The effect of sexual abuse on the young

A small child has no understanding of sex. It’s unthinkable that the activity could be “bad” when the perpetrator is a trusted authority. The child is in no position to “agree” to sex, not having the life experience to make such a judgment.

For me, the big people were my dignified old grandfather whom everyone respected and my heroic father returning home in his soldier’s uniform from the army. I was brought up to obey adults. I also knew not to tell anyone what I did with these big men.

Life was very confusing. One summer day my friend Robby and I were busy with our three year old explorations in a neighbour’s back yard. We found a collection of empty flower pots.

Robby pulled down his tartan shorts and showed me how he could pee into the flower pots standing up. I was amazed. Looking at his fleshy equipment I couldn’t have been more delighted if he’d shown me a newborn puppy. I squatted over the flower pot and took my turn.

When it was time to go home, my mother greeted me with anger.

“You’re a very bad, nasty girl,” she snapped.

“I didn’t do anything,” I managed to mutter, having no idea what my sin had been.

Never looking me in the eye, she whipped me around so that my back was to her full length mirror. My skirt was caught up in my underpants. Oh, I remembered, the flower pots. Somehow that meant I was bad.

I don’t know whether I ever cleared my head enough to wonder why playing with Robby was so bad but what my father and grandfather did was okay. It was all too confusing to even think about.

Russell Williams – “Call me Russ”

We’ve all been shaken to the core by this seemingly upstanding leader who turns out to be an evil sadist. The question most of us ask ourselves is this: How could this man be that man? How can the same person be a pillar of society and, at the same time, a depraved, heartless killer with a fetish for women’s lingerie?

Russell Williams, we’ve found out, is married to a woman who is respected by her colleagues and friends. On the surface, their lives together looked ideal: two successful adults doing good work for their communities.

In my own professional and private life, this has always been a burning question for me. We all know of self-righteous politicians who are revealed to have a secret and perverse sex life. Most of the perpetrators of my clients are pillars in their communities, popular heads of companies, church leaders and educators recognized with plaques and thanks for their years of service. My own grandfather was the epitome of self-controlled respectability.

It was this same question that led me to study German history for many years. I was teaching trauma therapy in Germany, getting to know my students and their parents who had often served The Third Reich. The participants in my workshops who were usually born just after the war. They’d often been beaten and shamed by their parents. It turned out that Germany has a long, well documented history of cruel child rearing known as “Black Pedagogy.” How, I wondered, could these gentle, sensitive older people I was meeting be the same people who beat their children and carried out unspeakably brutal acts under the Nazis?

What happened to Russell Williams to turn him into a monster? Was he born to be heartless and evil? Or did something awful happen to him? It’s an important question to ponder.

Don't be a bystander—that's all the help the perpetrator needs from you

What can each of us do to prevent a child’s life from being ruined by abuse?

First, we need to be aware. We need to deal with our own denial or dissociation around child abuse. Society’s denial and refusal to believe that child physical, emotional and sexual abuse are endemic allows child abuse to continue unchecked. It’s so easy to deny what you’re seeing or hearing.

In her wise and carefully reasoned book, Trauma and Recovery, Judith Hermann says this:

It is morally impossible to remain neutral in this conflict. The bystander is forced to take sides….It is very tempting to take the side of the perpetrator. All the perpetrator asks is that the bystander do nothing. He appeals to the universal desire to see, hear and speak no evil. The victim, on the contrary, asks the bystander to share the burden of pain. The victim demands action, engagement and remembering.

In order to escape accountability for his crimes, the perpetrator does everything in his power to promote forgetting. Secrecy and silence are the perpetrator’s first line of defense. If secrecy fails, the perpetrator attacks the credibility of his victim. If he cannot silence her absolutely, he tries to make sure that no one listens (pp. 7&8)

Which brings me to my own recent experience when the Globe and Mail published a favourable interview about me and my book, Confessions of a Trauma Therapist. No sooner was the article posted on the paper’s website than those whom I can only assume are perpetrators announced in authoritative tones that recovered memory had been proved not to exist and that I was some sort of hysterical female ruining the reputation of the men who are long dead and unable to defend themselves.

Those of us who join together in the fight to prevent child abuse need to be aware of these dirty tactics.

Traumatic memory—get informed

Want a fast and easy way to gain accurate, up-to-date information about traumatic memory and dissociation? Go to www.isst-d.org/education/trauma-info.htm. Then click on students and public.

Next, click on dissociative disorder information or trauma information or frequently asked questions.

