Category Archives: themes

Mother’s Day and the Mother Wound

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"Phantom Mother" by David Jewell.

Anyone else feel like an outcast on Mother’s Day? It’s not a festival of sunshine and flowers for all of us. Mother’s Day can be a minefield of emotional triggers for those who grew up in dysfunctional, abusive, or neglectful family systems.

The article linked below is addressed to daughters but it was a huge eye-opener for me as a son as well:

Maternal Narcissism Survey: Is This Your Mom?

For many men, there is nothing more terrifying (or unthinkable) than looking into their own Mother Wounds. I know my Father Wound well. It hurts but does not scare me. My Mother Wound terrifies me. It feels like a pit from which there is no return.

My Mother Wound is equally deep in its own way as my Father Wound, but much of it is hidden in the weeds and shadow realms of my psyche. Finding its various elements and aspects, seeing them, and recognizing them for what they are has been a tricky job, largely because my mother was the person I trusted most and she conditioned me not to see what she was doing to me. The culture has amplified, and continues to amplify, the conditioning my mother laid into me so early and so often that women (especially mothers) can never do wrong or be at fault, making a tough slog through the dark feminine underworld in my own psyche even tougher.

Today on Mother’s Day, I’m supposed to be the adult (as always) and set my own needs and feelings aside (again) for a woman who has no interest in me, and never really has. The loneliness and alienation I feel today as a son is multiplied by the non-stop social and media imperative to adore and deify a mother who has no understanding of me and no use for me outside the scope of my being what she wants me to be to suit her own needs.

This topic isn’t easy for me to write about. It feels incredibly risky. I feel safer writing about being sexually abused than writing about this. I never felt unduly constrained by the urge or the obligation to protect my father from my feelings about him as I wrote about working through my Father Wound. Mother is another story entirely. I expect I’m probably going to stumble and make mistakes going forward down this path, but this is work I have to do if I have any chance of being whole, mature, and complete as a man.

I know there are other men out there who need to do this work as well and I hope they’ll feel encouraged to do it. Any man who is consciously, actively working on his Mother Wound deserves support and understanding. By confronting one of our culture’s most powerful and deeply entrenched taboos, he is charting a necessary and critically important new route through largely unexplored territory for other men.

Photo credit: David Jewell. Used by permission.

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Rediscovering the original wound

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"Old House on the Rocks" by David Jewell.

“What you wanted, you still want.” ~ Robert Bly

1. Wound

I’ve been blessed during the last couple of months with another very fruitful phase of deep and intense creativity, soon to end when I return to the world of “real” work, i.e., work that is “real” in the sense that it’s perceived by others as having financial value. I love doing my creative work and know that it has tremendous value, but unfortunately that doesn’t translate into any sort of income, at least not so far.

It is, as always, terribly difficult for me to accept the hard reality that the work I love so much, that moves me so deeply and comes so naturally to me, doesn’t provide me with any material support. I know that there are many other writers, artists, guides, healers, and teachers out there (some of whom, quite frankly, have less to offer than I do) who are successfully supporting themselves doing their work. I don’t know why I’m not one of them, and it eats at me all the time.

The work I do, my real work, is a birthright once lost that I’ve fought long and hard to reclaim for about a quarter century now, nearly half my life. The battle has not been without its rewards, but I’ve also made some unexpected discoveries that have left me with painful questions I can’t answer, as expressed in the poem below.

original wound

many years ago
I heard a man say
	your gift to the world
	is in your wound
I found this idea very appealing
I ran with it
and I've been running with it
ever since.

in the last twenty-five years
I've discovered many gifts
	most long forgotten
	or never known to me at all
in many wounds.

many of the wounds had been
	forgotten as well
or not so much forgotten as buried
	deep in my dreams
beneath my skin
	in muscle and bone
under a series of identities
	I'd been forced to assume
	throughout my life
in order to survive.

so what I was told
	was not wrong
there truly is treasure to be found
	under the scars
but I've also learned something else.

my gifts
much like my wounds
are for the most part
unseen and unwanted by the world.

needed they may be
wanted they are not.

I wasn't prepared for such a discovery
and I also wasn't prepared for the fact
that the land of wounds seems to stretch out
into infinity
in every direction.

every wound I tend and heal
seems to be an entry point into several more
they cover one another like bandages
they're nested inside one another like
	a set of chinese boxes
	each of which contains
	another set of chinese boxes
and every wound I tend and heal
yields yet more gifts
that the world does not want.

perhaps that is the original wound
the mother of them all
the point of origin
the first and deepest cut
and the ultimate rejection:

	the world does not want me
	and it does not want
	what I have to offer.

if I could talk to the man who sent me
down this path twenty-five years ago
I'd love to ask him
	how am I to live
	and what am I to do
	with so many gifts
	the world does not want.

2. Reflection

I sat with this poem for several days after writing it. One of the core themes, that “the world” does not want my gifts, felt a little off to me. I know of many people who value my work and there are probably many others who do so of whom I’m unaware, so it struck me as an overstatement of the facts to say that “the world” does not want my gifts. And yet it still felt true to me at some fundamental level.

In terms of dollars and cents, I could still make the argument that a world that associates no financial value with my work doesn’t want it, and I think that was a lot of what was motivating what I was feeling when I wrote the poem, at least on the surface. But as I sat with what I’d written, I was reminded of something I’d heard someone (I can’t recall who) say years ago: When we speak in absolutes (always, never, etc.) about things that are upsetting us, there’s a good possibility that we’re actually expressing the pain of a wound that goes all the way back to childhood, when we were so very little, our needs were so very big, and everything that affected us deeply felt so very absolute.

