Introduction
Therefore the spirit of the depths forced me to speak to my soul, to call upon her as a living and self-existing being.
C. G. Jung, The Red Book

This is a story of my life between the ages of 14 and 18, an intense period that happened during the 1960’s in Wales and Ireland. It is an odd story, filled with twists and turns—but it is real, or at least as real as my memory and my Self allows. [1] I wrote most of the narrative years ago, but something was missing, incomplete.

Gradually, it dawned on me. As a psychotherapist, I inhabit two worlds: the ordinary world of taken-for-granted happenings and a deeper more intricate world of symbols and inner meaning. On the surface, everything is simply the way it seems; beneath the surface everything is something else. My task as a therapist is to delve the depths of the psyche, to illuminate mysteries, explore the tangled network of metaphorical connections—and ultimately contact the hidden realm of the soul. How could I write about the surface when the depths are ever-present and calling?

Life is more than personal, more than a unique sequence of events. As Winifred Rushforth, my first therapist used to say with a twinkle in her eye, “Something is happening!”[2] Beneath the skin, below the surface, something profound is going on, a whole tapestry of subterranean meaning. Subtle threads weave intricate patterns through the fabric of our lives, patterns that slip past our attention. To understand ourselves, we have to tease out the strands, searching for guiding signs and elusive indications. Only then can we recognize life for what it is—a purposeful journey of the soul.

So each chapter is an edgy amalgam of narrative and psychological reflections. The story is an adolescent ‘hero’s journey’; the reflections are the outflowing of many years engaging in Jungian-flavored psychotherapy. I am not a Jungian—but C.G. Jung has my most profound respect. A brilliant intellect who changed how we view the psyche, Jung was also a sage and shaman, an embodiment of the wise old man archetype. In my 20’s I read his memoir, Memories, Dreams, Reflections; almost from the first page, I knew that psychology was to be my chosen path. [3]

In this book, I invite you to use the story and reflections to contemplate your own experience. Recall the adventures and struggles, the doubts and triumphs. Examine the decisions you felt compelled to make. Understand the forces that affected your choices and experiences. Now is a good time to revisit those vital questions: What is going on? What is happening to me? What does it all mean?

The Book’s Structure
Each chapter has two parts; my remembered adolescence experiences, and the attendant psychological reflections, and associations . This dual process—outer story and inner meaning—is similar to the process of psychotherapy. In a therapy session, clients tell me the stories of their lives, both current and past. This surface narrative is the surface story.

Like a layer of frothed milk on a cup of coffee, the surface story tends to conceal the underlying dynamics within our psyche. During a session I endeavor to uncover the deeper story: the lost feelings, childlike fantasies and psychic patterns buried beneath the narrative. Understanding and integrating these deeper meanings helps unlock our stuck patterns of feeling and behavior.

Hopefully, this book will encourage you to revisit your own adolescent journey. If you take time to explore the deeper psychic processes involved, you will undoubtedly reap the invaluable treasure of deeper self-awareness.

 

[1] Self, with a capital S, is a conventional way to differentiate the totality of our being from our ego. The ego, or small self, comprises the conscious aspect of our psyche, the part we most identify with. I use the word soul to refer to those aspects of the Self that are beyond our comprehension.

[2] Winifred Rushforth, Something is Happening (Gateway, 1985),

[3] C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections (Random House, 1961),

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Wales 1966 – 1967

Summer 1966, age 14

The world reassembled as my eyes opened. I was looking up at a plain white ceiling, smooth with no cracks. It was not my bedroom ceiling. My gangly 14-year-old body was lying on a bed covered by a sheet and thin blanket, dressed in baggy blue-striped pajamas—definitely not my pajamas. The room had a faint disinfectant smell and it was empty except for the bed and a bedside table. Like the room, my head was empty—blank.

A thought popped in out of nowhere: I’m in hospital. It came with a feeling of swimming up from some unknown depths, gasping for an illusory breath. Another odd-shaped thought slipped into my mind: I’m alive.

Like catching a glimpse out of the corner of my eye, I sensed another place, restful, soft and inviting. Its soothing peace reminded me of waking when I was a child to a sunny morning filled with birdsong, a day that stretched endlessly with no demands and no worries. So that’s what it’s like when you die.

As I looked around the white room trying to fix on something familiar, the sense of peacefulness began to fade like a pebble dropped into a deep pond, sinking slowly out of sight. Memories started to trickle back…

I remembered my numb hands and dream-like warmth, the freezing water stealing my life, my mind contracting like the closing of a camera aperture, time distorting. The rocking of the waves lulled me with a rhythmic message: Let go; don’t struggle. A dim animal instinct insisted I hold tight to life but it faded, growing less and less persuasive. Fewer and fewer thoughts wormed into my brain, each more sluggish than the last. I’m dying. It feels like going home. This world is hard; the other world is welcoming. I let go and let go a little more; moments slipped away into eternity…

Back in the hospital room, I tried to figure it out: How had I got here? Who’d saved us? Another memory rose to the surface. I’d wanted to stay in that other place, but something dragged me back to a harsh gray world. Much as I tried to resist, something kept pulling at me: my younger brother Toody was screaming! Dad’s deeper voice echoed Toody’s. Reluctantly, salt-laden eyelids cracked open to a bleary image of a dark shape looming over us. It materialized into the hull of a massive ship.

A head peered over the edge of the smooth black cliff and called out. A rope ladder snaked down and hit the water with a splash. Toody thrashed over to it in his oversize life jacket, grabbed hold and sped up the ladder like a monkey; he seemed to fly. I shook myself awake and got to the ladder and pulled myself up the rocking rungs, hand after hand, surprised at my own strength. The ladder jerked behind me as Dad followed. Hands reached over a metal rim, grabbed my life jacket by the collar and pulled it over my ears, dragging me onto a cold hard surface. Images fragmented into a mist of hazy impressions: a blanket across my shoulders, foreign voices, hot tea with whiskey—then nothing.

We must have been taken to hospital. Where were Dad and Toody? What day was it? Fuzzy and unfocused, I tried to string the images together. Suddenly, like a dam bursting, memories of the shipwreck flooded back…

We’d set out from Cardiff Docks, the part of town filled with rusting warehouses and scary men in cloth caps. Toody, my 12-year-old younger brother and I were jumping out of our skins with excitement. It was to be our grand adventure, just the three of us on a sea journey down the Bristol Channel and around the coast to the town of Barry.

Dad had built an odd hybrid canoe, kayak and sailing boat at a local woodworking class over the previous winter. It was made of canvas over a wood frame—dusky red above, slate gray below—with wooden leeboards hanging down each side to keep it stable when the three sails filled with wind. We each had kayak paddles to push it along and there was a tiller and rudder at the rear. Toody named the long, narrow craft the Magog after a mythological Welsh giant. It was oddly beautiful and quite unstable.

“Time to get aboard. You first, Toody,” Dad said, stretching out his hand.

Once Toody was settled, I caught Dad’s knobby fingers in mine, feeling his surprisingly strong arm. The Magog wobbled and for a moment I was afraid it might capsize. Dad kept it stable while I snuggled into the middle seat. He handed each of us a paddle, clambered into the back seat, pushed off and the craft glided away from the jetty.

We paddled in a ragged rhythm, pulling the Magog out into the bay. I tried to follow Toody’s erratic rowing as he maneuvered his paddles side to side, short arms hampered by the life vest. Away from the shore, the wind strengthened, gusting across the sullen water, whipping up whitecaps of sea foam.

Dad sat behind me, intent. A wild seabird with his prominent beaked nose above a trim white beard, he peered over the water, graying hair blown every which way by the wind. Unlike his ordinary diffident self, Dad was in his element, relaxed and confident, directing our actions and answering our questions.

With the tide sweeping us out of the estuary and the winds blowing against us, it felt like we raced down a massive river emptying out into the Irish Sea. We set the mainsail, lowered the leeboards and raised the narrow foresail, while Dad set the mizzen sail at the rear. The boom swung over, the sails filled and we picked up speed, cutting through each wave, driving splashes of seawater over the bow. Toody turned and beamed a wide smile: this was what we’d been waiting for.

