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.
Wednesday, December 7, 2011
The End Of A Particularly Terrifying Era
(1)
My father died early last month (on the 7th of November).
Please - no tears. I didn't shed any. There was none of the usual sadness at the passing of a parent. In point of fact, upon receiving the email from my brother that our father had died, I turned to my significant female partner and broke into a wide smile, leaped up and danced joyfully around the room.
I had been looking forward to his death for many years. I promised myself that, upon hearing of his demise, I would 'break open a bottle of bubbly'. When I first said that, I still drank fruit juice (I had stopped drinking alcohol -- and therefore champagne -- 25 years ago) and I thought that would be a bottle of sparkling cider. But now I live on an even more restricted diet and the only liquid I drink is water; hence, I shared sparkling water with friends, to celebrate his death. A close friend in my congregation, though, suggested that a more appropriate toast would be, not about his death, but about my being given my freedom from the potentiality of his physical attack. That felt much more appropriate to me as well.
(2)
You see, in my case, my father and I had had, throughout my life, a most problematic relationship. I wanted, my whole life, to love my father -- and yearned to feel that he loved me, in the nurturing way that love is most positively expressed -- but that just wasn't possible.
My father was a violent man, shut down emotionally, who only knew how to connect emotionally with his sons by beating them with his fists. I spent the whole of my life -- from infancy forward -- in abject fright that, at any moment, with no relation to much of anything, I might be subjected to his violence.
My father was a sadist and a pedophile, at least with his own children. I'm quite sure, from years of therapy and dream and conscious memory, that he raped me, either anally or orally (or both) at the age of 9 months, and periodically several more times until I was 10 years-of-age. And he beat me savagely for the most minor of infractions, and often for no infraction at all -- only motivated by his personal psychic discomfort of the moment and his ability to lash out at his sons whenever he felt like it.
I was one of three sons [no sisters], but as the youngest, I was the one most subjected to his violent outbursts (an observation that even my brothers have acknowledged was true). By the time I reached high school, I was taller than our father (he was 6'2", and by the time I was 16 years-of-age, I had reached 6'8") and therefore was potentially in a position to defend myself. But, by then, my brothers had headed off to college and I was the only one left at home, for my senior year.
You must understand: I was like the elephant with the chain around its leg as an infant, who later, when he is bigger and stronger, only has a flimsy rope to hold him, who doesn't break away because he's been trained to obey. I was absolutely terrified of my father. That last year of high school, when he savagely beat me 3 - 4 times a week [during our 'talks' in the basement], he let me know, on many an occasion, that "if you ever get to thinking you're big enough to fight back, I can always use a baseball bat." And I knew he was insane enough to do it, so I never did fight back.
What was amazing is that he thought that his frightful violence toward his sons constituted love. He often said "I wouldn't beat you if I didn't love you." I would have been quite willing to have been loved a whole lot less, based upon that definition of love!!
(3)
He was a man of complex inner emotional conflicts, low self-esteem, and his own internalized gender confusion. My brothers and I were subjected to continual tirades about 'being stupid', no matter what we did or accomplished. When my brothers later became quite successful attorneys, our father continued to tell them they would never amount to anything. He told me, literally thousands of times, that I was "just plain stupid", which drove my already low self-esteem into the gutter and left me, for many years thereafter, with a craving to learn as much as I could about every possible subject, so deeply frightened was I that other people would think I was stupid. (Generally, I managed to overcompensate, to the point that I ended up intimidating almost everyone with my breadth of academic knowledge.)
As he was savagely beating me with his fists -- and the metal end of his belt, a favorite weapon for him to use -- he would often be screaming at the top of his lungs "Be a man! Be a man! Be a man!" like some sort of mantra. What occurred to me, in clear tones in my mind, was that if that behavior constituted 'being a man', then I wanted to have nothing to do with being a man. Which, of course, placed me in a quite confusing gender quandary: I was, biologically, a man, and yet the primary modeling, for me, of masculinity, was this frightfully violent and insane man who was my father. I was left, for many, many years thereafter, with a quite deep questioning about my own maleness, which only began to be healed when I discovered the men's wellness movement in the mid-1980's.
My mother did little to intervene in these outbursts, and in fact, often motivated them by coming up with equally illogical infractions that "your father will hear about when he comes home." Quite different from being a protector, my mother, in her own fear and chronic dissociation, ended up being an enabler for his violence. (So deep was her denial that for many years after our father divorced her, every time I would talk about the frightful degree of his physical violence, she would exclaim "Why have you never told me this before!" Every time! As though she had never heard it before that time.)
(4)
By the time I was in my senior year of high school, even in the midst of all these beatings, I was taking psychology courses and becoming quite clear that my father was profoundly insane and a sadist. Why didn't I fight back? Other than the 'baseball bat' threats, he was also a military officer (U.S. Air Force) and I knew that if I were to call the police [the military police, since that last year of high school we lived in military housing], they might arrest him, but that upon his being released [there were few, if any, laws against parents beating their children back in the '60's], he would have come home and literally have beaten me to death, since his military career would have been toast due to such an arrest. So, as painful as the beatings were, I didn't fight back or call the police out of a paradoxical sense of self-defense. The other point I would note, as well, is that all the other boys I knew whose fathers were military officers were being regularly beaten by their fathers -- that was just the 'ethic' among many military personnel for 'disciplining' their children.
An article I read recently on The Good Man Project noted that the behavior of my father was undoubtedly criminal. In this more enlightened era, he would have been arrested for child abuse (or at least should have been). But, such laws were few and far between back then, and generally not enforced even if they were on the books. Plus, as noted, he was in the military, which has its own 'code of justice', separate from the civilian courts.
(5)
My father, gripped as he was by the tumult of his own inner psychological conflicts, probably often felt out-of-control in his professional military career. He never got along well with his superiors (he remained a Captain for 13 years -- when the standard term-of-service in that rank was, by his own reckoning, 7 years -- before finally being promoted to and retiring as a Lt. Colonel). The one place where he had complete control was in his family, and there he devotedly practiced a form of out-of-control sadistic terror. My earliest conscious memory was at the age of 4 and it was of one of his terrifying beatings. As a child, I had no choice, out of shear personal defense, but to 'crawl up into myself' and believe, with all of my heart, that somehow, someday, this terror would eventually come to an end. And that I would still be alive when it happened.
Hence, upon hearing that my father had died, it was similar to someone who had been incarcerated in the Soviet Union gulags hearing that Joseph Stalin had died in his sleep.
