The Struggle Continues: “I did the best I could. Let those who can, do more”

By Paul Fjelrad and Natasha Fjelrad

At 10am on the 3rd of May, 2013, Paul walked into the therapy room. The sense of fear was immediate and palpable. He was shaking, hadn’t slept meaningfully for weeks, was barely able to function and in unbearable psychological and physical pain. However, this story of everything that had led up to this moment and what happened next, is being told from the other end of the therapist’s couch. A first-person account of Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, the life that led to it, and the challenges faced together by Paul his daughter Natasha during the fight back.  
With nothing held back, this is an intimate and up-close look at how childhood abuse, trauma led to a spiral of self-destruction until the reunion of father and daughter starts a journey on the long, hard road back to health. This isn’t a story of recovery or cure. This is learning to adapt and overcome from severe psychological injury and to accept that the struggle continues. It is written for all those who never stood a chance, all those without a voice who are still hidden behind the veil of silence, and all those held mute by the stigma of abuse, trauma and mental illness that pervades our society.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Troubador Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Feb 28, 2021
• ISBN: 9781800468283

Paul Fjelrad

Paul Fjelrad is a consultant, liveaboard sailor, and outspoken advocate on mental health since being diagnosed with C-PTSD. 

Book preview

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Contents

F

oreword

by John

No one can build you the bridge on which you, and only you, must cross the river of life. There may be countless trails and bridges and demigods who would gladly carry you across; but only at the price of pawning and forgoing yourself. There is one path in the world that none can walk but you. Where does it lead? Don’t ask, walk!

Friedrich Nietzsche, Schopenhauer as Educator

To introduce the introduction, you could try this simple exercise. If, as you are reading this, you are sitting down, stand up next to your seat. If you are not sitting, go to a chair or sofa and stand by it. Now, just sit down, slowly. As you lower yourself, notice the muscles in your legs and back that oppose gravity and allow you to descend gently towards the seat. Notice your first contact with the seat and how you can feel it pressing more and more firmly on the backs of your thighs and then on your buttocks. Finally, notice how you are held, supported, more or less comfortable, but undeniably safe.

This modest demonstration is an exercise in trust. You trust that your chair (or sofa) is there – even if it is behind you and you cannot actually see it. You trust that your weight will be borne, that there will be no collapse or breakage under the load. You trust that you will be comfortable, that, with the minimum of adjustment, you will be at ease in your new position.

Maybe you have had the experience of someone pulling a chair away from you – as a joke? – as you were lowering yourself into it. Maybe you have had a chair collapse as you were sitting down. If so, you might have been bruised – certainly your pride and dignity would have been sore. After an experience like that you might have been a bit more careful when sitting down. For a while, at least.

Trust, threats to trust and the damage it can be subjected to are huge components of our lives. We trust what we know, what we are certain is safe; we check and evaluate anything new. That is the way that we survive.

Sometimes, by design or by accident, something that has been labelled as safe fails to live up to its promise. Something or someone hitherto reliable lets us down. So, now, the trust is broken. When the damage caused by this failure is small, the impact of the event fades. Sometimes the memory is so small or inaccessible, we will expose ourselves to a similar experience. When the damage is large, when the lack of trust is overwhelming, an extra protective mechanism is activated. This is that the mind does not allow the memory of the event to fade, it does not permit the pain to lessen. Even though the smoke and flames have long disappeared, the fire alarm keeps ringing. It is easy to see why it works like this. It does not matter if we repeat some stupidity (forgetting to check if you have your front door key with you when you go out) when the penalty is small. It is another matter if the penalty is life-changing or life-threatening. In that case, the extreme reaction – keeping the memory active – is a good way of preventing a repetition.

This level of extreme response first became widely recognised during the World War of 1914–1918. Combatants, subjected to unendurable horrors, developed responses that were called ‘shell-shock’. A later wave of severely distressed combatants, this time US military involved in the Vietnam war in the 1960s and 1970s, resulted in new studies, new terminology (‘post-traumatic stress disorder’, PTSD for short) and new treatments. It is probably not a surprise to learn that familiarity with PTSD is a lot older than a hundred years. In Henry IV Part 1, Shakespeare wrote these lines for Lady Percy, who was talking about her husband, Harry:

Not only are so many of the symptoms of PTSD described accurately, over 400 years ago, there is a sting in the last five words – the effect of PTSD on the people connected to the sufferer.

