The following article was published in the Adelaide Advertiser
newspaper in Australia today.

IN my experience, people deal with childhood trauma in two ways. Both
involve burying the pain under the carpet so we can finish growing up.
One way to avoid dealing with it is through drugs, alcohol and other
self-destructive behaviour. The other, also effective, is through
overachieving.

I'm unusual in that I'm a crossover. My grandmother sold me to a
pedophile barrister at 14. As a result of the abuse, I checked into a
psych hospital at 16, became a prostitute at 19 and had made four
suicide attempts by the time I was 20. I had a child at 23 and after
that, I turned to overachieving as a way to blot out the past.

My family is a perfect representative sample of the two ways of coping
with the problems of a painful past. All of my siblings had some kind
of childhood trauma - with a mother who was 190kg and had six kids to
five different men, you can imagine.

The eldest still suffers from psychosis and drug problems. The
second-eldest committed suicide at 27. Of my two younger brothers, one
killed himself and the other has been unemployed for many years.

My youngest sister, however, is on a six-figure salary, runs a company
and has never dealt with her childhood issues. She believes she has
them licked. All we overachievers do.

One thing I've learned is that we ignore our past at our peril. But we
heal in bite-sized pieces and only when we're ready - not a minute
before.

We're all born whole and perfect. You only have to see a newborn baby
to know that in your bones. Then our childhoods can mess us up. Even
without abuse, there's always someone dying, moving, a teacher who
hated you. Our perfection becomes distorted. My take is that life -
relationships, families and careers - is the best vehicle to undo the
distortion and find our way back to that wholeness.

After I got pregnant, I practised piano eight hours a day in order to
leave not a single bit of room in my head for suicidal thoughts. It
worked a treat. During other emotionally difficult times, I've
rollerbladed 100km a week, ice-skated three hours a day, borrowed $1.2
million and bought five properties in five months (on a two-day-a-week
salary, mind).

Most recently, I bought an apartment in Paris. The Paris purchase is,
on the surface, a fun yarn about how I put in a ridiculously low offer
on a cute place overlooking a park. I didn't realise the 15,000 people
who'd died in the European heatwave of 2003 had left a glut of
apartments on the market.

The agent rang the next day to say it was mine. Why I said yes - when
I was only in Paris for four days, didn't speak French and didn't know
anyone there - was partly to do with the fact that it was during one
of the most difficult years of my life.

It was the year the first part of my autobiography, In Moral Danger,
had come out. I thought I'd dealt with the pain of my 14-year-old self.
Silly me. I'd only buried her under a deep shag-pile carpet. I had to
learn to go back and nurture her, let her grieve, get angry and
integrate her to make myself whole.

It was a tricky business. I hadn't been depressed for 25 years. It was
all I could do to get out of bed in the mornings. I used all my usual
tricks - read books, had counselling. I was even about to go off into
the desert to fast and meditate for two weeks.

Then, I learned that depression is unexpressed anger. Finally, after
decades, I got angry and the most important lesson of my life revealed
itself. My most important job is to listen to my feelings and not
rationalise them away. The fog of depression lifted immediately.

The moral of this story? Overachieve all you like - it beats drugs as
a distraction and can even make you rich - but remember one thing:
the little kids who live inside us won't leave us alone until we give
them a voice. They deserve to be heard. And loved. By us.

Barbara Biggs is a survivor of childhood sexual abuse and author of In
Moral Danger, The Road Home and The Accidental Renovator: A Paris
Story. Her website is www.barbarabiggs.com