I had no personal contact with Terry Waite until April, 2024. Up until then, he was someone who I knew had been held captive in Beirut before being finally released in 1991. I read his memoir, Taken on Trust, and knew he founded YCare, Hostage International and was President for the homeless charity Emmaus UK. In April, in my greenhouse, I listened to Terry reading his reflections and poems in his book: Out of Silence (SPCK 2016). In it, he reflects on the conflicts and forces within the corridors of our minds. He speaks about the effects of deprivation and torture and the contradictions that can remain in the mind, robbing peace and joy.
As a trauma therapist, I work with parts of minds that are frequently in conflict with one another, and other parts that rumble away and then can spring up when we are overwhelmed or if trust is broken. I felt sure his poems would help and console many. I loved the fact that Terry writes these poems and is encouraged by others to do so. When he reads them himself, they have a simplicity and a profundity that touches mystery. I also find poems are a way to connect pain but also beauty and can link them together. I think that Terry understands this function of poetry.
Here is something that he wrote on anger, which I have spoken about already with folk who are finding ways to use anger creatively:
Anger rages like a consuming fire
Destroying all that would impede
Its relentless pathway
Do not extinguish the flames totally
Calm them and warm yourself
By the gentle glow of the embers
Terry is also someone who understands therapy and the capacity in relationship to be understood and healed by contact with another person. So I took the risk of writing to Terry about my trauma book, about what I felt about the poems and, after a little while, he responded and asked to zoom with me. When we first met on zoom, within the first few minutes of our conversation, he silenced me by telling me that although his experience of extreme deprivation in solitary confinement and torture was truly terrible, he is grateful for the experience as it has taught him about human suffering.
The effect on me of hearing those words from Terry, as I imagined, if only to a small degree, the magnitude his extreme suffering, was deeply humbling. I have continued to be humbled by his response to me, by the no-nonsense way he engaged with me and the book, his willingness to write the foreword, record a video and most especially by his appreciation of my intention in the book to help both individuals in high stress professions and sufferers from trauma to find a way through to hope, peace, joy and creativity once again.
If you pre-order my book with a 15% discount before 20 November, you will also receive a link to the unedited video interview between Philippa and Terry Waite.