It’s strange what your mind chooses to keep
I remember the view, clear as anything. One of those moments where everything slows down the kind you don’t get often. We were up in the Scottish Highlands, the kids with me, just taking it all in. It felt safe enough. Not reckless, not careless just a family on a mountain enjoying the day. I remember turning to Toby and telling him to be careful. I remember warning him about the drop, saying something like, “If you go down there, you’re not coming back up.” Just a dad’s instinct, a throwaway warning you don’t think twice about at the time. May, Isla and Henry were just ahead of us, ten feet or so in front. Close enough that we were all together in that moment. And then… nothing.
No slip. No loss of footing. No memory of falling. That entire part gone. The next thing I know, I’m there, halfway down a mountainside on a slope that doesn’t feel like somewhere you’re meant to be. The angle’s wrong, the ground feels wrong and yet somehow that’s where I am. I’d slid around 100 metres. One minute I’m stood at the top, warning my son about the danger. The next, I’m the one who’s gone over. But while I lost that moment… they didn’t.
Toby saw it. He told me later he watched me reach out, trying to grab a tree something, anything to stop myself, but there was nothing there to hold onto. He didn’t scream straight away. He couldn’t. He was in shock, trying to process what he was seeing. Then it hit him. Behind him, May, Isla and Henry turned and realised what was happening. They saw their dad her partner of eighteen years sliding headfirst down a mountainside. Arms pinned back, almost like a penguin on ice. Except this wasn’t ice. There was no control. No stopping it.
And the hardest part to hear back is what May saw in my face. She said it didn’t look like me. Not panic. Not fear. Not even awareness. Just… nothing. Like no one was home. Like a ghost of the person she knew, sliding further away from her. And I didn’t feel any of it. I didn’t know it was happening. But they did. They saw everything.
Where my memory cuts out
Theirs carries on. For me, it’s like flicking between moments. No clean timeline, no full picture just snapshots.
There was no pain. That’s the strange part. No sudden wave of agony, no clear sense that my body had taken a huge impact. What hit first wasn’t physical it was panic. Deep, gut-level panic. Because the first real awareness I had wasn’t what had happened… it was where I was. One small movement, and I’m gone. Above me a drop. Below me an even bigger one. And somewhere further down, maybe another 150 metres, I could hear water rushing. Fast, loud not a gentle stream but a rocky river, swollen from rain.
I remember hearing May. “JOSH!” Over and over, panic in her voice. I was answering or I thought I was saying “I’m okay,” trying to reassure her. But she couldn’t hear me. I could hear her telling the kids to be quiet so she could listen. And all I could do was keep saying it: “I’m okay.” Then… nothing again.
The next moment I remember, there’s a man above me, holding onto a tree like he knew exactly how unstable the ground was. He was talking, but I couldn’t process it. I asked him to repeat himself. And again, I responded with the same thing: “I’m okay.” He looked at me, almost in disbelief. “How are you alive? How did you stop? You shouldn’t be here. I’ve seen people keep going… and die.” That stuck, because it mirrored exactly what was going through my own head. How did I stop? I didn’t remember anything that explained why I was still there.
Then another gap. Suddenly I’m somewhere else on the slope, closer to a tree. No memory of getting there. Then a jolt someone dragging me up. Another blank. The next clear moment: I see May. She’s wedged into a fallen tree, holding herself in place, reaching out to me, telling me to take her hand. She told me later I refused, afraid I’d pull her down with me. I don’t remember saying it, but it sounds like something I’d think. Then another blank. Until suddenly I’m back at the top, holding Henry, who’s in tears.
The fall lasted seconds. What came after didn’t.
Once the immediate danger passed, you assume things will settle. That you’ll dust everyone off and carry on. But it doesn’t work like that not when they’ve seen what mine saw. Later I looked at my watch. It had recorded the movement: roughly 100 metres at around 10 miles an hour. Seeing it like that made it feel even more real. Not just memory blur something measurable. And what they’d witnessed wasn’t small.
