My Story

How much trauma does a person have to go through by age 15 such that their ability to simply function as others do is severely compromised for life?

I can’t answer that question as a trauma specialist / Phd might respond, but I can tell you from experience what happened to me…

I was born in Montreal and my family lived there until the end of grade six whereupon I spent the next 5 years bounced around through 5 different schools ending up in Victoria BC by age 15. This is an account of those years and how by age 15 I was not only completely unprepared to deal with life as a teenager, but later as an adult also, on account of the frequency and degree of trauma I suffered as a child – while my brain and other biophysical systems were just developing.

Some of the event dates may not be accurate but the facts  are all real. First I relate traumatic events which happened at home and then others which happened outside the home up until age 10. Following that is a brief description of ages 11 / 15. Note: Complex PTSD is the result of a number of various unresolved traumatic experiences – piled on top of each other –  as opposed to PTSD which can result from even just one  traumatic experience. Both types of PTSD can happen to children or adults, but when a child experiences complex PTSD and is left untreated, is when that child’s future development may become compromised physically, emotionally, sexually, socially, spiritually and financially as is what happened to me.

From Birth to Grade Six

My father was an MIT engineering grad, a talented musician and an alcoholic like his father who was a church organist / musician. My mother was a Wren during WW2 who later met and married my father in Vancouver where she was born.

Shortly before I was born, my father had a car accident and sustained brain damage. He was operated on by one of the most eminent brain surgeons of the day, Dr Wilder Penfield, who told him to never drink again. Unfortunately my father was not able to stop drinking.

The earliest memories I have of my father are of him intoxicated, screaming and yelling after just one drink affecting his damaged brain,  about “why don’t they go out and get a job” (meaning my then 7 year old brother and me age 4 / ages approximate). Because of his brain injury, one drink would create chaos in his brain with his family on the receiving end of his malevolent alcohol induced behaviour. I remember around this time I had a recurring dream of being smothered by an elephant. Later in life my mother once said, “he was a happy alcoholic before the accident”.

Anecdotally, around age 40 I found a grade six class photo and on the back was a “monster” type pencil drawing. Instantly I new intuitively this was a subconscious representation of my father drawn then by my 9 your old self. My dad, the monster…

We moved one street over at some point (in grade 4 or 5) and I remember many nights standing behind a hallway door shaking in fear as my father would rage on making no sense at all, and my mother (who was not much of a drinker) trying to control / quiet him down by raging back at him. This happened maybe 3/4 times a week until I left home at age 15.

After grade 4 we moved one street over and I used to go on bottle hunts with my mother, not outside looking for pop bottles but in the lower duplex we lived in, looking for bottles of alcohol my father had hidden. I remember many nights watching the liquor cabinet from the kitchen, always on the lookout for him sneaking a drink. I think we used to go on bottles hunts at the previous address also but my memory is not 100% clear on that issue.

I don’t remember when I became perpetually anxious and afraid of my own father. 

At some point I became hyper vigilant. Hyper vigilance can be loosely defined as ones own brain being programmed to be  permanently on the look-out for danger. In my case, hyper vigilance took the form of being constantly on the look-out for danger at home and is what happens to some children and to people in war zones after being repeatedly traumatized. In some cases the brain loses its ability to turn off the fight or flight mechanism leaving the person perpetually anxious, sometimes for life. I don’t remember a time when I wasn’t  continually anxious at home and outside the home. As a child, trauma left me anxious all the time and I still am that way today as an adult. I’ve been continually anxious my entire life. 

I remember one Saturday morning my brother and I were bouncing / playing on one of the beds in the room we shared when my father burst in with a belt and started to beat my brother quite brutally. While he was screaming and retreating to the bathroom, where he was trapped and beaten more… I was petrified, standing on my bed, glued to the wall behind me in terror of what I was experiencing.

I remember once trying to defend my mother by poking at my advancing drunken father with the handle end of a broom.

