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During the filming of ‘Abuse’ I was overwhelmed by Phillip Hawkins’ story.
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For weeks I agonized over the footage.
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RTalks live from spontaneity and authenticity.
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So, I concluded to release it in full and in two parts
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but introduce it here with this warning:
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This video contains disturbing descriptions of child abuse and violence against and amongst parents,
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psychological and physical.
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If you are a recovering victim or abuser, or if you feel unstable,
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it is advisable to watch this video in the presence of a trusted person or to skip the explicit passages.
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They are highlighted in the description below the video and on our website.
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Phillip’s openness is a most treasurable gift to us all.
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It is inspiring and it contains valuable suggestions for victims and abusers alike.
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Not least, it alerts all of us not to turn a blind eye.
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I hope that by us talking about this sensitive subject
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we will inspire people with the hope that healing can happen.
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We don't need to speak about how that is done. It's enough that you and I are vulnerable and open.
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So Philip, I'd like to first introduce you a little bit to my audience.
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All his life Philip has been in a role as a carer of sorts. A mentor, a tutor, a support worker, a lecturer, a teacher.
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He has done so in psychiatric words, in prisons, in the police force, in town councils and so on.
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Besides training other career carers, other people who care and do social work,
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such skills as aggression-management or assertiveness, his clients were people with autism, learning disabilities, addictions and other complex needs.
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In a maximum security prison he delivered Reiki training also to high risk inmates.
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He has found time also to write 17 books and is (co-)founder of the women's community support group 'Sisters of Support'.
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Hello Philip.
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Good morning, how are you? And thank you so much for that wonderful introduction.
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I sat here thinking, is that me?
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Have I done all of those things?
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Well, wait until our visitors go and look at the biography in the description of the video and they will be amazed.
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You have achieved a lot of things and been very active but I want to zero in on 'Sisters of Support'.
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How dare you to found a community support group? You're a man, you're a sister. Tell us briefly how that came about.
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Very simple. I've got two friends, two lady friends and the one thing that we shared is that we all have mental health issues.
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Myself included. And during the conversation with both of them separately ...
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I very quickly realized that there was a need for a group to support
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women with mental health issues, a safe environment where they could come together
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and connect and share their thoughts, their fears, their beliefs. And when my two friends pointed out that that did not exist,
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I thought, well, I'm going to make it exist. I'm going to make it a reality.
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So I contacted both of them. I said, it now exists. You call it what you want.
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I will fund you initially to get up and running. You get the facilities organized. I will give you some money to do that.
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I will then step back and allow you to do whatever. That group is now established, they meet on a regular basis.
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I offered to be one of their speakers and I was politely told 'no'.
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(laughter)
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You said something very important: to open a space, a safe space.
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I think it's all right for a man to open a safe space for women.
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But like that refusal is also indicative that very often we need to be amongst ourselves.
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A long time ago in the 90s, I had a friend, an English friend in the UK
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and he worked also in prison. He has passed away in the meantime.
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God bless him, rest in peace.
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Anthony Artus was his name. Did you ever come across him? He did work in prisons.
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No, I didn't. I have to be honest, the prison I worked in was a maximum security prison that is not very far away from where I live.
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Because I was teaching in the community, I got the opportunity to go into the prison and deliver Reiki as a
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personal development technique if you want. Or a way of trying to find that better understanding of yourself.
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Anthony's observation was that - and more importantly, the officials in the prisons -
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they noticed that with the Reiki work in the prison, violence decreased, substance abuse decreased, and re-socialization
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was more smoothly for a lot of prisoners. I'm sure you found similar results in your work.
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Very much so. One of the ... memories that sticks in my mind is that after one of my classes,
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an inmate, prisoner, whatever terminology you want to use came up to me.
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And he said, look, I don't understand what you do. I don't understand the thought process behind it.
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I don't understand how you can simply stand next to a person and either hold their hand or
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simply put your hand on their shoulder and talk to them. And he said, it's obvious that something has happened,
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but I can't see anything happening. But he said, you did it to me and I've been in this institution for 12 years.
