Trauma Bonding and Reflecting on Reality

Hello Tom Ward. Hello Josh Thomas. This week we're going to talk about grade nine, a very big year for both of us actually. I think we should recap grade eight. Me and you met in high school. We started the B block which had like these like always thought hard werecore which is, actually so funny to look back on. They weren't hardcore, were they? We just read this about We thought they were like such strong men and in the world they would have been the biggest pussies at the school. And then me and you were most friends with the ladies. We talked about dating them a lot last episode when we talk about gray and I'm not sure that we made it clear that by dating we meant we asked them out or they asked us out and then broke up with them two days later. I never went to their house or soaked to them or touched them in any way. I mean, I kissed a couple . Oh no let's not back pedal too hard I had my first disagreed nine, first time I ever kissed a girl, first time I ever went down on a girl and also the first time I ever tried alcohol. Wow. And one night . Why do you always have to do things so much . You always go too hard. You can't just like tease things out. You always have to go too hard . To be fair, I was not , I don't think I was involved in any of those choices really. I was like, I mean, we'll tell the story later, but I mean, the kissing and the going down on the girl was something that wasn't something I pursued. I just sort of fell in. I think at some point you had a choice Yeah, yeah, yeah, but I didn't I didn't expect that to happen . And you, I guess, got caught up in the underworld . I had a very different experience to you in year nine obviously because of the crowd I fell into yeah . But I do I think a big moment for me in grade nine is because we were sitting with those like mean boys and I was friends with the girls and you were friends with both. They like sat separate because we were children . And one day they were being mean to me and you said, I don't want to sit here anymore. Let's just go and sit somewhere else. And we moved to a new group, a new nerdy girl group. It was just all girls nerdy. And then we also were friends with a different all female group that were like all girls, nerdy, but like a little bit more interested in being hardcore. Yeah, on reflection, those girls were way more hardcore than those boys. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. That second group. Yeah. It was the first group we call that A block and the second group was CBlock. B block was the M and M boys . The boys who were not the chocolate to kind of both . Because you could buy chocolates at the tuck shop there . That's where the tuck shop was. Prime real estate. That's why we always got dragged down there because you were racing off to get the Tuesday Chicken Burger. Tuesday Chicken Burgerlaze to get there early even if it meant getting pushed over by Neddy on the way . Why wasn't they just me or chicken burgers by the way? It was like such a thing in our school. Tuesday, like all the kids trying to leave five minutes of all lunch. Like it wasn't Jesus me. It was the whole school. It was like it was like this crazy Tuesday Chickenberg day. I don't know why they was only on Tuesday. I don't know why the Tuck Shop refused to do the mini other day. And like the teachers knew and they'd get to the end of the class and they'd be like, Please, we have to wait until the bell and if one's like, no, no, miss it's Chicken Burger Day. And sometimes I think they would let us out a few minutes early so we could get to the chicken burger on time. It was such a big, it was the biggest thing in the whole school. Is this just me or was it the whole school ? I don't think it was the whole school. But I guess I don't know if anyone had else in the school had negotiated an early departure. I think that was just you, but it was the most popular thing, even more than the pizza hut Thursdays. Way more. I think we missed out in a verse episode. We made a huge mistake by not talking about , I think because most of the years at school were defined by our school productions. You weren't in the grade eight school production . I wasn't ready. No, it was Teen Stars , which was an original musical written by our the teachers. I tried to find the cast recording. You couldn't get it. I mean, I when I say I tried I mean , I mean, like, you know, like I like I gave like my I thought about it and thought about it. And I think I messaged you messaged me. Yeah, that's it. That's all I did. Who wasn't in the musical ? And I said the drama teacher, which I think was a pretty good level of help for me . I just do think someone's gonna send it to me, we'll play it in a future episode because I did have my own song on it , which is pretty cool. You actually didn't sing though, did you? It was kind of like, you know that song in Parry to the Penzen modern major general like talking really fast like a tongue twist to like a beat . Yeah, the music teacher took advantage of your speech imp ediment. You think they were bullying me? I think they saw a kid with a voice and they wrote to it . And they definitely write to it. I definitely auditioned for it. All right, all right, grade eight, I was in the school production sharing my own song. Grade nine was the opening of the Kublock Arts Center and our dramatage was kind into like physical theater, like ritualistic performance. Because it was performing arts, it wasn't just the drama kids. They'd roped in some music kids as well. And obviously they had Bianca Piana up there doing