I remember my brother came home late one night and my (drunken) father started to push him around whereupon my brother pushed back causing him to fall and break his leg.

I never had any friends over after school as sometimes my father would come home early, drunk.

I remember I had a friend over for lunch once (literally, only once, from kindergarten to grade six). On account of the situation at home I had forgotten all about the lunch invitation and ran home ahead of my friend to tell my mother (who was not home) but had prepared some pizza for us, for my brother and I that is. I was so embarrassed.

I never had a birthday party with friends over as one never knew what state my father would be in.  My mother would always bake a chocolate cake with chocolate peppermint icing. She would bring the cake out after dinner and the only wish I ever made while blowing out the candles was for my father to stop drinking.

They say that if you live in a forest with animals that might attack you that is bad enough. But when the animal lives in your house is when there is nowhere you feel safe. This is the case with a number children who feel threatened and are traumatized by those who are supposed to love and care for them, their parents.

I have more early life “happy home memories”… but I think you get the picture.

How messed up was I at this point?

At some point after the lunch I forgot about (grade 4 or 5), the same friend invited me to their country cottage for the weekend. My friend’s dad had built 4/5 other cottages on their property and my suggestion was… “why don’t we break into one?” Not only did we break in but we defecated on the floor and stole some ceremonial swords. Eventually the QPP (Quebec Provincial Police) tracked us down in the snow and brought us in to headquarters.

Needless to say my friend was not a friend anymore after this and later that year I had to appear in court as charges had been laid.

I used to go out after dinner sometimes with another friend who had a happy home life  and at my behest we would kick out car headlights.

I remember in grade 4 I was regularly stealing money from my friend’s mother’s purse’s until I was caught and made to return the money – alone – saying I was sorry. It was such a shaming experience, as in reality, all I was doing was crying out for attention / the help that never came.

I started playing hockey about grade 4 maybe and one day after practice my father burst into the locker room quite drunk and abusive toward me screaming about being late for dinner… as I shrank in shame while the other kids looked at me with compassion. 

My hockey career ended in pee wee and  by that time I had played on 2 all star teams and won 2 trophies. And by that time I had also put a few kids in hospital by “charging” them on the ice. Charging is not checking them, it is about willfully hurting the other player by approaching at high speed – often blindly – and them hitting them with full force.

Why would I act this way? By this time I was  “acting out” a lot. All of my “abnormal” behaviour was an expression of my anger / sadness and distress about what was going on at home.

In retrospect I am sure my mother was quite stressed out about our “home life” and because of that, one day she failed to notice a plate glass door in front of her which she walked right through. According to the surgeon who stitched her back together, one more centimetre and the main artery from her heart would have been severed,a resulting in her bleeding to death  within minutes… on the sidewalk.

I don’t remember if I was there, and if I was this experience must have been so completely grisly that I  repressed it as it would have been too horrifyingly traumatic to not do so.

After we moved one street over from Lansdowne to Arlington in grade 4 or so I became good pals with a child my age who lived just a few doors up from us. My friend Freddy’s family owned a place in the Eastern Townships where they kept horses. His sister was into horses and they also had a pool there.

I went to the farm maybe ten times before we left Montreal after grade 6. I overheard my mother once telling someone that it would be good for me to get away from my father.

On one trip to my friends farm, which usually lasted about two weeks in the summer, a call came through. When the English nanny / housekeeper answered the phone her face went blank and then ashen grey as I watched her. I intuitively knew something was terribly wrong at home, and after she hung up said to get my stuff as we had to leave for home right away.

When I got home my mother called me out to the living room and told me this…

“Your brother has been accidentally shot in the head and is in hospital.”

I still remember collapsing on the floor crying uncontrollably. While at a friends house they had discovered the father’s loaded 22 rifle that somehow went off. The bullet hit a few things before entering my brother’s forehead, close to 90 degrees. As it had lost some velocity, it then went up at a 60/70 degree angle and did not pass through his brain and kill him.

