark. As I am doing this a blue light descends and tumbles over my body, cascading through me, getting into my blood-stream and oxygenating my blood, purifying it, removing the residue poison. It's light. Effervescent. I become aware that I am breathing out light, I am breathing light in and out. I feel clean. It's still raining outside. A gentle, grieving rain matching the grief I


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continue to feel for the child I was, trapped in abuse, and the grownup me at the beginning of my journey. I had no idea what was in store, or how hard it would be. How typical of me to believe I could deal with it all in eight days. Always I want it NOW. Despite the clouds, wind and rain there is a glimmer on the horizon that reveals itself as the moon rising, faithfully present. She has to struggle for visibility tonight. Vying with the clouds for position. Their blackness threatening to overpower her. But she manages to shine through in glimpses, letting me know the darkness is not complete. She reminds me of my search for God within my memories of abuse.


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CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Curled up in bed, two dogs snuggled close for love and warmth, I start to become aware of the sounds and smells around me. Rain. Heavy rain. Beating on my roof and windows, and then the different sound of water droplets rolling off plants and trees, splashing onto the leaves below as they journey downwards to the earth, bringing life and nourishment. There is a wonderful clean smell of cold sea air and of nature washed clean. It's morning. In the room where I write I look at my seascape with all its vitality and out my window with all its bleak greyness and the two merge together, calling me back into memories and writing. Reminding me that both vitality and greyness are the truth of those years. With the Healing Room and Woman-God in place the work of remembering my abuse started in earnest. As a child I lived in two separate worlds; the world of ritual abuse and the everyday world of a normal family doing normal family things. The wall between the two was impenetrable. Now, as an adult, I spent five years living in two worlds, the world of work, marriage, home and study and the world of therapy, memories and the Healing Room. This time the wall was permeable. Healing was a full-time occupation. I would spend all my spare time processing my memories through writing and art. Greg was magnificently supportive. Often by the time I finished work I'd run out of energy to function as an adult. Greg would arrive home to be greeted by a small and needy child. I always took responsibility for my moods. No matter what emotions I was dealing with I would make sure Greg knew what they were and tell him it was my stuff, not his. He was always willing to hear how therapy had been


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and to be part of the process in whatever way he could. Often, I would need to walk by water. There was a river twenty minutes away in tranquil bush, but often I needed the ocean with its pounding waves. This was an hour and a quarter's drive. Greg would drive me there and listen to me as I tried to sort out the latest lot of memories. He would walk with me as I splashed along the water's edge, hoping the wind and roar of the ocean would blow away some of the negativity I often felt engulfing me. There were times I didn't have what it took to organise dinner. He never complained. Sometimes he would cook and often we ate out. One of the joys of Sydney was eating out cheaply. I was conscious of how lucky I was to have Greg's support. I was never totally alone. The stress and strain of this time both brought us closer together and put a lot of pressure on our relationship. Working with memories was full on. My memories did not surface in uncontrollable flashbacks. My body or mind would let me know what was coming and I could always contain the memory enough for it to emerge in a therapy session. However, once the memory appeared it became all-consuming. In therapy I would follow either a flash of memory or body sensations and travel back to a scene of abuse. Once in the memory it was total. I was only vaguely aware of Susan's presence as I curled in on myself and my pain. I struggled to believe Susan cared for me, convinced she saw me as disgusting as a result of the abuse. I regret not being able to make more eye contact with her because when I did her eyes were full of love, compassion and concern, and at times tears. I tied myself up in all sorts of knots around Susan. I wanted her to hold me but didn't want her to. I wanted her to guess what I needed, she refused to guess, I had to ask. I wanted to be consumed by her or to crawl inside her and be safe. This, of course, was impossible. Often she would hold me as I sobbed. Sometimes the touching of little fingers together was almost too much to bear. What she consistently


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offered was her compassionate belief in what had happened to me. Her willingness to accompany me into many different hells, and her gentle assurance that I was not bad, but bad things had happened to me. I felt really alone in those early days of memories. While both Susan and Greg were magnificent it was incredibly difficult for me to come to terms with these new memories of abuse. I constantly moved between my belief in my Dad who loved me and my memories of my father who had perpetrated such barbarous cruelty. Was I the only person in the world such things had happened to? Working as a sexual assault counsellor I started to hear snippets about ritual abuse. I attended a workshop on the topic. An occasional article appeared in journals and it was referred to as satanic ritual abuse. Ritual abuse was coming into public consciousness as sexual assault had before it. One day I asked Susan if she thought what we were dealing with was satanic abuse. Her response: “Well, it most certainly isn't Godly!” She had a point. I rang some book shops to see if they had any books on the subject. They had never heard of ritual abuse. I tried a variety of approaches from saying I was a therapist looking for information, to the standard “I have a friend who...” line. In one of my efforts to describe what it was I was looking for I gave the wrong impression and the sales person became most indignant, assuring me they most certainly did NOT stock books detailing how to perform such acts. Oh dear! This really was the very beginning of ritual abuse becoming known. It was at least another year before books on the subject started to appear. A magazine arrived at work with the number of a ritual abuse information line. I took a few weeks to get up enough courage to ring. A friendly and helpful woman named Lynda answered the phone and offered to come and talk to me. We arranged a time. Once she arrived she suggested that before I tell her what had happened to me and ask my questions she tell me a little of her story. She proceeded to do so. I


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couldn't believe it. She was telling my story. The things that had happened to me had happened to her. How could this be? Of course the setting and people were different but she was talking of men robed in black, performing ritualised acts of “worship”, abuse and murder in the presence of others. She then told me people were remembering ritual abuse across Australia, Britain, the US and Europe. Remembering ritual abuse is one thing, discovering it has happened to untold numbers of people across the world is quite another. This abuse was not just my father and some of his cronies. This was organised and happened in many different countries. It happened inside churches, within educational institutions, through paedophile rings, in the bush, in towns, capital cities and in small rural communities. It was pervasive. I was shocked but no longer so isolated. During our first meeting Lynda made numerous assumptions about me and what I had been through, most of which were correct. I found it unnerving to have a complete stranger know so much. One of the first questions Lynda asked me was: “Are you a multiple?” “A multiple what?” I had no idea what she was talking about. Multiple personality! According to her, anyone who was a survivor of ritual abuse by definition was also someone who had multiple personalities. I was horrified. No, I did not have multiple personalities. Yes, there were a whole heap of internal voices but that was perfectly normal. Everyone had those. These could be explained rationally within a TA framework as different ego states or different aspects of the Child ego state. I had a large collection of teddy bears who had different names and personalities. Again, this was normal behaviour. The bears were a source of comfort and a way to nurture myself. If I wanted to be technical they were transitional objects. Lynda told me there was a support group for ritual abuse survivors that met on a Saturday afternoon and I would be most welcome to come along. The thought was terrifying, as was the experience itself. Somehow to discover there were enough survivors to need a support


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group started to make this all very real indeed. Summoning all my courage I went along. That first group was overwhelming. Six of us were present and some of the women were having a far harder time of it than me. There was a level of dissociation, despair and of being overwhelmed by life that was palpable and terrifying. Obviously, for some of these women just being alive was an enormous effort for there was little functionality and they were only just present in the room. One woman's wrists and forearms were covered with thick, angry scars that spoke of repeated serious suicide attempts. The group was my introduction to multiple personalities. I could see massive changes of energy move across the face and body of these women. I was used to seeing people move in and out of different ego states and the accompanying energetic changes. This was much more extreme. In my work as a therapist I assumed that my clients always knew what was going on. No matter what ego state they were in there was part of them that would be observing the work they were doing. This was not the impression these women gave. One group member was curled up in the foetal position in a bean bag and her changes of energies were constant. When she first spoke she sounded like a terrified three-year old, moments later her manner and voice were that of an angry teenager, then she appeared to be pre-verbal. These changes felt disconnected from the previous energy. There did not seem to be any functioning adult part to take care of, or responsibility for, her. Someone explained to me later that for some people the experience of multiple personalities was of discrete personalities with varying levels of mutual awareness. For some survivors it was possible for different parts to be in control for considerable periods of time and for the main personality to come back into the body with no idea of what had been happening, where they had been or how they got there. Being caught up in a cult was a major issue for people. I had no idea of the when, why or how of my escape from the cult but knew I


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had. I was holding down a good job and studying for my Transactional Analysis certification and was married to Greg who guaranteed I was not losing time. I did not live in fear of being tricked into going to cult events or of finding myself in strange places with no memory of travelling there. Nor were there huge, inexplicable gaps in my life. Comparatively, I was in very good shape indeed. I went home from that first meeting exhausted, subdued and absolutely certain I did not have multiple personalities. I attended the group for quite a while, becoming friends with some of the other women. The group was extremely heavy-going. What we needed was a qualified therapist to facilitate but we didn't have one. While I could not completely leave my therapy skills at the door I would not take on that role. We muddled along as best we could. I learnt a great deal in that group but invariably left drained and depleted. Certain events were especially triggering for people. Easter and Christmas were difficult for those whose cult had heavy Christian influences while other people found full moon, moon dark and solstice trying. Halloween and Beltane were the high holy days of the cult I grew up in, even though it had Christian overtones as well. Much ritual abuse was perpetrated either within the church with the priest or minister involved or by members of a congregation with their church membership being a cover. It seemed to me the more hierarchical and liturgical a church was, the more likely there was ritual abuse occurring somewhere within. This was satanic ritual abuse, by which I mean they engaged in the worship of Satan. The traditional sacraments of the church such as Baptism and Eucharist were inverted and perverted, for example, an animal or human would be sacrificed and then the dismembered body would be consecrated and distributed in a manner similar to the mass. The issue of human sacrifice was always fraught. Survivors didn't want to believe it, therapists doubted it, police disbelieved it and organisations such as the False Memory Foundation talked of


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therapists implanting memories into susceptible, vulnerable clients. There was also the issue of proof and questions of where the bodies came from and where they were disposed of. I have memories of people being murdered in front of me and similar stories from other survivors. These murders have similarities to atrocities committed by sections of the armed forces or by serial killers. When these events are reported in the news much of the population gasps in horror and asks how humans can commit such heinous acts. I just accepts that behaviour as part of life: for me there is nothing shocking in it at all. The support group was organised by a group called RASS (Ritual Abuse Survivors and Supporters) who produced a magazine called Beyond Survival. This was a mixture of poetry, people telling their stories, people talking about how they were surviving, educational articles, research and strategies for coping. This magazine became the Bible for many survivors. It validated our reality but could also be disturbing as it spoke about things that would cause flashbacks or body memories. Reading it was difficult and triggering yet at the same time comforting. Group members contributed to it on a regular basis. Being in a group with people recounting similar memories, or reading about them in a magazine, raised the problem of suggestibility. Did this happen to me or was I making it up because someone else had talked about it? I am sure there was a level of influence that took place. It was possible listening to someone else's story loosened a memory. Maybe some of the details of my abuse got confused with someone else's story. But would someone pretend to be a ritual abuse survivor through hearing these horrific stories? I doubted it. My friends' reactions, when they could listen at all, was overwhelming relief this had never happened to them. Many of the women I knew who were healing from abuse constantly struggled with the questions “Did this really happen? Am I making it up?” In so many ways it would be preferable to be making it up. For whatever reasons this was never a great issue for me. Whether


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it was Susan and Greg's implicit belief in me or the powerful way I felt memories in my body or the fact that it rang true and made sense of my earlier life I don't know. But I'm grateful it was one battle I didn't have to engage in. The friendships that came out of this group were intense. We struggled to keep our heads above water and make sense of what we remembered. A few of us lived near each other and we spent a lot of time together. We did our best to be available and to encourage each other through the heights and depths of the journey. Again, this took enormous energy. Here were women who understood exactly what I was talking about because they had been through it. There is often a language and empathy that comes from shared experience and ritual abuse was no different. These friendships took some of the pressure off Greg. Being the supporter of a ritual abuse survivor was hard work. I would encourage him to get the support he needed but he always declined, saying he was fine. There are always ups and downs to any kind of support group but what was fantastic was hearing other people's stories and witnessing the incredible strength and courage some of these women displayed in confronting their abuse and dealing with memories. Many of us viewed our healing as a spiritual journey and sought strength and courage from our different understandings of God. We respected each other's spirituality and acknowledged that ritual abuse included spiritual abuse. While this had dire consequences, there was also a sense that it scraped out a deep hollow within us that only the sacred could fill. I always found listening to people's journey was like walking on holy ground. Survivors are the only people who want to talk about ritual abuse ad infinitum. Reluctantly, I recognised my friends didn't want to hear about it. They could only ever manage tiny glimpses into my world. It was dark, awful and terrifying and they couldn't hear it. They would not, could not enter my darkness. I resented what I perceived as their


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uncomplicated lives. It was a lonely journey. Greg consistently gave all he could but I was aware of the huge strain this put on him and did my best to live at least part of my life in his world, although my thoughts were never far away from memories and healing. The longer I attended the group the more I was spooked by people who were still cult-active. As I learned about the lengths cults went to, fear started to invade my world. Week after week I watched women who were trying desperately hard to get out but were still trapped within the power of programming and dissociation. There were personalities who would take over and take them to cult events, or cult members would come to their homes and abduct them, or seize them as they walked along the street. Trying to escape from the cult led to violent assertions of power and control from those in power within the cult. I was scared of this. Scared they would find out who I was and then abduct me and take me into their cult. Or they would reprogramme me to become obedient to their high priests. Or they would bash, rape or mutilate me. Paranoia nibbled at the edges of my mind. I became clear on two things. First, as a psychotherapist I was not willing to work with ritual abuse survivors. I was still in the middle of my own work and knew I did not have the distance or the skills to help. There were therapists who were threatened and intimidated because of their work with ritual abuse survivors. A therapist friend of mine had her car brakes tampered with and on a couple of occasions found dead animals on her doorstep. Second, in order to feel safe, I could not have contact with anyone who was still involved in a cult in any way. This was an immensely unpopular decision. I was seen as betraying the other members of the group. The general understanding was that as ritual abuse survivors we had a responsibility to do anything and everything we could to help other survivors. I was not willing to accept those rules. It was a hard decision to make but was necessary for my own wellbeing. I stopped going to the support group but continued my friendships with some of


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the women. Then came the day one of the women who had been of enormous help, support and encouragement to me, revealed she believed she was being abducted and taken to cult events. She had come to a couple of times quite a distance from home in the small hours of the morning with the smell of rape on her body. I was torn in two. This woman was a brave, articulate, compassionate, sensitive woman. If she was still being accessed by the cult she deserved all the support in the world. She had given so much of herself to me and she deserved my support. In what was one of the hardest decisions of my life I told her I would not have anything to do with her until she was clear she was not involved with the cult in any way. She told me to fuck off and go to hell. She didn't want anything to do with me ever again. I couldn't blame her. I was heartbroken and guilt-ridden.

The view from my window includes the pathway along the foreshore. The rain has stopped and I can see the wind buffeting the waves and trees. People out walking are leaning forward bracing themselves against the wind. Tendrils of guilt and regret are wrapping themselves around my heart, but there is also pride in my ability to stand my ground and honour my decisions. I jump up and head out into the wind, hoping it will blow through these old cobwebs, blow through my heart and mind freeing me of the residue of a decision long since made.


