A man discovers his path from darkness through a combination of resolve and desire. Here is how he silences his ghosts.
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Note: The following is one man’s personal experience with recovery from trauma and is not presented as expertise or medical advice.
Heal thyself!
So is the advice when none other comes to mind, or when the intent is to shrug off the man who is struggling to recover from trauma. And the man on a journey to reclaim his life usually almost always hits the wall that is higher for men in recovery – sexism and social stigmas that men who cry or need help are somehow not masculine and virile enough, not a “real man,” maybe even weak.
Yet “heal thyself” packs an essential gospel: recovery is an “inside job,” meaning that healing is an internal process that cannot be trusted to external circumstances and other people. Regardless of how much professional therapy and well-intentioned support the man who is hurting receives, it is up to him and him alone to apply it to his recovery. The man who gambles his recovery on circumstances that might or might not develop or on what another person might or might not do will likely never reconcile himself to his private demons and put them to rest.
Recovery starts with the want to heal from a trauma regardless of when it was imposed, be it fairly recently or in young childhood and carried into adulthood. The sources of trauma so devastating that it can become an indelible part of its victim’s character emanate from a myriad of events, from childhood sexual or physical abuse, crime victimization, drug abuse and addiction, or the end of a relationship.
“Enough is enough! ” is usually the litmus test for the who is ready for recovery, when he understands that the reside of his psychic injury is in control of his emotions, feeling and thoughts. To no small degree, the lingering aftermath of a trauma can be a stumbling block in his commitments to jobs and other people and, as important, to his ego, self-image, personal security and very happiness and serenity. At its worst, trauma can inflict total immobilization, physically and emotionally.
After the realization that enough is enough, certain other realities become self-evident, one that although a man cannot always control the events that lead to his psychic scarring, he does control his response and – to some degree – his reaction to those events. Another reality, an imperative one, is understanding that an individual’s recovery is his and his alone, that it is an internal process of self-awareness and self-actuation and is not contingent on external circumstance and the actions, or whims, of other people.
Discarding sexist and gender-driven stigmas or stereotypes early in the process is supremely important. The man who is hurt, who cries and is scarred is not less a man, less masculine, less virile or “weak” when his emotional make-up does not fit the social stereotypes of “machismo.” This myth must be quickly rejected.
What follows in the recovery process are steps of action, the first being self-acceptance. Whatever the cause of the trauma, even if the man had some active role in the events that led to his internal anguish, recognition of his basic worth as a human being and that he is worthy of healing is absolutely imperative. Second in the steps of action is forgiveness – first of self and then of other people if their conduct contributed to the trauma.
If counseling and other forms of psychotherapy are involved along with psychotropic medications such as anti-depressant and anti-anxiety agents, they must be continued – some of the psychic damage from trauma can be long-term and sometimes permanent and its treatment indefinite. Under no circumstances should a patient discontinue treatment – counseling and pharmacological – on his own.
As a boy who was never really a child, one man had a father who apparently didn’t like him much – for whatever reason. The boy stumbled in the dark for years grasping for ways to please and be accepted by the dad who called hm “a goddamn queer” years before the son knew what queer meant. The boy never found the way to please his father, to be accepted, and he never really felt safe when his father was drunk and might beat him again for some wrong, real or imagined.
But the boy was given a reprieve of the most ironic kind at age 14 when his father, drunk again, stabbed him in the leg and literally threw out of the house. The bleeding and frightened boy faced his abdication as son and his new role as street urchin with an uncertainty about how to survive. Yet he carried a comfort that was also paradoxical at its root – while the boy began his frightening new journey on the streets, he left behind the certainty of the uncertainty of what to expect in the house in which he grew up, a house that had never really been his home. In this new uncertainty, the boy had some control and a freedom that were a strange comfort to him.
