Читать книгу A Man's Way through Relationships - Dan Griffin - Страница 12

CHAPTER TWO

My Story

If someone is taking you on a journey, you probably want to have some confidence that that person knows where he or she is going. If you are going to follow that person, you may want to know a little more about him or her. Well, I am going to do my best to be a guide, so I would like to share a little more about myself and what this journey has been like for me.

Like a lot of men, I was not given a very good map with which to chart the course of my life and my relationships. I do not blame anyone anymore for that; it is just how it worked out. My parents didn’t have very good maps, either. I have tried to map out the specific landscape of my relationships and have a better sense of where I am headed. Metaphorically, I have spent a lot of my life wanting to get to Paris, France, not realizing that my map only took me to Paris, Texas! The relationships I have craved in my life have been there, but I did not know how to find them—or appreciate them when I did. And again, this struggle starts with the Rules.

Every man has his own relationship to the Man Rules. I was born in 1972. If there were one word that would best describe the way my generation (and subsequent generations) responds to the Rules, it would be confusion. For many of us, the Rules (though still in effect and still invisible) have been softened and have become less stringent than they were in previous generations. That is both positive and negative. It is positive because we have more room to move around as far as what is expected of us. It is negative, however, because there is less certainty. There is more flexibility, but it is less clear when a particular Rule is going to be enforced and when it is not.

I was a rough-and-tumble kid. I was very athletic. I loved to play football with the neighborhood kids, and I was good at it. But Mom wouldn’t let me play football out of fear I would get hurt. I played soccer and excelled at that, along with street hockey, BMX, tennis, and golf. I loved playing with soldiers and matchbox cars, and doing anything outside. I was a boy’s boy. But I did not consider myself tough. As I mentioned earlier, I was also very sensitive and emotional. I seemed to have an inborn anxiety. This was all one big strike against me; it was against the Rules. I was the kid who would tackle another boy and feel bad if I hurt him. I hated violence. I didn’t like to fight. Strike two: I was a mama’s boy. She was the one I attached to and spent a lot of time protecting and trying to comfort when my father hurt her both emotionally and physically. I cried a lot. I also liked to read, write poetry, and even play with my sister and her friends. More strikes against me. More violations of the Rules. Nonetheless, on the surface I was pretty much following the same map as the rest of my friends. Though I was considered popular, and even “cool,” internally I felt confused and conflicted.

As an adolescent I had an unusual and deeply painful experience. My body literally did not grow. To say I was a late bloomer is an understatement. I became acutely aware of this in eighth grade, but there were still a few other boys who also had yet to hit puberty. The summer between eighth and ninth grade I had hoped “it” would happen, but it didn’t. I stayed short and began to feel more and more powerless. The shame about who I was and about my body began to spread like a weed throughout my psyche. It was a secret, and I had to protect myself from being found out to save myself from the ultimate humiliation.

I was five feet tall and about ninety pounds when I entered high school. I was intimidated by all of the bigger guys—and they were all bigger. My body had betrayed me. One incident was particularly humiliating. It was very early in our freshman year, and we had just finished our PE class. Everyone had to take showers. Everyone. I did my best to get out of it, but I simply wasn’t allowed. I had to take a shower, and ended up choosing the lesser of two humiliations. After all of the guys had finished, I stripped down to my underwear, stepped into the shower in my underwear, and turned the shower on. I stood under the water for the longest thirty seconds of my life and quickly got out of the shower. I cannot remember if the other boys were there or not. That was one of many humiliations that year that gave me a rude awakening to the new world in which I was living—high school—where the Rules went to the next level. It was very clear to me that I no longer fit in; I was no longer cool. And I definitely was still just a boy in a world where developing into a man was the most important rite of passage.

I would stare at my naked body over and over again in the mirror, cursing myself and God. I wouldn’t shower for days. I started having night terrors. I’d sleep over at a friend’s house and have the night terrors there as well. I almost punched a friend’s grandfather when he came to check on me because I had been screaming and cursing in my sleep. I refused to stay the night at friends’ houses after that. I became genuinely afraid for my sanity, yet somehow was still able to attend school day after day. Was it any wonder I was such a huge discipline problem?