I was then reminded of the following comments made by Robert Bly to Bill Moyers during the excellent but now largely forgotten documentary A Gathering of Men, first televised over twenty years ago:

Alice Miller says a wonderful thing. She says, “When you were young you needed something you did not receive. And you will never receive it. And the proper attitude is mourning.” Mourning is the proper attitude, not blame, mourning. And she says another thing that’s so wonderful. She says, “You know, when you came into the world, you brought this fantastic thing with you, coming from centuries, and eons, and you brought this amazing energy in from animal life, reptile life, other planets, everything. And this incredible energy you brought in … your parents didn’t want it. They wanted a nice boy. They wanted a nice girl.”

You couldn’t believe it. That’s your first rejection. It’s pre-verbal. That’s why encounter groups won’t get to that. That’s your first rejection. It’s profound. They didn’t want the energy you brought. They wanted a nice boy or a nice girl.

So when you’re small, you realize you can’t fight against that stuff your parents want … so you make up a kind of a false personality … You invent a false personality, and you survive.

And then Alice Miller says, “Now, please, you’ve got to forgive yourself for that, because you did it to survive, and you did the right thing. You did the right thing.” And the proof of it is that you’re alive right now.

I’ve watched A Gathering of Men many, many times over the years. Bly’s comments above, while they’ve always made complete sense to me, have never resonated more strongly with me than they do now, and I believe that’s the core truth I express near the end of my poem:

perhaps that is the original wound
the mother of them all
the point of origin
the first and deepest cut
and the ultimate rejection:

	the world does not want me
	and it does not want
	what I have to offer.

“The world”, especially when we are very young children, is home and family, and we construct our internal model of the world, the one we will carry forward into adulthood, accordingly. A large chunk of that model is developed in response to interactions with our parents. My mother wanted me to be someone else and did her best to make me into what she needed until I was no longer young enough, malleable enough, and helpless enough to be controlled and manipulated. My father didn’t want me at all and did his best to destroy and, ultimately, to eliminate me. I formed my identity living in the shadow of two giants too blinded by their own damage and their own unmet needs to see who I was. I wanted to fix both of them, even if it meant sacrificing and forgetting myself, and I tried for many years. Tried, failed, and lost myself in the process.

That was the world, as I experienced it, not only from the moment I was born, but from the moment I was conceived. That was, and is, my original wound: I was not wanted as I was, what I had to offer had no value, and I had to make myself into what “the world” wanted me to be in order to survive.

Now I’m about to do it again.

3. Process

I’m good for about ten hours of productive work on an average day, assuming I’m feeling well. I need about eight hours of sleep nightly. That leaves six hours for everything else: self-care, social activities, exercising, shopping, preparing and eating meals, etc. And down time.

Down time, doing nothing in all its forms (resting, daydreaming, allowing my thoughts to wander, etc.), is incredibly important for me, and not only because it’s the source of so much of my creative insight. It’s also vital, as I am a Highly Sensitive Person (HSP), to my health and well-being. Additional down time is necessary for HSPs because of the high amount of information we perceive and receive, and the depth and thoroughness with which we need to process it. Without at least two to three hours of down time every day, my edges begin to fray and I can lose my center pretty quickly.

Any so-called “9 to 5″ job I get is going to consume my ten productive hours a day (at least) leaving me with nothing for my deep creative work, my real work, the work that gives my life meaning and keeps me alive: the work of my soul. Even worse, it’ll consume my mornings, which are the keystone of my entire process.

For almost eight months now, I’ve been off the chain. A lot of people might assume that not having a job would equate to not working. Not so. I’ve been working about ten hours a day most days, sometimes more. No one has been making me do it. It’s natural. I wake up every morning with ideas. The process begins while I’m sleeping, in my dreams. My most productive hours, as a writer, generally come before noon. What happens in the morning determines the creative course of my day, and it happens every day, of its own accord, provided that I’m available to it.

There’s a wonderful sequence in the movie Pollock (one of my absolute favorite films). It begins with painter Jackson Pollock waking up in the morning. He dresses and stumbles half-asleep into the kitchen, where his wife hands him a cup of coffee as he lights his first cigarette of the day. She helps him put on his heavy coat, hat, and scarf and sends him off with a wordless pat. He steps outside into a cold winter day and trudges the short path through the snow to his studio in the barn. Once inside, he stokes the wood stove, gets a fire going, and starts his work for the day, which will last into the evening.

It’s clear from the presentation of this sequence in the film that this is his daily pattern, and I resonate with it so strongly because it is, in my own way, my daily pattern as well, that is, when financial circumstances allow it. I’ve often wondered how Jackson Pollock would’ve tolerated losing his mornings five days a week in exchange for sitting in a cubicle somewhere. My guess is: not well.

Doing creative work, in the way I do it, requires a certain amount of open time and space. In a lot of ways, I’m a channeler. Most of what I write (and all of what I draw) comes to me without any specific conscious intention. I never “try” to write a poem or an essay about anything. Words and ideas simply start coming. Sometimes, as in the case of most of my poetry, the bulk of the thing comes to me quickly and it’s all I can do to keep up. Essays can take a bit longer to germinate, beginning with a general idea or feeling that then develops in the background of my mind over a period of days, weeks, or even months until suddenly, one day, it’s time to write.

Whatever the case, whether it’s a poem that started as I was waking up or an essay that’s been incubating for a couple of weeks, when it’s time to write, I have to be there for it because, if I’m not, that transient energy that’s attempting to coalesce into something more solid will be lost, and lost forever.

