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“It is a joy to be hidden but disaster not to be found” (Winnicott, 1965, p. 186).
“Trauma, in the more popular sense of the term, implies a breaking of faith. The infant or child has built up a capacity to ‘believe in,’ and environmental provision first fits into this and then fails. … In the end, trauma is the destruction of the purity of the individual experience by a too sudden or unpredictable intrusion of actual fact” (Winnicott, 1989, pp. 146-147).
In the Private Lives piece that follows, Chris Turner provides us with his very personal account of what happens when the facilitating environment fails and the core self is violated. It is also a painful illustration of a child's transitional world of fantasy and play being radically intruded upon by a malevolent reality.