The analogy is not inappropriate. Living in our home often felt like living in a concentration camp, where terror was meted out based on a wholly irrational random basis. If I had been a juvenile delinquent, some of the rage could have been understood [though definitely not excused]. But I was the most meek and toe-the-line kind of kid, so the violence vastly outweighed the nature of the infractions. And frankly, as noted earlier, the 'infractions' were often manufactured whole-cloth in the moment. It wasn't simply a matter of 'a crazy-making rule structure' where today 'X' was okay, and tomorrow 'X' was not-okay; rather, each day a totally irrational 'event' was created to be the basis for my [and my brothers'] 'having done something that portrayed my/our stupidness' and therefore needed to be subjected to 'discipline' by our father. Objectively, it was about his internalized conflicts, not our behavior, but such objectivity is hard to maintain when one is being subjected to continual, life-long irrational random terror.
(6)
Did I learn nothing of importance from my father? Did he give me no positive messages? Of course, saying such would be a misrepresentation. My father often asked us, at the dinner table, what we had learned in school each day. There was a pro-intellectual emphasis on learning in our household. My father was a history buff and a stamp collector, and I became a history buff and stamp collector (I still enjoy both immensely). My parents encouraged religious exploration and early in our childhoods encouraged us to come to our own conclusions about religion. And I, in response, largely rejected religion until my mid-30's, when I became of Unitarian Universalist, a faith tradition which I have whole-heartedly accepted and continue to rejoice within.
But whatever positive influences my father had on me were negated, in fact so thunderously drowned by the irrational random terror that he exhibited, that I have few positive memories of him nor ever felt much respect for him as a person.
(7)
I have never wanted to have children of my own, given the painful memories I had of my own childhood (and, in fact, have always been and remain quite uncomfortable around children). And though I am "my father's son", am almost a spitting-image of my father, and share his first name, I have never, unlike my father, beaten or raped children, nor have I ever been physically violent toward anyone else.
Frankly, I'm profoundly terrified of violence. Whenever I'm in a situation that even has the barest inkling of possibility of turning physically violent, or whenever I'm around someone, the nature of whose behavior is meant to provoke a strong negative reaction from me, I search for the nearest exit and depart as quickly as I can before the situation gets anywhere near that. Further, to this day, I prefer to avoid 'horror' or violent 'action' films, because they remind me so much of my own childhood, and therefore I get too easily 'triggered' by them.
Whenever I see a movie or theatrical production where a positive father-son relationship is portrayed, or whenever I see that kind of relationship among my peers with their children, it brings tears to my eyes -- not because I had such a relationship and lost it, but because I never had such a nurturing relationship with my father and always wanted one. Every time I foolishly reached out emotionally to my father in hopes of fostering such a relationship, I was subjected to even more abuse, so conflicted was he with masculinity and warm loving feelings.
(8)
Hence, as I said at the start, upon hearing of my father's death, I felt quite relieved. Though I have been taller and stronger than him for many years (and have not had much of a connection with him since 1987, having last seen him at my mother's funeral in 2004), I continued to be, at a deep psychic level, in a state of terror about potentially being attacked by him, for whatever irrational reason, every day of my adult life.
I can finally release that fear. I can finally know, in my 'heart-of-hearts', that I am no longer potentially subject to the violence of my tormentor.
Therefore.... Please -- no tears. No condolences. No "I'm sorry that your father has died." You'd be wasting your breath. And you would be [albeit with no intended malice] trying to demand that I feel a 'cultural expectation' about the death of a parent which has nothing to do with the reality of my life.
Instead, warmly hug me, praise me for my work with adult male sexual abuse survivors and men's emotional wellness, and wish me well on my continued emotional healing.
My father's death is my ticket out of the hall of crazy mirrors. It's time to move forward as a free soul, with a more positive and accurate reflection of myself as a man who is seeking to achieve positive mental health for himself and other men in our culture.
My father died early last month (on the 7th of November).
Please - no tears. I didn't shed any. There was none of the usual sadness at the passing of a parent. In point of fact, upon receiving the email from my brother that our father had died, I turned to my significant female partner and broke into a wide smile, leaped up and danced joyfully around the room.
I had been looking forward to his death for many years. I promised myself that, upon hearing of his demise, I would 'break open a bottle of bubbly'. When I first said that, I still drank fruit juice (I had stopped drinking alcohol -- and therefore champagne -- 25 years ago) and I thought that would be a bottle of sparkling cider. But now I live on an even more restricted diet and the only liquid I drink is water; hence, I shared sparkling water with friends, to celebrate his death. A close friend in my congregation, though, suggested that a more appropriate toast would be, not about his death, but about my being given my freedom from the potentiality of his physical attack. That felt much more appropriate to me as well.
(2)
You see, in my case, my father and I had had, throughout my life, a most problematic relationship. I wanted, my whole life, to love my father -- and yearned to feel that he loved me, in the nurturing way that love is most positively expressed -- but that just wasn't possible.
My father was a violent man, shut down emotionally, who only knew how to connect emotionally with his sons by beating them with his fists. I spent the whole of my life -- from infancy forward -- in abject fright that, at any moment, with no relation to much of anything, I might be subjected to his violence.
My father was a sadist and a pedophile, at least with his own children. I'm quite sure, from years of therapy and dream and conscious memory, that he raped me, either anally or orally (or both) at the age of 9 months, and periodically several more times until I was 10 years-of-age. And he beat me savagely for the most minor of infractions, and often for no infraction at all -- only motivated by his personal psychic discomfort of the moment and his ability to lash out at his sons whenever he felt like it.
I was one of three sons [no sisters], but as the youngest, I was the one most subjected to his violent outbursts (an observation that even my brothers have acknowledged was true). By the time I reached high school, I was taller than our father (he was 6'2", and by the time I was 16 years-of-age, I had reached 6'8") and therefore was potentially in a position to defend myself. But, by then, my brothers had headed off to college and I was the only one left at home, for my senior year.
You must understand: I was like the elephant with the chain around its leg as an infant, who later, when he is bigger and stronger, only has a flimsy rope to hold him, who doesn't break away because he's been trained to obey. I was absolutely terrified of my father. That last year of high school, when he savagely beat me 3 - 4 times a week [during our 'talks' in the basement], he let me know, on many an occasion, that "if you ever get to thinking you're big enough to fight back, I can always use a baseball bat." And I knew he was insane enough to do it, so I never did fight back.
What was amazing is that he thought that his frightful violence toward his sons constituted love. He often said "I wouldn't beat you if I didn't love you." I would have been quite willing to have been loved a whole lot less, based upon that definition of love!!
(3)
He was a man of complex inner emotional conflicts, low self-esteem, and his own internalized gender confusion. My brothers and I were subjected to continual tirades about 'being stupid', no matter what we did or accomplished. When my brothers later became quite successful attorneys, our father continued to tell them they would never amount to anything. He told me, literally thousands of times, that I was "just plain stupid", which drove my already low self-esteem into the gutter and left me, for many years thereafter, with a craving to learn as much as I could about every possible subject, so deeply frightened was I that other people would think I was stupid. (Generally, I managed to overcompensate, to the point that I ended up intimidating almost everyone with my breadth of academic knowledge.)
