Читать книгу A Man's Way through Relationships - Dan Griffin - Страница 13
ОглавлениеMen, Relationships, and Trauma
“Through recovery I reshaped my beliefs of what being a man really is. Subsequently, I look at trauma as something that I don’t have to duck and hide from, and with the help of others, I move through it in an authentic manner.” —Mike
“My first sexual experience was with my adopted sister. She was sixteen, I was seven.” —Roland
“Forty-eight years of emotional abuse by a society that doesn’t accept men who have sex with men. Forty-eight years as an African-American walking on eggshells at times.” —David
“The shame of severe poverty, being referred to as a half-breed in a full-blood world, and the boarding school drove me to alcohol and other drugs and nearly destroyed me.” —Rod
The concept of trauma is absolutely essential to understanding the terrain over which we are traveling. Have you ever found yourself on a road trip or going for a walk and you encounter various obstacles that were not on the map you were using to guide you? You may not even be sure what the obstacles are or how to overcome them. You just know you are stuck.
Most of the men I’ve talked to over the years who are on the journey of recovery can identify some point in their lives when they realized it was not okay to express certain feelings and discuss particular behaviors or recount certain experiences, especially if these showed weakness, vulnerability, or sensitivity. Crying, above all, was strictly discouraged. These restrictions were not made up in our heads. They came from the Man Rules and what these Rules tell us.
We learned, sometimes through everyday interactions with other men but frequently because of abuse or other traumatic experiences, that the only appropriate way to express feelings like fear, hurt, rejection, or sadness was through the conduit of anger and violence. For the longest time I thought that meant that all men were like me, full of rage and bad tempered; but that is not the case at all. Anger happens along a continuum. Some men stuff their anger and it comes out through isolation and cold silence, and can lead to severe depression. In fact, I wasn’t always full of rage or temperamental; far from it. The point is that we have all of these emotions, and for many of us they get “stuffed” and held inside us and come out as some form of anger.
One of the most powerful breakthroughs in addiction recovery is our growing understanding of trauma. My friend, Jamie Marich, PhD, has a wonderful analogy she uses in her work to make trauma easier to understand. She reminds us that the word trauma is Greek for “wound.” She talks about all of the different kinds of wounds that exist—open wounds (lacerations, abrasions, punctures) vs. closed wounds (contusions, hematomas, crush injuries, or slowly developing chronic wounds)—and the different ways those wounds heal. As she describes, “For some people, simple traumas (wounds) can clear up on their own, but for others with more complicating emotional variables (many of which can be biologically based), the healing process may take longer. If an individual who has experienced a major emotional trauma doesn’t obtain the proper conditions to heal (which can include formal mental health treatment), it will likely take longer for the trauma to clear up, and it could end up causing other symptoms. Of course, the wound is never going to get better; in all likelihood, it will worsen.” And just like a physical wound, when someone experiences a traumatic event, he or she becomes susceptible to “rewounding” or being retraumatized. When other people in his or her life (sometimes including helping professionals) keep unintentionally disturbing the wound through words or actions that tap into the trauma, healing never takes place.
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. How people respond to events varies widely, and that response is influenced by numerous factors, including how the environment responds, especially one’s family and community. What was traumatic for me might not be for you. Even people from the same family can have dramatically different responses to the same event. Especially as children, we should not be expected to have to deal with traumatic experiences on our own. Children should be able to depend on a safe and supportive home environment. Sadly, that is often not the case. It does not have to be a violent home for a young boy to get the clear message that expressing his pain and sharing his pain with others is unwelcome, and even unsafe. For a lot of us, that was part of the training we got from our parents and community, and it is a form of rewounding.
Another important concept related to trauma is what Francine Shapiro, PhD, the developer of Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), a research-based trauma treatment, refers to as “big-T” and “small-t” traumas. Don’t be confused; “small” doesn’t mean the trauma is any less significant. It means it is easier to miss because it happens over an extended period of time and is often not seen or even treated as trauma. Big-T traumas are the ones that have a clear beginning and end. You can identify details regarding where you were, what you were doing, what happened to you, and what was happening around you. Big-T traumas can be car accidents, natural disasters, experiences in war, attacks or assaults, and so on. They tend to have a life-threatening dimension to them. The idea is that the individual is relatively stable and grounded in his or her life, and this experience is jarring and significantly impacts the individual’s sense of physical and/or emotional safety.