Vanessa Morrisi's shine. Every school has like a Christian girl that sings. That was the first time she'd ever performed it it and Yeah, and she then was asked to do shine literally ten times . And then there was a main school production of grade nine that was it must have been midsummer night's dream . Midsummer's drem meusical version. Was that really year nine? No, that was grade ten because they took them alternating years. So I think in grade nine they did into a production and so year nine . It was the opening of the Kubelock. So the opening of the Cuba they have like a new performing arts district in our school. Our school is in position now as a performing arts school with all these facilities and to do an opening, they were doing a ritualistic physical theater performance and that was the first time you ever did anything dramat ic and I don't really know why you did . You tricked me. I was like, What are we where are we going? And you were like, Oh, just come down hang out with these guys. They're really cool . And I was like, Whoa, whatever. I didn't really know where we were going. You were just like, Just come with me. And then we were in the drama room and I'm like, Oh, the drama block. Okay . And then five minutes later, I'm lying on my back, flicking my wrists in time to right here, right now , right here, right now . The thing about you is that you would join a cult. Like definitely like you watch thated excem doumentary and there's that girl that like she got branded and then she convinced other people to get branded you'd get right in that. Oh man, there's a guy in that documentary who's like just in love with this man . And then there's a bit where this other guy's like pointing out to him . He's pointing out to this nerdy guy why he shouldn't follow the cult leader. And you can see in the nerdy guy's eyes that he's just switching to follow this new guy . You can see in his eyes like maybe I like this guy. And I thought it's nothing worse than seeing yourself reflected. It just there's nothing more infuriating . Should we get into what happened to you? Yeah. Can I tell my side of it first? Sure. So you made a new friend. What do we need to call her? We're gonna call her Sally . And how you would turn up to school every so often I'd be chatting to you and then she'd come over and she'd cry a lot and then you'd walk away and then there'd be like a big secret and what's going on and you'd be like, shut up. You don't understand . You don't understand like that. You didn't understand. No one, no one understood. No. And then I would and then I would go and just like sit alone like quite often you guys would sit like around the corner and she would like have these really intense conversations for like months . Like so intense there was a lot to discuss basically , she let me know that she'd started dating an eighteen year old . She was like fourteen . And basically this guy was like kind of from the wrong side of the tracks And she started like getting into some kind of like bad situations and like I'm talking real stuff like this guy was doing like street racing which was, like crazy coincidental because Fast and the Furious had just come out at the cinemas . And I'd never met anyone who did that, but she did. Anyway, his name is Rich and I'm still kind of nervous to say it out loud. She was going to the street races? Yeah, yeah, she was she was being picked up you know at one AM in the morning from her parents' house in Bill Barry and taken to the street races, but they were doing some like breaking and entering as well . Oh yeah, yeah, I know. How'd she meet this guy ? I think through scouts and then and I think I think for context in this part of our lives pre mobile phone or maybe we had a knock the app, but you couldn't talk on it. No one was using landlines anymore, but we did have MSN Messenger . And the whole thing was just this one chat app and we all lived on MSN Messenger . Yeah . And that's where I would talk to him . Oh yeah. So she would log off and then quite often then he would log on. Oh , yeah. And then he'd chat to me and it was kind of confusing because sometimes he'd be like, Hey bro, what's up and telling me about like cars and stuff ? I didn't know anything about it. So what kind of cars ? Just like Ferraris and Porsches and stuff like that . They were stolen . Oh, oh yeah But what was confusing is sometimes he'd be like quite nice to me and other times he'd be like stay the fuck away from Sally or I'll kill you . Oh yeah . And those times when he was like that, it was really hard to sleep in the evenings . Yeah, I think I remember one night he quite specifically said he was going to come over that night and kill you. Yeah, yeah. He said he was going to come over and kill me so I should lock the doors. And so I went around my parents' house and just made sure the windows were locked. Who let them know there was a straight racing motor coming, organized crime street racing murder . Later on into like three years down the track because it went on for a while I did one night get so scared that I considered knocking on my dad's door, but then something made me stop and I just went back to bed . I also do like, I do know I say this quite often, but Prisman is just not I don't think I've seen. There's definitely never been a Ferrari in Balpari. No, I don't know where you would go to steal a Ferrari. I don't know if I don't know if there's a Ferrari in Brisbane. There might be now. There definitely wasn't one when we were growing up. And if it was one, it wasn't in Baldhari. No offense to Balbari in two thousand