When I met Paul his lack of trust was palpable. He could not have been less relaxed and comfortable if there had been a swarm of angry hornets in the room with us and the carpet was on fire. Yet this was a therapy room; quiet, calm, comfortable, warm and professional. And I was the therapist that Paul had chosen to see; similarly, quiet, warm and professional. But Paul was not seeing me, he was not absorbing the peace of the situation. He was not reacting to the purpose of engaging with therapy. Paul was afraid – terrified – and this fear, driven by his total lack of trust, was obliterating everything else.

Someone who has lost their trust because of a bad experience can be calmed, reassured, soothed and gradually brought down from that wired, jittery, adrenalin-driven fear. Not when it is PTSD. Every word, every gesture is, potentially, yet another assault. The hand extended to stroke is perceived as a hand lifted to smack. Even when the contact proves that the deed is kind, not punitive, the reaction is, ‘So you did not hurt me this time, but how do I know that you are not fooling me to let my guard down? How do I know that you not are just waiting until next time and then you will hurt me?’

Paul had been referred to me by a psychiatrist, which was unusual, and he had asked to have two sessions a week, also unusual. So, this was serious damage, it was something that had been going on for a long time and the trauma was from more than one source, so was complex (and producing C-PTSD). This meant that it would take a while to unravel, and Paul was really desperate to find a way of reducing or ending the fear.

So it was, it is, simple to explain the work – all I needed to do was to get Paul to trust me. Not because of anything to do with me, but because therapy is a bit like a ‘worked example’ in maths. That is, if Paul could trust me, it would show him that he could trust, that somewhere in his troubled mind the mechanism for trusting people was still there. More than that – it would let him access the ability to trust and use it appropriately so that he would be able to develop solid relationships.

And this is what we did. We built trust.

P

rologue

by Paul Fjelrad

Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this, too, was a gift.

Mary Oliver, Thirst

I might be stating the obvious here, but the decision to tell this story was not an easy one.

Firstly, the practical difficulty of being dyslexic, which in my case specifically impacts my writing rather than reading ability. It’s taken me years to figure out how to get the thoughts in my head out into a document or email, principally by having a conversation in my head, like I’m explaining an idea to someone, and writing my side of the conversation. Secondly, I have substantial memory problems prior to age thirteen, caused by dissociative amnesia, which I’ll explain in more detail later. Sometimes, with the right prompting, I can access some of these memories. But it’s a difficult and draining process, like staring through fog, while driving on a dark road at night.

Then there is the consideration that the key events of my life obviously involved and impacted other people, and it’s nigh on impossible to talk about one without the other. Therefore, I had to make a decision about what, and how much detail, I would include in my story, and how I would approach those parts of any narrative. I have been told, by both my therapist and friends, that I sometimes put the concerns of others in front of my own in a way that is not constructive to my own mental well-being. I also had the thought that if I was to do this, then it would be cowardly of me to do anything other than to tell all of my story and not to pick and choose. The second I become selective about which parts I do and don’t tell, then I’m either shielding others, out of concern for their feelings at the expense of telling the truth, or I’ll find reasons to leave out elements of my story because of how it reflects on me.

So, I made the decision that I would tell the story in its entirety, and the only reason elements would be left out would be because they don’t serve the goals of this book and would therefore be unnecessary. In this, my daughter is the best narrator and editor I could have, and she’ll keep me on the straight and narrow in telling the story as it needs to be told.

So, what are the goals of this book?

Firstly, I believe that there is no greater thing that someone in pain can discover than to find out that they are not alone. That someone else has been where they are, felt what they feel and, more than that, that there is hope. That somewhere, there is a path that can lead them out of this pain.

