Domestic violence and a vicious shooting left Rawson with PTSD and a choice: would it make or break him?

Australia Broadcast Center

16 hours ago

Striding up busy Bondi Road in Sydney's aspirational eastern suburbs, personal trainer Rawson Kirkhope is a picture of strength and confidence — all delts and abs and quads and tattoos on tanned skin. He looks fit and well.
But Kirkhope hasn't always felt that way inside. For years he has lived with complex post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), a consequence of growing up in a violent home and, when he was 14, watching his father bash and shoot his mother as she cowered on the bathroom floor in front of him.
For years after the shooting Kirkhope tried to outrun his trauma, self-medicating with booze to blur the sharp edges of anxiety, soaking in the "toxic cultures" of football and the navy where the M.O. seemed to be: don't ever show you're in pain or struggling, just get on with it, man up.
Lately, though, he's been speaking out, sharing snippets of his "difficult past" on social media, talking in more detail about his "mental health journey" on podcasts, turning a struggle he was once ashamed of into a recovery story he's proud to share.
Speaking publicly about his PTSD has been cathartic, a form of therapy, says Kirkhope, a co-owner of VRTUS, a Bondi gym whose ethos revolves around community, vulnerability and connection.
He also wants to brighten the spotlight on domestic violence: on the deep physical and psychological scars it leaves — including on children, who are often referred to as "invisible victims" — and the sting of injustice he and many others have felt. For shooting his mother and at his sister his father was sentenced to four years' imprisonment and was released on parole after two. Weighed against the harm done to his family, Kirkhope feels strongly it wasn't enough.
Because Kirkhope's experience of abuse remains disturbingly common. Almost 44 per cent of young people surveyed for the Australian Child Maltreatment Study reported being exposed to domestic violence as children, with shocking numbers disclosing they'd suffered physical abuse (32 per cent), emotional abuse (31 per cent) and sexual abuse (29 per cent) themselves. Crucially, those who experienced at least one kind of maltreatment were much more likely to have severe health issues: they were three times more likely to have depressive and anxiety disorders and problems with alcohol, and five times more likely to be diagnosed with PTSD.
"It's crazy that this is still going on," says Kirkhope, now 38. "Especially with how much education we have around domestic violence — maybe that's something we can do more of. But it's horrible, and it's why I've decided to share my story … I want other people to know they can get through it. You're not alone."
Kirkhope's father — an "angry, arrogant, vindictive guy" — had always been violent, he says. But he became even more so after sustaining serious head injuries in a car accident in 1987, which impaired his ability to control his temper. His mother Angela copped the worst of it — he still remembers the shame of her driving him to school with black eyes, of feeling powerless to help — but he and his older sister Amelia suffered as well.
Growing up on a farm about 40 minutes' drive from Launceston in Tasmania, Kirkhope lived in a "constant state of fear". He became so hypervigilant he could tell what kind of mood his dad was in from the way he'd drive up their long gravel driveway (fast meant bad). "You'd do everything you could to avoid that bad mood coming on," he says.
Eventually, just before he finished primary school, Angela managed to leave. They moved into Launceston and, for a while, things seemed relatively calm. But in February 2001, the night before Kirkhope was supposed to start year nine, his dad barged into their home, having spotted Angela inside with a man she'd just started seeing. He shot at Amelia with a semi-automatic pistol, narrowly missing her, then chased Angela into the bathroom, striking her over the head with his gun and calling her a "two-timing bitch" as he shot her.
Miraculously, she survived. But Kirkhope, who watched on in horror from the shower, thought his mother had been killed. The bullet fractured her arm, shattered her sixth rib, passed through her lung and lodged in her liver, where it remains today (she still limits her travel because it's distressing having to explain to airport security why she sets off the metal detector).
Kirkhope doesn't remember much about what happened next; he knows his father smashed the telephone on his way out, making it harder to call police, and that Amelia found him under his bed. He didn't go back to school for three months.
Having to testify against his father in court was another trauma. "I felt like I was telling on him, which is a crazy way of looking at it now," Kirkhope says. "I wanted him to be held accountable but … I didn't want to have to go up against him. I still wanted his approval."
His dad was found guilty of two counts of aggravated assault and one count of committing an unlawful act intended to cause bodily harm. He pleaded not guilty, though, claiming he'd "slipped" and accidentally shot his ex-wife. At his sentencing hearing the judge called out his "cunning and violent temperament" and concluded he was "an all too typical example of a man who uses violence in a domestic situation and thereafter refuses to fully accept responsibility for the grievous wrong done".