My sophomore year was full of more suffering: crying myself to sleep almost every night, praying to God that I would just grow, and suffering my father’s rage and abuse when he wasn’t passed out in various rooms throughout the house. I had such deep shame that I spoke to nobody. I even desperately tried to make my voice change simply by talking deeper. I did everything I could to give some semblance of having hit puberty. It was daily torture. If I had already been hypervigilant from growing up in an alcoholic home, I was now hyper-hypervigilant. I was traumatized.

Finally, after some help from a guidance counselor, Brother Paul, and my father walking into my room after I carved “Fuck You” into my arm, I was taken to our family doctor who referred me to a specialist at Georgetown University Hospital. I was medically treated with shots of testosterone for six months over the summer between my sophomore and junior years of high school. During this time, nobody—absolutely nobody—offered me any kind of compassion or empathy. They either said nothing or made what I now realize were very insensitive and inappropriate jokes and comments. Nobody told me that this didn’t make me defective, that it wasn’t my fault, or that there was nothing wrong with me. I had already spent two years coming to the conclusion that I was broken and being punished by “God,” and this was never challenged by anyone in my family or anyone at school. Adding emotional injury to insult, my father was too drunk to drive me to get one of the last shots, so I drove myself. Here I was at sixteen, hoping desperately to shed the boy-skin in which I was stuck, driving myself to the final appointment to receive the “magic serum” medically pushing me into manhood.

Early in my recovery I met some men, including my first sponsor, who had had similar experiences, but these did not seem to have been nearly as traumatic for them as for me. They also did not grow up in a violent home. Or maybe it was the difference in our personalities. But my reaction to everything that happened between ages fourteen and sixteen was extreme and profound. My intelligence, voracious introspection, and pathological sensitivity all worked against me, making everything worse. I obsessed about it daily and knew that every boy, girl, man, and woman was looking at me and “knew.” They knew I was just a boy. They were laughing at me. God was doing this to me. It became a deeply existential crisis. I was convinced that I was not a “real” young man. I was broken, ugly, and weak, and felt like a freak.

Now, when I tell this part of my story in my trainings and workshops, other men begin to open up about similar experiences—men like me, who you would not think were walking around ten, twenty, even thirty years later still feeling like a little powerless, scrawny kid. A truth I have discovered is that many men can identify with this type of experience to varying degrees. This is a trauma many of us have been carrying around, hidden deep inside us, for far too long.

I recently met with a young guy who looked exactly like me when I was eighteen: dark hair, short, tan, with a slender build. It was emotional as I looked into this mirror. I asked him as gently as I could how old he was. “Eighteen.” My heart sank for him as I projected my pain onto him and empathized with his situation. I shared a little bit about my experience and saw the sadness enter his face. I mentioned being medically treated to grow, and another young man in the same treatment program told me about his struggle with being small and not hitting puberty until his junior year and what that was like for him. Finally, there was another young man who also said that he had been scrawny long into his high school years and that he still struggled with those self-images. In his case it led to an unhealthy obsession with weight lifting and bodybuilding.

The truth is that as a prepubescent young man I stood outside the usual images of masculinity. I started to see the Water, not because I consciously and thoughtfully reflected on the Man Rules, but because I was not a man. As I felt myself in the Water, I also felt the dissonance between what seemed to be the ideal masculinity and me. I was drowning in the Water and desperate to find some degree of solace. Burning in my psyche was this constant and resounding voice telling me that I was not a man. I believed it. That voice haunted me. The worst part was that once I grew to almost six feet tall and matured into what many people consider to be a handsome man, it was too late. The damage had been done. Like anorexics wasting away on death’s door who still see themselves as fat, it has taken twenty-plus years for me to not see the gaunt, prepubescent five-foot boy looking back at me in the mirror. And he can still show up when I’m under stress or feeling threatened.

From my sophomore year of high school until my senior year of college, one thing helped to quiet the voices and allowed me to feel less insane and a little more comfortable around people: alcohol and other drugs. In that sense, initially, they saved my life. I needed numbness. And, of course, that boomeranged very quickly. When you search for sanity by turning to something that is known to destroy sanity, your problems are likely to get worse. The relief didn’t last long and I spiraled out of control, still tortured by the voice telling me I was not a man, that I was a freak.

