A Blog About Childhood Experiences And Their Impact on Adult Behaviour

I think this will likely be one of the lasts posts I write about years of difficult and devastating behaviour I tolerated from my mother during the course of my life. Sooner or later, one thinks enough, ruminates enough, writes enough and hopefully processes enough to wake up and just say enough is enough. Before…

Every horse’s birthday in the Southern Hemisphere is the 1st August. I learned today that in the Northern Hemisphere that date is the 1st January, and the reason is to define the start of the foaling season. So Happy Birthday Rab (the affectionate nickname given to him by his mother and I, due to the…

I was going to leave this until I had more fully read around the psychology of early childhood trauma and emotional neglect, however I think that is likely to take quite some time. In the meantime, I just want to come back to the reason why I started writing this blog in the first place,…

I studied my degree at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. Medicine at that time was a 6 year program generally by direct entry from HIgh School. The first three years were spent on campus learning much of the required basic sciences before clinical studies, ward clerking of patients and clinical tutorials became an increasingly important…

I turned 16 in January of Year 11 of High School. Although I have had several years since that would compete strongly for worst year of my life, this has to be right up there. My nan (mum’s mother) had turned 74 on Christmas Eve. She lived in South Yarra, in those days inner suburban…

Whilst I have been aware of a number of my own personality traits for a long time, it has only been since I began delving into the impacts of childhood emotional neglect (CEN) that I have started to understand the relationship between the two. As I have mentioned previously, I am not a psychologist. Consequently,…

I think this post is the reason I started writing this blog. All the stuff up to this point has been setting the scene, introductory filler if you like. It’s impossible to just launch in to what you think is wrong with yourself without trying to deconstruct some of the memories, emotions and behaviours that…

In Australia, Scouts encompasses the age range between 11-14 years. At the time I was scouting our troop was for boys only, with girls attending Girl Guides instead. The troop comprised 3-4 leaders, one of whom was my dad. Three ‘patrols’ of 6 kids, led by a patrol leader and assistant patrol leader. Weekly meetings…

My parents had a metal biscuit tin on the top shelf of their wardrobe. A filing cabinet of sorts, this is where bills and fortnightly cash pay from dad’s work would go, at least until those payments became automated and deposited straight to the bank. We would regularly be told to go and get some…

From as long as I can remember my mother had a fractured relationship with her mother-in-law. I have mentioned in a previous post that my father grew up in a small country town with his widowed mother and her brother. The weatherboard house in which they lived was the remnant of the Moora Hotel, a…