The power of coincidence

Benjamin Fry

Five years ago today I woke up and knew that I had come to the end of my capacity to tolerate any more pain. I wanted to die. That morning I faced a crossroad in my journey: turn left for death; turn right for life, more pain, uncertain recovery, a life unknown. The idea of turning left felt so comforting; a reliable path to the end of suffering.

Today, five years later, exactly to the day, I sit on a wonderful rural property waiting for the moving trucks to arrive bringing Khiron House to its new home. As I was preparing for this arrival, I found myself curious about the date and looked back five years in my diary. It was exactly today that this started five years ago. On that day I telephoned the Meadows in Arizona and was on a plane the next day. There I eventually discovered trauma healing treatment at Mellody House and my journey back to life began.

Today, as Khiron House moves to this wonderful property, leading that move is Colleen DeRango, who was the lead clinician at Mellody House.  She has recently become the executive director of Khiron House allowing me to take a step back from day-to-day involvement. The power of these coincidences, these bookends even, moved me deeply.

It is also the week of ‘Thanksgiving’ in America, as it was five years ago. It is a time to ask what we are grateful for. As I reflected on that this morning I was moved to tears. Tears of pain I became very familiar with, but tears of gratitude were a very new experience, one which I found for the first time when I left Mellody House and said goodbye (or so I believed!) to Colleen.

Today I am grateful:

• That I am alive
• For the continuing love, connection and support of my ex-wife and children, who suffered terribly with me
• For better health; both mental and physical
• For the opportunity to be working and productive
• That my work is meaningful to me
• For the brave people who work with me on our projects
• For our clinicians I found in the UK who were committed to trauma healing work
• For the trust, time and financial commitment from our patients who risk walking this journey with us too
• That I made that call and got on that plane five years ago and that there was somewhere to go to
• For Colleen DeRango, who  was there at the beginning and the end of this chapter, like some graceful divine presence, our Alpha and Omega
• For the healing energy of horses
• For love, connection and spirit, without which I would surely have taken the other path
• For life, in all of its rich complexity and magical layers

There was no artifice in this, no plan, not even any conscious awareness.  Exactly five years have passed from one event to the other, a death of sorts to a birth; a five year odyssey to bring a phoenix from the ashes of both myself and my life. And I only noticed this morning.

I would like to give my thanks to everyone who has nurtured me on that journey, travelled alongside me, suffered with me, and put up with me.  In this week of ‘thanksgiving’ I am overwhelmed with gratitude; something which I once never thought I would ever feel again.

I believe that it is a testament to the greater forces in our universe that a true surrender into recovery (which I was left with no choice but to make on that morning five years ago) is so often rewarded with rebirth. So my final gratitude is to my higher power and the angels who have watched over me. Truly I was saved in that desert five years ago and for that I can only reflect in wonder, humility and service.

If you would like a weekly email about new posts on our blog please sing up for our mailing list in the box above right

The post Five years of gratitude… my journey home appeared first on Khiron Clinics.

It was really heart-warming to be able to welcome to our annual outcomes presentation this morning several ex-patients of Khiron House. Three of them had started treatment with us in the residential clinic and another out-patient. I was amazed to see how easily they took to talking to a room full of people they didn’t know, and so early in the day too! These were well functioning nervous systems.

They told a uniform story of recovery, of lives not only put back on track, but also sent into new and healthier directions. When I set up Khiron House it was my goal that we could replicate for our clients my own experience in treatment. In their verbal testimonies I heard that this has been achieved. The word that comes back to us time and time again is ‘transformational’. I truly believe that this is the right adjective for our programme.

Our clinical director, Dr Charles Hallings-Pott, also presented to a select group of London clinicians our outcomes report for 2013. This was independently prepared for us by CORE and covered the period from October 2012 to the end of 2013. The results were very encouraging.

The severity of our clients conditions, as measured by the CORE psychometric tests, was in the top quarter of clinical cases on average. We achieved reliable improvement in two thirds of these clients and none of the other deteriorated. We included all clients who had completed treatment in that time and who had filled in a least two CORE forms. For the full story please download the report.

Overall our goal remains to make this treatment more effective and more reliable. To that end we have already implemented and improved aspects of our delivery since the period covered by this report. I’m excited to see the outcomes next year since we have clearly been able to provide very effective treatment to date and yet we are always working to be better.

All of this happens only for one reason: because our clients are brave enough to commit themselves to our treatment programme. Our success is only because of their successes. We hope to see more of them every year for many years to come.

If you would like a weekly email about new posts on our blog please sign up for our mailing list in the box above right. 

The post Khiron House outcomes presentation for 2013 appeared first on Khiron Clinics.

Horris Hill

There has been a huge response in the press to the journalist Alex Renton’s courageous article about examples of abuse in british boarding schools, which you can read here: Abuse in British boarding schools – why I had to confront my demons

He was writing about his experiences at Ashdown Prep School and the appalling abuse that the children suffered there.

As he says at the end of the article:-

“I thought of those others .. who wanted to speak up. I thought of the children in council care homes, in borstals and mental institutions, who over the years were left in thrall to adults without protection. I thought of .. the great swathe of collateral damage that psychological trauma leaves. I thought of all the kids taken from their homes too early and thus denied, as the writer David Thomas once put it, the chance to love”.

I think Alex Renton’s article is timely as, despite some increasing openness, people in positions of power undoubtedly still feel they can get away with abuse, and proper deterrents are not in place. It is important that there is a strong message in our society that causing sexual harm to children will not go unpunished.

To give you a case in point, a teacher whom I knew at prep school, up to the age of 12, was prosecuted in 2001 following complaints against him by six former pupils. He was acquitted, which shocked me. You can see why in the extract below from my 2004 book, ‘What’s Wrong With You’.

You will see that I am fairly certain that there has been miscarriage of justice. I hope that Alex’s brave article will go some way to helping to correct the culture which has facilitated that.

Case Study: Hot Rod

It turned out that there were four pedophiles teaching at my prep school. That’s quiet a lot among the staff for only one hundred and fifty boys.

The school was a top quality boarding school for young boys. I went there a few days after my eighth birthday. I was there for five years before going on to Eton. It was known as a prep-school because originally these kind of schools were used to prep-are boys for their grown up boarding schools.

Its main duty to the parents was to groom the boy for entrance to the school of their parents’ choice. Unfortunately while doing so, some of the staff had it in mind to groom the children for an entirely different sort of graduation.

We were there for eight months of the year. Each term there was a long weekend allowed at home for half-term. Otherwise you could go out for the day on Sunday (after chapel) three times each term. I have no idea why it was restricted to three times per term. I can only imagine that the school didn’t want to create an inequity among those boys whose parents could make it more often and those whose parents were not so keen. In any case it wasn’t much relief: eight hours at home, three times in three months. For the rest of the time we were living with our schoolmasters, the pedophiles in loco parentis.

I only became aware of this furtive undercurrent to our education during my final term. The deputy headmaster of the school, known as Hot Rod, was becoming a larger and larger figure in my life.

