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The Black Hole
I wandered the streets of London existing within a painful and divisive reality.
The adopted daughter of a prestigious family, escaped Jews from Nazi Germany, I had been educated by nannies and went to a posh school. But in reality, I was a distraught child lost in a maze of inner pain.
I had once been a Shirley Temple look alike with blonde curls. Mummy and daddy loved the child but rejected the troubled teenager, a cuckoo in a robin’s nest, a girl who smiled to be accepted but wanted to die.
My inner state was messy. I walked the edge of a big black hole, ready to slip in it from one minute to the next. As a child a voice had emerged from its darkness, a menacing whisper, as an adult it became a terrified scream.
I was kicked out of the house at sixteen. My disturbed behavior was too much to bear for my already wounded yet incapable parents.
I hitchhiked Europe covering up a black inner hole with a flower child demeanor to make up for the inner horror.
Something was wrong with me, I knew that, very wrong. But I was on the hippy trail and travelled to India “to discover myself” I spent time with a Guru. But the black hole never went away.
No matter how much I tried I felt as if my life hung by a thread with continual thoughts of suicide.
I met an Italian on a Roman beach and fell in love. We married.
He died in a scuba diving accident four years later. I lived for my son.
He was the only reason I could survive as a young mother.
The fear of total psychological imbalance and a sense of actually being IN the black hole…was threatening my life every day… like a Sword of Damocles.
Years later, I had moved to Tuscany where I met an amazing woman in the local health food shop. She spoke Italian with a German accent. I was nervous that day for the usual reasons. A bill had come, I had argued with my son, I felt unwell. She gently enquired whether I had heard of Family Constellation Therapy. “ What!” I screamed. “I have been to India; I do not need Family Constellation therapy ” I was furious that she should dare to imply.
I did not know what was going on in my life.
Something had moved within though.
I could not identify it then…yet.
I was on the edge of a breakthrough.
I kept bumping into Christine in the Tuscan village.
She was friendly, we had coffee together and chatted.
I decided to do a first session with her.
I had learned to trust her.
I liked her.
She appeared to work on what had caused all that inner oblivion.
We created my family ambiance.
We discovered the absent mother and father.
I found myself in a deadly circle of nothingness, standing on the edge of it with my son, both of us close to death.
So, who was my genetic mother, what had happened to her?
I later discovered that my birth mother was called Pamela.
She had given me away against her will at the end of World War II.
After the therapy sessions one thing led to another.
I discovered I had four siblings.
I discovered that my mother loved me and had never wanted to separate from me after three months of breastfeeding.
How?
Well, my half-brother Mark who is a writer and an opera singer was so overwhelmed when I finally had the courage to contact him, that he wrote an article for The Jewish Chronicle in the UK, recounting my story but also my mother’s and his.
In his article he said that he and his siblings had always known about me that Pam, my mother, had never forgotten me and all her life regretted losing me.
The article is called
As a result I had experienced with Christine
It opened a doorway
that guided me to understanding,
cleared up inner confusion and gave me back
the strength and self-love I had lost.
I was no longer desperate.
I was no longer confused.
I no longer felt my life was in consistent danger or experienced that sense of panic and loss within my heart and soul.
I was no longer negotiating a divisive reality.
