`Running". That's how Martin Duffy, a 48year-old film-maker, describes the 35 years of his life between the ages of 12 and 47. The agony and the anger which made him run also informed his art - he's probably best known for his film, The Boy from Mercury. That's little solace, however, for the fact that the agony and anger also poisoned his relationships with women over the years, and distanced him from his own sons.
Like many men (and women), Duffy withdrew or became enraged when faced with the emotional demands of intimacy. It took years for him to realise that he was even doing this, then more years to discover why. He admits that, during this journey, he wasn't always easy to live with.
"People have told me I was terrifying when I was angry," he says. He worked hard in psychotherapy to discover the source of his rage and get it under control. During a life of serially monogamous relationships with women, Duffy has fathered two sons (aged 22 and 26) and a daughter (aged four-and-a-half) with two different mothers. The relationships with both women ended painfully for Duffy, and one can only assume for the women involved, although Duffy will not talk about their feelings out of respect for their privacy.
It's in their fifth decade that many adults begin to see the multi-generational patterns that infect their lives, and Duffy is at that stage. When he entered psychotherapy for the first time in an attempt to discover the source of his pain, the focus was on his own father, who had emotionally abandoned him. "An unloved son becomes an unloving father who spawns unloved sons," he says sadly.
After this realisation, Duffy thought he had found the key to resolving his emotional distress. But a few years later, the pain emerged again. It was only during a second go at psychotherapy that he discovered it wasn't his cold, withdrawn father that was the sole source of his problems. He learned that, actually, his relationship with his father had been damaged by a trusted adult, who had inflicted something far more traumatic, which would send seismic waves through his life.
As a 12-year-old, Duffy was smart, outgoing, a "leader of the pack" who excelled academically. By the time he turned 13, however, he was a broken, introverted, terrified boy who hyperventilated, vomited and had panic attacks when he was forced to leave the house. The words "sexual abuse" have become so commonly used that it's easy to forget the power of the sexual sadism and emotional manipulation involved.
Duffy recalls: "The feelings I remember are of powerlessness. I felt: `I can do nothing about this. I have no control over this. This person can do whatever he wants to me'."
Duffy cannot recall a precise sequence of incidents at the hands of the trusted adult, only that the sexual sadism was a constant threat. As a result, says Duffy, "I just caved in on myself. I would not leave the safety of the house. My sister remembers my mum making me go outside to sit on the railing. I was hyperventilating, could not cope. I was vomiting and not talking".
Once an excellent student, Duffy's distress was such that he was forced to pull out of a scholarship exam for secondary school, yet was afraid to tell his family why.
Looking back through therapy, Duffy came to realise that his father was emotionally unavailable due to the death of Duffy's 23-year-old brother, who was killed in a motorcycle accident the year before the abuse began. His father was so deeply affected that he drank a lot more after that and became less engaged.
In 1965, Duffy entered Blackrock College with the idea of becoming a priest. "I was a very imploded kid, very isolated," he says. Having been brought up to believe that God was "a great person" who you could turn to if you didn't have any friends, Duffy believed that his "primary relationship was with God".
At 15, Duffy left the college, girls having become his primary motivation by then. He got a job as an apprentice projectionist in a cinema where, like the boy in Cinema Paradiso, he watched both the shows and the people at a safe distance. "Standing back has been the hallmark of my life," he says.
He successfully passed his Leaving Cert, studying by correspondence course, and then became a film editor, learning the comfort of "sitting in a room manipulating images" at Ardmore Studios. When the studios closed, Duffy became a postman, which he enjoyed because he was out working while others were asleep and returned home as the world was waking up.
At 21, he married and had two sons. The marriage broke up when Duffy was 32, and his ex-wife brought the boys to the US, where they still live.
Other relationships and work as an editor in RTE followed. At the age of 37, when his mother was dying, Duffy entered therapy for the first time. He was having a difficult time coping with the grief of losing a wife, children and a mother in quick succession. During this first bout of therapy, which focused on Duffy's father, the deeply buried abuse didn't come up.
"I focused on my father and had blackened him in my heart. Through therapy, I remembered all the good things about him. He was a good man," Duffy says. Turning to writing, Duffy made his first film, The Boy from Mercury, in 1996 at the age of 43, after taking voluntary redundancy from RTE. He was by now in a second long-term relationship with a woman, with whom he had a daughter. The couple were having "real problems", caused, Duffy thinks, by his "emotional withdrawal".
"It was like being with someone, but in your own world. I had an issue around anger which never physically manifested itself. It was just a well of anger that could be tapped into," he says.
In 1997, Duffy left his partner and daughter behind and went to the US, where he made his latest film, The Bumble Bee, which has been nominated for a prize at the Berlin Film Festival next week.
After the filming, Duffy spent time in the UK, then in 1999 returned to the Republic because he wanted to spend more time with his daughter.
Discovering an Irish society in the throes of catharsis following the States of Fear documentary series, Duffy, like many other abuse survivors, found his own memories triggered. Entering therapy again last year, Duffy finally recognised that the cause of his anger was the man who "took away my childhood, took away my chance at academic success, took away my relationship with my father and took away my subsequent relationships with women. A child who was fresh, new and enthusiastic was destroyed".
Living on his own now, Duffy feels that the next time he enters a relationship, he will be "all there" and truly able to engage on an intimate level. He has worked hard at nurturing close relationships with his children.
"I'm a decent, moderately successful guy and reasonably capable of loving and being loved. I'm not nearly as bad as before," he says. What Duffy's story shows is how one abuser's acts can have a devastating effect not just on the victims, but on their families and children for many generations.
In the midst of this, an artist was born - but that's small comfort, really.