“We don’t want to get too far out in the channel. That’s where the big ships go. Get ready to tack back in. Mind your heads when the boom swings over.” Dad shifted the tiller and we turned towards the shore.

A stiff breeze gusted under a sky that had turned gunmetal gray. Toody was chattering away while Dad was quietly concentrating as we rounded a point into a semicircular bay of rocks and pebbles. The bay looked calm and empty, a place to spend time searching in tidal pools for crabs and tiny fish.

Just then, Toody gestured and yelled, “What’s that, Dad?” He pointed to a line of white in the distance beyond the headland of the bay.

Dad cleared his throat: “I’m not sure—it could be a tide race. We’d better head in.”

We paddled hard but the powerful tide kept sweeping us around the bay and away from safety. Now we could see it: a huge wall of white-topped waves stretching far out into the main channel.

Dad’s voice was tense as he yelled. “Moey, we’d better head out into the bay and see if we can get around it.” It was hard to hear anything over a distant roaring, getting louder with each minute.

We turned the craft, the sails billowed and waves broke white over the bow. Moving swiftly against the tide, one of the leeboard stabilizers kept rising out of the water. Between paddle strokes I tried to hold it down, my hand freezing in the spray. Toody paddled hard, breathing heavily. Dad called out commands, his words snatched by the wind and overwhelmed by the roaring sound.

Slowly, relentlessly, we were sucked backward into the maw of a monstrous watery beast. Turning, I saw a massive wave towering high over the mast; it struck like a fist, engulfing us, tossing our craft like a toy.

The Magog flipped. Toody screamed. Dad called out something as I struggled to get out of my seat. Then the sails waterlogged, pulling the craft over and I went under. Icy saltwater filled my mouth and eyes as I scrabbled to get free. Shocked and spluttering, I surfaced to find my brother and father clinging to the Magog’s sides. Our life jackets kept us afloat as we each locked fingers onto a slippery ledge of the upside down craft.

Waves danced and heaved, but in moments we’d sped past the tide race and the sea settled back into its normal swell. Water chilled my back and the life jacket chafed my neck. My face and hands quickly became numb.

“What’s going to happen, Daddy?” Toody cried, his tears mixing with seawater. “I’m cold. Are we going to be rescued?” He looked small and helpless, a little boy needing comfort.

Dad’s voice was strained but calm, his training as a World War II pilot coming to the fore. “There’s no chance of getting the boat upright. We’ll have to wait until we get rescued. The main thing is to stay with the boat and hold on tight. I’ll set off the smoke signal as soon as we see a ship. They’ll come and get us.”

Dad’s composure settled me. It was no use getting upset; I’d have to trust everything would be OK…

Time passed. A chilled silence settled over us. Clinging to the boat, we rose and fell with the long slow waves of the open ocean. From the top of one swell, we saw a black shape far in the distance, a drift of smoke rising from its stack. Toody called out for help and lapsed into jumbled muttering. Dad reached under his life jacket for the emergency rescue canister. He pulled the tab and a long cloud of red smoke spread out behind us—our last hope.

We drifted, each lost in our own shrinking worlds. The only sound was the swish of water against canvas; all around stretched a wasteland of gray endless waves.

Random, hard-to-capture images tiptoed at the fringe of my mind. Wave and water drew heat from my body, inviting me to let go. Out of nowhere, something opened up inside me, an expansive view of everything: it was as it should be; there was nothing to fear. All I had to do was surrender.

Intruding on the peaceful calm, one thought remained: What about my sisters? I saw Dilly, Jeffie and Veronica standing around three graves with sorrowful ashen faces. They were left behind, overcome with sadness. Then a new thought: They will suffer; we are the fortunate ones. It’s OK to let go…

 

Back in the hospital room, a sharp knock startled me, sending a shock through my body. A door opened and in strode a blonde nurse consulting her clipboard, all brisk manner and starched white uniform. For a moment I was confused; I’d forgotten people existed.

“Owen Evans, isn’t it?” she asked in a singsong Welsh accent.

That was puzzling. Owen? Who was that? Oh, that’s me—but no one calls me Owen. I’m Moey. I pulled myself together and mumbled something vaguely affirmative.

“Your father and brother are in the next room. You’ll get to see them in a while. Now I need a little sample. I’ll be back to collect it.”

She placed an odd-shaped bottle on the bedside table, turned on the heel of her sensible shoes and left abruptly.

It took me a moment to recover. What was that strange thing she’d left? It crouched on its side like a distorted animal looking at me with a mouth-like spout. What is it? What am I supposed to do? Then it clicked: she wanted me to pee into it. I struggled shakily to my knees, opened the flap in the blue-striped pajamas and inserted my penis into the neck of the bottle.

After a moment’s pause something let go, and kept letting go. The floodgates had opened and I couldn’t stop the surge, even as the bottle threatened to overflow. Gritting my teeth, I finally clenched my bladder shut. A few drops of pee splattered onto the sheet.

When the nurse returned, she found me kneeling on the bed, carefully holding the bottle upright, filled to the brim with urine. Without a word, she wrapped it in a cloth and took it away.

A surge of embarrassment swept over me, flamed my face and jolted me into my familiar painful self. I was back in the world and part of me wished I wasn’t.

Life and Death
We should have died. A tiny speck in a vast heaving sea, there was little or no chance of being found. The rescue was a fluke, a long shot—one of those hokey endings in a Hollywood disaster movie. By chance someone saw our signal; by luck the captain decided to turn his ship around and find us before hypothermia set in. It all seems so unlikely. So is there a reason for our survival; is there a purpose for me to still be alive?

This book is about discovering meaning in every aspect of our experience, whether desired or unwelcome. We are called to grapple with the big questions, “Why am I alive? What does it mean?” If we do not engage fully with life, then by default, each moment, each day becomes thin and threadbare.

I’ve found that two main things keep us firmly tethered to this world: relationship and purpose. I will write about relationship later, but whenever purpose gets lost or becomes shaky, we are prone to depression and despair. It is simple: why should we wake up in the morning if there is no reason to live?

As I get older, I feel the proximity of death and the urgency of fulfilling the purpose of each day. If I can get still and attentive, my inner Self will guide me what I am meant to do that day. If I follow inner guidance, I sleep satisfied. We have to stay alive on purpose.

Trauma
Was I traumatized? Yes somewhat—but not as much as Toody. Later that summer at Aunty Peggy’s, he lost it. My cousin and I found him wandering in an open field, face waxy, eyes glazed as if peering into a distant universe. He was muttering in a small scared voice, “We could’ve died. We could’ve died.”

Toody experienced a typical reaction of traumatic shock and dissociation. Also typically, no one in the family took him or his feelings seriously. Even I found his reaction hard to bear. His behavior unleashed a mash of feelings—anxiety, confusion, agitation and s—feelings I was struggling hard to control. In recent discussions with my brother, he has little memory of the shipwreck and none of his reaction that summer. He lost a part of himself.

Trauma overwhelms our ability to cope. It distorts and often severs the thread of our identity—we lose continuity and connection to parts of our self. How much a trauma impacts us depends on three elements: our vulnerability, the intensity of the event, and the quality of the healing environment around us. The same incidents will affect individuals very differently depending on their age and resilience. However, it is the quality of emotional support they receive afterward that makes most of the difference.

If a parent listens, understands and soothes a child after they are hurt, the hurt goes away and is forgotten. If that parent is distracted, uncaring or critical, that same hurt leaves a permanent scar.

I was older than Toody and less vulnerable, so the trauma affected me less. I also did not feel his terror at dying. Both of us, however, experienced a defective healing environment. Not one person asked us how we were doing or if we needed help. Both Toody and I were scarred.