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And ... The night after your class that I attended
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was the first time in 12 years that I have had a good sound, solid night sleep.
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So he said, I know something happened.
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I don't understand what happened and my reply to that was, well, you don't need to understand.
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All you need to do is embrace the effect that that had on your life.
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And accept that things can change even if you don't understand the change process.
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Yes. And often it's very empowering to mirror back to the people in such a situation,
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it is YOU who's been doing the good sleeping during the night. It's your own achievement. It's empowering the people.
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So, every time somebody says to me, okay, 'abuse', where do we begin?
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My answer is always the same. We begin in childhood, because that's where it starts.
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Not just for the victim, but for the abuser as well.
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That's where the seeds are sown. That's where the foundation is laid.
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The abuse that I experienced, that I witnessed ...
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that had such a profound effect on me
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that for certainly a large part of my life, I was in fear
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of repeating all of those same patterns in my own life.
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And then I came to a point where I realized that unless I made changes,
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all I was going to do was just repeat everything that had happened to me.
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Because a lot of abuse is traditional. It is passed on from one generation to another.
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You know that fear, you just mentioned, which I all too well know myself ...
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When you spoke, it occurred to me that - because you also said that for the abuser, for the offender, it started in childhood too.
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When you described just now, it resonated to me that there is a degree of ...
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not agreeing with the offender, but a degree of empathy for the biography of the offender in that process.
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Absolutely.
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My mother was abused by both of her parents.
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So that was the starting point. She was abused by both her father and the mother.
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Now, the abuse that she went through was far worse than anything that I had to suffer. But it's like a ripple effect.
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It has a knock on effect.
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You can rationalize it, you can intellectualize it, you can sit down and discuss it in a safe environment.
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But when you are in that moment where you see violence that is beyond any kind of human comprehension,
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it affects you at such a deep level. It becomes almost cellular.
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And you then carry that throughout your life. I still have it with me ... today.
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The very fact that you and I are sat here at this moment, discussing this topic,
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proves to me beyond any shadow of a doubt that you can survive it.
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But more than night you can learn from it. And you can get to the point where you say,
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I've got a choice. I can either allow this to destroy me
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or I can allow it to empower me. To make a change. To help people that have gone through the same situation,
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I can become that light at the end of the dark tunnel.
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I can't change people's lives. People come up to me and say:
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"Phillip, thank you so much. You changed my life. You transformed my life."
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My answer is always the same: "No, I didn't."
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I don't live your life. You do.
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So all I've done is given you a thought, a word, an experience that worked for me and you've taken it
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and you've run with it and you've used it.
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And you're living a life where you express that vulnerability and you're standing up to your own biography,
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you're accepting your own biography, you're not in denial of it. And you have - and I'd like to think that's true for me too - embraced it to a degree.
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Yes.
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In my term and in my mindset, the word of reconciliation and forgiving is not far away.
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But that's not necessarily the language or the process I'm addressing here in this video.
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But the experience to have gone through traumatic experiences,
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then come to a juncture like you described where you're making a conscious choice, do I let this burden,
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which was put on my shoulders, destroy me or am I going to learn to cope with it and even better, to eventually to let it go?
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I'd like to be a little less abstract and talk about concrete examples.
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So ...
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...
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because you mentioned to me that you had experienced directly abuse
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and it resonated with me ...
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My abuse was not so much ... I wasn't beaten, I wasn't sexually abused, but I witnessed this as a child.
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So, I had a ... my papa wasn't my biological father, so it doesn't matter, but it is my papa as a child and I loved him and I still do
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and my mummy, who physically, biologically was actually my grandmother. So these are the people I grew up with.
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And papa was a drunk ... a drunkard.
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So each time when he came home drunk, there was physical violence against my mother.
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Now I was a little boy in bed sleeping, but when he came home and the beating started, of course I would wake up.
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Right? This is a very painful situation for me as a little boy,
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because I was suffering, what do I do now? I had fear. I was ... Shame was there.