Each of them carried it differently. Henry was the most obvious in tears, clinging to me like I might disappear again. Not just upset shaken. The kind of crying that comes from fear, from something huge he couldn’t understand. Isla went quieter. Stayed close. Kept looking at me, checking I was still there. And Toby… Toby saw everything from the start. He saw me go. He saw me try to stop it. He saw the part I don’t remember. And that stays with a kid.
There’s a moment as a parent when you realise this isn’t something you can explain away. Because in their heads, it wasn’t fine. In their heads, they’d already played out what could have happened. That’s where the flashbacks start. The questions. The quiet moments when you can tell they’re reliving it. Night times changed that’s when it comes back. You hear it in little ways: “I didn’t like that day.” “I thought you were gone.”
And that’s the hardest part. Because as a dad, your instinct is to protect them. To be the safe one. But in this case… I was the thing that caused the fear. Not through recklessness. Not through a bad decision. Just… a moment. And you can’t take that away from them. You can’t rewind it. All you can do is sit with it alongside them. Answer the same questions more than once. Reassure them in ways that sometimes don’t feel like enough. And hope, over time, it softens. But it doesn’t disappear. Not straight away.
The Helplessness as a Dad
What people don’t see is what happens after.
Not the fall. Not the rescue. Not the moment everyone realises you’re still here. But the hours and days that follow. Because while everything on the outside looks like it’s settled, inside it’s anything but.
This happened on day two of our holiday in Scotland. Day two. We were meant to have the rest of the week ahead of us. Walks planned. Time together. Something we’d all been looking forward to. And suddenly, everything had changed.
On the surface, I had to be steady. That’s what they needed. They needed their dad to be okay. To be calm. To show them that everything was under control, that nothing had really changed, that they were still safe. So that’s what I did. I kept my voice level, told them I was fine, reassured them over and over again.
But the reality was, I was terrified.
Not just of what had happened, but of what could have happened. Because once it starts to sink in, you realise how close it was. How easily that could have gone a different way.
I found myself going off on my own, even if it was just for a few minutes. Sitting on the toilet. Shaking. Crying. Trying to keep it together without them seeing. Because I couldn’t let that side of it spill out in front of them. They needed strength. But every time I had a moment alone, it all came out.
The fear. The guilt. The thought that they nearly lost their dad. That I’d put them in a position where they had to watch that happen.
And there’s something that sits heavy with that. A strange feeling of guilt for being alive. Because you start to realise how easily you might not have been. Then there was the part I wasn’t prepared for at all. Seeing it in them, out in the real world. Every time we went anywhere, I could feel it. Eyes on me. Watching where I was. Making sure I was still there. I wasn’t allowed out of their sight, not really. And as much as I understood why, it got to me.
Because something about that flips everything on its head. As a dad, you’re supposed to be the one watching them. The one keeping track. The one making sure they’re safe. Not the other way around. But suddenly, it was. And it made me feel vulnerable in a way I hadn’t felt before.
Henry felt it the most. Clinging onto me, wanting to hold my hand. Even on the walk-up Ben Lomond, he didn’t want to let go. And part of me wanted to tell him, “You’re okay, you don’t need to do that.” But another part of me knew exactly why he did. Because he thought he might lose me again.
At night, it didn’t switch off. That’s when it got worse. As soon as things went quiet, as soon as I started drifting off, it was there. Not the full fall, just flashes. Cliff edges. That moment before you go. Over and over again. Sleep wasn’t really sleep. It started to creep into everything else.
Driving, We took a trip over to the Isle of Skye. Something that should have been enjoyable, just another part of the holiday. But I couldn’t do it. I got behind the wheel, and something didn’t feel right. My heart started racing. Palpitations. I felt like I was going much faster than I was, like I wasn’t fully in control. I had to pull over. Got out of the car and just cried, because in that moment, I didn’t recognise myself. I didn’t know who I was. I didn’t know who was driving that car. And that’s a frightening place to be.
Because it’s not just the memory anymore. It’s something else. Something that’s followed you.
