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.
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Author Bio:
About the Author
Peter Gates is a Scottish author writing from lived experience. He grew up in the housing schemes of Glasgow during the 1980s, leaving school at sixteen before spending years navigating a world he never chose and escaping one he built himself.
He spent nearly fifteen years working in the telecoms industry, rising from entry-level work to managing high-value projects for major businesses across the UK — before chronic pain and the long-term effects of early trauma forced him into medical retirement.
He began writing in fragments. In a car. On a bed. Because if he didn’t get it out while he could, it wasn’t going to get out at all.
His debut memoir, Abused. Used. Broken. Spat Out!, was followed by The Abused & The Used — a more structured account of the conditioning, the collapse, and the cause and effect behind both. Those two books are now collected in a single volume: Abused, Used, Broken, Spat Out!: The Complete Memoir.
His first work of fiction, Blood on the Clyde: A Scottish Crime Thriller, draws on the landscapes, tensions, and shadows of the life he left behind.
He writes under a pen name to protect the people he loves.