Maybe I see them everywhere because I know them, or because they are everywhere. We hurt one another. We are hurt by our parents, who were by their parents, and so on. We inevitably hurt our children with what remains unresolved.
Sometimes the hurting is overt, sometimes insidious. Emotional bondage, oppression, dependence. Furtive emotional violence. A hand brushed over tiny genitals; perhaps kissed, or just one little finger. Maybe worse. Much, much worse.
Violations of human boundaries just as the soul is knitting itself to the physical body, creating gaping wounds that we can’t understand, but others of our kind can see and hone in on. To weaken us. To bring us down, because we are animals. Hairless monkeys. Less compassionate than cats. By far.
Until there are enough voices saying the same thing; crying in the same agony. Like soldiers. Soldiers who fight an entirely new battle once they leave the battlefield. One they’re not trained for. One inside their souls. The casualties have been great—one suicide a day for active duty personnel; one an hour for veterans.
Once every hour, a U.S. military veteran commits suicide. 1
After generations of being told to suck it up, to stay strong, to bury it, to let it go, to “be a man.” How much of this buried agony from past generations has transmuted us; our race, our beings from birth? We can't know. We can only know it is enough.
Now we want to help, but we’re sure how. Psychological counseling is practiced by cats. They toss labels at your wounds like they're a beach ball instead of a hand grenade, and you’re supposed to accept them as if it doesn’t hurt to get blown apart.
“Love addiction.
“Low self-esteem.”
“Attachment disorder.”
“Post traumatic stress disorder.”
And… “You’ll get over it.”
“It’s in the past.”
"Let it go.”
“That shouldn't bother you”
“It’s all in your head.”
It is in the head and the body. Molecules shift. Cells behave differently. The brain rewires to see and feel danger everywhere. Every person is a predator. Peace, contentment and love are impossible.
The mind doesn’t understand, runs away and buries. The body keeps a ledger like an accountant.2 Accounts come due. The body won't let the mind get away with ignoring it forever. The body remembers everything, from the brutality of war to the little finger in the crib.
I’ve wondered if that was it; what happened to me there in the Immanuel Deaconess Orphanage, Nursing School and Home for Aged, where young women were taught by men how to care for the broken as if they were not. What happened there?
I don’t know, but I stopped crying before the people who would parent me took me home. My mother said I did not like to be held, and never cried, except for when my leg was broken and no one realized to for weeks.
Did I really tumble in my walker, or was it that child’s rocking chair pinning my body to the floor while my diaper was being changed? I don’t remember falling in my walker. I remember that chair, it’s rockers on either side of my body.
Could she really have done that, the sweet resilient and tiny woman I now know as my mom? She was younger once, and different as we all are when we’re younger and our wounds are still raw with ragged edges.
She was raised with wolves. Wolfish people, hard and deprived. Always looking to survive by taking out all competition. Predators at the core, confused and injured themselves.
It just takes a split second to revert into what we know; to what our cells have been wrought. I know, because I was once young like her, easily provoked, oversensitive to threat. I still can be. It shocks the unversed.
She was once young girl whose half-Cherokee father left when she was a baby, leaving her mother to beat rugs for bankers’ wives in Depression-era Kansas. Children without fathers are easy prey. Poor, mixed-race children are as vulnerable as they come.
I have a picture of her at maybe eight or nine. Her eyes are too old, wise, needful and threatening. I can only suspect what’s buried there because I’ll never ask. It was enough that she lived through it. She may or may not have hurt me that day. I know she wouldn’t have meant to. She would have been terrified to realize it.
I do not blame her because I am her. My wounds resemble hers. I’m sure of it. But she was German-Cherokee, blood of iron. All personal violations were locked in a vault. I am said to be Scots. Blood of fire. All things are felt. All the pain running through generations like poison.
I did not let that continue. I knew when I was two that I would not have children. It was not her fault. It was no one’s fault. I was a foundling. She raised me. Gave me more than she ever had. But the echoes of unsaid things bouncing off the walls of that house lacerated me.
Sometimes I hear,“stop being a victim,” as if the generational ravages that formed me can be reversed on the spot.
“Rewire you brain,” chirped a veteran psychotherapist when I spoke of my struggles. She, who grew up with her own blood, in her own tribe, affluent enough for college, after which she married her high school sweetheart and had a family. As if she had a clue how to understand what I was. As if she had a clue about how utterly difficult it can be to rearrange cells formed in unpredictable volatility.
