This blog is starting to gather cobwebs from lack of use and, given my devotion to men's emotional wellness, that is beginning to bother me. With the Dog Days of July upon us, I decided it was high time I wrote down a number of thoughts that have been running through my brain about events in the media during the last several months. Hence, while I haven't enough for one 'single issue' article, I did want to write down my thoughts about several disparate issues of interest to me -- and hopefully of interest to my readers.
Global Warming and Blistering Heat
St. Louis, where I live, and most of the rest of the nation, have been experiencing triple digit temperatures since late June and they are continuing into late July (who knows when they will subside). It's surprising how few 'brown outs' there have been in the country, given how many air conditioners have been running full-blast trying to cope with this excessive heat. Personally, I have kept my thermostat at 77°F for most of the blast furnace heat wave, both to keep my cooling costs down and to be a conscious protector of the environment. Amazingly, by keeping my house at that temperature, the local electric utility has informed me that my budget billing plan will drop by $10 a month starting the next billing cycle.
The paradox of extreme heat is that when we run our air conditioners to overcome the heat, those units and the coal-fired power plants that provide the electricity add further carbon emissions to the environment, which produces more greenhouse gases that further fuel problems with global warming, which in turn produce hotter temperatures -- sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy. As a colleague of mine noted last winter, when we were having major snow storms in the Northeastern U.S., anyone who thinks that weather behavior displayed that global warming is not real confuses 'weather' with 'climate'. With the average temperature of the planet rising precipitously over the past decade, increased melting of glaciers and the polar ice caps and the consequent rising of sea levels, widespread extinction of species, profound droughts across our nation and the spreading of desertification in Africa and Asia, plus the destruction of coral reefs worldwide, if anyone still doubts that global warming is occurring, they have to be either living in a box or have their head in the sand. Clearly, 'climate change' is occurring and is doing so on a vast and disturbing scale.
Coming as I do originally from New Mexico, I've joked for years that when there's 25% humidity in New Mexico, people there think they're having a monsoon, whereas when there's less than 40% humidity in Missouri, people here think they're experiencing a drought. Every time it rains here, I let out a cheer, which makes people around me laugh in surprise, but they understand when I explain that I spent 30 years of my adult life in the desert where rain was a rare event. But, of late, there truly is a drought, both in New Mexico and Missouri, and in much of the rest of the nation as well. I've had few reasons to let out any shouts of joy for rain recently, because it has rained so rarely.
Hence, no matter how much we complain about the blast furnace heat this summer, we might be experiencing the metaphoric [and paradoxical] 'tip of the iceberg', with these extreme temperatures becoming chronic and worse in coming years. As much as I melt from the often extreme humidity here in St. Louis (and have taken to wearing a color-coordinated towel over my shoulder all summer), I have come to expect it in the 14 years I've lived in this part of the country. But that humidity hasn't occurred much this summer and the extreme dryness of New Mexico -- which is my 'benchmark' -- may become the norm here as well.
Tragedy in Aurora
The horrific slaughter in Aurora, Colorado this past weekend dominates the media at present. As with so many such events, there are a multiplicity of issues involved, not just the insanity of the shooter.
The news reports are rife with comments about how, during this presidential election season, while it is obvious that there are problems with our gun laws, very few candidates or members of Congress will be making many comments about that, because the National Rifle Association controls so many of the purse-strings of the various political campaigns. That civilians can legally go into a gun shop and purchase an assault weapon for personal use is, frankly, absurd. Except for killing large numbers of people (or animals), what purpose would anyone have for such a weapon? We have -- unfortunately -- successfully militarized our society to such an extent that there is little wonderment when we allow individuals to amass an arsenal of weapons in their homes. That the shooter in Aurora was able to purchase multiple high-powered weapons and copious rounds of ammunition online "because he had no criminal record" betrays the larger issue of why we allow anyone to purchase such weapons.
I read somewhere that there are something like 2 or 3 guns for every citizen in the country in the hands of private citizens. Given that I and most of the people I know personally don't have any guns, and many people in the society are in that category as well, that would mean that a small percentage of the population must have massive arsenals of weapons in their homes. This whole "right to bear arms" argument of the NRA is ridiculous in the extreme. I'm not so worried about people breaking into my house and harming me or stealing my possessions as I am about rogue citizens pulling out concealed weapons during traffic altercations or having 'legal' access to multiple weapons and engaging in the kind of behavior that occurred this weekend in Colorado.
As one headline I read noted the primary issue is not why it occurred, but why it doesn't occur more often. Given the easy and loose 'legal' access to weapons that is allowed in the United States, it's actually quite amazing that more such incidents don't occur.
Many years ago, when I lived in Albuquerque, I was dating a woman who was an anthropologist at the University of New Mexico. She told me about a paper she was presenting at a conference on urban violence. In her study, she noted that as horrible as the current statistics are concerning gun violence in inner cities in the U.S., around 1900 the statistics on weapons usage in the New York City tenements was even worse, and make our current statistics seem almost prosaic in comparison (though hardly minor for the people who have to experience them). Her paper stressed that the major difference was one of technology. In 1900, people had single-firing pistols, so when they were trying to murder a rival or mug someone, they largely killed only the person they were focused upon. Nowadays, though, with weapons that fire multiple rounds in seconds, when gangs are out to murder a rival they end up spraying the person and everyone around them with bullets, simply because the technology allows them to not be as accurate shots. The result is that while the level of urban violence may be less overall, the number of people killed in any one incident is greater.
