How did Phoenix's self-healing journey begin? In this article, Phoenix and Aria discuss some of the ways in which Phoenix (pictured above, as a child) helped himself to heal from childhood sexual-abuse.

This article is a transcript of a recorded conversation between Aria and Phoenix. If you would prefer to listen to the audio-recording on which this transcript is based, you can download a zip file containing the original audio file by clicking here. The transcript below is lightly edited for legibility, and to add new information.

ARIA: During our friendship, we’ve talked a lot together about the remembering process. I think it would be interesting for others to hear about your healing-process. My first question is: What made you want to begin remembering?

PHOENIX: Before I went through the process of examining what happened to me as a kid, I was what the medical community might call depressed. I now know that 'depression' is a self-containment of all the anger that should be expressed towards those who abused us. Because we are taught, as children, to repress this anger, our self-containment process becomes habitual. Feelings of anger are habitually directed back against the self. Depression is anger turned inwards.

This might sound like a controversial position on 'depression', but that is because our society is lagging dramatically in terms of its understanding of what depression is.

As I went back through my childhood, and I began to acknowledge what had happened to me, my depression lifted. My suicidal thoughts also lifted. I was led to believe that all of these symptoms: depression, anxiety, and confusion had no cause. I remember going to several doctors earlier in my life.

All these doctors gave me the impression that depression was a disease without a cause. But, I now know that it’s not. It is, however, a disease without a cause that society is comfortable discussing: The widespread abuse of children.

In my case, my depression, or my anger-which-was-turned-against-myself, was directly caused by the violent abuse I was subjected to as a kid. This violence was both physical and sexual abuse. I first began to accept this with the help of a very good, renegade psychoanalyst.

I want to emphasize, however, that psychoanalysis almost never helps anyone. I had a very rare experience, with a very unique guide. He was more a shaman than a psychoanalyst. Most often, psychologists and therapists impede our healing. I do not recommend working with a 'therapist' at all. Most of them are extremely dangerous and will derail your healing.

That said, I briefly worked with a renegade Freudian-psychoanalyst. After numerous terrible experiences with 'therapists' he was the exception that proved the rule. This psychoanalyst, interestingly, had originally trained as a computer-programmer and only recently moved into psychology. He looked at my condition as if regarding parts of a computer operating-system that were malfunctioning. Again, this is a completely novel approach, and I have encountered no literature on this method; despite extensive research.

This psychoanalyst-programmer-shaman was looking very closely at the language I used and, within just a few weeks, I began to piece together a connection between my confusion and anxiety in the present and what had been done to me as a kid. To be more specific: I was hit a lot, as a kid, in my family home. I was beaten unconscious. I was also emotionally abused; I was rarely given a chance to speak or express my feelings.

Eventually, when a child is consistently disallowed any expression of their feelings; when a child consistently finds their needs met with violence; that child then develops a defense mechanism. This defense mechanism causes the formation of something called an 'introject'.

An 'introject' is an internalization of an external abuser. In other words, the abused child begins to form — inside their psyche — a 'simulated' version of the person who is abusing them. This internal-simulation will preemptively attack the child inside to avoid attacks from the outside. This abuser-'introject' is both protector and persecutor of the child.

As a child, I formed introjects of many abusers around me. I began to model, unconsciously, their attitudes towards me. Before I could vocalize a need, I would suppress or push-down my own needs. Before I could express any anger at what was being done to me, I would stave off that anger by getting angry at myself. This process became a way that I survived childhood. By attacking myself, inside my psyche, I avoided some violence in the physical-realm.

This was useful as a kid, it was a survival mechanism. But as an adult, it wasn’t so useful. It was no longer necessary. As neurologists say: ‘What fires together; wires together’. When a certain set of behaviour-patterns establishes itself in the mind, it tends to establish itself for the long-term. Especially in a child.

You could say, "Oh I theorize that your depression is linked to childhood abuse", but to actually witness the programming unravel itself first-hand was a powerful education in human neurobiology. This was not a theoretical experience for me, it was a visceral reality. This is a topic that the medical community is very reluctant to speak out about.