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CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

I fear the vast expanse of the sea. There are times I have been on a boat in the middle of the ocean, surrounded by nothing but water as far as the eye could see, terrified as waves crashed over the deck. An infinitesimal dot clinging onto the rails of a structure incapable of protecting me should the depths call forth their immense, surging power and go wild. Remembering ritual abuse sometimes felt like I was adrift in a wild sea. There was a support group in my old home town. I wrote to the person running it mentioning my father's name and the names of a couple of people I remembered from childhood. Had she come across these names before? In hindsight it was a naïve and dangerous thing to do. Fortunately for me, the woman who received my letter was not cultactive and rang to suggest we meet. I travelled to her place nervous about being back on home turf. On arrival I was greeted by Annette who was slim, athletic, warm and welcoming. She had a light within her that was deeply attractive and a depth of spirituality that had survived the cult and shone brightly. There was a lightness about Annette I had not found in other survivors and was certain did not exist within me. She told me she was a feminist and a Baha'i. Annette had been part of the Al-Anon twelve-step program for a number of years and in therapy since she had remembered her abuse two years previously. She was further along the healing path than me and had a gentle wisdom and a way of looking at abuse issues that challenged me to claim my power and stop believing I was a victim. I greatly admired Annette for her spirituality and her perspective. We decided to meet together often.


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So developed a friendship that became an essential part of my healing and one of the great joys of my life. Annette had an infectious sense of humour and we would often laugh at ourselves and the intensity of the healing process. No matter how difficult a time Annette might be going through I would never walk away from our time together feeling exhausted. Our conversations were nourishing and life-giving. It was always a privilege to be part of her journey and my own load was lightened by our time together. When I was five my family lived in England for a year. During that time we made a trip to Boston, USA for Halloween. I looked forward to trick or treat and lots of lollies and to a Halloween party with other children and fancy dress. Halloween connected with a family story about how sick I had been while we were in Boston. I had come down with pneumonia and had a high temperature and they feared for my life. The doctor visited regularly and prescribed Coke and ice-cream. In a therapy session the memory emerged of being at the Halloween party where my parents socialised with the adults and I played with the children. Then my father came and collected me to take me downstairs into the basement where some of the guests from upstairs were now gathering, both adults and children. I was told that what was to happen was extremely important to my father, it was a great honour for us both to be here, and to behave myself. Once downstairs there were priests, an altar, and the attendant paraphernalia that meant very bad things were about to happen. The high priest welcomed my father as a brother from Australia and called him forward, offering him the honour of serving at the altar. My father officiated at a black mass that included the sacrifice of a goat. Then the high priest asked him what gifts he brought from Australia. He looked straight at me and said “I bring my daughter” and beckoned to me. I started to scream and tried to run. He grabbed me. I screamed, kicked and tried to bite. “Shut up you little bitch,” he hissed


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in my ear “you're embarrassing me.” I fought for dear life believing I would be offered to the priests so they could slit my throat the way they had the previous occupant of the altar. I could feel my father's mounting fury. I didn't care. There was nothing he could do that would be worse than what would happen in this room. He swallowed his rage and said to one of the priests I needed to cool down a little and asked if there was a door to outside that was accessible. He was shown the door. He took me outside and shook me within an inch of my life then threw me to the ground, telling me to cool down. I landed in deep snow. My father went back inside. I lay in the snow shaking with fear and sobbing. It was a long time before my father collected me and by then I was half dead with cold. As he picked me up to carry me to join my mother he started his usual mantra “You don't remember. It didn't happen. You know that I love you.” Over and over again. After this I didn't fight. As these two stories connected another memory opened up. I was lying in my bed extremely ill and could hear my parents' muffled voices in the next room. Then I heard my mother's voice: “I don't know what it is you are doing, but it has got to stop. She almost died. I am not going to stand by and …” Her words were cut off by the sickening sound of a fist connecting to flesh – hard; and then the sound of her crumpling to the floor. Nothing else was said. I recovered and the family story developed about how sick I'd been while we were in Boston and how much I liked American doctors. I was five years old and I had been abused on three continents. Another memory recorded. I'm exhausted. It still takes so much to extract the memory, to go back into those places and bring the fragments out. Then I have to look at each one and figure out how they fit together and compare them to the shards that have remained in my conscious memory since first reclaiming them. There are gaps, questions and I don't want to stir these memories. I don't want them


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to fully waken, stretch and roar, and do their best to devour me once again. As I spoke to other survivors I learned that cults were often made up of professional, intelligent people such as academics, doctors, surgeons, solicitors, QCs and police commissioners. They were patriarchal and hierarchical in its structure. With the cult I grew up in there was a theology that accompanied the abuse and members were indoctrinated to believe Satan was more powerful than God and that allegiance to God would result in death. Love, trust and hope were mortal sins. Being good was bad, you have to be bad in order to be good so you should be bad because that was good. That stuff still scrambles my brain. It wasn't just that good was bad and bad was good. Somehow the cult made it more complicated than that. It was like someone pulled out different strands of my brain and tied a knot. Then they tied a knot on top the first knot. Then another knot, and another, and another. Once there was a jumble of knots different threads were picked up, stretched to the point of breaking, and then let go so they twanged back and forced my brain to rebound inside my head. Allegiance to, and worship of, Satan and his manifestations was compulsory. The cult was satanic and engaged in distortions of Christian sacraments. Many rituals were in the form of a black mass: animals were sacrificed, as were humans. I remembered something similar to a baptism, a dedication to Satan when I was six months old. Then at age five I had to swear allegiance to Satan. These sacraments were reinforced with brainwashing and torture and no-win choices to prove my inherent evilness. Electric shock and other torture methods were used to take me to the point of losing consciousness. It was sophisticated and efficient and combined pain and fear. As these memories emerged it was increasingly difficult to hold onto a powerful and positive image of God.


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My parents sent me to Sunday School. One therapy session I remembered a scene when at age four I came bouncing into the house full of joy and excitement calling out “Mummy, mummy guess what, guess what. Jesus loves me!!!! The Sunday School teacher said so.” My mother looked down at me and said “Don't be so utterly ridiculous, no one could love anybody as disgusting as you.” My joy evaporated. There were times I despaired of ever being able to undo the damage of that line. It ricocheted through time undermining my belief in a loving Jesus and preventing me believing in my own worth. At age six or seven I was dragged outside and thrown into a deep pit. It was full of snakes, spiders, rats and cockroaches. I spent hours huddled in the corner of that dank, oozing pit, terrified of each and every thing that was in there, convinced they were all poisonous. At first I went almost hysterical as snakes slithered over me or rats scurried by. Then I tried to disappear into a ball of nothingness as spiders stalked up to me and started to clamber over my flesh. I had nothing to protect myself with, no stick, no rocks. Screaming was futile, but the terror boiled inside me, a frenetic energy that desperately wanted to escape as every inch of my skin shrank in petrified horror. I wanted to claw the skin off my body where these hideous creatures had been. Would they bite me? Would I die? Dear God, let it be now!! After an eternity my father came to collect me. He brought a ladder, climbed down, picked me up and carried me out. Then he held me in his arms, rocking me, saying “you poor girl, my poor, poor darling girl, I'm so sorry that happened to you, it must have been awful.” Was it really him who had thrown me in? It couldn't possibly be. And then of course his mantra: “You don't remember. It didn't happen. You know that I love you.” Over and over again. It was him, it really was my father who did that and who then came and offered sympathy. Who then loved me, cleaned me up and cared for me. Until next time.


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Terrifying as it was to be in the middle of the surging sea in a boat battered by waves, the miracle is I survived. The boat stayed upright and kept ploughing on to its destination. It was a long, dark night.


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CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

I look at my seascape and ponder the limits of nature and creativity. How, with so much colour and energy, did the artist manage to confine herself to the canvas? I can imagine her joyous celebration of the expanse available to her. Did she slop paint all over the floor? Did she sometimes long for a bigger canvas? A whole wall? Did she try and limit the amount of paint she used or, within the boundaries of the canvas, abandon herself to the joy and abundance of creativity and keep applying layer after layer until she got the effect she desired? I continued to see Sonia on an irregular basis and at times would write to her. She was the only person in my life who understood ritual abuse and Christianity. I needed her input. My need was such that I didn't manage to read the signals that I was asking too much. A few times she told me that she was busy and wouldn't be able to see me for a couple of weeks. Once two weeks were up I rang again, she was still too busy. At another time of my life I would have been able to interpret this as the brush off, but not then. After a few such instances Sonia agreed to meet me. We met at a restaurant for lunch and during the meal she gave me a long lecture on how demanding, thoughtless and totally unable to take a hint I was. She accused me of being self-absorbed and incapable of taking anyone else's needs into account. I was devastated and deeply ashamed and could only just manage to tell Greg about it when I got home. I took nine months to tell Susan, terrified she would agree with Sonia. Instead she was angry and indignant on my behalf. Susan was clear it was not my job to look after Sonia and that she, Sonia, needed to have much clearer boundaries and to maintain them, not blame me for her lack of them. Boundaries were something Susan had in abundance. When she


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said there would be consequences for unacceptable behaviour, there were. Oh, how I loved her boundaries and how I tested them. Hurling myself full force against the wall of her limits to see if it held. It did. It did not matter how much I ranted, screamed, raged or sobbed they held firm. This was safety. This was containment. No longer was I confined to the middle of my life. Now there was space. Nor did I have to keep going as far out as I could just to try and find the edges because Susan told me where they were. If I did overstep the mark consequences were enforced, but they were never violent and she didn't disappear. One of Susan's foundational rules was no suicide and no selfharm. She would not work with me unless I had a commitment to staying alive. She demanded a contract from me that I not kill or harm myself, accidentally or on purpose. The word demand may sound harsh but it didn't feel harsh, it felt rock-solid and non-negotiable. It gave me the assurance that there was someone in my world who actually cared whether I lived or died. No-suicide contracts originated in TA. For me a no-suicide contract provided containment and safety. One day while preparing pumpkin for dinner I cut my thumb. When Susan saw the band-aid she asked what had happened. I had held the pumpkin in my hand and moved the knife towards me. She told me that was a dangerous way to peel pumpkin, to stop peeling it that way, and if I had another injury she would consider me in breach of contract. Bloody hell!! Not long after this I was bitten by a mosquito and was overenthusiastic in scratching the bite producing a scabby sore the size of a five-cent piece. For the couple of days leading up to my next appointment I was totally obsessed with this injury. Was it bad enough for her to see it as self-harm? Should I ring her and tell her what had happened? I dreaded the thought of her not working with me, of being angry with me. I didn't want to go home and tell Greg I had driven all the way to therapy, paid her fee, but not had a session.


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Understandably he would view that as a waste of money and be annoyed. The day of the session arrived. I walked in, sat down and instantly Susan asked “What happened to your arm?” “It's just a mosquito bite,” I told her. “Are you allergic to mosquitoes?” she asked me. “No” I said, “I've just scratched it, that's all.” “That is not just a scratch.” she stated. “Why are you here? You are obviously in breach of your contract.” “But I wasn't sure,” I protested. “It's borderline, I thought maybe you wouldn't notice.” She didn't miss a beat. “If you didn't want me to see you could have worn long sleeves. You are in breach of contract.” “But that's not fair,” I wailed. “I need to talk to you about it.” “It is perfectly fair,” said Susan. “We have an agreement. I am keeping to my side of it. We will talk about it next session. Now, would you like a hug before you go?” I started to cry. I was devastated. I hated her. I was furious. And of course I wanted a hug but I was unable to answer. Susan stood up and said “It is time to go now.” My internal voices were screaming at me: “Look what you have done. We are missing out! You know how much we hang out for these sessions.” I walked to the office with Susan, paid for the session, and then she firmly said “I'll see you next week” and left. I dragged myself to the car and started the long trip home, tears pouring down my face. After about ten minutes I could feel a strange sort of gurgling feeling inside. I realised it was joy. “She did it!! She did it!! She kept her word”. I was flooded with feelings of relief and safety. She hadn't yelled, screamed or been violent in any way, but she had done exactly what she said she would. I felt valued and relieved and less tense and fearful. She cared enough about me to maintain the boundaries she said she would, and to keep me safe.


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Maintaining boundaries and confronting me as she had would have been costly to Susan but she had done it anyway. I knew what a truly excellent session it had been. I had not wasted my money. I had experienced something of tremendous power and importance. Convincing Greg of this took some doing. He found it difficult to understand how driving for two hours there and back and paying for a session I didn't have could be valuable. My therapy put a considerable hole in our weekly budget. He never complained, but I'm sure this particular occasion rankled. The fact Susan could keep strong and powerful boundaries was of incalculable value. Boundaries provided me with a sense of containment, of having limits, of being held. They stopped me from being able to waft to the other side of eternity and made my world a safer place to be. Susan provided the model for me to be able to set limits for myself and the clients I worked with. Susan's limit setting was consistently clear. It always impressed me. There was nothing muddy or murky about it and only once do I remember her being angry about my testing her limits around my safety. Oh, how I loved those limits. Even now, remembering, I get the sense of Susan's arms wrapped around me in a loving embrace. That's what it felt like. Someone cared. I actually mattered to her. She cared that I didn't harm myself and that I stayed alive. The truth of that was constantly surprising. After I had recovered from Sonia's rejection it was time to find a spiritual director. I often wrote to John and was amazed at the responses he gave from the other side of the world. I felt he reached across the world and into the black void I inhabited while working with memories. I was given a name of a possible director, rang, made an appointment, went for one session and was so appalled I didn't go back. I had to wait two months until I could see the next potential


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director. It was a long two months. At the initial interview I poured out all that ritual abuse was and its effects on my life. She decided she didn't have the space to take on something that heavy. With hindsight I see that as responsible behaviour on her part but at the time I saw it as a judgement on my depravity. She gave me the name of a couple of other directors, and this time I told them about ritual abuse over the phone. They were not willing to take me on, either. I was drowning. I needed someone to support me at a spiritual level. While Susan was extremely supportive of WomanGod and deeply spiritual herself she did not understand my Christianity and I often felt we spoke a different language when it came to our respective spiritual beliefs. Eventually someone told me about Noel, who had once been a member of a religious community of Catholic brothers. I talked to him on the phone and he thought the best thing we could do was have three sessions together and see what we both thought at the end of them. At first I found it difficult to talk to someone new, someone who wasn't John. Fortunately, I hung in there and discovered that Noel had a lot to offer. Like John he was a great listener. I poured out my filth and shame and talked about the different parts of myself who were telling their story in therapy. I told him I didn't know where God had been in the midst of my abuse. Noel accepted that absence and didn't argue against it. I'd had powerful experiences of Woman-God who wept with and for me over my abuse. She wept with the children who had such hideous acts inflicted upon them and she was always present in the Healing Room to offer love and support, but ultimately, she was a powerless God, unable to stop the abuse. Susan would encourage me to experience her as being present back then, during the abuse, but that was never my truth. Woman-God could be taken back into a memory or would be waiting for the child to return from the memory in need of her healing, but Woman-God was not to be found in the original abuse.


