He had relived every wrong he felt was done to him daily for years and he was able to recount it in explicit detail as if it was yesterday and I felt that he would not come to terms with it unless he stopped reliving it as so far it had achieved nothing to do this!
I had listened to the same stories over and over since the time he first came to the villa back when Steve and I were together the previous summer.
I felt that I had heard the same stories so many times over the past six months and tried so many different ways to help him move forward that I was starting to get frustrated with it.
I had tried the sympathetic approach thinking he just needed to get it off his chest at first and to be heard.
I tried to make him see that the past was gone and he couldn't change what happened but had a choice to now stop letting it ruin any more of his life and to let it go.
I tried to help him see he was still looking at it through the eyes of a child and not an adult and even tried to help him see that although it was not acceptable to him, there were possibly other reasons for the perceived bad treatment of his parents, his brother, his friends etc.
I tried to make him see that many others had suffered far worse and had come through it.
I tried to make him see that he had survived it as a child and now as an adult there was no point keep letting it ruin his life as it could not hurt him now.
I tried everything and I was getting tired of getting nowhere and having to hear it all over and over again which I could see was not helping him.
Noone has a perfect childhood and he was not the only one who had had it tough.. I had and I had come through it!
However Valeri was stuck in the past and it was as if he did not want to let it go or accept he was not the only one who had had it tough.
He even would belittle other peoples problems as not being as bad as his including mine.
I had had many years of counselling in my past to help me move forward so I was well aware of how to help him and what he needed to do but he would not help himself. I put this down to fear and him being scared to let go of the past as it was all he had!
I set him up some on line counselling sessions on line but he did not use them, claiming he was not ready and that he preferred for me to help him.
To be blunt, I was not of the opinion that the issues that had affected him so badly were actually that bad and to me were classic text book examples of the general type of things that had happened to many people in families that were poor all over the world.
However he seemed to have been traumatised by the past and I felt the only way forward was for him to see it through the eyes of an adult as well as from his parents side.
I could see why Valeri had come to feel such resentment towards his family and childhood as he was neglected to a degree but I felt, not through deliberate acts of cruelty and not because he was not loved but due to poverty as well as learned traits that his parents had passed on from their parents I felt. So he agreed to hear me out on my take of why these things had happened.
Valeri was born in Bulgaria in Aug 1986 just as the communist regime was ending.
His father was a drinker and refused to grow up and his mother adored him and was loyal and worked full time to support the family.
He had an older brother who was 5 years old when Valeri was born.
My understanding was that Valeri's father had not had a great childhood and was brought up by a draconian father who lacked the ability to express his emotions who beat him regularly and praised him little and lost himself in the bottle and never achieved anything in his life that was duty bound with nothing but hard work and family responsibilities.
As a result Valeri's father did not ever beat him however he wanted more than his father in life so when communism ended he took advantage of the freedom it gave and lived 'a rock n roll' lifestyle and used alcohol to provide the confidence for this as well as numb his pain, insecurities as well as the guilt for not taking responsibility for his family.
Valeri's mother had been brought up by a mother who was domineering, strong and very independent and very different to the women in Bulgaria by todays standards let alone back in her day. She had divorced her husband, Valeri's grandfather and his mothers father once communism ended and married two times again but left them both which made her quite a character.
I had the pleasure of meeting her and at 90 she is still strong and extremely bossy but I admire her.
She made her own money by ways that were not necessarily above board and involved scamming and hustling which she used Valeri to carry out when he was young. Netherless she ended up with money to buy her property as well as one for Valeri and his brother in later years.
Like many women of her generation her way of parenting was through criticism and fear rather than encouragement and softness which is a trait Valeri's mother also came to inherit.
Valeri has huge issues with his family, especially his brother for the things he did to him as a child.
However I felt that these things were not any different to what all brothers do and certainly what my brothers were like with each other.