Small-t traumas are very common for people in recovery, especially for those of us who grew up in addicted and chaotic family systems. The example I give in trainings is having an abusive alcoholic father and trying to figure out the details around specific incidents. Was he drunk? Was it daytime or nighttime? Was he getting angry at the same thing he had laughed at a week earlier? Was he passed out, or was he wreaking havoc? Was it Tuesday or Thursday or Saturday? Was it when I was six, twelve, or twenty? There are so many more subtle details, and they can be so different depending on certain circumstances that it is difficult to narrow them down. There are many examples of small-t trauma: the kid who is bullied for being overweight or is treated as an outcast because he comes from a poor family or neighborhood or is effeminate or is of a different race.
The cumulative impacts of these small-t traumas can remain hidden from the affected individual. He tells himself they do not matter or are not important or are simply “the way things are.” They become “normal.” He tells himself, and perhaps others tell him, that he should just get over them, so he tries to not think about them and suppresses the feelings associated with them. The thoughts and feelings are still there, but they have not been emotionally processed. When this boy grows up, and as an adult gets into a primary relationship that even remotely brings up memories of such past experiences, these small-t traumas can be triggered—without him or his partner having any knowledge of what is happening. On the surface it seems that there is a major emotional reaction completely out of proportion to an argument or some situation, when in fact a past trauma has been triggered.
And this can easily happen inadvertently. An example from my life is when I would walk around naked in front of Nancy. If she saw my body and didn’t have a positive reaction, I took her lack of response to be a lack of attraction, or even disgust. I did not know that I was reacting like that, but it would often lead to a fight or my putting her down or being rejecting toward her because I had a deep wound of shame that had been incidentally triggered. That is the key: Previous traumas will be triggered unknowingly in your most intimate relationships. If you are unaware of this phenomenon and/or not paying attention to how it can play out in your relationship, you and the person you’re in a relationship with will end up upset, as well as confused as to what is the real issue. This happens to men all the time, because if they are not emotionally aware of what is happening and do not catch the feelings at an early stage, then they get carried away on a wave of anger that may have little to do with what is occurring in the present. And when the explosion of anger takes place, many of us make it the other person’s fault. They unwittingly touch our wound, and we get pissed off at them.
The truth is that a lot of men dismiss small-t traumas as something they should “just get over.” In some cases we’ve heard it, and may even continue to hear it from our loved ones and, for those of us in twelve-step recovery, our peers and sponsors. A common message in recovery is “You just need to work the steps harder.” Know this: However small it (the traumatic issue) may seem, it is important. It does matter. It is not just a small thing. And struggling with it does not make you less of a man. The steps may very well be part of the solution, but that doesn’t mean they are the sole solution.
What is important for you to understand is that if the issue causes you discomfort, then it is real. If it is something you have been struggling with for some time, it is not likely that you will be able to simply “get over it”; otherwise you would have done so by now. Sadly, the voices telling us we are not working hard enough in our recovery or that we are doing something wrong only reinforce the shame we feel about whatever is causing us such distress. The real healing starts by talking about it, and that means having people in your life whom you trust, people you know will not laugh at you or judge you no matter how foolish, weak, or ashamed you feel about the issue. Mike said, “I have found it important to put some time and distance between me and the traumatic event. To back away, breathe, and just feel. Then I need to connect with one of my go-to guys and hear myself talk about the experience, to gain perspective, and to feel safe. After that I’m in a better position to deal with whatever is necessary.” That is an excellent approach to follow whenever issues connected to past trauma come up and cause you discomfort and distress.
I started sponsoring a man named Joe who had seven years in recovery. He knew my passion for helping men move into an area of what we call “emotional recovery.” I ask the hard questions and create as safe a space as I can for the man to talk. And I listen. I hear him. And I am not restricted by the Twelve Steps or the philosophy and literature of the various fellowships. As much as I love that part of recovery, I also firmly believe in seeking “outside help,” as advocated in the book Alcoholics Anonymous: “God has abundantly supplied this world with fine doctors, psychologists, and practitioners of various kinds. Do not hesitate to take your health problems to such persons.” This fact is often overlooked by some twelve-step fundamentalists.
Joe mentioned to me that he hadn’t slept in his own bed, or even in his own house, for almost two years. He was spending a lot of time sleeping at the homes of friends. He came up with good excuses for doing this. What really impressed me was that he had some close friends whom he felt safe enough to open up to and they, in return, had opened their homes to him. I did not suggest that he work a step about his lack of faith or do a fear inventory from the Fourth Step, or suggest that this was due to some defect of character. Grown men with seven years of recovery don’t fear sleeping in their bed because there is something wrong with their recovery. They do it because of trauma.