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God, in any of the ways I had encountered either him or her, was not there. It would have been intolerable to have God there. If God was there what kind of bastard would God be? I would hurl questions at God. “Why didn't you rescue me? Why didn't you rescue all the other children? Given that death would have been preferable to life, why didn't you let us die? WHERE WERE YOU? What kind of heartless, fucking bastard are you? How dare you leave me in the midst of such unmitigated horror.” I was furious with God. At times this was terrifying because I was scared God would let me go, drop me, walk away. Yet, I could also hear John encouraging me to be honest. Telling me the greatest gift we can give to God is our uncensored honesty. So internally I screamed in rage and fury. The honesty was freeing and liberating. The questions persisted. What kind of a loving God are you? Why didn't you come storming into the situation and rescue me? You don't look like a God of love to me. You look like an unconscionable bastard. You weren't there. In the midst of the horror God was absent. That was my truth, and as devastating as that was, the alternative would have been worse. Conventional wisdom claimed God was all-loving and all-powerful. That was absolute crap as far as I was concerned. It was impossible. I didn't believe either of those statements, let alone both. People told me God didn't interfere with free will. That line always made my skin crawl. It was a cop-out and something about the free will argument always felt deeply dishonest, as if people were trying to protect God rather than asking difficult questions and wrestling with them. Ritual abuse was most certainly not about my free will. Noel allowed me to stay in the struggle with these questions. In no way did he try to justify or defend God. My ultimate question was how do I stay believing in God, believing in the love of God? I fought to avoid the death of God within my soul. So did God. We were not going to let each other go.


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I did this with Woman-God. Having an image of God that was female reduced my fear of God and got around many of the illusions and tricks the cult had put in place regarding God. Obviously a feminine God had never entered their heads. So I was able to build a relationship with her free from brain-washing and guilt. I had a divided image of God. Anything that spoke of violence, power or coercion I viewed as male, while anything that was loving, nurturing or life-giving belonged to Woman-God. I had a strong fear reaction if anyone implied there were no secrets from God, that God would always shine a bright light into the hidden corners of our lives. This spoke to me of abuse, coercion and violation. Then one day a memory emerged that explained why the image of God's light was so terrifying. I was tied onto a contraption where they could slide me backwards and forwards for several metres. At one end it was dark and cold and at the other end there were huge, incandescent, theatre lights. My father dressed in black robes towered over me saying “I am Satan, you must honour and worship me. Do you choose the light ... or the dark?” As he said “the light” I was moved to the end of the contraption where the lights were so bright they hurt my eyes and so hot they burnt my skin. Then when he said “the dark” I was moved down to the other end where it was dark and cold. He moved me back and forward several times. When I was near the light he would say: “This is where God is, God is so bright he wants to burn you! God is so bright he can see into every corner of your being and he knows how bad and evil you are. God is disgusted by you.” When I was down the dark end he would tell me: “Satan is the God you should worship. I am Satan, I am ultimate evil and therefore worthy of all honour.” Then he would slide me back up to those blinding lights where he would ask, “Is this what you want? Do you want to be burnt because of your evil?” Back to the darkness. “This is where you belong, it's cool here. Is your skin burnt from those dreadful lights? This is where love is, this is where power is. Stay with me and I will share my power, give you power. You know I love you, I


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know you love me.” Backwards and forwards. God was good which was bad. Satan was bad which was good. I had to choose. I had to choose between God and my father. My choice. Except, of course, there was none. And always at the end of it my father's words “You don't remember. It didn't happen. You know that I love you.” Over and over again. Drugging me into dissociation, amnesia and sleep. I don't remember my age. Being made to choose evil and reaffirm my commitment to Satan reinforced how vile, evil and poisonous I was. I had deliberately chosen Satan over God. My father constantly reminded me of how unforgivable that was while at the same time telling me he was proud of me. Once I'd been brainwashed and programmed at this level I had no chance of finding God within the abuse. God was not there. There was no use asking, praying or searching because it was my fault God was not present. I raged at God for allowing this to happen, for not being big enough, strong enough, powerful enough to put a stop to it. If God really loved me he would have protected me. The fact that he didn't proved I was unlovable, therefore, I didn't deserve to live. As more memories came my feelings of filth increased. I was convinced I was putrid, vile and poisonous, and that my innermost core was utterly evil with nothing of light or goodness within me. At the same time, and seemingly contradictory to this, I was convinced of a small, delicate candle within that emitted a fragile light. This light became a central metaphor for my healing. Often when the filth and darkness overwhelmed me I would physically light a candle so I had an external representation of my fragile internal truth. Then I would simply sit and look at the candle. I spent years of my life focusing on those candles, both internal and external. My private psychotherapy practice was called the Healing Room and the logo was a small candle in a partly opened doorway with the words “discovering the light within” underneath. I still have a reaction if people try to tell me that God shines his


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light into every corner of my life. It is not one of fear but frustration with images of God I see as unhelpful. I am convinced that for me God will always issue gentle invitations for me to work with her. She never speaks to me in ways that have any hint of abuse, force or coercion. Rather I sense a wonderfully warm invitation to join her in acts of cocreation, working together to create the best out of any situation. Noel understood about that delicate candle and had a reverence for the shadow places of life and the growth that takes place there. He never tried to bring the blinding light of God's healing to me. Instead he encouraged me to stay in those shadow-lands and nurture the small seeds of growth and faith I found there. Noel supported me in viewing God as female and allowed me to discover who God was for me in whatever places I encountered her. I never felt I had to believe any prescribed articles of faith. God was about my truth and relationship. One session Noel suggested a ritual cleansing. I have long believed the Catholic sacrament of confession has healing power. Shame breeds in darkness and silence. Being able to name what we are ashamed of before God and another human being has the potential to evaporate that shame. With this in mind I told both God and Noel all I was most ashamed of: my despicable acts, my shameful emotions and my bodily reactions that were almost impossible to put into words, not only because of my shame but my deep sense of being betrayed by my body. Noel maintained eye contact throughout. He didn't look away revolted or sickened and once I was finished he anointed me with oil, proclaiming my forgiveness. It was like a spring cleaning, so much shit had piled up, this swept some of it away, making room for the next batch to arrive.

These days I take up my space in the world, stretch out and allow myself to be as big as I am. I can splash colour around and experiment with big, bold images, in clothes and in art. I no longer live my life terrified of people's disapproval, hardly daring to breathe. I can stride


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out into the world and explore the far edges of who I am. Life has become a joyous canvas inviting me to play and create.


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CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

I love food, all sorts of food, but especially I love “foreign food”. That's the catch-all phrase I use to describe any food that is not Tasmanian. Tasmanian food is fabulous; it is fresh, simple and uncomplicated. Sometimes I like complicated. I want variety and choice. There is nothing better than a banquet – Indian, Lebanese or Greek. A glorious abundance of spice, herbs, aroma, colour and taste. A plethora of dishes piled high with colour and shape: vegetables, meat and fish each with its own distinctive spice and sauce; its own story and tradition. Then there is the absolute delight of yum cha, all those wonderful wicker baskets trundling by with tasty morsels, steamed or fried, with or without chilli or soy sauce, friendly in their familiarity or slightly scary in their exotic difference. But each little package containing someone's bite-size piece of heaven. The question of multiple personalities continued to haunt me. I certainly felt there were far more voices and opinions than there had been before I remembered ritual abuse. My friend Annette had a way of trying things out for a little while to see if they worked for her or not. She called it doing a social experiment. I thought this was a great system because I wasn't actually committing to something, I was just acting as if. As I was driving to Annette's place contemplating the issue of multiplicity I decided to conduct my own social experiment. For a month I would act as if I had multiple personalities and see what difference that made. Internal cheering erupted and an enormous clamour. “At long last!” “Hurray!”


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“Now we might be heard.” “This has got to be better.” “I want to tell my story.” It was a full-on response and not one I had been expecting. It was the beginning of a wonderful and exhausting adventure. In some ways nothing was different but in other ways everything changed. These parts of me had always been there but now I was looking at them more closely and was prepared to acknowledge they existed, on their terms. Simple things like breakfast became complicated. There would be a fight over what to put on my toast. “I think I'll have Vegemite today.” “I don't like Vegemite.” “You had Vegemite yesterday.” “I want jam.” “Jam's yucky.” “You always get what you want, it's my turn and I want jam.” “Why do we always have to have toast, I want porridge.” “For fuck's sake!! Will the cast of thousands please shut the fuck up!” I read a lot about multiple personalities but it wasn't helpful as it didn't describe my reality or experience. The authors pathologised the condition and always referred to it as a disorder. I took great exception to that word. We did not view ourselves as suffering from a disorder. We saw it as a consequence of abuse and a creative way of surviving relentless, unmitigated horror. A strategy of resourcefulness, courage and a determination to survive. I always avoid referring to people as suffering from multiple personalities, as well. Greg, after a particularly torrid time dealing with all the different parts of me, felt that perhaps he was the one suffering from multiple personalities. Around the time I was coming to terms with the idea of multiplicity the psychiatric profession decided to rename multiplicity DID, dissociative identity disorder. I liked this nomenclature even less.


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It sounded clinical, cold and crazy. I knew then, as I know now, that these personalities had done a wonderful job of surviving. No matter what their task was, they had come into existence in the face of excruciating pain and overwhelming abuse. They were courageous, gutsy, fragile, broken, angry, suicidal, self-mutilating, terrified, aggressive, manipulative, addicted, frozen, sad, despairing, raging, surviving parts of me. What they were not was crazy; nor were they satanic. They had absolutely nothing to do with Satanic possession. I did not need an exorcism. They were an expression of my creativity and ability to survive. I grew to have enormous love and respect for them. Given the overwhelming relief in my internal world, I decided to stay with viewing myself as someone who had lots of different parts – I chose to call this multiplicity. Learning to live with a lot of distressed and damaged kids, and, as time went on, teenagers, was difficult. I found myself reading books on parenting and developmental stages in order to have some idea of how to parent them all. As much as was possible I was the overseer of all that went on. When another personality was to the fore I always had a witnessing presence, sometimes a strong one; at other times it was a tenuous connection. Susan was willing to go along with it once she realised looking at myself in terms of multiplicity was going to be useful. She formed separate relationships with lots of different parts of me. These parts would negotiate about who did what in therapy and how much time they would get. We developed rules. In spite of all the internal activity and the switching between different personalities I maintained a sense of self, a sense of an “I” who had always been there. It was this “I” who had to drive the car at all times and who was to enter and leave the therapy room. It was not OK to switch personalities without letting Susan know what was happening. Times with Susan and for therapy had to be assigned. Once different parts told their story they still wanted to be around.


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They were not going to just disappear again. They wanted to be in relationship with Susan, Woman-God, Greg and me. The Healing Room was invaluable. I would take all the different parts of me there and Woman-God was always available to help me look after them. It always surprised me that on my departure they might be painting or listening to a story and when I next checked in on them they were doing something different. The Healing Room had its own reality outside my conscious awareness. I also developed the habit of spending time at home allowing them to be out and about. They often wanted to write, or paint, or make cards, and they adored stickers and glitter. Half an hour of each therapy session was devoted to the Littlies as show and tell, for them to ask Susan questions or just to be held. In all of this Greg was supportive and compassionate. He became an expert at recognising the different parts of me. He didn't need to be told who was out because he would know them from their energy. He developed relationships with all of them. He would talk to them and admire their art work. He had no problems going on bush walks and having numerous conversations as the different parts of me popped in and out chatting about their lives or just wanting to spend time with him. During a session one of the Littlies mentioned she had her school case with her. “What have you got in there?” Susan asked. She opened it up. “I've got some sandwiches, a drink and an apple. And I've got some drawings, too.” Then in a whisper she said “Can I tell you what else's in here? It's a secret, and you've got to promise not to tell. Promise?” “I promise,” Susan solemnly replied. “Look, here, underneath the drawings. It's my soul, that's where I hid it.” “Why did you hide it?” “Because they wanted to kill it and I didn't think that was a very


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good thing for them to do, so I hid it in here.” “That was clever of you,” Susan said with a definite catch in her voice. “I thought so,” said the Littlie with pride. “What are you going to do with it now?” “I think maybe now it's safe enough to take it out of hiding and put it back inside me. What do you think?” “I think that would be a very good thing to do. I'm so glad you kept it safe.” The Littlie picked up her soul. It was beautiful, gold with all the intricacies of a snowflake. She held it up to her chest and felt it slip into that place deep, deep inside where it belonged. “That's better,” she said smiling up at Susan.

For me, holidays are about food. Travel is about immersing myself in the culinary delights of other cultures. Trying things that are unusual and being adventurous. Embracing the exotic. Trips to the mainland are about indulging in as many different kinds of food as is possible in the time available. The variety, colour, flavour and spices of food are great delights of my life. They bring joy to my day. What a gift food is.


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CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

The sand forms a barrier between the world of sea and land, yet also underpins the water. It's a negotiable barrier at times. But mostly it is overridden by the strength of the ocean. So many of my memories lived in the sand that was underneath the sea. Protected by its immensity. Submerged deep below. It was a world of not remembering. Of keeping things at bay. Making them go away. Underground, undersea. I learnt to inhabit those depths. Learnt that those memories could be dragged up from the deep; uncovered, released onto dry land. Sometimes they arrived like giant piles of seaweed or detritus littering the beach. They would cling tenaciously to the outcrop of rocks, refusing to accompany the tide as she travelled outwards. Other times they were pale, ornate, a single piece of driftwood, gently placed on unmarked sand. Potent in its aloneness and impact. I made sure that being in therapy did not affect my ability to work as a therapist. Susan and I decided that it was not appropriate for me to continue to see her for supervision as well as do such intensive therapy together. I found an excellent new supervisor and explained to her I was working on ritual abuse and I wanted to be scrupulous in making sure it didn't impact on my work. We discussed this in great detail and she agreed to join me in my vigilance. The majority of ritual abuse survivors I talked to said their abuse had started from birth. This matched my own memories. The earliest memory I had was of lying on an altar with a sword dangling above my heart that was held by a fine thread. There seemed to be a threat that


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the thread could break. Priests asked my father “Who brings this child to this place?” “I do,” replied my father. “Do you dedicate her to Satan to serve him and work for him and to bring about his purposes?” “I do,” he said. An animal was slaughtered. Its blood collected and used by the priests to mark me as a child of Satan. It was the equivalent of a Christian baptism. My fate had been sealed. I was six months old. The depth of these memories were the consequence of three hours of therapy a week over a five year period plus all the therapy I had done previously. Not only had I given myself permission to remember, I also actively prayed that God would bring to the surface whatever I needed to deal with. I was constantly aware of being in the process of remembering and healing. Therapy was a defrosting process. I was getting in touch with memories deep within ice and slowly and gently allowing them to thaw. The more memories, the more distinct, discrete parts of me wanted to tell their story. It was getting crowded inside my head. Imagine an old vase crazed with cracks. Most of the time I functioned as a whole vase, able to hold water and flowers, but sometimes all the different pieces of the vase separated and floated away from one another. I was no longer a vase. I was myriad isolated shards. It always amazed me how well I could operate even in the midst of this fragmentation. If the phone rang, a client calling because they were in distress, it took just seconds for all those pieces to realign, reassemble themselves and function as a vase once more. In wars people are tortured to make them talk but in ritual abuse victims are tortured to make sure they never talk. The most common way a cult will seek this silence is through programming. It is their attempt to maintain total control.