The International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation is a society of clinicians, researchers and academics that exists to train professionals and educate the public about psychological trauma.

Or you might Google traumatic memory. I did and I found solid, informative papers by leaders in the field of psychological trauma. Under Scholarly Articles for Traumatic Memory, click on van der Kolk and you’ll find this expert’s paper explaining the following:

“Trauma is an inescapably stressful event that overwhelms people’s coping mechanisms.” He describes “the differences between the recollections of stressful and traumatic events.”

A study of 46 subjects with PTSD indicates that “traumatic memories are retrieved, at least initially, in the form of dissociated mental imprints of sensory and affective elements of the traumatic experience: as visual, olfactory, affective, auditory and kinesthetic experiences. Over time, subjects reported the gradual emergence of a personal narrative that can be properly referred to as “explicit memory."

In my book, Confessions of a Trauma Therapist you can follow my personal process as my “traumatic memories were retrieved at least initially in the form of dissociated mental imprints.” I was in my late 40s before I had a personal narrative that made sense of my life and was a clear memory of incest.

Why traumatic memories are different

Traumatic memories are different from “bad memories.” Traumatic memories are those memories which the brain recognized as intolerable and inescapable. When we cannot live with a memory most of us are capable of dissociating. That is, the terrible event is not something we remember. This is a survival mechanism. Our brains don’t store what is too terrible to remember.

Soldiers experience this when they have witnessed what’s too horrible to endure. Survivors of torture and imprisonment in repressive regimes describe “forgetting” the terror they experienced until later. Children who are being abused by the adults who should be protecting them have to dissociate the memories in order to survive the betrayal.

Not everyone is capable of dissociating. My hunch is that children who are not able to dissociate and who live with unbearable suffering are those children who suicide or die in “accidents.”

The point is that the brain doesn’t store traumatic memory the way it stores other memories. It takes a little effort to learn about how the brain deals with events that are too awful to store and which we cannot escape.

You can go online to learn about traumatic memories if you don’t have that knowledge now. If you choose not to learn, then please do not say, “But how can you forget something so awful? I remember everything….” That’s really hurtful and insensitive to those of us who have lived with dissociation. If you don’t make the effort to understand, please don’t pretend you have a valid opinion.

The Globe and Mail tells my story

What an amazing feeling to waken this morning and find my story in The Globe and Mail! Sarah Hampson interviewed me about my book, Confessions of a Trauma Therapist and there was my photo and her description of our meeting right on the front page of the Life Section.

Then I went to the Internet and found it on the Globe’s webpage. But wait a minute, it had just come out and already people were commenting on it. They sure weren’t wasting any time. Let’s see…what were they saying?

Oh! They were all saying with a tone of authority that the issue of recovered memories was dead: that it was all in my imagination. They, of course, didn’t identify themselves or state their credentials for making such a statement and clearly they had not read my book.

“They” are ready to pounce on any information that might inform the public of our society’s endemic child sexual abuse. “They” are usually perpetrators who are waiting in fear for the children they once abused and who are now grown up, to sue them for their retirement savings. It’s an all too common event in the fight against child sexual abuse.

Anyway, since you’re reading my blog, you no doubt know differently. Please go to the Globe and Mail link given below and – if you feel comfortable doing so – leave a comment.

Read The Globe and Mail story by clicking this link: HERE

Old messages that hold us back

We all carry old messages, sometimes called implicit memories, from our early life. They’re messages we picked up from the world we were born into. They’re so much a part of us we barely know they exist.

What are your old messages? Maybe you learned:
-that you weren’t lovable
-that you weren’t smart enough
-that the world was a really scary place
-that you had to build a wall around yourself to be safe

Whatever your message, it’s probably not true in your present day world. It’s important to take a good hard look at these old tapes. They can be self-fulfilling.

-If you’re convinced you’re stupid, you likely avoid trying to get more education or a better job.

-If you consider yourself unlovable, maybe you don’t let people get to know you. Maybe you keep others at a distance so they won’t see how defective you are.

-If you think the world is such a scary place, you probably don’t take advantage of opportunities that come your way.

-Ask yourself if you really need to stay so hidden from others.

Once we identify our old messages, we need to take a good hard look at our current reality. What is the evidence for my stupidity? Are there signs that I’m not so stupid, like a graduation certificate? Or a good evaluation at work?

I’m unlovable? Is there somebody who loves me in spite of my faults?

When was the last time I was actually threatened by the world?

Are the people in my current world really dangerous to me?