Near-death Experience
Encounters with death cast a long shadow. In his memoir, C. G. Jung describes his experiences following a heart attack:
“For it seemed to me as if behind the horizon of the cosmos a three-dimensional world had been artificially built up, in which each person sat by himself in a little box. And now I should have to convince myself all over again that this was important! Life and the whole world struck me as a prison, and it bothered me beyond measure …”[1]

My own near-death experience (NDE) does not compare with Jung’s or the common descriptions of a tunnel of light, heavenly sights and deceased relatives in waiting. All I received was a place of comfort and peace—inviting but not exciting.[2] That may be because my immature ego was unequipped to hold the experience in consciousness; I forgot.

Many years later, my Grandmother talked to her dead husband and sister when she was near death after an operation for colon cancer. She wanted to leave with them, but, like Jung, the prayers of her friends and family drew her back into life. Eighteen months later, she died a beautiful dignified death in her own bed, totally convinced she was transitioning to a place filled with love.

My own glimpse behind the veil of mortality shifted something fundamental. Death became less frightening, less of an unknown. Like many others—Jung included—my connection to life became less enticing, less enthralling. At the center of my being, the instinct to survive wavered. I no longer hungered to stay alive and the reflexive terror at the thought of dying faded.

Since then, a small part of me does not want to stay here in this clunky world; it is demanding, constricted and too often uncomfortable. Beneath my usual enthusiasm for living there is a tidal pull from that other place. Though I don’t welcome the pain of dying or the sorrow of leaving loved ones behind, I am subtly attracted to my own death.

Death
Death is the inescapable truth: no avoiding, no hiding, no bargaining and no self-deception. The reality that we die forces us to reevaluate life—and splashes cold humility onto our sense of entitlement, our delusion that there is always time. In death, the things I think so important turn to dust: my garden withers and runs to weeds; my precious belongings are a burden to others; my emails go unanswered. Facing my demise strips me naked and demands, “What is essential to my living and dying?”

Look around a deathbed: loved ones surround those who have loved; in contrast, those who spread bitterness are discarded or imprisoned by resentment. In death, we are confronted with how we lived; it is the culmination and capstone of whom we are. The quality of our being, our capacity for understanding, love and kindness are reflected back to us by those left behind. To die alone and neglected is a horrific indictment of a life gone wrong.

Those who have ‘done their work’—engaged with their life purpose, struggled to overcome selfishness, shown love to others—enjoy a good death and the satisfaction of a job well done. That surely is enough, even if there is simply a blank afterward.

Life after Death
The question, “Is there life after death?” does not quite make sense. By definition, whatever happens after death cannot be life; it has to be something else. The discontinuity between life and after-life is insurmountable. We do not recall being expelled from our mother’s womb; we cannot be awake while we sleep. Death remains an impenetrable mystery and our firmest beliefs and suppositions are bound to be inadequate.

For myself, I look forward to my demise with curiosity. I have felt a connection with a vast, comforting space of light, not just at age 14 but many times since. I think of this space as Heavenly—and it acts like a beacon. Once we have felt that luminous space while alive, we will certainly know how to find it

[1] C. G .Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1961). Vintage Books, New York, p. 292.

[2] In a study of over 300 near death experiences (NDEs), 82 per cent mention calm and peace while a far smaller percentage describe a tunnel or light. See: Peter Fenwick and Elizabeth Fenwick, The Truth in the Light (2011). White Crow Books, Guildford, UK.

Summer 1966, age 14

We sat in the back of the rattling ambulance on our way back to Cardiff from the hospital—a journey of ten miles. The nurse had hustled us off, dressed in borrowed pajamas, dressing gowns and cheap slippers.

Across from me, Toody clung close to Dad, quiet and subdued. He looked smaller than usual in his drooping pajamas as though shrunk in the wash. Not quite 13, he was still a child: round baby face, big sad green eyes and shrill voice. We shared a bedroom but since the move to Cardiff 18 months ago, we’d grown apart—or maybe I’d stopped caring. His chirpy manner got on my nerves, so I tuned him out, like other things that bothered me. A lot of things bothered me.

Being fourteen and a half was no fun. I was a stranger in an overgrown body with croaking voice, sparse body hair and morning erections. Nothing seemed to fit. I kept tripping over my feet, bumping into things and feeling miserable for no reason. At every opportunity, I lost myself in the worlds of horror and science fiction: Lovecraft, Poe, Wells, Bradbury, Asimov. Books were comfort and companions. Immersed in fantastical worlds, escaping from the monotonous routines of everyday life, I could just about cope with the discomfort of being me.

The jerky progress of the ambulance shook me out of my reverie. I peered out the small back windows, trying to recognize landmarks, but the streets and houses all looked the same.

“Where are we, Dad?” I asked.

He looked up. “We’re close to Gabalfa. We’ll be home in a little while.” He sounded distracted.

Hunched on the bench opposite, his dressing gown gaping at the neck, Dad looked more washed out than usual. On a good day, I could rely on him to make a throat-clearing noise and expand on any given topic, often at length. He liked sharing useful and useless facts, interspersing his speech with bursts of breathy laughter. Now he looked burdened; I should leave him alone.

Dad was Dad—a familiar presence. His face was striking with bright blue eyes and a neat white goatee dominated by an eagle-hooked nose. That nose was infamous—the Bowen Nose. My brother John and eldest sister Veronica had inherited a similar aquiline beak from Granny’s aristocratic line. The nose looked fierce, but Dad was a quiet man, restrained and hesitant—unless cornered or provoked. In our family, any strong feelings prompted a pacifying joke, an uncomfortable hesitation and finally a full-scale retreat to the garden. Dilly, the youngest sister, dubbed him a typical Cancer—a crab withdrawing into his shell at the first sign of threat.

The ambulance jerked to a stop, the driver open the back doors and I looked out at dreary Whitchurch Road. Just seeing it induced a sick Cardiff feeling in the pit of my stomach: a strong case of nameless dread. A year and a half ago, we’d been living in the Lodge at Ffrwdgrech (frude-grech) in the gentle green countryside outside Brecon. Without warning, we’d been wrenched out of our familiar surroundings and plunked down in a city full of noise, grime and prying eyes. I had no idea why.

Our narrow brick house, one of a row of rentals on Whitchurch Road, was squeezed in between the mean butcher on our left and the deaf people on our right. I didn’t know any of them by sight but I could feel their baleful presence—watching and judging behind twitching lace curtains. No doubt, the arrival of this ambulance was ammunition for gossip, further confirmation of the weirdness of the Evans family.

We were not like other people: not respectable, not quite proper. For one thing, we spoke with upper-class English accents—quite different from our working-class Welsh neighbors. We were also poor. To make it worse, our household was raucous with loud voices and slammed doors; odd-looking visitors appeared any time of day or night with faces black, brown and indeterminate. Most shockingly, we had no mother to take care of the home or keep up appearances. Just to be difficult, Dad planted cabbages instead of flowers in our front garden. None of our neighbors spoke to us.

The rest of the family didn’t care what people thought, but it was torture for me. Voiceless disapproval cast a dark shadow, made me shrivel up inside. Our messy house, poverty and eccentricity embarrassed me to the depths of my being. But weirdly, I was proud of being an Evans, of coming from a long line of minor aristocracy—of being different.

Dad, Toody and I made our way up the brick path to the front door where Dilly, my prickly eighteen-year-old sister, hustled us into the house. From the street, the porch with its Edwardian tiles and stained glass hinted at a kind of faded elegance. Inside, the gloomy passageway told a different story. It smelled musty with discolored blue paint blistered in wandering lines where the damp had risen up inside the wall. To the left, a staircase covered with worn and tatty carpet scraps, rose up beside a narrow passageway. At the end of the passage, a door opened to the central space in the house: the dining room where we ate meals and came together from our separate lives.