With attention being sparce due to a father living his rock n roll lifestyle and his mother run ragged by working and looking after the family, I thought that Valeri's brother had probably felt resentful that he had to share the little attention he had with a little brother and probably why he had tormented him even though in my experience that is what brothers did.
Valeri's brother had in my opinion done nothing that was that bad to him but I sensed that it had terrified Valeri at the time and this fear had manifested itself in to his adult life causing him not to feel safe still.
His brother had held him down once and Valeri said he was petrified and he felt helpless as his brother drippled spit into ear.
Another time his brother gave him some of his poo and told him it was chocolate. Not nice but I did not see it as anything more than a silly prank that an 8 year old brother would do to his 3 year old brother!
Valeri also told me that he remembered his brother pushing him in the pushchair and when out of sight of their mother, his brother speeded up and was tipping it from side to side and stopped when their mother appeared again...
These things to me I saw as no big deal but to Valeri they were traumatic and still were...
Valeri had said that his mother did not believe him when he told her what his brother did and that had caused him much resentment.
Valeri had said that his mother often hit him for what he felt was no reason and without hearing his side of things first and often assumed the worst of him.
Valeri told me about the time he had a skateboard and the little girl who he grew up with who was not allowed to go on it, took the skateboard anyway and went on it and ended up falling off and hurting herself. The little girl then told Valeri's mother and her mother that Valeri had let her go on it and when he said that it was a lie and she had just taken it after he said no, his mother hit him anyway and threw the skateboard away.
Valeri had said that when he confronted his mother about this 20 years later, she claimed that she could barely recall it and because of this, Valeri had become even more incensed by it as instead of seeing it as insignificant to his mother because it was not something she ever dreamed would hurt him, he saw it as her now lying about not remembering it as a sign of guilt and something that she was not prepared to admit because she thought so little of him!
I felt that his mother was probably just so tired and at the end of her tether that she had probably lashed out as she couldn't cope with the constant drama of it all and it was probably insignificant to her at the time in comparison to the bigger picture and something she didnt even remember at the time as a big deal, let alone now. I doubt she was even aware that it would effect him at all at the time and certainly would not have done it if she thought for one moment it would still affect him so much over 20 years later.
Valeri's mother left Valeri's father eventually after years of broken promises and abuse (as I saw it) and they went to live with his grandmother.
Valeri's mother divorced his father and did not fight for half of their home which to me is understandable as she wanted a clean break from him and to continue the saga by a lengthy process of fighting for half of a house which in Bulgaria was not easy for a woman to do was something I feel she just did not have the energy to do.
However Valeri also resented his mother for this and felt she had put her own needs before theirs. However he failed to see that if he his father was a decent man he would have offered half the house without a legal battle and failing this, he will leave it to his sons on his death anyway as is the tradition in Bulgaria.
As it happened his father was to sell half of his land in the future and keep the profits for himself.
When Valeri was 14 his mother left him with his grandmother to finish school and she moved to Italy.
This part of his life I do feel was wrong of his mother to do.
Valeri was a boy who was in his adolescent years, going through changes and showing signs of struggling with life in his most important years of development into an adult was the time he needed his mother the most...but she left him!
I dont know her side of the story so it would be wrong of me to judge but I am in no doubt that this event has alot to do with why Valeri is the person he is today.
Valeri is full of insecurities and I feel he was not too dissimilar to a Huckleberry Finn character who was left to find his own way.
However he did have privileges in later life that he failed to see.
Such as his family buying him an apartment.
However Valeri felt wronged that he was not given the opportunity to input into the decor of the apartment and as a result he subsequently ripped out the kitchen in a act of rebellion against what he felt was the control he was still under from his family.
I saw his point to a degree but still felt that he was ungrateful to act in that manner when given the poverty in Bulgaria he had been bought an apartment by his family which I felt he should have been extremely thankful for and if I had ever been in that situation of being brought an apartment by my family I would have been extremely grateful.
Sadly Valeri was too bitter and resentful to be thankful for anything in his life!
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