Joe started seeing an experienced trauma therapist specializing in EMDR. He began to see that his difficulties started after his parents divorced (again) and worsened after he broke up with a girlfriend. Importantly, rather than engaging in an extensive regimen of talk therapy sessions, Joe learned a technique known as Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT). EFT is a process of tapping on key acupressure points, breathing, and doing positive repetitive self-talk. Joe began to see how shame and anxiety from these past experiences affected his ability to sleep peacefully in his bed. He also started slowly challenging himself to do things differently. But equally important, through EMDR and EFT Joe was able to rewire his brain and adjust the faulty connections created as a result of small-t traumas he experienced as a child that had been triggered in adulthood.
The brain plays a central role in the processing of traumatic experiences. Trauma has a profound impact on our brain and our body. The triune brain—a model proposed by the American physician and neuroscientist Paul D. MacLean and endorsed widely by trauma experts—includes the primitive or reptilian part of our brain, the limbic system, and the neocortex. When it comes to understanding and healing from trauma, the limbic system and the neocortex are critical. From an evolutionary perspective, the reptilian part of our brain is the oldest and most basic part of our brain. It is the part that we have in common with many animals and controls our most basic functions. The limbic system is the seat of all of our emotions and is also where the “fight-or-flight” response lives. The neocortex is the command center of the brain and what separates us from all other animals. The neocortex is what gives humans the abilities for abstract thinking, moral reasoning, delay of gratification, speech, and the capacity to process past experiences to use what we have learned to inform our decisions in the present.
The relationship between the limbic system and the neocortex has profound importance. As Jamie Marich explains, “for a person with unprocessed trauma symptoms, the three regions of the brain are not optimally communicating with each other. Indeed, during periods of intense emotional disturbance, a human being cannot optimally access the functions of the neocortex because the limbic, or emotional brain, is in control.” The limbic system is activated during traumatic experiences to help the person survive via fight, flight, or freeze. Resolving trauma involves creating new neural pathways reestablishing the linkage between the limbic system and the neocortex. Only then does a person regain the ability to process traumatic events, make sense of them and the emotions with which they are connected, and place them in the appropriate context where they can be understood and integrated into the person’s overall experience.
I lived in my limbic system for most of my recovery. The slightest event would trigger an emotional reaction, and BAM! I was in fight-or-flight mode—mostly fight, because again, as men we are trained to ignore the fear, and fight. Moreover, flight or running away is unmanly and violates the Rules. This neural connection was built and then reinforced over years and even decades of emotional instability and repeated triggering/activation. Over and over again many misperceived cues and triggers had me jumping right into my limbic system, and then I was being driven by my emotions and my shame—a toxic combination.
There are a lot of people in the rooms of recovery with untreated trauma, some of which even rises to the level of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The problem for decades, particularly for men, has been our tendency to focus on the diagnosis of PTSD, which is on the far end of the continuum of trauma. As a result, we have missed a lot of male trauma. Trauma occurs when, after a traumatic experience (or experiences), people become and remain stuck operating out of their limbic system. The impact on one’s life becomes significant enough that it has serious impact on our ability to engage in everyday activities and live a productive life.
As Lily Burana, a woman who has written with courage, humor, and vulnerability about her experiences, describes it, “The overload of stress makes your panic button touchier than most people’s, so certain things trigger a stress reaction—or more candidly—an overreaction. Sometimes, the panic button gets stuck altogether and you’re in a state of constant alert, buzzing and twitchy and aggressive. You can tell yourself, ‘it’s okay,’ but your wily brain is already ten steps ahead of the game, registering danger and sounding the alarm. The long-range result is that the peace of mind you deserve in the present is held hostage by the terror of your past.”
Can’t you just hear the pain in that description? Can you feel it in your body? What does trauma feel like to you? Not just in your brain, but what does it feel like in your body? Can you notice the physical cues when you are getting ready to go “off-line”? Literally, that is what is happening. It may feel like a super-quick shutdown, but there is a complex process happening, and the more you can learn to notice it, know what your triggers are, be in your body, do conscious breathing, and use other tools, the more you can slow the process down and even interrupt it.
Here’s a specific example of this for me: For the first seventeen years of my recovery I used to be on the verge of panic attacks when I went into any public restroom by myself. Did you catch that? I said seventeen years—not seventeen months or even seven years. The door would shut and I feared for my safety. Every time the door opened I had this feeling I was going to be attacked. I imagined it and felt it. For the longest time I never talked about this because I was embarrassed. Essentially, I told myself to “man up” and suffered with that panic for years. It didn’t make sense, because I was a grown man merely going to the bathroom. It got better, so I figured that was good enough. But it never went away. I didn’t know it was a symptom of trauma. I finally brought it up when I started seeing a trauma therapist and made a commitment to tell him everything. It was the most honest I had ever been with anyone in my life. That was in 2012, when I was long into my recovery and even my trauma recovery. The Rules have a very powerful way of keeping us silent. It isn’t until you start to truly breathe again that you realize how much you had been suffocating.