I never know where a poem or an essay is going when it begins, and I never know how long it’s going to take for the process to complete itself. My most recently finished poem (“shelter”) began when the first several lines came to me completely unplanned (as usual) as I was sitting in my truck in the parking lot of the neighborhood grocery store. I was supposed to be on my way to be drug tested for my upcoming job, but took the time to follow the thread those first lines offered as far as I could before hitting the road. After a short drive, I sat outside in the parking lot of the drug testing facility and worked on the poem until the place was about to close, at which point I set down my pen and pad and went in.

By then, the poem was nearly complete, but I still wasn’t satisfied with the ending. The last three lines finally came to me (again, unexpectedly) about half a mile into my evening walk. I didn’t have anything with me to write them down, so I had to repeat them to myself for a mile like an ad hoc mantra so I wouldn’t forget them before I made it home. I continued to poke at what I’d written for several hours though the evening until I felt satisfied, more or less. I never know if anything’s really done until I’ve slept on it.

All in all, from the moment the first couple of lines came to me until I felt comfortable enough with what I had to call the poem done, the process took about five hours. Five hours. Nineteen lines. Ninety-five words (including the one-word title, which also had to be dug out of the word stream). That’s what I mean when I say open time and space is required to do this work. If I’m unable to give those five hours to that poem when I did, there is no poem, period.

4. Survival

I start the new job in a couple of days, and I can already feel my creative engines shutting down. The same part of me that generates all the ideas and insights also knows when the required window of open time and space is closing. Shutting the process down, as bad as it feels (and it feels like death itself), is a necessary and largely involuntary form of protection for me. Not being able to roll out of bed, trudge out to my workshop, fire up the stove, and get to my work every morning means that insights and ideas, if they come, will have no opportunity for development, realization, and expression.

Imagine that if every time you started having sex you were forced to stop before you were finished. Imagine having that experience every morning, day after day, week after week. Before long you wouldn’t even want to start having sex, or even want to feel sexual at all, but that underlying, undeniable life energy would still be there in you nonetheless, looking for a way out, and you’d feel it. That’s how I’m going to be feeling when the circumstances of making a living force my most vital energies underground once again.

As a result, I would expect this to be my last blog post for a while. Maybe a long while. It’s hard to say. Sometimes my creative energy is powerful enough to push its way through constraining circumstances somehow, but if I’m not available to do something with it, I’ll only wind up frustrated and there’s a part of me that would rather feel nothing at all than feel that.

Money is an unfortunate necessity, and from that standpoint, I’m grateful to have this new job. Grateful, but not happy. It’s possible to feel one without feeling the other; gratitude and happiness are not the same thing. I’ll go forward, mindful of my original wound and its influence on how I see and experience “the world”, and I’ll try to keep Robert Bly’s comments paraphrasing Alice Miller in mind:

“Now, please, you’ve got to forgive yourself for that, because you did it to survive, and you did the right thing. You did the right thing.” And the proof of it is that you’re alive right now.

What I wanted, I still want. But once again, I’ll do what I have to do to survive, and I’ll forgive myself, as best I can, for doing it.

Photo credit: David Jewell. Used by permission.

A thank you to my allies

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"Rock, Sea, and Sky" by David Jewell.

A little background on this post: I originally wrote this entry on 02/28/13, but was feeling a bit too vulnerable then to share it. I read through it again this morning for the first time in over a month and felt a bit sorry that I hadn’t posted it. So here it is, a bit out of sequence in terms of specific time and feeling, but still relevant in terms of my motivation for writing it.

I’d like to thank everyone for the encouragement and supportive suggestions shared in response to my blog post from yesterday (“Caught between the road and the sky”). I’ve been struggling with the issue about which I wrote for a very long time. It has deep roots and there are times (like now) when I feel as if I will never resolve it.

I know I’m not alone in having longstanding core issues that challenge and confound. Unfortunately, I still often find it far easier to extend my patience, compassion, and understanding to others with their own issues than I do to myself with mine. Try as we may, sometimes we simply cannot see ourselves and our own situations fully and clearly. At those times, we need others.

I learned to survive during childhood by internalizing everything I could because my perceptions and feelings were not welcome or safe, and by relying on myself because I couldn’t trust others to be there when I needed them. Old habits of survival learned and practiced under decades of duress can be hard to shake.

I still expect, much of the time, that if I open up about a problem or share a fear or weakness, no one will be there. I still tend to expect that the help I need will not be there when I need it, and that I’ll have to go it alone, because that’s been my experience for so much of my life. I also learned, very early on, that any help, support, and attention I received typically came with a price. Receiving help, support, and attention meant paying up now or owing a debt. Most of the time, I paid by giving up part of myself, as that was all I had to give as a child. I’ve not shaken this pattern fully either.

I do my best to be brave and clear in both my life and my writing, but sometimes, despite my most heartfelt efforts and intentions, I feel weak and confused instead. I aspire to freedom but find ways to trap myself. I am sometimes as stubborn in my desire to quit as I am in my refusal to quit. I’ve been experiencing all of these states lately in some very deep ways, and I’m frustrated with myself, with my inability to be smarter, to make better decisions, and to solve my own problems.

For all of these reasons and many more, I appreciate the fact that I have allies, witnesses, and supporters out there (most of whom I’ve never met) as I continue to make my way forward in what mythologist Joseph Campbell called “the night sea journey … where the individual is going to bring forth in his life something that was never beheld before.” It’s a long trip, often lonely, sometimes dark, and it’s good to know that you’re with me.

Photo credit: David Jewell. Used by permission.