The house felt transitory—a corridor between here and there, not a place to settle, not a home. The four of us—Dad, Dilly, Toody and I—camped in the house. A cheap rental, it did not belong to us and we did not belong to it. Besides, we were not a whole family; half of our six siblings were scattered across the globe. My eldest sister, Veronica was in Spain or possibly Morocco; Jeffie, the next sister, lived in New York and John, my older brother was in Dungarvan in Ireland. Of course, Mummy was also in Dungarvan—but we didn’t talk about her.

As soon as we got inside the front door, Dilly laid into Dad: “What the fuck do you think you were doing, Daddy, getting lost at sea. I told you the trip was stupid. You could’ve all been drowned.” Dad cleared his throat and didn’t say anything.

From her ranting, I gathered Dilly was worried about our safety, but mostly she seemed annoyed at having us back. Dilly worked some dead-end job and held the household together, her dreams of being an opera singer fading into fantasy. It wasn’t fun looking after her father and two brothers—three useless males as she described us. To Toody and me, she was a strident voice demanding we stop making a mess and do our chores—but beneath her bossy irritability Dilly’s softer side sometimes peeked out.

“You better go and get dressed. I’m making squigglies; come down when I call.” She gave Toody and me a hard look and then smiled an unexpectedly sweet smile.

I followed Toody up to our shared room, dressed, picked up my most recent book of horror stories and lay on the bed, preparing to disappear. All too soon, from the bottom of the stairs came Dilly’s earsplitting yell, “Moey and Toody—suppertime!” Her operatically trained voice could be heard throughout the house and probably the neighborhood.

Dilly herded us into the kitchen, a frigid, concrete addition at the back of the house. “Serve yourself. The squigglies are on the stove.”

Squigglies was a cheap family favorite: spaghetti with a rich tomato sauce complete with chopped up lamb kidney. I loved the rich meaty smell. As we got our plates, I checked to make sure Toody hadn’t got a bigger serving; that wouldn’t be fair—I was the oldest.

The dining room was the only place we came together, huddled around the gas fire in elegant squalor, as Dad described us. The tiled floor was grimy, the walls a blotchy sky blue from cheap chalky paint. On one wall hung a striking half-size oil portrait of Toody sitting on a sofa, looking rather like a melancholy gnome. Close to it was a smaller portrait of me in a Fidel Castro hat painted in shades of green; I looked grumpy and sick. The pictures, painted by my artist sister Veronica, mirrored the unease that permeated the household.

To one side, pushed up tight to the window looking out at a blank wall six feet away, stood the dining table. Around it crowded an eclectic mix of mismatched chairs, some antique, others simply battered. One alcove was stacked with two sets of the Encyclopedia Britannica, row on row of massive volumes we consulted to resolve questions and disputes. Bookshelves covered another wall overflowing with paperbacks, poetry and classics including a set of Casanova’s sexy memoirs bound in white leather.

We sat down and started eating. Mealtimes were brief affairs; I ate fast. You never knew if the conversation might turn sticky and, with an empty plate, I could ask to be excused, leave the table and get back to my solitary reading.

With four of us around the table, the family was amputated as if missing vital limbs. When we had all been together at the Lodge a few years previously, meals were loud with banter, raucous with teasing comments, everyone talking on top of each other. Even the dining-room table was fascinating. Dad had covered it with a plastic map of the world and we spent our meals discovering new countries and tiny South Sea Islands, exotic places to visit when we grew up. Now half the family was scattered across that map; the rest of us were left behind.

“So, everything was lost,” Dilly said abruptly. I guessed she was referring to money rather than belongings.

Dad tensed. He hated talking about money—it was a non-subject like Mummy.

“Our bags floated away when we capsized. There’s a small chance they’ll get washed up on a beach but it’s unlikely we’ll see them again.”

He relayed the facts in a calm voice without looking up and took a forkful of red spaghetti worms and sauce. As he chewed, his jaw made a loud clicking noise as it moved side to side. He’d broken his jaw and lost a bunch of teeth in a horse racing accident as a young man.

Dilly took the hint and changed the subject. “So who rescued you?”

Toody interrupted, “Dilly, we’re going to be in the newspaper! They took photos of us sitting on my hospital bed.”

“Which newspaper? Can we get a copy?” I asked. This was a safe subject. I’d learned to navigate conversational whirlpools by staying quiet or steering the subject toward less dangerous waters.

Dad ignored the interruption and answered Dilly’s question, helping fill in the missing bits of my memory.

“We got picked up by a German cargo ship. I chatted with the Captain. He saw our smoke signal but because of the tides and the shipping lanes, he couldn’t get to us directly. He had to go all the way in and back out again. It’s a miracle he found us.”

“How long did it take?” Toody asked in a small voice. “I don’t remember.”

“About two or three hours. We were lucky—a little longer and we might not have made it.”

Toody’s face turned pale. Dad didn’t seem to notice and continued, “Nice chap, the Captain. His English was quite good, and we talked about the War and the places I’d bombed.” He gave a dry laugh. Dad had piloted bombing raids on most of the big German cities during the War.

A question nagged at me but I hesitated to speak. Toody put it into words, “What about the Magog? Is it all right? Can we take it out again?”

Dad looked down at his plate. He paused for a few moments. “No, I’m afraid not. When the coastguard towed it into Barry, the canvas got ripped off.”

Toody crumpled as silent tears slid down his cheeks. Dad made ineffectual soothing noises and Dilly was quiet.

My stomach dropped. “Can’t we get some canvas and fix it up? That wouldn’t be a big job, would it?”

“No, it’s not possible, the spars are broken—and there’s no way to get it back from Barry.”

Dad had given up. Leaden with disappointment, angry thoughts rattled around my brain: There must be something he can do. He made the damned thing; he can fix it!

Just as quickly, the angry thoughts slipped away. I couldn’t be upset with Dad for long, especially when he looked defeated. It was useless to say anything; he’d only retreat. Better to let it go. There’d be no more boating trips, no more adventures, nothing to look forward to. It was all gone, lost.

The squigglies were tasteless as we ate in silence. I didn’t even want seconds. Before it got unbearable, Dilly broke the spell. Almost as if talking to herself, she said: “That’s that then. What are the boys going to do for the rest of the summer? I’m working; I can’t look after them.” She examined Toody and me as if we were awkward baggage. “We could ask Aunty Peggy to take them. What do you think Daddy?”

Dad made an affirmative noise.

Dilly continued, “Well that’s settled. I’ll contact Aunty Peggy and you two can take a bus to Abergavenny. Whose turn is it to clean up? Moey, you do the washing up. Toody you can dry.”

“I did it last time,” I blurted. We had a roster for chores, but I hated dishwashing in the cramped kitchen with its narrow porcelain sink. It felt like being abandoned on some icy planet.

 

Sleep did not come easily. Lying in bed listening to Toody’s quiet breathing, my thoughts went round and round. Memory fragments invaded my mind: peeing into the hospital bottle, Toody crying, Dad looking lost, the girls around our graves. At the fringe of awareness came slippery thoughts, hard to pin down: We nearly died. Why didn’t we die?

One thing was certain: dying was not like I’d thought it would be. The other place was welcoming, comforting—not scary at all.

But why did I scream when the boat came? I could feel the part of me that wanted to stay quietly in that other place; then there was that bit of me desperate to stay alive. My sisters around the graves—that was sad. What did it mean? I hadn’t thought about Mummy or John at all; they never crossed my mind. It was better Mummy stayed away. What about John? Maybe he’d come back this summer.

I tossed and turned, the thoughts swirling like leaves in the wind. Trickier questions snuck in against my will: What about God? I hadn’t prayed! Should I have prayed?

I was meant to be a sort of Catholic, but I hadn’t thought about God or Jesus or any of that religious stuff. Do I really believe in God? The whole Catholic business twisted my stomach into knots. I had to make a decision soon. Best not to think about it.

Eventually sleep dragged me down into the darkness, colonized my dreams with disjointed images of waves and graves, unintelligible words and broken stories. I awoke late in the morning, brain muddled and muddy. All I wanted was to forget.

