Ben’s story

I thought that my childhood was idyllic, when I was a kid, and then, it wasn't until I grew up and started understanding some of my own difficulties in life, that I realized, and I uncovered, quite a lot that wasn't great at all about my family. And I suppose that the biggest thing that shed most light on it - when I was sort of involved in this sort of digging around process - was an amazingly frank discussion with my dad when we were working together on a job in London. I was really honest with him, it started with me being really honest with him, just saying that I was sort of suffering from depression, and I was just telling him what that was like, about the symptoms of it, and I said, “Look, I just want to be honest with you.” And he said, “Look, I want to be honest with you. When you were four, I came home from a meeting early and discovered your mum in bed with another man. It had been going on for a year.” And my dad told me that he beat them both up, he beat my mum up, and this bloke up, and actually physically kicked him out of the house. And from that moment on he stopped loving my mum and only stayed together for the sake of me and my sister.

Soon after that I discovered sort of healing and just was digging around, not digging around, but just remembering, started remembering lots, and one of the main things was that we lived, we basically lived, in a pretty loveless house. There was no love between my mum and dad because my dad stopped loving my mum and my mum was feeling really hurt, and really guilty, and so we grew up in a pretty loveless house. And because, you know, because of my mum and dad's upbringing, where their parents were not expressing emotion, I was never told that I was loved. And it's really funny, actually, because yesterday my mum said to me, because my mum stayed at the weekend, and when she left she said "I love you". No she didn't, she didn't, she just said - that's right we were talking on the phone - the last thing she said was "love ya". And it was so weird, it was so weird to hear my mum say it, it was beautiful, but I couldn't really receive it because it's like, you know, yeah, yeah it's nice, but it comes on top of a lot of none of that.

So that's the context really. My mum felt really guilty, so she was depressed for a lot of my childhood, so she was seeing a psychiatrist, although with huge shame because - in those days or certainly in my mum's eyes - there was sort of a stigma attached to that. So she was seeing a psychiatrist to try and deal with her depression and my dad was totally unsupportive, and just wanted her to sort herself out, and obviously carrying a lot of anger that he wasn't able to express properly because he hasn't got any friends. And the idea of emotional expression to him is just, you know - he's so frozen, my dad's so frozen. So he basically has, and still does, cart around with him a huge amount of unexpressed anger, which he keeps down with - he's got high blood pressure and he keeps it all down with beta blockers. Basically he's whacked out all day on beta blockers, they keep upping his dose and that sort of thing - so my dad, you know, people who meet him go, ‘Oh, he's quite cool.’ But you know, he's quite good at putting on a cool front, but you hang out with him, and especially around my mum, and just the anger's bubbling out of him all the time.

So that was the sort of, that was how it was. And Mum wasn't conscious of her, and didn't take responsibility for her, depression. And me and my sister - because we did things that upset her - we copped it, and we were constantly on the end of it. She used to take sessions on us basically - by screaming at us and hitting us and all that sort of thing. And so yes, and so I grew up in an environment where the love that I felt was got when I was doing what I was expected to do. Yeah? So if I was just doing what my parents expected me to do, I could pick up what scraps of love there were around to be had. And that was withdrawn as soon as I did something that didn't agree with what she wanted, and more than withdrawn. I quite often remember being chased around my house and being caught up and, you know… so I grew up being scared of my mum. That was the overriding feeling.

I wanted to say some things, and I told my mum that my overriding feeling towards her when I was, that I remember, was fear - and my sister is still scared of her, and somewhere you know I still carry that, and it’s not, it’s not totally healed, you know, it’s an ongoing process, my stuff round my mum - and she ... her reaction was, she said “Come to think of it," she said, "I was always scared of my mum."