But this is not a self-help book, nor am I qualified to write such a thing. All I’m saying by writing my story, is that I found a path and, therefore, maybe, others can find their own path as well. Particularly, with regard to my diagnosis of Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, I have read many of the books out there on the subject, and yet haven’t read anything from the perspective of the person living with that diagnosis, their life story up to that point and what they went through during the treatment process.

Secondly, it is my belief that children suffer abuse across this country, trapped in fear and silence, and I believe this is allowed to go on partly because we, as a society, look the other way. No one said a word when my brother went to school with bruises. There was nothing done when my brother was sent away by my mother and died in that home for children with what we would euphemistically describe today as ‘behavioural problems’. I understand now that my mother surrounded us with a narrative that we were evil, nasty monsters, and maybe my brother said nothing about what was done to him, and indeed to all of us, because he thought there was no hope. But surely something must have been there to alert our teachers, doctors, neighbours or social workers as to what was going on in that house. Yet apparently no one saw anything that suggested further investigation might be appropriate.

We have seen this pattern with terrible situations like the Rotherham girls and the horrific abuse they suffered, and cover-ups of abuse within religious institutions. We have seen it is the vulnerable that are targeted, and blame is shifted onto the children for anything that seems out of the ordinary, who are portrayed as troublemakers and delinquents. So anything I can do to raise awareness, furthering understanding of how this happens, and how it looks from both the outside and inside, I believe may have some value.

Thirdly, this book, as you’ll see, is predominantly a conversation between me and my daughter. She and I have been through our trials and challenges, both together and apart. As you’ll also come to see, she played a pivotal role in my recovery, and I could not be prouder of the amazing young woman she has become as she has triumphed in her own journey through adversity. I imagine many would always seek to shield their children from hearing such things as will be described in this book, however this isn’t how our relationship has developed and through this process, I would like her to understand her dad better. Indeed, how some events unfolded has also had a fundamental impact on her own life, so maybe she’ll come to understand herself a little better as well.

It may seem like a strange way to do this, but this was the choice I made and perhaps the why of it will become clear as you read the book. Taking this decision means that it is inevitable that I’ll be telling my daughter some things that she didn’t know, and also some things that will be very challenging for her to hear. It is my profound hope that the very act of turning this conversation into a book, will help her (and me) to process these events and from it, gain a new perspective.

So, now you understand what I’m looking to achieve by writing this book, let’s introduce some characters. One of the early decisions was that although I will endeavour to tell all of my story, without fear or favour, I will only mention my name, and that of my daughter, as joint authors of this book. My daughter and me, you will come to know through the narrative, so let’s go through the rest of the cast:

Family

Friends

The Ex-Wives Club

My Therapist

So we’ve established the cast list and set the stage, now we come to the question of how my daughter and I would like to tell this story.

I now see my life clearly as being in two parts. Before my mental collapse, which I will explain below; then my diagnosis with C-PTSD and what happened after. So this is how we will tell this story: Life 1, running from my birth up to before my ‘descent into madness’ and Life 2, my rebirth through therapy and learning to live with the person I am now. This isn’t just a narrative device, but actually how I see it as I look back and barely recognise the person I was before. In truth, when I hit the bottom and bounced back up, I had to leave behind everything that I was before that moment. I can of course only guess, but I think I feel somewhat like someone who survived a cancer diagnosis, where all hope was done and dusted, and they had been given bare months to live. Yet, somehow, they were now in remission and were miraculously granted a whole new life. Not just due to the therapy, but this experience has changed me, and this is one of the things I hope will be conveyed by this story.

So let’s get on to what caused all this and what I’ve described, only slightly tongue-in-cheek, as my ‘descent into madness’.

It all began with a phone call or, more correctly, two phone calls…

The first call was the one where my daughter, now seventeen, got back in touch with me after thirteen years when I wasn’t part of her life. I won’t get into the details of this now, aside from saying that this for me was the impossible made possible. I had never allowed myself to even dare to hope during those thirteen years and had been in a continuous and seemingly never-ending grieving process for the little girl I had lost. Yet here, out of the blue, she was talking to me on Facebook and on the phone, and we were planning for her visit to Spain, where I was living at the time. Again, the details of all this will be described in depth later but the only piece of the story I’ll explain now is that, during that first visit, I saw the telltale scars on her arm that told me she had been self-harming, and the way she brushed aside my query about the scars told me that this was ongoing.