It’s really important to learn what your old messages are and begin to change them.

Stress can wipe out memory

Memory is stored indelibly when an event shakes our world. We can all remember exactly where we were and what we were doing when 9/11 occurred. Stress at exam time helps us commit more to memory. Up to a point, then, stress helps store memory.

Knowing this, people who do not understand trauma have difficulty accepting that intolerable stress can wipe out memory, as it often does in childhood abuse. My own book, Confessions of a Trauma Therapist: A Memoir of Healing and Transformation tells my story of uncovering memories of child sexual abuse when I was almost 50.

I know it’s amazing. But it’s true. The normal child’s brain does not store what is too terrible to survive. Forgetting allows the child to continue to live within that family or situation when no other life is possible. After all, a child can’t decide to live elsewhere.

I’m always surprised when I meet otherwise intelligent people who cannot fathom that it’s possible to wipe out a childhood history of betrayal by the adults who were supposed to protect you. I forget that many people still are not aware of the prevalence of child abuse.

Recently, I told a neighbour the subject of my recently published book. This well educated, caring man expressed disbelief. It was really a stretch for him to view me as one who had been traumatized by child sexual abuse. I don’t look like Precious (from the movie of the same name), after all, and I didn’t grow up in a slum. That I could have forgotten the abuse in my childhood until I was nearly 50 was mind boggling for the poor man.

It takes some effort to learn about memory storage and to understand how something too terrible to remember, a secret too awful to know, can be pushed into the unconscious to allow the child to survive.

Do you have an experience to share? I’d like to hear from you in the section for comments on this blog.

The trauma myth

There’s a new book on trauma called The Trauma Myth: The Truth About the Sexual Abuse of Children – and Its Aftermath. I ordered it online from Amazon. The promo interested me. The author, Susan A. Clancy, a researcher at Harvard, claims that the adult survivors of child sex with adults did not find the sexual activity traumatic at the time it occurred.

I was interested. From my clients’ stories and from my own experience with my father and grandfather, I know that physical force and fear are not necessarily involved in child sexual. The perpetrator is most often a trusted, loved adult authority.

The abuse for these children does not meet the criteria for trauma. It wasn’t intolerable and inescapable at the time. The lifelong damage they suffer comes from the guilty secret they must hide, their sense of betrayal when they’re old enough to understand the meaning of sex and their shame about participating in these acts. Clancy is certainly not the first to point out that, for many children, it’s often not the act itself that causes the problems. “They made it clear to me that the abuse was not traumatic for them when it was happening because they had not understood what was going on,”she writes. (p.55)

When the book arrived I was shocked to read the author’s claims that child sexual abuse damages people because “of therapists and others who make a business of treating the supposed victims.”

Whooaa, there! Something was very wrong with this book. What’s more, she said recovered memory was nonsense. (Clearly, Susan Clancy has not read my detailed account in Confessions of a Trauma Therapist of how my memories surfaced in my late 40s?) Anyone who knows about recovered memory realizes 50 is a usual age for memories to surface.

Confused, I went back to Amazon where I’d ordered the book and read the reviews. (I should have done this in the first place before I spent my money on such nonsense) It turns out Susan A. Clancy has no experience as a psychotherapist. She is a researcher and associated with a group of people who deny that children are harmed by sex with adults.

Studying the family tree

We can all benefit from studying our family trees. Once we have an accurate picture of where we come from, much of our life struggles make sense. Too often we are told only of the characters who reflect well on the family. Erasing the troubled and the weak only confuses us. If we don’t have the truth, we cannot come to a conclusion that makes sense of our lives.

In a recent Globe and Mail, Sarah Hampson interviews James FitzGerald the author of a new memoir. She describes him as belonging to high-WASP culture. In What Disturbs our Blood: A Son’s Quest to Redeem the Past, the author explores the psychology of his father and grandfather who both committed suicide at the height of their careers as successful medical pioneers. “In my family if you become successful you end up crazy or dead,” says the author.

The shameful secret of the suicides was something no one in the family would discuss. Fitzgerald had to work hard to get the story. He describes himself as a “traitor to his class” setting about to reveal the inner working of high-WASP culture.

“Learning the truth made him feel as though he wasn’t crazy himself. He could finally come to terms with the complexity of his childhood,” says Hampson.

“His two sibling have been supportive of the work. The telling of the story has helped them too,” says Hampson. (The Globe and Mail, Monday July 5, 2010.)