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I didn't know what to do. Helplessness. And there were moments where I mustered all my courage and got up
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and I basically stood in front of mummy and said, please stop daddy.
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I don't want you to beat mummy. Please be kind with each other.
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She would pick me up, put me back to bed, tuck me in, pacify me with kind words
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and she would go back and this time she would go to the guest room at the very end of the apartment
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in order for me not to hear the noise. And of course - this is another taboo -
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then the physical violence ended also with her surrendering to certain sexual activities.
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It was an act of survival for her to do sexually what she had to do.
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And of course, the child, the boy, even if he didn't see it physically on the spot, he knew precisely what was going on.
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So this is the abuse which had a very profound effect on me, a lifelong effect on me,
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a sensitivity when it comes to injustice, when it comes to transgression,
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of violent, physically violent or sexual abuse manipulative, to this very point, to this point in life for me today.
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And to some degree, even my reconciliation work I'm doing for the Reiki community,
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the root of this goes back to these kind of childhood experiences.
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Now I've spoken about my experience and no doubt you have seen much worse biographies.
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And I know that you yourself have probably had experienced worst things than I had.
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So would you tell me a little bit, would you tell us a little bit about how your youth was, how you experienced abuse?
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No problem at all. If I could just, if you like, set the scene, there's to the level of violence
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that I experienced and the level of violence that I'm talking about.
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When you talk to people about violence, they usually ... their experience is
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punching and slapping and that kind of thing or the sexual violence if someone imposes themselves on another person,
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that is nothing like the level of violence that I experienced.
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When my mother ... As I already said, my mother was abused by both of her parents, physically, mentally, emotionally.
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When my mother was in the late teens, early 20s, she was babysitting one of my cousins.
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He was being a pain in the back side. He was being a nuisance. He was five years old.
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Yeah? Now because of my mother's mental health
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- she had bipolar, manic depression, she also had a violent personality disorder -
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she could go from one to a hundred in a split second on the rage scale where she lost control completely.
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And this day, my cousin was being an absolute nuisance. I was told that he picked something up, he threw it up my mother.
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He then - bare in mind: five years old - he then crawled under the kitchen table to get out of the way.
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But by this time, my mother had lost complete control.
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She reached under the table, grabbed him by his hair,
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dragged him out, picked up a carving knife that was on the kitchen table
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and cut his throat.
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Luckily, he did not die because there were members of her family that were present,
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were able to overpower her and take the knife off her.
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Later in life, I was made to stand and watch
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whilst I held my sister's hand who was four years younger than me - bear in mind: I was probably only seven or eight myself.
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I was made to stand as my mother went to do the same thing with my older brother.
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I was forced to stand there and watch that to teach us a lesson:
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this is what happens when you do something wrong!
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That is over 65 years ago.
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If I sit quietly, I can still hear the both of them screaming.
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My brother for his life.
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And my mother because she is completely lost and out of control.
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That's the level of violence that I have witnessed.
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I have a memory of when I was four or five years old myself.
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My mother had been out one night. She was addicted to drugs,
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she was also an alc... not an alcoholic, but she had a very strong dependency on alcohol.
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And because of her violent nature, she was continuously getting into fights and all sorts.
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She came in one night, my grandmother was babysitting. My mother walked through the door.
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As was the fashion in them days, she had like a tie-belt coat, a trench coat type of thing.
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And it was literally covered in blood from chest height down to the hem. Completely.
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When she pulled her hands out of her pockets, both of her wrists and her arms were cut to ribbons,
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because she put windows out with her fists.
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That's the level of violence. Now, when you go through that as a child,
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you are not fearful of not getting fed at meal-time. You are not fearful of not getting a present for your birthday.
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You are fearful of your own life, that it can be ended in a split second.
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That is the fear that I lived with throughout my childhood and into my teens.
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That was the main cause of me trying to murder my abuser, my own mother, when I was 18 years old.
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And I came frighteningly close.
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So close, because I was using manual strangulation.
