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Dream Life of Debris

A Journey of Trauma and Healing

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This is a journey of pain, anger and forgiveness with clear love of the characters that inhabit the author. The book wrote itself as the author listened in amazed, frightened, disgusted and always cheering the heroes on. Following his mother death delivering him in an emergency caesarian section, Paul was happily fostered in a medical family in Devon UK. When aged 8 he was sent out to live with his biological father, a man he had never met. The father was lonely and needed a companion in Australia. Paul came to fulfil that role becoming a parentified child. The loss of his foster brothers and family, his friends, neighbourhood, his place in the world and his people became frozen in his heart, hidden in a pattern of psychological fragmentation. There was the part he left at home in England in a photograph on the grand piano, and the part that arrived in Australia as a ten pound pom. As a twelve-year-old Paul skips school often using made up illnesses. He loves to walk the train tracks of suburban Adelaide. One day as he's exploring with his faithful Jack Russell, hiding in the prickly bushes above a train station, he notices a body hanging in the station master's office. Later a group of men arrive and discovering the suicide, they panic. Paul hears them speaking to each other and recognises some names. He doesn't understand what he saw and heard, and runs from the scene. He buries the memory deep in his subconscious, choosing instead to dwell on dreams and stories he can write. He began to write a play using those men's names. It surprises his father that the child can write, but he takes no notice of it. A year later his father moves from Adelaide to Hobart with Paul aged 13. He was enrolled in an elite school, where an active pedophile network operated with impunity. A year later they move to Brisbane. At age 18 Paul abandons his father in Brisbane and returns to Adelaide to make a life for himself, driving a VW combi he had rebuilt, and decorated inside with pages from the Encyclopaedia Brittanica 1941 edition. As an adult, Paul personality is in pieces. He has many parts to his character. He experiences debilitating PTSD storms without knowing the cause. He becomes a playwright and actor, and uses his public persona to hide his past from himself, his family and his lover, a public prosecutor. He is married to a psychoanalytic child psychotherapist with two children, twins, all who who adore him. One of the twins is particularly clued in to Paul's disappearing acts. The other is a free spirit. His wife refuses to analyse him, as it only leads to trouble between them. One day on a weekend train trip with his lover, his memory of early traumatic events in Tasmania and Adelaide comes rushing back in a nightmare. His lover holds him, breathes him back to life, and enquires about what he saw in the dream. She senses a case and contacts the major crime unit of the Adelaide police. With the help of an investigator working for Australia's Child Abuse Royal Commission, Paul confronts the demons of his past. He relives memories of how the principal of his Tasmanian school took special care of him, loving him in a way that his distant father never had. But that love turned out to be far more sinister. Can Paul's wife and his lover work together, with the investigator to help him unravel the memories without any of the marriages or families or Paul dissolving? Can Paul reveal these memories to the investigative team in the train tunnels where he used to play? Can he expose his wounds to his wife and fix their marriage? Can his lover repair hers? Will remembering the secrets heal him or further fragment him? The novel is a form of autobiographical fiction, and demonstrates the author's own clinical and emotional experiences, placed in marriage and family stories wrapped in a crime mystery.

Weniger Details

Peter J Fox is a writer, visual artist and for a time a Playback Theatre actor and director. He was a victim of child sexual abuse by the headmaster of an elite Anglican school in Tasmania. He delivered his testimony at public hearing Case 20 of the Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse.He has worked as a clinical psychologist for over fifty years specialising in trauma and relationships. This work of autobiographical fiction draws from evidence at the hearings and grew from his experiences as a survivor-witness and as a trauma specialist. He was born in 1949 Devon, England, still in the grips of post war rationing. He was the third child of his parents, the first two having died in the previous year. His mother died birthing him. He was an orphan from birth as his father absconded. Shortly afterward he was fostered by friends of his mother, both medical practitioners. His foster mother had been orphaned during the war when aged 13. One of the few women at that time to later become a medical practitioner. His foster father, a country GP, was also a pianist, raconteur, and repertory actor. Peter slotted into the place where his foster mother had lost a child born spina bifida just before Peter's birth. He became the middle child of three boys, two from foster mother. He had little contact with his mother's family, he was dead to them believing he had killed their daughter in childbirth. This changed when as a young adult he formed a strong relationship with his maternal aunt who was the Matron of Eton College. She became one of the strongest influences in his life. At aged 8 Peter emigrated to Melbourne Australia to be the companion of his lone biological father, his foster family remaining in England, adding twins to their family four months after he left. After a year or so his father moved to Adelaide then sometime later a move to Tasmania. Then a move to Brisbane where he ultimately enrolled in Veterinary Science at the University of Queensland. This was short-lived and after a year transferred to The University of NSW in a Clinical Psychology Science degree. There he met his first wife. His first clinical job was a locum position at the School of Psychiatry, Prince Henry Hospital. Subsequently he was employed in various roles at the ACT Health Commission. Five years into that job he left to open his first private practice and by that stage had two young children. He has been in private practice ever since, specialising in trauma recovery, marriage, and family therapy. With his second wife Mary, Peter lives on a property backing on to Nightcap National Park. They love the solitude and building rain forest habitat for numerous wildlife species, some endangered. Every year they host young people through the HelpX service - singles, couples, and siblings. They come from around the world for a month or more, to learn about living in harmony with the land and with each other, about bush regeneration, growing habitat, local flora, fauna, and fungi. These teaching experiences, he says, are among the many blessings as custodians in the land of the Bundjalung nation. Late in his career Peter continues to provide a specialist couple therapy service. Most have a background of trauma. He has lived experience of these relationship patterns and is widely respected in his community and beyond as an expert in trauma and intimate relationships. He makes sense of his journey by giving back to the community.