Ben Ralston

Why I had to leave Bangkok after just one night. Part 1 – The Girl with Black Eyes.

I cried a little writing this. Sometimes, I am ashamed to be a man…
I was 21 years old and I went to Thailand. A guy I knew who was very cool had been there, so I thought that perhaps if I went to Thailand, I’d be cool too. As far as I can remember that was my motivation… and I guess I wanted to grow up a little.
Well, I grew up a little.
It’s funny. Before I left, my Mum begged me to promise to call her every day. I thought she was insane and I assured her in no uncertain terms that I would not be giving her daily progress reports. As it turned out though, she had good reason to worry!
I’d planned to stay 3 nights in Bangkok, and then get on a train and go North. It didn’t work out that way…
When I arrived, I headed for the area where all the tourists usually stay. I forget the name (Khao San road?), but it’s very well know. And actually, the place I ended up staying is the place where Leonardo DiCaprio’s character stays in the movie The Beach. I was there first, but only for one night.
I was 21 years old and alone in a very strange land. I went down the steps into the sitting area below and ordered a beer. I remember feeling like a fish out of water. I don’t know what I was thinking, going to Thailand. I wasn’t comfortable in my own skin, let alone South East Asia. But there I was…
And there were a couple of old Thai Dudes playing chess, and I sat near them and plucked up the courage to watch. In the end, I had a game with one of them (my Dad taught me to play chess when I was about 5 years old, and by the time I was 15 I was beating him consistently. He was a very, very sore loser, and wouldn’t speak to me after we played. He’d just go to bed sulking. I never let him win though, even though my Mum asked me to when he was sick. I couldn’t do that to him. I loved him too much).
Anyway, here’s what happened in Bangkok:
I played a little chess with this old Thai Dude and he was a bit of a charmer. After our game, he invited me out for some “traditional Thai food and music”. I was really happy – I wanted to get to know the real Thailand, not just the Khao San road (or whatever it’s called). So off we went… and ended up in this fairly tacky looking restaurant. The manager was floating around us, wringing his hands and doing his best “I’m servile and I’ll do anything for a tip” act. The band played synthesized Western rock songs. It was awful. And the only other thing I remember from the evening was the girl with black eyes…
The Thai dude called over the manager and whispered in his ear, and the manager scuttled off somewhere and came back a few minutes later with a young Thai girl. I’d say she was 11 years old. I’m usually very good at guessing people’s ages. I usually get it spot on.
I’d say she was 11. But she had black eyes. I don’t mean the color – although, I think that the color of her eyes was black too. What I mean is that there was no light – no light, whatsoever – in her eyes. There was only darkness.
Can you imagine? Have you ever seen a child with no light in their eyes? It’s unimaginable. Her eyes weren’t eyes. They were black holes.
She stood in front of me, and looked through me. I could feel her discomfort, her total unease… no, her hate.
The Thai Dude told me that for a few dollars I could do whatever I wanted with her, and for a few dollars more I could have her for the night.
The charm, and the chit-chat, and the chess game, and the pretense, all fell away. I felt sick to my stomach.
I leaned forward to try to talk to this girl; to reassure her that I didn’t want anything from her. But she recoiled. She didn’t speak a word of English, and she trusted me as much as all the other men she’d ever known.
I wanted to rescue her. I wanted to pull out my Uzi and kill every motherfucker in there – the band, The Dude, the manager, and any other cunt who had any part in all of this. I wanted to throw this girl over my shoulder and get her the fuck out of there.
I didn’t have an Uzi, but I swear to God I would have killed those people with my bare hands there and then if there had been a chance of helping her. If she had seen me for who I was, and let me help her, I would have. But there was nothing I could do.
The feeling I had was like when you are in a restaurant, and you see a lobster being taken out of the tank and dropped into boiling water. This girl with black eyes was like an 11-year-old girl in boiling water, and I was powerless to help her.
In the end all I could do was stand up and walk out of there. I walked out into the night, no clue where I was, and somehow found my way back to the hotel. The next day I left Bangkok. I couldn’t stand to stay there any longer.
I’ll never forget that girl, and how she looked right through me.

