Tag Archives: trauma

Painful projections

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"Blue Projection Blindness" by David Jewell.

Last December, I published a post titled “A male survivor’s perspective on ‘rape culture’” in which I wrote about attending my first group for male survivors of childhood sexual abuse at the local rape crisis center. I recalled that as men entering a space most prominently defined as a safe space for women, an environment where men were perceived by many to be the enemy, we were less than welcome:

I’ll never forget the looks I received from the women I encountered as I crossed the parking lot and entered the building. Hostility would be putting it mildly …

I could understand the attitude, given the “men are perpetrators, not victims” orthodoxy of the time and the likelihood that at least some of the women felt profoundly unsafe around men due to personal history. I could allow for all of that, but it didn’t make screwing up the courage to face the unearned anger, scorn, and disdain every week any less of a challenge.

The publication of my post resulted in an email conversation with a female reader who, having also read some of my poetry (including this one), said:

I wrote something, encouraged by the directness of your poems, and even though I don’t want to share it as ‘me’, I would like to share it anonymously. The idea came to me that this could be something that would fit well with your mission and would allow you to address the topic you addressed here further, on how it’s important for women to understand the impact they have on the men around them who had nothing to do with their abuse trauma …

Writing this has been a big healing milestone for me and an anchor point and I wouldn’t have if it hadn’t been for your e-mail. Thank you!

With her permission, I’m posting her poem below (anonymously per her request). Beyond its personal significance for the author, this poem is a wonderful example of how an open-hearted dialogue, in which men and women hold their own space while allowing space for the other, can lead to significant new insights and better understanding of self as well as of the other. As such, it is a welcome antidote to the deeply held antagonism and bitter power struggles so rampant nowadays in what is commonly known as the gender wars. It serves as a much-needed reminder that a healing conversation between men and women is still possible, especially if we are willing to identify and take full ownership of our personal histories, projections, and fears.

Here is her poem. It is untitled.

I already knew that love was foreign to you.

Yet mom always said you are a typical (normal) man

and so for a long time I believed her.

I knew that getting on your good side
meant being rational.
I knew that the closest thing you knew to love
was respecting someone
because they were able to win.

I tried hard to win.

Yet the better I got,
the more I was losing.

I got to a point where I realised I didn't want to compete with you for approval.
I didn't want to try so hard to get your 'positive' attention.

I started to understand that it wasn't normal that I had to try so hard.
I started to understand that you are not a typical, nor normal man at all.

All this time I'd expected all the men in my life to be like you,
and so I let them get away with being cold and rational,
just like I expected.

I was pushing away all the good men out there,
because I didn't believe they really existed.

Sometimes I was mean to someone
and I didn't understand where it came from.
Or I didn't realise I was being mean at all.

I had forgotten that I was maintaining
two different versions of you:
version one was the man who did
what you did.
Version two was the man who did
what you should have done.

I waited a long time for version two to materialize in you,
and all that time,
I was angry at all the men out there
because I believed that deep inside,
they were all a version one of you.

I was confused.

I needed to be confused
to survive the insanity.

So I saw you everywhere,
except in yourself.

Now that you are you again,
all the other men
can again start morphing back
into who they truly are.

No longer version one of you.

I am sorry
for all the pain
of those projections
that kept me safe
from my own fear
of the truth.

incest.

~AnonyMiss.

Photo credit: David Jewell. Used by permission.

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.

secret children

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a desert
a wasteland
cold.

something terrible
thousands and thousands of crude wooden crosses
	the skeleton of a child nailed to each and every one
close your eyes and imagine this
imagine your own child in this place
imagine yourself.

winter winds whip the bones of these children
rib cages frozen in fear decades ago rattle but
	keep their secrets still.

between the bones
	there is ice
inside the ice
	there is fire
within the fire
	there is a secret
the secret that keeps them here.

each child was brought here by an adult
	a trusted friend
brought here
	exploited
	split open
	left here
left to hang in this bitter wind and commune with ghosts.

the child never had a choice.

these children have families that love them dearly
	blind families that will see no evil
	deaf families that will hear no evil
	dumb families that will speak no evil.