As he was savagely beating me with his fists -- and the metal end of his belt, a favorite weapon for him to use -- he would often be screaming at the top of his lungs "Be a man! Be a man! Be a man!" like some sort of mantra. What occurred to me, in clear tones in my mind, was that if that behavior constituted 'being a man', then I wanted to have nothing to do with being a man. Which, of course, placed me in a quite confusing gender quandary: I was, biologically, a man, and yet the primary modeling, for me, of masculinity, was this frightfully violent and insane man who was my father. I was left, for many, many years thereafter, with a quite deep questioning about my own maleness, which only began to be healed when I discovered the men's wellness movement in the mid-1980's.
My mother did little to intervene in these outbursts, and in fact, often motivated them by coming up with equally illogical infractions that "your father will hear about when he comes home." Quite different from being a protector, my mother, in her own fear and chronic dissociation, ended up being an enabler for his violence. (So deep was her denial that for many years after our father divorced her, every time I would talk about the frightful degree of his physical violence, she would exclaim "Why have you never told me this before!" Every time! As though she had never heard it before that time.)
(4)
By the time I was in my senior year of high school, even in the midst of all these beatings, I was taking psychology courses and becoming quite clear that my father was profoundly insane and a sadist. Why didn't I fight back? Other than the 'baseball bat' threats, he was also a military officer (U.S. Air Force) and I knew that if I were to call the police [the military police, since that last year of high school we lived in military housing], they might arrest him, but that upon his being released [there were few, if any, laws against parents beating their children back in the '60's], he would have come home and literally have beaten me to death, since his military career would have been toast due to such an arrest. So, as painful as the beatings were, I didn't fight back or call the police out of a paradoxical sense of self-defense. The other point I would note, as well, is that all the other boys I knew whose fathers were military officers were being regularly beaten by their fathers -- that was just the 'ethic' among many military personnel for 'disciplining' their children.
An article I read recently on The Good Man Project noted that the behavior of my father was undoubtedly criminal. In this more enlightened era, he would have been arrested for child abuse (or at least should have been). But, such laws were few and far between back then, and generally not enforced even if they were on the books. Plus, as noted, he was in the military, which has its own 'code of justice', separate from the civilian courts.
(5)
My father, gripped as he was by the tumult of his own inner psychological conflicts, probably often felt out-of-control in his professional military career. He never got along well with his superiors (he remained a Captain for 13 years -- when the standard term-of-service in that rank was, by his own reckoning, 7 years -- before finally being promoted to and retiring as a Lt. Colonel). The one place where he had complete control was in his family, and there he devotedly practiced a form of out-of-control sadistic terror. My earliest conscious memory was at the age of 4 and it was of one of his terrifying beatings. As a child, I had no choice, out of shear personal defense, but to 'crawl up into myself' and believe, with all of my heart, that somehow, someday, this terror would eventually come to an end. And that I would still be alive when it happened.
Hence, upon hearing that my father had died, it was similar to someone who had been incarcerated in the Soviet Union gulags hearing that Joseph Stalin had died in his sleep.
The analogy is not inappropriate. Living in our home often felt like living in a concentration camp, where terror was meted out based on a wholly irrational random basis. If I had been a juvenile delinquent, some of the rage could have been understood [though definitely not excused]. But I was the most meek and toe-the-line kind of kid, so the violence vastly outweighed the nature of the infractions. And frankly, as noted earlier, the 'infractions' were often manufactured whole-cloth in the moment. It wasn't simply a matter of 'a crazy-making rule structure' where today 'X' was okay, and tomorrow 'X' was not-okay; rather, each day a totally irrational 'event' was created to be the basis for my [and my brothers'] 'having done something that portrayed my/our stupidness' and therefore needed to be subjected to 'discipline' by our father. Objectively, it was about his internalized conflicts, not our behavior, but such objectivity is hard to maintain when one is being subjected to continual, life-long irrational random terror.
(6)
Did I learn nothing of importance from my father? Did he give me no positive messages? Of course, saying such would be a misrepresentation. My father often asked us, at the dinner table, what we had learned in school each day. There was a pro-intellectual emphasis on learning in our household. My father was a history buff and a stamp collector, and I became a history buff and stamp collector (I still enjoy both immensely). My parents encouraged religious exploration and early in our childhoods encouraged us to come to our own conclusions about religion. And I, in response, largely rejected religion until my mid-30's, when I became of Unitarian Universalist, a faith tradition which I have whole-heartedly accepted and continue to rejoice within.
But whatever positive influences my father had on me were negated, in fact so thunderously drowned by the irrational random terror that he exhibited, that I have few positive memories of him nor ever felt much respect for him as a person.
(7)
I have never wanted to have children of my own, given the painful memories I had of my own childhood (and, in fact, have always been and remain quite uncomfortable around children). And though I am "my father's son", am almost a spitting-image of my father, and share his first name, I have never, unlike my father, beaten or raped children, nor have I ever been physically violent toward anyone else.
Frankly, I'm profoundly terrified of violence. Whenever I'm in a situation that even has the barest inkling of possibility of turning physically violent, or whenever I'm around someone, the nature of whose behavior is meant to provoke a strong negative reaction from me, I search for the nearest exit and depart as quickly as I can before the situation gets anywhere near that. Further, to this day, I prefer to avoid 'horror' or violent 'action' films, because they remind me so much of my own childhood, and therefore I get too easily 'triggered' by them.
Whenever I see a movie or theatrical production where a positive father-son relationship is portrayed, or whenever I see that kind of relationship among my peers with their children, it brings tears to my eyes -- not because I had such a relationship and lost it, but because I never had such a nurturing relationship with my father and always wanted one. Every time I foolishly reached out emotionally to my father in hopes of fostering such a relationship, I was subjected to even more abuse, so conflicted was he with masculinity and warm loving feelings.
(8)
Hence, as I said at the start, upon hearing of my father's death, I felt quite relieved. Though I have been taller and stronger than him for many years (and have not had much of a connection with him since 1987, having last seen him at my mother's funeral in 2004), I continued to be, at a deep psychic level, in a state of terror about potentially being attacked by him, for whatever irrational reason, every day of my adult life.
I can finally release that fear. I can finally know, in my 'heart-of-hearts', that I am no longer potentially subject to the violence of my tormentor.
Therefore.... Please -- no tears. No condolences. No "I'm sorry that your father has died." You'd be wasting your breath. And you would be [albeit with no intended malice] trying to demand that I feel a 'cultural expectation' about the death of a parent which has nothing to do with the reality of my life.
Instead, warmly hug me, praise me for my work with adult male sexual abuse survivors and men's emotional wellness, and wish me well on my continued emotional healing.
My father's death is my ticket out of the hall of crazy mirrors. It's time to move forward as a free soul, with a more positive and accurate reflection of myself as a man who is seeking to achieve positive mental health for himself and other men in our culture.