I don’t recall how long he was in hospital clinging to life but I do remember praying to God every night, crying as I did so, to “please let my brother live”. He was my only sibling, my only confidant, the big brother I looked up to, in a family in serious trouble. My brother did survive after many months in hospital.

Later, on another trip to my friends farm (the last one in fact) I had the idea to experiment mixing sugar with chlorine (from the pool) to see if it might burn. A few weeks earlier I had learned how to make gunpowder with my brother and one of his friends who showed us how.

And so after a few trials we got something that basically fizzled an eery green colour with greenish grey smoke. We had about half a mop bucket full of the mixture. Next we found a ceramic drain pipe about 5/6 inches in diameter by about 12 / 15 inches long and buried it about 8 inches into the soil of a nearby field. The house was about 100 feet away (30M).

We poured a little bit in and tossed a match in. After a few seconds a small green flame appeared with a little bit of smoke. “Let’s pour it all in and see what happens” we agreed, only we were out of matches and for some reason I was the one who went to the house to get more matches.

When I was about 5 feet from the back door, I heard a blood curdling scream, turned around and witnessed my friend on fire from the waist up with a huge green flame about 15 feet high lighting up the field for a large area around where my best friend was now rolling in the long grass screaming in agony. I ran back to help put out the flames and then ran to the house for help.

 The concoction had ignited from the bottom up with material from the first test still molten, so it was a ferocious pillar of fire that erupted right onto his upper body and face as he was either looking down at the pipe or standing close by. I never asked him about the details.

Freddy was in hospital for about 6 months and survived but was seriously disfigured as a result.

The last incident I want to share with you is of a very personal nature and so I’m just going to give you the pertinent facts.

And I should mention beforehand that later in life, a female therapist I was a client of for a while told me that sexual experimentation among young boys is common. And most children who do experiment turn out to be heterosexual, as was the case with me.

I think I was in grade 5 when I was experimenting sexually with a friend. My brother found out so I must have told him. One Saturday my brother suggested we go to a local park, and so he and a friend, along with myself and my friend all went to the park.

We were walking on a pathway when my brother stopped and said, “take your pants down (meaning both of us) and lie down on top of your friend. Do this or I will tell mum about you and your friend.”

I did as I was told, completely terrified about what was happening and his threat. The last thing I remember was my brother and his friend laughing hysterically at us just as some strangers came upon the scene. My next recollection was of crying hysterically on my parents living room floor saying “my brother made me do it.”

Incidentally, the over whelming traumatic shock of what transpired in the park caused me to completely blackout from the moment the strangers came by (a few seconds after my brother and his friend started to laugh hysterically at us) to the moment I was crying uncontrollably on the living room floor. And the only reason I know I did black out / repress part of this experience from my conscious mind, and that the police were involved and that we were taken home by the police is: it was only many decades later that I remembered seeing a young French Canadian police officer poke his head around the corner of the front door as he was leaving and say to my father… “perhaps you should spend more time with your children Mr Driscoll.”

It would have been horrible / damaging enough had this humiliating and shameful incident happened in private somewhere with a stranger, but to be so severely embarrassed, humiliated, and shamed this way, and to be coerced / forced to act this way (in public no less) by my own brother, with strangers and the police involved, only served to magnify the trauma many fold.

This is how unbearable traumatic shock causes the victim to “blackout” because the pain / embarrassment / shame is too hurtful to experience consciously, so it is repressed from the conscious mind / memory… sometimes for life.

I was then told to go to my room where after a few minutes I heard a terrible screaming in the back alley way, which faced the bedroom I shared with my brother.

I ran out and beheld the older brother of the other little boy involved sitting on my brother and repeatedly smashing his head onto the pavement that by then was covered in blood. He was older and bigger than my brother and would probably have killed him if I hadn’t ran to get my father who came out and was able to stop the beating.

I don’t remember if my parents took my brother to emergency but he was in pretty rough shape for a few months after that.

