Reliving the past can be a horrible experience, but sometimes we have to go through it to put things to rest, or to enable someone else to do that. I have expierenced this again recently following a contact through friends reunited.
My first job was in a home for teenage girls in Gravesend, Kent. It was not a good place to be - at all. They had terrible ways to "deal with the girls behaviour". I left several years before the place was closed down, and spent most of that time trying to find a new job with no qualifications and no other experience. In the end I re-trained as a secretary and tried to put the horrors behind me.
I put the house down as a "workplace" on friends reunited years ago, in the hope that one of the girls would get back to me and confirm that at least some of them had come out of it all intact.
At last someone did. Her name is Teresa and she has set up a website for survivors of abuse - www.no2abuse.com She is writing a book about her experiences there and wanted to know some of the story from a staff's viewpoint. Recording and recalling some of that stuff has been powerful and scary.
She has spent years researching what really went on there, most of which I had no idea about. I would love to see the files she has got hold of. Apparently the book is coming out sometime in the new year. I'll keep you posted.