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I was programmed to believe I was poisonous. I can't remember it ever not being there. I believed that if you cut me I would ooze poison. That anyone who loved me or touched me would die. This was how I saw myself. I knew it to be true. To show me how poisonous I was they forced people to have intercourse with me. Sometimes it was with people who had been kind to me and other times with complete strangers. Either way their death was inevitable. Or my father, or someone else in the cult, made it appear that way. They'd had intimate contact with me. They'd touched my poison. They would die. That was what they trained me to believe. What I saw was a slow, gruesome death. I was forced to watch. It was my fault. Whether it was a complicated illusion or reality I have no way of knowing. At the time I was convinced it was real. When I remembered it, it felt real. Any time I did anything evil that the cult approved of, like hurting another child, I was told this was a good thing and would increase my core blackness. If I did something wrong, that was against the rules, like trusting, loving or questioning their authority, that was a bad thing and my core blackness would decrease. Things would be done to increase the level of my internal poison. Despair increased my core blackness. The more trapped, brutalised or betrayed I felt the deeper and darker the blackness became. It was hideously confusing because anything that felt bad and wrong was defined as evil, which was good. Anything I did that felt right or had a lightness to it they would also define as bad. Really bad. Not good bad. So I would be punished. Often when I felt I'd done something I was deeply ashamed of they would be proud of me. I hated that. If I did something they deemed worthy of punishment they had an hideous contraption made of metal that went around my neck and over my head. It was connected to another piece of metal that went


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around my chest and clamped onto my nipples. Punishment meant being suspended from the ceiling in this contraption. I can feel the clamp of metal and the excruciating pain. Breathe, keep breathing. Take your time. Come back to now. As I do I can hear the sound of snoring. Loud snoring. One small dog, curled up on a cushion on the lounge chair, sound asleep and making a lot of noise in the process. The other dog is struggling to breathe. He has asthma and he's been having a hard time of it of late. I'm always sympathetic, but as I feel the memory of steel clamped round my neck and the fear of strangulation, I go over to him and tell him I know just how awful it is to be unsure you'll be able to manage the next breath. He seems to appreciate the sympathy. The perpetrators of my abuse always aimed to overload my system. To bombard me with every kind of pain imaginable. I wouldn't just be raped, I would be raped by my father who would later say he loved me. It was rarely just one person. They would humiliate me in the process; blood, urine or shit would be smeared over me. They gave me drugs to dull my senses and befuddle my mind. They used electric shock to send pain surging through my body or further scramble my brain. They threatened me with extreme violence in order to ensure my compliance. I was told no one would or could help me. It was my fault this was happening. Every rape or piece of torture was further proof I was bad. So bad that no one would ever want to help me or rescue me. There was no escape, no point even thinking of escape. If I tried they would make me intensely sorry. They could make the physical pain continue for days. The psychological pain seemed endless. The spiritual pain was unspeakable. They would inflict pain or death on someone I cared about. They aimed to kill everything good within me. To create an internal world of total blackness and destroy hope, love, joy and faith. Those things were viewed as crimes. Secretly I continued to hold them dear.


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Their ultimate aim was the destruction of my soul. The perpetrators' stock in trade was terror, torture, humiliation, intimidation, confusion and violence. All of these were used to ensure my silence. They also used trickery and illusion. They implanted a magic time bomb and said if I ever even thought of telling or escaping the bomb would start to tick. I was drugged. Woke up to discover blood all over my chest. Was sore where the surgery had taken place. If I even began to think of telling or leaving fear would kick in. My heart would start to pound. Consciously or unconsciously, I knew this was the time bomb starting. I had to stop thinking immediately. Otherwise I would be blown to smithereens. It wasn't difficult to keep me, an already terrified child, in a constant state of dissociation using a combination of violence and illusion. I could not live with ongoing memories of terror, torture, abuse, murder, violence and hate. I dissociated to protect myself from going mad. I felt there was a smoke machine with putrid, grey smog billowing out. Poisoning my body. Hijacking my mind. I would be thinking clearly and well one minute and then the stultifying black smog would start to seep throughout my brain which would turn to mush. A dense fog would engulf me which took hours, if not days, to emerge from. When this happened I could not think straight or trust my body's knowing. Over the years I had developed a clear way of telling if something felt right for me or not. If I felt clean then it was good. If I felt murky it was wrong. I trusted this knowing, programming annihilated it. I would watch the clear and the good fade from view and be engulfed in a fog of impenetrable confusion. Believing that if I cut myself a foul, putrid, black ooze would exude from my veins, not blood. I felt like it penetrated and polluted the very core of me. Again and again I would struggle through a morass of poison and illness, writing it off as the usual consequences of working on memories. I would be vomiting and wonder what I had eaten that disagreed with me. I would feel poisoned to the core and just accept it as the truth of my life. I would hardly be able to crawl out of bed


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because of a migraine and would accept it as inevitable. I viewed these symptoms as the punishment for talking about ritual abuse. Over time I started to recognise them for what they were: programming. Naming them helped. Then I would try and fight them, would tell myself I was not bad or poisonous and people didn't die from loving me. I felt as if it was a battle I could never win. The best thing I could do was light a candle. That was all, just light a candle. Internally, externally, both. It was my symbol that my allegiance was now with God and with the light. Doing this kept me out of the battle and sooner or later the darkness would lift. I was made to believe that programming was inescapable. That's how I felt. But this was another of the cult's lies. Programming was not a death sentence and didn't always have the power to incapacitate. There were ways out. Recognising and naming it helped. Seeing it as a lie was liberating. Having friends and a therapist who were strongly on my side and who would offer me a lifeline to help me out of the pit that programming plunged me into was invaluable. Finding the truth and holding onto it worked. There were many times I talked through programming with Annette, worked out what was the lie, what was the hook that kept me dangling in their darkness. There were times when I would say over and over again: “It's not true, it's a lie, it's not true, I'm not what they say.” I learnt to not enter into the battle. Not surrender, but not fight either. To simply hold on to my beliefs. I had escaped the cult. I was free and they no longer had any power over me. More and more I believed God had hold of me. I could sense a safety and security that surrounded me. I was coming to believe that this was God's work I was doing and no way would she abandon me. No way could I fall back into their power. When I realised this I would light a candle.

How much of my life still lives at the bottom of the ocean? How much is embedded in the sand; trapped, submerged, unable to escape? What


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movements of tide, current, thaw or swell dislodge a secret, a memory, and free it so it may start its journey upward, into sunlight, air and consciousness?


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CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Some days are so beautiful they are like a caress. The gentle touch of sun warming my body and wind playfully ruffling my hair. There is a sensuousness to the smell of salt in my nose and its tang on my tongue as my body becomes one with the beauty that abounds. The sounds of ocean, trees and wind wrap themselves around me whispering a love song. How wonderful it is to have a body that can now recognise and enjoy these subtle delights. How grateful I am to Susan for showing me gentle touch. One of the ongoing battles Susan and I had was how much of my nurturing she should do and how much was my responsibility. I wanted her to do it all. She believed the purpose of her nurturing was to give me positive experience and structure that I could draw on to nurture myself. I did not want to take responsibility for myself. Many of my internal children were so damaged that making any contact with them was a long drawn-out process requiring patience and tentative, gentle offers of help and of touch. Touch was vital. Good, safe, loving, non-sexual touch. I have heard it argued that the problem with touch is it opens up a cavernous longing that can never be filled. For me it certainly opened up a cavernous longing. At times I wanted to swallow Susan whole to try and fill the emptiness. To this day there are times when the depth of my need and longing are devastating in their intensity. Is this because Susan used therapeutic touch or because there was a big hole left by the inadequacies of my parents' parenting? I would say the latter. Touch, and being held by Susan, complicated and intensified our relationship. I am grateful for Susan's willingness to navigate and


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contain all those added difficulties. My journey would have been nowhere near as rich without her touch. Nor would I have had the ability to create an image of God, Woman-God, who could generously shower me with love and nurture, if I did not have Susan's many years of re-parenting to fall back on. She showed me what good parenting was. To start with I could not help but create God in the image of my father. Susan provided an alternative. Going into a memory meant travelling back in time. I would use feelings, flashes of memory or body sensations as the thread to follow. This invariably led me to a place of intense pain. I would curl up on the mattress, hugging a cushion, rocking, as the images of a memory would start to run through my mind: Sometimes in fits and starts, sometimes a jumble, other times in a more or less co-ordinated sequence. Often I would get a sense of my age, of location, perhaps images of who was there, or the equipment that was being used. If I only had glimpses then the observer part of me would run ahead with the possibilities. They had specialised equipment for inflicting pain and for electric shocks. Seeing an altar was bad, as was seeing manacles. There were also drugs to induce confusion or hallucination. Memory work involved feeling the abuse as it happened. I would experience myself as a small child, overwhelmed by terror, watching enormous adults prepare to use both themselves and hideous equipment for the purpose of causing pain. There were always words that went with it. Words of blame, of accusation, of dogma and ritual. Words that were designed to confuse, bewilder or belittle and always to let me know that this was my fault. I asked for it; this was what I deserved. Then there were words of incantation and summoning power. Sonorous ritual phrases designed to invoke the power of Satan, to engulf us and subject us to his power. Words that reinforced subservience, obedience and humility. As I hunched over my pain I would whisper the emerging details to Susan trying to create a picture for her. The level of touch I wanted


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varied enormously. Sometime, while actually remembering, any kind of touch was unbearable. I felt I had been flayed alive and touch was excruciating. Other times I needed her to sit beside me and hold my hand giving me the strength to remember. Sometimes I longed to be held but was overwhelmed with terror and mistrust and couldn't or wouldn't ask Susan for what I needed. Again and again Susan would have to explain to me that not all touch was bad. She would never hurt me and didn't want anything from me except for me to be myself. Small parts of me would ask her if she was going to fuck me, beat me, electrocute me or harm me in some way. Over and over she would reassure me. As therapy progressed and more parts of me were healed it was possible for the unhealed parts to hear from those who now understood about safe and loving touch and gain some courage from them. It was a long, slow process. Memories could take weeks or months to fully emerge because to get them all at once would totally overload my system. Once I had done the memory work of a session Susan would hold me and together we would try and undo the damage. The small wounded child would say to Susan: “They said I was bad. They told me it was my fault. He shouldn't have done that, should he?” Susan would consistently, lovingly answer my questions and assure me I was not bad, it was not my fault, and no, under no circumstances whatsoever should he have done that. The unanswerable questions were “Why? What did I do to deserve that?” I accepted there were no satisfactory answers but constantly needed reassurance. To my amazement Susan not only allowed but encouraged me to ring her between sessions. She was generous in her love and support and understood my need for reassurance. She knew that the time between therapy sessions was an eternity for me. She would also leave messages on my answer machine so I could replay them, something I would do repeatedly, possibly even obsessively. There were times in my work with Susan I would lose sight of her care


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for me and would stop believing she was on my side. Convinced she was out to get me I would think what she was asking of me was unfair and unreasonable. This was usually a request that I accept responsibility for myself, ask for what I want, and stop waiting for the world to meet me on my terms. I battled over this regularly. Often Susan seemed to me to be the idealised parent, perfect in every way, but then I would change my view of her and would transform her into an evil monster and see her as someone determined to withhold love and care. At these times the battles between Susan and I were intense. She would point out to me that I was seeing her as either my Mum or Dad and I was being unreasonable. I would either rage at her that I was only responding to her provocation or, more likely, sink into a sullen, manipulative sulking in an effort to get her to be what I wanted. This never worked, but it was a process I repeated over and over again. Slowly I learnt that with Susan asking for what I wanted often meant I got it. Whereas with my parents letting them know what I wanted guaranteed it was the last thing on earth I would get. Susan always expected me to remember this difference. I also came to realise that entering into a battle with Susan was a sure indicator that a new memory was emerging. This was how my subconscious way avoided it. Nevertheless, there were times that even though I knew what I was doing I would continue the behaviour rather than face the memory. Susan's touch helped undo the harm of the past. Helped scrape off the abuse, confusion and ugliness and helped me find the strength to keep working on my memories. She consistently provided me with potent, powerful, positive permissions and new experiences of love, life and touch.

My seascape too, is a caress, a feast to the senses. It teaches me about essence, colour and texture. It vibrates with passion and beauty.


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How grateful I am that I no longer live in a body tensed against tenderness, walled in against life.


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CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

During winter, when it's cold and still, wood smoke settles over the town. People with respiratory conditions complain it is hard to breathe and my view is muted by the smoke haze. After a while my eyes start to sting and I long for a wind to come and blow through the town. When Liberty arrived she blew through my life. She was more than a breath of fresh air, she was a hurricane. One day a new personality emerged. She was angry, prickly, smart and sassy. She had been watching from the background for a while and she was both intrigued by the relationship the Littlies had with Susan and terrified of it. She was scathing in her attitude towards kindness and tenderness. She didn't believe anybody ever did anything for you without getting something in return and knew that in any relationship she ended up being fucked: metaphorically, physically or both. Her arrival upped the ante. She was a cult-wise teenager of thirteen. She was aggressive, bitter and despised any displays of weakness. Touch and being held were anathema to her. She had a wall around her that was as deep as it was high and she used language that made even me, a seasoned swearer, blush. She questioned and challenged everything and words like love made her want to vomit. She was a thinker and had a gutsy, honest determination. Once she got the hang of therapy she was tireless and courageous. She realised many of the things she had been taught about life, love, God, faith, sex and the cult were lies. So she determined to examine it all. She bombarded Susan with questions. What was normal? What was life like for other thirteen-year olds? Were they fucked by their Dads? What did they think? What would they do with their boyfriends? What


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did they think about God? What would they have been taught about their body? Sex? Boundaries? Limits? She wanted to know it all. She thought about who she was. What her purpose might be and how she could best fulfil it. She asked questions about evil, suffering and the cult and where God was in the midst of it all. She wanted to understand power, its uses and misuses. She began to understand that her demands to have a God every bit as powerful as the cult would mean believing in a God who misused power. She came to see that in the midst of all the shit and horror, right on the raw, festering edge of her life, was God. Waiting, smiling; right in the middle of hell. She was relentless and she was magnificent. For quite some time Susan, Greg and I called her the thirteen year-old, but as she started to mellow a little and some of her rough edges started to soften she decided she wanted a name. As she talked about it in a therapy session we saw a name coming towards us. It arrived as a gift: Liberty. This was a name that spoke of freedom from oppression and incarceration, the right to self-determination, to act according to one's will, the right and power to act, believe, or express oneself in a manner of one's own choosing, and immunity from the arbitrary exercise of authority. It was a fabulous name. Liberty formed a relationship with Greg. It was fascinating to watch. Greg was a shy, quiet man, intelligent but not a deep thinker. Liberty wanted to discuss her thoughts and ponderings with him. He was always a willing listener but this was not enough for Liberty, she wanted to know his opinion. If he didn't have one because he'd never thought about it she would challenge him. Liberty embraced the unexamined life is not worth living whereas Greg was a peace at any price kind of guy. With Liberty around there certainly wasn't any peace. She demanded the best out of everyone. What was fascinating was the effect she had on Greg. Questions or discussions I had tried to initiate with no luck, meeting closed doors, she ploughed into, demanding and getting thoughts and answers. She was a whirlwind that blew through


