Jimmy Groen was born in 1962 and lived about two and half years with his parents and family before he was placed in a children's home in Groningen. He experienced deep horizontal bonding until he was almost four years old and was placed in a fundamental religious and far- right foster family.  Growing up in forced social isolation and various types of abuse, confinement and severe humiliations he fled the foster family at age seventeen with lasting physical injury. The youth care organizations denied him access to mental and physical help and  left him in halfway- houses for addicted, homeless in the Hell of Hoog Catharijne in Utrecht,  in the streets and living alone in the large forests of the Veluwe until he was about twenty years old and left the system. He found himself left without any proper education and with complex gender and identity issues. His isolated issues were followed by several suicide attempts, and he got hospitalized for two weeks  in the psychiatric section of the hospital  in Amersfoort in 1989 and was sent away with the words that "ending his life would probably be the best solution in his case". 

At age 23, he encountered severe police (sexual) violence and torture  in a police cell and was released after eight days and nights with lasting physical injury.  Without criminal record,  it still appeared impossible to process his experiences, while mental health care refused him  because of a diagnosis  dissociative identity disorder (DID) along with five trauma -based diagnoses,  given to him in 1998. 

Since 1992 Jimmy creates to process and as way of storytelling, although large collections of many hundreds of work have been destroyed in 2002 and 2018, including about 450 oil paintings.  His life outside society was altered by volunteer work in archaeology and his work as archaeobotanist. Between 2006 and 2011 Jimmy  gave many public lectures on 'vegetation history and  prehistoric landscapes'. He  carried out numerous archaeological field  surveys of which a large part is published at Zenodo. org. 

Jimmy was also the maker of the blog Arbannig 

His creative journey  was fragmented in periods of study (quantum physics, Arabic language, geometric structures),  periods at art academy (Verviers, Tongeren  2019-2025) and periods of high productivity (about 600 artworks created in 2023). 

In 2024 he found out that his foster mother that severely abused three foster children was decorated with the Golden State medal in the Order of Orange Nassau in 1995, one year before he and his brother's official report against the foster parents at the Public Prosecutor in Utrecht.  His report was dismissively dismissed in 1996  as pure nonsense by the Public Prosecutor. 

After  2018 there was a shift in his life: his story became "public"  as one of the ten stories in attachment to a report for the Commission de Winter ( Max in pages 459- 464 Bijlagen vooronderzoek geweld in de jeugdzorg).  In 2019,  Jimmy  was officially recognized as a victim of the youth care system by Foster Care Netherlands and the Child Protection Council.  The state recognized him in 2020 in the category of  most severe victims of violence. In the same year he spoke for the first time at the Nationale Ombudsman  and the police about the extreme conditions and violations of art 3ECHR in a police cell in 1986,  which was haunting his life, especially because of the antisemitic rhetoric and sexual degradation used against him.   

Jimmy  wrote two books under the pseudonym Jasper Heijting (2020/ 2022) and under the same pseudonym at the free journalist forum Reporters online  he published a large number of radical articles on the youth care system and related subjects. 

Between 2020 and 2023 Jimmy  was a member of the joint Fantastike studio, which marked his first exhibitions. In this period he gave several talks on the intersection of dissociative identity and creativity, like at #BFF 13 in the Bonnefantenmuseum in Maastricht, for Hogeschool Zuyd Heerlen and Stichting MEE Heerlen. 

After decades of harsh rejection  within the LGBT- communities Jimmy  was  suddenly  allowed to participate in the LGBT in 2023 with his non- binary gender identity,  he experienced since he left foster care.  He is admitted to the  waiting list for gender- support , since 1972 when he first experienced his  special gender incongruity, forced upon him in foster care.

Living a life without support and without access to mental health care,  Jimmy decided  to turn to the silence, redrawing largely from the internet as from summer 2026 to live a simple, minimalist life with the ones he loves.