There is a problem in speaking out about this connection. Doctors and therapists are scared to publicly state that depression is largely caused by childhood abuse. The problem is that this realization breaks some of the biggest taboos in our society. Those taboos are: Do not criticize parents; do not criticize people older than you; Do not criticize authority.

ARIA: It’s like the brilliant book that we talked about. The one about Freud.

PHOENIX: The Assault on Truth by J.M. Masson.

ARIA: Yes. That book goes into detail about Freud and how he was prevented from sharing his research on this topic.

PHOENIX: Yes, Freud presented a paper early in his career called The Aetiology of Hysteria. I highly recommend reading the paper. The paper could have been written by a high-level expert trauma theorist today. Freud essentially figured it all out.

In The Aetiology of Hysteria Freud wrote that all of his female patients, who were presenting with psychological problems, had been abused. They had been sexually abused by their parents.

When Freud presented that paper in Vienna, society said: "You can’t say this." And they almost destroyed Freud’s career.

In response to those threats, Freud retracted that theory in fear. And then he concocted something called 'The Oedipus Complex'. And 'The Oedipus Complex' turns the situation on its head. 'The Oedipus Complex' claims that children are sexually attracted to their parents.

ARIA: It’s so wrong.

PHOENIX: It’s the exact opposite of the situation that Freud observed.

ARIA: It’s putting the blame back on the child again.

PHOENIX: I think that’s what Freud was encouraged to do. It feels like Freud went off on a tangent at that point.

This book by J.M. Masson, The Assault on Truth, is fascinating. It’s not just a theory that Masson has come up with, it’s documented thoroughly by Freud’s letters.

Masson went back through all of Freud’s papers and he presented irrefutable proof that Freud had discovered this connection between sexual-abuse and mental-health problems, but was not allowed to publicize his work. It’s been over one hundred years since Freud uncovered the truth, and for more than one hundred years it’s been suppressed by the psychology community.

ARIA: I thought it was interesting in The Assault on Truth how the book presents evidence of doctors in the past, looking at autopsies of children, and seeing how many of them had been so severely abused. In the medical records it was just undeniable. I found it a shocking book to read.

My next question is: What was it like growing up in London when you were a kid?

PHOENIX: London was a strange place when I was a kid. It was a very aggressive, violent place. At the time, Margaret Thatcher was the Prime Minister.

She knew that members of her government were raping children at the time. There were several TV presenters: Jimmy Saville, Rolf Harris — both knighted by the Queen — who were abusing many, many children.

I remember, as a kid, having this sense of: Where am I? What is this place? What is this strange planet where these people don’t care about children?

Adults seemed to be much more concerned about objects. It was the peak of the 1980s, so it was the point at which the generation who became absolutely-obsessed with money and possessions had reached their crescendo of madness.

My dad worked for an oil company. It seemed as though the general-attitude of people, not just in that company, but in the city in general, was: 'Let’s make as much money as possible.' Emotional connections didn’t matter.

I remember at the time, the Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher she said — I’m paraphrasing — “When I see a man riding the bus, I see a man who’s failed”.

It was an age of selfish-individualism. It was very much about getting ahead as an individual. I remember there were office parties that were held at my house. These oil company members would get very drunk and stumble around the house interfering with me and my sister. It felt like a very strange pantomime where all these big creatures seemed to think they were very superior whilst they hurt children.

I don’t know what it was like to be an adult at that time. I don’t know what steps they took to deny or distract themselves from what they were doing.

There was a lot of drinking. And there was a lot of pain. This pain was expressed through this pointless grabbing at possessions.

ARIA: It was acceptable to do that. Among those circles, nobody said anything.

PHOENIX: Yes, there was complete denial. It was a very, very surreal place. The UK still is hell for many kids. It’s very strange to be born into a country that is so hurt, and unable to see how difficult it is for a kid to be in a place where there’s so much deception and so much hidden.

ARIA: It’s interesting that you said your dad was working in an oil company, because my dad was working at one too.