Family
Family is a blessing—family is a curse. But what is family? It’s not blood relationship—many non-related people consider themselves kin. If I sense the individuals who are most deeply embedded in my psyche, I know them as family. Each person is a node in a powerful feeling web that binds me into a kind of loosely unified entity.

Rather than a bunch of people, think of family as a force like gravity. Gravity holds us down whether we like it or not; it keeps us grounded and stops us floating away. In the same way, family holds us to this earth in a field of relationships. We cannot see it, have only the haziest sense of what it is, but its power affects every aspect of our being.

No matter whether we have contact with its members, we cannot escape family. My dead parents, my scattered siblings, all pop up in the corners of my dreams. Woven into the fabric of my identity, I see my family mirrored in the words I speak, the jokes I make, and particularly in how I feel about myself. The Evans family was the emotional soil in which I germinated and grew. It gave me certain strengths and resilience but parts of my being were sadly malnourished and stunted. Whether we like it or not, our families live inside us; they are part of us.

The Family Unconscious
G. Jung tells us, we are born into the unconscious atmosphere of our families. Like fish swimming in an unseen ocean, we cannot speak of the powerful psychic current swirling around and through us. The family unconscious is vast, more powerful than individual members, and it’s primarily through parents that the unconscious energy is channeled to the child.

It all begins with conception. Luckily, unlike others of my siblings, I was conceived during a relatively benign period in my parent’s marriage. My mother did not actively try to abort me as she did with Toody. She liked being pregnant, so I did not experience that uneasy dread of being unwelcome in the world.

However, within two years, the chaotic and hostile energies spiraling around my parents became the oxygen I breathed. When parents fight, when tension crackles in the air, a child knows their lives are in danger. Imminent threat demands a response and my instinctual reaction was a kind of physical dread. Soon anxiety and tension became a normal part of my self-experience; I could not conceive of any other way of being.

With the newborn’s cry, we breathe in the unconscious atmosphere of our family. It fills our lungs and quickly permeates our being. The language we speak, the thoughts we thinks, the emotions we feel—these are the offerings of our family. We cannot refuse those gifts; to refuse invites rejection and to be rejected means death. We have no choice but to keep breathing, even as the toxic fumes threaten to choke us.

The Family Emotional System[1]
Families evoke powerful and dangerous emotions. Relationship and feelings are two sides of the same coin; we feel most about those we are entwined with. The bonds of family create extraordinary love and extreme abuse. Its gravitational field, its unseen atmosphere binds us together but also serves to keep dangerous urges and emotions in check. Like a seesaw, emotional balance is unsteady, particularly when secrets and trauma are buried in the family’s history.

I was an Evans male and our way was to push disturbing thoughts and feelings down into the dark repository of the undealt-with, the mislaid and forgotten. By age 14, I was adept at repression. The familial atmosphere encouraged me to avoid and forget, just like my father.

Our emotional restrictions were not culturally abnormal. Dad, a child of the upper class, was brought up by a nanny and only saw his mother and father during a set time each day. At age of seven, he was sent off to boarding school at the far end of the country. Sobbing alone in bed night after night, he had to learn how to stop feeling. Like others of his class, he was molded to have the emotionally detached stiff upper lip necessary for founders of the British Empire.

Like my father, I was a semi-motherless child. I yearned for affection but only Jeffie (the second sister) enjoyed physical contact; most evenings when I was young, we’d cuddle up listening to Radio Luxembourg, the first pop music station. As a result, I got teased for being ‘sloppy’, too physically demonstrative, as if affection was a slippery, slimy mess. I soon learned softer feelings should not be expressed; vulnerability could be made fun of; banter was safe. Speaking the word “love” was far too intimate—almost shameful. It just wasn’t done.

Every family has to come to some sort of resolution and adaptation around feeling and expressing emotions. Like the Evanses, many stuff feelings down. Unfortunately, like a buoyant ball held under water, repressed feelings tend to bob up to the surface as anxiety, shame and disturbed dreams. We pay an expensive price for not feeling and not sharing our feelings.

Ancestors
All our forebears were survivors. They lived long enough to pass on their genes and add another eddy to the family unconscious.^[2] Family is not only those we know; it is a vast branching prehumen and human tree with roots tunneling deep into the darkest past. We are the latest leaves on the human tree, nourished by the same sap, connected to a fragile twig, partaking of the trees vitality and its sickness.

We were Evanses and that meant something. We could trace 500 years of ancestry. On the walls of Ffrwdgrech House hung the gold engraved family tree stretching back to the 15th century—English Royalty in the top left-hand corner, my grandfather, Major J.D.D. Evans in the top right. In a tiny village church outside Brecon was the ancient Evans moss-covered burial plot. My Grandmother was daughter of Sir George Bevan Bowen, High Sheriff of Pembrokeshire.

In contrast, the Jollys on my mother’s side were upper-middle class, business owners and professionals. My maternal grandfather, Arnold Jolly, was a London barrister. My grandmother’s line, the Learoyds, owned “satanic woolen mills’, employing starving women and children for a pittance. They embodied the dark side of capitalist greed and exploitation.

I carry my portion of ancestral forces. Evanses have a kind of self-effacing superiority; we simply do not belong in the same category as other people. We see ourselves as distinct, different and special—not to be bothered with mundane particulars, such as money. On the positive side, we are physically sturdy and have a deep connection with the land and soil. From my maternal grandfather, Arnold Jolly, I inherited a good mind and spiritual aspirations. The dark side is inherited mainly from the Learoyds: a tendency towards addiction and a need for control.

Do you know your ancestors, their strengths and weaknesses? Can you feel the tug of their dysfunction, their clinging anxieties and sullen depression? Do you appreciate the resilience and talents they have left you? How can we truly understand ourselves, if we do not know our forebears and our heritage?

When we get stuck, unable to move forward psychologically, most likely ancestral forces have trapped us in a strangling embrace. My ambivalence around money and success has deep roots; I had to learn to be vigilant around alcohol and drugs. Knowing I am not guilty for all my flaws is a relief. It allows me to distinguish what are my faults as opposed to those handed down to me.

That does not absolve me of responsibility. I am saddled with ancient psychic forces and my job is to do something about them. If I don’t illuminate the shadow of my ancestors, my children will have to. They’ll struggle with the same burdens, be subjected to the same dark forces. The psychological work we do slows down and even halts the massive snowball of dysfunction rolling down through the generations.

We cannot disown our ancestors—just like can we cannot reject our bones. To remain ignorant of our family and its ancestral patterns is dangerous. Our task is to bring light to our ancestral inheritance and not repeat age-old destructive patterns.

[1] If You Met My Family, You’d Understand: A Family Systems Primer (2020), Jack Shitama

[2] Recent research shows that we can directly inherit traits form our ancestors that are related to their experience rather than their genes. Epigenetics is an exciting new lens that focuses the impact of ancestors on our being.

Late summer, 1966, age 14

I lugged the clothes in two overstuffed duffle bags out of the launderette and up the street. We had no washing machine at home; it was my turn to sit with the rumbling tumble-dryers, nursing my mortification, fearful of being seen. On the walk home I was on edge: What if I meet someone from school? What do I say?

At our front door, I yelled through the letterbox for someone to open up. I had no key and the doorbell was broken. Instead of Dilly muttering irritably, the door jerked open and my brother John stood smiling up at me, a mop of blond hair hanging over one eye, his short compact body radiating impatience.

“Great! You’re back.” He took me by the arm, dragging me inside. “Come upstairs—let me tell you what’s happened!”

“Hold on, John. Help me with the laundry.” Irritated by his impulsive energy, I was still glad to see him.

He grabbed both bags and swept me upstairs to the front bedroom. The laundry was thrown into a corner as he sat on the bed and gabbled on about Ireland, peppering his stories with odd Irish words. I gathered he’d been expelled from St Augustine’s friary in Dungarvan and Mummy had shipped him over on the ferry. He wasn’t going back.

