Psychologist, presenter and author Nigel Latta was one of New Zealand's great losses of 2025. His prolific career and ability to enlighten Kiwis on issues of the heart and mind had made him a household name and, after a battle with cancer, his death in September was widely mourned. But in this chapter from his last book, Lessons on Living, Latta reveals the high-school bullying he endured and the resulting insecurities that followed him into adulthood.
I don’t remember a lot of my early life. I remember lots of snippets, but not many longer scenes. If this were 1992 I would instantly conclude from this fact that I was obviously ritually sexually abused by a satanic cult for many years and somehow just blocked all that out. Fortunately, we live in less hysterical times and I’m free to make more rational interpretations of the stretches that I can recall.
The truth is I had a lovely mum and a fantastic dad. We never really had a lot of money, but I got something far more valuable from them … the very best of starts a kid could wish for.
I always felt loved, and that is no small thing. So I have lots of moments from my childhood I can recall: playing cowboys and Indians with the other kids in the neighbourhood, almost burning the house down with my friend from next door when we learned why you shouldn’t play with matches, eating fresh bread on a Sunday night as we watched The Wonderful World of Disney, making cars out of half-empty cardboard apple boxes that we knelt in and slid around the house, birthday parties, and visiting grandparents.
These are all just snippets for me, more like old Polaroids than old movies. One of the things I do remember clearly is that I always loved horror stories. In fact, I loved any story where something extraordinary happened right inside the everyday.
I inhaled Stephen King like a cocaine addict who’d just come into a ton of money and immediately spent it on bags of white powdery bliss. Vampires consume a small town? Cool.
A car somehow comes alive? I’ll buy that.
The lovable Saint Bernard gets rabies and starts to eat people? A creepy psychotic clown in the sewers? Jack Torrance writing his novel at the Overlook Hotel? A weaponised strain of the flu called called Captain Trips wipes out the world?
Sign me up for all that.
I loved the idea that there was something underneath it all, something hidden … waiting … biding its time. Something dark.
I still do.
I was on a plane last night flying home, and the sun was setting on a vast landscape of grey clouds. And I imagined, as I almost always do, the far-off figure of a cloud man appearing on one of the misty grey summits, standing holding a spear, watching my plane fly past. I don’t know why cloud people have spears. They just do.
I imagined watching him as he raised his long skinny arm and waved at me. I’d wave back, as he drifted slowly past, before finally disappearing from view.
I am not a woo-woo person. I don’t believe in spirits, or the afterlife, or ghosts, or cloud people. There are many people who believe in some or all those things, and I’m happy for them.
When it comes to matters of faith and belief, I’m with the Buddha on this one … believe in whatever you choose to believe as long as it does no harm to yourself or others. So, I don’t really believe in cloud people, but on almost every flight I’ll find myself glancing out the window from time to time.
Just in case.
From the very beginning I wanted to find the road less travelled. I wanted to find wonders, but just as much I wanted to find the darkness too. The town I grew up in, Oamaru, was a perfectly fine and perfectly ordinary place, but for the whole time I was there (1967–1986) it was as boring as boring can be. It wasn’t just Oamaru … I think most small towns in New Zealand over that period were similarly boring.
If you wanted to be a builder, or work at the meat processing plant, or be a farmer, then you could make a fine and rewarding life. My dad was a builder and he built a great life there with my mother. They loved each other and raised four children and filled their lives with things they enjoyed doing.
But I wanted something different to what everyone else was doing. I wanted to be on the inside. I wanted to be there when the secret rocks were lifted and dark things wriggled out. I wanted to see the edges of what it means to be human.
Boredom felt like death to me then, and it still does today. We all get one run at life, and I wanted to fill mine with as many wonders and horrors as I could find.
If there really were two roads that diverged in a wood, and there was some guy there pointing to the right-hand road and telling everyone to go down that one because it was safe, and well signposted, and well lit … and there was even a nice little café at the end serving great coffee and tasty pastries … I’d ask him about the other one.
‘Don’t go down that one, mate,’ he’d say in a grave, hushed voice. ‘There’s some messed-up shit down there.’
‘Like what?’
‘Some super rapey otters for a start. Those deviant little bastards are raping seal pups so hard they’re drowning them.*
Can you imagine such a thing? But that’s just the beginning of it. You can’t even imagine the crazy messed-up shit down there.’
‘Okay,’ I’d say. ‘Thanks for the heads-up.’
Then I’d head straight down Rapey Otter Road to see what there was to see. I have always, and will always, choose the road less travelled.
The problem is I was living in a small town on the east coast of the South Island and there didn’t seem to be an oversupply of wonders and horrors. Rather, there was an abundance of fairly average stuff. There were no less-travelled roads immediately obvious to me.
If you wanted to get hold of some farming equipment, or join a rugby club, Oamaru had you well sorted. Anything more exciting was in very short supply.
That hunger must have been there right from the start because, at the age of eight, I signed up to be a St John Ambulance cadet. Now, at first glance, this probably seems a little nerdy … but I saw it as a path to adventure. I’d seen ambulances tearing through town, lights and sirens blasting, and I’d always thought that looked quite exciting.