There are two other elements about the massacre this last Friday that are equally disturbing. The first is why our citizens take such an avid interest in attending movies that portray the kind of extreme violence in "Dark Knight Rises". Our television screens are nightly filled with violent images, both of extreme brutality and gratuitous sexuality. While I am no conservative 'moralist' who believes that I have the right to pontificate about what kind of moral code our society must adhere to, I do believe it of value to 'sit back' and think about that. What kind of society have we created that allows us to view such imagery with dispassionate interest?
Personally, I rarely watch 'serials', for just such a reason. Such imagery is extremely disturbing to me and I have no desire to be 'triggered' by images which remind me so much about the violence I experienced as a child in my family-of-origin (which I've written about in previous articles). PBS is my cup-of-tea; I'd rather learn something of value, than be dulled into mindlessness by violent 'entertainment'.
The other element that made my skin crawl when hearing reports about the survivors of the assault was why were so many very young children in the audience? That they were in attendance with their parents was important, but why would parents take their impressionable children to such a movie in the first place? That in our society we believe it appropriate to expose young children to such violent images, portrayed in brilliant color and with the use of special effects (making them seem all too real) can't help but traumatize the children at some deep psychological level however much the kids may superficially delight in such images. In this case, of course, the 'reality' of the violence became, horrifically, all too real, and many people, including children, we injured or killed in the process. As a society, I believe that we should honestly question whether exposing children to such violent imagery is appropriate. I feel that exposing adults to such nihilistic villains has it's own psychological problems, but at least most adults can distinguish between fiction and reality; children have not developed such discernment.
The Sandusky Child Rape Trail
Given the emphasis of the Mariposa Men's Wellness Institute on the issues of adult male sexual abuse survivors, the child rape trial in Pennsylvania has been on my mind since it began last spring. That the convicted perpetrator, Jerry Sandusky, could engage in multiple rapes of young boys over a decade or more, with the complicity or at least willful ignorance of the Penn State athletic program, is disturbing in the extreme. It's one thing to hear about child rape within families, when it occurs behind 'closed doors', wherein others, outside the home, have no idea it is occurring (until it is discovered by alert social workers, having family members break the familial silence or denial, or the survivor has the courage to step forward and expose the perpetrator). But when a 'system', which is supposed to protect their students and/or any other person from abuse, willfully suppresses the information to protect it's 'image', one's stomach can only turn in revulsion.
Clearly, the athletic program was far more concerned about the image it projected to the public as a powerhouse team than they were about the rights and moral concern for the young boys from poor families. It was as though, since they were economically deprived and, as a disempowered population, unable to protect themselves, the authorities willfully 'looked the other way' and covered-up the rape of the children. Their concern was for their short-term corporate image, rather than longer-term social protection of children.
This, of course, only continues the society's allowance of institutional coverup of male child rape so thoroughly exposed in recent years in the Catholic Church. Clearly, we as a nation have learned little or nothing about this widespread crime. That girls are not the only population that are subject to sexual child abuse should already have been obvious, yet the society continues to be shocked by such cases -- not shocked into doing much about it, but rather shocked that it occurs at all. Yet, given the statistics that 1 out of 4 girls and 1 out of 7 boys is being or has been sexually molested as a child, the phenomenon is far more common than the public perception of its occurrence allows.
The Miss Universe Canada Pageant
When, last spring, "The Donald" Trump, funder of the Miss Universe Canada Pageant, under intense public pressure, reversed himself and allowed Jeanna Talackova, a 23-year-old transsexual woman, to compete in the event, that was reason for me to both leap in joy and feel slightly queasy.
I felt joy because gender, which has been allowed (after many painful years of battling) to be seen as more 'fluid' than the strict cultural categories of male and female, has now allowed transsexual females to be viewed as 'culturally attractive', even 'sexy', at least in that contest's perspective. But also queasy: genetic females have, quite reasonably, attacked beauty contests as personifications of the kind of 'femininity' that demands that women fulfill a male-view-demand for a certain specific variety of attractiveness. Transsexual women, in their struggle to be allowed to express their inner sense of gender identity, are often denied 'validity' because they don't 'appear', after transition, to be the kind of attractive women that our culture demand that all women look like. That in my view is profoundly oppressive and unacceptable. I have written about this on the Mariposa Men's Wellness Institute website, under the section "Gender Socialization".
One of the books that has strongly influenced my views on feminism over the last 20 years is Femininity by Susan Brownmiller. She wrote about the ways in which culturally-defined femininity is often incredibly oppressive to women. It's not that 'being or delighting in being feminine' is so negative; clearly, it can be very enjoyable for many females and very attractive to a number of men. But the demand that women fulfill a specific variety of femininity that constrains their ability to exercise their human completeness is the issue that is so troubling. And beauty contest-defined femininity is, hence, very oppressive to many females.
Further, I remember Helen Boyd's comment in She's Not the Man I Married, when she observed that her husband, in the process of acting out 'his sense of femininity', started behaving in what she termed "an über feminine" manner, where he was delighting in women's fashions (specifically shoes). As she noted, his delight failed to factor in that women's lives weren't simply about 'feminine fun', but involved childcare, cleaning homes, working, and taking care of boyfriends and husbands. While it's a reasonable and quite understandable 'phase' that many transsexual women go through, in trying to gain a clear sense of 'what it's like to be female', getting stuck in that phase is something that many feminists have, with equal reason, been fighting for the last 30 years.