John had that familiar devilish grin as he told of his exploits. “One of the friars, Father Aidan—he was a really shite teacher. I gave him a hard time, you know, taunting him.. He had a nervous breakdown, and they sent him off to a home for nutty priests. The other boys thought it was gas, but I got into deep doodoo.”

“And then me and my friends—we broke out and hitched to a hop in Cappoquin. What a night! We got so drunk we missed our lift back and they caught us sneaking in for breakfast.”

He turned almost serious. “The Principal said he didn’t want me back. I’m glad to be out of it.” He gave another chuckle. That was John’s life: wild escapades and perpetual disasters.

I was younger than John by exactly two years minus one day. My birthday was the 10^th and his was the 11^th of October. Born so close together, we should have shared some qualities in common but we were night-and-day opposites. We didn’t even look related. John was short and blond, a bundle of intense energy with the hooked Bowen nose like Dad and Granny. Gregarious and outspoken with loads of pals, he was constantly in trouble at school and elsewhere. I was taller, dark, bland-faced and shy with only one school friend; school was boring but easy.

In the last few summers, John had come and gone between Wales and Ireland. Living with us for a few weeks, suddenly he was absent and we wouldn’t see him again for another year. Like an overcharged speedboat, John left a massive wake behind him—turbulent, tremulous and unsettling.

Memories of our shared childhood evoked an uneasy mix of enjoyment and alarm. At age three, I’d watched in horror as he cut the eyestalks off a snail with a pair of scissors. A few years later he set the big ash tree in the back yard on fire, cracked Jeffie’s front tooth in half with a thrown brick and dropped a handful of wriggling white maggots down the front of Veronica’s blouse. The sheer ingenuity of his exploits was impressive—he never ran out of mischief. By time I was five, he tormented me most days, chasing me around the house, wringing my neck and sitting on me so I couldn’t breathe.

After a lifetime of torment (he was ten and I was eight), I lost it. John had badgered me all morning and I was holding back tears of frustration. In the kitchen, from the opposite side of the table, he taunted me with a singsong: “Moey is a sissy, Moey is a crybaby.”

A blood-red curtain of rage swept over my eyes. I grabbed a carving knife from the sink and went after him screaming, “I’m going to kill you.”

Around the table, through the front room and out into the garden, I chased him with murderous intent. Initially, he dodged with a mocking laugh but soon he was running hard. I stayed silent and determined, gripping the knife hard in my right hand. My longer legs should have outrun his shorter ones, but my feet felt leaden. I hated him, had to hurt him—but a part of me held back—and he got away.

As I stopped running a wave of horror crashed over me: What if I’d caught him? What if I’d stabbed and killed him? The thought was chilling, unimaginable. In that moment I resolved never to let rage grip me again—it was too dangerous.

Whenever I got upset, I told myself: People who lose their temper are stupid. I’ll be calm and in control; that makes me stronger and better than they are. When provoked, my stomach tightened, my face set and the anger dissipated. Soon enough, icy restraint was automatic.

I grew taller and could match John physically. He stopped trying to bully me in the face of my silent distain. Instead, he wielded powers of persuasion and I became his accomplice on adventures and daring deeds: exploring the haunted house up the road, digging for treasure in an empty lot, scrumping apples from the neighbor’s orchard, sneaking a cigarette from mummy’s bag.

John knew how to bend me to his will. His magnetic personality and wacky sense of adventure won out against my passivity. Even though his nefarious plans mostly ended in disaster, I followed where he led. When we got into trouble, john took the blame. I was just the sidekick—Tonto to his Lone Ranger. On one occasion, however, his influence caused me to commit an unforgivable crime.

That was a time when we shared bunk beds in a tiny bedroom of the Lodge at Ffrwdgrech (frude-grech). Ffrwd was my grandparent’s stately home and domain that stretched for miles all the way to the Brecon Beacons, purple heather-covered mountains far in the distance. The estate encompassed over 6000 acres.

Elegantly laid out grounds with a bubbling brook, rustic bridges, a crumbling summerhouse, massive scarlet and pink rhododendrons, exotic gunneras and groves of bamboo surrounded the expansive lawns mowed in perfect parallel stripes. Commanding the center of the estate sat the Big House of Ffrwd, not graceful but certainly imposing. A rambling mansion of 35 rooms, the Big House was where Granny and Grampa lived with their servants and two sausage dogs, the dachshunds Grechen and Gretta.

In contrast, our family lived in the cramped lodge house next to the main entrance gate. In our childish minds, the estate extended endlessly; we could walk all day knowing we were still on Evans land. John the explorer dragged me off on hikes through the woods and up into the mountains to collect spent rifle bullets from the Army Firing Range. Once, we carted home two unexploded mortar bombs, long canisters with metal fins at one end. Dad told us they were signal mortars and probably not dangerous.

That summer, I was ten and John was twelve. John decided we should go camping up on the Brecon Beacons. Dad seemed happy to get us out of the house and helped pack a tent and supplies into a rucksack. We set off up the narrow lane, past Ffrwdgrech waterfalls into the mountains. In a grove of trees at the edge of a meadow surrounded by bracken, we pitched the tent and went in search of adventure.

Toody and I often played at Robin Hood or Red Indians and Dad had helped us make bows out of curved yew branches. I practiced daily, shooting at targets with arrows made of peeled willow wands, their points sharpened and hardened in a fire. John had grown out of make-believe games but I carried my bow and arrows with me everywhere.

Looking around for something exciting to do and pointing at my bow, John said in an offhand manner, “I bet you couldn’t shoot one of those sheep.”

A small flock of white-faced mountain sheep grazed peacefully at the far end of the meadow, minding their own business.

“Bet you I could. I’ve got really good.” John had a way of forcing me to prove myself.

“Well go on then. See if you can hit that one over there. Looks like she’s on her last legs anyway.”

He gave a laugh and pointed to an old ewe with long scrawny neck, bloated belly and ragged fleece hanging off her back.

“Nah, I don’t want to. I can hit that grass tump, if you like.”

“Go on. Don’t be a coward. I’ll go drive them to you and you shoot as they pass—just pretend they’re buffalo and you’re an Indian.”

He set off at a lope around the edge of the meadow. A few of the flock scattered in wild panic but three of them, including the old one, galloped towards me. I picked up my bow and fitted an arrow to the string. With only three arrows there was little chance of hitting a moving target. Two of the sheep sped past while the old ewe hobble along in the rear.

I pulled and fired without thought. I heard a thump as the arrow struck. It pierced the sheep’s bloated side, stuck there for a few moments and dropped to the ground. To my horror, the sheep keeled over panting frantically, legs cycling in the air, eyes rolling in fear. John and I ran up to it and stood over the animal, stunned. Then it struck me: John had never believed I’d do it. The whole thing was one of his mind games.

Standing side by side, John looked as sickened as I felt. “We can’t just leave it. We have to put it out of its misery.” His voice was high and tight. “Shoot it in the heart.”

“No, that won’t work.” I hated the way those eyes kept rolling, the sides heaving up and down.

John left my side and in a moment appeared with the hatchet we used to chop wood. “Here, hit it on the head and kill it.”

“No way. It was your idea. You do it.”

“You shot it. You have to finish it off.” His voice was firm as he handed me the hatchet. “Do it quickly. Get it over with.”

I felt panicked but even so I knew not to use the blade of the hatchet—that would splash blood everywhere. I turned the hatchet over and hit the sheep’s head with the hammer-like back of the blade. The skull crunched and indented; the sheep jerked but the eyes still rolled. I hit once more, hard enough to make the skull cave in. The eyes startled wide then went blank. I stood, hatchet dangling from my hand, knowing I’d done something unforgivable. I’d killed a defenseless animal for no reason and it could never be undone.

Immediately, John went into scheming mode. “We can’t leave the body here; the farmer will find it. Here help me. We’ll push it over the bank so it looks like an accident.”

I nodded in assent, feeling a kind of numb dread but knowing it had to be done.