Caught between the road and the sky

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When we come to the place where the road and the sky collide
Throw me over the edge and let my spirit glide
They told me I was going to have to work for a living
But all I want to do is ride …

~ “The Road and the Sky”, Jackson Browne

I was seventeen when I first heard the song that began with these lyrics, but I wasn’t hearing what I thought I was hearing. I was close, but one word made all the difference for me:

They told me I was going to have to work for a living
But all I want to do is write …

There was much I didn’t know, and had forgotten, about myself at age seventeen, but one thing I knew for certain was that I wanted to write. Another thing I knew for certain, given my broken blue collar family origins, was that I was going to have to work for a living. And I didn’t see how I’d ever be able to reconcile the two. I still can’t.

Now I find myself once again at “the place where the road and the sky collide,” the road being the very real earthbound necessities of working for a living and the sky being the equally real work of actualizing my creative and expressive aspirations as a writer.

These two realities have collided in my life many times before and I’ve made numerous attempts for nearly 25 years now to merge them into a single, unified path, but without success. The time I spend in the sky always comes at the price of far more time on the road. And now the road, the necessity to work for a living, is calling me back once more.

I don’t know how much writing I’ll be doing going forward. The road always takes a big toll on that part of my life. I could write something every day, given the opportunity, but my writing process is typically far more time and labor intensive, and far more dependent on relatively short-lived little windows of inspiration, than the average work week can accommodate.

I often think, sometimes quite seriously, about giving up the writing. The costs of keeping at it, both financial and personal, seem far too great for me to continue to bear at times, especially as the years pile on. Then I hear from someone like Steve Spitzer. Steve is a Professor of Sociology at Suffolk University and founder of the Jericho Circle Project, a non-profit organization that runs men’s support groups in correctional facilities in Massachusetts. Steve sent me a message last week to tell me that he’s been using my poem “little iron man” in his course at Suffolk University as well as in some of the Jericho Circle prison groups.

Or I see a comment here on the blog like this one, posted yesterday:

I can’t thank you enough for the joy I just felt reading your kind words :) I had fallen into a bad place again, and your encouragement and your writings have helped to remind me how to get out of that place. I really love how your writing gets behind my barriers and makes me ‘feel’. Words can’t describe how comforting it is to connect with someone who can relate to these emotions. Much love x

Or I get a phone call like the one I received recently from a young man in Florida who wanted to thank me personally for my first book, Iron Man Family Outing.

And then I think: How can I quit?

Those are just a few examples from recent experience right off the top of my head. There are many others, and probably still others of which I’m not even aware. This tells me that I’ve been right all along: that I really am on to something, that what I’ve been doing has value, and that people need it.

If I could only find some way to make a living doing this work, I’d never even think about quitting. Ever. I love it more than anything. But the road is what pays the bills, and now it’s time for me to come down out of the sky again.

On days like this, I am torn between the desire, the need, to keep moving forward with the work that moves me (and others) and the absolute necessity to provide for myself and for my well-being. This is the place where the road and the sky collide in my life, the place where I have spent so much of my adult life trapped, like some ancient cursed mythological figure, in tormented suspension between the one and the other.

Unhiding myself

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1. Wounded wonder boy

I’m having a hard time trying to communicate with a teenage boy I know. He’s smart, sensitive, idealistic, fiery, and full of potential. He’s also been wounded and traumatized more than he feels he can bear, and he’s come to the conclusion that the only way to keep himself safe in a world he’s repeatedly experienced as unsafe is to hide.

There was a time, not so long ago, when he was eager to stand in front of the class and happy to share the stories he’d written. He was seen as a leader by both teachers and other students, and he liked it. He ran for class president and won. He enjoyed being recognized at school assemblies for his academic achievements. He was comfortable being seen. He expected it.

Now he’s wary and terrified of the unwanted attention, both positive and negative, that can come with being seen. He hasn’t been the same since a beloved sixth grade teacher stood him up before the class and then savagely criticized him in front of everyone in a surprise attack that was as vicious and unwarranted as it was completely unexpected. In the aftermath of that experience, he began to have terrible anxiety attacks any time he had to stand up and speak to the class. This was new to him. He’d felt excited before speaking in the past, but never scared. He began to feel himself shrink inside whenever his name was called and he just wanted to disappear.

He didn’t know what to do about what he was feeling and things only got worse in junior high when his elementary school class merged with classes from the other elementary schools in his town. There were so many new kids he didn’t know, but somehow a lot of them knew him. Or thought they did. Everywhere he went, kids he didn’t know said things to him like “Hey genius!” and “There’s the brain!” He didn’t know them, didn’t know how they knew who he was, and didn’t like the names they called him. He felt like he was being mocked for being smart. He’d never experienced anything like that before from the other kids at school. It was weird. It made him feel unsafe and ashamed. He felt like a target.

Some of the girls came up to him and told him things like “You’re going to be rich someday!” and “Someday you’ll be famous!” He didn’t like this either. He felt like they wanted something from him and he didn’t even know who they were.

Everywhere he went, he encountered people who’d already decided who he was before he’d ever met them. He felt like he’d had no chance to form his own identity with these new people. Instead, a preformed identity with all sorts of preconceptions, assumptions, expectations, and responsibilities was being cast upon him, and much of the attention he received as a result was not just unwelcome, but negative and hostile.

Among other things, he now found himself to be the target of numerous malcontents and bullies. Again, these were not people whom he’d wronged or even knew. Some of the abuse he received from them was verbal, some was psychological, and some was physical.

He no longer felt safe at school. It no longer felt like a positive place to be. He felt overwhelmed and on edge all the time. He had severe panic attacks every morning before school and felt like throwing up all day long. Most days, he didn’t eat much of anything until he got home after school. He felt scared all the time.