Tuesday, August 16, 2011
Worsening Unemployment Statistics Deepen Social Unrest
We've temporarily survived the 2011 debt ceiling extortion of the Tea Party Republicans. At least President Obama doesn't have to face that tactic again until after the 2012 election. Now we can get back to the most important issue at hand: jobs and the economy. As Robert Reich and others have pointed out, a 'jobs agenda' is the most important 'next step' to tackle, and the result spawned by the debt ceiling extortion wrangled by the Republicans has created a worse atmosphere for job creation than before that battle.
The corporations are sitting on billions of dollars in profits. Many of them have paid little or no taxes on those earnings, either due to tax credits or because, due to the antiquated tax structure, they aren't taxed if they've moved their businesses off-shore (either physically to a foreign country or to a mailbox address in a tax-haven location like the Cayman Islands). What is most important is that the corporations are not hiring new workers in substantial numbers. On top of this, due to the federal cuts in subsidies for state government services, many state and local government workers are losing their jobs.
The result has been that more and more Americans are becoming unemployed. The 'official' unemployment statistic is 9.1%, which means that around 14 million Americans are out of work. But what that statistic doesn't include -- as many commentators have discussed -- are the increasingly large number of former workers who have joined the ranks of 'discouraged workers' and simply stopped looking for work. And who can blame them: the latest jobs available vs. number of applicants ratio is around 1 to 6. Millions of Americans have now been unemployed for 9 months or more, with many, many Americans having been unemployed for 2 years or more. (This writer, for one, has been without a full-time professional position that equated to his academic credentials, training and experience for more than 9 years, in spite of thousands of resumes sent out.)
An article that I read recently pegged the 'real' unemployment statistic at 16% (or more than 25 million Americans) and, frankly, I believe that is even too low; the more likely unemployment statistic is around 20% or more. Teen unemployment is around 40%, unemployment for African Americans and other minority groups is far greater than for whites (which has historically been the case, but it's even worse now), and about the only 'job' that many people can acquire consistently is to join the volunteer military (which is hardly 'volunteer' when it is one of the few choices available, even for people who have no desire to risk dying in warfare for the doubtful chance at career stability). We may not currently have an official military draft, but when a job in the military is one of the few choices available to many applicants, it becomes a 'military draft' by default.
Many articles have been written pointing out that, in the best possible scenario, the 'official' unemployment statistic won't drop to 5% until 2016 or later. Millions more Americans are being born and millions are 'coming of age' and want to join the workforce; yet, there weren't enough jobs available for those already looking for work, much less for new applicants 'coming on line' into the nation's workforce. I read a statistic in the Harper's Index last month that 85% of current college graduates are returning home to live following graduation because they can't find work with their college degrees and can't survive economically on their own.
Robert Reich and other writers have suggested that the country engage in 1930's style Civilian Conservation Corps programs, to help rebuild the crumbling infrastructure of the nation and provide jobs to millions of the unemployed in the meantime. But with all the cuts demanded by the debt ceiling 'deal', that is an unlikely possibility -- there is simply no funding available for it. Added to this dilemma, there have been numerous articles in the media of late about how corporations are furthering the pain by refusing to hire people who are currently unemployed, and are only being willing to hire workers who currently have jobs and are looking to transfer. While this tactic is clearly a violation of existing federal laws, legally proving that this has occurred in any particular employment situation is difficult, and clearly beyond the financial ability of most unemployed workers.
I keep being brought back to a somewhat 'pathetic good news/bad news joke' that I tell my friends (which I believe I coined): "The Good News -- and mind you this IS the good news -- is that it's only going to get worse before it gets better. And the Bad News is that it may not get better." Yes, a rather depressing attempt at humor, but though I began telling that joke when the recession started in 2007, it has become more and more true this past year as the number of layoffs and corporate downsizing has increased. The other cliché that I feel applies here is: "It's a recession when your friend loses his job, but a depression when you've lost yours." And more and more Americans are facing that daunting prospect.
Added to the pain is the demand from Tea Party Republicans that no new revenues be added. They want to reduce the federal deficit solely by slashing Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare, and other social safety net entitlement programs, while increasing the military budget (or at least not cutting it down concurrently). The result is that the pain for individual Americans has increased, the wealthy are paying a lower rate than most middle-class citizens, and the economic disparity between the top 1% super-rich and most Americans is increasing. Warren Buffet's recent article, wherein he points out that he's paying a smaller percentage of his income in taxes than his own staff, reveals much about this insanity. As he noted in the article, he wants to pay more, because it's the only fair thing to do.
In most countries, in past historical time periods, and even currently in many nations, this kind of deepening unemployment combined with increasing economic disparity between the social classes has resulted in profound social unrest. I don't wish that upon America. I am a liberal reformer, not a revolutionary, and want us, as a caring nation, to help those least able to help themselves. But the trend in our country, currently, is moving in the opposite direction, toward ensuring that the social unrest is magnified due to increasing economic disparity. We need a caring and cooperative bipartisan government that can reach out and care for and about its citizens, not one that casts its citizens further into the gutter, from which extraction will be more difficult to achieve, even when the economy 'turns around', whenever and if ever that occurs.
The corporations are sitting on billions of dollars in profits. Many of them have paid little or no taxes on those earnings, either due to tax credits or because, due to the antiquated tax structure, they aren't taxed if they've moved their businesses off-shore (either physically to a foreign country or to a mailbox address in a tax-haven location like the Cayman Islands). What is most important is that the corporations are not hiring new workers in substantial numbers. On top of this, due to the federal cuts in subsidies for state government services, many state and local government workers are losing their jobs.
The result has been that more and more Americans are becoming unemployed. The 'official' unemployment statistic is 9.1%, which means that around 14 million Americans are out of work. But what that statistic doesn't include -- as many commentators have discussed -- are the increasingly large number of former workers who have joined the ranks of 'discouraged workers' and simply stopped looking for work. And who can blame them: the latest jobs available vs. number of applicants ratio is around 1 to 6. Millions of Americans have now been unemployed for 9 months or more, with many, many Americans having been unemployed for 2 years or more. (This writer, for one, has been without a full-time professional position that equated to his academic credentials, training and experience for more than 9 years, in spite of thousands of resumes sent out.)
An article that I read recently pegged the 'real' unemployment statistic at 16% (or more than 25 million Americans) and, frankly, I believe that is even too low; the more likely unemployment statistic is around 20% or more. Teen unemployment is around 40%, unemployment for African Americans and other minority groups is far greater than for whites (which has historically been the case, but it's even worse now), and about the only 'job' that many people can acquire consistently is to join the volunteer military (which is hardly 'volunteer' when it is one of the few choices available, even for people who have no desire to risk dying in warfare for the doubtful chance at career stability). We may not currently have an official military draft, but when a job in the military is one of the few choices available to many applicants, it becomes a 'military draft' by default.
