Surviving School.

Trauma attracted trauma at school

At school I was caned a lot. I thought I was a dunce. On my first day at school, I cried when I left my mother at the school gate. For that, I was put in the corner with a dunce hat on. Wow! What a caring, loving start that was!

Please hear this: I do not want you to feel sorry for me. I am just saying how it was. At school I learned not how to learn, but to survive!

Insight: So many children’s genius is being lost today. They are being forced to learn with such conservative and competitive methods. Teachers, who are often my clients, come to counseling exhausted and often disillusioned from fear of being checked up on, by Ofsted (the official body for inspecting schools in the UK). This lack of trust together with a lack of person-centered, humane learning, is leading to fear. Paperwork is becoming more important than people, and more important than young people’s true capacity for loving to learn. Although I do recognize we need some accountability in our school and college environments, this present method (in my opinion) doesn’t seem to be working. The parasite of domestication is strong in our rigid school system. Because of this, alternatives have been born, like the [Rudolf Steiner] Waldorf humanistic approach and various home school models.

A lovely book that is timeless in wisdom, is Carl Rogers’ Freedom To Learn. Another is John Holt’s How Children Fail. I would like to see a book: How Children Succeed with Love!

Surviving school

I may have looked as though I was listening; yet I was dreaming: There must be a better life than this! I had no understanding of anything except how to survive school and my family. So often I was brought up in front of school as a boy who could not remember his poetry lines. I was like the boy Dibs who just got everyone’s disapproval for poor behavior. Do read Dibs in Search of Self by Virginia Axline. She is a brilliant play therapist who brought a disturbed boy into his true genius.

I had no understanding of English grammar and would be caned for ranking bottom of my class in Latin. All I wanted to do was run … just run from school… and then run from me inside. I learned to bury feelings. I would not listen to them, and I would not show my vulnerable emotions. Yet the consequence was that I lied to everyone, including myself. I became an actor. My father’s threat was coming true. I went to school with Chris Tarrant. He was head boy, and now is a TV millionaire. Chris often sent me for the cane to Major Wormal Headmaster, as I was always a rebel.

Nobody taught me ideas like this quote from Louise Hay: “Life is really very simple. What we give out, we get back.”

Life got worse. I was bullied at my secondary school. After three years of humiliation, it got so bad that I turned on my bully and nearly strangled him. My father thought this was a good reaction. I became so scared of my anger. I believed I could kill if the right triggers were pulled! Well, readers, have you got any anger issues?

My anger sparked my imagination often during the night when I could hear my mother trying to resist my father, who felt he needed sex. As I said earlier, I used to imagine killing my father—not a very healthy emotional pattern. The nightly trauma certainly gave me a very warped idea of relationships between men and women. What was really crazy was my mother making me listen to her childhood stories of abuse while I was so young. This repeated trauma and emotional pattern of physical abuse has played out continually in my life.

Insight: I have listened with empathy to clients tell me what they think normal intimate sex should be like, and I have realized how abnormal these ideas really are. One ultra-religious, middle-aged woman who was very intelligent had rationalized being beaten before and after sex by her husband. She cried through tears asking me, “Isn’t it normal? I have gone through this experience for years!” Oh, what we do to rationalize the irrational barbarity of what people allow to be done to their minds, bodies and souls. This is where fundamental religiosity can make an abused person feel so wrong for admitting they are being abused. I call this spiritual abuse of the worst kind.

Suggestion: Ask the person you love—a partner or a parent—what secrets have you had to hold from you or the world? Would it help to talk about them?