How can I escape the pain of my past that haunts me
Voyager upon life’s sea, To yourself be true; And, whate’er your lot may be, Paddle your own canoe SARAH T. BOLTON, AMERICAN POET AND WOMEN’S RIGHTS ADVOCATE (1814–1893)
DEAR Bel,
I’M 57, married to my wonderful second wife Jenny, and have four children. Two are from a previous marriage, but we have no relationship due to a vitriolic divorce 20 years ago.
Jenny and I have been together 20 years and our son and daughter live at home. My wife has been in a wheelchair for 17 years and I’m her full-time carer. She is still capable of living a good life but daily pain medication can make her forgetful so she cannot be left on her own. Obviously I wish she was still well and independent but we have a great marriage.
My only issue recently is sleep, despite medication. My mind goes into turmoil, worrying about things I cannot control.
My mother (who I was close to), father, then older sister passed away through Covid.
My family were never ‘touchyfeely,’ as I have strived to make mine. I don’t think I’ve ever grieved for my parents and sister.
We were not allowed to show feelings as children and I was shipped off to boarding school because my mother had mental health problems and, despite my father’s wealth, was unable to look after me.
I didn’t attend my father’s funeral as his second wife and I don’t get on (she was always verbally abusive) ? and she ordered me to stay away because of Covid.
I get very morbid on my own, and sometimes find myself crying for no apparent reason.
Do you think it’s because I haven’t grieved properly or is there something else in the background?
One night, when I was nine, I was raped by prefects in my school. I remember everything, and in my early 20s tracked down all five and dealt with it in my own way. A slap or two here and there, a message to a wife to watch her young boys with him.
One had passed away so I visited his grave and urinated on it. I don’t think that trauma involving the rape has anything to do with now, as I feel like I dealt with it in my own head.
I just cannot help brooding on things like my upbringing and being unable to talk to my sister and parents. I don’t want to feel this melancholy anymore. What can I do, can you help?
HENRY
THE writer of today’s long second letter began with ‘Life is so sad, isn’t it?’ I saved her comment for here, because I want to answer, ‘Yes, it damn well is!’ for you too, Henry.
This is the point at which lovely, kind-hearted people chime in to remind us of all the good things in life, and advise us to rejoice in the daffodils. Why, I’ve done that myself, more than once. But just now I’m racked by shingles pain, caused (I’m sure) by eight months of stress.
So I’m not going to bestow uplifting chirps on a man bravely looking into the abyss every day after tormented nights ? yet surviving to care for a beloved, disabled wife. I salute you.
What jumps out of your letter is the horrific rape by five prefects when you were nine. You are convinced you dealt with it, so it has gone Goodbye, trauma. But it’s far from being that easy. You say, ‘I remember everything’ and I suggest that is clear evidence of the trauma which is now racking you and preventing sleep.
You had a loveless childhood, and suffered the rejection and loneliness of being banished to boarding school, where you were raped by older boys. It’s horrific. I rather admire the decisive way you tackled it (or rather, them) when you were a man; it must have felt like a triumph at the time.
But trauma doesn’t go away. Listen to the great psychiatrist, Bessel van der Kolk, in his brilliant book, The Body Keeps The Score: ‘We have learnt that trauma is not just an event that took place some time in the past; it is also the imprint left by that experience on mind, brain and body.’
According to this worldfamous expert, an horrific experience like the one you endured as a child can ‘cause actual changes in the brain.’ In addition, of course, you are grieving for your parents and sister, but perhaps some of that grief is for something irretrievably lost to you: the possibility of changing your family’s emotional history.
You know in your heart it was always far too late for them to talk and demonstrate the love you yearned for, and yet you could dream, couldn’t you? But now they’ve gone and you are left dealing with painful memories which will not heal.
It is my conviction that you urgently need to start therapy to help the healing process. Do it to enable you to be strong for your family in the future. Read this medicalnewstoday.com/ articles/therapy-for-childhoodtrauma and then decide what to do next.
I hold out my hand to you.
him, but nothing of my mum.’
Finally, in November 2008, Benham was convicted of second degree murder, and sentenced to 12 years in prison. By then, Olivia had been the subject of a bitter and lengthy custody battle between the grandparents.
In the end, custody was awarded to Linda, her maternal grandmother, who took the decision to bring Olivia, then seven years old, back to England.
Today, she remembers the alienation she felt at crossing an ocean to an unfamiliar country and leaving everything — and everyone — she knew behind, including her beloved aunt, her mother’s sister Michelle.