He was an urbane, charming and educated classics scholar. He had been at Oxford with my father. I had always felt comfortable with him because of the family connection. He had suggested that I learn a musical instrument and pointed me to the French Horn. He conducted the school orchestra.He was the head of the house where I slept. He taught Latin to the top form. And crucially now, he was the master in charge of cricket. It being the summer term there was a new cricket team to be found and a new captain to be appointed.It was clear from the opening games of the season that I was first choice for this post.

And so we fell into a cosy relationship. He would be the one to turn out our lights at night and to wish me goodnight. He would wake us up in the morning. He would supervise our washing. He would take morning assembly. He would teach me Latin. He would conduct the orchestra. He would coach the cricket and increasingly annex me into the management of this term’s cricket team. There would be conversations snatched during the morning rush to prepare for the day. There would be conferences in the hall before bedtime. I felt quite grown up, quite a part of his world.

There was always something a little unbalanced about Hot Rod. He had a temper, that much was abundantly clear. He was middle-aged and yet single. He was rumoured to drink, although we had little idea what that really meant. But to a pre-pubescent boy, the strangest thing about him was undoubtedly his habit of wearing his shirts tucked into his Y-fronts. These Y-fronts would protrude above the waistline of his trousers and had the moniker Y-jockey repeated around their elastic waists. Seeing the deputy headmaster’s pants was hysterical for us small boys.

However, it is hard now not to reflect differently on Hot Rod’s pants. Was it an unconscious leak of where the man’s real thoughts lay? Was it a warning to the boys? Or to the staff? Or a coded message advertising the existence of the demons that perhaps he used the drink to keep at bay? I can not in retrospect see it as a coincidence that every boy in the entire school was able to see the pants of the most senior paedophile on the staff. After all you’d have to presume that pants was what he wanted to get into. Perhaps this was his way of playing ‘I’ll show you mine if you’ll show me yours’; something that the boys themselves were innocently pursuing as they stumbled into the earliest stages of adolescence.

I wasn’t the easiest pupil. Despite intellectual and sporting talents, I was quite frequently in trouble. I never fitted easily into an organisation. I didn’t cooperate naturally with rules. I liked to understand them and appreciated their structure, but more than that I liked to break them and to get away with it. I was a compulsive rebel, but I managed it with charm rather than confrontation. It created quite a conundrum for my teachers. On the one hand I was engaging and talented, just what the school looked for to promote its qualities, and on the other hand I undermined the institution with my behaviour.

It was still early in the term and I had found myself in serial trouble. I can’t remember the details. It was always something trivial, a missed music lesson here, a bad prep there. The incidents themselves never provoked too much outrage but the pattern had the teachers flummoxed. This flouting of authority challenged them all the more because I should have been a shining example of the school’s successes. Finally, I was summoned to a crunch talk with Hot Rod. There had been dark muttering about my behaviour rendering me unsuitable to be appointed captain of cricket. Such an important member of the school should not be transgressing its rules so regularly. The issue needed a resolution and, unusually, I was invited to see Hot Rod in the private side of the school in the headmaster’s house.

I went after lunch. There was always a strange feeling to these rooms. They had a musty smell and a lack of proprietary care that comes from staff accommodation. There was no-one there on that day but Hot Rod. He invited me into the study to talk. He seemed a little distracted. He began by cataloguing my failures that term and outlined the concerns of the staff about my suitability for any kind of senior responsibility. I was used to this. I’d had it on and off for the last five years. I would tend to argue a bit, justify a bit, apologise a bit, charm a bit and get through it. But there was something different going on today. I was hesitant in this intimidating atmosphere and Hot Rod was almost conspiratorial rather than didactic in his recital of the staff’s concerns.

He presented little admonishment, more the proposition of a problem that we needed to solve, so I had little to say in return. He paused, presumably wrestling with himself, and then handed down his sentence. He had decided that I was to be beaten. This would then be sufficient to absolve me of all my sins so far that term and we could start from a clean sheet. I would be free to become the cricket captain in my pristine state of virginal discipline.

This was a shock. Corporal punishment was whispered about but even in those days rarely encountered. When it was so it was usually for quite severe and dangerous transgressions such as the wilful destruction of property or malicious harming of a pupil or teacher. It seemed to me to be such a harsh word: beaten. I was to be beaten. And for what? Missing a few music lessons? Cheeking a few teachers? And what was this artifice for? To purge me so that I could be appointed the cricket captain? Even then I was aware that something ddidn’t quite add up although I could not have guessed yet the real motives at work.

I half expected that he was joking, that he would relent and send me on my way. Indeed it seemed that he was himself struggling with that same possibility. There was a pause, his opportunity to reverse the course of events that he may had plotted for some time, but in the end there was no mercy. He left the room and returned a little while later with an object that shocked me anew. He was holding what was euphemistically referred to as a hairbrush, but I believe that the only hair that it was meant for was on horses. Now, what was a stable grooming instrument doing secreted in the headmaster’s quarters? Hot Rod was well known for carrying a butter pat in his briefcase; a small wooden paddle that he threatened as an instrument of discipline. (A butter pat in a briefcase! How could that not alarm adults who encountered him?) I’m not sure that I had had any idea what to expect, but I suppose the butter pat had seemed likely. Instead I was facing a much more fearsome weapon. The hairbrush was about three feet long with a heavy wide head where the bristles were mounted. It looked dangerous. Hot Rod had a strange excited air about him as he asked me to bend over. Thankfully my clothes stayed on. I was grateful at least for that dignity as I grabbed my knees, unable to imagine what was about to happen.

He struck me damn hard with the first blow. I couldn’t believe the violence of it. The pain was bad enough but what was worse was to be assaulted like this, in cold blood, by this otherwise avuncular figure in whose pastoral care I found myself more often than any other teacher. He was, on purpose, attacking me, literally beating me, and all the while on the most flimsy of pretexts. There were other blows that followed, but by then I was in shock. When he had had his fill, he invited me to stand. All I could do was to choke back the tears. I couldn’t speak. He let me go. I walked out of the room, down the hall back to the school, and when the door closed behind me only then did I let the sobs overwhelm me. I couldn’t believe the pain and the violence that I had just experienced in the tranquil setting of the headmaster’s study.  All I could remember was the gentle ticking of the mantelpiece carriage clock suddenly being interrupted by the explosive force of the hairbrush on my arse. Tick tock, tick tock, beat my arse, jolly good, well done fella.

Half an hour later Hot Rod was taking our fielding practice on the cricket pitch. I was late. He smiled at me in welcome as if nothing had happened. My whole bottom was black and blue for days. But I was appointed captain of the cricket team the next day, and from then on was able to spend even more time cloistered with my assailant.

Case Study: Hot Rod, at home

Nothing wrong with a sound beating, I hear you say. Sounds like the snotty little nerd got what was coming to him. A horse’s hair-brush a pedophile does not make. Possibly. But you wouldn’t say that if you were in the cricket team. That wasn’t the end of Hot Rod’s special relationship with instruments of flagellation and it wasn’t the end of Hot Rod’s interesting ideas for new ways to interact with me.

