Cried watching Dr Pamela Connolly interview Stephen Fry.

April 12, 2015 by Healing From Complex Trauma & PTSD/CPTSD 3 Comments

I’m watching a lot more TV lately, because it takes my mind off my own thoughts and my life. I don’t normally watch a lot of TV, but it’s increased since my internet use has rapidly decreased. I realise I have switched from one freeze trauma coping habit, to another.

Stephen Fry is a tortured soul, who was abused in his childhood, yet clearly by the interview he doesn’t see the fullness of that abuse from his father. He was also sexually abused by older boys at school and he doesn’t even see that as abuse, or the depth of the consequences of that. He’s so clearly in denial, as was pointed out in the interview.

He did talk about the voice of his father still haunting him and he is also clearly tortured by questions like did the sexual abuse as a child, lead him to be gay. How he has self hate and never feels ‘good enough’. But, it was so obvious at that time of that interview, his need for denial and minimization, part of his coping needs. I get it, I’ve been there in the past.

I get this denial. It’s so much harder to deal with the full reality, than to stay in denial. Now I do have more of an understanding of the severity and depth of the consequences and affects of prolonged childhood trauma, I am having to face the severity and depth of emotions that come with that.

One thing I realised though ….. whether you deal the reality, or run away from it, either way there can be severe depression. There can be wanting to be dead. There is deep pain.

Steven talked about often wishing he could be dead. I understand that. I didn’t identify with many things he talked about – the anti-social behaviours when he was younger, the stealing, the bullying he did to others as a child, the smugness he can see he portrays. I can see the ‘better than you’ issues he projects in some interviews, are no doubt his way of protecting himself. How he copes with the ‘not good enough’ issues.

I felt a deep rush of empathy and emotions for him as he was talking. He had a bad childhood, with ongoing childhood trauma and it has messed his life up and I see that very clearly.

As Pamela went on to talk so empathically, so caringly and so non judgmentally to him about how she understands why he copes the way he does, but how he needs to face the reality of his childhood and the sexual abuse, and she talked about how horrendously it affects a persons life, I cried my eyes out.

Deep searing pain.

For him, because it did fuck his life up and I don’t want that for him.

And for me, because severe childhood trauma, has fucked my life up too.