Does that sound familiar? Only when we understand our own family history and what we experienced in childhood can we be compassionate with our bewildering and embarrassing failures in life.

The truth sets us free.

What do you think? Is it always best to know the truth about our families? Or is it sometimes better not to dig up skeletons in the closet?

Leave your comment in the space below.

The Amygdala: your brain's watchdog

I’m sure you’ve had the experience of stepping off the curb and almost being run over by a truck. But you weren’t! Before you knew it, you’d jumped back on the sidewalk. You were probably amazed that you reacted so fast.

You can thank your brain’s survival system, the fight or flight response. You didn’t have time to register that there was a truck threatening your life. There was no time for thinking. Your limbic system’s amygdala saved your life.

If you’re a trauma survivor, there may be times your amydgala embarrasses you - like when you are startled by someone coming up behind you, causing you to nearly jump out of your skin. When you were a child your amygdala fired and fired, with good reason. It’s as if the amygdala got worn out when you lived with intolerable and inescapable fear as a child.

In your present life, situations that remind the amygdala of the terrifying past–smells, sounds, visual flashes, anything that the brain’s watchdog perceives as threatening your safety–set off the alarm system in your brain.

Your amygdala doesn’t distinguish between your present safety as an adult and your vulnerable life as the child you once were. Trauma therapy and relaxation may lessen its vigilance, but since it’s neurological, you just have to learn to live with it.

It’s worth establishing a friendly relationship with the amygdala. After all, when you were suffering and frightened, it was working very hard to help you survive. Developing a hostile relationship with it will only make things worse.

Telling and "Dying"

The first time I disclosed my own history of child sexual abuse publicly, I was presenting a workshop on trauma to a conference of colleagues. This was early in the North American therapeutic community’s awareness of the brain’s role in trauma. The setting was a resort near Boston. The conference was the annual International Focusing Conference.

In my presentation I mentioned my own history of childhood trauma mainly as a point of interest, merely stating the fact without any of the details.

A number of my colleagues came up to me afterwards and offered their condolences and surprise that something like this had happened to me. I felt pleased with the knowledge I had brought to the conference and with my courage in presenting it.

I went upstairs to my room, intending to get ready for the evening’s socializing. That was as far as I got. I was hit by an inexplicable black hole of depression. Suddenly I felt horrible. Any liveliness I had felt earlier in the day was smothered in grey ashes.

There were several colleagues who would have been very willing to use their therapeutic skills to help me through this mysterious bog of despair. But I was too frozen to ask someone to help me.

It wasn’t until weeks later when I met with Dr. Ralph Bierman that he led me to realize I was living out my father’s threat – you tell, you die. I had told and now I was dying.

Our bodies seem loaded with persecutory triggers, ready to paralyze us with anxiety or depression when we tell our terrible secrets.

A tidal wave of love after disclosing child sexual abuse

I’m feeling incredibly loved and supported these days. Why? Ever since I published Confessions of a Trauma Therapist people have been coming up to me to express their caring and sadness that I carried a heavy burden in my earlier life. I’ve never had so many hugs.

Readers have been thanking me for helping them deal with their own painful childhood memories. Many express their appreciation that I put into words the way my memories gradually surfaced. Others tell me my struggles help them validate their own difficulties and feel less shame for what was done to them. They all send me their thanks and their caring.

As well, I’ve heard from old friends who send me love and their understanding. Some knew about my childhood. Some didn’t. One dear friend whom I haven’t seen very much in recent years, shared with me her own recovered memory of child abuse.

Publishing my memoir was, on my part, an act of courage. It took me a long time to decide to go public with a story that laid bare my unsavoury childhood and would bring pain to my extended family. Did I have a right to upset my sister and my nephews and nieces? I had to balance this against the good my book would do out there in the world.

I decided to put my story out there to help the thousands of others suffering from the invisible wounds of childhood trauma. I never anticipated all the love and caring that would be directed my way when I told my story. I am once more reassured that telling our secrets is healthy and good for everyone, even though telling sets off alarm bells in our psyches.

EMDR? What's that?

Before I learned Eye Movement, Desensitization and Reprocessing, I had considerable success in treating victims of childhood trauma. Yet, there were always some aspects of trauma remaining. People were still triggered into panic by sounds, smells or sights which are benign in the present but propell them back into a terrifying past. This happens so fast there is no time to think about it. As well, their exaggerated startle response to any sudden noise remained.