families that cannot believe 
	a child's body knows the difference between 
	fantasy and reality
	... are you sure you're not making this up?

families that cannot believe 
	their beautiful children could have been 
	taken away
	... but you were such a happy child!
 
families that cannot believe 
	this could ever happen to 
	their own children
	... not in this family!

families that cannot believe 
	the words sexually abused could ever describe 
	their own children
	... no secrets in this family, by god!

it is not too late for these children
they await resurrection and salvation
they ache to be healed
	but cannot do it alone
fathers mothers brothers and sisters
lovers spouses families and friends
	they need you.

take them down from these crosses
	trust them
welcome them into your heart
	love them
hold them close and warm their coldest places
	hear them
feel their fire and honor it
	believe them.

one secret at a time
one child at a time
	believe them.

(PDF version | Video version)

A male survivor’s perspective on “rape culture”

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"Erosion of Innocence" by David Jewell. Copyright © 2013 by David Jewell.

An article titled “Rape Culture: What It Is and How It Works” posted on the Good Men Project website earlier this week prompted me to leave the following comment:

The “rape culture” terminology, as I’ve typically seen it applied, brands all men and boys as potential or latent assailants and perpetrators who need to be “taught not to rape.” Any man who somehow resists the inborn imperative to rape is nevertheless still considered responsible for all the men who don’t. Many boys and men who’ve been sexually violated, who are often already carrying the secret and undeserved burden of psychological responsibility for what someone else did to them, will quite naturally respond to these characterizations by retreating even deeper into the familiar phantom zone of feeling shamed, scorned, disowned, and scapegoated by the culture around them.

This, in turn, makes taking the risk of seeking help feel even more daunting. The first group I ever attended for male survivors of childhood sexual abuse was held at the local rape crisis center. I remember arriving for the first meeting one evening after work. I was so terrified. I’d been in my share of men’s groups, which helped me feel a bit safer, but I’d never spoken about that part of my history in a group of strangers. The walk from the parking lot to the front door seemed to take every ounce of strength I had.

I’ll never forget the looks I received from the women I encountered as I crossed the parking lot and entered the building. Hostility would be putting it mildly. I shrunk even further into my shell as I took a seat on one of the couches in the small waiting room, trying not to make eye contact with anyone, but I could feel the hot, disapproving glare of every woman who spotted me there.

I happened to be a bit early, and as my male peers in the group began to trickle into the waiting room and take their seats, I felt some of the energy being directed at me starting to dissipate as the focus widened from me as an individual to us (men) as a group. Safety in numbers. But I still felt profoundly unwelcome in a space where I was seeking refuge.

Over the weeks, as the group went on, the heat vision stares subsided a bit as some of the women became more accustomed to seeing us come and go once a week. We were quietly and reluctantly tolerated, if not welcomed. Discussing and processing, as a group, the experience of being treated like invaders or enemies when we were already feeling so raw, fragile, small, scared, and ashamed helped greatly. I could understand the attitude, given the “men are perpetrators, not victims” orthodoxy of the time and the likelihood that at least some of the women felt profoundly unsafe around men due to personal history. I could allow for all of that, but it didn’t make screwing up the courage to face the unearned anger, scorn, and disdain every week any less of a challenge.

The group, I’m happy to say, was excellent and made passing through the emotional and psychological gauntlet on the way in well worth the effort. The therapist who facilitated, a male, was terrific. He showed real vision and courage in proposing the establishment of a group for male survivors in that environment. I’ll always be grateful to him for that as well as to whoever it was at the center (probably a woman or women) who gave him the green light to go ahead. After the first eight weeks or so, he found a new location for us to meet, a “neutral” place, and it was a relief. I still felt anxious before each group, but the likelihood of receiving death stares (or potentially something worse) in the parking lot and waiting room was thankfully no longer a worry.

I’ve gone on far longer here than I anticipated, so I’ll close with two more points.

First, two members of my extended family were involved in the sexual violation I experienced as a child. One was a man. One was a woman. Both genders. Both involved.