He took a front leg and I took a back leg. With all our strength, we dragged the heavy body across the grass to the edge of the drop and rolled it over. It landed with a wool-muffled thump. We looked down at the white shape below, then silently made our way back to the campsite, packed our stuff and went home.

No one ever knew. John and I never spoke of it. I should have heeded the gnawing guilt that ate at my innards and avoided John—but I didn’t.

As each of us children got old enough, we were taught to hunt using Mummy’s elegant 28-bore double-barrel shotgun. A prized possession, it had been custom-made for her as a young woman: polished walnut stock, blued barrel and finely crafted hammers. Light, with a minimal kick and perfect balance, even a ten-year-old could carry it all day. The barrel size was unusual so cartridges were expensive and by law, we could only buy a few at a time.

That afternoon, John was showing off to his three school friends from town. They were a rowdy lot, working class, not like us. Toody and I as the younger members, hung around the fringe while John held center stage carrying Mummy’s gun, telling tall stories, acting as if he owned the whole Evans estate. With the chatter and noise, no animals dared appear so John hadn’t had a chance to show his prowess with the gun.

The gang walked past an empty farmhouse set back from the road, square with gray slate roof and faded pink wash. Some of the ground floor windows were broken and one of the boys wandered over, picked up a stone and idly tossed it at the smashed glass. It tinkled as it fell. Soon all of us, including Toody were pelting the broken windows with small rocks—very satisfying.

From behind us John’s voice called out, commanding: “Hold on, you lot. Come back here. Watch that top window in the middle.”

John raised the gun while we watched in hushed suspense. He clicked the two hammers into firing position, aimed and let go with both barrels. There was an almighty boom and the whole of the top window exploded into smithereens. After a moment shocked silence, we looked at each other in alarm and took off running.

A few days later, two policemen arrived at the front door of the Big House. They were looking for the Evans boys. We were interrogated and sent up before the magistrate in a dark-paneled room, quivering in our shoes. Toody wept silently while I stood sick and still. We pleaded guilty and had to pay a hefty fine for vandalism. To make it worse, Toody and I were fined the same amount as John. By family agreement, no one mentioned the gun. I felt enraged at the injustice; all the money in my Post Office account was gone.

It got worse after Grampa died. The whole of Ffrwdgrech estate—farms, land, house and contents—was left to Uncle David and Aunt Perenna. Granny moved into the cottage next door so the Big House stood empty, month after month, a vast rambling assortment of rooms and treasures, uncared for, just sitting there. It seemed so unjust; they got everything and we got nothing. Dad explained in his calm way: the house had been ‘entailed’ by Grampa via David to David’s eldest son in order to keep the estate together. The younger offspring including my father would not get anything.

Maybe it was the injustice, maybe it was because we all hated Uncle David and horse-faced Perenna, but John had to go and do it. After casing the joint, he slipped the catch on a tiny lavatory window and climbed inside the Big House. The household keys lay waiting in Grampa’s desk and the whole place—35 rooms, cellar, gunroom and safe—everything was at John’s mercy.

Bursting with excitement and triumph, John convinced me to join him on a scouting expedition. We weren’t going to mess with anything, we were just going to look—or so he said. The next evening, I stood by the side door while John climbed through the window. The door opened and he ushered me over the threshold into the gloom. Inside, the house felt silent and neglected, stuffy with stale air; I wondered if the ghosts were watching.

Like an enthusiastic custodian, John had to show me everything. “Let’s go down into the cellar. It’s full of wine and port—bottles and bottles of the stuff.”

The cellar had always been out of bounds. Now he unlocked the door and we scrambled down the narrow stone steps into an ancient world—flagstone floor coated with dust, arched cave-like alcoves and rough rock walls.

“Watch out for the giant spiders,” he whispered. The dim light illuminated the closer wine racks festooned with thick clingy spider webs. John snatched up a dusty bottle of wine and we hastily re-climbed the stairs. The watery evening light in the corridor was a relief.

“You can’t take that, John. It’s stealing.” I said in my best moral voice, pointing at the bottle. “Anyway, you don’t like wine.”

John grinned. “No one will miss it. I’ll give it to Mummy.” Our mother had appeared from Ireland a few weeks previously carrying her baggage of venom and chaos. She’d love to guzzle on stolen wine from Ffrwd.

Next on the guided tour was the gunroom, crowded with rods, fishing gear, rifles and shotguns. John opened a glass-fronted cabinet and took down a selection of guns. The walls of the Big House were lined with heads of animals—yak, deer, antelope and kudu. As a young man Grampa had slaughtered them on safari in Africa and Asia. Grandpa’s elephant rifle was almost too heavy for John and he got it back into the rack with some difficulty.

Under the cabinets were rows of drawers. One held a blue-steel army revolver from the First World War. Others were filled with bullets of all sizes: massive 12-bore elephant slugs, rifle and revolver rounds and delicate .22 shells.

Up in the far corner of the gunroom, built into the wall, was a safe, painted a creamy yellow to match the walls. John climbed up on a chair, fitted the key into the brass keyhole, turned the heavy handle with a clunk and swung open the thick metal door. One shelf was filled with boring papers, but on another lay the treasures: silver bracelets, christening cups, gold and silver coins and a dark leather case. John flipped opened the case. There, nestled in blue velvet, sparkled Granny’s diamond tiara. She’d worn it at her debutante ball when she was 16.

That was too much: “Put that back, John. You shouldn’t even be touching it.”

“Don’t worry—I just wanted to show you,” he said in a soothing voice. I wasn’t fooled. I saw the greedy glint in his eye.

I couldn’t catch my breath; the airless suffocating atmosphere closed in around me. I had to get out into the fresh air. There was no stopping John. He was going to do what he was going to do, but I couldn’t be involved.

In our bunk beds at night, John tried to peak my curiosity and draw me into his intrigues. I turned my back and repeated to myself, I don’t want to know. For a while it worked, but his crafty words eventually broke my resistance. He’d ‘borrowed’ the Webley army revolver and a .22 rifle and stashed them up in the woods. He had to show me. Next Saturday, we went to his hiding spot, a thicket half a mile from the house.

First he displayed the .22 rifle, a small gun obviously built for boys. To my disappointment, he’d used up all the bullets so I couldn’t have a go. Then, with a flourish, he pulled out the army revolver from a plastic bag under a log. The loaded handgun looked massive and I noticed rust spots had speckled the blued barrel—not a good idea. Too heavy to hold upright, John loaded a bullet, lodged the trigger guard in the fork of a tree and cocked the hammer. Using a stick, he pulled the trigger. With a staggering boom, the gun flew through the air to land a few yards behind us.

A shock went through my body. That was it! I had to get away and forget his madness.

As usual we got caught—not for the break-ins, not for the stolen bottles of wine or the silver trinkets John sold to a jeweler in Brecon, but for the petty crime of taking cigarettes from Granny’s cigarette box. Granny only smoked one or two cigarettes a day and she’d noticed her shrinking supply. Only us boys could be to blame.

Dad confronted me. Trapped in the spotlight of his anger, he looked bigger and scarier than I’d ever seen him: How could I treat Granny that way? She’d fed us, let us watch television, driven us into town, helped us with money. I’d betrayed her trust, committed a terrible crime.

I burst into tears and before I could stop myself, the story about the guns tumbled out. Dad’s face blanched white with fear and rage; his body tensed. Yelling for John to come into the room, he rolled up his sleeves, showing his hairy muscular arms.

“You two, get ready for a spanking,” he roared. “John, sit over there.” He gestured toward the sofa.

“Moey, come here. You’re first.” His voice was fierce as he sat down.

He caught me with hands of steel and threw me over his lap. Silently and methodically, he spanked me on the bottom with his calloused open hand. Every slap stung with excruciating pain, forcing floods of tears from my eyes. I lay still, taking the beating passively, waiting for it to end. Dad was so angry, so upset and disappointed. I knew he hated spanking me—and I knew I deserved to be spanked.

Finally, he stopped and he let me up. My bottom stung horribly, but to my surprise, what I felt most was relief. The thrashing had lifted a weight from my soul. I was absolved of guilt.