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all our lives. Liberty had questions about her sexual orientation. She hated sex with men. She felt more comfortable around women and she adored Susan. Did this mean she was a lesbian? She talked to Susan about it, asking how she could figure this out. Susan explained that in normal situations a young woman would have opportunities to explore her sexuality and to experiment. Liberty remembered an encounter with the daughter of a family friend which had been exploratory and enjoyable. She wanted to explore her sexuality. She asked both Susan and Greg if she could do so. The answer from both was “NO”. One of the consequences of working on memories was I had no interest in a sexual relationship at all. In my mind sex was linked with abuse, pain, humiliation and torture. Greg was unstintingly generous in providing me with non-sexual touch and support and he did his utmost to put as little sexual pressure on me as was possible. At times this became difficult for him and it was something I was unable to change. I had completely shut down that area of my life and had no interest in opening it back up again. This slowly impacted on our marriage. It was a complicated situation. I now shared my body with a lot of other personalities. Here was Liberty, in my body, but a different personality, who wanted to experiment sexually. We started seeing a couples' counsellor. Ritual abuse put many strains on our relationship and Greg kept giving support without talking to anyone about it or receiving support himself. Not only was he providing support for me in my healing work he was also encouraging me in my studies. At this time I was writing the thirtyeight essays that were part of my training in TA. Greg was always willing to proofread and edit them and gained a thorough grounding in TA himself. Liberty, more than me, got the whole idea of God being the opposite of evil and that meant God wasn't going to be huge and big and powerful. God wasn't going to match the intensity of the cult. Wasn't the blazing


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light that would burn her to a crisp, or violate by barging into the hidden corners of her soul. God wasn't omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient. Rather God was the still, small voice, the gentle breeze and the healing hand. God would enter my life only at my invitation. During a therapy session one day Liberty remembered, or imagined, herself in the presence of God before she was born. A being of infinite compassion was showing her the darkness of the world and the cult. She wasn't frightened but she could sense a deep grief, a mourning. God was heartbroken. Then she felt God asking her if she would be willing to be born into that family. A family that was surrounded by darkness and was part of a satanic cult. Liberty experienced God asking her to enter into their world in order to bring light. She agreed. After that she believed that every piece of therapy we did, every change we made, every time we managed to bring a little more light to our world it made a difference to the world back then. And it made a difference to the world now. Every bit of freedom we gained was freedom for other ritual abuse survivors as well. As we gained the courage to remember and face the horror it became a little bit easier for another survivor somewhere else to face their demons. She had a deep knowing of the interconnectedness healing could bring. This experience added to her feisty determination to face everything that had happened to her and to transform it. Liberty added to my life in so many ways. Her integrity and essence were intensely attractive. She could be rough as guts and seriously anarchic but she had an enormous heart and monumental courage. She was also more than capable of giving me a hard kick up the bum when I needed it. There were times when the ongoingness of therapy overwhelmed me and I would want to give up, or give in, or just stay stuck. In Liberty's opinion this was cowardice, laziness, wimping out or just plain stupid.


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Liberty and I struggled with believing Dad had done all those dreadful things. There must be some mistake. We didn't doubt they had happened, just that it was our father who had perpetrated them. With all the tenacity we could muster we hung onto our belief that Dad was a good Dad and, if we could only figure out the magical formula, everything would be OK and all would be well. We constantly, desperately longed for our father's love. We wanted to know what it would be like to see ourselves reflected in his eyes and see beauty and potential not ugliness, violence, hatred and rape. I hung on like that, waiting for my father's perfect love, for months and years. Stuck. Suffering. Within myself and at other people, trying to make them feel bad or make them responsible for easing my pain. I was not willing to move forward. I was trying to extort from the world what I believed I needed – a perfect childhood – back then. Liberty shared my longing but she moved through it and saw it far more clearly than me. Her advice: “Get over it. What you want is never going to happen, it's sheer fantasy and it's bullshit! Dad was an arsehole!!!! An evil, murdering, raping bastard!!!! Move on.” Liberty had the courage to face what needed to be faced, our utter powerlessness. The cold, hard truth was that I had absolutely no power. I could not escape from the cult, could not avoid them or programming. I had to witness every vile act they perpetrated. I could not protect myself. I had held on to a belief that much of what had happened was because of me, because I was bad, wrong, evil, poisonous and if only I could figure out a way to be good enough and to make Dad love me then everything would be OK. Not true. I could do nothing. I had absolutely no power. It was devastating to face that truth. There were ways that Liberty lightened the load for me. In other ways life was even harder. Watching Liberty's struggles was far more heartbreaking than watching my own. I was less equipped to offer support to Liberty than to the Littlies. They were grateful for the care I gave


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them. Liberty always demanded authenticity and integrity. Her intensity and passion were both a delight and a burden.

As the winds roared around the house last night I found myself holding my breath. Tense, scared, listening. Were the trees still standing? The roof still on? The fence upright? All things I feared every time the wind howled. Again and again the wind buffeted the house. Eddies of wind came through the gaps in the doorways, up through the floorboards and swept down the chimney, scampering across the floor, disturbing papers and ruffling the dogs' fur. One dog's nose kept twitching with delight as all sorts of exciting aromas arrived, delivered right to his nostrils. No fear of the storm for him, just delight in the moment.


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CHAPTER THIRTY

On days like today when the ocean is rough and the waves are pounding against the shore I'm glad there is more than the breakwall to keep them contained. I'm relieved there is some kind of limit, an invisible barricade so the ocean comes this far and no further. Today I am fearful that one day the ocean will disobey. It will decide to come calling, and may knock on my door, seeking entrance. Liberty struggled with self-harm and suicidality and if I had loved boundaries and needed to push them it was nothing to Liberty's amazement and wonder that such things existed. She thought they were fantastic and set about testing them with all the force of her personality. Liberty had to test every rule. It had to make sense to her otherwise she couldn't see any point in keeping it. “Because I said so”, which was my father's favourite reason, was intolerable, no kind of reason at all. Up until Liberty's arrival Susan and I didn't have any rules about alcohol. By this stage of my life I could have a couple of glasses of wine with dinner and they didn't set up any addictive cravings at all. However, a couple of glasses of wine with Liberty around meant I was a little less in control and failed in my duty of care. The call to suicide and self-harm continued. Sometimes this was just part of the general background noise, other times it was both deafening and exhausting. A constant call to darkness and oblivion. These thoughts permeated my life. It was because of their relentlessness that Susan and I ended up including a no alcohol part to my contract. This meant I had to take responsibility for myself. I


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couldn't use the excuse I'd had a couple of drinks therefore I couldn't help it. Susan had great compassion for my ongoing struggle with suicide. I imagine she could well understand why it so often appeared as solace and comfort. However, she was non-negotiable about me having a contract and was not prepared to work with me unless I was prepared to do at least 50% of the work and matched her commitment to keeping me alive. She understood there were times when the best I could manage was to reaffirm my contract on a sessional basis, and occasionally on a daily basis. This re-contracting was important. It kept my commitment to staying alive in the forefront of my mind and it reduced, but by no means eliminated, my internal battles around suicide. It also became one of the ways I knew Susan cared for me. My contract became a security blanket. One of the things I used to do in a session as a memory emerged was scratch and pound at my arms. Having no fingernails to speak of, I would rarely break skin but I used a deal of force and often Susan would tell me to stop. Somehow or other it was understood that this was behaviour Susan helped me be conscious of and control. She was rock-solid on her consequences around self-harm. Then, one day, she showed me that she was also able to be flexible when appropriate. Liberty was working on some memories with all the angst and heartbreak that involved. As the memories and feelings were surfacing the pain felt uncontainable. Liberty was rocking backwards and forwards not knowing how to hold it all. She started clawing and scratching at her arms. As usual Susan told her to stop. In the midst of the horror of emerging memories, somewhere at the corners of consciousness, Liberty decided to push the limits of this arm-clawing behaviour. So, as she continued to face the horror, she also continued to claw, scratch and pound her arms. When Susan was conscious of it she would tell her to stop. No skin was broken. But the next day there were enormous bruises on both arms. Oh shit!! What was this going to


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mean? At this stage I was seeing Susan three times a fortnight and sessions went for either one and a half hours or two hours. Dividing up the time was always fraught because everyone wanted as much time as possible. However, there was also a real understanding between us all of how important it was, so going overtime tended not to happen. In fact, in extreme cases one part would give up her precious time to allow someone else to have enough time to do important work. Considering the large range of personalities and needs there were remarkably few battles over this area of my life, far less than disputes about what was to go on my toast in the mornings. The week Liberty bruised her arms was a two-session week. We were meant to be going again in two days' time and the session was to be divided up between Liberty and the Littlies. Well!! The Littlies were furious!! “How dare you take away our time!!” “That is NOT fair.” First they read Liberty the riot act. Then me, for not supervising her and protecting us all from Liberty's bad and selfish behaviour. There is no fury like Littlies deprived of their needs. I arrived at the session with Liberty scared and sulking in the background and the Littlies full of indignation. Of course as soon as I sat down Susan noticed my arms and asked what I had done. Let's be honest here, I would have been bitterly disappointed if she hadn't. I told her it had happened during the previous session, Liberty's session. Of course Susan would not let me get away with saying it had happened or with putting all the blame on Liberty. Susan insisted I accept ultimate control and responsibility. “So why did you come?” asked Susan. The honest answer would have been “So I could watch you enforce the consequences of my contract” – but I didn't fully realise that. I explained I thought it was borderline and very tentatively said that she usually helped Liberty be aware of her self-harming behaviour within a session. I waited for the axe to fall. To be ordered home. Certainly to be told there was no way it was Susan's responsibility. Susan took time to think, then said she would accept some of the responsibility. Her decision: Liberty would miss out on her


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session but Susan would spend thirty minutes with the Littlies as negotiated, then I would leave. What the............? Who the..............? How the.............? I was gobsmacked. What was that!?!? How had she done that? It was the most amazing decision. The Littlies inundated her with questions. They couldn't believe that Liberty had been punished, their word, but they were getting what they needed. Susan admitted she should have been more aware of what Liberty was doing in the previous session and done something different, therefore a compromise was necessary. However, she was still upholding the rules, and closing the loophole against the future. We were all so impressed. We learnt that even non-negotiable rules can be negotiated in certain circumstances and have flexibility. Susan explained that to not negotiate would mean the rules had become rigid and that is when they are no longer loving and have the potential to do harm. We were awestruck. How did she know to do that? We could not have been more impressed had she done magic tricks. Liberty was over the moon. It was a transformative moment of therapy. There are moments in a lifetime that are defining. That was one of them. I knew about implacability, about black and white, about no compromise, but this, this was about justice. It showed compassion, compromise, the ability to look at all sides of a situation and to take everyone's needs into account. It was flexible, gentle, yet it had more strength than anything I had experienced at my parent's hands. The problem with transformative moments of therapy was I would try to recreate them. I loved limits but there was no therapeutic value in breaking my contract again and again just for the sake of breaking it. That took away valuable therapy time and it lost its potency. At the conclusion of one session Susan asked me to restate my contract. There were times doing so was difficult and required my drawing on my commitment to the process. This was one of those difficult times and I decided to push the boundaries and would not


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renew my contract. Once it became clear I meant it Susan asked me to hand over my car keys. She would not allow me to leave until I had renewed my contract. I handed over the keys. She was not going to stay and do battle with me. She told me to come to the office and pay for my session. After I had paid she again asked me to renew my contract, I said no. She suggested I go and sit for thirty minutes and think about what I was doing. I still would not renew my contract. I was stuck. I wanted the security of her sticking to the limits but it wasn't working. I wanted to give in but didn't know how. It felt like I had the upper hand but I sure as hell wasn't winning. Susan had taken my car keys and it was up to me when I would allow her to give them back. This was not a good situation. This was one of the few times Susan got angry. She told me I was playing games and she didn't like it. She was not going to stay and argue with me – she had a group to lead that night and she was going to prepare for it. Part of me wanted to push it to the point of still being there when her group turned up. But this wasn't feeling right, it didn't feel like containment and I knew if I won this I would lose something far bigger and more important. Once Susan came back I spat out my renewed contract at her with as much ungraciousness as I could muster. She said thank you, returned my keys and left. No hug that evening. As a result of that evening we came up with a new way of helping me feel contained. The mattress in the therapy room had many cushions on it. We started to experiment and to explore ways of placing the cushions around my body then Susan pushing on them or lying on them providing firm, consistent pressure. It took time, patience and the ability to stay in control if something we tried was triggering. However, because it was an experiment we embarked on together I don't recall ever losing control or going into flashback or regression for more than a second or two. Eventually, we discovered that if I lay on the mattress, with cushions against the wall, and me as close to the cushions as possible, and then big cushions the other side of me and on top of me, with Susan applying firm pressure, I would


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feel contained. I LOVED IT. I felt safe. My body soaked it up like a sponge. This was good touch, safe touch, love, containment with no violence and no sex. This was healing at a cellular level. Many years later I saw a TV programme on autism where they used a squeeze machine to give all over deep pressure as a way of comforting people with autism. I understood the need.

There have been times when the ocean hasn't kept to the rules. When it has come over the breakwall, or onto the grass beyond the sand. One time, when it had been raining for days, a dam upstream from the creek that runs through the park broke. Thousands of litres of water came downstream as the tide turned and water from the ocean was heading upstream. The tide was inexorably on its way in. It couldn't turn nor could it adapt and take the excess water away. I watched from my window as the water rose and spilt over the banks of the creek, swallowing up the trees and submerging the park and heading for the road. Gardens nearby disappeared underwater and fences were totally immersed and the water lapped just underneath balconies and back doors. A couple of metres higher and it would have come inside.