Her kind subjected me to years of recounting my horrors and then counseling me to intentionally alter my internal dialog, reinforced by the the years of recounting.
All along I needed witnesses. Witnesses who revered me for what I survived, instead of condescending to me in psychological jargon. Witnesses who see within and beyond us, and how we came to be this way. No explanations required. Compassionate.
I’ve had two. One is dead; one is dying. Almost everything is forgivable when you’re dying. That’s how Spike evolved. He let things go inside, but still wouldn’t tolerate many people. Forgiveness is easier when others become abstract.
Spike was just one of the men who hurt me, even though he saved my life. He hurt me because he’d been hurt like me. His wounds lined up with mine.
Others since have been the same, all shattered boundaries and gaping wounds. Men who don’t know they’re hurt. Left fragile from being told for generations to suck it up. Stop crying. Stand up. Be a man. The man of the house.
No wonder there is a rape culture. No wonder men are angry. No wonder they hurt others; go to war, leave their children—either emotionally or physically or both. Their pain transmutes to anger, rage and violence.
Those in my adult life, I can forgive once I’ve made them abstract. The one who abused me throughout my childhood, I can forgive. Perhaps even the one in the orphanage, if indeed there was one.
But not so much the adult men who took advantage of my wounds when I was a teenager. They should be in jail. Instead, I was labeled a slut because they perpetuated the violence of others before them. But that was OK, because men are supposed to be sexually aggressive. It’s part of being a man.
A damaged one.
I remember one in particular who looked me up when I was in my 30s, working my way through college as a landscaper. He thought we might be friends. I was horrified and nauseated.
He was surely injured by someone. He was left alone with his mother, who never remarried after his father abandoned them. He was probably set up as the “man of the house.” He deserves compassion. He deserves forgiveness. But not from me.
I’ve heard it said that what we don’t forgive only hurts us, but that’s not true. Not forgiving can protect you from getting hurt again.
“We cannot throw anger out the window and don forgiveness as if it were a costume, “ Karla McLaren says.2 It’s messy, difficult and ongoing.
I’m trying to forgive someone now. I fell in love. I don’t know why. I was unimpressed when he showed me pictures of his car and his motorcycle. The neon insecurity sign. Later, when we talked, there was a real person. I walked away and had an unbidden intuition that he would be my husband. I’d never had that before. I let myself believe it. I don’t know how love works, so why not? People talk all the time about how they just saw each other and knew.
He was disastrous. Destructive, mean and seemingly unconscious about it. He made a mockery of my feelings; exploited my vulnerabilities. If this person was my match, what was I? I was Somerset Maugham’s Philip Carey. It was hard to comprehend. I was sickened by my own vulnerability; my own weakness for him. It took some doing, but I finally drove him away.
Why would I feel so strongly about someone so utterly without compassion for me? Welcome to my scar pattern. His matched mine precisely, and reignited the traumas McLaren says must be healed by witnesses; with a welcoming back to the tribe.
Like what those wounded soldiers are doing. Witnessing and welcoming one another back into their own tribe. In this way, they are still fighting for the rest of us also cut off from the larger tribe, but in my case and that of many others like me—we can't find each other.
The support group community erroneously lumps traumas together. Soldiers are not going to see themselves among survivors of early sexual abuse, and vice versa.
Further, survivors of early sexual abuse don’t often relate to each other, because the wounds are as specific in characteristics as a person’s relationship to the abuser. Father-on-daughter, stranger-on-child, brother-on-sister, mother-on-son.
I’ve met two women who experienced what I went through growing up. It can only be whispered once, in a drunken moment, when it can’t be fully felt. But you know immediately when they are one of your kind.
Our pain has been denied. Our healing has been denied. Because everyone who was around at that time is culpable, and they can’t bear the truth. They tell us to forget, move on, let it go. As if we can just “rewire our brain,” and suddenly live safely in a world we know as inherently unsafe, because those charged with protecting us when we were completely helpless left us broken and wounded.
So we carry the weight of their transgressions throughout our lives, spending on it the energy we might otherwise have to fulfill our potential. And we are blamed for that, too.
How, then, do we heal ourselves, in the absence of witnesses and without a tribe? I know of only one thing. To tell our stories. So I’ll tell mine.