Hence, while I honor the struggle that Ms. Talackova has gone through, and the mountain she has successfully scaled in her legal battle with the Miss Universe Canada Pageant, I am also bothered that females, genetic or transsexual, continue to be 'rated' on their attractiveness as human beings, their very value as participants in the culture, by a Playboy-style beauty contest-defined vision of womanly acceptability. Females, both genetic and trans, are more than their bodies, and we should be careful in making sure we honor their humanity with equal energy.
Wednesday, July 25, 2012
Monday, April 23, 2012
Tenth Anniversary of Redundancy
April 1, 2012 marked the 10th 'anniversary' of unemployment for me. Some friends wonder why I don't simply say that I'm retired [to the extent that is accurate, it's clearly an unrequested and forced retirement]. In some ways that might be an easier designation for my employment prospects. I'm kind of partial to the British labor term redundant, in reference to being laid off or terminated, to describe my situation. I've surely felt quite redundant these last 10 years! As in 'too many highly educated, well-experienced, over-50 year old males for the present state of the American economy'.
I'm hardly alone in this predicament. The unemployment reports are continually rife with comments that, regardless of the 'official unemployment statistic', there are 4 - 6% more people who have become so thoroughly frustrated with looking for work that they have dropped out of the 'job market' altogether, and therefore aren't included in the 'official' unemployment figures. I've read other articles that note that, for many people over 50 years of age, they may never be hired again in any position that has the same level of salary and benefits that they had before termination, and may not be able to obtain any form of employment at all. The American economy is so battered and anemic that older, more experienced workers are facing the same dim employment prospects as many newly minted college graduates, many of who can't find work with which to either support themselves and/or pay off their massive student loan debt.
Whenever I read that someone has been out of work for 8 months, or even for a year and a half, and then found work again, far from seeing that person as someone who should be pitied, I see that person as being rather lucky. After a fruitless 10-year job search, during which I've submitted several thousand resumes and engaged in over 300 job interviews, I no longer even have the illusion that employment is possible.
On the other hand, it's not as though I'm starving. Actually, I'm in the rather unusual position of having some inherited income, enough that I own my house, have a good quality workable vehicle, adequate food in my stomach, and some flexibility in my income stream -- not enough to take many trips, but enough to adequately survive without profound anxiety. On the other hand, I haven't had health insurance since 2004, but do have access to a welfare health system which affords me a caring and competent physician for no monthly health premiums. If I ever end up in the hospital, though, the expense would probably break me financially, but I'm hoping against hope that I can maintain reasonable health until 65 when Medicare kicks in.
So, though I'd very much like to have some decent employment that engages me in something that stimulates my brain, I'm not desperate for employment (like I was between 2002 - 2004, before these other funds became available to me). Still, I am very much aware of the issues that are prevalent in the employment market and keep my knowledge on the subject quite current.
Back in 1997, when I was working on an MSW (Master of Social Work) in New Mexico, many professional people I knew there said "Oh, when you finish your MSW, along with the MPA (Master of Public Administration, which I had earned at the University of New Mexico in 1978) that you already have, you'll be an eminently qualified person for professional employment." Well, those were indeed positive thoughts, but life just didn't work out that way. I attended one year of graduate social work school in New Mexico in the 1995-96 academic year, then worked at my practicum agency as a contract employee for another couple of years. My supervisor, who had become a very supportive colleague, motivated me to complete my MSW education, saying it would come in handy later. During 1997-98, when I had a contract with the State of New Mexico as the statewide Shaken Baby Syndrome Training Coordinator [one of the most enjoyable and challenging jobs I've ever had], I applied to twelve different graduate programs around the country, hoping to gain admission so that I could complete my 2nd year of graduate school social work education. (I was most unimpressed and not sufficiently mentally or academically challenged by the graduate program in New Mexico.)
I'm hardly alone in this predicament. The unemployment reports are continually rife with comments that, regardless of the 'official unemployment statistic', there are 4 - 6% more people who have become so thoroughly frustrated with looking for work that they have dropped out of the 'job market' altogether, and therefore aren't included in the 'official' unemployment figures. I've read other articles that note that, for many people over 50 years of age, they may never be hired again in any position that has the same level of salary and benefits that they had before termination, and may not be able to obtain any form of employment at all. The American economy is so battered and anemic that older, more experienced workers are facing the same dim employment prospects as many newly minted college graduates, many of who can't find work with which to either support themselves and/or pay off their massive student loan debt.
Whenever I read that someone has been out of work for 8 months, or even for a year and a half, and then found work again, far from seeing that person as someone who should be pitied, I see that person as being rather lucky. After a fruitless 10-year job search, during which I've submitted several thousand resumes and engaged in over 300 job interviews, I no longer even have the illusion that employment is possible.
On the other hand, it's not as though I'm starving. Actually, I'm in the rather unusual position of having some inherited income, enough that I own my house, have a good quality workable vehicle, adequate food in my stomach, and some flexibility in my income stream -- not enough to take many trips, but enough to adequately survive without profound anxiety. On the other hand, I haven't had health insurance since 2004, but do have access to a welfare health system which affords me a caring and competent physician for no monthly health premiums. If I ever end up in the hospital, though, the expense would probably break me financially, but I'm hoping against hope that I can maintain reasonable health until 65 when Medicare kicks in.