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Any psychologist will tell you that that act is a very hateful, vengeful way of inflicting pain on somebody.
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I was so close to her, I could actually see the light going out of her eyes.
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My own vision turned blood red.
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People say, Oh, I saw red. When you are so intense, when the emotion is so powerful,
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it can affect your vision to such an extent, you begin to physically see red.
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I don't know what saved it. What I do know that whatever it was saved her,
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from dying at that moment, it saved me from probably either a life in prison
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or a life in the psychiatric hospital for the mentally insane.
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That's the level of abuse, the fear that I experienced.
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It's ... shocking.
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You know, in these conversations normally, there's a light amusement, a little video, we are philosophizing.
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Of course, you and I are going to an entirely different level.
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And I'm glad we do because all too often...
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It's so easy to hold hands and watch the sunset and don't we all love each other and be in that stage.
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But I sometimes feel that this is sometimes pregnant with denial
0:26:38.160,0:26:51.190
and not having spoken the truth. And I severely believe that particularly in a conscious reconciliation process, the ...
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the terror and the horror of such situations needs to be ...
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- in a sane mind or in a healthy environment - it needs to be looked at.
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It needs to be acknowledged that it happened. And in that context, I think what you just said,
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as painful as it is to listen to you - and I'm sure that every viewer is empathizing with that boy you were then -
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as important it is to not look away, to not blink.
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...
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The generations, you know, your mother having experienced violence, then being violent with you and your siblings,
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and you being at the verge of entering ... of continuing this behavior pattern,
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that's so ... That's why I think it is so important to look at these things and ...
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try and heal them or at least cope with them in a non-damaging way.
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As I said in my introduction, this has to do with generations
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of our children and their children, but also going back to our ancestors,
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because the mother of your mother may have experienced the same thing.
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I spoke at the beginning about having been adopted in Switzerland,
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in an other environment and my father was an alcoholic.
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Unbeknownst to me, my biological father had four other children in Italy.
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As a grown man, I was end 30s, I discovered them for the first time.
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It was very interesting to speak to my siblings, three girls and one boy. The youngest is a boy,
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the eldest are three girls. And our common biological father was also a violent person.
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And one thing I have in common with my younger half brother is that both of us experienced violence
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and being so incompetent, impotent, is the more precise word. Completely and utterly impotent as a young boy
0:29:38.440,0:29:44.030
wanting to protect, in his case the older sisters and his mother,
0:29:44.150,0:29:50.450
and in my case my grandmother and not being able to and coming to the point
0:29:50.640,0:29:59.800
- the first thing my half brother when I met him the first time, within 15 minutes, he told me he left home and
0:30:00.180,0:30:06.030
when he got back home as a grown man and he was in the army at that moment,
0:30:06.540,0:30:10.200
his father came home and he was visiting his mother,
0:30:10.790,0:30:15.920
he knew that if he, the father raises his hand against the mother,
0:30:16.230,0:30:18.410
he's going to kill him.
0:30:18.550,0:30:20.600
It wasn't a figure of speech.
0:30:20.650,0:30:21.540
No.
0:30:22.510,0:30:23.590
Like you.
0:30:24.210,0:30:32.110
It's so close to the question of one's own survival.
0:30:35.950,0:30:41.120
You didn't do what you did for much other reason,
0:30:41.120,0:30:46.520
then your own ... fighting for your own survival. Now that doesn't justify violence
0:30:46.670,0:30:51.070
and it certainly doesn't justify killing another person. Far from it.
0:30:52.420,0:30:58.680
Yet, these are the kind of dynamics most of us have one way or the other experienced.
0:30:58.680,0:31:05.850
I think men in particular are very close to that physical violence,
0:31:06.880,0:31:11.510
which is not far away from physically killing another person.
0:31:12.100,0:31:16.100
Would you agree with what that just said with your experiences?
0:31:17.300,0:31:18.470
Absolutely.
0:31:19.000,0:31:24.310
One of the things that you have said that I really do feel very passionate about is that
0:31:24.310,0:31:29.900
the child does not have the voice to question.