Giving presentations to the class became harder and harder. He always did well, but he was a nervous wreck beforehand. He still excelled academically, but was increasingly teased and tormented for it. He won his categories two years in a row in his junior high science fairs, but felt nearly paralyzed with terror before each presentation. One of the judges, a science teacher at the high school, was so impressed with his eighth grade science fair entry that he was invited to repeat his presentation for students in the teacher’s high school physics classes. He declined. It was just too scary. This was the first time he ever said “no” to an invitation to be seen and recognized for his work. It would not be the last.

In high school, all of these trends continued and his patterns of fear and avoidance of attention deepened. As a freshman, he ran for student office and had to give a speech in the auditorium before the entire student body. It was a miserable experience for him, utterly terrifying, and for the first time he didn’t even feel like he’d done a good job, stumbling over his words and shaking as he spoke. He wouldn’t try anything like that again.

The mocking continued: nerd, geek, brain, head, genius, etc. He was getting tired of being ridiculed and coming to resent the attention he received. Even when it was positive, it came with all sorts of expectations, especially from adults, about who he was and what he was going to do. “You’re going to be a scientist. You’re going to be an engineer. You’re going to be a mathematician.” Sure, he got good grades in math and science, but he wasn’t that interested in either subject. He loved drawing, writing, and music; he was rich to overflowing with creativity, imagination, and ideas. But no one ever talked with him about making a life for himself with any of that, so he assumed it was not possible and that none of those things that moved him so naturally and so deeply had any value in the “real world” of adulthood he’d be entering soon.

He felt trapped in an identity, or a set of identities, that he’d never chosen. He was miserable, scared, and nauseous every day. Everybody thought they knew who he was and either liked him or didn’t like him based on whichever identity they recognized. Some people saw him as a hero who was going to make everyone proud; other people wanted to hurt him or make him fail. He didn’t ask for any of this. It was all wearing him out and he saw no end to it.

That’s when he decided there was only one safe course of action. He decided to hide. And he’s been hiding ever since. Hiding and feeling safe. But not happy. Not happy because the light that he used to share so freely is still there in him and still wants to find its way out. He knows this because he can feel it. He can feel it all the time. He feels frustrated that he can’t let himself shine like he used to, and he feels frustrated when he sees how well others have done in their lives while he’s been hiding. But when he thinks about coming back out again, all the old terror and dread comes crashing down on him, so he pulls back into the safety of the shadows.

2. Hiding man

I’ve been living with this kid who decided to hide himself as a strategy of self-preservation for forty years now. He’s an identity I formed for myself in reaction to all those other identities that were being imposed upon me, not just at school but at home and in my extended family as well. As I’ve written in my poem “life decisions at sixteen”:

I want to be left alone
I want to be anonymous
I'm tired of standing out.

I don't want to be in the spotlight anymore
I don't want to be recognized
I don't want to be seen.

I don't want to be seen
	as a "brain" or a "genius" or a "head" anymore
I don't want all the pressure to be
	"the smartest" anymore.

I don't want all the expectations anymore
I don't want all the responsibility anymore
I don't want to be a leader anymore
I want to drop out and be left alone.

That was my life at sixteen and I’d had enough of it, so I rebelled. I pulled the plug on a life I could no longer tolerate, one that felt unbearably oppressive and threatening to my well-being, by pulling myself out from the spotlight of unwanted attention and expectations. I went into hiding and I was proud of myself for doing so. I actually liked myself again for the first time in years. I felt like I was in charge of my life for the first time ever. I felt empowered. I didn’t feel like a target anymore. And I finally began to feel a bit safer again after so many years living with relentless fear and anxiety at school every day.

I did everything I could to destroy all those false identities that had been put on me that I hated so much. I shocked everyone by signing up for welding classes at the vocational school, which was widely regarded at that time to be for the loser kids who couldn’t cut it academically. I tanked my grades so I wouldn’t be the valedictorian because I didn’t want to have to make a speech at graduation. I ignored offers from universities and went to work in a sawmill after high school. While most of my friends were leaving home and going off to college, I was living in my parents’ basement, dodging logs and stacking boards ten hours a day at work, and doing exactly what I’d set out to do: being anonymous.

Not surprisingly, that life also started to get pretty old after a while. I began to feel trapped again and started looking for a way out. Eventually I found one, and my life began to move forward, but I can see now that I’ve continued to aim low and try to keep myself invisible and anonymous throughout much of adulthood because that desperate kid who bailed out of everything and went into hiding to save himself is still with me.

He’s still making decisions for me, too. In a lot of ways, he feels like the strongest part of me. In some ways, perhaps he is. He is the one who knew what he had to do to survive, he did it, and I can’t fault him for that. He was in a bad situation, feeling totally overwhelmed by his life, and had no one to whom he could turn for help. I often wonder what my life might look like today if that boy had only had the knowledgeable and compassionate assistance and guidance he needed to deal with the attention, feelings, and experiences that were overwhelming him. It is a tragedy that he felt that hiding himself was the only way to survive.

Now I find myself coming face to face with him again, perhaps for the first time as an adult. I’ve done a lot of inner child work with myself, covering various ages, but I’ve done almost no work with this teenage boy. In some ways, I think I actually feel more protective of him than of some of my earlier age incarnations because I know how vulnerable he really was, and is. But he also scares me. He’s angry, he’s powerful, he’s stubborn, and he’s willing to walk away from anything if he feels threatened in terms of either safety or integrity.

3. The challenge of unhiding

Teenagers, in general, are a puzzle for me. I’m very comfortable with kids up until they hit about age twelve, after which they seem more and more like walking mysteries. I don’t think this is a coincidence. I was eleven when my sixth grade teacher bullied and verbally abused me in front of the class. That was, in many ways, the end of childhood for me and the beginning of learning to hide myself. It was also when I began to separate from some major aspects of myself and to become a walking mystery to myself.

