Former professor, university president and licensed psychologist Neal King, PhD recently published “Trauma Is a Thief,” his candid new memoir that seeks to make sense of the damaging abuse he suffered as a child.
King explores the pieces of his life using all available evidence to try to comprehend the hidden sexual abuse within his family. In seeking to understand, he approaches it like a detective to gain a larger picture of the generational emotional programming at work. Hi story contains many insights into abusers, the effects of abuse, and survivor’s guilt.
“Whatever its form or context, trauma is invariably a thief,” he writes. “It steals something essential from you that you can never fully recover.”
Misery
King writes that it’s strange to realize that as a young man his father Roy belonged to the last generation of Irish men to still be seen as inferior, “a line of angry Irish men with chips on their shoulders about life not having been fair to them.”That fact made even more poignant in light of history. “It’s of course a huge leap from the ancient and hallowed kings of the west of Ireland, the ancestral line of legend of the King family,” he writes.
As a boy, his father had to “shamefully scrounge along the railroad tracks for bits of coal to help keep the family warm, and of there often being not enough for the family to eat.”
But his mother’s family, of English extraction, did not have to endure such indignities during the Great Depression, despite also being uneducated and working class. While his mother was not abusive, she had no idea what was going on and was utterly unable to protect her children.
It is worth recalling that purely due to geography, Ireland was the only European country to be completely enslaved. There seems to be an inverse definition of manhood operating in families like the author’s. Predatory males see manhood as offering them the prerogative to “do as they will,” immaturely catering to their most base instincts, the exact opposite of traditional manhood (code of chivalry) whose goal is to support and protect one’s family.
This book pulls no punches. It documents the predator’s methods in full detail, which may be too graphic for some readers.
King writes, “I have knowledge at this writing of male childhood sexual abuse having afflicted three of the brothers’ families, within the family, in my generation — which leads me to suspect strongly that there is a much larger story to be told than I have the information to tell here. My father, as far as I know, was the only brother to have perpetrated sexual abuse.”
The first time his father sexually abused him was when King was 12 years old. It happened in his father’s cabin on-board his Naval flagship where Roy was division commander.
“His face was grotesque, distorted by lust; I had never seen such an expression,” King observes. Immediately afterward, King recalls they went to lunch in the officer’s wardroom. “Looking back, I am stunned at his shamelessness and ability to compartmentalize.”
This event marked the beginning of a decade of absolute misery for young Neale King.
Just as the family hierarchy opened the door to horrific abuse, King discovered that Church hierarchy was no different. As a teen, he attended a Catholic seminary. While most monks and priests were honorable men, he was surprised that he alone could see through the motives of a teaching monk who maintained a communal house of young seminarians. More recently, King’s instincts were confirmed when the monk’s name was prominent among the clergy accused of being molesters in the lawsuits against the Catholic Church.
Healing
It may be counter-intuitive, but serving as a conscientious objector in conjunction with the Vietnam War was a healing experience for the author. King served as an English teacher in Laos during the war. He was in Cambodia when Nixon and Kissinger decided to attack it in 1970, and witnessed the tragedy of a country transformed overnight from a fun-loving one into a war-torn one.
About his time in Southeast Asia, King was able to protect several innocent young men from an American predator named Roy, like his father. He remembers being “warmly embraced by a people who were loving, kind, compassionate, and generous. Both were deeply healing — in ways I didn’t fully understand then that I sorely needed.”
Notably, one of the author’s students gifted him a hand-carved animal bone “Buddha…to protect me in my travels with a handmade border and gold chain… I still wear and treasure this gift today.”
Like Neal King’s first book “Speaking Our Truth: Voices of Courage and Healing for Male Survivors of Childhood Sexual Abuse” (1995), “Trauma Is a Thief” is also a book to heal a broken world.
‘Trauma Is a Thief’ by Neal King, $21.95.
www.halopublishing.com
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