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CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

I'm scared by the thought of rising sea levels. Sometimes I imagine looking out my window, or walking along the foreshore, and seeing a tsunami heading towards me. When I watch documentaries on extreme weather I quake as I view towering waves battering small boats, or wreaking destruction on coastal towns and villages. I hate the thought of being so overwhelmed by water turned violent that breathing is impossible, escape inconceivable, with my body tossed about like so much flotsam and jetsam, eventually smashed against some indifferent shore. Some memories were like that. I feared I would be left smashed, battered, unable to recover. My father used to promise I would rise up through the ranks of the cult and become a high priestess, a promise often made to cult victims but rarely fulfilled. In order to be a priestess I had to be a woman and once a woman I was to be married to Satan. This was one of the biggest events within cult life and Dad was proud. I was dressed all in white with a veil, white shoes, the works. The women who helped me to prepare told me what an honour it was to marry Satan. This meant I was “chosen” and destined for greatness. Two men led me to the altar where I was made to lie down and was examined. My purity had to be established. I know, I would have thought that a bit tricky too – but they managed to brandish a blood soaked cloth around. Once that was done Satan, cloaked, hooded and masked in black, entered. I had to kneel before him and acknowledge I had been dedicated to him and baptised in his name as a child, then swear my continued allegiance to him. Swearing allegiance renounced


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all claims to purity. I was stripped and forced to kneel again vowing to serve him forever. He then raised me to my feet saying he chose me for his bride and promised I would share his power. As we exchanged marriage vows we presented our wrists to a priest holding a sharp knife. Blood was drawn, then our wrists were bound together, blood mingling. The marriage was consummated in full view of the many who had gathered. It was violent, humiliating and with an inordinate amount of blood. Once it was over I was forced to stand sore, naked, blood smeared and semen dripping while they placed a black cape around me. The role of Satan was played by my father. I became pregnant. Liberty held this memory. She was thirteen. I was ecstatic about being pregnant. I desperately wanted this baby. To have something, someone to love and protect. A baby would provide me with the strength and motivation to escape the cult. Dad promised I could keep the baby. Our baby. Our special secret. A sign of how much he loved me. This baby would be loved like no baby before or since and would be my salvation. I would protect it with my life. I was three months pregnant and once again I was the centre of attention. I was stripped. Tied to the altar. My legs were forced upwards and apart. Something cold and sharp was inserted into me. Cramps gripped me. I was scraped clean. The pain was excruciating with no anaesthetic. They aborted my baby. Then held high the foetus proclaiming it the spawn of Satan. They placed the foetus on the altar. My baby. The priest said words of invocation. My baby was then hacked into several pieces. The priest bought a piece of flesh over to me. I was forced to eat it. Then punished for vomiting. The hacked foetus was distributed to those assembled. It was a bizarre, cannibalistic perversion of the Christian mass. That was the death of hope.


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The effects on Liberty of remembering that abortion are impossible to describe. Liberty with all her vitality, passion and intensity. Both the pain and the guilt were overwhelming. She had longed for that child. Believed that it would provide her with the necessary catalyst for escape. Her inability to protect it to the point of birth caused great angst and diatribes of self-hatred and abuse. That she had been incapable of not participating in the cannibalistic Eucharist tore at her soul. Despair overtook her. I placed Liberty in the intensive care part of the Healing Room. She was like a burns victim with wounds over the majority of her body. She was in constant agony. Her remorse was endless. The pain relentless. The promise of suicide and self-mutilation held out the only hope of pain relief but Liberty didn't feel she deserved this modicum of comfort. She had not been able to protect her baby so she had no right to solace of any kind. She withdrew from the world and from therapy. She curled into a ball of comatose pain and started to disappear. She wrote:

Shadows on my soul Loss of hope loss of love loss of trust Shadows on my soul. Death by abandonment Death through despair Death through their poison Vile and putrid and poison? I think not


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This darkness This comatose me Is not made up of their evil but is a consequence of their evil I think perhaps she is solid pain I think she may be utter despair I think maybe she is deeper than that She is loss of hope And that is the greatest call to death of all And yet now I take a risk I reveal her presence Comatose Poisoned Almost dead This may well be her final call. I constantly longed for total oblivion. For a long time she kept profoundly still, hardly daring to breathe, not wanting to risk disturbing the wounds. It was months before Liberty could start to express her pain. Then her broken-hearted sobs wracked her body and were almost too much to bear. And then she got angry, and in touch with white-hot fury: flaming, blazing, intense and pure. Rage poured out of every pore of her body. Eventually Liberty was able to speak to the aborted foetus in a piece of therapeutic work. Susan encouraged her to see the foetus in front of her, represented by a cushion, and to talk to it. Liberty sat on the mattress and haltingly began to put words to her pain, her sorrow, her remorse. “I'm so sorry. I'm so, so sorry. I wanted you so much. I would have loved you, but I couldn't protect you. I couldn't keep you safe. I tried, please believe that I tried.” Tears poured down her face. “Oh God!! This


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hurts so much!. I wanted to protect you. I would have done anything, everything I could to get you out. To keep you safe. To let you be born. To have a good life. I used to imagine what it would be like to care for you and carry you. Look after you. I imagined playing with you and watching you grow up. I always knew you would be beautiful...and special. I'm so sorry you didn't get to be born. So sorry you didn't get to live your life and be who you were meant to be. I would have loved you, encouraged you, shared in your dreams and hopes.” Liberty fell silent. Then: “Her name is Kelly Kate. I would have called her that.” “That's a beautiful name,” said Susan softly. “Does she have anything she wants to say to you?” Liberty took some time to become Kelly Kate and to hear what she wanted to say. “It was not your fault. You couldn't save me. You could never win against them,” said Kelly Kate. “Truly, it was not your fault.” At that Liberty grabbed the cushion representing her lost child and hugged it to her, sobbing. As she reached out to Susan for support she saw Susan's face was streaked with tears. Susan held Liberty as she sobbed and rocked, holding Kelly Kate, saying over and over again “I am so sorry, I am so, so sorry”. Susan said those same words to Liberty, over and over again. Then there was nothing left but complete exhaustion. Liberty lay down still holding Kelly Kate. Susan placed a blanket over her and left her to sleep for a while. That night Susan rang me at home to see how I was. Always a precious occasion. For months Liberty carried Kelly Kate around with her pouring out all the love she had stored up from so long ago.

I have been avoiding writing this for days. I am hardly breathing. Always with this memory comes the question is this why I chose not to have children? Is this the reason I never felt it possible? And still I do not have the courage to answer the question. That would unleash a tsunami of grief I could not bear. Tears are pouring down my face. My heart aches and I feel so


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desperately sad. Sad for the me I was back then, but also for the childless me now. Grief, loss, regret break over me like the towering waves of the ocean as once again I face this tragedy. My father's actions were unconscionable. On top of that my body betrayed me. I was not able to hold on to what I wanted most in all the world. Had not been strong enough to protect this foetus. To stand up to them. To stop them. I did not have the strength or ability to resist their bizarre and gruesome rituals. Liberty decided she hated being a woman. Womanhood was frightening and way too vulnerable. There were a multitude of reasons for me hating sex. One of the fundamental ones was not trusting my body. I did not trust it to not get pregnant and, if pregnant, to complete the pregnancy. While intercourse itself held many hideous memories of barbarism and brutality and all the attendant pain and shame, these things paled into insignificance compared to the utter devastation of losing a desperately wanted child who was to provide the means of escape and who was to lead us into a new life. In the middle of the desolation and devastation of being a victim of ritual abuse, I became a survivor. I recognised the amazing gifts inherent in this hell. Admiration and self-respect started to bloom in me as I discovered my tenacity and courage. Forgiveness of myself blossomed because so much of the mess that had been my life now made sense. If I had survived ritual abuse and was healing from it then I knew I could survive anything else that life dished up. In the midst of my healing was also the ongoing reality of everyday life. By now I had completed my TA essays. The oral exams were held in Adelaide as part of an international conference. To add to the stress of sitting my exams I also agreed to present a workshop at the conference on using TA with adult survivors of childhood sexual assault. The only hint that I wasn't like any other person sitting their


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exams was I took a small teddy bear into the exam room with me; his name was Morgan. I introduced him to the examination panel and explained that he was an invaluable part of my work and he was there as my support bear. He did a wonderful job and I passed with flying colours. After that I presented my workshop and enjoyed the conference, then Greg and I had a week's well-deserved holiday in Adelaide. Several months after remembering the abortion, Liberty decided she needed to do something symbolic to break the power of the allegiance she had sworn to Satan. Because rituals are powerful in their symbolism and they use the body, mind and senses I knew we had to do something embodied, symbolic and potent. I wanted to deal with the rituals that had bound me to Satan: the baptism, swearing allegiance at age five, and the marriage. Susan was to be my witness. I had three ribbons: black, red and brown. I wrapped them around my wrists and tied them together saying: “This black ribbon represents Satan, evil, lies, death and hate. It represents all the evil I have done in the name of Satan and because of my allegiance to Satan. I have committed acts of violence, hatred and death. I have done things I am unspeakably ashamed of and have added to the evil of this world. “This red ribbon represents blood, sex, murder and dominating power. Because of my allegiance to Satan and my involvement in ritual abuse I have participated in every kind of violent sexual act imaginable. I have sought power over people in order to do them harm and I have been involved in the murder of both humans and animals. I have used sex for power and manipulation. “This brown ribbon represents my parents and how I have been bound to them. How I have sought their love and approval and obeyed their commands. Living the life they have ordained for me.” I then cut the ribbons and unbound my wrists saying: “I renounce Satan, evil and dominating power. I renounce my allegiance to Satan and sever all connections with him and his realm. From here on I


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choose peace over violence, love over hate, freedom over coercion and abuse. I no longer seek domination and control and will do my best to cause no harm to humans or animals. I sever all ties with my parents, and will no longer follow in their footsteps or accept their values.” I asked Woman-God to be the new source of power in my life. I placed three new ribbons in front of me: white for truth, yellow for light and gold for love. I acknowledged that these were the ideals I wanted to base my life on. Susan offered each ribbon to me, expanding on what they meant. I accepted and held each ribbon. Then to symbolise the change in allegiance and the baptism into a new life Susan made a sign of a heart on me and also gave me a magnificent yellow rose. I bought myself a Russian wedding ring, with its three bands of differently coloured gold, to represent my change in allegiance. I felt clean. Using my body to claim my freedom was powerful as was using symbols with all their potency as a way of severing the old and embracing the new. I had closed the door on the power of the past and now there was a new beginning.

God glimmers in the most unexpected places. In raging storms drops of water are flung into the air, suspended in time, caught by light, flash like diamonds and join the surging swell again. In the midst of utter heartbreak and despair moments of love and courage break in, shine for awhile, give strength and hope and then fall away. In the face of utter evil and destruction life continues, injured, shattered, unsound. Yet, somehow, the broken parts manage to reach out, connect and interlink in order to form a fragile, damaged whole that tentatively holds itself together and creates new life.


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CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

Today the ocean is being demure: calm, gentle waves softly lapping at the shore. I am not fooled. I am always aware of the enormous energy that swells and pounds not far from my window. I know Bass Strait can become a wild and stormy stretch of water. It has claimed numerous lives, and many boats; some have vanished without a trace. It is considered far more dangerous than the English Channel. Unexpected, life-threatening and wild. That was how I viewed the Vengeful One's entry into my life. The pull towards suicide and self-mutilation fluctuated in its intensity. There were times when my constant suicidal thoughts were nothing more than boring, constant, nagging companions, that I wished would go away, but basically ignored. Other times their insistence and intensity were exhausting. To begin with there was a logical thought progression. “This work is difficult and exhausting. I'm remembering all sorts of dreadful, awful things. How long is it going to take to come out the other side? I'm sick to death of this. I feel bad, evil and poisonous. I feel so sick all the time. There is no hope. It's never going to get any better. I'm going to keep remembering this horror for the rest of my life. I can't stand this any more. Please make it stop. No one is ever going to believe me or love me or care about me. I want to die. Death would be so much easier than life. Why don't I kill myself?” But on a bad day I could get from “this is really hard” to “I'm unlovable, I might just as well be dead” in about three seconds flat. Sometimes this tore away at me but other times it was unutterably boring. Yes, boring. There is something wearying and dreary about hearing a voice inside your head say the


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same thing over and over again. It's like a nagging child. “Are we there yet? Are we there yet? I want, I want, I want” but this was “die, die, die”. There were days when my response to suicide was “you're not getting it, now piss off”. Other days I longed for death. Sometimes I could make contracts with Susan about my safety for a month or more, it was a routine thing that took hardly any energy at all. Other times it was more difficult and occasionally it felt impossible when I couldn't even manage a contract from one session to the next. Then we would break it down to every couple of days and I would ring Susan to restate my contract and to get the support I needed to stay alive and keep going. These were scary times and Susan was generous in her love and support. Then came a time when my struggle to make a contract came from a different place. I was angry and rebellious, not scared and little. I couldn't understand what was going on. Why had it suddenly got this difficult. What was happening? I longed to use drugs again. I felt I had a volcano inside me that wanted to erupt with fury and hate. I started to hear a voice. A loud, angry, aggressive voice, full of strength and hate. I did my best to push it down. To not listen. I would have flashes where my body surged with a wild, uncontrollable, evil power that soared over everyone and everything and scared me to death. I started to hear my mother's voice: “Use, abuse, go crazy, die.” And glimpsed a room in a house we had lived in. It was like a pantry and was filled with bottles of insects, snakes, spiders; a plethora of creepy, crawly, scary things. I saw myself lying strapped, naked, spread eagled on a table as my mother placed these things all over my body: they crawled over my face, into my nose and ears, through my hair, everywhere. My whole body shrank, cringing in disgust and revulsion. I wanted to scream in terror. My mother kept telling me I was no good and would amount to nothing. I was a slut and a whore and would end my days as a cheap, pathetic prostitute selling my body for sex just to get enough money to


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buy drugs, but ultimately my fate was insanity and death. Over and over again she told me this. “Use, abuse, go crazy, die” spilled from her lips and inserted itself as a feedback loop inside my brain. When she had finished she untied me and threw my clothes at me and told me to get out of her sight. I disgusted her so much she wanted to vomit. Often my response to memories was to collapse into sadness or to feel overwhelmed by the awfulness of it all. I would curl in on myself and succumb to an agony of self-pity and loathing. Not this time. There were flashes of fury and hate and of power that towered over my mother. I was capable of murder and would delight in it. These feelings terrified me. I begged God to take the memory away, then begged for the courage to face it. I recognised these flashes as the beginning of memories and I knew a new part of me was about to emerge. I tried a tentative “Who are you?” I was greeted with “I am the Vengeful One, I am full of power and hate and you, you are despicable. You are worthless scum. I despise you.” Oh great!! “Nice to meet you, too.” I knew this wasn't going to be good. Not that memories ever were but this one was showing all the signs of being a real doozy. The Vengeful One was terrifying. She exploded into my internal world using stand-over, bullying tactics. She despised everyone and was full of power and hate. She reeked of sex. She reminded me of the drunken rebirthing session all those years ago when I'd experienced myself full of intoxicating power. One of the promises my father always made was that I would follow in his footsteps. Just as he was a high priest I would become a priestess, then a high priestess and would have the same kind of power he had. I would no longer be the victim. I would have power to kill, hurt and abuse. He told me how wonderful this power was, how exciting, gratifying and how it made sex fantastic. He explained that the orgasm that comes with murder is greater than any other.