Hiding myself has kept me safe, or at least feeling safe, for many years, but it has also cost me dearly. I’m beginning to see that now in a much deeper way than I ever have before, and it hurts. It hurts to know that by hiding myself I’ve also been blocking myself from the meaningful, creative life I’ve been wanting so long and working so hard to have, the life I know I’m capable of having and that I know I deserve.

Words are inadequate to express how I feel about this. There is a massive sense of loss, a deep and powerful sadness. I’m ashamed and disappointed to realize how I’ve been failing myself. I’m filled with grief about the life, the lives, I’ve given away in exchange for keeping myself hidden so I could feel safe. I’m scared and worried that I’ve been hiding myself for so long, that it’s so native to my way of seeing and functioning in the world, that I won’t be able to recognize when I’m doing it, much less change it.

Painful as it is to admit, I can see that while hiding myself might have been my best option for keeping safe all those years ago, it’s actually having the opposite effect now, and has been for some time. Often the strategies we choose when young to survive and keep ourselves safe no longer suit us and begin to fail us later in life, and can even put us at risk if we adhere to them too long. Hiding myself still feels safe but it isn’t. Unhiding myself feels profoundly unsafe, but it’s increasingly obvious to me that doing so is fast becoming not only an issue of safety for me, but of survival.

The prospect of unhiding myself is profoundly frightening to me in a variety of ways. I also know that I can’t change what I’ve been doing without the cooperation of that teenage rebel, the wounded wonder boy, inside me. He stands astride the path to change, guarding it fiercely, and is determined that I will not pass because he does not want me carrying him back into the dangerous territory he once left, swearing never to return. He is powerful, he is dug in, and he is used to making the decisions in this area of my life. If I am to move forward at all in this task of unhiding myself, I’m going to have to deal with him: his fear, his sadness, his vulnerability, his anger, his frustration, his creativity, his determination, his pride, his absolute certainty that there is one and only one way to be safe.

How do I approach him? Perhaps the key lies in something I wrote earlier about the absence of knowledgeable and compassionate help in his life. Perhaps I’m in a position to give him something like that now, somehow, if I can only reach him. I know that, deep down inside, hiding was never his first choice, just as it was never mine. Perhaps we can find a way to unhide ourselves together.

Related posts:
I am a Highly Sensitive Man
Sensitivity in the lion’s den

Falling through: One man’s fear of feeling

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I’m making my first appearance today as a guest blogger on Jungian author Jean Raffa’s blog with a video poem and commentary titled “Falling Through: One Man’s Fear of Feeling” about my fear of feeling and expressing grief, sadness, and pain. Here’s Jean’s introduction to my post:

In keeping with my latest theme of the wounded masculine, I’m pleased to share this piece by guest blogger, Rick Belden. Rick is an author and a poet who has struggled to get in touch with his feelings throughout his adult life. As you’ll see in this post, he’s learned how to use his creative imagination to heal the wounds of his childhood.

You can read the full article here.

Photo credit: David Jewell. Used by permission.

Sensitivity in the lion’s den

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During the past 25 years, I’ve had the good fortune to be a participant in a number of men’s groups. Some were better than others, but in every case I gained something important and useful from the experience. Among other things, a men’s group can provide a great opportunity for a man to explore and express the more sensitive side of his nature and his experience, which may be embodied in a number of ways: vulnerability, tenderness, trust, compassion, grief, deep sharing, deep listening, awareness of self and others, perceptiveness, insight, etc.

For a man like me who is also a Highly Sensitive Person (HSP), a men’s group can provide a unique opportunity, perhaps his first, to experiment with the possibility that he can be open with his sensitivity with other men in a safe way. Seeing other men in a group not only accepted and supported, but admired and respected, for owning and expressing aspects of their sensitivity can be deeply healing and even life-changing for a Highly Sensitive Man (HSM) who’s been hiding a significant part of himself for fear of being seen as unmanly. But there can also be challenges for an HSM even in a group of men with whom he feels safe, and part of his growth will depend on how he faces those challenges when they occur.

I was once a member of a peer-facilitated men’s group. As there was no “authority figure” (counselor or therapist) present, it was up to each of us, as individual group members, to maintain the safety of the group. We began every group meeting by giving each member the opportunity to check in and share whatever was up for him at that time. During one such check-in, I told everyone about an all-day monster headache (I believe I called it a “rhino killer”) that had almost convinced me not to come to group that evening. I wasn’t fishing for sympathy or praise; I simply wanted everyone to know that I wasn’t feeling well, that I wasn’t at my best, and that it had been a bit of a struggle to join them that day.

Much to my surprise, one of the other group members responded by telling me to “stop whining and just get on with things.” I was stunned and very upset to receive such a powerfully critical reaction in what was supposed to be a safe environment where we could all be open and honest about whatever we had going on. I felt profoundly shamed and invalidated. Shocked, rattled, and unsure of what I should do, I kept my feelings to myself (as HSPs are often prone to do immediately after what feels like a surprise attack) and completed the meeting as best I could.

Our group met bi-weekly, so I had a full two weeks to process my experience and review my options. I thought about leaving the group, as it no longer felt like the safe environment I’d thought it was, but decided to attend one more meeting and talk about what happened previously as the first order of business. The meeting location for the group rotated from member to member each time, and as it happened, the next meeting was being held in the home of the fellow who’d told me to “stop whining.”

I felt like I was walking into the lion’s den that evening, but I kept my commitment to myself. I spoke honestly about what I’d experienced, defined limits in terms of what I found helpful and unhelpful in terms of feedback, and expressed my expectations for how I was to be treated in the group. The result was a very productive discussion about what had happened during our last meeting, how we all might have handled the situation differently, and what I needed from everyone to continue my participation. Everyone, including the “lion”, expressed appreciation to me for my courage in showing up and stating my position and my needs so clearly. And they all said they’d learned something from the way I did it.

