Recovery: It's More A Verb Than A Noun (Part 5)

It's been quite a while since I wrote my last blog, on somatic body memories, and now I want to address the next installment, the one that has created the most anxiety for me. I stated, at the end of that blog [Part 4], that the next time around I wanted to address the issue of male body disconnect, which is the topic I'm going to write about today.

Given the 'emotionally delicate' nature of the topic, I have been, as is my style, 'writing it in my head and heart' for several months. I have also been 'investing' time on expanding my involvement on Facebook and LinkedIn over the last 6 months, adding a wealth of interesting and creative people to my networks and posting articles of interest to myself (and hopefully of interest to others).

I'm always trying to find 'the best day to write' my blogs, based on other activities, errands to be run, meetings to attend, problems that need immediate attention, and, most critically, whether my health will permit it. About 25-50% of any day I am overcome with a profound feeling of nausea, primarily caused by GI tract upset. I have had, since childhood, a very sensitive stomach, and over the years it has gotten worse. Between the discipline in my family being meted out at the dinner table, years of substance abuse due to intense depression caused by the childhood PTSD, a very nasty bout of giardiasis in the late 1980s [which took me 6 years to recover from], and then 7 years of blood thinners that I had to take to minimize more blood clots [after two veinous embolisms in 1997 & 1999], my GI tract has become quite compromised and fragile, to say the least.

I'm feeling overt nausea today, again, but also feeling that "it's time" to write this next installment of my 'Recovery' blog, before it drives me completely crazy thinking about it. And I may 'keep it short' today, just get some ideas down without writing my usual treatise, so this may be Part 5.0, with Part 5.1 coming later (my numbering system gets a bit complicated at times!). But for now lets just make it Part 5 and go with that.

Parts of Self

I find the best way to deal with this whole issue, as before, is to talk about 'parts of the Self'. The book that I read last year that really assisted me greatly was Parts Work: An Illustrated Guide to Your Inner Life, by Tom & Lauri Holmes. Their book talks about the whole landscape of 'inner voices' within each of us, which are generated by and respond to various emotional stimuli in our lives. The problem, they note, is that when we speak of "what I think", that may or may not be the "I" that spoke an hour ago, or yesterday, or when you were angry or sad or triggered by a past memory. Each of us has 'parts' that speak at various periods of our lives and which are replicated at later periods. There is the child self, the teen self, the adult self, the exiles, firemen, worriers, happy selves, etc. All of us are a complex combination of 'parts of Self' and, as I've learned from 30 years of psychotherapy, even the parts have 'sub-parts'.

This isn't just an exercise in complexity, it's actually a very helpful way to address serious trauma. And we ALL have trauma in our lives. Life is a trauma event. Exiting from the womb into the world is itself a traumatic event, but there are others: feeling abandoned by our parents (even the most loving of parents can't satisfy all of a child's needs), growing up and dealing with siblings and friends, not having our needs/wants/dreams fulfilled, being turned down for a job, nearly having an accident when we are driving, ingesting a food or beverage to which we have a negative reaction, taking medication for which we suddenly realize we are allergic, being rejected by someone we wish to have an intimate connection, being attacked in a bar or raped in a crowded city or being attacked in our house by either a stranger or even someone whom we thought we could trust. The list is endless, and the possibilities for trauma equally infinite.

But then, if you add in sexual, emotional, physical, religious, and psychological trauma to the mix -- the kinds of traumas in which others have a direct intent to hurt us -- that makes the whole of the system of traumatic events profoundly more complex. And 'parts of Self' become not just the 'ordinary multiplicity of different reactions to different life events', but in fact methods of dealing with profound trauma in such a way that we can survive the experience. It is that aspect of 'parts of Self' that I want to address here, when talking about my own male body disconnect that I have had to cope with since my earliest memories.

Running Away From The Self-Of-Birth

As I've noted in past blogs, I came from a family wherein both my parents raped me as a child. I know this to be a 'fact', both from conscious memories, somatic memories, and the emotional 'outcomes' and 'behaviors' that the abuse generated. I fought that knowledge for a very long time: who wants to 'know' that they were not only not loved by their parents, but that their parents -- who were supposedly their 'caregivers' -- actively sought to hurt their children? I was able to 'know' about my father's torture fairly quickly (I have distinct conscious memories of the hundreds of severe beatings), but it was a shock to my system in the mid-1980's -- when my therapist presented me with the 'incest model' and it 'fit like a glove' for the 20% of my memories that the physical torture model did not address -- to realize that my father had raped me. Around that time I also began theorizing that my mother either 'looked the other way', remained in denial, or engaged is similar behavior herself, but while I often said "it is possible that my mother raped me", it wasn't until 2006 that I finally 'admitted it to my Self' and started to work on healing from it. It was simply too painful to admit to myself that my mother had engaged in sexual molestation, either in a conscious or dissociative state of mind. But the 'behavioral outcomes' were glaring.