Something that just came to mind was: I remember once when I was at university, I had started giving a little bit of money each month to a charity. My dad was really shocked by that. He couldn’t understand why I would do that. I think that encapsulates that mentality of individualism.

PHOENIX: What you said reminded me of some strange thing that my dad did once: He was abusing me and my sister and yet I remember this odd event. There was a guy who was in a traffic helicopter over London for a radio station. My dad gave this guy money in order that he would read out my name on the radio, with the intention, apparently, of supporting a charity called Help A London Child.

There was this weird, massive contradiction which I think encapsulated the entire bi-polarity of being a kid at that time in London and that was: Why is my dad giving money to a charity called Help a London Child as publicly as possible whilst abusing me and my sister?

It was completely mind-blowing. But, actually, I think it’s not inconsistent with the behavior of many abusers. To return to Jimmy Savile again: He was notoriously affiliated with many charities and he appeared on the surface to be doing a lot of charitable work, but you peeled back the curtain on that man, like you peel back the curtain on my father, and underneath was someone doing completely the opposite.

I think we have a word for it now, and it’s called virtue signaling. It’s where you give the impression of having virtue not because you want to particularly do anything good, but because you want to appear good.

ARIA: That makes me reflect on how I remember, as a kid, feeling the same: Everyone around me just seemed very strange which made sense because most of the adults were abusing me.

Now I’m much more in touch with myself, I wouldn’t go anywhere near these kind of people because I would feel their energy.

It’s super hard when that’s your only environment. You are around these people that have a really strong, violent energy. But, because you’re around them so often, you have to stop feeling.

PHOENIX: You’re exactly right. I feel this strange thing about my childhood, and it’s probably true for many people: I didn’t know anything else. I only knew monsters.

As far as I knew — and it was true in many cases — it was entirely normal for parents to sexually abuse their children, and it was entirely normal to have to keep quiet about that. It the only reality I knew, and it was the reality for many children around me. I wasn’t alone in that experience.

When something is normalized to that extent, it can take years to perceive the horror of it. You many have to leave a space for many years, traveling overseas like I did, to look back in and see "Ah, that wasn’t normal at all; there are different ways of being a family. A family doesn’t mean that you’re being sexually abused. A family doesn’t mean you’re spending a lot of your time covering up sexual abuse."

For someone who hasn’t experienced this, it might seem very strange, or difficult, to understand how normal it was. How completely 'normal' it is to abuse children in the UK.

ARIA: As a child, you don’t have the words for it really. You don’t have any concept of what it is and, yet, you know it is happening.

Of course there were also direct threats, violent threats, forcing children not to talk about it.

PHOENIX: This is the corrupt masterpiece of most religions: The taboo, or the apparent taboo, surrounding sexuality, and talking about sex.

Many societies think that its scary or dangerous to educate children about sex at an early age. Largely because of so-called ‘religious reasons’.

I see this as quite a malicious design. I could imagine quite vividly a bunch of priests sat around saying, "Okay, if we’re going to sexually abuse children: What is the best way that we can not get caught? I know, what if we say that children can’t have any language to describe sex. Or, if we say children can’t be told what sex is, or understand the process. So when we abuse them, they won’t have any language to explain what we did to them."

To me, it doesn’t seem like a strange coincidence; it seems engineered. I know that many people would like to think there is some sort of moral-basis for it, there’s some sort of good reason why a basic knowledge of sex should be so secretive or hidden from children.

But I think it should be out in the open, so that when a child is abused, the child has the language to describe what has happened.

Because, currently, we have a society where children are not allowed access to the information, or the language, to describe what one in three of them, we now know, have been subjected to.

ARIA: I remember, I had a difficult experience as a child when that topic of conversation came up at school. It was so distressing because, for me, sexuality was just violence.

So, it was like someone talking about exactly what was happening to me; something that I knew I couldn’t talk about. So, I just felt very scared.

I found it very traumatizing. Especially given the situation for so many children: The abuse that so many of those children are facing and the insensitivity towards that topic.

PHOENIX: I agree. I feel like the first thing that should be said in a sex education class at school is: "Well, one in three of you will have been sexually-abused by this point. So, this topic is probably going to be distressing.""