My point in sharing this story is that it’s important for those of us who are HSPs (male or female) to use the skills we have to assert ourselves and our needs when similar challenging opportunities present themselves to us, as they inevitably will in a world that often feels so hostile and unfriendly to our very natures. We need to do this not only for our own sakes, but also for those who may benefit from seeing the strength and clarity that we sensitive folks often hide, even from ourselves. Taking action on our own behalf will not always yield the outcome we desire, but we can only get stronger with practice.

Photo credit: David Jewell. Used by permission.

Related posts:
I am a Highly Sensitive Man
Welcoming the new generation of Highly Sensitive Men

What do you need right now?

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Being asked what you need for the very first time by someone who really wants to know and then finding yourself coming up blank is, I think, a common experience for many men. In the very first men’s group I ever attended, virtually every man (including me) was unable to answer the first time the facilitator asked him, “What do you need right now?”

The most common immediate reaction was disorientation and confusion, as if the question itself was somehow beyond comprehension. A lot of men were rendered speechless. Some shrugged and said, “Nothing.” Some looked away or stared at the floor, as if ashamed at the prospect that they might even have needs. Others made jokes or attempted to change the subject. But almost no one was able to answer the question truthfully and sincerely.

In exploring our reactions and discomfort with the question as a group, it became clear very quickly that most of us (including me) were unaccustomed to expecting anyone else to genuinely care about what we needed, much less give it to us. As we dug a little deeper into our individual experiences and histories, many of us found ourselves feeling very angry about how little our needs had mattered to those around us throughout our lives. There was often a great sadness as well. In some cases, the grief expressed was profound.

One of the first steps for many of us was to learn that it was okay for us to respond to “What do you need right now?” by simply saying, “I don’t know.” Perhaps this seems like an obvious answer to the question, but it’s one that doesn’t come easy for many men. “I don’t know” is a state of mind men have often been taught to equate with weakness; it is something we’ve been conditioned not to acknowledge to ourselves, much less say out loud.

The work required to break through the associated resistance was often substantial for the men involved, and sometimes quite grueling. But a man who is honestly able to say “I don’t know” when he is asked what he needs right now has taken a powerful first step forward in the direction of reconnecting with himself, and those of us who began to answer in that fashion generally found ourselves pleasantly surprised at our ability to respond with something far more specific very soon thereafter.

As we made our first attempts at saying what we needed, some other patterns began to emerge. There was a tendency for many men to talk about their needs in very abstract or high level terms (e.g., “I need more money,” “I need a new job,” “I need a girlfriend,” etc.) that sidestepped the “right now” part of the question. Time after time, the facilitator patiently but firmly steered each man who answered in this manner back into the group, back into the room, and back into real time “right now” experience with the other men who were there with him. This was the next hurdle for many of us, because it meant answering the question not only in “right now” terms, but in terms of telling the other men, “This is what I need from you right now.”

Admitting our needs to other men was another challenging taboo for most of us. We had little or no experience understanding and expressing our needs, and many of our initial attempts felt awkward and clumsy at first. It was also very hard for most of us to trust the other men. Men are often most deeply wounded in groups of other males while growing up, and are therefore highly protected against letting it happen again. But the group provided us with what we most needed, a safe space to practice and make mistakes, and we all made progress, in our own way and at our own pace. It was beautiful and often quite moving to watch these men brave the truly daunting risks of opening and unfolding themselves before others in ways they never had before, and such a great and unforgettable privilege to be present as both a participant and a witness.

I’ve been in several other men’s groups over the years since then, with scores of other men, and I’ve continued to see this same dynamic over and over. Many men, when presented with the question “What do you need right now?”, honestly cannot answer because they learned long ago that their needs were not important. A man who is disconnected from his own needs is truly disconnected from himself, and well down the path to trouble in his life. The good news is that, with proper support, attention, and assistance, every man can learn to answer this very important question consistently with clarity and confidence.

Photo credit: David Jewell. Used by permission.

Welcoming the new generation of Highly Sensitive Men

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A couple of months ago, I wrote a post called “I am a Highly Sensitive Man” in which I shared some of my history and experience as a man who is a Highly Sensitive Person (HSP). My post was then reprinted on the Good Men Project website, where it’s been very popular, and has subsequently been reprinted on numerous other sites around the world and shared widely across social media.

I’ve been very pleased that so many people have felt such a strong connection with what I wrote and have found it so helpful. Many of the most powerful and moving responses I’ve seen have come from young men. Some examples from various sites:

As a young 23 year old guy, reading this article was a revelation. [Good Men Project]

I thought you should know, your article changed my life. [Good Men Project]

Thanks for writing this. I’ve always felt like I am an extreme minority. It was very nice to hear how someone shares the exact same feelings I do … this could have been written by me. [Good Men Project]

I’ve always been this way, I just never knew the term “HSP” … It is a relief to have a name for it, something I can research; and it is a relief to know I’m not alone. [Good Men Project]

I am compelled to comment because I had never heard of the concept of HSPs before reading this article, and these traits describe me incredibly accurately. I am a 29 year old male who’s been in and out of therapy, struggled with addiction, and generally convinced himself that he is incapable of having normal human relationships due to my sensitivity and generalized anxiety. Upon reading this, I immediately did some research, reserved some books at my library, and spreading the word to those few close to me that I think I realized what my perceived “defect” was. And it’s not even a defect! [xoJane]

This post is exactly a reflection of who I am as a person. [xoJane]

I think this is an amazing article. I’ve known a lot of these facts for a while, but I’ve never seen them presented in such a combined article … Thank you for writing this. I’m going to save this article for myself to look back on. [xoJane]

As an HSP (highly sensitive person), this article resonates with me. [The Masculine Heart]

An insight into the masculine underground. [Twitter]

Thanks for your post entitled “I’m a highly sensitive man”. I couldn’t have put it better myself. [Facebook]

I also received a number of private communications from other young men expressing similar thoughts and feelings.