So you know it's not... it's just how it is, it's a family thing that's passed on. I don't ... I have felt a huge amount of anger towards my parents, you know, I understand that they are only able to deal with the material that they've been given themselves. I know that it takes someone to go ‘I'm not passing this on,’ or, ‘I'm passing as little of this on as I can.’ But they weren't around, you know, they hadn't been in that environment, or they hadn't put themselves in that environment, where that sort of thing was going on. It's a generational thing, isn't it. In their generation it wasn't really happening, you know, there was the explosion in the sixties with love and all that thing. It wasn't very grounded - it was mainly drugs - and now we're at a time when we can challenge all this stuff, but yeah, that was their environment. And pertinent or relevant to all this was that I never saw my mum and dad naked in all my life. And they weren't making love hardly because there was no love between them - so there wasn't much physical, there wasn't much intimacy going on, and... it was more that it was sort of a shameful thing, you know: sex was a shameful thing.

There was the bare sort of basics of sex education in Biology, which was, you know, giggly, laughy, you know, but that's the sort of mechanics of it. I got right into pornography when I was fourteen and became the sort of school pornography dealer having come across stashes where people had obviously just chucked them out. And so I basically became sort of like a librarian, I'd just deal it out and make sure that people gave it back a few days later. And I got caught by the teacher and he confiscated them all. Pornography was actually like - I suppose basically because there's lots of stories in pornographic magazines and they're talking about people having sex with each other and exactly what happens - so yeah, that was sex education. And yeah, and there's a connection in that with my parents, in that where I kept them at home was across my bedroom floor and underneath this sort of compartment of a cupboard which creaked slightly as I pulled it up, and I used to hide them under there as a kid. I used to get home, get them out and have a look at them, but put them back, and one day, when I went to get them, they'd gone and I knew that my mum had taken them. She hadn't said anything to me, and I didn't want to say anything to her because it was too embarrassing.

When I was 17 I went on a lad's holiday - just finished A levels and we all went to Mallorca and my mum said to me, she said, “Now, be good and if you can't be good, be careful." That said it all for me, you know, the being good thing, being good means not having sex, you know.

For me the overriding energy of it all, again, was fear - it was fear driven - I was utterly consumed with fear and the fear came from a number of places. Because of my sexual education I had a sort of insecurity complex about physically not being big enough. All those blokes in the magazines and videos that I saw, all their penises were loads bigger than mine and I thought - ‘Shit! I'm deformed!’ and I'm this or that and it's like - how am I going to ‘you know‘? That was the first thing. The second thing was just I was one of the last to develop at school. A lot of my friends developed before me and had sex before me - either that or they lied. There was this sort of pressure, this real pressure, to lose my virginity. I was desperate to as well, you know. Even though I was one of the last to develop, you know.

I can't remember, I can’t remember how old I was when I first started masturbating, but 13 or 14 probably. But I was, you know, I had a huge amount of sexual energy, but I didn’t have a clue because of there not being much love in my home, certainly, between my mum and my dad, and I suppose it’s my mum and dad who are going to show me how a man and a woman relate, and that’s going to be through the love and tenderness and doing things for each other and caring for each other - well, they fucking hated each other and they were always digging at each other, so there was no example shown. And I suppose what example I got shown was, was the window cleaner that went round. These are in the stories in magazines where the window cleaner goes round, sees a woman who answers the door in a negligee and he says “Alright Darlin’ I’ve come round to clean your windows.” And she noticed that he was looking at her in a kind of a way, and so, and she said “Hey and when you’ve finished cleaning my windows why don’t you come in and give me some attention?” Do you know what I mean? So I had this… I didn’t have a clue. I laugh at it, I can laugh at it, you know, it’s funny, but I used to stand around places sort of trying to look cool because I didn’t know what to do - I really didn’t know what to do.

So there was the pressure from school, you know. My school was a pretty typical boys’ school, I suppose - a grammar school. It was all about scrabbling around for a place in the pecking order, and people would put each other down just to make themselves higher up in the pecking order, and one really quick way to put someone down was to go like that (makes V for Victory sign) which means ‘you’re a virgin.’ Yeah, so if one of your mates had had sex, and you hadn’t, then that was a way to... the argument’s finished basically, the battle’s done and dusted. So, I was desperate to lose my virginity to get up the pecking order. It was hard enough as it was because, you know, another way they’d do it was to take the piss out of my high voice, because my voice hadn’t broken. Do you know what I mean? It was - there was so much ammunition that people can throw. I really wanted to, for that reason, and I really wanted to just because I was, you know, I was a sexual animal and I was clueless.