There’s this engineered blindness to that. It’s very carefully calculated. I feel its very much about the Catholic church and many other cults. So now we’re seeing that organization exposed essentially as a pedophile-ring and it seems as though there’s still a large number of people who think that the Catholic Church is a religious organization; that in some way it connects people. Of course, there are also the Freemasons, another pedophile ring, and sects of basically every other major world-religion.

Most of these organizations are designed from the ground-up to hurt children. It makes a lot of sense that if you want power and control, that you would deeply wound as many members of the population as you could so that they would be unable to stand up or assert themselves against your control systems.

We know that the most effective way to prevent someone from feeling confident; from feeling able to speak up; from being able to assert themselves; or to present a strong argument. We know one of the most effective ways to prevent them from doing that is to abuse them as a child.

ARIA: Especially sexually abuse them.

PHOENIX: Especially this. Horrible though it may be for us to acknowledge, I understand, now, that organizations like the Catholic Church, the Freemasons, and many other 'religious' cults have engineered this. It’s not some strange aberration that has crept into churches and other buildings under darkness. These cults were engineered, from their inception, to injure children for power and control.

ARIA: It makes a lot of sense to me, especially when — and we won’t go into this too much today — we consider things like ritual abuse and mind control.

So, my next question is: What part did violence play in your family home?

PHOENIX: Violence was a central part of the family system that I grew up in. It seemed as though one of the key methods of communicating between parent and child in the society in which I grew up in was to hit the child. We know, from the experiments that Pavlov did with his dog, that there is a process of psychological programming called associative-conditioning. That is where you have a stimulus and a response. And you can pair a stimulus with a response.

For example, Pavlov would ring a bell every time he fed the dog. Then, the dog began to associate the bell with the arrival of food. And what happened, after a certain amount of time, is that Pavlov would simply ring the bell and the dog would salivate in anticipation of the food.

In other words, you could create a desired-response simply with the stimulus alone. This is basic mind-control.

I think some people might think: Mind control? That sounds a bit weird and science fiction! Well, it’s not very science fiction. Pavlov demonstrated mind control. That is: Ring a bell and provide food; keep doing that. Then just ring the bell, and then the dog will anticipate the food so much so that there is a physiological response.

The same thing is true with children. A parent can mind-control a child by choosing a behavior — it could be anything as simple as the child putting her elbows on the table or something — then every time the kid does that, the parent will hit the kid. Then, eventually, the kid will begin to get a sense around tables, for example, of fear.

Experiences can be paired with pain and, as a result, you create a situation in which you are not allowing a child to explore the world; you’re not supporting them in their discovery of the world; you’re programming them. It’s a programming system.

I think the difficulty for me is that I do sometimes feel, when someone talks about mind control or programming the human nervous system, the reaction often is: ‘Oh no, we’re free individuals, nothing controls us.’

If someone thinks that, they haven’t examined closely enough the process of child-rearing which many of us undergo in this society.

Many of us undergo a process of being hurt when we do certain things. And often that thing is: Asserting ourselves. It’s interesting when you look at the parallels between governmental systems and the family home. For me, these things are fractal to each other. As in: they are self-similar at different scales.

When we find oppressive governmental systems; we also find oppressive family systems. The essential purpose of both these systems is to maintain power for a small number of individuals and that is done through threats and coercion.

ARIA: For me, books and stories really created different worlds, or a secure world to grow. It was a world that I didn’t experience anywhere else.

Did you have some favorite books or films that helped you through the abuse that you suffered?

PHOENIX: Yes, I often escaped into books. I remember enjoying the Narnia series of books by C.S. Lewis, like The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe. I enjoyed any book in which children, or a child, escaped their normal reality into another one. The Box of Delights by John Masefield was also a favorite of mine as a kid.

I read through most of my childhood. I used books as a means of escaping the abuse. The same thing with films, I used to watch films a lot.

One of the films that I feel is most useful — in terms of understanding and processing abuse — is The Labyrinth (1986). It’s a movie by Jim Henson. With a lot of different puppets in it, and David Bowie.