Now some in the recovery community might say the problem is that I didn’t work a thorough Fourth Step. It’s just a fear, Dan. You had all of the tools you needed with the Twelve Steps. You didn’t need to go to a professional. Or maybe they’ll say that I needed to look more honestly at Steps Six and Seven because it is a defect of character showing itself. Or I just had to pray every time I went into a bathroom. And after. And whenever I thought about going to the bathroom. Unfortunately, sometimes in recovery we shame people into trying to work a better recovery program. I used to be guilty of it myself, assuming that the standard tools of recovery would be sufficient to overcome all pain and tragedy.
Shaming behaviors contradict the spirit of recovery. However, that doesn’t mean there isn’t some truth to those step-related comments. There is absolutely no question that the steps and other tools of twelve-step recovery can help men better deal with their most painful experiences. Almost every man I interviewed talked about how the steps, particularly Steps Four and Five and Eight and Nine, have helped them significantly in sorting through the pain of their past. There is no question there is something powerful about the power of prayer; it transforms our thinking and, in brain parlance, helps to create new neural connections.
The bottom line is that it’s 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 in any way at fault. More often than not, that’s just the Rules talking. The Rules are co-conspirators with trauma. They hide trauma. Our desperate attempts to be men often keep us from seeing our trauma and/or how much it has affected us. Only a few of the men I interviewed identified no trauma in their lives.
As Peter A. Levine, PhD, one of the leading authorities on understanding trauma, says in his book, Healing Trauma, “Recently, trauma has been used as a buzzword to replace everyday stress, as in, ‘I had a traumatic day at work.’ However, this use is completely misleading. While it is true that all traumatic events are stressful, all stressful events are not traumatic.” This notwithstanding, he goes on to say “. . . almost all of us have experienced some form of trauma, either directly or indirectly.” Put simply, per Bessel van der Kolk, MD, also among the world’s foremost experts, trauma occurs when an external threat overwhelms an individual’s internal and external positive coping mechanisms. So, if your first reaction is to say that you don’t have trauma, it may well be a defensive reaction—a way of proclaiming or even protecting your masculinity.
Until you have quietly reflected on this issue and looked into it at some length with an open mind, you may not know whether or not you have experienced any trauma. What I can say is that I know far too many men who have lived with trauma for many years of their recovery with no awareness that trauma was at the root of their suffering and feelings of disconnection. Do not let contempt prior to investigation prevent you from exploring something that could offer you a degree of peace and freedom you never thought possible.
The challenge a lot of men have is that they do not necessarily see their experiences as traumatic because they compare them to other people’s traumas—what they might consider “real” or more serious trauma, consistent with the big-T-versus-small-t trauma distinction. Many men probably look at their small-t traumatic experiences in hindsight with an adult’s understanding, saying to themselves something to the effect of “I see how this could be traumatic for a six-year-old, but I am forty years old now and it’s not a big deal. I am over it. That was a long time ago.” That is the danger. Our brain, particularly our brain’s limbic system, does not care about our age, then or now. And it maintains the emotional memories of those experiences, no matter how long ago they occurred. That is why people’s trauma reactions can be triggered so long after the original events took place. Our bodies also carry the memories of traumatic events, and we may have physiological reactions to external stimuli without realizing that this is a common trauma response.
Even long into doing the work on my own trauma, it took me some time before it became clear that my experiences related to delayed growth and physical maturation, along with the violence at home and misery at high school, were significant traumas for me that had far-reaching effects on my life. For the longest time I had minimized it despite the incredible body dysmorphia and horribly negative internal scripts that defined my sense of being a man. I am still making peace with the deep trauma I experienced as a result of not growing.
Often our desperate attempts to be strong and powerful as men end up hurting people, especially ourselves. Frequently this happens as collateral damage of the trauma-based war waged inside us. The less we see and understand our trauma, the more damage it causes. When trauma remains unacknowledged and untreated, men in recovery—even long-term recovery—may find themselves alienated from others, including their twelve-step communities, and abusing loved ones, destroying their marriages, struggling with relapse, and acting out in other ways that damage themselves and others. As Luke said, “Without having the tools to deal with my trauma in a healthy way, I either avoided it or wallowed in it and blamed others.”
