The Psychopath: A True Story(50)

I never attempted suicide. Although I didn’t really care if I lived or died, I would never have done that to my family. I might not have cared about myself but I did care very deeply about them.

I don’t really remember much about my childhood or my teenage years because I spent so much time acting a part and pretending that everything was OK. It worked sometimes. I was a good gymnast and a great musician. There are snapshots and pieces of memory, peaks appearing above the fog.

When I finally told someone and said the words out loud, I was seventeen years old.

I said simply, ‘I was molested as a child.’

The friend I was with looked horrified and said, ‘That must have been awful; you must have been terrified!’

There it was, the attitude I was to hear over and over again and the comment that made me believe I was an even more unworthy and unlovable person because I hadn’t been terrified. Childline, the telephone line support organisation, had started as well as new national campaigns to save abused children, each campaign talking publicly about the abuse and horrors that happened to molested children. They all reinforced the fact that child abuse was a horrible thing and that I should have been petrified at the time. I should have found it awful and disgusting; I should have fought my abuser off and told my parents. But I hadn’t. I had participated and joined in his game. Therefore, in my mind, I must have been as bad as him. I was as bad or worse than a paedophile. It was a horrible time. Saying the words out loud was like turning a key to a locked door inside my head. I recognised that behind that door was the monster part of me that I had shut away, and now it was clamouring to come out. It terrified me. I had to do everything I could to keep that door shut.

I had my first lover when I was eighteen and it felt like I was taking control back. I could use sex rather than letting sex use me. I could use sex instead of cutting myself. From then on, I was almost constantly in a couple and they were always quite highly sexual relationships. I rarely lost control though and although very good at sex I was not very good at relationships. When I started to open up and trust the man I was with, I would also start to push them away because quite simply I felt I was not worthy of love and therefore they were wrong to love me at all. I could only respect the men who disrespected me, because at least they knew who I really was and what I deserved.

I started a degree course in Creative and Performing Arts in 1983, and one day I met someone whose body language seemed familiar. I knew without her saying that she had been molested too but had never talked about it. So I told her my story instead, that I had been abused, and a bit about what had happened. She opened up to me and told me her story in return. It helped me so much just to know I had not been alone. After that I would recognise more and more people, and started to talk to those I knew who had also experienced childhood sexual abuse. Finally I instinctively knew the time was right and admitted to someone that the hardest thing to overcome was the fact that I had enjoyed it. Her eyes opened wide and she lit up like a light bulb. She felt the same way. It was not just me. Over the years I heard more and more people say the same thing and each one had felt unlovable and dirty because of it.

I graduated from college in 1987 and got a 2:1 in my BA Hons Creative and Performing Arts degree. I had expected to fail and as a result had not really worked as hard as I should have, so the result came as rather a surprise.

As I got older, I came to understand and to forgive myself for having participated in the paedophile’s game. It took a few more years of talking to people and writing about it, but gradually a door opened up inside me and I could see there wasn’t a monster inside the room at all. It was a little four-year-old girl sitting on the floor against the back wall. Her legs bent and her head hidden in the folded arms resting on her knees. All around her was dust and cobwebs and she didn’t move or talk but just sat there muffling her tears. I was no longer frightened of her; I just felt an overwhelming sorrow for having trapped her there for so long and wanted to set her free.

Then one day when I was in my mid-twenties, I woke up and sat bolt upright in bed. I don’t know what had happened or if I had had a dream or something, but I felt a huge change. Almost like a hallucination, I witnessed the door of the room in my head swing open and hit the wall behind it. The room crumbled to dust and the wind blew through it in a gust. The girl was gone.

I finally realised on an instinctive level that I was not to blame. That I was an innocent child who didn’t have the knowledge or understanding to stand up to an adult who was abusing me. I also realised that what he had done to me ended when I was six years old, and everything that had happened since I had done to myself. I had been a victim but I wasn’t going to be any more. I chose to love that little girl inside me, to nurture her and accept her, for every wonderful thing that she was and not to punish her for the crimes against her.

Having accepted and forgiven myself for being caught by a paedophile, the next step was to forgive him. That took a while, but I knew that hating Jimmy or being angry would just hurt me more and I decided that I wanted to be happy. As someone said to me, hating someone else is like taking poison and expecting them to die. So I talked to a lot of people and I read a lot of books – I became fascinated by psychology and interested in why people like Jimmy abuse others.

I found out that people are not born paedophiles and usually become that way because they were abused as children themselves. Rather than come to terms with it, they take on the role of abuser instead. I decided that my abuser was not evil, but just damaged. I figured that most people who hurt others were probably victims themselves at one point or another. Nowhere, in all my reading, was there ever a mention of a paedophile being a psychopath or sociopath.