Many articles have been written pointing out that, in the best possible scenario, the 'official' unemployment statistic won't drop to 5% until 2016 or later. Millions more Americans are being born and millions are 'coming of age' and want to join the workforce; yet, there weren't enough jobs available for those already looking for work, much less for new applicants 'coming on line' into the nation's workforce. I read a statistic in the Harper's Index last month that 85% of current college graduates are returning home to live following graduation because they can't find work with their college degrees and can't survive economically on their own.
Robert Reich and other writers have suggested that the country engage in 1930's style Civilian Conservation Corps programs, to help rebuild the crumbling infrastructure of the nation and provide jobs to millions of the unemployed in the meantime. But with all the cuts demanded by the debt ceiling 'deal', that is an unlikely possibility -- there is simply no funding available for it. Added to this dilemma, there have been numerous articles in the media of late about how corporations are furthering the pain by refusing to hire people who are currently unemployed, and are only being willing to hire workers who currently have jobs and are looking to transfer. While this tactic is clearly a violation of existing federal laws, legally proving that this has occurred in any particular employment situation is difficult, and clearly beyond the financial ability of most unemployed workers.
I keep being brought back to a somewhat 'pathetic good news/bad news joke' that I tell my friends (which I believe I coined): "The Good News -- and mind you this IS the good news -- is that it's only going to get worse before it gets better. And the Bad News is that it may not get better." Yes, a rather depressing attempt at humor, but though I began telling that joke when the recession started in 2007, it has become more and more true this past year as the number of layoffs and corporate downsizing has increased. The other cliché that I feel applies here is: "It's a recession when your friend loses his job, but a depression when you've lost yours." And more and more Americans are facing that daunting prospect.
Added to the pain is the demand from Tea Party Republicans that no new revenues be added. They want to reduce the federal deficit solely by slashing Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare, and other social safety net entitlement programs, while increasing the military budget (or at least not cutting it down concurrently). The result is that the pain for individual Americans has increased, the wealthy are paying a lower rate than most middle-class citizens, and the economic disparity between the top 1% super-rich and most Americans is increasing. Warren Buffet's recent article, wherein he points out that he's paying a smaller percentage of his income in taxes than his own staff, reveals much about this insanity. As he noted in the article, he wants to pay more, because it's the only fair thing to do.
In most countries, in past historical time periods, and even currently in many nations, this kind of deepening unemployment combined with increasing economic disparity between the social classes has resulted in profound social unrest. I don't wish that upon America. I am a liberal reformer, not a revolutionary, and want us, as a caring nation, to help those least able to help themselves. But the trend in our country, currently, is moving in the opposite direction, toward ensuring that the social unrest is magnified due to increasing economic disparity. We need a caring and cooperative bipartisan government that can reach out and care for and about its citizens, not one that casts its citizens further into the gutter, from which extraction will be more difficult to achieve, even when the economy 'turns around', whenever and if ever that occurs.
Friday, July 15, 2011
The Tale Of Two Cities
"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times." So begins Charles Dickens' A Tale Of Two Cities about London and Paris on the verge of the French Revolution. I'm not actually writing a review of that book, nor discussing revolutionary ideas; I simply like the title and it fits my discussion today. I've written about this subject once before, last December, in my article You Can Never Really Go Home Again, but it's an issue that keeps coming back, again and again, as I search, in my heart-of-hearts, for that 'sense of home'.
For me, the 'two cities' are Albuquerque, New Mexico and St. Louis, Missouri. They are my two cities, the two that have factored most prominently in my life journey. I lived in Albuquerque at various times as a child, and then as an adult, from 1970 - 1998. At that point, in an effort to complete social work graduate school, I moved to St. Louis, where I've lived since 1998. Having grown up in a military family (as an Air Force 'brat') I never actually had a 'hometown', at least not in the sense the term is normally used, as a place where one grew up as a child. Though I was born in Dayton, Ohio, in actuality I was born at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, at the base hospital; it just circumstantially happened to be where my father was stationed at the time [and, coincidentally, Dayton was where he had been born]. We lived there for 3 months after my birth, and I've never lived there since. (Hence, saying I was born in Ohio is, while true, not the least indicative of where I grew up.)
As a child, I lived on Guam; at Lajes Field in the Azores; El Segundo, California; Scott USAF base in Belleville, Illinois; Tokyo, Japan; McConnell USAF base in Wichita, Kansas; and at various times in Albuquerque, New Mexico. For a military dependent, it was a relatively 'normal' amount of moving about, nationally and internationally. I felt fairly stable in that regard. I once met a fellow whose father had been in the Air Force real estate agency [before meeting him, I didn't realize there even was such a unit in the USAF] who had lived in 20 different places before the age of 18. After hearing that story, I felt rather lucky by comparison!
What motivated me to write further about this subject was a casual comment a close friend made yesterday when we were talking about an upcoming trip of mine to New Mexico, upon my noting that it had been 2 1/2 years since my last visit. He said "You don't have to come back to Albuquerque every year -- you now have a home in St. Louis." Arriving at that 'sense of home' has been difficult. I have not, since 2002, had any 'salaried professional employment' locally, nor anything other than casual part-time work, so the usual 'connection due to work' just hasn't applied to developing that 'sense of home' here. (Although my friend says "You're not unemployed, Donald; you actually work quite hard, you just don't have anyone who is willing to pay you for that work.")
On the other hand, I have been dating a woman for the last 3 1/2 years who is a St. Louisian to-the-bone, and via her, I've met a lot of 'local natives'. Plus, for the past seven years, I've owned a home here; I'm deeply connected to my Unitarian Universalist congregation and, as of May 2011, am now a member of their Board of Trustees; and I have been an usher at 7 different entertainment venues in St. Louis for the past 8 years, and have developed a 'sense of family' with many of the other ushers.
My friend's comment motivated one of those periodic 'sit back on your heels and re-vision an inaccurate mantra that has run around in your head' moments. When I describe myself to St. Louis citizens, I usually say that I'm a transplanted New Mexican [which is accurate, in that I lived there half of my life]. But I usually say that, not simply because of my longevity in New Mexico -- and because I've always related far more to my maternal New Mexican Hispanic roots than to my paternal Ohioan German-English roots, but because, as noted in my previous article, people in St. Louis don't believe someone is from here unless they were born in St. Louis and graduated from one of the local high schools. On the other hand, when I'm traveling in the Midwest, I generally tell people who ask that I'm a St. Louisian, since folks outside of St. Louis aren't ruled by that limited parochial perception that is true locally [though they probably have it about whatever town they are from!].