The boy spent three years as a street waif until he was “busted” by a maternal aunt. She got a call from police one night that her nephew, then 17, was in juvenile lockup after being picked up for underage drinking. She fumed when she figured out that her nephew and sister, the boy’s mother, had lied to her about his living in the home of a childhood friend. The aunt promptly got her nephew out of juvie, took him to her house, assigned him a bedroom and warned him he’d be back on the streets if she ever caught him lying to her again. Her contacts with her sister, the boy’s mother, diminished greatly afterward and, when there were any, they were almost invariably contentious in nature.
By the time the boy was taken off the streets at the age of 17, the psychological and emotional damage to him was firmly rooted – deeply, indelibly and stubbornly. In his aunt’s home, he frequently sneaked gulps from the fifth of whiskey that he hid well, a liquid “courage” he was taught on the streets that emboldened him to whore himself to the men willing to provide something to eat and a warm bed on a cold night in exchange for sex. And in consenting to sex with men, the boy, a child no more, resigned to being what his father had called him for years – “a goddamn queer.”
With no male role models in his past to guide and inspire him, no sense of adulthood or manhood and what was expected of him, raped of all self-confidence and hope for a better life, the teen-ager literally stumbled into young adulthood under the influence of the booze he never gave up. By his 21st birthday, the young man was firmly entrenched in a dangerous and downward spiral into alcoholism. Drinking himself into the safety zone of oblivion had become a ritual literally every night, and the young man simply accepted and took for granted that he was not quite good enough for anything better and never would be.
He never once recognized or even considered that he was damaged goods and in desperate need of help. But those realities were forced on him when the young man, concerned but not overly worried about a steady but noticeable weight loss and a non-existent appetite – his diet for months consisted only of coffee, cigarettes and booze – forced him to be checked out by a doctor. Predicting nothing more than a prescription for vitamins and maybe a diet supplement, the young man instead heard the doctor’s diagnosis: “It’s time for a psychiatrist.”
The next few years of the young man ‘s life were regimented by regular sessions with the shrink and a stream of psychotropic medications that included anti-depressants and anti-anxiety “pick-er-uppers.” By accident, he stumbled onto the synergistic effect of the meds when combined with alcohol but, in time, drinking himself into oblivion every night inspired a suicide attempt with the pills and booze.
He failed but stopped drinking – not because of a sense of gratitude for being spared, but because of a perverted anger at a god that wouldn’t let him die. As the young man dried out from years of active alcoholism and prescription drug abuse, he lamented the futility of the years he spent in psychotherapy. It hadn’t changed much for the young man: his failed effort to die reinforced his lifelong sense that he could do nothing right, it hadn’t reunited him with his estranged family or somehow made him a son worthy of a father’s pride, and it hadn’t ridden the man’s belief that he didn’t fit in anywhere or with anyone.
Until a searing awakening to a self-realization – he hit the point of being sick and tired of being sick and tired, of self-absorption in the form of self-pity, of toting a crate of emotional baggage that had out-lived its purpose if it had served any purpose at all.
Without recognizing it then, the man wanted to heal from the trauma of years of hate, rejection by others and himself, self-loathing, self-disgust and self-abuse. And also without realizing it then, he began to heal.
Some of the ghosts of a by-gone era still try to haunt the man today, but they are vanquished by the man’s resolve not to slide back into that deep abyss of darkness and fear. Those ghosts are also rendered impotent by the man’s acceptance of his losses triggered by events in his life. There would be no reconciliation of the man with his estranged family, and the man would not be blessed with the experience he once hoped for – being a father to his own son.
But the ghosts, and memories, have taught and continue to teach the man that recovery is a dynamic, continuing process that now signals the pitfalls of recovery – occasional depression, a sense of unworthiness, self-pity and shame, and regret for his own mistakes. The man is learning, and he is sober and sincerely grateful to whatever powers that be that his losses in life were not more than he endured.
Above all, he has found his place in life and an introduction to the innocent child he seeks, the one he thought was beyond his grasp — within himself.
Photo: Flickr/canaloupe99