Consumption: Memories of My Childhood, Books I & II

A candid psychiatric autobiography on the guilt, shame, fear, and long-term trauma instigated by parental emotional abuse in a toxic environment of schoolyard bullying, medical malpractice, molestation, and harrowing physical violence, and the spiralling personal consequences for a wounded childhood. Beginning when Benjamin was not yet a toddler, this heart-wrenching account tracks his sad dissolution across his early life, up through school, and into the climax of the depression that engulfed his late teenage years, culminating in a terrifying and destructive psychosis and the effective murder of his soul. Inspired by the writings of Alice Miller, César Tort, and John Modrow, this two-book life history seeks to create a new literary genre, that of vindictive autobiography, where the painful abuses of Benjamin’s parents are spelled out in full detail, and, contrary to the ’wisdom’ of most modern psychological therapies, they are held to account and not forgiven. As Benjamin explains: I love my Mum and Dad, but forgiveness is not a one way street, and they have never assimilated their responsibility, apologised, or tried to make things right, instead foisting me with further trauma on the cynical, pseudoscientific victim-blaming of the orthodox psychiatric industry. Though I was raised as a strict Catholic, my writings seek to repudiate the fourth commandment, remembering the words of Friedrich Nietzsche in Twilight of the Idols: ’When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one’s feet.’