I’m building up to it, I’m building up to it, because these are really important these fears, and you know... And another place of fear was a sort of a physical thing again. When I was a kid, my mum came at me, when I was about five or six, came at me, said “Hang on a minute, dear, we’ve just got to do this.” She grabbed my foreskin and she pulled it back. She said, “We’ve got to make sure that you can do this because…” - for hygiene reasons or whatever. But she never ever showed me how to wash myself. My dad never showed me how to wash myself and so that was it, basically. She just had to check for herself, maybe she’d heard something. And then, when I was about 11, I can remember getting out of the bath and putting my school trousers on, but not putting any pants on, and as I did the zip up, caught my willy in it - and I don’t know whether that was a contributory factor. I didn’t tell my mum and dad anything because there was never any tenderness when I did, so it wasn’t worth it. I’d never tell them anything where I was going to feel pain because they just, you know, turn… I remember saying “I’m finding this really difficult” and because of their inability to deal with their own emotion they couldn’t deal with mine and they told me not to be silly. And so I just, you know, well, I’m not going to bother then: I’ll be independent and self sufficient. But anyway, I don’t know whether it was that, or whether I’d just never done it, but actually in my memory I’d never pulled the foreskin back over the head of my penis. So, and I knew that that was what had to happen, but I, yeah, I think actually I wouldn’t, couldn’t, do it, and so a big fear - and it’s only really only in the last year that I’ve remembered this and had to deal with it - I was scared of hurting myself. So there was a combination of having not a clue what to do to attract a woman - I knew what to do, I knew the mechanics of it because I’d read endless... but I didn’t know what to do to attract a woman, make that first step, physically I was scared of getting hurt - I was also thinking I wouldn’t be good enough.

Now, being good enough was my bottom line, because that’s where love was rationed and not being good enough that was my bottom line, so performance was really important. I knew that I had to be good, and how could I be good when I was… when the tools that I had were half the size of the tools that, you know, that you needed? And so that was what led me into it - total fear. And I mean, I met various girls and had sort of relationships and I’d get off with girls at parties and, you know, I didn’t know, I just didn’t know how to relate to women really so it never lasted very long. And the girl, eventually, that I first had sex with - and I won’t say that I made love with her because it wasn’t like that - was someone who I didn’t respect, who I didn’t really like that much, but I knew that she dished it out, you know, and I knew that she liked me as well. And so I was quite a dapper dresser when I was that age, you know, growing up, and I used to have long hair and I suppose I was quite pretty and I never had - there never was a shortage of admirers - I just didn’t know what to do with them.

With her, Linda her name was - I’d really like to get in touch with her actually, just to say, look, this is what was going on for me at the time - I didn’t tell her, I didn’t tell her anything at all. I knew that she fancied me. I was 17. I can’t remember whether I’d gone to the pub with her or not. She was part of a group of friends of mine. We’d go to the pub. But I went round to her house and I remember the exact spot - I was on her sofa in her front room. And it was a fumbling, you know, sort of … oohh … it really makes me cringe to think about it. And we were, you know, we basically, you know… I can’t remember how many of our clothes we took off but I was just so desperate, I was just so desperate to put my penis inside her and then that was it: I wasn’t a virgin any more; basically was the story. (Laughs) And so we, you know, through all that fear I think I probably got half an erection, I can’t really… but enough to get it in there and then, as sexually frustrated as I was, it didn’t last for very long. And then there certainly wasn’t any, you know, much, connection. Her eyes, and I remember being quite scared of her eyes, because she was in her heart and she really looked at me, she really liked me, and she looked at me through these beautiful eyes, you know. Part of her story was wanting to feel loved herself, which is why she had sex quite freely with lots of boys, ‘cos she wanted to get that kind of reflection, and she was really looking for a loving reflection from me and I couldn’t give it because I was so scared.