Part 2

Part 3

My wife told me to edit this (too graphic). I didn’t – read at your own discretion.



I had a miserable childhood.
Don’t get me wrong: I was blessed with great parents who gave me very strong foundations. But beyond that, I got a fairly tough deal.
Each and every school I went to sucked. Sucked with a capital S.
Strange really because they were all private schools; or as we say in England (in a typically counter-intuitive, oxymoronic kind of a way), public schools. The schools that parents have to pay a lot of money to send their kids to.
So I supposedly had one of the best educations that money can buy! Sure didn’t feel like it though… and I suspect that education is not something that can, or should be, bought…
***
When I was six, we lived in Israel for a year. I didn’t speak a word of Hebrew when we first got there, and I didn’t know a soul, but the ‘teacher’ made me stand facing into the corner at the front of the classroom, all the Israeli kids behind me sniggering at the pale, dumb kid who even the teacher didn’t like.
My mother had to pick me up from hospital one day – I’d had my head cracked open by a rock-wielding Israelite. I must admit, I may have thrown the first stone. But his was a lot bigger…



At the end of that year we moved back to England, and my ‘education’ began in earnest…

***
My first school back home: the ‘headmistress’ force-fed me (fairly violently) a particularly disgusting school dinner. I was about 8 years old I guess. To this day I would rather chew my own legs off than eat rice pudding.
Her husband, the ‘headmaster’, on a separate occasion punished me by taking me into his office – he closed the door, made me take my pants down, and bent me over his desk. He then beat me with a stick across my buttocks, gently. I suspect that he was playing with himself at the same time.
At that school, I had not a single nice teacher. Not one. There were only grey, lifeless, totally uninspired, empty-shell ghost-shadow excuses for human beings pretending to teach us. They didn’t teach. They stood at the front of the room and pointed their fingers, looking bored. The only thing to learn from them was that life is mindless, repetitive, and without joy.
When we, the children, mirrored their boredom, we were punished, usually by being given pages of ‘lines’ to write out as extra homework. Usually from the bible.
I would do my lines in bed with a flashlight so that I didn’t have to tell my parents that I’d been ‘bad’. One time my Father came in and caught me with a bible in bed (I’d managed to hide the paper and pen when I heard him coming). The memory of his face now makes me laugh. He obviously thought that his 9-year-old son was doing late night bible studies, and probably had visions of me becoming a priest!
He said something like:
“Ah, you’re reading the bible, eh? Yes, it’s an, er… interesting book isn’t it?”
Let me tell you – to a 9-year-old boy, the bible is anything but interesting. But I nodded and waited for him to leave so that I could finish my lines.

***
One day, when I was about 11, my mother told me she was taking me out of the school a year early. She’d enrolled me in a new school. I remember her saying to me somewhat apologetically:
“You haven’t been happy here have you?”
So I went to a new school for a year. It was much better. We had to travel a bit further each day to get there, but there were some nice teachers. Also, again, some very lifeless ones, but it was better. One of the nice teachers turned out to be a bit too nice though. He was the drama teacher, and he gave me the lead role in the school play: Hiawatha. He also invited me to his on-campus apartment where he played hardcore porn on his VHS and encouraged me to masturbate. He then sat in a chair slightly behind me, and masturbated himself…
I was afraid of him; fascinated by the beautiful naked women and the sex that he introduced me to; and deeply uncomfortable with the various situations that I kept finding myself in with him. But I didn’t tell anyone. Abused children rarely do…
He ingratiated himself with my parents by nursing my budding acting abilities (for which my Ma was grateful), and before I knew it he’d become a ‘family friend’. He’d come for barbecues and evening meals and I’d sit there inwardly squirming.

