Beyond Belief: Abused by His Priest, Betrayed by His Church, the Story of the Boy Who Sued the Pope by Colm O'Gorman

Author:Colm O'Gorman
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780340925287
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
Published: 2011-04-01T13:00:00+00:00

15

Suing the Pope

After Dad died I was left reeling by the events of the previous twelve months. I’d broken my silence, dared to speak the unspeakable and begun gearing up for the battle of my life: I’d found my father, only for him to be snatched from me less than ten months later. I was a wreck and functioning on autopilot from one day to the next. I couldn’t allow myself to feel the impact of what had happened; if I did, I might never escape a place full of tears. And so I reverted to doing rather than feeling.

I was now back at home in London. I decided that a positive response to everything that had happened was to become a therapist. A more considered and reasonable response would have been to go into therapy, but not for me.

I needed to prove to myself that I was not broken. A part of me was terrified that I was, and that I would never be able to deal with it. One way to prove it was to become the fixer. Better that than the one needing to be fixed.

My training lasted from January 1996 to June 1998. I was lucky enough that the people who trained me, the extraordinary husband and wife team of Anne Geraghty and Martin Gerish, were tough, and determined that any trainee of theirs would undergo the personal therapy necessary to work professionally.

It was a really difficult and demanding time. I had to fall apart and slowly rebuild myself with my newly informed sense of who I was and of the past I had worked so hard to forget.

I’d been running from it for so long. Each time I escaped one dark event or place I had to run forward as if it had never happened. I never spoke of it or consciously thought about it again. But I buried all those experiences inside myself as if they had never happened, and there they sat in isolation. I never allowed myself the compassion to look at each incident honestly and objectively, to know that the boy I was could not have prevented those men in the village from hurting me, or that the teenage neighbour, himself a victim of the same exploitation, was nonetheless responsible for his actions. I never let myself acknowledge how powerless I was, or see the power of the priest and the vulnerability of the boy he abused. I never allowed myself to feel my sorrow at how I had been failed by those who loved me and were unable to protect me.

And beneath it all was a well of shame so deep I couldn’t even allow myself to look at its surface for fear of drowning. None of this was intellectual, none of it conscious, it all lived below the neck, in my body. I didn’t allow myself to feel, feelings were too dangerous.

Intellectually, I knew I wasn’t to blame for the things I was powerless to prevent. At least I knew it in an impersonal kind of way.

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