FLYING HIGHER: Finding Inspiration in Trauma

by Sylvia Fraser

I have sometimes wondered what my life might have been like if my father had been a good and loving man instead of an angry child abuser. The truth is, I wouldn’t know who that carefree child was, any more than I would know the next stranger who happened to sit beside me on the subway. Wishing her into existence would be like wishing myself dead. In my 1987 book, "My Father’s a Memoir of Incest and of Healing," I related how, at age forty-eight, I was shocked into an awareness that I had what the psychiatric literature describes as a multiple personality. Inside “my” brain and body lived my Other Self who, unbeknownst to me, had functioned as my father’s secret sexual accomplice. Though it’s hard to believe now, sexual abuse was not on Western society’s radar screen in the early eighties. My memoir caused a sensation, as one of the first in a wave of abuse revelations that would grow into a tsunami.Trauma - whether caused by child abuse or war or poverty or accident or other misfortune - is not something you choose. It chooses you. What you do with it, is your own responsibility. The challenge of surviving and of healing can force you to pay attention, to see possibilities others might have missed, to take risks, to dig deeper so that you can fly higher. Sex with my father, and the pedophiles to whom he introduced me as a child, exposed me to an evil world of lust, selfishness and reckless greed. My journey into health and harmony taught me that the Universe is far more luminous. meaningful, magical, purposeful and cooperative than I could have imagined.A story doesn’t always end neatly with the writing of a book. After publishing My Father’s House, I became aware that my Other Self had saved her worst revelations till last. I relate these in "Flying Finding Inspiration in Trauma." However my intention is not just to resurrect painful incidents of the past, but to place these in a context that allows the reader to see - as I came to see - the awesome Universe that guides and embraces us, in ways that can seem miraculous, but that I now believe to be a reflection of its natural order.

192 pages, Kindle Edition

Published September 25, 2011

About the author

Sylvia Fraser (born 8 March 1935 in Hamilton, Ontario) was a Canadian novelist, journalist and travel writer. Fraser was educated at the University of Western Ontario. In her fifty year career as a journalist, she has written hundreds of articles, beginning as a Feature Writer for The Toronto Star Weekly (1957-68), and continuing with articles for many other magazines and newspapers including the Globe & Mail, Saturday Night, Chatelaine, the Walrus and Toronto Life. She taught creative writing for many years at Banff Centre and at various university workshops. She has participated in extensive media tours, given lectures and readings throughout Canada, the United States, Britain and Sweden. She served on the Arts Advisory Panel to Canada Council and was a member of Canada Council's 1985 Cultural Delegation to China. She was a founding member of The Writers’ Union of Canada and for many years was on the executive of The Writers' Trust, a charitable organization for the support of Canadian authors and literature. Fraser lived in Toronto, Ontario.