John’s turn was next but we wouldn’t submit. Dad had to pick him up bodily while John resisted with all his strength. Instead of lying still, he squirmed and turned, desperate to avoid every slap, moaning and complaining. Dad’s frustration turned brutal, the spanking got harder and longer while their mutual fury burned white hot.

Through my tears, I kept repeating to myself: Please stop fighting—please give in. You’re just making it worse!

That marked the turning point. John was sent off to Ireland to live with Mummy and we only saw him during the holidays. He and I became virtual strangers, no longer brothers in arms. By the time he moved back, John had been out of my life for four years. Now he was going to live with us in Whitchurch Road. Already he was filling my head with tall tales and the prospect of adventure. Our quiet, sedate life was going to change.

The Personal Shadow
We all have a dark side, parts of ourselves we don’t like to acknowledge: depraved desires, murderous intent, greed, cruelty and selfishness. When a nasty thought slips past our defenses, when we do something that we can’t face, our first impulse is to disown it, stuff it down into the darkness and forget it ever happened. ‘That’s not who I am! I’m a good person, really.’

The more we look towards the light, the darker grows the murk over our left shoulder. Robert Bly calls the shadow, The Long Bag We Drag Behind Us.[1] That is a compelling image. One of my clients dreamt she was hauling a heavy bag over her shoulder over a bleak landscape. When she looked in the bag, there was her mother!

In our house, we had a cubbyhole under the stairs packed with junk. To me the shadow is a secret closet crammed with festering body stuff, mounds of undigested memories and a kind of dark oozing slime. Buried deep beneath the mess are a few neglected treasures.[2]

Each time we reject some part of our experience it gets stuffed into the closet. That’s what happened to me as a result of John’s bullying. My murderous rage terrified me. What if I’d stabbed and killed him? The act would be unpardonable, would blight my life. I had to suppress those raging feelings—better to mutilate my own nature than commit a murder.

In that moment of dread, I made a life-binding decision: Never give in to anger again. Unlike adults, children can make powerful resolutions about their experiences, ones that last a lifetime. These decision are essentially a matter of survival: If I don’t do this, I will be rejected and forever outcast. I had no choice but to hide my wrath in the closet.

That decision, made as an eight-year-old, haunted me. My anger got sucked into a black hole and with it went other precious parts of my being. Consciously, I felt anxious and depressed while, under the surface, I was full of rage. We need the essence of anger, our inner force, to engage fully with life. Without it, we are powerless to counteract injustice, intrusions and iniquities. At its best, anger fuels our resilience and sense of self. Repressed, it seethes in smoldering irritation, erupts in aggression and drags us down into depression.

In order to become whole, we have to face the shadow and offer it space in our being. If not, the universe conspires to force us to look over our shoulder. It gives hints, a still small voice of unease. If we do not listen, it taps us on the shoulder—an insistent reminder that something needs attention. If we persist with denial, we get a whack over the head with a baseball bat. I often ask my clients: Why wait for the baseball bat?

Wherever there is light, the shadow lurks; we cannot escape its hidden power. I feared killing John in a fit of rage but I murdered a sheep accidentally on purpose. What we fear most, what we try to avoid, pursues us relentlessly.

The Family Shadow
C.G. Jung described an upstanding man who couldn’t imagine he had ever done anything wrong. His son became a thief and his daughter a prostitute. “Because the father would not take on his shadow, his share in the imperfection of human nature, his children were compelled to live out the dark side which he had ignored.”[3]

The family unconscious is dynamic; it has power and presence. All too often the negative or shadow aspect of that power alights on a particular family member. It could be the parent who erupts in anger; it might be the child who is far too shy. Whoever it is, that individual is elected to be ‘the family problem.’

That doesn’t mean the problems are imaginary: the parent does have anger issues; the child is anxious. There has to be a hook, a grain of truth for the family shadow to hitch on to. But something more is going on. In order for one part of the family to maintain its ‘goodness’, it gets rid of its ‘badness.’ That is the function of the problem person—to carry the family shit.

In our family, the shadow was obvious; it was my mother. She embodied all that was dark and disturbing, all that was intolerable and inexcusable. With so much darkness, she had to be ejected and forgotten, consigned to the closet under the stairs. In that way, she was a perfect excuse for the weakness and flaws of my father. It was so obvious: Mummy was bad and Dad was good. What could be simpler?

Gold in the Shadow
If Mummy was shadow, what about John? He had lived with Mummy, so he was also estranged. She was the heart of darkness; he occupied her penumbra of gloom. Plainly the problem child, he could hardly read, he tormented his siblings and he was always in trouble. Like Mummy, he was impossible!

The rule-breaker, the risk-taker—impulsive, bursting with enthusiasm and a kind of madcap courage—John’s tricky energy was a problem, but it was also a breath of fresh air. For our depressed and depleted family, he personified a kind of shadow-trickster energy—a dazzling, distorted, volatile reflection of our dreariness.[4]

Polar opposites, John and I were magnetically drawn together: two sides of the Libra scales seeking balance. I needed John to be wicked and wily; he needed me to be stolid and introspective. If only we could absorb the positive shadow qualities from each other, we might find equilibrium and wholeness. His spontaneity and courage would have helped me loosen up and enjoy. My restraint could have helped him create less of a mess.

There are treasures in the shadow, those attributes and aspects we need in order to become whole. We find those aspects both attractive and repellent. Can I imagine being like that other person? Can I accept they have just the qualities I need?

The shadow is not simply disgusting dirt and grime. When properly processed it is compost germinating the seeds of awareness in our psyche. Like cosmic dark matter, it overflows with potential energy, energy that engenders enthusiasm and creativity. Hidden within the darkness is what Robert Johnson calls our inner gold.[5] This is all our glorious unrealized capacity, all those experiences we need to become whole.

Projecting the Shadow
The darkest family shadow was projected onto our mother. John projected his un-integrated shadow onto me and I reciprocated. That is what we do with shadow energy: project it onto others.

Projection is powerful and devious. At its most benign, it is like a movie projector casting images onto the screen of other people. Unconscious assumptions and past experiences generate convincing pictures and expectations of others: we idolize celebrities, condemn criminals and hold strong opinions about people we don’t even know.

But what we project gets reflected back—both darkness and light. If we hate, we invite hatefulness; if we love we harvest love. Whatever we fear, whatever we try to avoid, is doubly reflected back at us. When we ignore our flaws and evil impulses, when we fail in compassion and self-awareness, our shadow projections becomes destructive, both to us and to other people.

Malevolent energy is sticky. Like thrown muck, it defiles everything in its path. The ‘bad’ child believes they are bad—so they act out of their badness. If criminals and opponents are treated as if they are inhuman, they will act from their inhumanity—and hurt us if they can. We all can sense the dark energy of a negative projection; it is yucky and strange. Even knowing the other person’s perceptions are imaginary and untrue, we still retaliate from a place of meanness. Shadow projections activate the worse aspects of our own shadow.

The shadow lurks in obscurity and we are blind to its malevolence and to its glory. To become whole, to become human, we have to turn inward and face our darkness. Looking down a deep ancient well, at only notice the clinging filth, repulsive insects and slimy mold. Gradually, as our eyes to adjust to the darkness, we sense the clear refreshing water far below. In that water is a dim reflection of our true Self.[6]

[1] Robert Bly, A Little Book on the Human Shadow. (HarperOne, 1988)

[2] Robert A. Johnson, Inner Gold: Understanding Psychological Projection (Chiron Publications, 2017)

[3] William McGuire and R.C.F. Hull, ed., C.G. Jung Speaking (London: Picador 1980), P.161.

[4] The Trickster is the archetypal energy that like the shadow upsets the balance of ego-dominated consciousness.

[5] Johnson, Inner Gold.

[6] Robert A. Johnson, Owning Your Own Shadow: Understanding the Dark Side of the Psyche (HarperSanFrancisco, 1994)