I loved this movie as a kid, but I never really understood why. However, as an adult, the deeper-themes in The Labyrinth revealed themselves to me. I began to realize that The Labyrinth is one of the most intensely-sophisticated movies ever made.

In The Labyrinth Jim Henson shows us with a working-model of the human psyche and the way in which we shut off traumatic memories in order to protect ourselves.

In The Labyrinth, Sarah’s brother, Toby, is stolen by The Goblin King, and taken to the middle of The Labyrinth. Sarah then spends the rest of the movie trying to make her way through The Labyrinth to save Toby from The Goblin King.

I feel, now, that Toby was Sarah’s inner-child and that Sarah was going back through The Labyrinth of her own mind. She confronts different defenses and difficult challenges that she built into her own psyche to prevent herself from having to face the trauma of having been hurt as a kid.

And I feel very much, through my own journey of recovery, that I’ve gone through my own labyrinth, the labyrinth of my psyche in which I face those same challenges that are presented in The Labyrinth, the movie.

There’s this really great scene in The Labyrinth where Sarah is almost at the center of The Labyrinth and there’s all these different rock formations with faces and they’re saying things like, "Turn back now, there’s no hope." And then Hoggle, who is Sarah’s little friend in the movie, says something like: "Just ignore these guys, they’re just defenses, they’re lying." I encountered the same internal-constructs, so many times, in my own recovery.

I often found that, when I was going back to process memories, there would be defenses and they wouldn’t say things as benign as defenses in The Labyrinth. They would say things deeply disturbing or threatening. These were things that were said to me by abusers, when I was a kid.

When an abuser said, "If you talk about this we’re going to kill you." I really believed that as a kid. And in some cases it was probably true.

So, when I go back into those memories as an adult, I face those defensive-structures that psychologists call perpetrator-introjects. These perpetrator introjects are effectively: A threatening voice or feeling. It’s the abuser, in a sense, installed into your psyche, preventing you from going back into a memory. This is because the threat they made at the time seems so real. And the risk of remembering as a kid was overwhelming.

For me, there were so many instances of abuse that it feels like going back into those memories is a challenge. Even as an adult it is hard. As a kid, it was more or less impossible. The best move for me as a kid was simply to shut those memories away and attempt to survive.

I think that was the same for many, many kids. I think so many of us locked the rooms in our head.

I had so many locked doors in my head. So many corridors I hadn’t walked down for so many years. So many defenses. So many children, part-selves of myself, left in different experiences where I was abused.

But, slowly, over four years, I unlocked many of those doors and I re-met many of those children. And I led many of them out. And I think most of them are now out. And that’s given me a great sense of relief.

ARIA: You went to an 'elite' London school. What was your experience of what they subjected children to there?

For me, the reputation of King’s House School is one of abuse. I have written extensively on this topic elsewhere. My experience of that school was that a great number of teachers there abuse students and others deny it or cover it up. The school is still covering it up.

The problem is that organizations like King’s House School have huge amounts of money and I think that many people send their children there because it is 'prestigious'.

I’m not sure what this word means exactly. Based on my experience as a child, a 'prestigious' school is a school where — if you think your child is a product, like a trophy, that you need to demonstrate to others the value of &mdash you send them to something called a prestigious school. That seemed to be true of the other kids that were there.

A lot of these kids came from very rich families who were very neglectful. Parents basically felt that their children were a trophy to show off. There was very little emotional connection. I went to many of the houses of the kids there; very big houses; very empty houses. Strange places. Some of the children at the school had parents who were TV presenters, or famous musicians, this kind of thing.

King's House School was a very cold, aggressive place. The parallels with the Catholic Church strike me. The school was a pedophile-ring disguised as a school. A lot of my experience there was simply surviving; just staying out of the way of teachers who were sexually molesting me.

A lot of the time I spent at King's House involved staying out of the way of teachers who were emotionally and physically abusive. A lot of the time I spent there was trying to avoid being sent to something called detention.