Hot Rod was a favourite with the boys. He played up to his popular appeal. He was suave and charming, urbane and intelligent. The other teachers mostly faded in his shadow. He carried with him a particularly fine confection called “Black Bullets”. These were no ordinary sweets. Sweets to us were consumer products that we smuggled back to school, snatched hastily from a newsagent as our parents bribed us to go willingly. Hot Rod’s sweets were luxury goods. They were as impressive and seductive to us boys as the gleamingly new white BMW that he parked in his drive. And these sweets gave him great power, a unique hold over his inner circle.

The routine after a match against another school was to repair to Hot Rod’s boarding house, the one where I was now the senior dormitory captain, and to post-mortem the game in Hot Rod’s sitting room. Inevitably there were complaints to be made against players and issues raised. This was a great opportunity for Hot Rod. He cajoled us on the one hand, entertaining us in his rooms, pouring out the ginger beer, raising team morale and solidarity, but then he would turn his critical eye and his fragile temper on the stragglers who were failing to follow his directives. There developed a formula for dealing with such failures, a formula that I was already familiar with. During our cosy debriefings, among the fizzy drinks and the black bullets, Hot Rod effortlessly introduced the butter pat into our sporting lexicon. The solution to our weak squad was to punish our transgressions in play with a mild spanking. He would identify a player who had underperformed and then there would be a reckoning. A few mercifully light taps with the butter pat would have them restored to team status, and of course it was all presented as a bit of a gag, a bracing piece of boarding school life: manly stuff.

It had become inevitable that certain individuals were always going to be targets for his post-mortem spankings. He reverted to his technique that he had applied with me of offering a salvation from the beating. He made his victim a hero with a consolation supply of black bullets. We were all getting a black bullet here and there but unreliably and they were heart-stoppingly delicious to small boys eating filth day in and day out. Now Hot Rod introduced the idea of a reliable supply. Those who took the butter pat would get the bullet. Carefully he manipulated the presentation so that the boys began to realise that this relationship could be inverted. Remarkably quickly, he had established his private salon of young boys of sporting excellence, secreted in his boarding house, a thousand yards from the main school, and there, in the cosy seclusion of his sitting room, he dispensed voluntary beatings in return for a gratefully received reliable supply of sugar.

Picture the scene of eleven twelve-year-olds, after a long afternoon doing battle on the field with local rivals, gathered in the warm well furnished rooms of the deputy headmaster. The rest of the school was ploughing through its Victorian routine, stuck in their shorts, sat on stiff wooden benches in cold inhospitable classrooms. But we were regaled, entertained, cajoled and provided for by Hot Rod. Mainly it was a very pleasant diversion and a just reward for our elite status as school representatives. We weren’t looking to find anything wrong with it. Okay, perhaps it was a bit weird that Hot Rod would inevitably open up his briefcase as some point and produce the butter pat. Perhaps it was a bit unfair that one or two boys were always the ones to find themselves on the wrong end of the butter pat. But it wasn’t going to ruin our fun. We were being spoilt. We didn’t want to see that we were being spoiled. Boarding school life is exceedingly grim, especially in terms of creature comforts. We took our pleasures where we could find them. Hot Rod knew exactly how to seduce us.

Not surprisingly, I never asked for a black bullet via the butter pat. By this point I wasn’t entirely comfortable with Hot Rod, his weapons, or his schemes to raise a spanking, fair or foul. Three other very odd things happened that summer. The first was shortly after my initial beating and subsequent appointment as cricket captain. One of the rituals of our mornings was to take it in turns, dormitory by dormitory, to go to the washrooms. This was a process sometimes supervised by Hot Rod himself. Then we would return to our dormitories to dress and tidy our beds. This morning, Hot Rod asked me to come to his room when I was dressed to discuss the cricket team. His room did not mean his study but his bedroom, which was about ten yards down the hall from my bedroom. I duly ventured in after getting myself ready. He called out to me to enter, but he was not there. He was in his en-suite bathroom and emerged naked from the waist up, brushing his teeth. His signature Y-fronts were most firmly in evidence. He finished his brushing and we made some small talk about the cricket team. Again he seemed somewhat distracted and again I was aware of the incongruity of discussing these ordinary school details but in the extraordinary setting of his bedroom with him half naked. Then without provocation he suddenly clasped me to his chest and exclaimed, “my dear boy, how could I have done such a thing?”

Of course I knew what he was talking about. I had known that there was something weird about the beating he had given me and now I had the evidence. His remorse clearly signalled to me that what he had done was wrong. However, this latest chapter was another weird and confusing incident. I had not spoken much about the beating partly due to the shame of it, but also because there had been something creepy about it, something that was easier to forget. So I wasn’t going to broadcast this new incident. It was just too weird for me. Adult passions, rage, violence, grief, shame and remorse were beyond me. I was just a small boy in a dangerous place trying to stay safe. I hoped that would be the end of it.

No such luck. Some time later Hot Rod took me aside towards the end of the day as we prepared for bedtime. He invited me again into his bedroom. He said he had an idea for a game and seemed very excited. That was odd enough in itself. He explained to me in detail his cunning plan. In the morning, he would summon me to his bedroom as he invited my dormitory to go for washing. Then we would play a trick on the other boys. He would shout something at me and then smack two slippers together to make a loud beating noise. This would fool the other boys into believing that he had been beating me. I would then go down to wash. What a brilliant game!

It didn’t really involve me doing anything but I had a very weird feeling that this was not normal. How was this amusing? It what way was it a game? What was the point in trying to pretend that he was beating me? After all, he’d shown that he had the inclination and authority to do so for real whenever he pleased. So just what was the point? Morning came and Hot Rod duly carried out his plans. I was somewhat dumbfounded, hoping I suppose that he would have just forgotten about his silly idea. I stood in his bedroom as he shouted something and then he beat two slippers, very loudly, against one another, after which I went down to the washrooms with the others. No-one said a word. No-one wanted to get involved in what was going on.

There were small boys everywhere in pyjamas and dressing gowns, washing, dressing and undressing. For supervision they had Hot Rod, the Y-front toting grown-up who played spanking games with slippers behind his bedroom door. Was he masturbating in that bathroom, the echo of fresh blows ringing in this ears, young boys in various states of undress so close to him all around the house? Maybe not. Would you rather think not? If you’d paid most of your disposable income to have your son be there, in that house at that moment, would you really rather not even consider it? Perhaps I’m being unkind. Perhaps Hot Rod was just a reluctant and clumsy disciplinarian who had a bad sense of humour. There surely must be an explanation? Was he avuncular and lonely, or really perverted and dangerous? I was going to be given one final opportunity to find out.

I never found it that easy to get off to sleep. I think that I must have mentioned this to Hot Rod once because one night, as he was putting us to bed as usual, he casually let it be known, fully audible to the whole dormitory, that if I didn’t get off to sleep I was welcome to join him downstairs for a drink in his study. I mumbled some reply.

Now I knew what happened in movies when people asked other people to have a drink with them, especially late at night. Even in my own innocence and chastity I couldn’t see this as anything other than an overture of some kind. Sexual? Romantic? Familiar? I didn’t know. I didn’t even know what those words meant. But I did know that down there, in the room below my bed, separated from me by a few joists and floorboards, waited for me a world that I was not advised to intrude upon. Hot Rod was rumoured to drink whisky. A lot of whisky. What was the plan? Were we to share a tumbler late into the night? The housemaster and the twelve year-old boy?