The young men who left the comments above and those who communicated with me privately may not know it yet, but they are far from alone. To the contrary, they at the leading edge of an emerging demographic with tremendous potential for moving our world in a more positive direction. They are the new generation of Highly Sensitive Men.

The video that follows was made by Chrisi Brand, a 24-year-old Austrian man. In the video, Chrisi introduces his new website, highlysensitivemen.com, and his vision for an online community for Highly Sensitive Men. I encourage you to have a look at this video as it is a wonderful example of the sort of initiative, clarity, confidence, and creativity I hope we’ll be seeing more and more from the Highly Sensitive Men of his generation.

I’m very happy to see young men like Chrisi and those whose comments I included above recognizing and claiming themselves as highly sensitive early in adulthood. I’m hoping that means they’re going to avoid a lot of the pain, confusion, and wasted time that so many men like me, who’ve come before them, have experienced in our lives.

These young Highly Sensitive Men are all around us, and they are eager to be seen, understood, accepted, and appreciated so that they can more actively offer their unique gifts to a world that needs them. To all of these young men, I say: Welcome!

Photo credit: David Jewell. Used by permission.

Empty promises

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When I was younger, I used to spend this time of the year making all sorts of commitments and promises to myself about what my life would be like a year later. Every year I’d promise myself that I wouldn’t spend another whole year of my life without love and that I’d finally find a way to support myself with truly meaningful work. I dutifully identified goals and objectives, and wrote them all down. I prayed and visualized. I applied myself in every way I knew how. But the things that mattered most to me, love and work, have never changed.

My last relationship ended over sixteen years ago, and it wasn’t even all that good. The one before it was even worse. Sometimes I feel incredibly sad, irritable, angry, and dissatisfied and I’m not sure why. Then I remind myself that I’ve been without love for nearly two decades. What was for many years an open, gaping wound in me that was always at the forefront of my consciousness is now so buried under years of coping, pattern, habit, and routine that I’m barely aware it’s still with me, but it’s there. It doesn’t howl as loudly and as often as it used to, but it makes itself known to me in other ways if I pay attention.

The holidays have been difficult for me this year in ways they hadn’t been in several years. I’ve felt that familiar wolf bite of loneliness, that old cold emptiness in my chest, more acutely in the last couple of weeks than I have in some time, and familiar questions about how I could ever possibly do anything about it have been trying to seep into my thoughts. I learned a long time ago how to push them away, to keep myself pointed forward and living with what I’ve got, but like that gaping wound of lovelessness, they slip into the background of my psyche, but never really go away.

As for work … work never really changes. The work that matters to me is what I share here, on my website, and in my books. The work I do for money matters only for money. I do it because I have to. Up until recently, I still had illusions of somehow translating what I do because I love it into what I do for money. That seems increasingly unlikely to me now. I’ve been working non-stop for the last 5+ years to make that change and I’m no closer to it today than I was when I started.

My first book, Iron Man Family Outing, will be going out of print soon, probably within the year, and without some help from who knows where, there’s no reprint coming. It’s also looking less and less likely to me that my second book, Scapegoat’s Cross, will ever see the light of day. I completed the manuscript in September 2009 (right before I broke my right wrist and shoulder in a fall) and I’ve made absolutely zero progress since then in developing either the art needed to finish the book or any sort of satisfactory scenario with regard to publication.

Sometime within the next few months, I’ll undoubtedly (and hopefully, if I want to keep eating) return to my standard anonymous schmuck in a cubicle routine, and the luxury of autonomy and devoting my days to what truly moves me will once again be a memory, maybe for several years. Maybe for good, given my age and finances.

I used to feel like I could change anything in my life if I really wanted to do it and really applied myself. That used to work, too. It’s a good thing it did because that’s how I survived a pretty bad childhood and made a life for myself as an adult without the kind of help a lot of kids receive when starting out. The conviction that “I deserve better and I can get it” has been the fuel that’s kept me going time after time when I’ve found myself abandoned, betrayed, disappointed, and pressed to the edge of oblivion by people and circumstances.

That conviction is still there in me, but it’s been muted by years of learning, very reluctantly, that commitment, desire, will power, and the willingness to go all in don’t necessarily get me what I want and deserve. Maybe this is yet another unwanted lesson that comes with being an involuntary passenger on that sinking ship known as aging. It would probably be a good topic of conversation with a trusted older mentor who’s some years down the road from me in time, but I’ve never had anyone like that in my life either.

So here I am at the beginning of another new year, wanting to make the same old promises to myself: “I won’t spend another year alone. I won’t spend another year wasting my life doing meaningless work.” It all has the vague feel of some fairy tale I can’t quite recall, something about someone who’s been entranced and is doomed to repeat the same promises and patterns year after year after year. Every year he returns to the mirror, sees himself another year older, and repeats the same promises. Promises he once meant and believed with all his being that are now nothing but dim remnants of fading hope. Promises, once held high like torches on a dark path, that now slip through graying heart and hands like the last fraying strands of a life, however deeply felt, that never was.

I wish I could remember how that fairy tale ends, if it even exists at all. I don’t want another year of empty promises. They may be all I have, but promises I can’t keep are promises not worth making to anyone, least of all to myself.