For many men, past traumas help them to understand their problems with addiction and violence—even in recovery.
Most of the men I’ve talked to over the years in the journey through recovery can identify some point in their lives when they realized it was not okay to express certain feelings or behaviors, especially if those feelings showed weakness, vulnerability or sensitivity. Crying above all was strictly discouraged.
They also learned—sometimes through everyday interactions with other men but frequently because of abuse or traumatic experiences—that the only appropriate way to express things like fear, hurt, rejection, or sadness was through the conduit of anger and violence.
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One of the most powerful breakthroughs in addiction treatment is our growing understanding of trauma. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders defines an event as traumatic when both of the following are present: “(1) the person experienced, witnessed, or was confronted with an event or events that involved actual or threatened death or serious injury, or a threat to the physical integrity of self or others, and (2) the person’s response involved intense fear, helplessness, or horror.”
Mental health practitioners now understand that one of the distinguishing factors with trauma is not the event itself as much as an individual’s response to the event. It’s very important to understand that if you’ve had a traumatic experience and still suffer from it, this does not mean you’re weak, sick, or that you are in any way at fault. When the serious effects of trauma go untreated, men in recovery—even long-term recovery—find that they struggle with relapse, isolate themselves from others and their communities, abuse loved ones, destroy their marriages, and act out in ways that damage themselves and others.
An alcoholic man in this place, for example, can work the Twelve Steps rigorously, but the emotional, physical, and psychological fallout of untreated trauma will keep him stuck in the pain, confusion, depression, anger, and hopelessness of addictive and unhealthy behaviors. Those around him might see him as a “dry drunk,” even though he has been technically sober for years.
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Of course, men are rarely encouraged to talk about their experiences of abuse or trauma, and our culture seems very confused about what is acceptable behavior both from and toward boys and men. One notable exception to this norm produced an amazing cultural breakthrough regarding men’s experience of trauma. It started with Tyler Perry talking about his own sexual abuse and culminated in November 2010 when Oprah aired an episode focusing on men’s needs. Two hundred men came forward with sexual abuse they had experienced. Even more powerful, their loved ones heard these stories—many for the first time—and were then interviewed for the show.
Only recently have we started to make the connection between the violence and abuse perpetrated on boys and men, how men are raised in this society, and the violence men commit. Every man I spoke with during the writing of my book, A Man’s Way Through the Twelve Steps, had experienced some kind of emotional or verbal abuse, and many talked about physical abuse as well. A small percentage of men also admitted having been sexually abused. The silence that many men feel forced to keep around these traumatic experiences causes a great deal of pain and, not surprisingly, often becomes a factor in their addictive behaviors down the line.
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Knowing that abuse, trauma and violence against boys and men are so strongly linked with addiction—and knowing, if left untreated, that the aftermath of these experiences can cause undeniable psychological, emotional, relational, physical, and spiritual destruction—doesn’t it seem not only logical but necessary to create addiction treatment curricula that are trauma-informed?
Care providers, like myself, should be obligated to acknowledge the powerful role that trauma plays in men’s identity, addiction and recovery. We should offer help and healing opportunities not just for the addictive behavior on the surface, but for the untold pain, grief, violence and fear that underlie and feed it.
I am in the process of writing a series of articles dedicated to the topic of men’s experiences with violence and how a trauma-informed curriculum can address their unique needs in recovery. My hope is that you will join this conversation, share your stories, and help get the word out about this important issue.
—Photo Smath./Flickr
About Dan Griffin
I am very glad to see attention being brought to this issue… one that I feel is extremely important. My life has been one extremely traumatic experience after another, and it has had a very negative impact on my relationships, sense of self, and has hindered my ability to live a complete and satisfying life.
Though I had had many traumatic experiences before my father died, that was the one that really irreparably changed my life. He had cancer for years, and when I was ten, I sat with him and watched him die. We were extremely close and the crushing devastation I felt cannot be accurately put into words.
I have done many things to block this trauma as much as possible. One of those things is calling him my father – a word I never used when he was alive – as it is much more clinical and formal than dad. It allows me to discuss it with a distance that would not otherwise be there. I also have a little black hole in my otherwise astonishing memory with regard to the date he died. It has been 12 years, and I don’t know what day of the month he died. Around that time every year, I’ve asked my sister what day it was and she’ll throw her hands in the air and tell me thinking that it’s a joke that I don’t know after so many years, but I don’t. I know all of my credit card numbers, bank account numbers – routing numbers included – and all sorts of other obscure pieces of information off the top of my head, but I can’t remember the date my father died.
Another thing that I do is I lie about it. I am incapable of telling the truth about my childhood. My father’s death was the first of many extremely severe traumas that I suffered and I make up a completely imaginary life history when it comes to meeting people in real life. I am unable to admit that these traumas have affected me and that I was not able to just shrug them off without any negative effects at all. Being honest about these things makes me feel vulnerable, weak, and ashamed.
It took a few additional severe traumas after the death of my father for me to completely sever myself from exhibiting normal human emotions. For a decade now, I have kept an iron fist on my emotions, and I have become adept at crushing them. It took years to allow myself to feel emotional when I was completely alone, but I still keep them smothered so other people cannot see. For example, there have been three instances since my father died that I have almost cried in front of someone else. As soon as I felt it coming on, I started grinding my teeth, holding my breath, and almost literally choking it off.
All of the sadness, the shame, the misery, the feelings of abandonment, hopelessness, and fear for the past 12 years of continual trauma and abuse have been sequestered behind a psychological dam to prevent me from actually feeling those feelings. I have a massive reservoir of over a decades worth of toxic emotions pressing against that psychological dam.