two. No , I didn't know that. I didn't think I didn't know about that either. But I know, one time he actually had to stash Porsche and some other fast car and he didn't have anyone else and he actually asked me if I could hide the cars for him . But I told him I couldn't because my parents' carport only had two spaces and the cars they were already filled. Yeah . And a Lamborghini would be hard to . then But it was quite convincing because you say went up for three years? Went for three years . So it was really hard being at school because I was involved in stuff way more serious than the other kids. And so you were forced to grow up so fast by Rich. Yeah. And Mark, who was another person I'd speak to an ESN messenger, and Mark and Rich were in a gang war ring with each other . Oh , Mark was kind of like a protector figure for me and Sally And Rich almost murdered Sally , but Mark came in at the last second and saved her. Wait, how did you find out that Rich almost murdered Sally? Sally told me in a series in person No, she didn't really talk about it that much in person but she would give me these very long letters she would tell me she used to write these letters. You guys always hand these really intense handittwenr let ters to each other. Yeah, and sometimes like she wouldn't really talk to me about it at school, but then at the end of the day, she'd just make one comment that would really stick with me. Like once we were at the shopping center and we were walking and she turned and whispered in my ear, Rich is following us right now . Oh , and that was really intense. And I wasn't allowed to turn around. Wait, that's so scary. Yeah, it was really scary. It was really scary. But that's why like you know, all these petty things that you guys were worried about at school , stealing coke cans from the HPE offices . Oh my god, I stole so many coke cans from the Health and Physical Education Storage locker. That's not what that's not what it's designed to be. This is just childish photos for me . I was very scared for my life for a lot of my high school. It wasn't three years. It was like eighteen months . It was two years for sure . And then in the last half of the third year , Sally had left school and I was kind of just coming to terms. So it ended kind of on her last day just before we went to Germany, skipping forward a bit here, but she told me that Rich was dead as we were walking to the bus for the last time I really saw Sally and we'd walked to the bus together after school and she said Rich is dead which was good because Rich had actually killed Mark and I was very scared because Mark had been our protector , you know , and now Mark was dead, but thanfully Carlos killed Rich . Oh yeah. And then Carlos went back to I think South America . But the thing is, I know it sounds crazy, but then every now and again she would do something that really convinced me it was maybe real . Like she told me about how she went ld the listener that is not real yet . Well, I sometimes the thing is I did sometimes think maybe this isn't real. I wondered but then she'd show me like she told me about how she had also through her gang affiliation been trained in like special fighting skills . And I thought this is a bit far fetched. But then one day on sports day, this kid was giving us trouble on the field. He was taking our soccer ball and I just saw Sally's eyes change and I thought, 'Oh God, this is what she's been talking about . She ran in this way towards him with her hands stretched out like the Terminator guy so fast and then I thought, Oh God no she's gonna use the skills on him and she did this she did this crazy like street fighter slide kick on this guy like swept his legs and he flipped over and I was like, oh my god, she truly is a trained killer and I was too scared to ever question it after that. Woah , yeah. Where you guys what sort of romance? Was she in love with you? I don't know . I mean, you'd say so, wouldn't you? Given the energy she put into this . But I think I was in love with her, for sure. I was definitely in love with her. We were trauma bonded. Yeah , yeah. Trauma bonded. She did that to you . But she did tell other people about this who were also sworn to secrecy . So who else? She told Katherine. Oh yeah, our ex and she told Rosie, my ex erc ise that I wasn't allowed to know, wasn't it? I told you and you just looked at me like I was crazy, but I think you were just gonna walk away from it . You didn't tell me in the middle. No, I didn't tell you too later. No, you told me once you knew. I don't think so. I don't know . I pretty I remember pretty clearly you telling something about sniper . I think there was a sniper when I told you. I mean, maybe you told me somewhere in the middle and I just didn't know what you were talking about, but I remember the day that you told me this has been going on for so long. But what I didn't realize when I was a child was how intensely we were laughing about it because it was so crazy when you told me or whatever. But it's actually so horrific what happened to you . Like usually therapy. It's like shattering like it's like it's an important developmental era of your life. You have like one of the most damaging betrayals of trust a person could imagine, even though it's so stupid for you to believe that she wasn't in a gang war, you did believe it. I did. It's actually not that funny, but it was okay because it was quite a good distraction from my parents' divorce. Oh , I see. I gotta go. My child is crying . , okay. We'll do we'll do grade nine in two parts. Okay, I really gotta go by