And so it didn’t last for very long and I remember straight afterwards looking down to see if I was going to be mutilated or not, and what I saw really shocked me, and I felt so embarrassed, but luckily I could sort of hide myself, you know: from not, from years, I suppose, some years, of never, ever pulling my foreskin back, you can imagine it was pretty gunky. And so I was just so completely shocked and, you know, ashamed of my body and of what, and all of that, but also blimey - you know - I just realized that I’d neglected myself for… you know. So it was all pretty shocking and I was sort of… can remember putting my clothes back on, and her saying “Please will you stay for a bit?” and me saying, “I got to get back, I got to get back.”

So I went home and as I walked home, it was about half a mile to home, I sort of walked out and it was like having succeeded in an army mission or something and I ran down the road and, I remember, I ran down the road and I punched the air like I scored the winning goal in the cup final - (laughs) - to celebrate just having got over this ordeal. And having lost my virginity. Going back to school the next day, you know I was at sixth form, everybody: ah! ah! - you know.

And after that I saw her again and I felt a lot more relaxed obviously but… and I think for a week after that we had a really beautiful time together - and I felt a lot towards her, you know, just for having been part of, you know, my journey. I couldn’t put it into words then but I remember feeling that I felt a lot closer to her after that and she asked me if that was my first time and I said “No, no, no, no!” Even in all that I still couldn’t be honest and truthful with her and I just want to go and own myself with her and just, you know, I’d given her - I’d been with her in a way that isn’t truthful - and I want to do that in all my old relationships and say - “Hey this is what was going on for me at…” I mean - it might help them grow - and so I would like to do that, but obviously not enough to have done it, because I probably could find out where she lives.

So that’s the story really. And about a week after that I stopped seeing her and then very soon after that I met somebody else who I really liked and felt… yeah, it all changed after that… er, er ,yeah… I met somebody who I was with for a year and a half, I think, before we even had sex because she was 15 and I was 17 and she was quite scared. It was interesting being the other way round being with her, and she was a virgin and so I was experienced and so it felt different and so… There was someone before her because while she was away I had a bit of a time with her best mate - so that was the second time that I ever had sex - so it was just so different, and so I realized to some extent that some of the fear that I’d had was unfounded: the fear of not being big enough and all that sort of… just realizing that that it was all alright, even though that is stuff that I did carry on.

The more conscious I’ve got, I’ve realized that when I first - if I get a new girlfriend and the first time I make love with her - I’m really scared. And it’s only a year ago, I connected it. It was only then that I connected it to this first sexual experience. It was only a year ago that I realized the extent of the connection and of the extent of the fear that I had around hurting myself and around, yeah, particularly around hurting myself. But all the other fears are there as well - about not being good enough, about not being big enough, all of that, yeah. And it’s only, it’s because, I suppose, for quite… I don’t know, I think, if I look back, it’s probably been like that with every partner that I’ve had… but I’ve been able to - that first time - I’ve been able to get over it with - either just getting pissed, you know, or using drugs or whatever, or just to not fully understanding it, you know, ‘that’s just how it is the first time you make love to somebody, you’re bound to be nervous’ - you know what I mean, but I haven’t really understood the extent of the fear that’s been there. And it’s only since I started forming more conscious relationships that I’ve - where people have been actually able to understand - what am I trying to say? - in conscious relationships, where it’s not just about having sex, it’s about having connection, so in the moment of having sex and saying - ‘hang on a minute, I just need to stop here, because I’m really feeling this and I want to share it with you.’ That hasn’t been possible until the last seven years, six or seven years, when I’ve been having a more conscious relationship where actually that’s more important than anything else - is the healing and providing space for each other, you know - heal all our old stuff, so. And that doesn’t stop because you keep uncovering more and more, and going deeper and deeper, and I don’t want it to stop. It’s like, well, part of me wants it to stop, but that’s what’s beautiful about connecting with people now is sharing those spaces and being able to help each other heal.