Over the next year, aside from a very tentative conversation on Facebook, there was never the opportunity to get into a meaningful dialogue with my daughter about those scars. Our relationship was still too new, too fragile, and building up the trust needed to have that talk was made more difficult by the distance between us and the infrequent nature of her visits.

Then came the second phone call and this is where it all changed…

I was working on a client site that day and was in a stairwell, running up several flights of stairs to get to my next meeting, when the phone rang. I stopped, looked down, saw my daughter’s name displayed on the phone and answered, mostly to tell her, ‘Hey, darlin’, I’m busy, Is it urgent? and, Can I call you back?’ Even though this very moment has replayed in my head innumerable times as flashbacks and nightmares, what she said next, or how I replied’ is a complete blank. So I’ll just lay it out for you:

Unless you have been in a similar situation, and I sincerely hope you haven’t, then it’s impossible to describe this moment. For any parent, the idea that your child would be so full of despair and without hope that not only did they want to die, but were willing to severely injure themselves to do so, would be an unimaginable nightmare.

For me, this was the culmination of a forty-year nightmare and was not only imaginable, but was a horror that had played through my head more times than I can count, particularly during the thirteen years when I didn’t have contact and didn’t even know if she was alive or dead. You will see through this story that it seemed like everything was leading to this moment, like the inevitability of an approaching avalanche.

My mind didn’t collapse in on itself immediately, but the stone had been kicked off the top of the mountain and the process that would lead to inevitable destruction had started.

What followed was a blur. I know there were taxis, trains, an aeroplane and a hire car involved, but I remember little of the journey to the hospital where Natasha was being treated. At this point I must have been running on autopilot. I don’t remember much about the initial conversation as I rushed into Natasha’s room. Just the tears, the hugging, and the blood that was still in her hair. That visceral image of the blood in her hair was one that would replay itself in my head over and over again during the next few years, always accompanied by the overwhelming emotions of horror and a painful desperation.

I had a brief Facebook conversation with GB over the next few days, where I explained to him that I knew something was happening inside me and that in my head, I was storing up a price that I was going to have to pay sooner rather than later. But I also explained that this was something I’d deal with another time and right now, the only thing that mattered was Natasha. Little did I know what was heading my way. I may have felt the tremors of the approaching avalanche, but I hadn’t yet comprehended the scale of what was coming.

Within a couple of months, while the focus was primarily on ensuring Natasha got the right therapeutic help, my mental stability started to shatter. My relationship with LT was disintegrating and my emotional state became more unstable by the day.

Then, after yet another argument, LT met up with a guy, cheated on me and, when she returned to our flat, she told me what had happened: that it was ‘a beautiful moment’ and that our relationship was over. Once again I do not know what happened next. It was like the walls of my world caved in and my mind ceased to function. I apparently lay immobile in bed for the next few days until the flat tenancy ending forced me to get up and start moving. I packed a few things, dumped the rest, got in the car and drove to my sister’s house in Bristol.

Everything from this time is blurry. The only clear moments were the nightmares, which had kicked in with such a force that I barely slept, the flashbacks assaulting my mind in a non-stop barrage of terror and pain. The overwhelming and inescapable thought was that the only way out was to die.

Then, after one completely sleepless night where I sat on the windowsill, smoking, and thinking only about whether and how I could die, the sun rose and I went down to the garden to sit, think and make a decision. I had this brief moment of clarity and a simple choice was laid out in front of me.

Either to end my life here and now, as there was no way I could continue to live with the pain I was feeling and the endless parade of nightmarish visions being replayed in my mind’s eye.

Or…

To start to climb up, fight back, and find a way to deal with what had happened.

I’m sure it’s a lovely romantic notion that I, as a father, saw that my daughter needed me, and my friends and family would surely miss me. That I had a lot to live for and therefore I shouldn’t take my own life, but should find a way to start to heal for both myself and them.