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I didn't want to know. One of the consequences of my marriage to Satan was they now considered me an adult. Time for me to be initiated into adult rites, the rites of a priestess. It was time for me to have power. Becoming a priestess moved me from being a victim to becoming a perpetrator. That sentence takes my breath away. Do I want you to know that? The training was to continue my desensitisation to murder and abuse. It was meant to make me enjoy it and be stimulated by it. I hated it, but resistance was futile. The consequences were violent in the extreme. There was no way out. Now I was a woman I was to be honoured. They told me many people would love to have the position of power being bestowed upon me. Besides, my father would not only be embarrassed if I didn't embrace this role, he would be punished. I could not, would not, let him down. Susan and Greg were amazed at how much I hated my mother and how, in the face of memory after memory, I would stand up for my father and say he was my good Dad, he loved me and I loved him. I clung to this love. Obviously his oft repeated mantra of “You don't remember. It didn't happen. You know that I love you,” worked. I knew that he loved me. In my defence, my everyday memories - that other world I inhabited that was not ritual abuse - contained memories of sitting up late at night having philosophical conversations with my father. It was Dad who listened to me and was interested in my life and sometimes helped me with my homework. What feeble crumbs these were, and how hungrily I gulped them down. I allowed the Vengeful One's memories to emerge. Her power was awesome. She was clothed in a black cape at the altar. Full of pride, she was standing by it rather than lying on it. Her energy filled the


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room. Sexual excitement, lust and maniacal power. Tied to the altar was a naked child. Her task was to inflict pain and humiliation. Systematically and tortuously. Enjoyment was compulsory. Susan tried to reach out to her with compassion. Her care was slapped away with disdain and treated as soft, mushy and pathetic. She didn't need love. She didn't need understanding. All she wanted was power. I was terrified of her. Greg avoided her at all costs. Susan did her best to make contact but without much success. It was Annette who formed a relationship with her and called her “Venge”. No one else would have dared. I always thought she was twenty-seven. In my mind she was a towering adult presence. I now realise she would have been somewhere between thirteen and fourteen. She had no choice. I did not want to acknowledge her as a part of me. I hated what she stood for and how I felt when she was around. Part of me was seduced by her and wanted that power, thrilled to it, responded, lit up with it. Part of me loved being the perpetrator because it meant I caused the pain. I was in control and no one could get me. I was no longer the victim. I was exhilarated by her power roaring through my body and would gulp in air, feeling alive, every cell in my body pulsating with sexual energy. I felt invincible, and it felt fantastic. The cloak she wrapped around herself was made up of sexual power and my father's lusts. It was imbued with violence and manipulation and could extinguish light and love with the merest flick. Around her vulnerability was a crime, love was treason – the penalty: death. Often in the middle of a memory I would curl completely in on myself, totally consumed by my pain. Other times I would look out the window of the counselling room and disappear into the beauty of the bush outside. Perhaps a blue-winged butterfly would catch my attention, or a red-breasted robin would hop from bush to shrub. Lizards would scurry past and ants would be involved in creating a world a million light-years from mine. I would visit their world for a moment, seeking


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solace, respite and strength. Then, taking a deep breath or uttering a quick prayer, I would return to my world of horror. Coming to terms with the Vengeful One was hard work. I was in shock for days or weeks and wandered around in a daze with nothing much getting out or coming in, except of course at work. Somehow, in the midst of it all, I kept working. The memory of being a perpetrator tore me to shreds. I had taken the moral high ground as a victim of abuse; at least I had never harmed others deliberately. Now, not only was I remembering having abused and killed others, I was remembering the sheer ecstasy of power and the delight of sexual gratification I had felt in the process.

I'm breathing hard. Panting. My body is tingling and my head swirling from going back to that place. Her power was immense. I want to vomit. Power is such a seductive force. I can hear an echo of her in the corner of my mind. She is telling me what a fool I am. How ridiculous to be living in a small country town. How absurd to be satisfied with this life. She tells me I could harness her power, change my life, become successful, high-powered, important. Move back to the city. Into the heartbeat of the world. I admit there is something tempting in the intensity of her energy. She was always the seductress. I love the sense of passion I get from her. But move back to the city? No. No temptation there. The split between myself and the Vengeful One was huge. I felt enormous grief over these memories. I felt so sad and lost; a deep, deep-down-in-my-depths sadness. Sometimes I would wake up in the morning and hear crying. It was the Littlies, upset, distressed. If I didn't have to get up and go to work I would lay in bed for hours, holding a pillow, holding a child, rocking them, crooning, promising them it would be all right. I wasn't sure how it was going to be all right but I


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was determined to do my best to shelter the Littlies from the Vengeful One. I called her a murderer, whore and slut. But then would ask myself to what extent her stuff was my own. I kept trying to keep it in a separate world. My self-hatred was already intense without adding this to it. How could I live with myself owning those truths? I believed that knowing the truth was the way to freedom and that liberation lay in facing the truth and accepting each and every part. This time I struggled. Where was the freedom in accepting I had murdered and abused? Which way was redemption? Through pain? Hadn't anyone come up with an alternate route yet? This was a call to face the depths of me. Prayer was always an essential part of my memory work. Prayers of despair, disgust, desolation. Prayers asking for strength and perseverance. I felt the call to total honesty, to face myself and God without pretence. I could not have done it without Annette. She saw very little difference between Liberty and the Vengeful One, for her it was the obvious progression. She also held on to the fact the Vengeful One was thirteen or fourteen, not an adult, not responsible, incapable of standing up to the cult and refusing. Annette had a great line she'd read somewhere “Never trust anyone who hasn't come to terms with their inner-murderer.” She believed it was only through facing the murderous parts of ourselves that we could take complete responsibility for them. It is nothing less than total honesty that transforms the violence within. Between God, Annette and Liberty I found the courage to face the truth. What we had to face was horrendous. The Vengeful One used her immense power to manipulate, humiliate, degrade, debase and torture children. The cult forced her to rape and humiliate grown men. It felt as if she had the power to dominate the world. She felt inviolate, invincible, unassailable. She had the power of Satan and all evil at her beck and call. I resisted this knowledge every step of the way and I was deeply


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suicidal. Writing this even now is difficult. I have spent days sitting at the computer looking out into space, eking out a word here and there and then seeking refuge in mindless computer games. I haven't remembered this stuff in a long time. I don't want to remember it now. Do I want to tell the world I have done such things? Will I dare to show this to anybody? To publish? In my real name? Could I stand the thought of friends reading this? Why on earth am I doing this to myself? Because I believe in the power of truth, and I want to reach out to the reader who is going through their version of this hell. Or any other hell that my truth may lighten. The hell continued. For the first time I was dealing with a part of me that revelled in sex and it was disgusting. Susan tried to explain to me that having a sexual response was understandable. I didn't want to hear it. The Vengeful One's sexuality was repugnant. One day in exasperation Susan exclaimed “for goodness sake, she has murdered people, that is far worse!” I looked at her in utter astonishment and said “Sex is worse than murder.” Susan was stunned by this response. When I talked to a friend, a ritual abuse survivor, her response was “Yes, absolutely!! Sex is far worse than murder.” I wrote at the time:

Sex is worse than murder!! What could possibly be going on that I won't make a contract? That I actively want to die? That I long for – yearn for – the oblivion of drugs? Move towards insanity as the preferred choice? What could possibly be so bad? That I would choose - “use, abuse, go crazy, die”? Instead of continue my commitment to healing?


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What could it possibly be? SEX!!! Oh my God!! Everything inside me curls up in horror Everything inside me screams out NO!! Is revolted Horrified Repulsed Disgusted Nauseated Sickened Repelled Everything inside me curls into a tight little ball And screams NO!! NO!! a million times NO!! I will not do it I will never own it I will not turn it around I will not learn to like it, enjoy it, see it as part of love Part of spirituality Some sacred gift I will not do it I refuse And I will cut my body into a million pieces before I let it respond I will slice myself Kill myself Obliterate myself Anything Everything Rather than own sex


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Face sex Have sex I will not do it I will not face it I will not look at it I will not feel it Sex as good Sex as enjoyment Sex as pleasure or love I would far, far rather die This is something utterly, completely, devastatingly repulsive “This is an invitation to learn about sex.” NO WAY But this voice says I have to This voice says it is part of my healing Part of growth Part of being alive and human This voice says it is the next step along the way NO – GIVE ME DEATH A THOUSAND TIMES OVER GIVE ME DEATH When I took the above piece of writing to therapy Susan was shocked at the intensity of it. She would often try to tell me that sex could be a beautiful, nurturing, sacred, loving expression between two people. I would ask her questions about that, so did Liberty, but we could never believe her answers, not in our hearts. For us sex was all about abuse, degradation, violation and horror. I imagine many victims of ritual abuse if given the choice between sex or death would choose death. It was a choice I had tried to make many times, either at my own hands or to force the cult to kill me. It


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never happened. It would have been a release. Sex on the other hand went on and on and on. Sex was the worst of all the tortures because it happened inside the body as well as outside. It always seemed to violate the soul. So often they would force my body to betray itself increasing my level of humiliation and shame. Sex or murder? Surely murder was kinder than sex. In the midst of dealing with all this my work situation changed. The sexual assault agency where I worked had a policy of working with both adult survivors and child victims of sexual assault. My counselling gifts were with adults. My work with children was adequate but certainly not great. Because of inadequate funding for sexual assault agencies many services were struggling with long waiting lists. People were having to wait for months before being seen. This put stress on everyone; staff and management had numerous meetings trying to decide how best to deal with the problem. The final decision was made that it was more appropriate and efficient to see children who were recent victims of assault than to work with adults. Working with adults often took many months or years. Working with children could bring about change more quickly and prevented many of the ongoing problems that arose from not having counselling soon after the abuse became known. While I understood the decision I couldn't work under those circumstances. My passion and my gift was for adults. I wanted to provide long-term counselling for adults who had been abused as children. I started a private practice called The Healing Room; the name was an external honouring of my inner reality. I seemed to attract people who were survivors of extreme abuse and became an expert at spotting a ritual abuse survivor within the first few minutes of an initial interview. These people I always referred on. I could not do my own work and have ritual abuse clients at the same time. Fortunately, I knew someone I respected to whom I could refer clients. As for the Vengeful One, she was full of a hatred that was both white


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hot and ice cold. Millimetre by millimetre she entered into the therapeutic process and started to form a relationship with me. During my years in therapy there were many, many times I did anger work and the Vengeful One was the only part of me that did hate work. Within her was a hatred I had never experienced before, hatred of my parents, the cult and of all that she had been forced to do. Hatred poured out of every part of her body. There were no words she could use, all she could do was make guttural sounds and scream, scream and scream. She pushed every skerrick of hatred out of my body in whatever way came to mind. She kicked, hit, thumped, pounded, bit and ripped. At the end of the session I was exhausted, hoarse and empty. Susan commented that she had never known hatred to be so clean. There was nothing hidden or shameful about it. I had consciously asked God to be present. Everything I said was done knowing God was listening. There was no judgement, only release and relief. Underneath the hate was remorse and shame. The Vengeful One was consumed with guilt. The barriers between us started to fade as together we remembered all she had done. The very few people I dared talk to about it constantly told me it was not my fault, to not blame myself, or her. I had been trained into this behaviour. Brainwashed. Coerced. I had no choice. Every time someone said this I felt bad, wrong and the Vengeful One got angry. This wasn't what we needed to hear. It was wrong, terribly, dreadfully wrong. I continued to berate myself. Susan constantly assured me it was not my fault, that I wasn't bad. My distress mounted. I felt my safe world, the world I considered reality, tilting out of shape. I was begging Susan to see what I had done as bad, I couldn't stand it that she kept saying it was OK. IT WAS NOT OK. And then she got it. In her firmest voice, the one she used for maintaining boundaries, she told me that what I had done was bad. It was dreadfully bad. It was wrong. It was immoral and it was illegal.


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Thank goodness. I heaved an enormous sigh of relief. That's what I thought. It's what I thought God thought, but desperately needed someone with authority to say. The cult thought it was OK. I knew it wasn't. But when others kept saying it was not my fault, I heard them tell me what I had done was OK. It took me back to never knowing if bad was good or bad. It messed with my mind, my reality. Once Susan told me how bad and wrong these things were my reality was confirmed and I could start to accept they were not my fault. This work had a powerful effect on the Vengeful One. It allowed her to embrace her truth. She no longer had to be a murderous, adult presence. She became the teenager she really was. Annette had always known she was just an older version of Liberty. It took me a long time to realise that but once I did my terror changed to love and admiration. The Vengeful One changed her name to Verity and learnt to speak truth to power. She was another ally in my healing and a further step in the amazing transformation that kept taking place as the horror of the past was opened up to the gentle light of Woman-God's healing power. She was another of the beautiful jewels I unearthed along the way.

It has been raining all day but as I drove home late this afternoon the sun unexpectedly burst through the layers of clouds on the horizon. The sea became the colour of a good merlot. The clouds sought to outdo each other in hue and intensity. In shades of red, orange, grey and black that shouldn't be seen in a sky but strode across the horizon in proud glory, spraying colour everywhere. The sky went every shade of blue imaginable from the palest, wispy blue to an intense royal that clashed against the clouds and the wine dark sea. It was so breathtakingly beautiful I drove through town to a lookout so I could stop and gape and wonder. It was inconceivable that Bass Strait could ever cause harm.


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CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

The constant pounding of waves changes the landscape. The power of the water alters the shape and texture of the beach daily. Some days it is flat, unmarked sand, others days there are rocks, seaweed, pebbles and shells scattered all over in wild disarray. One day a large tree branch sat in the middle of the sand. Even though it was bereft of leaves it had not metamorphosed into driftwood, and looked incongruous against its aquatic backdrop. Sometimes the sand piles high with sharp, steep edges dropping down to where new, temporary river beds cut through. Stand on the edge at your peril. There are days when the sand is firm to walk on, other days when it looks safe and hard, but it turns treacherous underfoot, as it resembles quicksand, greedily sucking my unsuspecting feet into its depths. It was not often that ritual abuse memories revealed events that had happened at home. Usually the abuse took place in set-aside venues. However, as we worked with Verity, once again my mother's voice could be heard telling me to “use, abuse, go crazy, die” along with her assurance I would end up as nothing but a low-class whore. Then one day memories came that I couldn't get clear. Verity was towering over men, treating them with utter contempt but with great sexual prowess. Mingled with this memory were images of me in my bedroom at home with various family friends coming into my room and having sex with me. My mother was collecting money for my services as they left. My mother prostituted me! Bloody hell, is there no end to this horror?! This was not the worst memory, not by a long shot but it was disturbing. I had come so close to living the life my mother had set out for me. The way to win my mother's love and approval, the way to get


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her to be proud of me, was to use drugs, go crazy and be a whore. This was a lie. The reason I knew it was a lie was because I had done everything she had said. I had sold myself a thousand times over in a million different ways. Ended up in hospital with tubes up my nose and down my throat. Gone to the brink of insanity again and again. Once I got to the precipice of sanity her love was meant to bring me back. Huh!!! Once I got to that edge it was me who had taken care of myself and got me into Ward One. All my mother had done was deny I was even in a psychiatric institution. And still she didn't love me. Still she wasn't proud of me. Did I really do that? Did I really try and win my mother's love that way? Yes. I did. And I've done it again and again since then. Turned myself inside out and back to front in order to be looked after, loved, cared for. Recreated myself in whatever image I thought would bring me love. I even did it when I first moved to Tasmania. It didn't work then either. As I was dealing with these memories I was also reading Edwina Gateley's “A Warm, Moist, Salty God”. Great title. It took me away from images of an all-powerful God. Reading Gateley's experience of God as mother I wept. She talked about a God who cared, who cared about her hurting children, responded to them, embraced and healed their wounds. As a mother. With a heart overflowing with love. Who could do nothing other than love, with generosity, intensity, passion. This was Woman-God, the God I experienced, but it was the first time I had read anyone else talk of God in this way. This God seemed bigger than my experiences of her so far. This was a God who was connected to the earth. Who was Mother. I desperately wanted to reach out to her, but couldn't believe in a God who would be mother … to me. I hated my mother so much for that. Hated her for my fear. Fear that if I reached out to this God, who seemed to offer so much, she would be a trick, she would laugh in my face and tell me to fuck off. I was bone weary with the constant effort of moving forward. To


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keep looking for God. To keep staying alive. I was worn out. Somehow I kept putting one foot in front of the other. It was all I could do.