In the morning I saw him again in the washroom. He hadn’t forgotten. He perhaps seemed relieved that I had not come. I wonder how long he waited; how he wrestled with himself over what he might do if I did arrive. He joked with me that I was bound to have fallen asleep straight away after such an invitation. I don’t remember answering. The truth was that I had hardly slept at all.

The following year I heard news of Hot Rod from my old school friends who had gone with me to Eton. He had been asked to give some extra lessons during the Easter holidays to a pupil who lived near the school. Hot Rod attempted to sexually molest the boy while giving him some remedial Latin. Hot Rod made a mistake here. He had acted outside of term-time. The boy went straight home and told his mother. Hot Rod “left”. The rumour was that he went to America. Not jail. That would never do, after all he was the deputy headmaster. Did the police ever investigate? Certainly no-one ever asked me any questions. How many other boys had been interfered with, threatened, toyed with, groomed? Was he acting alone, or was he being encouraged? Did they ever try to find out? Had they done so, they might have spared the student population of my school yet more suffering.

Before I had left Eton I heard of three more paedophiles unmasked among the teaching staff of my prep-school. I was told that one had gone to jail and the two others, one of them an old-Etonian, took their own lives when caught. They were all on the staff when I was there. How many boys had suffered and in how many ways before that tally was reached? How many suffer still today, having never breathed out loud a word of their experiences? How many other children are being freshly damaged every day and every night, while their schools employ perverts to watch over the future leaders of our companies, councils, schools and assets?

 If you would like a weekly email about new posts on our blog please sign up for our mailing list in the box above right. 

The post Denied The Chance To Love: Examples Of Abuse In British Boarding Schools appeared first on Khiron Clinics.

I write quite openly in the press sometimes about my experiences of being unwell and in treatment. People ask me why I expose myself so much. They think that it is a little odd, something they would not do. Added to that, I am a psychotherapist, so they wonder if it would be bad for my career, or even my clients, to know that I was completely bonkers myself. They are all fair points. In many ways it is an agony to disclose things about myself, and in other ways it can be considered to be unprofessional.

I took this dilemma to a new level in the writing of my latest book, which tells the intimate story of my breakdown, treatment and recovery. I made a decision early on in writing the draft to leave nothing out of the initial version, but then had to come back to this and to wonder if I was really going to be ok being that vulnerable in the public domain. In fact, I decided not to be and then that very same day a new client came to see me in London and this made me rethink.

She had been terribly abused as a child and found this really hard to talk about. She was reliving, forty years later, the same conditions of her childhood home, in which she was not allowed to talk ‘about it’. She had none of my advantages of education, treatment and support, and I could see how difficult it was for her even to tell me, in the privacy of a consultation which she was paying for. It made me realise that if I wasn’t going to be courageous about talking about my abuse, then how could I ask her to be?

I had to think about the issue on a deeper level too. Why did I feel guilty, dirty even, to talk about the abuse in my childhood? Over and over, I came back to the thought that it wasn’t my fault, so why should I be ‘wrong’ or ‘bad’ to talk about it. And yet I did feel wrong and bad, but most of all ashamed.

In theory, I understood that I was feeling the abuser’s shame, but this was no comfort. The idea is that the child has to make a choice between seeing the abusing adult as the ‘bad’ one, but if that is too terrifying it itself (which it often is if you rely on that adult), then it is easier to see yourself as the ‘bad’ one. Bad things happen to me because I am bad. And, yes, that is actually how I feel about it when I talk about my childhood too. I feel that I am commenting negatively on myself when I say that something bad happened to me. It’s a terrible bind.

So I have steeled myself to take the plunge. In the end I decided to publish the original book, with all the worst of my story remaining in it. It has become even more difficult because the original idea was to use these stories to illustrate a more theoretical book, but the story itself was so long that we decided to publish it standalone. I never set out to tell my story just for the sake of it, and certainly not in this detail, but that is what appeared to end up as the result. Then I faced this awful dilemma.

The book is now available and I feel like I just want to hide. I can see that it is a good book that would be of great value to people with similar problems or histories, but part of me also doesn’t mind if nobody reads it. In my work, I tell people that the antidote to shame is to speak out, to name your truth and to survive it. I am hoping to survive this book. It is my deepest truth. Why should I feel bad about that?

You can read the articles and excerpts from the book on our blog.

Buy the book from amazon.com and amazon.co.uk or download it to your Kindle.

If you would like a weekly email about new posts on our blog please sign up for our mailing list in the box above right. 

The post The agony of self disclosure by Benjamin Fry appeared first on Khiron Clinics.

Colleen Derango

I arrived at this workshop sick of therapy. I run a mental health service, work with therapists, deliver therapy and have a therapist! Sometimes I have disagreements with all of them, including myself, and so I got to Arizona in a state of slight burn-out, wondering why I had taken leisure time to be around yet more therapy. I was, in short, somewhat disagreeable.

The first day I parked myself somewhat sulkily under the tree by the campfire and found myself relaxing into some uncharacteristic lapses of highly negative thinking. The space that I had, with no phone, no work, no family, was allowing some stresses to surface. A recent conflict which I had had in my own therapy was playing on my mind and slowly I started to notice the effect this was having on me in the here and now. Fortunately I was able to observe myself a little and to have some dual awareness of my condition. I was watching Colleen Derango working, possibly the person I trust the most with my own health, and I was grumpy. I was second guessing what we were doing there, if I would get enough time, if I would get what I needed. And then I just noticed this. I thought to myself, “if I am being negative about Colleen, then there is obviously something really upsetting me” and I realised that before anything productive would happen I would need to talk to her about this.

So we started our first session with the horse with me able to tell her exactly how I was feeling about her and what we were doing. This has been one of the great benefits for me from my treatment. When I feel safe with someone I can talk about something which might be difficult. Colleen herself actually taught me how to do this. I just make sure that I am talking about myself, how I am feeling and what I am thinking, and don’t make it about the other person. I was able to own my negativity and in doing so, look for the source of this. I found myself moving quickly on to telling her about some troubles I had had with my own therapist which clearly were not resolved. Just being listened to about this allowed me to reoriente myself to ‘therapy’ in general and I was able to begin to engage property with the workshop. I stopped being so distant and aloof and started to join in.

My first somatic equine therapy session with the horse was baffling. I’d been on a horse once in 30 years and didn’t really like them. I was scared. In this training in horsemanship, we didn’t get on a horse. We worked with them in a ’round pen’. Buddy, the horseman, told me to get the horse moving just by intending him to with my body! How bonkers is that? I was flummoxed. This was the beginning of the horse part of the journey ‘into the self’. In order to get the horse to know what I wanted, I had to try to fully inhabit my own body and then connect with, or resonate with, the horse, so that our bodies became driven together by my own somatic intentions. I was rubbish at it on day one.