Detention was were you were kept after school and then a teacher abused you. Teachers would use detention as an opportunity to be alone with a child after school and they would molest them. And this seemed to be the way that the school was run.

It might be the case that someone casually listening to this; or someone who hasn’t been though this experience; or someone who isn’t familiar with the ways in which elite British schools condition kids might think: That sounds implausible. That would never happen.

I have to refer people to other camps along the same lines. There’s been examples of this kind of behavior during the holocaust. We know that humans can do terrible things to other humans. We also know there have been other camps throughout the world, and schools, in which huge amounts of abuse has taken place.

I feel like there might be a tendency, in those who didn’t personally go though this, to disbelieve what I am saying, and to think, ‘This doesn’t sound plausible. What’s he saying? A pedophile ring disguised as a school! That wouldn’t happen.’

Let's remember that the BBC employed a man called Jimmy Savile. He raped children in the British Broadcasting Corporation whilst I was a kid. Why would it be so implausible that a school, a major elite London school, King’s house, Richmond, was allowing children to be abused on the same scale?

ARIA: You mentioned trying to edit the Wikipedia page for King’s House School and problems you experienced there. And also this newspaper article that came out recently about another student accusing the headmaster.

PHOENIX: Yes, a headmaster of King’s House School, Neville Chaplain, was charged with abusing boys; raping them. I’ve obviously made a report myself to the police. Like you say, I went to the school’s Wikipedia page to add information on another teacher at the school who had been convicted as a pedophile for abusing children at the school.

I put that information on the Wikipedia page because I thought it was important for people to know the history of the school, if not the current nature of the school. The school removed that from the Wikipedia page.

I then added information on the Wikipedia page linking to my reports of my own abuse there. The school removed that from the Wikipedia page. They didn’t contact me. They just removed it. I put it back on; they removed it again.

They didn’t contact me. They could have contacted me. They have my name. They didn’t contact me. They removed it again. I put it up; they locked the page.

That was their response to the abuse. That was King’s House School’s response to my sexual abuse as a child: was to silence me again.

ARIA: My last question is: How have you used music to heal?

PHOENIX: When I was a kid, I was abused by my piano teacher at King’s House School and that led me away from music. It made me not want to be around the piano, and it took many years before I slowly moved back to it.

It feels, again, like it was very maliciously designed.

The piano teacher realized that I had a natural connection with the piano and, on the basis of that, he decided to destroy it. This felt like it was the objective of many of these people: They simply wanted to destroy anything that felt alive.

ARIA: I felt that with a lot of abusers: That there’s a certain magic to children and that spark, or that magic. The abusers just want to take that away because they have lost it completely. Maybe it was something similar?

PHOENIX: I think so. It took me years before I felt comfortable being deeply involved with the piano again, but it’s been something that’s brought me back to myself and really helped me to express some of the experiences I’ve had.

I think it’s the same with you and your art, Aria. I feel like, with the piano, it allows me to express things that there really aren’t words for. I can express whole experiences that I went though as a kid in a vocabulary that doesn’t really exist in the English language, or maybe in any other language.

The piano has been a very powerful way of me speaking out about what happened. It’s an interesting medium because I think it’s not directly expressive, in the same way that language, is of the experience itself. I can write a piano piece that expresses the essence of how it felt. The sadness of it.

At other times, I can express the elation and freedom of having been through that experience and healed. The piano has been a friend to me for a long time, and it was a friend that I really needed.

I suppose it has an advantage over language, perhaps, and that is that I can speak out about the abuse I experienced, using the piano, without confusing or disturbing those who really don’t want to approach this topic.

But it still resonates. I think the piano pieces that I write convey something about the nature of what happens to so many children. But it’s not confrontational. It’s something that people can experience and connect with without feeling threatened, or confused, or upset.

ARIA: I’ve always thought that music has the most direct impact in a way, because you’re surrounded, and you feel it, and everyone can feel it together.

PHOENIX: It would benefit so many people, even if they feel they are not musical, to express themselves through creating sound. Even it means banging drums, or smashing keys on the piano, or gently pressing keys on the piano. I think it’s a great way to express feelings and to move through pain.