The Butterflies Grave - And The Children's Home At Killay House

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Killay House Childrens's Home The Journey Back | Photo 02

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uploaded by Art de Rivers

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Art De Rivers . 

The Post Trauma Journey to Make Sense .

Within the Personality Disorder network which is pretty loose in the UK,  I am sometimes approached about the experience of bearing difficult feelings and PTSD states of mind  that arise from child abuse and other related trauma where the "Self" of development has been emotionally injured and has often lived in terror or forms of personal torture - some of which are partially dissociated and float about in people's minds causing terror and fear .  

Even recently I have been approached by suicidal people who want better help and have no navigational ways - no support . Its a great tragedy of  the UK NHS that it does have money slushing around in systems that do not touch the needs of some highly damaged people.

The system of mainly NHS internal therapy supply assures suicides every year because there are no mechanisms for consumer driven therapy choices outside of the NHS State limited and top heavy (and I would argue potentially more expensive) model  

Some people do not wish to recall their damaged Selves and prefer drugs and some want a journey to restore more sense of Self .. All journeys must be choice based  . Each person must be sovereign over that . Its about individualized pace and deep respect  for that . The pursuit of each individual journey brings it own limits and experiences .

Here is the story of a partially healing journey. I hope it reaches the insights of  "damaged peoples" .  There is no perfect healing for highly damaged people in my opinion though . You cannot undo what is done but you can create ways to live with it and make it creative and you can mourn it to relieve the tragic pressure of its periodic and often reactivated pain .  Some things will always be painful - but a highly damaged Self  contains its own message too of human truth even within its own painful imprint . Sometimes that shines .

The Doctor Who Helped

A Doctor in 1989 sped the journey on for me when after years of research about my adoption and strange displacement,  half in and half out of my genetic extended family - he handed me an NHS  Med Card with a crucial record of an address on it . 

A single moment of liberation occured . Years of searching were answered . The address said 

"KILLAY HOUSE  GOWER ROAD SWANSEA "  

It was the Children's home where I had been as a child prior to a cruel adoption that included abuse.

Part of my soul that had been coming back and back to me for years like a knife through my head heard its name : "KILLAY HOUSE  SWANSEA".    I had been recalling swills of memory of gulls clacking and screaming and open spaces and feelings of estuary . It was bloody painful - quite physically so . "GOWER" - the Swansea landscape is by a wide estuarine area .

My head and mind had often felt  especially torn physically regarding these events as though two selves were doing battle. One that recalled something and the other was a paradox of some neuronal warrior inside trying to secure back sense  and doing that amongst the flying neuronal axes while taking wounds on .

The pain would at times overwhelm and I would go , internally speaking ,  blue and cold and like I'd had an injection to send me off to sleep .. It is what I was sometimes like as a child too .

The NHS Med Card said - I'd existed in a place  where later human memory in my various strands of genetic family had lost the me-mirror of events . It was hardly recalled . I'd been a Self that no-one remembered that much .   But a  few names were recalled by my Genetic Granny :   "Swansea , Sketty , Gower..."  . That had set me on the trail for years  

But some Primal Self in me could not give up reclaiming memory because it wanted to be me ..  In our societies when you are on your own with interior voyages to your own lost or amputated worlds you really do feel the sanity and social stakes are high and maybe "some stakes" will be put through you ..

A lot of "family wisdom" had told me shut up about the past and yet the only sense of real identity and existential continuity that was created post adoption was mainly by own efforts , research, one good genetic aunt ,  and private therapy.

I'd often touched on issues of great shame in my genetic family that had been minimised . Children were "seen and not heard" .. Invalidated . And doubly so,  if by their separation and displacement events had pointed to shameful behaviors and adult self interest . 

It took years to reconnect my "Self"  partly because of disability and the attempt to build a pain tolerance up to doing a journey back to the Children's Home of my odd  lifetime. 

A Journey of a soul-time really. Its often felt like I am travelling Time and with secret stars under many midnights . An interior world that brushes the present with a gravity of heavy individualized Time and yet some human universality,   I had to build up to climbing a cripples internal Everest . The mountain of raw feelings and layered Self and other aspects of post trauma .  You take the mixed tragedy with you on your expeditions and its continually unfolding inner-outer poetry of being alive with so much potential for reactivation of pain and internalised social perversity 

But I got there .. I went back to Killay .

On the Train in 1995 going towards the tragedy of Killay House when in 1956 my genetic mother and father put us in that Children Home,  the multilayers of other different types of related trauma, well into the future of that time at Killay,  were sparking around me , and then something happened .

I could feel a ghost landscape with a blue electric set of ghosted events . It was my mind and the sense of Time coming back to itself  being answered. I think I laughed . I was not afraid of a part of me confirming inside an internal vision and feelings of an invisible journey I'd once done as child  .   It was something special that made you want to cry and be amazed too .

Jeese I was with "my Child" in some way . Half victory,  half hell . Its weird being "with yourself" like two people joining that were not allowed to join before . But they merge too .

Its like a living art of being half Child and half bent up picasso-man made of many angles. Picasso would have it found poetically interesting ..... 

After using a bed and breakfast hotel in Swansea I went by bike to Killay House . I took pictures and found a door open . 

My genetic sister had not been able to go there with me . I phoned her though from Swansea to link events . I took two large printed pictures of us as kids to Swansea  .

I walked around Killay House with them  finally making an altar by a cupboard door where kids had scrawled their identity in markers onto it .. I put our names in small scratches and the year 1956 .. I sat for a long time on the floor and just wept ..It was sacred . All-Human too .

It was do-able .. To partially re-integrate,  was do-able .. To deal with one's childhood vast anonymity,  in trauma after trauma is a great grief . A terrible splitting up template for life .. But its valid to struggle because we are cultures of damage and injury for so many . Its valid to try to be better integrated .

I found two dead butterflies too in Killay House  and I put them on the stair-rail ..

Markers for Time .

Markers of poetic purity and vulnerability that we had been there too ...

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