What wasn’t known back when I was using standard therapies, is that trauma is held in the right side of the brain, the emotional side. The trauma does not have access to the left brain, the logical, cognitive side. It’s only an eighth of an inch between the two halves, but the spark can’t jump the gap, so to speak. EMDR allows the right side to connect with the left and “reprocess” the experience.

How is this done? EMDR treatment involves the bi-lateral stimulation of the brain: left side, right side by directing the eyes from side to side, tapping the hands, using headphones to send sound to the left and then to the right ear. This bi-lateral stimulation uses the brain’s natural way of dealing with upsetting emotion. Think of the rapid eye movement when someone is dreaming. Dreaming is not enough to handle the terror of trauma. The brain needs added help to clear the emotion.

EMDR takes advantage of the brain’s natural way of dealing with emotion. The EMDR practitioner guides the client’s eyes with her fingers, a light wand or a light bar. Sometimes the practitioner uses light tapping on the hands or knees.

Typically, clients start out very upset by the memory and end up putting the upset in the past where it belongs. Measuring the degree of upset on a scale of 0 – 10, people may start out with a 10 and end up with a 0 or 1.

Practitioners of EMDR specialize in helping clients heal from psychological trauma. They are psychotherapists with a thorough understanding of trauma and its effects on people. The eye movement described in this post is safe only in the hands of such professionals.

You can find out more on the EMDR website at www.emdr.org.

Three essential life lessons my yoga guru taught me

During my ten years of studying with Swami Sivananda Radha, my guru brought order to my inner chaos. One of the most effective practices involved determining priorities for each day. Everything else could fall into place around the most important events. Balance was central to the yogi’s life. Balance, however, did not have to occur in the space of one day. It could be over a period of time. For example, on some days getting things done might be the priority. On another, relaxing and self-care might be central themes.

She was the first feminist I met. Women need a room of their own, she told me. Very few women, even those in large houses, have a room where they can close the door and leave everything untouched until they return. If you can’t have a room, at least have a part of a room which is out of bounds to others.

On energy: think of your energy like fuel in your gas tank. Never run on your reserve. Another time she told me that energy was like a bank account. Some activities and people give you energy. These are like deposits in your account. Other activities and people drain you. These are withdrawals. Try to keep as much money in the bank as possible.

On food: if you think it’s bad for you, for goodness’ sake don’t eat it.

On abortion: It is hard to find a human birth. Usually the soul does not enter the fetus until the last moment. If a fetus is aborted, the soul is not destroyed. It simply goes looking for another birth.

On an altar: Make a special place in your house for prayer and meditation, even if it’s just a place where you don’t ordinarily sit.

Today, thirty years later, many of these practices still serve to structure my life.

How can you forget something so terrible?

I’m in Germany at the International Focusing Conference. Today I gave a workshop on traumatic memory. The theme was why it’s possible to have no memory of terrifying events.

First, I wanted the participants to be clear on the definition of “traumatic.” Often people use the term to describe a memory that is merely bad or painful. A traumatic event has to be (1)inescapable and (2)intolerable.

Our natural impulse when something threatens us is to go into a state of fight or flight. If we can’t fight and we can’t flee, we freeze or dissociate.

Normal children are capable of dissociating in order to survive. Dissociation is learned at an early age and is a highly developed skill. I tell my clients that yogis go into a cave for years to learn this skill.

What does it feel like to dissociate? Some people describe it as looking at the world through a pane of glass while feeling nothing. Others float on the ceiling and look down at what seems to be happening to somebody else. Yet another common form of dissociation involves simply leaving the body and feeling nothing.

At one time, dissociation spared us from feeling the full impact of a situation we couldn’t tolerate. Otherwise we wouldn’t be capable of this advanced mind/body control. It allowed us to participate in some parts of normal childhood, such as going to school.

In a nutshell, our brains are designed to assure the survival of our species. Dissociation deserves our respect.

Germany and child sexual abuse

I’m writing this from Germany where I’m experiencing a sort of déjà vu with regard to child sexual abuse. I’m reminded of what was happening in North America years ago when victims first started coming forward to accuse The Christian Brothers and other priests of having sexually abused the vulnerable children in their care.

Everyone I talk to here, every newspaper I see, and all the radio stations – they’re all shocked and angry about the recent charges against the Roman Catholic priests.

That’s how it began in North America. The unthinkable became thinkable. Victims of boarding schools then began disclosing their sexual abuse at the hands of teachers. Pandora’s Box got opened even more when individuals started reporting being sexually abused in their own homes.

