Telling my story to raise awareness of emotional abuse

Last year, I began to share my story of suffering and healing from longstanding emotional abuse by my father, including through my book, Reclaiming Christmas (available from Amazon UK here, and other Amazon links here on my website).

On Friday, i News published a feature detailing further aspects of my story.  For the first time, I talked about the fact that my father was James Cran, a former Member of Parliament in the UK for nearly twenty years.

I’m writing this blog on what would have been his eightieth birthday. Strange timing, which is making me reflect further upon the rollercoaster on which I have found myself in recent years.

I would never have wished for things to have turned out the way they have, and to be telling my story publicly. A child simply craves unconditional love and support from their parents, and I was no different. Even when I had experienced the difficult aspects of his character many times, all I continued to want was to have the good version of him involved in my life.

As I explained in my i interview, my father was a Jekyll and Hyde type character:

“I think emotional abuse is behaviour which is calculated to cause emotional harm, that is one way I would describe it...One of the toughest things about it was that he could be really kind at times – a lovely, loving parent. But other times he was the exact opposite. In some ways, it was the total uncertainty about how he was going to show up that was particularly challenging.”

My desire not to rock the boat as a child led me to strive to be perfect, because mistakes could be costly. While having an incredibly well-behaved child sounds brilliant in theory, this can be taken to extremes, and the toll on me was far higher than I understood at the time.

The article goes on to describe how the abuse didn’t stop when I grew up. I used to dread Christmas in particular, as it was an annual flashpoint. And my father’s difficult behaviour surrounding my mother’s death was destructive, seriously undermining my grieving process.

As a young adult, I developed a range of mental health problems, as well as chronic insomnia. I used to think that I was just odd and unhealthy, whereas I now understand that these health issues were a direct result of the emotional abuse that I had suffered for so long.

Even so, I kept ties with my father for many years after my mother’s death in 2014, because he was family and I loved him. This was even despite my growing awareness of the damaging nature of his behaviour towards me, and his increasing consumption of alcohol which aggravated his problematic tendencies. I only estranged from him when I could literally see no other viable way forward.

I am telling my story in this way to raise awareness about the emotional abuse of children – both what it can look like in practice, and the long-term negative consequences.

I feel a responsibility to tell my story because I am able to do so: my father died last year, and there are no other living close family members who were involved in the situation. Many people who suffer from abuse are not in this position, and are therefore unable to speak freely. I hope that, in sharing my experiences candidly, I can do my bit to ensure that emotional abuse is recognised for the dangerous and harmful act that it is.

As I said to the i in my interview: “I would often minimise it to myself and question whether there was really a problem, so I want to help people to understand that what they are going through is a problem and it’s okay to call it out.”

I am embarking on a second book which will discuss my experiences and healing journey in more detail. Please do sign up to my newsletter on my homepage if you’re interested in getting updates from me about this and about the wider work of Damsel Not In Distress. I’d love for you to join me on this journey!