Upward Press Forward Gaze
By Merleen Von Caues - AIM Director
Compared to many stories I read mine doesn’t seem very special. However, I am sure I am not alone in feeling this way. This is why I want to thank AIM for allowing each of us the platform to be brave enough to share! My father was a highly intellectual man and at the age of 20 he was already appointed as manager at the Bank. However, he developed a serious drinking problem and on the 4th of July 1984, when I was 17 years old, my father passed away in a rehab centre in Cullinan, just outside Pretoria. My mother was a dedicated nursing sister and a devoted wife and mother, but suffered severely from stress and nervous tension. As children, we often see our parents fight battles we don’t know much about and it passes by without us ever questioning how they handled it or being curious about the consequences of their behaviour and lifestyle. When we enter adulthood with all its fabulous facets, from choosing a career, marriage, parenting, raising children, forming new friendships, buying or building a new home, and all the financial challenges that go with these things, we learn about life! I joined the South African Police Service when I was 20 and spent 13 wonderful years serving the community and my country as a trainer and media liaison officer. As an editor at the Video Unit, I was involved in filming different crime 8
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scenes of gruesome family murders for training purposes. And while working in the Karoo, I was exposed to several brutal farm murders where the horror of crime against young children was forced into my world time after time. Going home after attending to scenes such as these and then being met by the faces of my own two beautiful children, made me literally run to the bathroom, lock the door and sit there for hours just sobbing my heart out!! It is then no surprise, given my family history, that I was inevitably, diagnosed with PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome). What followed were years and years of endless medication, ultimately numbing all feelings of pain and trauma in order to cope and just carry on with carrying on. After leaving the Police I followed a few different career paths in marketing and early childhood development. I finally joined my husband for two years in Somalia, where we were both mentors for the Somalian Police Force. Here too, the brutality of war and the total disregard for human life together with the unnecessary loss of friends’ and colleagues’ lives, made it difficult to handle day to day tasks and the norm amongst all of us in camp was to simply self-medicate with either alcohol and or medications.