What my brother did to me that day in the park burned a hole in my soul. And so after years of being routinely traumatized by a father who by then I subconsciously perceived to be  a monster, I was already a severely disturbed child with major developmental issues. What happened that day at the park was an act of unspeakable cruelty to put it mildly, and when combined with what happened later that day at home… was the straw that broke the camels back for me developmentally, as the saying goes. 

And so by age 10 I was well on my way to my life stalling out by age fifteen. Before this happened my parental connection could only be described as poor to non existent… and now my own brother had fundamentally stabbed me in the heart. 

Long story short, because of my brother mistakenly branding me as homosexual, I was now effectively branded as being “gay” in my parents eyes… when nothing could have been further from the truth. I never was gay and never became gay. 

 From a professional / therapeutic perspective, what was the emotional / psychological / traumatic effect on me from being so horribly embarrassed, humiliated and shamed this way… in public no less, by my own brother? One therapist said it was the equivalent of being raped or castrated in public by your brother.

As a consequence of what happened, this was the day my relationship with my brother became broken for life.

It was also the day he and my parents rejected me for life because… they thought I was gay. My brother actually believed this delusion most of his life as did both my parents who died believing the same. 

And to complicate matters even more, because of the beating that day, my brother had absolutely no recollection of anything that happened until much later in life when I wrote him the first of three letters explaining that day to him. As an adult I assume this act of severe cruelty was his way of acting out his anger about our home life (and / or he really meant to hurt me because he was jealous of my sports abilities), but understanding something intellectually in no way mitigates the trauma resulting from what transpired that day. 

From Grade Six to Leaving Home at Age 15 / 16

The above incident happened to me when I was in grade five and my family left Montreal after I finished grade 6, one year after after the FLQ started their terror campaign. One disastrous effect of what my brother did to me was that from grade 5 to grade 11 I went through 5 different school and major geographical changes, finally ending up in Victoria BC. 

My father got a job setting up some kind of industrial production facility in Toronto, with my brother and mother going to live with my father’s mother (granny) in Victoria.

And so by the age of ten or eleven I was in serious trouble emotionally / developmentally. And what became of me… now that I was the family freak in everyone’s eyes? After landing in Victoria I was initially sent to a private school on Vancouver Island because of now being branded as gay by my own brother. I was effectively excommunicated from my own family for being something I never was.

And my brother? He got to attend the local high school for 4/5 years.

Right when I needed serious intensive psychotherapy, I was rejected by my own family with no one to lean on emotionally. And to reiterate, needless to say, my relationship with my brother was irrevocably broken that day in the park and has remained pretty well that way for most of my life. To this day he rarely gets in touch with me and even then hardly ever asks how I’m doing. 

While at the boarding school that year I spent a lot of time crying by myself in the school church and was molested by the math teacher who was gay. This teacher probably felt entitled to do so after being told by the headmaster that I was “gay”, after my parents initially told him that I was gay.

Talk about being victimized…

The following year my mother and I joined my father in Toronto (grade 9 at public school) while my brother stayed in Victoria with friends from Montreal  (who had moved to Victoria in the meantime), and who incidentally were the same family the shooting occurred with. My mother thought it would be better for my brother to continue at Oak Bay High rather than drag him along to Toronto also. And so my brother got to spend four or five years years at one high school (Oak Bay high), made lots of friends / had a great social life, and despite his head injury was doing quite well developmentally. He later went on to marry, have a career and family.

When I was in elementary school (before the park incident) my mother used to say my brother would be a carpenter and I was going to be a lawyer on account of he was slow to breathe at birth and might have brain damage. As things turned out he had a good career in media and I became an erstwhile cab driver / house painter.

Meanwhile, my life on the other hand was not going so well… and never did.

My grandmother died in the summer of ’68 and left my Dad a house and some money so he retired and we moved back to Victoria from Toronto.

I was sent back to the same boarding school for grade 10 and got tossed out with two other kids for smoking pot and finished my grade 10 at a Victoria tutorial school.