This would be a lie…

As I sat there, I felt like I was staring death in the face and, in the other direction, there was nothing but a fight I didn’t believe I could win. When I made my choice, it was down to one reason and one reason only.

Fuck you!

Fuck my family and every person who had hurt me and by whose actions or inaction I had ended up in this place!

Fuck the universe, fuck life and fuck death!

Fuck everyone who had a happy life and everyone who had turned their back and looked away while I was being hurt behind the doors of 2 Lower Chapel Lane.

Fuck everything, everyone; and fuck you!

I was furious and I wasn’t going to be beaten. I wasn’t going to give them the satisfaction, whoever the hell ‘them’ was. I would find a way back just to spite them, regardless of what it took.

Then I stopped and grew calm as my choice had been made. I thought of my daughter and I knew that I could never do this to her. She needed me and I would somehow figure out how to be the father she needed, because what had happened to me should not hurt her any more than it already had.

I had no idea what was ahead of me and no idea how to get there. I could barely function, and I had nowhere to turn. So, for reasons that don’t make sense to me, even now, I found a therapy centre in Brighton, back where I had lived with LT, made an appointment for an assessment, booked a hotel to stay in and drove back.

… and Life 2 started from this moment.

Life 1, Chapter 1

First Memories

by Natasha Fjelrad

Scars have a strange power to remind us that our past is real.

Cormac McCarthy

Okay, before we start, just take a deep breath. You earned it. Congratulations on making it through the prologue. I know that was a heavy start and I’m sorry about that. If I had written it, I would have tried to ease you into the story a bit slower but, alas, my dad insisted and, as you might have guessed by now, he is brutally honest and doesn’t know the meaning of ‘pulling punches’. I’m pretty sure he considers the term an insult. You’ll get…

… Actually, no. You don’t get used to it. He’s my bleeding dad and I’m still not used to it. If I had a penny for every time I’ve wanted to tell that man, ‘Calm down, you don’t have to fight all the time.’

I never have, though. I understand all too well that this is part of who he is and that without it, I might not have a dad.

I won’t lie, you’re about to hear a very difficult story, so feel free to put the book down whenever you need a breather. Heaven knows I needed plenty of them myself. But don’t worry, for the most part of this story, you’re going to be with me and I promise, I’m a bit more easy-going.

So, with that cannonball in the face earlier in mind, you might be wondering, where the heck do we start from there?

Well, as Dad mentioned, this story will be told in two parts. So like the song says, the beginning is a very good place to start. This is Life 1 and the very start of Life 1 is, of course, my dad’s birth and earliest memories. Before that though, I’d like to introduce you to my dad’s family.

My dad was born on 18th August 1971, the youngest of four. His three siblings, whom you’ll know as his brother, sister and eldest sister, were all born with his mother’s deceased husband, while Dad was the first and only child of her new, eight-years-younger husband. With the money she received from losing her first husband she bought a house in Frampton Cotterell, where her family was originally from, and this was where my dad, his siblings and parents lived for most of my dad’s childhood. What you have to understand is that this was not a normal family. Normal had abandoned ship generations before his mother was even born, but that’s a story that would take years to tell. Dad thought I was making a very dark joke when I said that. I didn’t realise it myself until he pointed it out.

Anyway.

His siblings’ father, who was a merchant seaman, was lost at sea, so rather than a location there was just a latitude and longitude on the death certificate. His eldest sister had cerebral palsy with cognitive impairment. For those who don’t know what that means, she was mentally handicapped, and her mental development had all but stopped around the age of eight. Dad’s father was born prematurely, out of wedlock and with over-tight tendons in his legs, giving him malformed hips and legs. Then there’s his mother. The Dragon. The Force of Nature. God in this House. I’ve heard many names and stories about her. In fact, when my dad told me how he came home one day to see this 1970s housewife lifting the engine out of their car, I just shrugged and thought, that’s the most normal thing you’ve told me about her.