Second, if you view my video poem “secret children” on this site (http://goodmenproject.com/health/the-secret-children), you will notice that there is no mention whatsoever of gender or privilege with regard to either victims or perpetrators. Countless innocent men and boys have been and are being abused and violated, and I feel that using terms like “rape culture” and “male privilege” obscures that reality and contributes to the ongoing exclusion of these men and boys from the conversation.

While I see and understand the effort on the part of the author of this post and some of those who’ve commented to expand the definition of “rape culture” to include those men and boys, from my perspective that term is already hopelessly tainted by what I’ve seen as its more commonly used, more restrictive definition (i.e., men are rapists, women are victims) and therefore I don’t see how it can be successfully reframed at this point.

I generally try to steer clear of the charged comment streams and messy, unproductive dogma dogfights I’ve seen so often in response to articles primarily focused on advancing a specific social ideology, but the increasingly common and ever more prevalent use of “rape culture” terminology has been eating at me for a while now and I finally felt it was time to express my point of view, for better or worse.

I’ll admit to feeling a fair amount of anxiety about what sort of reaction my comment might generate. I felt like I’d gone way out on a limb (or maybe marched headlong into a swamp), not only in challenging the “rape culture” paradigm but also in sharing some deeply personal experience I’d never shared before. It’s not easy for a man to go on the record with such things. The fearful voice that tells me I should keep quiet and invisible is always there with me.

It’s been nearly 24 hours now since I posted my comment and there’s been only one response, from another man who left a brief message of support. I don’t know what to make of the silence. I’m certainly not disappointed that no one’s come at me (the part of me that feels safer being invisible is pretty relieved) and I don’t want to exaggerate the significance of the situation, but the near absence of response to what I had to say in a comment stream that continues to be pretty active has me wondering, yet again, just how interested people really are in the experiences and challenges faced by male survivors of sexual violation and abuse.

Photo credit: David Jewell. Used by permission.

virus

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"Virus" by Staci Poirier

a liquid black cloud spreads its fingers
across the family sky
	like ink from a squid
	filling an aquarium tank
blotting out the sun
turning everyone and everything
	the color of a funeral
	shadow blue.

a virus infects the family tree
	twisting the future
	obscuring the past
spreading from generation to generation
feeding on the children
turning the adults into monsters
	or rendering them
	mute.

a parasite enters the family bloodstream
	burrowing into hearts and minds
	anchoring in tender bodies
protecting and propagating itself with a trance
	forget
	forget
	forget.

I will not forget
and I will not pass these nightmares on to anyone else.

I'll pull those black fingers down out of my sky
I'll dig this virus out of my roots
I'll burn this parasite out of my blood.

I'll hunt down every last trace of this psychic infection
this evil rot that was injected into me when I was a child
	and I'll haul it out into the daylight
	where it can't survive.

I'll scream it out
I'll vomit it out
I'll drag it out of me
	any way I can
	tooth and claw
	root and branch
	blood and bone
until I've purged it from my life
and cleansed myself completely.

I reject the conspiracy of amnesia and silence
	that allows this systemic scourge
	to thrive unchallenged
	in secret
	in dark and helpless places
I reject the family commandments
	thou shalt not remember
	thou shalt not feel
	thou shalt not tell
I will remember
I will feel
I will tell
I'll take back my life from this shadow blue plague
and if that makes me an outcast
	a traitor in the eyes of the family
then so be it.

(PDF version)

About the artwork:
The art that accompanies this poem is a mixed media painting called “Virus” by the very talented Canadian artist Staci Poirier. Staci created her painting as a both a response and a companion to my poem. You can read more about Staci here and see more of her artwork here.

Painting and poem were featured earlier this year on the Good Men Project website with a “zoom page” for the painting where you can view larger images of various sections to see some of the marvelous detail.

The artwork and poem also appeared together in the Fall 2012 issue of the Jungian journal Depth Insights, which featured Staci’s painting on the cover and includes some additional background from her about materials used to create the art as well as some of her thoughts on the themes that are being expressed.

Depth Insights is also available as a free PDF with painting and poem presented side by side on page 8.

It’s been a great pleasure to be a part of this poetry-and-art collaboration, and I’ve been very happy to see my poem and Staci’s art presented together in multiple places in such an elegant fashion.