On day two, I was starting to unravel a bit. The stresses of life before horse were beginning to catch up on me and in a session that morning, we did some somatic work, rather than horsemanship. This was the marvel of that week.With the therapist and the cowboy, we could switch seamlessly between horsemanship and therapy, as the body wanted to go. I needed to process something. We never even got the horse out of her stall. I started to resonate with the horse and, weirdly, we both started to twitch in the shoulder, and then start pawing with the same leg! As she did so, I felt myself let go of some part of me that had be standing a vigilant sentry and I started to cry. I felt a deep sense of loneliness, a kind of existential loneliness, and was awash with true sadness. Perhaps the consequences of my divorce were catching up on me, or maybe something deeper, a resonance of my first time in the desert with Colleen, when I was so alone in treatment, echoing the desperate aloneness of my infant life. In any case, the wonder of working with the horse is that the reason, the memory, the process, none of it matters. I really didn’t need to go there. My body did the work, with the horse and my metabolizing container, and I was left with something much simpler than my history. Around the campfire, I was asked what came up for me now, as my body rested. And it was simple; “I’m ok”.

I started my life in mental health as a highfalutin psycho-dynamic psychotherapist, excited about the complexity of interpreting the unconscious. I feel that it is a graduation to come to the point of just letting an unknown horse work with my body, and then my mind having nothing in it but two two-letter words. That’s progress for me. My hugely developed conscious mind giving way to a simpler, more ancient wisdom; the intuitive work of the body and the soul. More and more I’m “ok” on ever deeper levels. And it was a joy to be connected to that felt sense, that core truth, while working far outside my comfort zone, far from everything I knew.

The week just got better and better. I found myself on the last day 180 degrees away from my chuntering ingrate of the first morning. I consider that week to have been a true blessing for which I will always be grateful, worth every penny and pioneered by a pair of genuine visionaries, masters of their crafts. I thoroughly recommend it.

Visit their website for more details.

If you would like a weekly email about new posts on our blog please sign up for our mailing list in the box above right. 

The post My journey Into The Desert With Somatic Equine Therapy – Part Two appeared first on Khiron Clinics.

Somatic Equine Therapy

Last week I went to Arizona to spend a week on a ranch with a somatic therapist and a horse whisperer. Since I don’t really like horses and have not been on one for 30 years, this was somewhat of a leap of faith.

The workshop was led by Colleen Derango, the former head of Mellody House (which has now closed). She was partnered by Buddy Uldrikson, one of America’s most celebrated horsemen. She has been developing this work with Buddy over the last five years and has now synthesized something quite remarkable.

Why Horses?

Key principles of working with the nervous system are regulation and capacity. Regulation is the goal of this work, and implies an ability to smoothly react appropriately (regulated) to external threat, and then to unwind from that reaction completely. We learn regulation as infants from our larger caregivers, who provide extra capacity (or holding) for our tiny, dysregulated systems. This is how we use good attachment to create good mental health.

This work is not done in the brain, it is done in the body. Specifically it seems to be done by the vagus nerve, which apparently has more neuronal connections to the gut than there are in the brain. The horse has the largest vagus nerve of any land mammal, and therefore it represents a huge capacitor for regulating (or metabolizing) our own nervous systems; just like a mother to an infant.

So why the horse whisperer?

We are not infants. Most of us who have lost our regulation along the way (usually through a combination of poor attachments and a series of over-stressful events) have lost the ability to become attuned to another mammal, and thereby to settle our own nervous system by the power of connection (good attachment). We see people relearning this skill in groups. With the right (safe enough) set up, we can start to settle, trust and to connect again. The 12-step groups are usually a good example of this, and the regulation that it sets up on the inside reduces the need to get regulated from the outside by chemicals. We see the same effect in our trauma reduction groups at Khiron House.

Moving this on to horses, we need to learn a new trick if we are to put this into practice in what they call the ‘round pen’, a training area for learning to work with a horse without riding one. Buddy ostensibly taught us how to handle a horse, but in doing so asked us to connect with the horse, and to do that, crucially, we had to connect to our own somatic selves first. So in working with horsemanship skills, we were doing, as he had done all of his life, the first basic work of somatic therapy, which is to slow down, sense into ourselves and try to connect with the other from a new more embodied place. Cowboys, I have noticed, don’t rush. They are in the moment, otherwise they can’t work with the animals which are always in the moment too.

Ok but where is the therapy?

Colleen and Buddy have worked on creating a seamless partnership which allows a fluid transition from this initial connection with self and with the horse to a truly powerful somatic therapy. Colleen would take over to guide us into some processing with the horse acting as our capacitor. This allowed me to reach places, safely and organically, that might have been hard to access without such robust support.

The net result of the whole experience was a settling of my nervous system to a state of deep relaxation. I was able to process some of my remaining trauma, resource myself with their lovely horses, relax in the sunshine in the great containing capacitor of the desert, and to be in a group of people who were really working their own stuff, a very safe place to be.

Next week I will take you further into that internal journey and open up for you my own intimate experience of trauma healing and somatic resourcing, as gifted to me by Colleen and Buddy out in the simple environment of a ranch in the Sonora high desert.

Visit their website for more details.

If you would like a weekly email about new posts on our blog please sign up for our mailing list in the box above right. 

The post My journey Into The Desert With Somatic Equine Therapy – Part One appeared first on Khiron Clinics.

Telegraph Weekend Section 1 March 2014

Therapist Benjamin Fry’s privileged upbringing left him ill-equipped for his own collapse. Now he shares the radical ideas that helped him to recover.

A few years ago, I had a major breakdown and was admitted to a specialist psychiatric hospital in Arizona, where I stayed for four months. In that time, I didn’t receive a single card, letter or email from any of my friends or family. Nobody called, nobody visited. Every day, I would check for mail, telephone messages and email. Nothing. Being British and posh, I did what I was bar-coded to do and just carried on.

I know it sounds like a poor little rich kid’s sob story, but bear with me. Behind that sad sketch lies a problem that has plagued me all my life.

My father was a multimillionaire, earning his money through the financial services industry. My mother died when I was 11 months old, but when my father remarried I was brought up at a prestigious address in Knightsbridge, London, and I went first to Eton and then to Oxford. Most normal people would tag me as ludicrously privileged.

By 30 I was married with a child (the first of five), working as a psychotherapist and presenting TV shows such as Freaky Eaters and Spendaholics.

You may not believe it but my life was, in fact, far from golden. I had felt from very early on that there was something wrong with me – I’d wander through my prep school alone at night, anxious. Later, in my twenties, I suffered panic attacks and needed therapy, which was only partially helpful.

Bad things, such as losing a mother, can happen to any of us, but I found that my background had not only prepared me spectacularly badly for dealing with them, but had contributed to the mental health problems they would cause and had been a serious barrier to my recovery.

I became brilliant at faking the kind of extraordinary confidence that people like me, equipped with a world-class education, are supposed to have, but inside I knew I had zero emotional skills.

I didn’t feel as though I could complain, which might have led to suggestions for help – I had drawn lucky in life, so what had I to moan about? People like me don’t cry: we cover our emotions and carry on.

On the surface things looked fine, but I was ignoring a rising panic within. I began to behave more and more recklessly to try to keep my golden façade intact and I invested in the emerging Greek property bubble to compensate for my lack of earnings from the work I loved.