So, though I'd very much like to have some decent employment that engages me in something that stimulates my brain, I'm not desperate for employment (like I was between 2002 - 2004, before these other funds became available to me). Still, I am very much aware of the issues that are prevalent in the employment market and keep my knowledge on the subject quite current.
Back in 1997, when I was working on an MSW (Master of Social Work) in New Mexico, many professional people I knew there said "Oh, when you finish your MSW, along with the MPA (Master of Public Administration, which I had earned at the University of New Mexico in 1978) that you already have, you'll be an eminently qualified person for professional employment." Well, those were indeed positive thoughts, but life just didn't work out that way. I attended one year of graduate social work school in New Mexico in the 1995-96 academic year, then worked at my practicum agency as a contract employee for another couple of years. My supervisor, who had become a very supportive colleague, motivated me to complete my MSW education, saying it would come in handy later. During 1997-98, when I had a contract with the State of New Mexico as the statewide Shaken Baby Syndrome Training Coordinator [one of the most enjoyable and challenging jobs I've ever had], I applied to twelve different graduate programs around the country, hoping to gain admission so that I could complete my 2nd year of graduate school social work education. (I was most unimpressed and not sufficiently mentally or academically challenged by the graduate program in New Mexico.)
In 1998, 5 of the 12 schools offered me admission, and after visiting several of them, accepted admission at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri (where I continued to live after graduation). I graduated in 1999 and then pursued a Graduate Certificate in Nonprofit Management at the University of Missouri, which I obtained in 2002. I kept thinking (with an increasingly forlorn perspective) that all of this graduate education would ‘come in handy’ in a job search. But, alas, the reality was quite the opposite of my expectations. Upon graduating with my MSW in 1999, I could only obtain short-term, part-time contractual positions. I was able to finally gain a professional position as the project director for a statewide anti-smoking coalition, but after 7 months of administrative hell, willingly resigned from that position in 2002 (shortly after finishing the graduate certificate in nonprofit management). From that point on, I began a job search in earnest, but found -- much to my dismay and frustration -- that all of the graduate education I had obtained largely guaranteed continued unemployment. It turned out that the more education I obtained, the more slender my job prospects became.
I was increasingly confronted with the paradoxical ‘overqualified, under-experienced’ syndrome. I had too much education and experience for entry-level positions, and not enough professional experience for management positions. Plus, I was facing the unofficial [and illegal, but nonetheless widely practiced] over-50 age discrimination reality of the job market. Between the poor employment market I had faced for 25 years in New Mexico and several bouts of long-term illness, I had never really been able to manifest a steady ‘career’ in anything that was actually marketable. I was a veteran of over 60 electoral campaigns, but none of those skills were considered to be relevant by most employers (in spite of having wide-ranging experience in management, volunteer coordinator, budgeting, marketing, and all the other required skills for getting people elected to office in the United States).
For far too many jobs that I applied for, the candidate who was ultimately hired had considerably less education, experience, and skills, and was half my age. Or, if the person was equal in qualifications, the position went to a female, since increasingly social work and/or nonprofit management positions are obtained by women, given that the boards of directors are primarily female. (As a feminist man, I’m actually quite supportive of employing more women in management positions; it’s just that, regardless of my political or ethical position, I’m also the subject of failing to obtain management jobs for precisely those reasons. One of those great paradoxes in life!)
Hence, I was confronted with a most profound and frustrating obstacle: all my experience, education, and skill acquisition, combined with being a ‘seasoned worker’, actually operated against me, rather than being a benefit. But once you’ve obtained all of that, short of falsifying your resume (which has it’s own ethical and moral problems) and denying that you have this education or experience, there is no backing out of what you’ve gained in life. You’re stuck with what you thought would be of benefit, but which turned out to be seen by many employers as a deficit.
Therefore, the job search has since become an exercise in futility. To say that I’m a discouraged job seeker is to put it mildly; after a while, the act of looking for work simply drove me into a deeper and deeper sense of depression and desperation. I still apply for work on occasion when it seems that the position requires skills that I have, but I no longer have any expectation that I will be interviewed, and less hope that I will be employed even if the interview is completed respectably. I am now only too aware that all the talk about older workers being more respected for their experience is just so much hokum. And equally aware that the American job landscape has changed so radically that there is no telling what employers are actually looking for in terms of “what would make an applicant qualified for employment”. It’s all far too subjective. There is no longer any kind of stable ‘benchmark’ upon which to base a credible job search.
The one ‘anchor’ I had available to me was my work on men’s emotional wellness. In 2003, I applied for and obtained federal nonprofit tax status for Mariposa Men’s Wellness Institute, my own nonprofit organization (of which I’m the sole, unpaid employee). I searched for grant funding for the organization, but quickly realized how few possibilities existed for funding nonprofit ventures focused on men’s issues. It appeared, for a while, like there existed some possible funding from the Missouri Foundation for Health. My first application was rejected, but when I approached the foundation officer about what I could do to enhance my application for funds, their initial response was to note that they were actually quite impressed by the venture (“you’re the only organization in Missouri who is discussing these issues”) and to encourage me to apply again, after I had obtained collaborators and a fiscal manager (or pass-through accounting agency). They stated that they were willing to consider a grant of $1 million over two years (instead of $1.5 million over 3 years, as I had originally applied for) assuming I could manifest those added features to the organization. But when I returned, a couple of months later [in 2004], with those enhancements, first they said their Board had postponed consideration for several months, and then, the following year, that a new Board had a quite different agenda and men’s wellness was no longer ‘in the mix’ of their funding priorities.