0:31:29.910,0:31:39.410
The child does not have the power to challenge what is happening.
0:31:39.540,0:31:47.950
So, the only option left to that child is to simply accept it but in that acceptance,
0:31:47.950,0:32:00.970
the child takes on all sorts of guilt and childish misconceptions about right-wrong,
0:32:01.030,0:32:08.380
what they should have done as a child. But of course, we know that the child can't do anything.
0:32:08.560,0:32:19.560
The child is a victim. But one of the things that I try to get across to my students
0:32:19.770,0:32:27.560
is that - and a lot of people find this very difficult to accept until I explain it
0:32:27.660,0:32:34.230
when I say, that the abuse is not personal.
0:32:34.630,0:32:38.920
Now people say, well, it's very personal to me. Yeah, it is!
0:32:39.070,0:32:44.990
The abuse that happened to me was very personal on a very personal level.
0:32:45.000,0:32:51.580
But the abuse that happened was not because of me, me being Phillip.
0:32:52.150,0:33:01.730
You could have taken me out of the equation and put a total different person into that position
0:33:02.020,0:33:06.400
and the abuse would have been exactly the same.
0:33:07.540,0:33:18.730
The abuse is personal to the victim, but it's not personal to the abuser because it's a part of who they are.
0:33:19.150,0:33:20.310
They ...
0:33:20.990,0:33:26.350
Abusers are not born. We would like to think that
0:33:26.780,0:33:36.990
because that helps us try to get our brain around what is a very painful, a very complex situation
0:33:36.990,0:33:41.390
that we are faced with, that abuse happens all the time.
0:33:42.050,0:33:52.030
I feel very, very strongly that the people that promote this abuse
0:33:53.090,0:33:58.600
are not the abusers themselves, but the people that do nothing.
0:33:59.260,0:34:03.530
The people that are aware that the abuse is happening.
0:34:04.520,0:34:09.180
My family knew how dangerous my mother was.
0:34:10.580,0:34:16.420
But they never got involved. They never interfered.
0:34:16.690,0:34:22.050
I never saw social worker. I never saw a police officer coming.
0:34:22.170,0:34:27.830
I never saw neighbors coming to see how we were
0:34:28.250,0:34:32.230
because people did not want to get involved.
0:34:32.390,0:34:34.270
They knew it was happening.
0:34:34.660,0:34:39.090
But it was easier for them, for their survival
0:34:39.510,0:34:45.050
to turn away and pretend that they couldn't see it.
0:34:47.760,0:34:54.630
That's exactly what went through my mind when you described the child's position so correctly.
0:34:55.380,0:35:04.650
The child often cannot do anything. Yes, we can educate our children to the point that we say,
0:35:05.000,0:35:09.560
go and ask for help, speak to neighbors, speak to aunties, speak to your godfather.
0:35:10.000,0:35:20.580
And of course in abusive and - what's the word I'm looking for - dysfunctional families, of course that doesn't happen.
0:35:20.580,0:35:28.710
The opposite happens that the environment is suppressing the children and is making them addicted and fearful
0:35:28.750,0:35:32.930
and not see the possibility that they could go.
0:35:33.010,0:35:41.700
However, when you spoke it went through my mind and I'm glad you said this at the end that we, outside of the families,
0:35:41.810,0:35:49.830
we can be more aware. And yes we do hear when the neighbor is screaming and yelling.
0:35:50.650,0:35:57.530
We all do it occasionally, but that's one thing. But when it happens regularly, when there is violence,
0:35:57.640,0:36:07.400
let's not shy away of kindly and politely interfering and asking questions.
0:36:08.020,0:36:09.940
Could I give you an example?
0:36:10.260,0:36:11.260
Please.
0:36:12.480,0:36:21.800
As I've said, my mother was abused ... horribly by my grandmother and my grandfather.
0:36:22.700,0:36:32.610
My grandfather had a brain injury when he was three years old. The injury caused severe brain damage.