And through all of that, I still felt like I had to be strong. To keep things normal. To keep that “happy Scotland holiday” feeling going for the kids. To not let it become something bigger than it already was.
So I pushed it down. Kept going. Put one foot in front of the other, but looking back now, that was just the start of it. The start of something much bigger than I realised at the time.
The start of things beginning to slip mentally. The start of going somewhere darker.
I just didn’t know it yet!
Trying to Get Help
What I didn’t realise at the time was that the fall wasn’t the end of it. It was the beginning.
When we got back from Scotland, I knew something wasn’t right. Not just physically, but mentally. I didn’t feel like myself, and I couldn’t just ignore it. I knew I needed help, so I started looking for it.
That’s where things got even harder.
Every avenue I tried felt like it led to a closed door. I was reaching out, explaining what had happened, how I was feeling, and being told I didn’t meet the criteria. Not severe enough. Not the right pathway. Not eligible. You start to question yourself at that point. Am I overreacting? Should I just be dealing with this? Why does it feel this bad if I’m being told it’s not?
So I went to the GP. I explained everything, the fall, the flashbacks, the fear, the way it was affecting me day to day. I was struggling to sleep properly because every time I started drifting off, I’d see it again, that moment before the drop, over and over.
I was given sleeping tablets to help with that. They worked in one sense, but they took it out of me completely. I didn’t feel like myself on them, just drained. So that was changed, and I was put on anti-anxiety medication to try and take the edge off what I was feeling day to day.
That’s when the GP said it. That what I was experiencing was trauma-related, that it pointed towards PTSD. In a strange way, hearing that almost helped. It finally put a name to it. It meant I wasn’t just not coping, there was a reason it felt like this.
But even then, the help didn’t follow.
I had already referred myself to talking therapies, trying to do the right thing and get ahead of it. When I spoke to them, they told me I needed trauma counselling. But they couldn’t offer it. I wasn’t severe enough, not life-threatening, and because I had a diagnosis of binge eating disorder, I couldn’t do two therapies at once.
So I was stuck in this strange position. Being told I needed help, but not being able to access it. Five months on, I’m still waiting for the BED therapy, and in the meantime, dealing with everything else on my own.
That’s the part that’s hard to explain. You’re told you need help. You accept that you need help. You reach out for it. And then you’re left in limbo.
At the same time, it wasn’t just me. I could see it in the kids.
Toby started lashing out. Not like him. Snapping at people, reacting in ways that didn’t make sense unless you knew what he’d seen. Isla was getting flashbacks. Quietly carrying it, but you could tell it was there. The what ifs sitting in her head, the thought that I might not have come back.
And Henry was having nightmares.
He tried to explain it once, and it stuck with me straight away. He said it felt like he couldn’t hold his scream in, like it was building up inside him and he couldn’t stop it.
That wasn’t just a random fear. That came from that moment on the mountain.
When May was shouting my name, trying to hear if I was okay, she told the kids to be quiet so she could listen. And Henry physically put his hand over his mouth. A six-year-old, holding his own scream in, trying to help his mum hear his dad.
That’s the part that breaks me. Because that’s not something a child should ever feel responsible for.
In that moment, he wasn’t just scared. He was trying to help. Trying to do his bit. Trying to make sure his dad was still there.
And that stayed with him. It came back in his sleep. That same feeling of trying to hold it in, trying to stay quiet, trying to control something that no child should ever have to control.
As a dad, that’s hard to carry. Because you realise it wasn’t just a moment for them. It became something they took away with them, something that followed them home.
I knew then I had to find something for them. So I contacted the school, let them know what had happened, tried to put something in place, anything that might help them process it.
Every lunch break, I was in the car on the phone. Calling therapists, speaking to services, repeating the story over and over again, hoping someone would say yes, we can help. But it felt like I was just going round in circles.
At the same time, work didn’t stop. My boss told me I needed to get help, and he was right, but I wasn’t in the right frame of mind to even process that properly because of the doors that had been shut in front of me. I remember losing my temper shouting I AM TRYING! And just took some time to collect myself.