So, here I am, 8 years later. As noted, I’m not starving, and in fact have been able to cobble together a reasonable life, with the help of my modest inherited income. I don’t have health insurance (and, unless or until the new health care law takes effect, can’t obtain any kind of health coverage, at any price, due to a significant pre-existing condition). But I have a roof over my head, food in my stomach, a joyously positive interpersonal intimacy with a delightful female partner, and a part-time staff position as an usher at the St. Louis Symphony. Plus, I volunteer usher at 6 other venues around town, allowing me a rich cultural life for no monetary outlay (between 150-200 performances a year). And I have a wealth of time to work on projects -- such as my Unitarian Universalist congregation’s Board of Trustees; writing blogs and maintaining the website for Mariposa Men’s Wellness Institute (plus a couple of other community websites); learning how to make competent use of various Apple software packages; and focusing on my continued emotional healing from childhood incest and torture. As my brother often points out, having time to work on projects I enjoy is a rare treat that very few workers have available in their lives, at any point.
A colleague in my church recently said his perception of me is that I’m “gainfully unemployed”, which I found to be (and which I’m sure was his intention) a most paradoxically interesting combination of terms. It’s true that I’m largely unemployed, in a ‘wage’ sense (except the part-time ushering position), and that all of my graduate education and experience presents an egregious obstacle to ever being professionally employed again, but I’m clearly not vegetating in the midst of that unemployment. I’m intensely gainfully engaged in marketing and spiritual support in my religious community, deeply engaged in work on men’s emotional wellness, and have served on several community Boards of Directors. I just don’t get any kind of payment for all that work (other than from my family, which is no doubt a profound blessing to me as an adult, especially after all the traumatic negativity of my childhood).
As a blogger, I never know what effect I will have on my readers, or even who is reading my blogs. (This is not to say I don’t get feedback -- indeed, I have received a fair amount, especially after the articles on my relationship with my father -- but that there are many people who read my thoughts and don’t respond or post comments.) What is important for me is that I’m engaged in work that I find intellectually and emotionally stimulating, even if I never obtain a dime for it. This is not to say that I wouldn’t be overjoyed to eventually find funding for Mariposa Men’s Wellness Institute; indeed, I keep my eyes and ears open for such possibilities. But whether that ever occurs will not, I hope, discourage me from continuing to pursue, via these articles and the MMWI website, a devotion to working on and discussing aspects of men’s emotional wellness.
Being paid for our efforts is helpful (we all have to economically survive), but I’ve been thankfully blessed with the opportunity to pursue my interests in spite of not being able to obtain employment. And in some paradoxical ways, it is that lack of employment which has placed me in a better position to pursue my intellectual interests. It’s most interesting how our lives turn out; often not as we expected them to, but then we can never be aware of all the potential possibilities when we construct our expectations. To be able to understand that time, in and of itself, can be an aspect of wealth and happiness has been one of the most profound spiritual breakthroughs of my life.
Tuesday, February 21, 2012
On The Death Of My Father: A Postscript
Prologue
Since publishing my most recent article, The End of A Particularly Terrifying Era, about the death of my father last November, I have received a wealth of very thoughtful responses from many close friends and professional colleagues, both personally and online (via Facebook and LinkedIn). Generally, the comments have been positive, with many people saying the article 'spoke to them', that it 'mirrored experiences they had had in their own lives', and that it allowed others to understand me better, by opening up, for them, a window into my own childhood experiences that allowed others to realize how those experiences colored my view of the world around me.
Yet other people had quite different reactions. They noted it was just plain difficult to read the memoir, that they cringed and had to set it aside several times before finishing it -- or didn't finish it at all, because it was too painful to read in its entirety. Some noted how completely paradoxical it was for them: their own experience of their parents had been quite positive and endearing, and, as a result, they found it quite disorienting to hear from someone who had been in terrifying fear of their father (and mother).
At my congregation, during the 'Joys and Concerns' portion of the sermon, the minister, who had heard my story beforehand, said "Donald has a joy, but you need to ask him about it", knowing full well that saying that my joy was about my father's death was far too paradoxical for most people to stomach. When one of the church members asked me, a couple of weeks later, "what was the joy we should ask you about", and I said it was that my father had died, she raised her eyebrows and asked if I was joking. And I said "no, I'm not joking, it is a joy -- but rather than explaining it, read my blog", which she said she would do.
There was no doubt in my mind when I wrote the blog that the unexpected joy I felt at my father's demise would make many people queasy (I say unexpected, because for them it was unexpected, not that I ever failed to expect that I would feel true relief or satisfaction when it finally occurred). My experience flies in the face of the dominant cultural expectation that parents love their children, their children feel loved, and love their parents in return. But, of course, as noted above, from the reactions of some that they had had similar experiences, that sort of Father Knows Best kind of happy American family was not as common an experience as our culture would want us to believe. My reaction may not be common, but it is certainly not completely unusual either.
(1)
When I wrote that article, I wanted to see it as the end of a life of being continually tormented by a person who had made my young life a living hell and had visited his most venial destructive tendencies on a defenseless child. I wanted to view his demise as the end of that emotional wasteland. I hoped that I would now be allowed a reprieve, so that I could move forward unimpeded by those haunting memories. But 30 years of incredibly painful (though often enlightening) therapy, during which I worked through the outcomes of the post-traumatic stress syndrome [PTSD] that I had experienced, taught me that such hopes were at best wistful and probably unlikely.