***
When I was 13 I went to high school, and for some strange reason I asked my parents if I could board there. I remember having fantasies of pillow fights and midnight snacks. I had two brothers 10 years younger than me, and perhaps I just craved the company of my peers. I don’t know. But the fun I had hoped to find wasn’t there. Instead there was an accepted culture of bullying and abuse that dated back to the dark ages – literally. Public schools in England are renowned for it.
The teachers weren’t so bad though, although I can’t say that any of them were great teachers. They still seemed pretty bored.
Except one. Mr Green, an English teacher. I will never, ever forget that man. He was only there for a year, but he changed my life. In many ways, he probably saved it.


At that school every teacher had a nickname. All the nicknames were things like ‘Witch’ (the very creepy chemistry teacher) and ‘Buttocks’ (the geography teacher whose arse was so large that she had to go sideways through doors. No kidding. I went through a phase of having a crush on her so bad that I would sit with an erection through entire geography classes. If ever she asked me to stand up and come to the front of the class I had to will my penis to behave: not easy when you’re 13-years-old).
Mr Green had long sideburns, and his nickname was… ‘Sideburns’. I wondered at the time how he got away with such an innocuous nickname. Now I realize that it was a sign of our affection for him.

How else do teenagers say “I love you”?
To me he was like a pool of glistening water, an oasis in a burning sandy-hot desert. Going to his classes I was excited, inspired, engaged. He gave us books to read that I could understand and believe in, and he read them out loud with us, sharing his passion with us. Every word of his was measured, had meaning, and was offered elegantly, with a smile.
His eyes shone, and he would encourage us when we did well, and berate us when we were fools, but everything was done with love.
One day I found out that he was leaving to go to a better school. I remember vividly how I felt. Betrayed, distraught, abandoned. He was too good for me.
He left, and I was alone with the shadows for the rest of my time there.
One sentence of his haunts me (in a ‘friendly ghost’ way) to this day. I must have not done something that I should have done (apologized to someone for something?), and he asked me why not – why hadn’t I done it? I couldn’t answer him. And he said:
“Ahh. You’re a moral coward”
I think that I’ve been trying to prove him wrong ever since.
Isn’t that what a great teacher does? Every word and action transmits wisdom, and the world around them becomes a wiser, better place.
Every word of his was a stone dropped carefully into the pond of my young mind, and his concentric circles of compassion and understanding continue to ripple on through my life, even to this day.
If only there were more teachers like that, eh?




Please share this. Use the buttons below to ‘like’ it, Tweet it, Stumble it, email it… spread the love!


Abuse causes trauma. The trauma of abuse, until healed, causes countless problems later in life. Abuse does not need to be obvious (i.e. sexual abuse). It can also be subtle, (i.e. lack of attention from parents). Most people who suffer abuse tend to find themselves in a cycle of abuse – as was clearly my case. The good news is that it is very, very easy now to heal trauma. And it is no longer necessary to talk about what happened (to relive the experience). If you, or anyone you know, lives with the consequences of abuse or trauma, please contact me, because I can help.

2 things wrong here: One: ‘priests’ who abuse children. Two: a ‘church’ that has $166m in spare change.

Photo credit: Peter Watts

The thing that struck me most about this story of an order of Catholic Jesuits who have agreed to pay out $166m to the (Native American) victims of child abuse (at the hands of their priests) was not the sexual abuse.
We all know that priests have been abusing children sexually. We know how widespread it’s been (and hope it no longer is). Somehow, it’s not that shocking anymore. Amazing how easily we become desensitized to something isn’t it?
The thing that hit me most was the money.
What business does the Church, or any so-called religious institution, have hoarding hundreds of millions of dollars?!
I somehow can’t imagine Jesus ‘saving for a rainy day’.
I mean, it’s not like there are people starving in the world is it? Or villages without water? Or vast numbers of homeless refugees?
I’m not saying that the ‘victims’ of those priests don’t deserve a little compensation.
I’m saying that they shouldn’t need to be compensated, because they should never have been abused in the first place.
And a church that is one of the wealthiest institutions in the world, and whose representatives damage the people they are meant to protect, needs to be seriously questioned.

HEALING the trauma of sexual abuse

It’s taboo. It makes us feel uncomfortable.
But the statistics are staggering: it is estimated that 25% of girls and 17% of boys are sexually abused before the age of 18*.
The reason I want to write about this is that if you were abused, or if you know someone who was abused, I CAN HELP.