When I lost everything in the crash of 2008, I gradually spiralled into a total collapse and became suicidal. I tried every clinic there was, but nothing helped. In the end, months after I had ignored a recommendation from a therapist friend, I gave in and found myself on a plane to Mellody House, in Arizona.

There, where a new generation of psychological therapies were being pioneered, I finally had a breakthrough.

I learned that conditions we have traditionally called ‘mental health’ problems, such as anxiety and depression, are now beginning to be understood differently.

Increasingly, they are seen as being rooted in the neurobiology of our nervous systems, and in this respect all mammals are almost identical. When faced with stress, which the body perceives as a threat, the body does what it needs to to respond and ensure survival.

However, when there is no chance to allow stressful experiences to resolve themselves naturally, many of us are unable to turn off our ‘neuroception’ of threat long after the threat itself has been survived. This means we get stuck in a frozen state that our system struggles to resolve, resulting in a biological meltdown (aka ‘trauma’). We relive the biology of a child who could not resolve his or her sense of threat.

Outwardly, this can manifest itself as many symptoms including anxiety (when the system overreacts to perceived threat); depression (when it underreacts); OCD; ADHD and ‘medically unexplained symptoms’. These almost always arise from a failure of the nervous system to automatically regulate itself.

Many people unknowingly make things worse by medicating the symptoms of trauma with drugs and alcohol as they try to bring themselves back to a balanced ‘normal’.

As I began to understand this, I realised I could apply it to my own childhood. My mother’s death was a major stress factor that I hadn’t resolved. On top of that – part of the double bind of being posh – I was pushed to be independent from a very young age at boarding school, another stress. I formed weak, anxious attachments because my parents were posh and were therefore the product of an even more difficult generation above. There’s no blame in this, I realised, just biology and causation. Mammals that are well attached in early childhood metabolise threat and stress well; those who are not, do not.

I realised that in 32 years from starting boarding school to being admitted to hospital, I had been hiding. At Eton I was desperate for friendship, and pretended I was fine. At university I didn’t offer friendship, but instead used it. I started a lifelong habit of neglecting friends once I found a woman to comfort me. I just couldn’t get vulnerable, or be open, with anyone. I had to continue the façade, doing what posh people do, living like posh people live, succeeding like posh people succeed; crying was not an option, and so in the end no one even knew who I was. And I don’t doubt that I used and abused my family’s help: I just took from them and then withdrew again. Ours was a typically high achieving, stiff upper lip household, and they didn’t know what to make of my gradual, messy falling apart.

The Arizona centre treated my breakdown with a form of trauma therapy which I now attribute to saving my life.

Working with the body from the ‘bottom up’ (which means literally working upwards through the brainstem rather than from the ‘mind down’, the opposite), my so-called ‘mental health’ problems were restored by a new generation of body psychotherapies, such as Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, Somatic Experiencing and EMDR.

The difference between these and other therapies I’d encountered is that the therapist tries to engage with the mammal part of the brain and biology, not the human thinking or ‘mind’. The instruction to patients is often to engage with ‘sensation’ rather than ‘thought’ and in doing so the therapists are helping us to resolve problems in our mammalian brain (the limbic system) rather than in the human neocortex. This is radically new because it puts the primal, animal instinct before the brilliant, overdeveloped human in the chain of solving this particular problem. And it works.

Months later, recovered and back in England, I began to get back to work. The entrepreneur in me slowly fluttered to life again. My illness had taught me a lot, not least about how difficult it is to find the right kind of help, so I founded a non-profit organisation and lobbied government for better access to more effective treatment for all. Passionate about the ground-breaking therapy that had so helped me, but which was only available in America, I also established a residential clinic, Khiron House, in Oxfordshire, and an outpatient practice in Harley Street.

People began to come in their droves, from every conceivable walk of life. I couldn’t help but observe, however, that those who had grown up with the same advantages as myself, although they had the money for treatment, somehow found it even harder to accept help.

One such posh patient, George, came to see me last year. Educated at Harrow and Cirencester, George led a hedonistic life. Successful in property, he had left it behind to pursue his passion of sponsoring sport. He was charming, flamboyant, but something inside was consuming him. He was unable to tolerate his many romantic relationships for long. He suffered depression, often resorting to shutting himself in his house alone, running his business in his pyjamas. He was resourceful, resilient, but after the umpteenth bout of despair, he became suicidal. His life ‘should have been’ wonderful – and he was ashamed of not being happy, let alone well, and the isolation this caused was almost worse than his illness.

In treatment, we helped him to understand that his nervous system was responding in its natural way to the threats he’d encountered when young (an alcoholic mother and the desperation he felt when he was bullied, aged eight, at his new boarding school). We enabled George to stop judging himself for being unwell, emerge from his crushing self-hatred and accept that he needed help. Finally we were able to admit him to our residential clinic in Oxfordshire and get him on the path to a full recovery.

Anxiety; depression; OCD; bi-polar; addiction: in my clinic we no longer think solely in terms of these recognised conditions. We think of ‘incomplete stress cycles’. Our patients are overwhelmed, responding to life as if it is a constant threat, and they cannot cope.

The first step to recovery is helping patients to understand this. In my case, I also had to come to terms with the reasons why I was alone in that Arizona hospital. And it was because I deserved to be. I had treated people badly.

The damage still runs deep. Much of my family still don’t speak to me and I’m getting divorced, but at least now I understand why. I accept my own adult responsibility for the consequences of my behaviour and have gone a long way towards fixing that permanently – and now can help others to do so too. I was lucky.

Benjamin Fry’s book ‘How I F***ed Up My Life and Made It Mean Something’ is published later this month. He is the founder of Khiron House (www.khironhouse.com) and Get Stable (www.getstable.org).

If you would like a weekly email about new posts on our blog please sign up for our mailing list in the box above right. 

The post Telegraph Article: People like me don’t cry; we just carry on by Benjamin Fry appeared first on Khiron Clinics.

Benjamin Fry’s new book, How I F***Ed Up My Life And Made It Mean Something, is to be published in March. It is a searingly honest and deeply personal account of Benjamin’s nervous breakdown and his journey to find a treatment that could help him. It took him across the Atlantic Ocean and taught him that there was a new paradigm of treatment emerging that would start to make sense of his situation.

In fact, Khiron House only exists today because of the journey Benjamin made and the transforming treatments he ultimately found in the United States. Those treatments are now part of a whole new approach to healing mind and body, and they are the treatments that are now practiced here in the United Kingdom at Khiron House.