We all wish that the process of emotional healing would be linear, moving from one phase to the next seamlessly, with logical gradations, and with a satisfying conclusion. But the reality is that it's more like two steps forward, three back, several to the side, and then eventually moving to the next phase, with periodic elastic bounce-backs to earlier points in the journey. In the same way, I would like to believe that the passing of my father last November -- and hence the death of my tormentor -- would be the end of my chronic panic anxiety. But that's just not how the healing journey works. My own experience is an example of how PTSD works it's way into every cell and fiber of one's body, and periodically, when it is exposed to the light of day, forces us to re-experience profound states of panic anxiety.
My father's torture and rape of my child Self was so unrelenting and so continually invasive that overcoming the resultant effects has been profoundly difficult. I have engaged in 30 years of psychotherapy and 'worked my ass off', plus have read hundreds of books on the subject and accessed many massages and other bodywork treatments. And yet, for all that effort, while the panic fears have been greatly 'bled off', they are hardly gone. Each time they arise again (as they do when I take homeopathic remedies or have acupuncture treatments or am 'triggered' by some stressful event) they 'feel' as terrifying as the original events that produced them.
I have, over many years of therapy, acquired more effective 'coping skills', in that I can usually tell the difference between 'the here and now' anxiety and the fear 'that this will last forever'. But the panic is nonetheless overwhelming when I am in the midst of it, with the panic spewing from my chest, throat, head, and guts at full force. And it doesn't, in that moment, feel like 'the past revisited', but like 'the fear that never went away, but was only temporarily sublimated'. Those panic releases often make me feel like I am 'dying', like the end is near, like there's no point going on and I just want to end the terror NOW! But so far the panic has eventually passed by, though my body is often exhausted and painful afterward.
(2)
For many years, especially when I sat in church services, when I heard a child crying, on one level I was irritated (in that the crying disrupted my meditative state), but on another, more terrifying level, I was in profound fear for the child's life.
Now, this second fear doesn't make 'logical' sense, unless it was my personal experience as a child. Crying, to my father, represented rebellion or rejection, and he simply could not tolerate being around it. Like parents who violently shake their crying infants and cause brain damage (as in Shaken Baby Syndrome), our father often beat us even worse if we cried, screaming "I'll give you something to cry about!!" Expressing discomfort or anger in our family was simply not acceptable to the Enforcer and our mother did nothing to impede that behavior.
It took me many years of first noticing my reaction, then analyzing why I felt that, and finally realizing that just because that had happened to me as a child, it did not mean that all parents would act that way toward their children. And then putting one and one together and being able to lower my own fear and paranoia for the child's life.
(3)
The same 'illogical' reaction arose when women I was dating would mention the idea of having children or a family eventually.
Often my experience was that the women I dated had no motivation to 'know me for whom I was', but rather were solely focused on 'shoving me into their Man Box', whether or not I actually fit. It was like they were talking to me, but looking over my shoulder instead of into my eyes, focusing on their dream of having a family. I was solely the 'potential means to an end', not someone with whom they wanted to engage in an intimate, connective relationship.
My 'objectively illogical feeling' was very much like they were putting a 45-caliber pistol to my head and threatening my very existence. My PTSD experience, the way in which I was 'triggered' by this hope for a 'family', was that I was being asked to support their dream of a happy family, of two adults who were parents of children, without their taking the time or wanting to invest the energy in getting to know me first as a friend, which would allow the two of us to work out such an arrangement collectively. I was simply, for them, a potential paycheck and 'a guy' with whom to have a child.
Now, frankly, it never actually reached that juncture. I was so thoroughly terrified of the idea of having children, given how frightfully painful my own childhood had been, that when such a subject was broached (and especially if it was continually stressed), I would simply back away from the relationship and let it wither on the vine. I was often asked to support and defend women when I had no template upon which to base such behavior, having never had the opportunity to experience loving support and protection within my family-of-origin. The vast majority of my intimate relationships with women (except for my present, quite respectful 4-year relationship with my female friend and partner) ended after 3 or 4 months, with my feeling a profound sense of emotional anguish, since it was obvious that my partners had no wish to know me for whom I really was, but rather only whom they wanted to see me as being.
(4)
The most lasting result of my father's terror (combined with my mother's complicity in the dysfunctional behavioral pattern) was a continual 'distrust of my own body' and a strong desire to dissociate from the 'here and now' reality. I've spent a lifetime of struggle trying to 'stay inside my own body', without feeling an overwhelming desire to 'go somewhere else -- almost anywhere else -- or be someone else' rather than having to face the omnipresent fear that pervades every waking moment. And a lifetime of coping with the suppressed anger at the way in which I was abused as a child.
Dissociation is a common defense mechanism for physically and sexually abused children, and I have fallen back upon that emotional defense throughout my life. It has taken much of my years of therapy to work through those fear and anger spaces, and it still takes much of my energy to fight with those dissociative tendencies when I am triggered by stressful events in my life.
I'll speak more about this in later articles; for now, I want to acknowledge that it has been a prominent emotional outcome of all the pervasive abuse.