‘I hated it,’ she says. ‘Everything felt different; the people, the houses; everything. I didn’t know anyone.’
By then, Olivia knew that her father had killed her mother, but little more than that.
‘No-one talked about it, and certainly not my nan. I think she found it too difficult. So it was just something that was locked away.’
By the time she arrived at secondary school Olivia was still none the wiser about the exact circumstances in which her mum met her premature end — until a school IT lesson when she was 12.
For reasons she still doesn’t really understand, she entered her mother’s name into an internet search engine, only to find herself staring back at a series of grim newspaper headlines reporting that Benham had badly beaten her mother before strangling her at their home.
‘I felt this horror, because it was so much worse than I knew, this realisation that he really hit her, he really hurt her and carried on hurting her. It takes a lot to strangle someone to death. So it was really bad,’ she recalls.
She was offered counselling, but found it impossible to form any sort of meaningful bond with the woman assigned to her.
‘Part of it was me not wanting to let things go, but also it just seemed so generic: talk about your feelings. And everything I felt was so complicated,’ she says.
And so Olivia carried on doing what she had done so far: keeping it all shut away.
‘I never talked to anyone about what had happened, including my nan who didn’t want to talk about it either,’ she says.
‘It’s hard to put myself back in that mindset now, but I think I just felt it wouldn’t make any difference, it wouldn’t change what had happened so what was the point?’
When people asked her where her parents were, she would reply — as she sometimes still does — ‘I don’t have parents’ to shut down the conversation.
Of course, as Olivia acknowledges, it is not just the generation above her she has lost: for many years she had no relationship at all with her paternal grandparents, despite their attempts to reach out to her.
She recalls how, when she was about 13, a car arrived outside the home she shared with Linda, and her grandmother promptly having something akin to a panic attack.
‘I’d just come in from school and I was watching the Horse of the Year Show on television when nan told me to go and hide as my dad’s family were outside.’
At the time, the episode was laced with sinister undertones.
Linda told Olivia that the family had been following her home from school, determined to make contact with their only granddaughter, although today Olivia sees it differently.
‘It was their way of trying to connect. They had written letters but my nan had never answered,’ she says. ‘They’re monsters to her, which I understand as their son killed her daughter.’
Time has certainly made her more forgiving towards Benham’s extended family.
At Christmas, not long after releasing her TikTok video, she had a Skype call with some of them, including her paternal grandparents.
‘I suppose it felt like the right time, finally, after I had acknowledged it to the world,’ she says. ‘It felt strange, and we were all a bit selfconscious, but I am glad I did it.’
That tentative connection is likely to be cemented this summer when she flies to Canada for her halfbrother Reece’s wedding. It will be the first time she has returned to the area where her mother’s life came to an end.
‘I have a massive family there, and we all had a really good relationship when we were young,’ she says. ‘I am a bit apprehensive, but I think it would be nice to reconnect.’
That sentiment does not apply to her father, now 54, who came out of prison in 2020 after serving his 12-year sentence but is now back behind bars following another allegation of domestic abuse.
‘I know he is desperate to make contact with me but, while I can never say never, I don’t believe I can ever see him. I know I can never forgive him,’ she says.
Who can blame her? The loss he inflicted underpins her life, and was the reason she uploaded that emotional TikTok video. Alone at home, while her boyfriend Mike was having a meal with family, she found herself overwhelmed with grief, which is still palpable today.
‘In hindsight, I never spoke about it, because I never wanted to be accused of being an attentionseeker, and I’ve spent so long keeping it in,’ she recalls, wiping away tears.
‘Then, in that moment, I realised there were going to be plenty of others scrolling through TikTok, who don’t have a clue what people are actually going through, and I wanted to share my story.’
She has been touched by the overwhelming outpouring of support she has received, especially from others in her position thanking her for highlighting what they have gone through.
She knows there is no one size fits all answer for what three-year-old Olivia went through and what 21-year-old Olivia is going through to this day, but thinks a designated specialist counsellor for any child who has gone through domestic homicide could help.
‘It’s someone who knows your story, so you don’t have to explain it again and again,’ she says.
No amount of counselling, of course, can change the cold harsh truth that Olivia has to live with every day. ‘They can’t give you a normal family,’ she says. ‘I think that’s the hardest bit, accepting you get one life — and mine was screwed up early on.’
‘I never talked to anyone about what happened’ ‘I know I can never forgive my father’