This is the last of three extracts from the book. Benjamin has found his way to the the trauma clinic in Arizona, and there he finally finds the treatment his dysregulated nervous system needs :-

Trauma Treatment 

In this new, safe and secure environment, reconnecting with some of my own energy and desires, I was invited to start working on my over-coupled stack of trauma. With little time, no money and a conviction that this was the only possible treatment for me on the planet that had a hope in hell of working, I went at it with everything I had. We worked with two main trauma modalities, the EMDR and Somatic Experiencing (SE). What they seemed to have in common was that they would both allow the middle part of the brain (originally the mammal brain, now called the limbic system) to run the show and, in doing so, moved us on from our stuck places of looping in traumatic energy. Using these two methods, in conjunction, often had spectacular results since they would come at the problem in slightly different ways . The caveat with all this work was that this processing had to happen inside “something”, a biological container of some sort, a metaphorical bowl, say, in which I carried all my pain. I found that if that container was too small, weak or fragile, and I was to force it too full of my unprocessed traumatic energy, it could break or fracture and the result would be referred to as re-traumatisation. I came to understand that the entire set up of this trauma clinic.. acted as a bigger bowl.. a reinforcement for the busted personal container that I was trying to repair…

Coming Home

I emerged from my sojourn in the desert to some extent all shiny and new. I passed through the doors from customs into the arrivals hall at Heathrow on a sunny March morning. My wife and five beautiful children were there waiting for me. As I received their various hugs, I realised that I was ‘with’ them for the first time in well over a year and for the first time ever with my youngest. They were so bright, loving and full of life. It was the greatest of joys just to be able to sit still with them, to look at them while they were talking, to listen to them, to play with them …

I was no longer mentally ill, but I was far from recovered. It is fair to say that they saved my life with the medication at the hospital and the treatment at the trauma clinic but this only gave me a new problem to solve. There is a point in recovery which can be a difficult one, depending on an individual’s circumstances, which I began to cross. Instead of measuring each day by how far away I was from the bottom of my life – which in my case meant how suicidal I didn’t feel – I started to look at it in terms of how far away I was from the peak experiences of my life, which was pretty bloody far in my case! .. I had no work, no job and probably no career either. I also had numerous bridges to build at home, with an exhausted wife and pretty freaked out children. Slowly the stories of their winter began to be told and were in places extremely hard to hear. My wife had been called in to see the nursery teacher of our three year old daughter who had explained that she had been overhead telling other children that her daddy was dead. All the children seemed overjoyed to see me, but I could see in the shock on all their faces that it had been a long haul…

I was very lucky to find a practitioner of Somatic Experiencing who had just moved back to the UK from Canada and was one of the first people to train in the method…. From her perspective, I was highly agitated still and it took months to help bring me in to land following my inordinately intense ten weeks at the trauma clinic. …This process itself now needed some recovery, which was an interesting and slower process. Going at this steadier rate was like paying attention to a detailed repair job to a wall that had been blasted clean. I often used to think of EMDR as the sandblaster and SE as the delicate brush with which we would clean up the surface afterwards… Much of the emotion was yet to resolve itself. I would spend months grieving before moving on to a deeper resolution of the whole system.

One of the odder features of deep nervous system recovery is the twitching, shaking and trembling which all mammals appear to experience as the sympathetic nervous system discharges. One day I started twitching furiously in my session. As the session ended, I stopped. It did not happen again until I walked up the path to my therapist’s door when it would immediately start again! This happened for weeks. With every passing iteration, my nervous system was calming down and I was beginning to resemble nothing more uncommon than a rather stressed out normal person. I was able to come off my medication – a bit of a drama in its own right but I managed it – and survived the ups and downs and anxieties which this created. I ended up unmedicated, stable, sleeping, able to have fun, play with my children, relate to my wife and even begin to become productive again. Without this treatment, I could have been a burden to the state for ever, but I was getting ready to be able to work again. I could not let go of my interest in why the state could not provide such treatments more successfully and also my entrepreneurial instincts started to kick in, thinking that if these treatments really were so untried and untested in the UK that this represented an opportunity to bring something really valuable to the private sector too.

And Benjamin’s realisation of that ‘opportunity’ of course led to the birth of Khiron House and the work we are now doing here.

Benjamin’s new book tells the story of his nervous breakdown, treatment and recovery. It is the full story hinted at in various articles that he has published over the last few years.

You can read the articles and excerpts from the book on our blog.

Buy the book from amazon.com and amazon.co.uk or download it to your Kindle.

If you would like a weekly email about new posts on our blog please sign up for our mailing list in the box above right. 

The post Benjamin Fry writes about the personal torment that led to the birth of Khiron House (final part) appeared first on Khiron Clinics.

Benjamin Fry’s new book, How I F***Ed Up My Life And Made It Mean Something, is to be published this month. It is a searingly honest and deeply personal account of Benjamin’s nervous breakdown and his journey to find a treatment that could actually help him. It took him across the Atlantic Ocean and taught him that there was a new paradigm of treatment emerging that would start to make sense of his situation.

In fact, Khiron House only exists today because of the journey Benjamin made and the transforming treatments he ultimately found in the United States. Those treatments are now part of a whole new approach to healing mind and body, and they are the treatments that are now practiced here in the United Kingdom at Khiron House.

This is the second of three extracts from the book. Benjamin Fry has been persuaded that he needs to seek treatment in the USA, in Arizona. He begins the stabilisation stage of his treatment in a large rehab/hospital where things do not initially go well at all…

Treatment

Barely able to walk, I stumbled down to the nurses’ station and asked the astonishingly patient staff there if they would help me. Of course they did. One of them took me into a small consulting room and I just fell apart.

I cried so hard and for so long that I thought I would do myself an internal injury. I was completely saturated with the experience of being totally bereft. My entire soul seemed to shake with terror, loss and sadness. I was so wracked with grief that I actually fell off the chair and onto the floor. Even in this state I was aware enough to follow the ‘no touching without permission’ rule and asked the nurse if she would hold my hands. She was kind enough to do so, but clearly had absolutely no idea how to deal with me. After about fifteen to twenty minutes of this I think she got worried enough to call for back up. The head of the counselling team was wheeled in to see me. I was slightly recovering but still unmanageably distressed. I had never seen him before and assumed that he must be their top therapist, but my world rather dissolved around me when he started treating me with the same CBT method that had been employed at the Priory and from which I had scarpered. He asked me what the thought was that I had had just before I became so distressed. I understand that if I think to myself, “I’m never going to get another job,” I will distress myself, obviously, but this had been on a totally different scale. There had not been any thought, just a torrent of non-verbal, probably pre-verbal, distress. The idea that I could have done this to myself with some lazy thinking was ludicrous. I was totally shocked to realise that I was back in a therapeutic black hole, more aware of what I needed than were the people I was paying to treat me, and yet still a million miles away from being able to fix myself, or knowing who could do it for me.

Gradually I recovered over the next hour or so and they all went back to work. I had to go to a group session and somehow stumbled through the morning, but I could feel the same emotional tsunami building up again. It did not help that my group now included people who were there for their own rather strikingly difficult reasons, such as being on the way to jail for such things as stalking and photographing underage girls. Not quite the ideal environment for me, at that moment.

By lunch time I was melting down again. I went back to the nurses’ station and asked if I could sit in one of their rooms. I waited there and again fell apart, sobbing uncontrollably, slumped on the floor hugging a chair to try to keep upright. But this time nobody came. I thought this was odd, but they were often busy there with the high need patients like me. I managed to process some of my emotional overload on my own and felt somewhat better for it. That afternoon I had to sit in on another group member’s family session, which was our typical afternoon schedule. At least that would take the focus off me for a while. Things surely could not get any worse than our hard-core morning groups and it gave me a chance just to try to calm down. At some point during this session I began to feel a slight positive tug at my system, perhaps a dividend of the exhausting emotional overload of the morning. I thought maybe I might be starting to turn the corner. But my excitement was short lived.