Wherever You Go, There You Are is another great book title, this one about mindfulness, by Jon Kabat-Zinn. It sums up my dilemma nicely. Wherever you live, that becomes your 'world'. While I primarily have friends both in Albuquerque and St. Louis (and others scattered around the nation), for quite simply 'daily contact' reasons my friends here have more of my attention, though email and social networking have minimized the dislocation of friendships. With those media, I'm able to keep contact with my family and many good friends in New Mexico, as well as those locally. Yet, like everyone else, I tend to keep close to home. Even though the Illinois border is only about 10 miles to the east, I only on rare occasions actually cross it; one needs to have a reason for traveling and I seem to rarely have a rationale for making the trip. All of my needs are taken care of here on the Missouri side, and so when I'm traveling, I tend to travel west or south, but rarely east.
I'm hardly saying that my pattern of travel is unusual; quite the contrary, it is the 'normal' or 'average' pattern. I remember what Bill Bryson wrote in Made in America: that until 1820, most people rarely traveled more than 5 miles outside their town during their whole lives, both from lack of curiosity and because the roads were so heavily rutted, not to mention quite unsafe. I read another article several years ago in Parade, about how even though 20% of the American population is highly mobile, the other 80% continue to be fairly provincial in their travel patterns. Alternately, America tends to be a nation of immigrants, and St. Louis is very much in that vein. There are many foreign nationals in St. Louis who have become citizens (we have, for example, the largest Bosnian population in the country, of around 60,000 immigrants). And for those first generation immigrants, traveling quite far is the norm, but second generation Americans tend to be more sedentary.
When I ask many St. Louis-born people if they've traveled much outside of St. Louis, the ones who do travel tend to mention other Midwest points-of-interest. That was true in New Mexico: many people there might have gone to Arizona, Colorado or Texas, or had grown up in New Mexico, moved to California for work, and then come home to New Mexico to retire. Of course, in part that is because of economics; it is simply less expensive to travel in your local area than further afield. But what puts that economic limitation in perspective is that many people note they've never really had an interest in traveling elsewhere in the nation - or outside the United States. Their attitude is "I've got everything I need, including my extended family, right here; why go anywhere else?"
That lack of curiosity about the 'outside world' is, paradoxically, pretty 'foreign' to me. Having grown up in a globe-trotting military family, I'm used to the idea of extensive travel. While I've done painfully little international travel as an adult [primarily because I couldn't find someone else, like the military when I was a dependent, to pay the ticket], I have a profound interest in the world around me. As such, I read books about other countries, watch travel and news programs on PBS, and subscribe to The Economist, to keep 'in touch' with developments in other nations and areas of the planet.
But then there are other people I know -- many [though not all] of whom were not born in St. Louis, but rather are transplants like myself -- who do a lot of traveling, taking several international trips each year. They are 'rooted', in the sense that they don't particularly want to live anywhere else, but that doesn't stop them from traveling often. I envy them, since I haven't figured out how to afford that myself, but at the same time, I take pleasure in the vicarious enjoyment of hearing about their travels.
In summation, I guess I could say that I'm home now, right here, where I am at this point in my life. I still very much want to travel, to visit the national parks in the United States, and to visit foreign countries, if I can ever figure out how to afford such. And, if I can find a substantial scholarship, I might eventually move to Boston to attend divinity school at Harvard. But for now, this is 'home'. And while I will always have the tale of two cities [and maybe more cities someday] to contend with in my heart, I can allow myself to settle into a sense of place right here, right now, and be content with that acceptance.
For me, the 'two cities' are Albuquerque, New Mexico and St. Louis, Missouri. They are my two cities, the two that have factored most prominently in my life journey. I lived in Albuquerque at various times as a child, and then as an adult, from 1970 - 1998. At that point, in an effort to complete social work graduate school, I moved to St. Louis, where I've lived since 1998. Having grown up in a military family (as an Air Force 'brat') I never actually had a 'hometown', at least not in the sense the term is normally used, as a place where one grew up as a child. Though I was born in Dayton, Ohio, in actuality I was born at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, at the base hospital; it just circumstantially happened to be where my father was stationed at the time [and, coincidentally, Dayton was where he had been born]. We lived there for 3 months after my birth, and I've never lived there since. (Hence, saying I was born in Ohio is, while true, not the least indicative of where I grew up.)
As a child, I lived on Guam; at Lajes Field in the Azores; El Segundo, California; Scott USAF base in Belleville, Illinois; Tokyo, Japan; McConnell USAF base in Wichita, Kansas; and at various times in Albuquerque, New Mexico. For a military dependent, it was a relatively 'normal' amount of moving about, nationally and internationally. I felt fairly stable in that regard. I once met a fellow whose father had been in the Air Force real estate agency [before meeting him, I didn't realize there even was such a unit in the USAF] who had lived in 20 different places before the age of 18. After hearing that story, I felt rather lucky by comparison!
What motivated me to write further about this subject was a casual comment a close friend made yesterday when we were talking about an upcoming trip of mine to New Mexico, upon my noting that it had been 2 1/2 years since my last visit. He said "You don't have to come back to Albuquerque every year -- you now have a home in St. Louis." Arriving at that 'sense of home' has been difficult. I have not, since 2002, had any 'salaried professional employment' locally, nor anything other than casual part-time work, so the usual 'connection due to work' just hasn't applied to developing that 'sense of home' here. (Although my friend says "You're not unemployed, Donald; you actually work quite hard, you just don't have anyone who is willing to pay you for that work.")
On the other hand, I have been dating a woman for the last 3 1/2 years who is a St. Louisian to-the-bone, and via her, I've met a lot of 'local natives'. Plus, for the past seven years, I've owned a home here; I'm deeply connected to my Unitarian Universalist congregation and, as of May 2011, am now a member of their Board of Trustees; and I have been an usher at 7 different entertainment venues in St. Louis for the past 8 years, and have developed a 'sense of family' with many of the other ushers.
My friend's comment motivated one of those periodic 'sit back on your heels and re-vision an inaccurate mantra that has run around in your head' moments. When I describe myself to St. Louis citizens, I usually say that I'm a transplanted New Mexican [which is accurate, in that I lived there half of my life]. But I usually say that, not simply because of my longevity in New Mexico -- and because I've always related far more to my maternal New Mexican Hispanic roots than to my paternal Ohioan German-English roots, but because, as noted in my previous article, people in St. Louis don't believe someone is from here unless they were born in St. Louis and graduated from one of the local high schools. On the other hand, when I'm traveling in the Midwest, I generally tell people who ask that I'm a St. Louisian, since folks outside of St. Louis aren't ruled by that limited parochial perception that is true locally [though they probably have it about whatever town they are from!].
