Abused, Used, Broken, Spat Out! : The complete memoir. by Peter Gates
Abused, Used, Broken, Spat Out!: The Complete Memoir
This is not a story of triumph. It is a document of survival.
Peter Gates grew up in the schemes of Glasgow during the Thatcher years — moving between schools, moving between houses, never long enough to settle. At nine years old, something happened that changed the architecture of everything that followed. It went on for years. Nobody asked the right questions. Nobody knew to look.
By sixteen he was out of school and pulled into a world that recognised what he could do and used it. The drug world didn’t ask for qualifications. It simply needed men who could read a room, hold their nerve, and never write anything down. He was all of those things. He survived it. He got out.
What came next looked like a normal life. A wife. Children. A career in telecoms that took him from the bottom of a call centre to managing contracts worth hundreds of millions. Nobody in that world knew where he had come from. He made sure of it.
But the body keeps score.
By his early thirties the pain had started. Not dramatically — just present, every day, building. Years of appointments, referrals, medications tried and removed. Eventually a diagnosis that named the symptoms without explaining the cause. Then the job gone. Then the medical retirement. Then the dark rooms and the Monday mornings and the pills counted out in the right order.
This book is two memoirs in one volume. The first was written in fragments — in a car on the school run, on a bed when the pain allowed. Raw, unfiltered, out of order. Because that is how trauma lives. The second was written in seventy-two hours straight because the first left too much unsaid. Together they form the complete story — the abuse, the conditioning, the underworld, the escape, the collapse, and what remains.
What remains is this: a father who stayed. A cycle that stopped. A truth that refused to stay buried.
This is not inspiration. It is documentation. And it is the full story.
