Breaking the Cycle

I just spent a week working with a group of people who want to build a better future for themselves. All had difficult life stories. Many had spent time in prison. And, unusually for these courses, the majority were women.

I witnessed a lot of honesty and courage this week, a lot of wisdom and support, and an intense desire to bring up their own children to choose a different path.

Their stories reinforced my belief that the way the teenage years are handled are critical: it is so easy to create alienation when the support of adults is most needed but least likely to be ask for, our disapproval pushing teenagers into the very company we don't want them to keep.

The pain these women and their children have been through breaks my heart. But there is hope too: facing and moving on from their past may allow the women to break the cycle and not to pass their troubles on to the next generation.

Reflections of a boy biker

I did everything I could to fit into any gang that would have me in the 70’s. Long hair, unwashed, jeans full of holes, leather jacket with studs and a 750cc Triumph Bonneville motorcycle with extra loud exhaust pipes. I left school at 16 with poor grades from my exams but managed to talk my way into a job. Today my friends are mostly university professors or company directors. Punk Rock is a major feature on our iPods, we exchange old stories of teenage sex, drugs, parties and run-ins with the police that surprise most kids today, mostly because that is not what they would expect of “successful” adults.

That suggests two things two me:
1)  You never know who these boys could become.
2)  They never know who they could become.

I got a couple of breaks. An older prototype wireman at an electronics firm I worked for had been a motorcyclist and his son a drug addict. He was tough but compassionate. He never judged me for my lifestyle, he never acted like a parent, he bought me beer when I was underage and told me obscene jokes whilst teaching me the trade. It was my first real adult relationship.

At the same company the Technical Director gave me my big chance. He had been a motorcyclist and a 60’s “Rocker” enjoying fighting with the Teds on Brighton seafront. He did not see me as just another oik on a motorbike. He saw me as a comrade to join him in an internal company revolution to improve business process's and quality control. He became my next mentor and I have never looked back.

Thank you Doug “Mac” McWilliams and John Freeman of Audix Ltd for some of the most critical experiences of my life between 1978 and 1984.

James Carroll
Founder & CEO THOR Photomedicine Ltd http://www.thorlaser.com
Fellow Royal Society of Medicine
Assoc Member Institute of Physics