And what I mean by 'glaring' started here: one of my earliest memories was being in kindergarten class in the Azores (my father was in the military and we were stationed there at that point in my life). The class was engaged in one of those "what do you want to be when you grow up" exercises. When the teacher turned to me, what I very much wanted to answer was "I want to be a housewife when I grow up". I knew though, even at that tender age, that that was the 'wrong answer', and so I said "a fireman". That satisfied the 'socially acceptable situation' and got past the moment. But what that says (as I looked back on it during my years of psychotherapy) was that even at the age of 5, I was 'identifying with my abuser' and 'wanting to be like her so she wouldn't continue to hurt me'. And that my male-self-of-birth is something I was running away from and continued to emotionally avoid for much of my life thereafter.

Not only was I was set up for abuse by my mother -- and sexually abused by her -- but my father, who was the 'male role model', was beating me unmercifully quite often (my very first memory was, at the age of 4, being savagely beaten for having vomited at the dinner table, when my parents fed me beets [sort of a linguistic irony, beating beaten for vomiting up beets]). Given that he was the 'model of what maleness looked like', the very last thing I wanted to be was a man like him. And since he was the only 'model' of maleness that I had (I did have two brothers, but they were gone much of the time, escaping the family home as often as they could to avoid being beaten) and his model was in my face quite often, with his fists pummeling me, I was 'running away' from being a boy for all I could muster.

That provoked a major emotional crisis. I had a boy body, so I couldn't be a girl (hoping that if I were a girl, my mother would see me as 'just like her', and if I were a girl, my father would be less likely to beat me -- or so the 'magical answer' child's mind thought). And the world around 'related to me' as a boy, later as a man, but inside I was terrified to be me. I continued 'running from myself' for most of my remaining life, until quite recently. It took quite a number of years of therapy to start understanding that I could be a man who was different from the kind of man my father was, and I could be a man who could, at some carefully constructed level, be at ease with my male self. 

Beginning To Accept The Male-Part-Of-Self

In the late 1980s I discovered the men's wellness movement. It was the first model I had encountered that allowed me to construct a kind of masculinity that was not terrifying to my 'frightened inner-child parts of self'. And it has been, since then -- as I have stated often -- a 'lifeboat' that has saved me from either suicidal thoughts, slow-burning generalized self-destruction or a total lifetime of morbid depression. For a great many years in my life, I was wracked by dissociative thoughts: every time I was 'triggered' by events which evoked an emotional sensation or memory from my childhood (and this occurred quite often), I would dissociate and 'create an inner emotional self' that allowed me to feel even slightly safe in the moment. Often, no one on the 'outside' noticed anything unusual, other than that they were dealing with an anxious individual. I was able to keep the 'traumatic reaction' within my self, but it did result in 'feeling like a victim', which distinctly 'got in the way' of positive, healthy interactions with other people.

It was being able to start healing from that profound 'sense of victimhood' that really took my recovery in a whole new and positive direction. And allowed me to start having a positive feeling about being a man.

The other significant impediment to my recovery, though, had always been what I interpreted as a distinct failure to 'meet the ideal of what men were supposed to accomplish'. I could not, for all my efforts, create a long-term intimate relationship with a female; I could not, for all my efforts and in spite of earning multiple graduate degrees, manifest a 'settled professional career', or produce any kind of significant monetary income. And my reaction to this 'failure' was to run away from my maleness, because I interpreted those intimate and economic failures as an inability to BE A MAN. 

Finally, though, I just said "to hell with this definition, I am going to be the kind of man that I am, in a way that feels comfortable to me." And what I have manifested over the last 20 years is a man who is motivated by his personal sense of feminine energy [because that is the only form of gender that is not threatening to me], who is open about enjoying pink, pastel colors, flowers, lace, and such, and yet has been able to generate, over the past 7 years, a mutually loving long-term heterosexual relationship with a woman who appreciates the kind of man that I have become.

Moving On

Hence, what I have been able to manifest, at this point in my life, is a comfort with maleness that allows for a flexible gender interpretation of my life. I enjoy and feel at ease -- at least to a much greater degree than I was for most of my youth -- being a pro-feminist man, a man who is distinctly uncomfortable with 'macho' mentalities or behaviors, and who often can identify far more with the approaches to life of my female friends and my pro-feminist male colleagues than with males who are devoted to 'traditional' male behavior. That's not to say that I'm effeminate; my female partner and my therapist have often pointed out that I behave much more in a 'classically male way' than I am emotionally comfortable admitting to.

Whether I'm 'successful as a man' at this point in my life is anyone's guess, and more defined by others. My 'inner sense of self' is somewhat mixed [there is a male-part-of-self, and a female-part-of-self, and many others of various combinations]. I continue to pursue and work vigorously on men's emotional wellness -- not because I believe that I have 'figured out what being a man should be,' but because it is the only 'model of maleness' that feels valid [and safe] to me. 'Being a man' is less important to me now that 'being a conscious, caring, nurturing, loving pro-feminist man who is continually trying to be at ease with the gender of his birth'. And how that has been manifested in recent years continues to be an intimate aspect of my emotional recovery from profound physical and sexual abuse.

I'll stop there for now. And I will continue to focus my energies on the journey toward physical, sexual, and emotional recovery.