My Story - The Brief Version
I am now seventy-two. I did not properly begin recovering until some twelve years ago. From about the age of eighteen I sensed there was something wrong in ways I’d not experienced as a child. But, despite immersing myself in the great religions, consulting spiritual guides and more than thirty psychotherapists of all denominations over a thirty five year period, as well as spending a great deal of energy every day seeking to understand what was wrong, I did not understand I was dissociative or that being abandoned by my mother, father and entire extended family at age four had been ‘traumatic’, until I was approaching sixty. Only then did I seek a childhood trauma/dissociation orientated therapist and undertake a trauma based program of recovery which eventually proved fruitful.
The book is partly about my recovery, even more it is about the years before my recovery began. The years of despair, puzzlement and sense of fraudulence that I felt during most of them, and the many theories and ideas about my state that I part created and part ‘rented’ from the academic and clinical literatures on the way to understanding myself as dissociative. Before my recovery began nothing significantly changed in the structure of myself despite the many life experiences I went through - I remember being struck when at the age of around fifty I re-read some journal entries from my late teens and though the language was slightly different and more grandiose, the problems I was describing were identical to those I was still confronting at fifty.
More About Me
You can find my profile on Counselling Directory at: www.counselling-directory.org.uk/