By the time I ended up at Oak Bay High (Victoria BC) for grade 11, I was pretty much a basket case developmentally. I was regularly called into the school counsellor’s office weekly and quite often twice a week. And during that year, while I was a student at the Victoria Conservatory of Music (studying classical guitar for six months), my teacher who was the department head commented that I had enough talent to “sleepwalk through Juliard'”, which is a world famous music school located in New York. I never did go as I could barely function emotionally or socially by age 15. 

I remember getting a yearbook  and asking this person who had become a friend to sign it, and this is what he said before signing it, “Of all the people I know Rob, you are the most likely to commit suicide.” And I should mention this person had always been quite friendly, kind and respectful toward me… he was just being honest and not intentionally hurtful.

On my first and only high school date ever, while at Oak Bay high for grade11 with a girl I had a bad crush on, she said this, “I think your family life is interfering with our relationship.” She refused to see me after that. That was the only date I ever went on for the two years I did attend high school – grade nine in Toronto and grade 11 in Victoria, before leaving home at age15 or 16.

I never did have a girl friend in high school,  

Maybe if I’d been allowed to go to one high school for four or five years I might have had a chance to normalize somewhat socially and come out the other end somewhat prepared for the rest of my life like my brother did, but that never happened.

And so in effect, while most people get to grow up in what might be termed a stable and loving home environment… I never had that opportunity. In effect, not only did I never have the opportunity to simply grow up and develop naturally the way most people do, but instead became irrevocably damaged by the constant trauma I experienced at home and elsewhere.

I eventually left home at age 15, a broken and seriously emotionally disturbed person who never really got to “start my life”. Why? Because by the age of 15 my life was already “stalling out” under the weight of many years of serious and repetitive trauma.

And by way of illustration I want to relate one last anecdote involving my daughter, about how just one seemingly innocuous event can get repressed and seriously scar a young person, and then pop up spontaneously later in life.

One night when my daughter was in grade 5 or 6 I went to her room to say good night. I don’t recall what triggered the event but she started to hyper-ventilate and was crying. This went on for about 20 minutes while I held her close the entire time until it stopped. As I have complex PTSD myself I surmised she was releasing some bad energy related to a past event that had become locked in her body. I asked her if anything bad had ever happened at Mummy’s house and she said no. She remained quiet after that and I sat with her till she went to sleep. Just by coincidence my daughter had a regular appointment with the counsellor for that day and I went to talk with the counsellor after that. From that meeting I discovered that while she was hesitant to tell me any memories, she did tell the school counsellor.

The counsellor told me that when Charlotte was maybe  3 or 4, on our way from Mummy’s house to a nearby park while just leaving an alleyway, her mother came after us, made a scene and tried to hit me a few times. Charlotte told the counsellor that she was terrified by this and wanted to “protect daddy”, but was unable to for obvious reasons.  And so the negative energy of that moment, the trauma, became repressed / locked in her body until it was spontaneously released many years later.

Because of what happened to me as a child I have walked away from all potentially violent scenes my entire life, including any time her mother might have initiated such action which did not happen very often. 

And so if you compare the trauma my daughter experienced (just once) to someone who is repeatedly severely traumatized on a regular basis at home and then suffers other serious trauma outside the home with no one at all to turn to for comfort,  solace, support or love… you will get an idea of how badly damaged my life was by age 15. I know, because that happened to me and many others I am sure.

And so in my case it crippled me developmentally,  for life. 

When I left home at age 15 or 16, my “tool box” of life skills was empty and in it’s place was a lifetime of bad experiences / memories and the trauma it left me with. I had no “template of relationships” gained in my family of origin to carry forward in life with me, and thus use to form new relationships.

It was only much later in life when I was graced with a wonderful daughter that my heart started to mend and micro-dosing  with psilocybin for the past few years years has helped me to function better.

I never did become the person I could have – to express my creative / productive potential –  and this is how childhood trauma can cripple and rob someone of their future. I know, because it happened to me.