The Pain behind Paradise

Episode 1 – The Unknown Danger of Vows

Hello everyone, this is Stephen Leslie France here and I’m the writer of The Paradise Induction.

Welcome to The Pain behind Paradise.

I’m creating this series of episodes for two main reasons.

One is to answer some general questions of readers, who have dived into the world of protagonist Christopher Charles in The Paradise Induction.

The other is to promote the book to people, unaware of the novel’s presence in our saturated book market.

For this first episode, I wanted to address the query, did this story really happen?

Now, first off, if you’ve read the book you will know exactly why several readers have asked this question.

If you haven’t read it, I invite you to sample the first three chapters online; it isn’t a pleasant journey to say the least, but it is a true story of my own attempt to escape mediocrity, and the feeling of failure.

I did this by emigrating from the rat race City of London to the striking tropical paradise of the Caribbean.

But the question, did this really happen? has emerged several times because of the graphic nature of the harsher elements that arise.

The short answer is: “yes, this happened.”

Christopher Charles is the fictional representative I created to retell my voluntary exile from London to the tropical islands of the Caribbean, and so he bears all the experiences that came with it. 

I made some amendments to the story so that the narrative flowed, and the ‘air conditioning’ situation on the plane at the beginning was formed as a comical, light-hearted introduction. But essentially, that jovial tone was to prepare the way for descent into the claustrophobia of a true story.

Now, one listening or reading this might say, “wait a second – Claustrophobia?”

The word ‘claustrophobia’ is not exactly vocabulary that fits a plot, detailing a person’s escape from the polluted, congested city of London to the lush tropics of the Caribbean.

However, I invite you to read and find out how the lead character Christopher Charles experiences this feeling of entrapment…

I suppose a fuller answer to this question ‘did this really happen?’ would be to explain why Christopher Charles—my fictional surrogate—stayed in the Caribbean for the length of time he did.

The reason is to do with the matrix of pain within Chris’ childhood. And this is something where you the reader might empathise.

When Chris was hurt in his childhood and teenage years, he subconsciously and consciously made vows, oaths, and promises.

This was an automatic defence mechanism and because he had no awareness of its existence, it piloted his life on an invisible, intangible, and covert level.

The most common vow that emerges in this defensive system, is the silent promise:

I will NEVER be hurt in this way again.

This led Chris to a series of conscious and unconscious thoughts and actions, bringing him to activate the very powerful vow at twenty-five years old of leaving the country.

Christopher had felt he’d failed life in a very specific way, so this subconscious vow granted him a sense of control and power in an otherwise chaotic and uncontrollable situation.

The reason I mention this vow is because at the beginning of The Paradise Induction, Christopher Charles clearly explains that it feels like he’s being forced to leave the country.

He is not joyful or excited as one would expect, with a relocation to a more favourable climate and beautiful surroundings.

He is in fact apprehensive, fearful, and disturbed, genuinely feeling like he’s being kicked out of London.

This active oxymoron in this situation, highlights a deeper trauma that Chris is unaware he possesses.

He’s going forward with a powerful vow in his heart against his own conscious mind. This promise tells him, leave London, things will be better; all for the purpose of somehow salvaging what he perceives to be a failed existence.

This, is the Pain behind Paradise.

Chris chooses to leave for what he perceives to be paradise and stay in what ultimately becomes a very claustrophobic atmosphere, all because of a past trauma that is secretly governing his life.

The vow is so strong because of the pain behind it, that Chris cannot operate sensibly to simply leave the island paradise when things get…well, I don’t wish to give anything away, but let’s leave it at “claustrophobic.”

The pain behind Chris’s paradise can be summarised in this basic formula.

1. Chris was hurt in his childhood.
2. He made subconscious as well as conscious vows as a result of that pain.
3. The vows then came to life in full strength, blinding him to the obvious. By this point, he didn’t have the mental clarity to overcome the vows, hence his decision to leave London and also to stay in what must seem to readers like a very nasty situation.  

And that, is the pain behind paradise.

For those of you who read the novel, please look forward to the audiobook version which I intend to release late next year: 2020.

For those who haven’t, please sample the free chapters below and if you enjoy, read on…

What I can promise, is a descent into raw, undiluted Truth.

Please subscribe for instant updates, thank you for listening/reading, and join me next time for another episode of The Pain behind Paradise.