(5)
My introduction to the men's movement in 1986, when I lived in New Mexico, and my devotion to working on issues of men's emotional wellness ever since, has given me a new 'lease on life' and has allowed me to find some degree of comfort with my maleness. My father's weird and bizarre views on gender and on what it 'meant to be a man' so profoundly poisoned my own satisfaction and 'comfort with my male Self' that it has taken me many years and countless hours of therapy to crawl out of that totally confusing abyss. At least I'm now on the path of solution orientation, on the healing journey of transformation, rather than wallowing in the profound victimization of so much of my earlier life. The journey to a 'healed emotional state of heart' continues to be difficult. But the respect and love of my intimate partner, competent guidance and assistance from my therapist, emotional support of my friends, respect from professional colleagues, confidence displayed by members of my Unitarian Universalist congregation, and my own developing knowledge and inner self-confidence about my many skills and abilities has allowed me, in recent years, to find a greater sense of personal satisfaction with my life.
As Lord Byron said "No one leaves this world without some pain." I'm slowly working through my own and attempting to assist many others with theirs, via the Mariposa Men's Wellness Institute website and blog, facilitation of men's support groups, and work on issues surrounding men's emotional wellness. Though not a linear path (in fact, rather quite a zig-zag path), I am making clear and distinct progress toward inner emotional health. And that alone is a great testament to how it is possible to heal from such terrifying beginnings.
As I often joke "we live with our parents for 20 years and spend the next 60-80 years trying to overcome that experience." For some that experience is positive, but clearly it was not for me. But there is hope, and I'm an example of someone who has 'seen the light at the end of the tunnel' and known that it was not an oncoming train, but rather a manifestation of 'enlightenment'.
There is no perfection in this world, but transformation is indeed possible.
And, for now, that is enough.
Since publishing my most recent article, The End of A Particularly Terrifying Era, about the death of my father last November, I have received a wealth of very thoughtful responses from many close friends and professional colleagues, both personally and online (via Facebook and LinkedIn). Generally, the comments have been positive, with many people saying the article 'spoke to them', that it 'mirrored experiences they had had in their own lives', and that it allowed others to understand me better, by opening up, for them, a window into my own childhood experiences that allowed others to realize how those experiences colored my view of the world around me.
Yet other people had quite different reactions. They noted it was just plain difficult to read the memoir, that they cringed and had to set it aside several times before finishing it -- or didn't finish it at all, because it was too painful to read in its entirety. Some noted how completely paradoxical it was for them: their own experience of their parents had been quite positive and endearing, and, as a result, they found it quite disorienting to hear from someone who had been in terrifying fear of their father (and mother).
At my congregation, during the 'Joys and Concerns' portion of the sermon, the minister, who had heard my story beforehand, said "Donald has a joy, but you need to ask him about it", knowing full well that saying that my joy was about my father's death was far too paradoxical for most people to stomach. When one of the church members asked me, a couple of weeks later, "what was the joy we should ask you about", and I said it was that my father had died, she raised her eyebrows and asked if I was joking. And I said "no, I'm not joking, it is a joy -- but rather than explaining it, read my blog", which she said she would do.
There was no doubt in my mind when I wrote the blog that the unexpected joy I felt at my father's demise would make many people queasy (I say unexpected, because for them it was unexpected, not that I ever failed to expect that I would feel true relief or satisfaction when it finally occurred). My experience flies in the face of the dominant cultural expectation that parents love their children, their children feel loved, and love their parents in return. But, of course, as noted above, from the reactions of some that they had had similar experiences, that sort of Father Knows Best kind of happy American family was not as common an experience as our culture would want us to believe. My reaction may not be common, but it is certainly not completely unusual either.
(1)
When I wrote that article, I wanted to see it as the end of a life of being continually tormented by a person who had made my young life a living hell and had visited his most venial destructive tendencies on a defenseless child. I wanted to view his demise as the end of that emotional wasteland. I hoped that I would now be allowed a reprieve, so that I could move forward unimpeded by those haunting memories. But 30 years of incredibly painful (though often enlightening) therapy, during which I worked through the outcomes of the post-traumatic stress syndrome [PTSD] that I had experienced, taught me that such hopes were at best wistful and probably unlikely.
We all wish that the process of emotional healing would be linear, moving from one phase to the next seamlessly, with logical gradations, and with a satisfying conclusion. But the reality is that it's more like two steps forward, three back, several to the side, and then eventually moving to the next phase, with periodic elastic bounce-backs to earlier points in the journey. In the same way, I would like to believe that the passing of my father last November -- and hence the death of my tormentor -- would be the end of my chronic panic anxiety. But that's just not how the healing journey works. My own experience is an example of how PTSD works it's way into every cell and fiber of one's body, and periodically, when it is exposed to the light of day, forces us to re-experience profound states of panic anxiety.
My father's torture and rape of my child Self was so unrelenting and so continually invasive that overcoming the resultant effects has been profoundly difficult. I have engaged in 30 years of psychotherapy and 'worked my ass off', plus have read hundreds of books on the subject and accessed many massages and other bodywork treatments. And yet, for all that effort, while the panic fears have been greatly 'bled off', they are hardly gone. Each time they arise again (as they do when I take homeopathic remedies or have acupuncture treatments or am 'triggered' by some stressful event) they 'feel' as terrifying as the original events that produced them.