Wherever You Go, There You Are is another great book title, this one about mindfulness, by Jon Kabat-Zinn. It sums up my dilemma nicely. Wherever you live, that becomes your 'world'. While I primarily have friends both in Albuquerque and St. Louis (and others scattered around the nation), for quite simply 'daily contact' reasons my friends here have more of my attention, though email and social networking have minimized the dislocation of friendships. With those media, I'm able to keep contact with my family and many good friends in New Mexico, as well as those locally. Yet, like everyone else, I tend to keep close to home. Even though the Illinois border is only about 10 miles to the east, I only on rare occasions actually cross it; one needs to have a reason for traveling and I seem to rarely have a rationale for making the trip. All of my needs are taken care of here on the Missouri side, and so when I'm traveling, I tend to travel west or south, but rarely east.
I'm hardly saying that my pattern of travel is unusual; quite the contrary, it is the 'normal' or 'average' pattern. I remember what Bill Bryson wrote in Made in America: that until 1820, most people rarely traveled more than 5 miles outside their town during their whole lives, both from lack of curiosity and because the roads were so heavily rutted, not to mention quite unsafe. I read another article several years ago in Parade, about how even though 20% of the American population is highly mobile, the other 80% continue to be fairly provincial in their travel patterns. Alternately, America tends to be a nation of immigrants, and St. Louis is very much in that vein. There are many foreign nationals in St. Louis who have become citizens (we have, for example, the largest Bosnian population in the country, of around 60,000 immigrants). And for those first generation immigrants, traveling quite far is the norm, but second generation Americans tend to be more sedentary.
When I ask many St. Louis-born people if they've traveled much outside of St. Louis, the ones who do travel tend to mention other Midwest points-of-interest. That was true in New Mexico: many people there might have gone to Arizona, Colorado or Texas, or had grown up in New Mexico, moved to California for work, and then come home to New Mexico to retire. Of course, in part that is because of economics; it is simply less expensive to travel in your local area than further afield. But what puts that economic limitation in perspective is that many people note they've never really had an interest in traveling elsewhere in the nation - or outside the United States. Their attitude is "I've got everything I need, including my extended family, right here; why go anywhere else?"
That lack of curiosity about the 'outside world' is, paradoxically, pretty 'foreign' to me. Having grown up in a globe-trotting military family, I'm used to the idea of extensive travel. While I've done painfully little international travel as an adult [primarily because I couldn't find someone else, like the military when I was a dependent, to pay the ticket], I have a profound interest in the world around me. As such, I read books about other countries, watch travel and news programs on PBS, and subscribe to The Economist, to keep 'in touch' with developments in other nations and areas of the planet.
But then there are other people I know -- many [though not all] of whom were not born in St. Louis, but rather are transplants like myself -- who do a lot of traveling, taking several international trips each year. They are 'rooted', in the sense that they don't particularly want to live anywhere else, but that doesn't stop them from traveling often. I envy them, since I haven't figured out how to afford that myself, but at the same time, I take pleasure in the vicarious enjoyment of hearing about their travels.
In summation, I guess I could say that I'm home now, right here, where I am at this point in my life. I still very much want to travel, to visit the national parks in the United States, and to visit foreign countries, if I can ever figure out how to afford such. And, if I can find a substantial scholarship, I might eventually move to Boston to attend divinity school at Harvard. But for now, this is 'home'. And while I will always have the tale of two cities [and maybe more cities someday] to contend with in my heart, I can allow myself to settle into a sense of place right here, right now, and be content with that acceptance.
Tuesday, July 5, 2011
Acquisition Addiction
Last December, I wrote an article for the MMWI Blog entitled Filling The Bottomless Pit of 'Not Enough' about how sexual abuse survivors end up feeling like they are never 'good enough' and how all the struggles they go through in their lives in an effort to fill in that 'empty hole' in their hearts often feel like they are for naught. This week's article, written after an almost two-month hiatus, discusses some further aspects of that primal fear and how I, as a sexual abuse survivor, have tried, with a variety of different paths, to overcome those wrenching anxieties.
When I was wracked by deep insecurities as a younger man, I turned to substance abuse to 'kill' the emotional pain that resulted from being a survivor of physical beatings and torture, and from being sexually molested by both of my parents. Like many sexual abuse survivors, I spent much of my life, at least until I was 40, in a state of dissociation, sufficiently coping with my daily life such that I 'functioned adequately' in professional employment, but felt emotionally conflicted about my gender, or at least conflicted about the gender that I both felt that I really was and/or wanted to be. More on that in a later article.
My point is that substance abuse became my 'addiction of choice' until I was 32. Shortly before I 'hit bottom' and 'cleaned up', I had started mental health work and group therapy. I have had, in the course of my life, the wonderful 'blessing' of having many really skilled and caring mental health therapists, who have been very thoughtful guides. (When one first enters therapy there is, often, the mistaken belief that the therapist will 'cure' the patient; but, in fact, the best therapists are guides who encourage the client to find the pathway that is most effective for themselves.) After going through a very stressful nervous breakthrough that lasted about 7 years, with the assistance of my guides I managed to come out into the light of greater clarity on the other side.
However, like many sexual abuse survivors, I merely traded one very destructive addiction (substance abuse) for a less destructive one (acquisition of 'stuff', or 'collecting'). [Addictions are used, often unconsciously, by individuals to avoid feeling their personal emotional pain.] So while my new addiction was healthier than the life I had lived before, it wasn't healthy. In the process, I acquired a lot of nice 'stuff', in addition to several graduate degrees, but the primary point here was that each new item (or bit of academic education) failed to 'fill that empty space in my heart' and failed to make me feel any more safe.
Now, I should note that acquisition addiction isn't particular solely to sexual and/or physical abuse survivors. Many people in American society have this addiction, and the credit industry in our country does everything it can think of to deepen the society's addiction to the acquisition of 'more stuff'. Two excellent books (and associated documentaries) on the subject have been written in recent years. Affluenza is a tongue-in-cheek documentary about the addiction to buying far more 'stuff' than anyone really needs, and in the process destroying the ecosystem with our 'American Way of Life'; and Maxed Out discusses, in great detail (with its own humorous explanation of quite serious subjects) how the credit industry has convinced Americans that 'debt is good', and in the process has destroyed many people's lives by offering them far-too-easy-to-use credit cards. Further, the banks and credit industry have encouraged them to use additional loans and credit cards to pay off the previous ones, driving people into often endless rounds of debt that have, eventually, lead some people into poverty and/or spending the rest of their lives paying on credit bills which only get worse over time.
Hence, many people in America suffer from acquisition addiction, and if the credit industry, mortgage and loan brokers, check cashing services, and banks have their way, most of the population will end up like putty in their hands, to be manipulated and abused by this most pernicious addiction. For sexual and physical abuse survivors, though, the addiction is magnified. They are enticed by the offer of images of security on the outside (which turn out to be anything but security) and wracked by profound emotional insecurities on the inside, in their heart and souls. We tend to use 'stuff' that we purchase to wall the world off, to create a sense of security by purchasing yet another item that we hope will fill that empty hole in our hearts. But the 'fix' of purchasing is only temporary -- and in fact extremely transitory -- to be replaced in short order by a deepening sense of emptiness and a further need for another 'purchasing fix'.
