One Saturday morning long ago, a deranged 52-year-old man attempted to shoot the family of a suburban squash centre manager at their home, and then to destroy the nearby crowd-filled centre using his car's jerrycan-loaded cabin and brimming fuel tank as an improvised explosive device. Through the combination of an over-ambitious endgame, the extraordinary courage and decisiveness of several bystanders, and an abundance of blind serendipity, only the perpetrator himself was killed.

'Armed man amok, dies in car blaze', screamed the tabloid headline.   

Precipitating this rampage was a seemingly minor (squash-related) disagreement between this man and his own fifteen-year-old son—the principal intended target.

I was (and remain) that son. Later, I became (but for mental health reasons am no longer) a medical doctor.

For my two siblings and me, trauma ensued less from the day of denouement than from our shared preceding early-life subjection to unremitting domestic tyranny, ever-hidden from the wider world. We had faced incessant hostile scrutiny from (within an ambience of intractable and increasingly murderous hatred imposed by) a singularly paranoid, misanthropic monster—our father. Devoid of psychotherapy-seeking insight and (notwithstanding occasional police interventions) never having crossed the criminal sanction threshold, he had evaded mental health and judicial system constraints. While he lived, my physical survival had necessitated continuous self-surveillance and self-straitjacketing, despite which the inevitability of mortal violence had crescendoed.

And the aftermath? Since my father's ostentatious demise, my self-doubts have been perpetuated by the shame of cascading failures in attaining rites of passage, life skills and personal goals. A life constrained by complex post-traumatic stress, anxiety/depression, and avoidant personality traits has been compensated by glimmers of redemption.

Enduring an act of overt ultraviolence may constitute merely the 'iceberg-tip' in a parental abuse survivor's experiential journey involving lifelong vulnerability to further (including occupational) trauma—along with healing opportunities.