I was born into a family of father, mother, a brother and a sister. My brother was a few years older than me, my sister just over a year older.

We lived in a flat above a shop that my mother ran. My father had other employment. We lived in what was my first home for the first seven years of my life.

I have very few memories of this time. Despite two years of complex trauma counselling, most memories of occasions, smells, tastes, images, feelings, or thoughts, still evade me.

My first memory is a visual and sensory one as a baby. I recall being held by my father, seeing my mother some distance behind him past his right arm, looking on. I sensed him holding me, with his hands all over my body. It was a strange sense, his hands holding and feeling over me rather than arms supporting me.

My next memory was being in a bath, facing my sister. Although I have no sense of my age, I remember that we were sat with our backs to opposite ends of the bath, with some distance between our feet even with legs outstretched. She was a year older than me, so I reason that I must have been around a year to eighteen months old.

I don't feel a dislike of my, nor do I feel any sense of connection, more a sense of competition.

To my right is my father leaning over the side of the bath. He must have been kneeling as his elbows were only just above the bath rim.

My father tells my sister to get out of the bath. She protests and moves slowly. My father's hand grabs her arm and pulls her to stand up and then over the rim of the bath. I can clearly visualise her small naked body in front of me, before she is pulled and clambers out of the bath.