I have, over many years of therapy, acquired more effective 'coping skills', in that I can usually tell the difference between 'the here and now' anxiety and the fear 'that this will last forever'. But the panic is nonetheless overwhelming when I am in the midst of it, with the panic spewing from my chest, throat, head, and guts at full force. And it doesn't, in that moment, feel like 'the past revisited', but like 'the fear that never went away, but was only temporarily sublimated'. Those panic releases often make me feel like I am 'dying', like the end is near, like there's no point going on and I just want to end the terror NOW! But so far the panic has eventually passed by, though my body is often exhausted and painful afterward.
(2)
For many years, especially when I sat in church services, when I heard a child crying, on one level I was irritated (in that the crying disrupted my meditative state), but on another, more terrifying level, I was in profound fear for the child's life.
Now, this second fear doesn't make 'logical' sense, unless it was my personal experience as a child. Crying, to my father, represented rebellion or rejection, and he simply could not tolerate being around it. Like parents who violently shake their crying infants and cause brain damage (as in Shaken Baby Syndrome), our father often beat us even worse if we cried, screaming "I'll give you something to cry about!!" Expressing discomfort or anger in our family was simply not acceptable to the Enforcer and our mother did nothing to impede that behavior.
It took me many years of first noticing my reaction, then analyzing why I felt that, and finally realizing that just because that had happened to me as a child, it did not mean that all parents would act that way toward their children. And then putting one and one together and being able to lower my own fear and paranoia for the child's life.
(3)
The same 'illogical' reaction arose when women I was dating would mention the idea of having children or a family eventually.
Often my experience was that the women I dated had no motivation to 'know me for whom I was', but rather were solely focused on 'shoving me into their Man Box', whether or not I actually fit. It was like they were talking to me, but looking over my shoulder instead of into my eyes, focusing on their dream of having a family. I was solely the 'potential means to an end', not someone with whom they wanted to engage in an intimate, connective relationship.
My 'objectively illogical feeling' was very much like they were putting a 45-caliber pistol to my head and threatening my very existence. My PTSD experience, the way in which I was 'triggered' by this hope for a 'family', was that I was being asked to support their dream of a happy family, of two adults who were parents of children, without their taking the time or wanting to invest the energy in getting to know me first as a friend, which would allow the two of us to work out such an arrangement collectively. I was simply, for them, a potential paycheck and 'a guy' with whom to have a child.
Now, frankly, it never actually reached that juncture. I was so thoroughly terrified of the idea of having children, given how frightfully painful my own childhood had been, that when such a subject was broached (and especially if it was continually stressed), I would simply back away from the relationship and let it wither on the vine. I was often asked to support and defend women when I had no template upon which to base such behavior, having never had the opportunity to experience loving support and protection within my family-of-origin. The vast majority of my intimate relationships with women (except for my present, quite respectful 4-year relationship with my female friend and partner) ended after 3 or 4 months, with my feeling a profound sense of emotional anguish, since it was obvious that my partners had no wish to know me for whom I really was, but rather only whom they wanted to see me as being.
(4)
The most lasting result of my father's terror (combined with my mother's complicity in the dysfunctional behavioral pattern) was a continual 'distrust of my own body' and a strong desire to dissociate from the 'here and now' reality. I've spent a lifetime of struggle trying to 'stay inside my own body', without feeling an overwhelming desire to 'go somewhere else -- almost anywhere else -- or be someone else' rather than having to face the omnipresent fear that pervades every waking moment. And a lifetime of coping with the suppressed anger at the way in which I was abused as a child.
Dissociation is a common defense mechanism for physically and sexually abused children, and I have fallen back upon that emotional defense throughout my life. It has taken much of my years of therapy to work through those fear and anger spaces, and it still takes much of my energy to fight with those dissociative tendencies when I am triggered by stressful events in my life.
I'll speak more about this in later articles; for now, I want to acknowledge that it has been a prominent emotional outcome of all the pervasive abuse.
(5)
My introduction to the men's movement in 1986, when I lived in New Mexico, and my devotion to working on issues of men's emotional wellness ever since, has given me a new 'lease on life' and has allowed me to find some degree of comfort with my maleness. My father's weird and bizarre views on gender and on what it 'meant to be a man' so profoundly poisoned my own satisfaction and 'comfort with my male Self' that it has taken me many years and countless hours of therapy to crawl out of that totally confusing abyss. At least I'm now on the path of solution orientation, on the healing journey of transformation, rather than wallowing in the profound victimization of so much of my earlier life. The journey to a 'healed emotional state of heart' continues to be difficult. But the respect and love of my intimate partner, competent guidance and assistance from my therapist, emotional support of my friends, respect from professional colleagues, confidence displayed by members of my Unitarian Universalist congregation, and my own developing knowledge and inner self-confidence about my many skills and abilities has allowed me, in recent years, to find a greater sense of personal satisfaction with my life.
As Lord Byron said "No one leaves this world without some pain." I'm slowly working through my own and attempting to assist many others with theirs, via the Mariposa Men's Wellness Institute website and blog, facilitation of men's support groups, and work on issues surrounding men's emotional wellness. Though not a linear path (in fact, rather quite a zig-zag path), I am making clear and distinct progress toward inner emotional health. And that alone is a great testament to how it is possible to heal from such terrifying beginnings.
As I often joke "we live with our parents for 20 years and spend the next 60-80 years trying to overcome that experience." For some that experience is positive, but clearly it was not for me. But there is hope, and I'm an example of someone who has 'seen the light at the end of the tunnel' and known that it was not an oncoming train, but rather a manifestation of 'enlightenment'.
There is no perfection in this world, but transformation is indeed possible.
And, for now, that is enough.
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