0:36:33.010,0:36:41.390
The doctors that attended ... It was actually playing out in the street. Three years old, playing out in a village street.
0:36:41.720,0:36:44.990
He fell under the wheel of a horse and cart
0:36:45.360,0:36:55.410
and it split his head from the crown all the way down all the his left brow damaging the frontal cortex of his brain.
0:36:55.940,0:37:05.040
The doctor said, prepare for the funeral because a child with such damage cannot survive.
0:37:05.080,0:37:17.060
If it does, it will be a cabbage. It didn't die. It wasn't a cabbage but it grew up to be an extremely, extremely violent, evil man.
0:37:17.470,0:37:23.510
He beat men, women and children with equal ferocity.
0:37:24.290,0:37:30.320
My mother told me that he used to beat his own mother to such an extent
0:37:30.610,0:37:40.620
that she would have to sit with leeches on her face to draw off the blood just so that she could open her eyes to see.
0:37:41.480,0:37:51.750
One of my grandfather's favorite tricks would be that my grandmother, bless her, was five feet tall.
0:37:52.330,0:37:53.630
Tiny little lady.
0:37:54.250,0:37:59.500
My grandfather was a big strapping man. Six foot odd.
0:37:59.890,0:38:03.340
Pitman. Very powerful man.
0:38:04.850,0:38:13.230
My grandmother's hair was right way down ... nearly down to her knees.
0:38:13.750,0:38:21.530
What he used to do when the mood took him was that he would rap his hand in her hair.
0:38:22.460,0:38:26.360
Then he would drag her up and down the street,
0:38:27.110,0:38:30.390
stopping outside of neighbours' doors
0:38:30.760,0:38:37.800
and punching my grandmother till her face was just a complete mess.
0:38:38.330,0:38:45.060
He would stand and dare anybody to come out and stop him.
0:38:46.420,0:38:55.720
That's the kind of thing that my mother grew up witnessing on a regular basis.
0:38:55.770,0:39:03.150
Is it any wonder that she was as damaged the way that she was?
0:39:05.510,0:39:14.310
It's a very valid question and one could now say, well, this is many generations back.
0:39:16.030,0:39:21.630
Yeah, one could say that. But that's also not being honest.
0:39:21.630,0:39:30.950
That's also not looking at the here and now, because if we're looking at the violence which still is today, and
0:39:31.170,0:39:32.560
...
0:39:32.840,0:39:39.460
I'm going to come to a close now and we will continue talking, Philip.
0:39:40.330,0:39:45.700
There's going to be two sequels of this RTalk. OK?
0:39:45.900,0:39:46.970
(garbled)
0:39:46.970,0:39:52.710
I'm going to close here for the moment where I'm saying:
0:39:53.940,0:40:00.180
This is where we are in our conversation looking at these horrible things.
0:40:00.400,0:40:04.370
Basically there's two summaries, two conclusions.
0:40:04.370,0:40:14.110
One: let's not be naïve and close our eyes to the violence and abuse which is around us right now today.
0:40:14.710,0:40:22.440
Two: you and I spoke about this in such transparency and openness because
0:40:22.910,0:40:31.660
- I take the liberty of saying - that we have liberated ourselves from the ill feelings, the hatred towards our parents,
0:40:31.740,0:40:39.950
towards our environment. We've undergone a degree of healing which allows us to have this conversation.
0:40:39.960,0:40:50.860
Hopefully this observation should inspire people not only can you and should you interfere, there's also hope that healing can happen.
0:40:51.510,0:40:54.640
Absolutely, I've survived
0:40:56.350,0:40:59.420
because I accepted the past.
0:40:59.720,0:41:07.030
I accepted its effect on me. I accepted the consequences of my actions.
0:41:07.730,0:41:17.350
And I accepted the things that I did. That acceptance is part of the healing process.
0:41:17.350,0:41:18.060
Yeah.
0:41:19.380,0:41:23.280
Once I did that I was no longer a victim.
Arno Greter, Switzerland, 