I am also one of those statistics: I was sexually abused by a teacher who became a ‘family friend’. From the age of 10 until about 16 I was repeatedly molested…


Sexual abuse causes us to feel small, powerless, weak, lonely, isolated, ashamed, guilty, and depressed. When it happens to a child there is a loss of innocence, a loss of trust, and a loss of openness. The results can be devastating…

I lived with the abuse for about 6 years. I lived with the consequences of that abuse for about 15 years before I told anyone. And that is what almost always happens – the abused child keeps quiet about it.


So many adults; people you know, have been abused as children, and have never told anyone. They live with that secret shame, guilt, and depression hidden deep in their subconscious. In my case it was so deeply hidden I had almost forgotten that it even happened! One day I suddenly remembered – “oh my God, I was sexually abused as a child!”


HOW CAN I HELP?


Until now, people who wanted to help themselves get over the consequences of abuse usually went to see a counsellor or a psychotherapist. They often had to spend many sessions, a lot of money, and a lot of time and energy reliving the trauma of those events. Often, the therapy was slow and inefficient. Why? Because most it focused on the trauma. In some cases, it actually re-inforced the trauma!
Well guess what? The trauma itself is not the problem! The trauma itself is in the past. It is what we have left over from the trauma, in the present – with us still, that is the real problem.
Trauma causes pain. It is the pain that is the problem – when we suppress that pain (as a defensive or survival mechanism) into our subconscious, we create a blockage. That subconscious blockage is the problem – it is often the cause of mental and emotional anguish; inability to trust; difficulty in letting go / relaxing; blockages towards sex and relationships; and many other very serious problems. These problems often lock people into a very difficult and painful cycle of abuse which can seem hopeless. But it’s not!


The point is: the trauma itself: the actual abuse, IS NOT THE CAUSE OF THE PROBLEMS – THE SUPPRESSED PAIN IS.


So, how can I help?
Well, I can help people to release that subconscious blockage – the suppressed pain – so that they can live their life FREE of the trauma of abuse. Not only that, but I can help them to strengthen their boundaries so that they no longer need to worry about being abused again. Because it’s a fact that people who are abused tend to get caught up in a cycle of abuse.


I met a woman who had 20 years of weekly psychotherapy sessions. She was constantly reliving the trauma of her childhood sexual abuse. Not only that – she had been abused in many ways, by many different people, throughout her adult life.
In one session of Reference Point Therapy (RPT), she freed herself from all of that. 


Now, I am not promising that one session is always enough. Nor am I saying that other therapies don’t work – please don’t misunderstand me. I know that there are other good therapists and healers out there!
However, there is a new way which is very fast, very simple, and very efficient. And it’s particularly useful for people who have been sexually abused – because they don’t have to talk about the abuse. The abuse – the trauma itself – is not the problem. And that’s great, because one of the reasons why people in the past didn’t even go to see a counselor is that it’s embarrassing and painful talking about what happened.


When a Reference Point Therapist heals trauma, s/he doesn’t need to know much about the trauma itself – it’s the feelings (pain) that came up at that time that are the real cause of the problem. All the information I need is:

  • what happened (abuse)
  • roughly when it happened (i.e. – about 10 years old)
And that’s it. With that information, I guide the client to the feelings that were suppressed, and we release them!

Please, if you or anyone you know was affected by abuse of any kind, let them know about Reference Point Therapy. You can help break the cycle of abuse.
It’s not necessary to live in the shadow of the past. It’s actually possible to easily, gently, and quickly release any blockage – and to begin to live fully in the present moment, free of the effects of trauma.

For more information:


As always I welcome your comments, thoughts, and ideas.
Were you abused? Do you know someone that has been affected by abuse? Do you know any other way in which trauma can be so easily treated? Do you have any questions about RPT?
Please feel free to contribute – you can always do so anonymously.
And if you think that this article is useful, share it.

(*Statistics taken from the Darkness to Light website)