The demons of childhood sexual abuse are stubborn, but can be banished

Even as I have grown older, I can still recall from my distant childhood some disconnected images of my father sitting by my bedside when I was sick; our walks along the seafront promenade that was then called Queen Elizabeth Walk; of my mother teaching me to write by tracing the strokes of the Chinese characters on my palm; and of the chicken noodles redolent of sesame oil she cooked on my birthdays.

- Chong Siow Ann

To this day, I still dream of my childhood - happy dreams, never troubled.

When I became a psychiatrist, I became more grateful that my parents gave me a stable and secure childhood that a number of my patients did not have. I remember a chronically depressed man, orphaned when he was eight; another with panic attacks and recurring nightmares of his father beating him with a chain when he was a boy; a woman with borderline personality disorder whose mother abandoned her as a 10-year-old to her stepfather who sexually abused her, and many others where there was this thread that spooled out from a traumatic childhood to a subsequent disruptive and even destructive life.

Much of what happens to us in our childhood sets the course and character of our later life. The pioneering study on what is referred to as adverse childhood experiences, or ACEs (a term encompassing various traumatic experiences that children experience before the age of 18, including emotional, physical or sexual abuse; emotional or physical neglect; parental separation or divorce; or living in a household in which domestic violence occurs) was done in the US in the mid-1990s on some 17,000 participants. It found a strong and direct link between childhood trauma and adult onset of chronic disease (both physical and mental), incarceration, and work problems.