Alcohol and pot served another important purpose, though: They were the only tools I had to help me talk to girls. Before I hit puberty I could talk to girls, but even in my most drunken state I had to be hypervigilant so that I didn’t get too close or have my shameful secret found out. One girl in particular thought I was funny and cute and I started talking to her on the phone after New Year’s Eve of my sophomore year, and then I realized, why am I talking to her? There was no way I could go on a date with her. Or be intimate with her in any way. So I just stopped calling her. That was what helped put me over the edge and led to the cutting incident that brought me to the attention of medical professionals.

Even when I finally hit puberty, I continued to look for evidence that I was still not a man. I didn’t have enough hair under my arms and none on my chest, I had no real muscle tone, and I hadn’t yet started to shave. I started drinking more and smoking pot, which made it easier for me to meet more young women. They liked me. They thought I was cute and funny. They liked that I was smart and self-deprecating. But I still didn’t date. I went on one date in high school. It was with a young woman who one summer worked at the same telemarketing business as me, and I only asked her out because my friend, a quintessential stud visiting from Australia, asked her sister out. I had no idea how to talk to her or be with her, and yet somehow I was still able to lose my virginity to her. And that was also humiliating. I did not have a clue what I was doing or that it was extremely common for young men to experience orgasm within seconds of penetration. I only saw it as more evidence that I was not a man and that there was something wrong with my body.

When I started working out to build muscle, my only coach was the voice inside my head constantly calling me a “pussy,” a “wimp,” and every epithet a young man can hurl at himself to bench-press a little more weight or do a few more curls. No matter how much muscle I may have developed, I still could only see myself as a puny weakling. My wife would often comment on my muscular body or how I compared to other guys at the beach, and my first thought was (1) She is making fun of me, or (2) She is lying to me. It has taken a long time for me to see my body accurately, as it is rather than as it was. When I was forty years old and writing this book, Nancy encouraged me to walk down the airport walkways and notice how many men I was actually taller than. I laughed it off when she suggested it, but when I did it I was amazed that I was taller than 80 to 85 percent of the men I encountered.

Under the influence or not, the shame I felt about my body and about not being a man was constant and had me always on guard. The saying that “addicts don’t get into relationships, they take hostages” was absolutely true for me. I lured women in as a nice guy, but if they got too close to me or hit any of my wounds, I reacted intensely. I became my father. I was an asshole. Mean. Enraged. Abusive. I watched a person whom I barely recognized come out of me. And that just added more fuel to the fire of shame that burned inside me.

My life changed irrevocably in 1994, my senior year of college, in two very important ways. I discovered the concept of gender, and I was confronted by multiple people about my use of alcohol and other drugs, and consequently got into recovery. Those two forces coming together offered me more hope than I had ever felt in my entire life. I learned that gender-based reality was painful for a lot of people. As a result of the social upheaval of the late 1960s and early 1970s, there were people thinking very actively and critically about the expectations around how women and men “perform” our scripts for gender. Because of my experience in adolescence I was more than eager to listen to those who were deconstructing male expectations. My process of recovery gave me permission to begin to give voice to the incredibly painful emotions and thoughts that were killing me from the inside out. I also learned something even more powerful from both of these experiences: I was not alone. I began to see the Water more clearly.

But the shame ran deep, and recovery made it harder to hide all of the pain. I started to learn how to talk to people sober. I learned how to just hang out and have friends. I learned how to connect. I wanted to connect with others so badly. That was always a core part of who I was, and still am. Slowly but surely, I began to learn how to crawl socially, then walk, and then even run. It was terrifying at times. Other times it felt like I was destined to be alone for the rest of my life. Long into my recovery I carried the shame and the feelings of worthlessness from my trauma around with me. It controlled so much of my life, yet I was still unable to talk about it.