At the end of the group I was asked to stay behind. The scary therapist was joined by her intern and the family therapist, a veteran of the treatment centre. Suddenly the mood in the room seemed quite different, like visiting the headmaster. I was able, briefly, to assert that I had had a terrible day but was beginning to feel a bit better, when I was assaulted by what I can only reflect upon in retrospect as a therapeutic intervention of utter madness. I was faced by the three of them with stern body language and expressions and then this rather business-like young lady bluntly accused me of being a histrionic baby, castigated me for my “performance” in the nurses’ station, admonished me for touching the nurse and holding onto her and was then told to grow up. They told me that the nurses had now been instructed not to help me anymore and that if I was to behave like this again I would be transferred out to a maximum security psychiatric hospital where I would be left on my own in a bed. I was also put on a ‘no touch’ and ‘no female contact’ contract, which meant that I couldn’t talk to any woman or touch anyone at all. This was written on my name tag which I wore around my neck. Some of my best friends in there by now were women, there being more of them in treatment than men, such as a lovely lady who offered to meditate with me daily and who I remember one day being kind enough to hug me when she found me frozen, weeping in the bookshop. Finally I was told to go and buy a book called, “Growing Myself Up” and invited to follow the instructions. I was totally flabbergasted.

My moment of feeling an inkling of recovery was blown to smithereens. I was assaulted by new anxieties in every direction. In a few minutes they had ripped away from me most of my friends and many of my other sources of security and comfort in recovery. Everything I had come to rely on to get through these few weeks was demolished. I had had to believe in these people, to trust that they knew something new which could get me well. This was obliterated. Their own treatment protocol had made me so unstable and now they were blaming me for being upset! I just couldn’t believe it. Obviously, though, they weren’t reacting to nothing. I was incredibly irritatingly babyish in many ways, or ‘wounded’ as they would have said. My whole demeanour was that of the beleaguered infant who was drowning in abuse and too small to fight back. I was needy, and desperate and probably very annoying. But I was also very ill. The problem with this treatment programme was that it was exclusively behavioural and therefore they took the view that they should reboot my behaviour without working first with what was making me so unwell. There is a time and a place for both in treatment and unfortunately, in this case, they got their judgement on this very wrong. I was left to pick up the pieces alone.

In the next extract from Benjamin Fry’s new book, How I F***Ed Up My Life And Made It Mean Something, we will witness him finally experiencing the treatments that would help him and lead to the birth of Khiron House.

Benjamin’s new book tells the story of his nervous breakdown, treatment and recovery. It is the full story hinted at in various articles that he has published over the last few years.

You can read the articles and excerpts from the book on our blog.

Buy the book from amazon.com and amazon.co.uk or download it to your Kindle.

If you would like a weekly email about new posts on our blog please sign up for our mailing list in the box above right. 

The post Benjamin Fry writes about the personal torment that led to the birth of Khiron House (part two) appeared first on Khiron Clinics.

Benjamin Fry’s new book “How I F***Ed Up My Life And Made It Mean Something”, is to be published next month.

It is a searingly honest and deeply personal account of Benjamin’s nervous breakdown and his journey to find a treatment that could actually help him.

It took him across the Atlantic Ocean and taught him that there was a new paradigm emerging that would start to make sense of his situation. In fact, Khiron House only exists today because of the journey Benjamin made and the transforming treatments he ultimately found in the United States. Those treatments are now part of a whole new approach to healing mind and body, and they are the treatments that are now practised here in the United Kingdom, at Khiron House.

This is the first of three extracts from the book.

I remember the Christmas of 2008. I had a lovely home, a big tree, enough presents, food, four lovely children and a pregnant wife, but all I did all day was shake. 

We had some friends over I had met at the church I had continued to attend regularly, thinking I could pray away the anxiety like all the early Christians, who seemed to positively beam with poverty.

Although I could communicate, with the simulation of superficial small-talk, and sit with people, the only experience I could connect with was the one rampaging through my physical system. I remember my lower abdomen just trembling all the time. My body was just ‘on’. I probably lost two stone over the previous two months. I literally shook it off. I was still eating, as I did at Christmas lunch, but I must have been burning energy at such a rate that it was the equivalent of starving myself despite the normal intake of calories.

It was interesting how I experienced these changes. I certainly didn’t see myself then as I see myself now, looking back. That wasn’t possible. Had I told myself then that I was sliding into a serious mental illness it would have made my worries worse. Instead, I rationalised that I was just taking on too many new clients at work and that ‘their stuff’ was overwhelming me. This was partly true, but trying to solve the problem as if this was all it was didn’t work. I spent more time with my supervisor, ostensibly discussing my clients, but gradually all we found ourselves discussing was me and how I was falling apart. 

Then I stopped sleeping properly. This is really when all semblance of normality began to leave my life, mind and body. 

Sleep, I have come to reflect, is a thing like money and love in as much as you can’t really appreciate its value until you lose it. I began to wake up earlier and earlier in the morning, initially with a murmur, latterly with a start, then finally like a gunshot had exploded in my head. The worse it got, the more of an issue it became; the more of an issue it became, the more I worried about it; the more I worried, the less I slept. 

It got to the point where each morning I would wake up and the first thing I would do was look at my watch; then, seeing something like 3.15am I would immediately panic that I was losing my capacity to function in the world, and the panic would untimely rip me wide awake. Then I would spend agonising hours in bed, trying to contain my tortured mind sufficiently to let me go back to sleep. I would budget an hour for a full-on worry attack, believing that this would then let me calm down enough to rest again.

I didn’t do anything helpful or constructive like get up or move around. I just lay there in the dark wrestling with my mind, thinking that this time I might get somewhere. Never, ever, did it work. Relentlessly I continued to try. Why? Why would I fall over and over again into the same hole? I had no idea what else to do. 

I couldn’t properly understand what was wrong with me. My therapeutic resources seemed unable to solve this problem, the mind seeming to be so far away from the body where I was feeling this. And, although I read lots of books and there was advice a plenty, I needed action, and short of medication which I was loathe to engage with, the psy- professions seemed to have little to offer the severity of my condition. I wasn’t able to fully look, honestly, at how ill I was and I had no idea what to do about the problem if I did.

In two weeks time, in the second of three extracts from Benjamin Fry’s new book “How I F***Ed Up My Life And Made It Mean Something”, we will read about how Benjamin started, painfully, to find his way to the clinic in the United States that would begin to help him and in the third we witness him finally experiencing the treatments that would save his life.

Benjamin’s new book tells the story of his nervous breakdown, treatment and recovery. It is the full story hinted at in various articles that he has published over the last few years.

You can read the articles and excerpts from the book on our <a title=”Benjamin’s Articles” href=”http://http://khironhouse.dev.fl9.uk/blog/category/benjamins-articles/”>blog</a>.

Buy the book from amazon.com and amazon.co.uk or download it to your Kindle.

If you would like a weekly email about new posts on our blog please sign up for our mailing list in the box above right. 

The post Benjamin Fry writes about the personal torment that led to the birth of Khiron House appeared first on Khiron Clinics.