All these things are just the tip of the iceberg of this strange, dysfunctional family, and that’s without even touching on his mother’s family. I haven’t met them, but I have heard many stories about his numerous uncles, who are all crazy, mad, bonkers, any word in this category you can think of, all with a less-than-healthy dose of violence. When my dad said that he did not want me to meet them, and in the rare scenario that I might, to never tell them my address, I agreed readily.

So now you have a rough picture of the family Dad was born into. But since you’ve looked at the cover and read the prologue, you don’t need me to tell you that there was so much more going on beneath the surface.

Truth be told, I was worried about how I was going to be able to tell this story. Not just as a daughter listening to these stories, but the practical challenge of putting together my dad’s fragmented memories. But I was pleasantly surprised to discover how much he had managed to piece together over the years and as research for this book. And yes, it’s weird to have to research your own life, but like I said, normal had long since abandoned ship. You’re going to see many conversations between me and my dad further on and follow us on a journey to key points in his life. You’ll also discover that he can be a bit dramatic with his storytelling and likes to tell extravagant stories, quote comedians, authors, songs and so on to make his points. And, dear God, it’s hard to get a word in edgewise when he gets really into it.

But why don’t you see for yourself, and we’ll actually get into the story of the first memories.

It’s a rather romantic image, the first memories being of the seaside and how my dad, forty years later, still has a deep connection to the sea, but I couldn’t help but wonder if there wasn’t something more to it and asked, straight out, why he remembered those bits when everything else from that period was all but gone.

I couldn’t help but mutter Understandable under my breath, but there would be plenty of opportunities to talk about this later. At that moment, we were actually in Plymouth, the very town where he had some precious memories, and I was more interested in hearing about them and, particularly, in hearing about the person in those memories. His grandad. I’ve always been curious about him because he was such a fleeting person in my dad’s life, but he’s one of the very few things in his childhood that he’d think back fondly on.

Dad always described him as a giant of a man, larger than life, and I couldn’t help but wonder if he actually was a giant, or it just seemed that way because my dad was so small. Let me be honest here; he was tiny for his age. Actually, he’s still not all that tall even if he’ll vehemently insist that he’s average height, thank you very much, but never mind that. Dad chuckled at my question and told me a bit more about his grandad and how he was known for being a hard man. He worked as a crane driver, the kind of work that back then was what they called piece work, which meant that he got paid for the amount of work he did, not the hours he worked. It sounded very unfair to me, but this was common back then and was very fair if the dock was busy. He then told me a story that he was told by an old guy who spotted him across a bar and mistook him for his grandfather’s son, of all things. Something that still both amuses and confuses him.

I did not see that one coming. At all. I mean, I’ve seen old black and white movies about rough and hardy seamen and dockworkers, but that was movies and this was a real story, and damn! I know that I said I’ve heard many stories about my dad’s family, but that’s kind of the point. My dad’s grandfather was not related to him by blood. Which makes it even more strange that the old guy in the pub would recognise him as his grandad’s boy, and it’s the excuse I’m going with as to why that shocked me so much.

But anyway, I’m getting off track. We were actually talking about his first clear memory of his grandad.

(Buck is his grandad’s friend of many years).

I only asked… maybe because that story about the dry dock was still fresh in mind, but also because as a little kid I would definitely be intimidated by being looked down at by a large person. But Dad’s voice when he answered was unusually soft, and I realised I had forgotten something important.

My grandpa on my mum’s side is also one of those dignified, traditional men. Not one to speak sentimental words often, very set in his ways, and not to be pushed around or disrespected. And I have never been frightened of him. Why would I? I’ve never known anything but complete safety and love with him, and it wasn’t really until then I realised that maybe it was the same for my dad. At least here with his grandad.

He described how they would sail out of the harbour, down the Tamar, past the entrance to Devonport with its military base where his grandfather worked, and then come out into Plymouth Sound, with the beaches: Bovisand on the left, Kingsand on the right and the breakwater, with a big tower ahead.

He smiled fondly as he recalled how his grandad had taken him over to the wheel, propped a load of books and cushions onto the seat and sat him up there so he could steer the boat while he got the fishing lines ready.