I took five days off as soon as we got back from Scotland. Five days. That was it. I met with my boss on the Thursday before I was due back, and it was made clear that those were the five days I had as hard as that was for him to tell me. So, I knew I had to go back, whether I was ready or not.
And I wasn’t.
So, I did what I thought I had to do. I pushed it all down.
At work, I wasn’t myself. I was short-tempered, snappy, a version of me that wasn’t really me, but I didn’t have the capacity to be anything else. People noticed. People talked. Some found out about the fall, and when they asked about it, it took everything in me not to break down.
All project work was taken off me.
Lunch breaks became something else entirely. I’d go out to the car, drive somewhere quiet, and just sit there and sob. Because I didn’t recognise who I was becoming. No excitement, no patience, just trying to get through the day.
And that followed me home.
I’d walk through the door, hear the kids arguing, and instead of dealing with it, I’d just break down. All I wanted was peace. Then I’d hear footsteps, wipe my eyes, pull myself together, because they couldn’t see that. They needed me to be steady, even when I wasn’t.
It got to the point where I had a meeting with HR, and I just broke. Sat there and sobbed, because I didn’t know what to do anymore.
I felt guilty for what my family had been through. Guilty that they’d seen it. Guilty that I couldn’t explain how it happened, or why I stopped.
And underneath all of that, there was still that same thought.
That I shouldn’t be here. That somehow, I’d walked away from something I wasn’t meant to.
And I didn’t know how to make sense of that.
What I’ve Learned (And Where I Am Now)
I don’t think something like that ever fully leaves you.
Time moves on. Life carries on. From the outside, everything starts to look normal again, but underneath, something’s changed.
For me, it’s not just the memory of the fall. It’s everything that came with it. What my kids saw. What it did to them. What it did to me.
Things started to shift when I found the right help. My boss could see how much I was struggling and how many doors were being shut, so he asked about private therapy through work. That’s how I was introduced to Naomi, who specialises in trauma.
From the start, it felt different. She listened. She didn’t judge. We worked through something called the rewind technique. I’ll be honest, I thought it sounded like mumbo jumbo at first, but I gave it a go.
It was intense. Draining. On one session, it took 20 minutes to bring me back down. I was shaking, sobbing, clammy, completely overwhelmed. I felt like I was there again, watching myself fall, unable to do anything to stop it.
She asked me, “What’s the worst that can happen?” I said, “I don’t help myself.” She said, “The worst has already happened. Why are you trying to stop it?” And the only answer I had was to stop him feeling this pain.
The technique worked. The flashbacks stopped. The nightmares stopped. But it opened something else.
Things from my past, my childhood, guilt, shame. Things that were already there, just buried.
I even said I was going to stop going, because it felt like it was pulling me away from my family. May said I’d become distant, that I wasn’t seeing the fun in anything. But she also said I had to keep going. I’d opened that box, and I needed to deal with what was inside it.
As hard as it is, and as much as I don’t want to feel like this anymore, if that means dealing with my past and rebuilding properly, then that’s what I need to do.
I’m still working through it. Some days are better than others.
Toby and Isla are still waiting for therapy, five months on. This happened in October 2025, and I’m sitting here writing this in March 2026. Still waiting. Still trying to support them as best we can.
And May… she’s the rock of the family. I don’t know how she does it. Through all of this, she’s held everything together. Because of her, I’m still able to be her partner. I still get to be the kids’ dad, and that’s something I don’t take for granted anymore.
If there’s one thing I’d say to anyone reading this, it’s this. Don’t ignore it. Don’t push it down and carry on like nothing happened. Talk about it. Ask for help. Even if doors get shut, keep going. Don’t be ashamed to cry in front of your family. We are human after all.
Because there is help out there. You will find the right person.
I’m not there yet, but I’m getting there. The journey is hard, but I will get there.
And if you’re going through something like this, you will too.
