New Labour’s mantra needs careful interpretation. “We are taking difficult decisions for the long term” - on the face of it this sounds fine. But, difficult, in New Labour speak means “we do not understand the issues” and long-term means “we won’t live to see the effects”.

So Mr Blair and New Labour are making decisions they don’t understand the implications of and with which they will not have to live. They are screwing generations to come because they are making the wrong decisions. This is only to be expected from a man and government that backed Bush’s illegal war in Iraq, lied about the logic and then tried very hard to hide the truth.

I can’t say and I won’t say is all he says today,
Another day I may come, if you ask me out to play.
But for the being time, or the time being for, I
Can only do what I do and that is not any more.
It is what I do now and will do till the day I die,
For when I stop the doing there’ll not be another try.

Pants. The world is pants. Some days you just feel pissed. I like being silly on those days. Rarely does it take long to cheer up and stop being a bore. Today was a great day from the start to the finish. I couldn’t resist the headline

I didn’t know, when I offered my friend a home, what would come of it. Her need drove that situation forward. On her journey to self discovery and ownership, I have offered strength, courage, wisdom and friendship in addition to a safe place to be that was the original deal.

I did not expect or want or need much in return. I asked only simple things: don’t lie, steal or cheat; Use your time wisely. Those things were asked more for her sake than for mine. I have been surprised daily for the last months by the success of this recipe.

Now I get my payback, unexpected and unsought as it is. I feel very proud of my friend and the vast distance she has travelled in such a short time. Her infectious energy is rubbing off on me. People are telling me I seem happier. It is true. She has reinvigorated my sense of progress and hunger for healing. I had become more than a little stuck. She has injected 100% proof joy into my life.

The London School of Economics Centre for Economic Performance has published a paper suggesting depression causes massive economic damage and that therapy available for all would pay for itself. Richard Layard writes “There is a mass of suffering which is untreated and imposes severe burdens on the economy”.

It imposes even more severe burdens on the sufferers and it is a great shame that economic argument and not human need is the driver of this thinking. I am sure Mr Layard is driven by human need and suffering and the opportunity to end this. It reveals very deep wounds to our humanity and society that he needs to dress this in economic argument to be heard.

Read The Depression Report.

During a BBC Breakfast discussion over a report on playground safety, one of the experts confirmed that “Stranger Danger” is a myth and represents no greater risk than ever before. So who is causing the damage and destruction wreaked on sexually abused children? People they know. It’s the paedophiles at home that are the risk, as I have written before.

Yet still governments including our own spend millions on stranger danger campaigns, prompted in part by cases such as the two innocent young victims of Ian Huntly. Yet even in this extremely well known case the victims were known to the killer. Most cases are quiter and more pernicious. Young girls and boys, infants and children, raped, orally abused, violated and invaded, night after night, by a man they have to sit and quietly play happy families with at breakfast in the morning.

How can this pernicious crime be faaught? Firstly by overcoming the denial of the subject inherent in the responses we see. These responses such as the misdirected campaigns of government and “False Memory Syndrome” propoganda of the mentally ill, are smokescreens hiding the truth and holding back the healing of this society wide sickness.

“… despite there being something very clearly wrong, he could find no orthopaedic reason for your symptoms.”

“… ocasionally patients like yourself come along who do not fit any classical clinical picture and although clearly something is wrong, we are unable to find out what the formal diagnosis is and all we can do as doctors is reassure you that this is not a serious orthopaedic problem.”

” … if we cannot make a diagnosis, then we cannot instigate any treatment and that really is the bottom line as far as us doctors are concerned.”

From a doctor at the RNOH Stanmore who will remain nameless as he was a very nice man given the unfortunate task of handing out official stupidity to a patient. Under the misinformation that the RNOH were trying to find out what was wrong with me and how to help I wasted more than a year of my life under their “care”. I didn’t know they were trying to “make a diagnosis” and “instigate treatment”. Given they had already admitted I was a “unique” case and “not in the textbooks” I wonder why they pretended to be looking for a diagnosis they knew was not there?

P.s any medically qualified persons who can put some of the above into our modern-rationalist medical framework and plain English language please comment.

P.p.s “… something very clearly wrong …” / ” … not a serious orthopaedic problem.” … Is it just me???

Paedophilia - as defined at Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia means the sexual dysfunction of “being sexually attracted primarily or exclusively to pre-pubescent children”. Persons with this attraction are called paedophiles. How can it be that some persons are sexually attracted to children? Anyone who has enjoyed the priveledge of spending time with young infants and children knows their vulnerabilty, openness and charm, and can only be horrified that this happens at all. We must move beyond horror to understanding. We must do this because to do otherwise is a continuation of the denial of these acts, their prevelance and the harm they cause.

A paedophile is acting under forces within their mind that are so strong as to override the natural nurturing instincs and allow them to hurt infants and children. These forces, these drives are the result of a deeply scarred and divided psyche. The paedophile was themselves almost certainly sexualised at an early age in a violent and painful manner and most probably this has caused them to suffer dissociation in response. This is not to say that all victims or dissociated persons will become abusers - indeed the opposite is true: most will not.

The dissociated parts of the whole form a web of deceit that hides the abuse and its concomitant shame, rage and horror from the conscious mind. Especially if the abuse is repeated, there will be a part of the self which is aware of and may even grow to enjoy the physical contact and acts of sex. This part of the person is removed from conscious contact with the rest of the mind. This contains the abuse within a closed world to allow normal functioning at times when the victim is not being abused. This type of splitting typically occurs with children sexualised before age 3 - 6 when the personality is being formed. Those abused later when the personality has had more chance of forming enjoy a greater chance or remaining intact and will follow a different pathology.

When the victim of these acts grows up one of three things will happen. For most they will live lives dictated by uncertaintly and fear on a level they are only dimly aware of. They may or may not form working relationships and hold down jobs. They may or may not become drug users, criminals or prostitues. They may or may not commit suicide. They will not abuse children, though if they are women, they may chose to have relationships with men who do.

The next largest group will become aware at some point that “something is wrong”. They will work on themselves to find peace, achieve understanding or remember what this distant hum of pain is hiding. They will struggle and fight the denial they have so successfully welded into themselves and that of society. They may remember the abuse and they may or may not recover to varying extents. They will not abuse children.

The third group will never become aware there is something wrong. They are so strongly dissociated they just can’t see the walls or feel them, let alone peer over or break them down. Without knowing it they are full of rage, hatred, and other posionous emotions. There is still a part of them that is a sexualised child and that part may find children sexy. That part may in certain circumstances wrench control from the rest of the person, or may be in total conrol, and act out the horrors inflicted on it. That part of the person does not know it is wrong, or does not hear the screams of other parts of the person which do. They represent a danger to children.

Some abusers might not fit this pattern. Some may come from non dissociative, non abusive pasts. But if such information is gathered from perpetrators there is no way of knowing its accuracy. They may not know, may still be in denial, not only of the hurt they have caused, but of the harm done to them. Broken people break people. Like the victims of abuse, the abusers are not to be blamed if we want to solve the problem. The patterns have to be broken yet at the moment we are acting out a usual human herd tendancy that will produce no good results. This tendancy is to cast out that which we find distasteful.

By stigmatising and publicly hanging out to dry the occassional abuser through the criminal system, by waging “stranger danger” campaigns and the like we are ignoring the truth of the matter. Most children who are sexually abused will be abused by otherwise loving members of their own family. People who are themselves victims. By turning pedophillia into the new witchcraft and casting out our demons we ignore the truth and endanger children of future generations.