The Acid Diaries (Christopher Gray) / quote 93 of 125
A childhood illness as root trauma
The CD played out, so it must have been the best part of an hour—then abruptly several disparate pieces of information jigsawed themselves together. Suddenly I knew that I had been very seriously ill as a young child when I was living at Windle Hey. Perhaps it was bronchitis, though I was sure I could remember Mum telling me I had nearly died of whooping cough during the war. How old would I have been then? Two? Three? Equally, I was certain that the cough which has haunted so many of my trips was the ghost of this illness; and that such physical trauma could be just as devastating, if not more so, as any purely emotional shock. Not only would I have felt that I was choking to death, I would have felt abandoned, interpreting my mother and my Gran’s inability to do anything to help me as wanton if not malign indifference. Furthermore, it seemed perfectly plausible that such pain going on for weeks on end could form a “matrix,” an original template for all my later chronic mistrust of life. I saw exactly why the coughing would have first erupted during a trip when I was trying to focus on the deep feelings underlying my break-up with Asha. The unconscious spotlit the root trauma suffusing all my feelings of abandonment and despair, and which would have to be confronted before any later distress could be drained of its irrational affective content. Not