If I go to the beach at the wrong time walking is hard work. If the tide is in I'm consigned to walking along the soft sand. I never know how far into the sand I'm going to sink and it is a constant effort to keep pulling my foot out in order to place it in front of me so it can sink all over again. On and on I go, struggling forward, making hard, slow progress. I never feel quite stable when it is like this. I'm scared I will lose my balance and stumble, maybe even fall. On these days I feel the beach is not my friend.


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CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

As I walked along the pathway by the beach I noticed a crack in the concrete with a single blade of grass poking through. I watched them make this pathway. Saw all the effort they went to, to make sure there was no grass underneath that could cause this kind of problem. I looked on as they flattened and rolled the earth and put in the metal reinforcements and poured vast amounts of concrete. Finally roughening the surface to make it grip in the wet. And despite it all a blade of grass has broken through, a single blade of grass – strong enough to crack cement. I am delighted. Ritual abuse is designed to kill the life force in people. It is meant to take away the will to live and sap all the joy of life from you. But despite all their best efforts, all the concrete they poured over me and everything they did to stop me being me, the power of life reigns supreme, and within me is the ability to be that blade of grass that can crack cement. After I had been seeing Susan for more than four and a half years she announced she was finishing work as a therapist and was going to concentrate on her spiritual work. She would be taking six months to finish up with all her clients. I was devastated. Often during therapy I had been scared there wouldn't be enough time to finish my work and would feel compulsive about trying to get everything done. Susan had always assured me I had all the time I needed. She would be there for as long as it took. The adult in me could understand the decision she had made but I was heartbroken. As far as the Littlies were concerned – she lied. That final stint of therapy was exhausting. As well as trying to deal


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with as much ritual abuse as possible it was important to deal with the ending of our relationship. I was furious. I did not want to work with anyone else. The thought of having to tell so much of my story to another therapist was abhorrent. I wasn't prepared to do it. I became obsessive, wanting more sessions, trying to rush through memories and get everything all tied up. It didn't work of course. Susan kept calling me to be honest about the end of our therapeutic relationship and to deal with it with integrity. Again and again during therapy, as the different parts of me told their story and this story was listened to and allowed to impact on those who heard it, those parts managed to let go all the intensity of their memories and feelings. In their place was a jewel, a gem. An amazing strength or treasure that was forged in the fire of this work. Somehow out of it all was birthed an incredible gratitude that this was what I was doing. I believed this was my life's work. This was growth in a way I had never believed possible. It scooped out all that was wrong, dark and poisonous and showed me the depths that were now available to be filled with a different understanding of life. To be filled with God. To be open to love. As I worked with Woman-God co-creating this transformed life, its power and influence went far beyond anything I could imagine. Once the memories were defrosted, they merged in with the rest of me, but they also joined an interconnected web of being, and they made a difference. I learnt at the deepest possible level that ultimately the truth does set us free - but it is one hell of a process. Of major importance in finishing therapy was the fact I still operated as someone who lived their life with multiple personalities. The subject of integration, all personalities merging into one, had always been a difficult one because I had grown to have enormous love and respect for all these parts of me. Not only had they kept me sane and alive during the abuse, they had become an integral part of my healing, offering their courage, perspective and, thank heavens,


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their humour. I felt integration was a way of killing off my personalities. I was passionately opposed to the idea. I read a book that talked about reunion, rather than integration. This was a word I could live with, that held the possibility of each part still maintaining her individuality yet also coming together as a whole. I needed to do something symbolic. I found a small wooden jigsaw puzzle with twenty pieces to it and spent hours decorating each piece, making it represent different personalities and including things that symbolised the relationships these parts had with Susan, Greg and me. Then during a session I placed all the different pieces on the floor and one by one picked them up. Susan and I reminisced. We spoke of them and to them, with love and respect. I placed each piece in its section of the jigsaw. By the end of the session all pieces were contained within the wooden frame. They were still separate, you could see the outlines of each one, but they were also part of a whole. This ritual brought a sense of solidity to my life without betraying or abandoning myself. I look back on that part of my life and I feel such fondness for all those different parts of me. Yes, it was hard, exhausting work and their stories broke my heart, but they brought such richness to my life. This was one place I could see God in action within the abuse – multiplicity. God didn't rescue me, but she did give me the coping mechanism to survive. Having so many perspectives on things was wonderful, as was reliving the delights and fascinations of childhood and the awed wonder at the intricacies of the natural world as we walked in the bush, and the sheer enchantment of paddling in the ocean. I look back at the energy of those small parts of me and the time and effort they would spend on paintings or moulding clay. The enjoyment of stories read. The incredible courage and determination to heal. They gained so much during that time. They had the opportunities for love, laughter and creativity that had not been there when I was a child. Learning to love those children were huge steps in learning to love myself.


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Life is easier and quieter without them, but not as rich. They were enchanting. During this final stage of therapy I started attending some of the spiritual workshops Susan and her partner, Georgia, were offering. While I found the workshops themselves nourishing, and I met some warm and caring people, I found it too difficult. I would have an intense session with Susan, then would spend a couple of hours walking around the property and then attend an evening meeting. I could not manage the switch from Susan as therapist, Mum, support, nurturer, to Susan the teacher and spiritual guide. It was too big an ask. However, it was understood that once I finished with Susan, after a break of a couple of months, I could return and attend spiritual groups. In the meantime Susan and I needed to say our goodbyes to the relationship that had been an essential part of my life and healing, more on than off, for over twenty years. Our final session was full of honesty, love, gratitude and tears. And every possible good wish and blessing for each others' future. Once therapy finished Greg and I had a seven-week holiday to Greece and Ireland which was an excellent way to get distance, put things in perspective, and have some fun together free from the preoccupation of therapy. Of all the places Greg and I had holidayed together the Greek Islands were my favourite holiday destination. I loved the colour, the light, the food, the people. The Greeks exude a joy for life and living that is contagious. I decided not to seek another therapist, but see how I went without therapy and hope I had done enough work to be able to resume a normal life. I also decided it would not work for me to become part of Susan's spiritual community. I did not feel able to operate at the level that would be required. For the first few months being without therapy was extremely


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uncomfortable. I had spent the last five years intensely involved in my process, working constantly. It left an enormous gap in my life. Shortly after my finishing therapy, John returned from overseas. With great respect and gratitude for his journeying with me I bid Noel farewell and returned to spiritual direction with John. This gave me a sense of an intense period of my life being over and normal life resuming. As before, John and I revisited many of the memories I had initially faced with Susan. Once again there were places that needed to be re-entered. With God. It was the next layer of healing. We returned without the intensity of feelings and with a much deeper sense of unity within myself. We filed off the jagged edges. It was like putting salve onto the wounds of my scars. They started to heal. It was much lower key than therapy. It did not consume all my energies. It helped me to transition back to a life where ritual abuse was not the major focus. I regained the ability to engage in the world again. One day in the city, I became aware I was dazzled by the intensity of colour everywhere and by the presence of people. Faces radiated energy. I couldn't help but notice them; I was drawn to them, especially their eyes. Then I realised I was seeing people again. They had been faceless blurs for months and years. Now I was back, present, able to see and to connect with life and with people.

These days I walk along the beach, looking out at the ocean and realise that underneath the surface of the water, no matter if it is calm or tumultuous, there is power and peace. Below all the surface tensions the underwater world continues unperturbed. I don't fear wild weather as much these days. I don't fear anything as much. Certainly not living life. Not because the fear no longer exists, but because it is no longer the dominant note, the foundational colour, of my life. My painting reminds me of that. I look at its wild slaps of


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colour, the diversity of brush strokes and its tenacious vibrancy and know that each and every colour and stroke contributes to the richness of the whole. There, beneath the curves and splashes of blue, purple, white, brown and orange I float, no longer tossed about in its chaos but, immersed within it, surrounded, part of the whole. And I relax. Because at last I have learnt to breathe underwater.


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EPILOGUE

Looking out my window the joy of spring is all around. My fruit trees have blossoms and are promising the delight of apples, peaches and apricots. In the park the weeping cherry has just a tinge of green to it. Across the road new shoots on the poplars and willows announce that new life has come again. My seascape still keeps me company and other paintings have been added, so the room is bursting with images and colour. It's been fourteen years since finishing therapy and much has happened in that time. Sadly, my marriage to Greg came to an end four years after the conclusion of my therapy. In some ways it was due to the pressures of that time but also because Greg developed major depression and decided he needed to live by himself. The pain of his departure was intense but we parted as friends and continued to support each other as we learnt to go our separate ways. As time went on I found a strength and vitality emerging that surprised me. I came to realise just how much of myself I had submerged in my marriage. Bit by bit I reclaimed those parts of myself, embracing my passion and intensity. In my ongoing quest for a deeper relationship with God I decided to study for a Bachelor of Theology. I wanted to understand Scripture. People talked about the importance, the sacredness, of Scripture but I never seemed to get it. It didn't matter how much I read the Bible or explanations of it; I found it boring. I decided to study the Bible from an academic point of view to see if this would open up a new world to me and bring the Scriptures to life but that didn't work either. In fact, I had some huge arguments with the Scriptures. They broke my heart with their barbarism, sexism, brutality and violence. I raged against


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them and wept bucket loads of tears in horror, fury and frustration. And ultimately – they left me stone cold. What I discovered was theology. I loved theology! Here was life, questing, passion, yearning, longing, questioning, imagination – all those words that described my relationship with God. Also screaming, raging and demanding. In short - honesty. I was seriously hooked, and unbelievably excited because here were people who were asking my kinds of questions. They were trying to figure out the problem of evil and suffering in the world, and it had a name – theodicy. People were asking questions I'd never even thought of: interesting and intelligent questions. Theology opened up a whole new world. I listened to women's voices, the voices of the poor, third-world voices, black voices, lesbian voices and post-colonial voices. I had the time of my life. I knew God delighted in my questioning and enjoyment. The journey of writing this book has been one of letting go the remnants of the abuse that continued to ensnare me. The most significant of these has been my weight. As I have written my truth I have let go the protection I believed my weight gave me. In the past eighteen months I have lost sixty-five kilos and have found a joy in my body I never thought possible. These days I hold my life gently. I continue to be nourished by the beauty of this place. At my deepest level I long to be loved and understood. I now believe this is possible because I have some understanding of what love is. I no longer believe the lie of my father that ritual abuse was an act of love. I gaze out the window, knowing these are the last words of my book. The next stage of my life is waiting to emerge and reveal itself. I have no idea what comes next but whatever it may be I have the strength to embrace it and live it to the full. No matter what life throws at me I have the courage and faith to survive it. I now have a life that is brimming with possibilities and sparkling with God.


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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS: There are many people who supported me on the long road of healing and got me to the point of writing this book. To all of you who journeyed with me, who helped keep me going in body, mind and spirit: friends, fellow group members, residents, 12-step-programme participants and other survivors; healers; herbalists; massage therapist; physiotherapists; colleagues; nurses; doctors; ministers and counsellors, my heartfelt thanks. To all my friends who encouraged me to tell my story and those who kept me going with support, suggestions and critique – always over mocha and food, thank you for your belief in me. I am also grateful to those in my writing class who read, encouraged and gave honest feed-back and had great ideas. To those who got my body going again, who helped transform me from pain-riddled immobility to a fit and active iron woman, my eternal gratitude. I never believed I would like my body – now it gives me joy and pleasure. My appreciation goes to those who put in monumental efforts of reading, feedback, advising and editing. They took my raw story and provided a structure, insisted I apply the rules of grammar and punctuation to my manuscript and helped me clarify what I wanted to say. Finally, my thanks to the designer of my website elspethliberty.com for his generosity, patience and perfectionism. Each and every one of you has contributed in some way to the sum total of my life and to this book. My love and thanks to you all.


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BIBLIOGRAPHY: Books on Ritual Abuse Bibby, P. (Ed.) (1996). Organised abuse: The current debate. London: Arena. Fraser, G. (Ed.) (1997). The dilemma of ritual abuse: Cautions and guides for therapists. Washington: American Psychiatric Press. Gallagher, B. (1998). Grappling with smoke: Investigating and managing organised child sexual abuse - A good practice guide . (Policy, Practice, Research). London: National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. Mollon, P. (1996). Multiple selves, multiple voices: Working with trauma, violation and dissociation. West Sussex: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Noblitt, J. R. & Perskin, P. S. (2000). Cult and ritual abuse: Its history, anthropology and recent discovery in contemporary America . Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers. Noblitt, R. & Perskin Noblitt, P. (Eds.). (2008). Ritual abuse in the twenty-first century: Psychological, forensic, social and political considerations. Brandon, OR: Robert D. Reed Publishing. Sachs, A. & Galton, G. (Eds.). (2008). Forensic aspects of dissociative identity disorder. London: Karnac. Sakheim, D. K. & Devine, S. E. (Eds.). (1992). Out of Darkness: Exploring Satanism and Ritual Abuse. Lexington Books: New York. Scott, S. (2001). Beyond disbelief: The politics and experience of ritual abuse. Buckingham: Open University Press.


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Sinason, V. (Ed.) (1994). Treating survivors of satanist abuse. London: Routledge. Sinason, V. (Ed.) (2002). Attachment, trauma and multiplicity: Working with Dissociative Identity Disorder. London: Brunner-Routledge. Smith, M. (1993). Ritual Abuse: What it is, why it happens, how to help . New York: HarperCollins Publishing. Books on Transactional Analysis Berne, Eric, (7th Edition, 1996) Games people play: The basic handbook of Transactional Analysis. Ballantine Books. Goulding, R. and Goulding, M. (Rev sub edition, 1997) Changing lives through redecision therapy. Grove Press. James, M. and Jongeward, D. (25th Anniversary Edition, 1996) Born to win: Transactional Analysis with Gestalt experiments. De Capo Press. Stewart, I. and Joines, V. (1987) TA today: A new introduction to Transactional Analysis. Lifespace Publishing. Steiner, C. (Reprint, 1994) Scripts people live by: Transactional Analysis of Life Scripts. Grove Press.

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