Obviously at eight I was a few years off from all that, but at least it seemed to be heading in the right direction. Joining up at eight seemed like the best start I had going.
For me, joining St John’s as a little kid was the start of a very long road that would take me through the beginnings of the wonders, and horrors, I sought so desperately. Ultimately, it would also take me to the deepest love there can be. I didn’t know it then, but the journey to all those things had already begun.
And so I spent years as a little cadet. It was actually a lot of fun … St John’s is kind of like Scouting with lots and lots of first-aid training. I was crewing ambulances from the age of 14.
I wasn’t a fully fledged member of the team then, but I got to ride along, I got to see stuff. I was a proper member of the crew three years later.
A lot of it was not that nice. I found the horrors. I saw a little girl who’d been hit and killed by a train, an old dead guy vomited in my mouth,* and I saw a lot of the insides of various other people. I saw a lot of dead people … and not like the little boy in the The Sixth Sense, but actual dead people. The cold and grey dead people, and the warm and pink recently dead as well.
And just while we’re here, there’s a lot to be said for the concept of Post-Traumatic Growth or PTG (i.e. whatever doesn’t kill me makes me stronger). Not all exposure to traumatic incidents leads to PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder). For the great majority of people, adversity actually builds resilience.
I got stronger from all that bad stuff. But the real cost of my doing all that, the biggest, most persistent black balloon in my life, snuck in through a side door.
I’d had a pretty free ride through primary school and intermediate; it was all fairly easy and fun. But when I got to high school that all changed. A teacher at the school was a volunteer ambulance officer and asked me to help at the inter-school rugby matches. That meant having to stand on thensidelines in my little black and white uniform with a container of water and run onto the field if a player was hurt. Those experiences may account for my total lack of interest in our national game.
Mostly they weren’t hurt but just wanted a drink of water. I sorted that out pretty quickly by always adding salt to the water. The problem was that everyone in the school thought the teacher was gay, which meant I was gay by association, and so I ended up spending quite a lot of my high-school years getting a lot of shit from other boys.
Being called ‘first aids’ became my new reality.
Very witty.
In 1982 at Waitaki Boys’ High School in Oamaru there were no rainbows and being gay was about the worst thing a guy could ever possibly be. I wasn’t gay, but that didn’t matter. I was associated with a teacher who everyone thought was gay, which meant I got thrown into the big gay box as well.
I had a small group of friends, most of whom I’m still in contact with, but many of the rest of the boys at school loved nothing more than to give me shit.
I f***ing hated high school.
My response to it all was to declare myself a pacifist and to try to rise above it all with feigned disregard and good humour.
I decided I was going to Gandhi the heck out of it, all sprinkled with a liberal dose of John Lennon. That kind of worked. It taught me to be quick on my feet with my comebacks when someone was giving me a hard time, and was very good training for working with angry teenagers many years down the road, but it didn’t help the way all that stuff made me feel back then.
That’s when I collected one of my oldest black balloons:
People don’t like you.
And that balloon dominated my life for many years. I’m an introvert through and through, which is often a surprise when I say that to people, but it’s as true about me as anything else. I definitely need time by myself to recharge my batteries, and long periods of socialising drain me. Interestingly, that doesn’t happen with friends to the same extent, but new people quickly drain me.
The problem with introverts is that when black balloons like that one get hitched to us, it’s easy to fold the two things together and think that all social occasions are threatening and stressful.
Adolescence was a nightmare for me. I was pretty shy and found making new friends hard. When I went off to university I chose a hostel no one else from my school was going to so I could reinvent myself. I was going to be the new, socially confident me, and it was going to change everything.
To my great dismay I learned that the black balloon was tied to me, not to Oamaru. Nothing changed and the shyness and social anxiety were still there. I remember going down for meals and not having the confidence to sit down and talk to new people.
I did eventually find a group of friends … but it was hard.
People don’t like you.
In truth, there were two things that really helped me. The first was that, once I got into the clinical psychology programme and started learning some things, I made an effort to practise what I preached and so consciously acted as if I believed people would find me likeable and interesting – and that was something I worked away at for years. Instead of thinking I wasn’t interesting, I acted as if I truly believed I was and pushed myself in conversations and in groups.
And the other big thing that helped me reduce the influence of that balloon was working in telly. People kept coming up to me with each new show saying they liked my work, which kind of meant they liked me too.
If you get a constant stream of strangers coming up to you saying nice stuff, sooner or later you’re going to start feeling better about yourself. I wish that everyone who has social anxiety could have that experience, and I am eternally grateful for all the people over the years who have said those things to me.
It was a gift … thank you.
* I didn't make that up … otters really do that. They may look cute but in reality they’re just rapey, murdery, psychopathic paedophiles.
* Don’t expect doing CPR on someone in cardiac arrest is anything like the resus dummies they get you to practise on. The truth is that doing CPR on a real person is super gross.
Extracted from Lessons on Living, by Nigel Latta (published by HarperCollins Aotearoa NZ).
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