Addressing these emotions is almost impossible at this point. I have tried therapy, but it is impossible to poke a hole in a dam and expect the leak to remain a trickle. Once I allow myself to experience the feelings associated with one of those situations, I will be totally unable to prevent the reservoir of negative emotions from smashing through in a cascading torrent in which I will certainly drown.
Unfortunately, I do not have any other options but to keep reinforcing the dam and stuffing emotions behind it. I have no family; I have no friends; I have no support group. I have no one. There is no one to throw me a lifesaver, no one to pull me into their boat and help me ride out the massive flood. I build the dam higher and higher, the reservoir gets deeper and deeper, and I move further and further away from the rest of humanity who is waiting for me on the dried up riverbed below.
CJ, find a therapist and start talking. The feelings are not going to kill you, believe it or not, if you start expressing them. You need to do this. The trick is to find someone who will mainly listen. It’s hard now with insurance only paying for limited visits, but you may be able to find a person or clinic where they do sliding scale with cash.
Hi CJ. First, I hear you.Second, thank you so much for your candid, honest, and vulnerable response. I have been there – thinking that if I cried or let any of the pain out it would kill me. NOT letting it out was killing me – and every meaningful relationship in my life. I still remember the exact night I decided I would never cry again – looking at myself in the mirror. I know the pain of not expressing the pain. It comes out – whether we want it to or not.
I was afraid of what was there. I was afraid the pain and trauma would destroy me. It didn’t. It hasn’t. It won’t. If you read the whole series I am publishing you will see that my upbringing was not a bed of roses. But I had NO perspective on my life. The last two years have been all about me seeing the good in my father and grieving my horrible behavior. It has taken a long time to get there. It takes time. AND, it is absolutely worth it. Now, I see that my life had a lot of violence and chaos and there were some genuinely good moments. More important, they do not control me anymore. I have taken their power away.
I was blessed in being able to be surrounded by men who 1) done similar work and/or 2) loved me. YOU ARE NOT ALONE. If you seek you SHALL find. Take care and realize you deserve the gift of healing the pain of trauma. Everyone does. Hope this helps – even a little bit.
Interestingly for me, this appears on my father’s birthday. If he were living, he would be 99 today. The longer I live, the easier I find it to forgive his abusive ways—his Mr. Hyde side. In his Dr. Jekyll moments, there was never a better man. I like the Six Words on Dads answer several commenters suggested: “He did the best he could.” I hope the same may be said of me someday. http://goodmenproject.com/six-word-memoirs-about-dad/six-word-memoirs-about-dad/
That typifies my relationship with my father today Dan – “He did the best he could.” And I know that to be true. It offers quite a bit of solace and peace.
I was lucky enough to have a non-abusive father, who was charming and funny. The downside is that he was distant with me because, I think, his dad had molested him when he was very young, and he was trying to avoid this. He was bi, and a philanderer. I grew up in a working class neighborhood, though, where boys who did have abusive fathers were always looking for a fight, so I had to fight most of my childhood, fairly frequently. So I have some PTSD from this, and also my dad’s suicide when I was 12.
My family is mostly alcoholics, genetically mostly, I think, since I never had anywhere the problem with pills or marijuana I had with alcohol.
Hi Henry – the pain of trauma can be so insidious in our relationships. I know that when I allow the process show me what needs to heal and I simply trust that process – amazing things happen. You do not have to know how any of this works. The essence of my recovery from trauma has been getting help – asking for help, accepting help, and even giving help to others. Peace
Thanks, Dan. That was helpful.
I’m glad some guys had the courage to respond to this topic.
In Boston and surrounding areas there is my agency who had the forethought to initiate four years ago, a ‘clinical’ approach to a father/men’s program-Helping Fathers Be Fathers. I am it’s first supervisor, a licensed mental health counselor with an advanced graduate degree in family therapy from UMASS Boston. Dan’s advice is sound. Start talking rather than stuffing back the emotions that many/most of us boys were taught/caught to do growing up. It’s called sticking to the ‘Boy Code’ made famous by William Pollack in “Real Boys”. Another dynamic that I’ve found is VERY important for men (for all actually) is the Narrative guru Michael White’s practice of identifying ‘Premature Negative Identity Conclusions’. Whew, a mouthful:) The idea is to ask yourself when you say to yourself or out loud, “That’s just me…the way I am…who I am…etc.” WHEN did I first start thinking this way about me-and the labels I’ve attached and still attach to ‘the way I am?’. Or about women, your mother, family life, father, my race, my community and on and on. You will invariably be brought back to a memory from your ‘family of origin’, if you were blessed with one (i.e., foster care, resi treatment, etc). So, you’re back there, in a memory, think NOW about the larger context and the players and people and the pressures-Now will you still say you’re a coward, when you, as the boy, needed someone to ‘get’ how things were for you? The idea here is to take the time to engage in ‘reclaiming your story’. You (and a trusted other) can begin the ‘reauthoring’ process. This is Narrative Therapy’s greatest idea to the field of ‘people helpers’. So, for guys in the Boston area, a shameless plug for the work of my agency.
If you’re in the other 48+ states, take Dan’s advice-look for a ‘trained’ person who can assist you as you reclaim your story. Your son or daughter, or wife, girlfriend/boyfriend(?) and family will be glad (eventually) you did. Two maxims: “Children Learn What They Live” & “The Only Way out of the Pain is to go Through it-the only Way to Go through it is to Embrace it”. Onward!