I believe that Germany—as Canada twenty years ago—is just beginning to realize the extent of child sexual abuse in its midst

By now in North America, it’s not too difficult for most people to believe that sexual abuse happens in the slums to poor, unloved children. It’s harder to accept that middle class children of prosperous, seemingly “good” families can suffer sexual abuse at the hands of the adults who are supposed to be protecting them. Our discomfort is increased by the fact that we’re more likely to identify with these middle class victims.

Confessions of a Trauma Therapist, my memoir, tells of a middle class girl from an affluent family who seems to have everything a North American girl could want. I think that’s important. Child sexual abuse, although we might prefer to allocate it to the poor, knows no class or socio-economic boundary.

Memories of the Launch

My mind is filled with the scenes and feelings of the book launch that took place a few days ago when Confessions of a Trauma Therapist got birthed and went out into the world. Its mission? To help the victims of child sexual abuse and expose this crime against children.

A kaleidoscope of remembered hugs, greetings, old friends and colleagues, as well as the faces of those who came to hear that it’s possible to recover from childhood trauma – these experiences tumble over and over in my memory.

The book’s conclusion tells about foreseeing the book launch in a dream I had back in 1999.

I am a singer standing alone on the stage of a huge concert hall. My voice soars, filling the hall with its richness. The sound seems to wrap around each person sitting there. A rich contralto rises up effortlessly from my belly.

Then my song finishes and the crowd cheers, deeply moved by my voice. I step off the stage to join Harvey. He and I greet hundreds of audience members whom we recognize as survivors of childhood sexual abuse.

My heart goes out to them as I encourage them to go on with their healing. Then come their friends and supporters, followed by their helping professionals. All of us are joined in the work of healing past traumas and in the fight to prevent child sexual abuse in the future.

That is my dream, my vision and my hope in writing about my own history of incest. Never mind that I can’t hold a tune. The dream may be counter-factual, but it certainly matches how I feel about Confessions of a Trauma Therapist.

I was the smartest of the dumb bunnies

Childhood trauma is cumulative. You start out being traumatized by the original abuse. Then, each stage of life piles on more bad experiences. As a child, I couldn’t clear my head to think. This excerpt from Confessions of a Trauma Therapist describes my life in grade three.

Grade three was the year the class was divided into two. Smart kids got to do grade four work, skipping a grade. Dumb kids sat in separate rows doing grade three stuff. I was held back with the dumb kids.

I dreaded telling my parents. Standing in front of them that evening, I looked for a way to soften the blow.

“Well,” I assured them, “I’m the smartest of the dumb bunnies.”

My father howled with laughter, doubled over, smoker’s cough erupting, breathless with the hilarity of it. That was the funniest thing he’d ever heard. Smartest of the dumb bunnies! Ha, ha, ha!

My mother shared his amusement, albeit less raucously.

As for me, I just slunk away, relieved they weren’t mad at me. Nobody ever asked me how I felt. I don’t remember my parents ever mentioning it again.

My friends went on with the smart kids and I stayed behind. By the time I got to high school, I was already older and feeling more sophisticated than my classmates especially the late-maturing boys. When I was sixteen, I tried to makeup for the lag by choosing an older boyfriend. His interest in me may have soothed one part of my battered ego, but the fact that I couldn’t say no to his sexual urges made me feel even worse about myself.

When Father came marching home

Here is another excerpt from my book about father-daughter incest.

In 1945 when I was seven, the war ended and the men came home. What a strange time for the world. It was an era of post-traumatic stress disorders from the horrors of war. And for many it was a time of marital stress from too many years of living separate lives.

I don’t know how my parents’ marriage would have been different if it hadn’t been interrupted by the war. And I don’t know if my father would have relied less on rye and Coke to face his world. He had always been a party boy, but after the war he was seldom sober.

Each time he returned home during the war years I had initially been scared of him. He was huge. He could lift me up with one hand. Mostly I remember his smell. It was different from anyone else’s: a nose-tingling blend of the rough khaki wool of his scratchy uniform, the whisky on his breath and the ever-present Export A in his mouth.

Once he had been with us for a day or two, my shyness faded and I delighted in climbing into his giant lap.

When he returned home for good I experienced a strange mixture of fear and intense love. I wanted to be with him as much as possible. The most important thing in my young life was keeping Daddy happy.

Many years later, I learned he had another woman in England and that my role in the family, as my mother saw it, was to keep him home with us in Canada.

I grew up believing I was very fortunate to be my father’s companion. I thought I was lucky to go off camping with him, just the two of us.