It still bothers Kirkhope that his dad's initial charges — two counts of attempted murder — didn't stick. He says a prosecutor told his mother that they were being withdrawn because his dad, who'd served in the army, was a good shot and could have killed her if he wanted to. In other words, proving that he intended to kill was going to be difficult.
"But they also didn't take into account that he was right-handed when he was in the army," Kirkhope says. "Because he was later paralysed down his right side, he shot [Mum] with his left hand. I think they could have easily argued it."
It would be years before Kirkhope understood the impact of the trauma he'd experienced, that it had a name. Complex PTSD can develop in people who have been exposed to prolonged and repeated traumatic events, often interpersonal in nature, from which escape can seem impossible: chronic childhood abuse, domestic violence, and living in war zones are common examples.
"I was just a nervous wreck most of the time, constantly in fight-or-flight … always surveying the room, always looking for an 'out' in every conversation I had," Kirkhope says. Serving in the navy for eight years after he left school and hanging out in macho footy clubs made it easier to ignore the pain.
He drank, too, to numb his anxiety, to forget. He struggled to sleep. He pushed people away and "sabotaged" relationships — a subconscious strategy to leave before he could be left. "My mind was just constantly on," Kirkhope says. "I felt like I was just floating through life and didn't really have any purpose."
It took a relationship breakdown a few years ago for him to finally get professional help. He's worked with several therapists — talking, feeling and journalling his way through shame, guilt and grief, learning his triggers and how to manage them. He recognised his "victim mindset" — his "poor me" negativity spiral — was holding him back and that positivity was the path out.
And he's only recently stopped seeking in other people the validation he didn't get from his dad. "When he passed away when I was 19, it set me back big time," says Kirkhope, who wishes he'd been able to talk to his father about what he did — whether he was remorseful, "how it was going to result in him and I having a relationship". It probably wouldn't have changed anything, he says. "But it would have given me some closure. I would have been able to move on with my life a lot easier."
Perhaps one of Kirkhope's most powerful weapons has been friendship, especially with Hamish Young, with whom he runs VRTUS. Young was waiting for Kirkhope when he eventually went back to school in year nine, ready to support and protect him, and the two have been best mates since, bonding over their respective troubles — Kirkhope's trauma and Young's battle with Crohn's disease.
"Hamo is a brilliant man. He's very calm, very level-headed … He actually lives upstairs from me now, we do everything together," Kirkhope says. "My granddad bought me a weight bench when I was 15 and Hamish and myself just started training — we'd catch the bus home from school and train … we became kind of obsessed with it. We'd sit there and design the gyms that we were going to open one day."
The duo flung open the doors of VRTUS — named for the Roman goddess, Virtus — in late 2021, hoping to tap into the loneliness and listlessness many people were feeling during COVID lockdowns.
"Community and connection was something that had been taken away from people, so we really tried to focus on that," Kirkhope says. "We put a big emphasis on getting to know every single member. And we don't care if we have the most technical coaches in the world, it's about how they communicate, how they make people feel. We want people to feel welcome, that for the hour they're there, it's the best hour of the day for them."
Really, it all boils down to this: "I'm trying to help others by doing what's helped me," Kirkhope says. "Getting together with like-minded people, training together, moving your body, letting them know what's worked for me: discipline, structure and routine … talking, sharing."
Not that it has always come easy. Before he first spoke publicly about growing up with domestic violence and PTSD — on Instagram in 2022 — Kirkhope says he wrote and deleted and rewrote the post "probably 20 times" before he finally worked up the courage to share it. His fear? "Judgement? People thinking I was doing it for the wrong reasons, just to get a bit of clout, I guess." It was maximum vulnerability.
What came back, though — to that post and others since — made it all worth it: hundreds of messages of "Thank you", of "I'm going through something similar", and "I wish more people were this open".
"It's a big thing, something I couldn't do for years," Kirkhope says. "Mum's so proud of me for telling this story, I wouldn't do it without her backing. I guess I'm her voice as well, and she wants me to share on the off chance it helps other people … And for me, talking has been the best thing I could have done. I'm not hiding behind quick fixes and escapes anymore."