Sweet companions
Félix Chivite-Matthews 2018-2025
Autobiography, 212,000 words
Spaninsh version also availble following this link.
Topics: domestic abuse, childhood depression, dysfunctional family, feminicide, the suffering of children, adolescence, patricide, suicide, drug addiction, crime, eighties youth movements, forgiveness, freedom, practical theology, parenting.
Reader: parents, psychologists, sociologists, family therapists, addiction therapists, suicide and feminicide prevention therapy, childcare providers, educators, historians of seventies and eighties Spain, catechists.
Blurb
This is the story of a boy who feels betrayed and abandoned by Jesus in the face of relentless domestic abuse. It narrates the fall into apostasy, the consequences of turning his back on God, and the long journey back to faith and forgiveness. This is a case study in human suffering and how it can be understood through a Christian lens.
It also uncovers a kind of abuse the author was not aware of having suffered before writing the book: socio-cultural abuse.
An English university student falls in love with a Spanish man while on a summer course in France. From that moment on, she becomes a prisoner of abuse. This story is told from the point of view of her eldest child, the writer, who tries to answer many of the questions he has had all his life. For example: Why didn’t she leave her abuser? What was wrong with his own father? How do we understand the undeserved pain suffered by children? Is it possible to cure the past? What is the spiritual path that leads us to forgiveness and peace? Writing this autobiography gives the author the opportunity to connect with his past, to face the events of abuse suffered in childhood, and to try and understand his own parents with the maturity of an adult.
Synopsis
The author writes a letter to his children detailing a situation of family abuse in which he was involved from his childhood to his adolescence. The author's children become characters in this story by giving him the opportunity to be the father he himself did not have and to vindicate his own youth: "You are not going to have a stolen childhood, a childhood of abuse, sadness, hunger and cold”. However, forty years later, there are still many unanswered questions. Among them: why the abuse occurred, why it was allowed to continue for years, and why the victims and witnesses remain silent.
“The more I think about sharing these memories, the more I realise there can be no turning back. Silence encourages abuse. It's time to talk. There are many unanswered questions. We all need to talk.”
The effort to remember those years of chaos and abuse plunges the author into a kind of terrifying psychoanalysis through which depression and psychopathies are revisited. The characters in the book possess the writer to the point of causing him psychotic episodes as if the letter were truly cursed.
At the same time, the author discovers, in this exploration of his past, that his father was not the cause of all his suffering, but that there is a whole network of sociocultural abuse; an abuse that is described as a brutalisation process to which we are all subjected and that leaves us vulnerable to all types of depravity.
As a result of this dulling process, the main character develops a patricidal, suicidal and antisocial conscience in his adolescence, which will lead him to school failure, drug addiction, crime and militancy in the “movida”, a Spanish youth movement of the eighties.
However, as the author shares with his children, “despite the abuse, my childhood was filled with magic, love, incredible characters, and freedom. It's a positive story, I assure you; my best history. I don't want you to miss it.” Indeed, this book pays tribute to all those people who, perhaps without realising it, were guardian angels for a family affected by domestic violence.
One of the biggest unknowns in this story is undeserved suffering. In the search for answers to the suffering of children, a new character will emerge, Jesus Christ, who will gradually become the main character in the story, because only Christ explains pain and only Christ gives meaning and foundations to life.
Sweet Companions is written from the perspective of forgiveness and describes the abuser as just another victim. That is why it is a positive story that seeks answers to a problem that is normally oversimplified. This biography immerses us in the confusing world of the dysfunctional family, the mistreatment suffered at the hands of loved ones, and the helplessness of childhood depression. Furthermore, it encourages us to share our experiences of abuse and to engage in honest and conciliatory dialogue.
About the author
Felix Chivite-Matthews has worked as a teacher, translator and designer since 1990. Having read Linguistics at Southampton University, his first specialism is teaching English as a Foreign Language. Felix is also a Christian artist. He has published a care guide, a novel, and several children's stories.
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