Every relationship I ever had was affected by the core belief that there was something wrong with me, and that I was not a man. When I was still active in my addiction, I would only have one-night stands with women. That continued in recovery, despite it being generally against my values. I rarely connected with women in other ways, not because I was trying to be mean or hurtful, but because I was scared shitless. I didn’t have a relationship longer than a month until I was twenty-two years old, and that was long-distance. After that, no relationship lasted longer than a month until I was twenty-five, when the woman I was seeing actually asked me if I was interested in her or just trying to stay in a relationship longer than a month! I was unable to let anyone get too close. The women usually ended up breaking up with me long before I broke up with them. Any woman with the slightest amount of self-esteem would drop me as soon as she got a glimpse of my darker side. Sadly, part of the Woman Rules is that women are supposed to put up with that guy and be able to change him. Several tried with me, but not for long.

I would not be naked in front of women. I would never raise my arms. I spent every second I had with any girlfriend wondering how she could be interested in me. I could never trust that she would stay with me. Or really like me. Or want to be with me over someone else—someone manlier. If I was drunk, that didn’t matter as much. However, once the special elixir wore off, I was left to face me, and one look in the mirror was all I needed to be reminded that any woman who was with me was a fool. And a liar. And just waiting to find someone better.

That was my experience for a very long time, even in recovery. It made it easy for me to choose the work I did for my master’s degree, as well as the focus I have now. At some deeply emotional level it has all been about trying to prove to myself and the world that I am a man. As silly as it may sound, it is true.

This is only a small part of my story but a huge part of the trauma that has shaped my perceptions of myself as man, as well as the man I have become. I now spend a lot of my time going around the country talking with others about the Man Rules and their effects upon how men see and conduct themselves. It is amazing to me, despite how much personal work I have done, how often the Rules control my behavior and lead me to act in ways that are contrary to the man I truly aspire to be. I write this not in a spirit of self-shaming, but rather to impress upon you just how tenacious these Rules are. You may very much want to be a different man than you are, but you also find that you are controlled by the Rules more than you ever realized. And until you can see the Water you swim in, you don’t even know these Rules exist.

We all have our own stories about how we have become the men we are now. Chances are there are aspects of your experience that worked for you and that align with the man you want to be. There are also probably aspects of your experience that do not align with the man you want to be. All of these experiences combine to become your story of becoming a man.

I have discovered something very important ever since I found the courage to bring my inquiry about masculinity out into the world, and my guess is that this also applies to you: Every man I have spoken with or heard from has some kind of conversation happening inside him, questioning how much of a man he is. Very few men feel completely secure and grounded in their masculinity. When they are being truly honest, very few can say they feel deeply confident in their masculinity and their sense of being a real man. Of course, that is the problem with so much of this: What is a real man? Is being a real man solely defined by society? Of course not. Ultimately, it is different for each of us, but it is essential that we reflect on our ideas about what it means to be a man, and the degree to which we have blindly followed the Rules.

Today, as I stated above, I have been happily married for ten years, with a beautiful four-year-old daughter. I am fairly confident in who I am and basically comfortable in my skin. You would never look at me and have any idea about what I have been through or the road I have traveled to become the man I am today. What is most important about that statement is that you can say the exact same thing about every man—you have no idea what his journey has been to become the man you now see. That is why our stories are so important and why I have shared mine. It is in telling our stories that we get to reinforce who we are and create the man we want to be. As sharing our stories transforms us, our map and everything charted upon it is also transformed. We have the opportunity to own our stories—or they will continue to own us.

Into Action

In your notebook, set aside about ten blank pages. Begin to write your story. Focus on specific intervals of your life based on age (0–5, 6–10, 11–15, 16–20, 21–25, etc.) or specific milestones (childhood, grade school, middle school, high school, etc.) until you get to your present age. Allow each interval to have at least its own page, front and back. For each interval, write your story of becoming a boy or a man during that time, as applicable. Answer the following questions for each interval:

What ways of behaving were considered acceptable?

What ways of behaving were considered unacceptable?

How did boys/men treat you?

How did girls/women treat you?

What are some of the more difficult memories you have from this period of your life as related to your becoming a boy or a man?

What are some of the best memories you have from this period of your life as related to your becoming a boy or a man?

What were some of the biggest Man Rules operating in your life at that time?

Share some or all of your story with your partner, sponsor, and/or a trusted friend.