Abraham Maslow talked about this sense of transitory fulfillment in his Hierarchy of Needs study: that giving an employee a higher salary only temporarily 'satisfied' him, but as soon as his life 'acclimated' to the greater income, his dissatisfaction returned. What employees needed was to be psychologically, rather than materially, valued. Over time, that kind of real, emotionally healthy, and sustained difference in their lives tends to lead to a far greater degree of personal satisfaction.
The media would have us believe -- and much of the populace drinks this elixir with tremendous enthusiasm -- that by having the 'right' kind of vehicle, or using the 'right' kind of deodorant, or purchasing a house which has more space than you'll ever need in your lifetime, or filling our lives with this or that purchase, the individual will be more satisfied and content. But, in fact, the results are just the opposite: the more we acquire, the more we want to purchase and accumulate. It becomes a vicious never-ending cycle -- and it is that 'cycle of consumer spending' upon which our economy, at least since the 1880's, has depended for growth and prosperity. [Well, at least prosperity for some, and poverty for many others.]
For a sexual abuse survivor, who was 'taught' [by the abuse] that his or her primary value was sexual, gaining a sense of personal value is far more stable and leads to a greater degree of contentment than all the 'stuff' which the culture around us tries to convince us to purchase. What I have learned over the years of mental health therapy and working on my spiritual quest was that if I couldn't figure out how to love and care for myself, then all the 'stuff' from the outside wasn't going to make me feel any more safe or content. And it isn't going to 'substitute' for my need to learn how to manifest a personal sense of gender comfort.
I plan to write more about this subject in the future, as this is a very deep and pernicious addiction that, lacking care and concern, could lead me into penury, and a total lack of contentment and emotional and physical safety.
When I was wracked by deep insecurities as a younger man, I turned to substance abuse to 'kill' the emotional pain that resulted from being a survivor of physical beatings and torture, and from being sexually molested by both of my parents. Like many sexual abuse survivors, I spent much of my life, at least until I was 40, in a state of dissociation, sufficiently coping with my daily life such that I 'functioned adequately' in professional employment, but felt emotionally conflicted about my gender, or at least conflicted about the gender that I both felt that I really was and/or wanted to be. More on that in a later article.
My point is that substance abuse became my 'addiction of choice' until I was 32. Shortly before I 'hit bottom' and 'cleaned up', I had started mental health work and group therapy. I have had, in the course of my life, the wonderful 'blessing' of having many really skilled and caring mental health therapists, who have been very thoughtful guides. (When one first enters therapy there is, often, the mistaken belief that the therapist will 'cure' the patient; but, in fact, the best therapists are guides who encourage the client to find the pathway that is most effective for themselves.) After going through a very stressful nervous breakthrough that lasted about 7 years, with the assistance of my guides I managed to come out into the light of greater clarity on the other side.
However, like many sexual abuse survivors, I merely traded one very destructive addiction (substance abuse) for a less destructive one (acquisition of 'stuff', or 'collecting'). [Addictions are used, often unconsciously, by individuals to avoid feeling their personal emotional pain.] So while my new addiction was healthier than the life I had lived before, it wasn't healthy. In the process, I acquired a lot of nice 'stuff', in addition to several graduate degrees, but the primary point here was that each new item (or bit of academic education) failed to 'fill that empty space in my heart' and failed to make me feel any more safe.
Now, I should note that acquisition addiction isn't particular solely to sexual and/or physical abuse survivors. Many people in American society have this addiction, and the credit industry in our country does everything it can think of to deepen the society's addiction to the acquisition of 'more stuff'. Two excellent books (and associated documentaries) on the subject have been written in recent years. Affluenza is a tongue-in-cheek documentary about the addiction to buying far more 'stuff' than anyone really needs, and in the process destroying the ecosystem with our 'American Way of Life'; and Maxed Out discusses, in great detail (with its own humorous explanation of quite serious subjects) how the credit industry has convinced Americans that 'debt is good', and in the process has destroyed many people's lives by offering them far-too-easy-to-use credit cards. Further, the banks and credit industry have encouraged them to use additional loans and credit cards to pay off the previous ones, driving people into often endless rounds of debt that have, eventually, lead some people into poverty and/or spending the rest of their lives paying on credit bills which only get worse over time.
Hence, many people in America suffer from acquisition addiction, and if the credit industry, mortgage and loan brokers, check cashing services, and banks have their way, most of the population will end up like putty in their hands, to be manipulated and abused by this most pernicious addiction. For sexual and physical abuse survivors, though, the addiction is magnified. They are enticed by the offer of images of security on the outside (which turn out to be anything but security) and wracked by profound emotional insecurities on the inside, in their heart and souls. We tend to use 'stuff' that we purchase to wall the world off, to create a sense of security by purchasing yet another item that we hope will fill that empty hole in our hearts. But the 'fix' of purchasing is only temporary -- and in fact extremely transitory -- to be replaced in short order by a deepening sense of emptiness and a further need for another 'purchasing fix'.
Abraham Maslow talked about this sense of transitory fulfillment in his Hierarchy of Needs study: that giving an employee a higher salary only temporarily 'satisfied' him, but as soon as his life 'acclimated' to the greater income, his dissatisfaction returned. What employees needed was to be psychologically, rather than materially, valued. Over time, that kind of real, emotionally healthy, and sustained difference in their lives tends to lead to a far greater degree of personal satisfaction.
The media would have us believe -- and much of the populace drinks this elixir with tremendous enthusiasm -- that by having the 'right' kind of vehicle, or using the 'right' kind of deodorant, or purchasing a house which has more space than you'll ever need in your lifetime, or filling our lives with this or that purchase, the individual will be more satisfied and content. But, in fact, the results are just the opposite: the more we acquire, the more we want to purchase and accumulate. It becomes a vicious never-ending cycle -- and it is that 'cycle of consumer spending' upon which our economy, at least since the 1880's, has depended for growth and prosperity. [Well, at least prosperity for some, and poverty for many others.]
For a sexual abuse survivor, who was 'taught' [by the abuse] that his or her primary value was sexual, gaining a sense of personal value is far more stable and leads to a greater degree of contentment than all the 'stuff' which the culture around us tries to convince us to purchase. What I have learned over the years of mental health therapy and working on my spiritual quest was that if I couldn't figure out how to love and care for myself, then all the 'stuff' from the outside wasn't going to make me feel any more safe or content. And it isn't going to 'substitute' for my need to learn how to manifest a personal sense of gender comfort.
I plan to write more about this subject in the future, as this is a very deep and pernicious addiction that, lacking care and concern, could lead me into penury, and a total lack of contentment and emotional and physical safety.
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