A man can work the 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 other unhealthy behaviors. Those around him might see him as a “dry drunk” even though he has been in recovery for years. The vast majority of the men who continue to act like “tornadoes in the lives of others” do not want to be that guy. But they act in ways that make it hard, often really hard, to have compassion for them. We have to help men find ways to see the harm they cause when acting out on their trauma while fostering compassion for them so they can become compassionate toward themselves.
The first steps toward healing happen when we give ourselves permission to acknowledge the emotional impact of our experiences. This is critical, because men who stay abstinent for a year or more without beginning to address their trauma are the exception, not the rule. There is no question in my mind that the number-one factor in relapse for people recently out of treatment, during their first years in recovery, and even in later years, is undiagnosed and untreated trauma. It’s not because they didn’t go to enough meetings or because they didn’t work the steps well enough. While that may be part of the picture, it is rarely the only reason. If someone is telling you that, then chances are they have little awareness of trauma, including possibly their own.
Untreated trauma is insidious. There is probably nothing that is more destructive to our relationships. Again, because of the Rules, we tend not to see trauma. If you have struggled with relapse or have found yourself struggling with other forms of addiction in your recovery, and nobody has ever talked to you about or assessed you for trauma, this is an area that may be important for you to explore. Find a professional who knows what he or she is talking about and get the support and services that can help you.
Men’s Trauma
My recovery was severely limited as I attempted to heal through the painful effects of trauma without knowing that’s what I was struggling with. Among the effects of my trauma was that my relationships were also severely limited. The idea common in the twelve-step community of being “happy, joyous, and free” felt elusive to me.
In the years I have been working with men in recovery I’ve come to realize how prevalent hidden trauma is. As essential as it is to recognize trauma and its effects, we also need to understand the reality of men’s gender-specific experience of trauma. How men experience, respond to, express the symptoms of, and heal from trauma is often (though not always) different from women. And that’s primarily because of those damn Man Rules. “The Eight Points of Agreement Regarding Males, Trauma, and Addiction,” (see Appendix A) is a document created when, with funding from a private family foundation, I was able to bring a group of national experts together to focus greater attention on the issue of male trauma. I had the privilege of visualizing and organizing the summit out of which this document came. To date it is one of the most significant professional experiences I have had. This is part of the map to help you in your recovery.
“Asshole”
As I like to say in the trainings I do, “What is a word we commonly use for a man who has trauma? Asshole.” Isn’t that interesting? Have you ever thought that when you act like an asshole it could be because you have had some kind of trauma triggered and you do not know how to deal with the pain of it so you act in ways that push people away? You react before you even know what you are doing. Does that sound at all familiar? Have you ever thought that about the other men in your life when they are acting that way? Maybe you are in a relationship—romantic, professional, or friend—with a man who acts like an asshole. Have you ever thought that it could be trauma? Can you cultivate the compassion necessary to support him while making it clear that mean or abusive behavior is unacceptable?
The feeling of being “Jekyll and Hyde” haunted me during those first twelve years in recovery, and I never understood it. I thought those kinds of wild emotional swings were supposed to be over once I got through early recovery. I had a secret I kept from the people closest to me in my community and even from myself. The shame was debilitating. I didn’t talk about it in meetings. In fact, I was deeply invested in looking good in my twelve-step meetings because I had five years in recovery. Then ten years. Yet, all the while I was slowly dying inside and becoming more and more afraid that I would never be able to feel close to anyone without feeling like it was ripping me apart.
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. The historical silence surrounding the issue of the sexual abuse of boys began to break with the Catholic clergy sex abuse scandal. The sex abuse scandal at Penn State University reinforced that sexual abuse, one of the types of trauma that has the most ignorance and stigma associated with it, even happens to the young men we view as the toughest and the best representatives of masculinity. There have been some other notable events that have helped to erode our societal denial regarding the sexual abuse of men. In October of 2010 Tyler Perry talked about his own sexual abuse, and in November of 2010 Oprah Winfrey aired an episode focusing on men’s experience of sexual abuse. Two hundred men came forward about 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 next show.
We have started to make an increasingly clear 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 this book had experienced some kind of emotional or verbal abuse, and many talked about physical abuse as well. Some of their stories are heartbreaking. They run the gamut of abuse, from extreme verbal and emotional abuse to racism, to sexual abuse by both men and women, to the systematic abuse perpetrated at the boarding schools that Native Americans were forced to endure in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The silence that many men feel forced to keep around these traumatic experiences of abuse causes a great deal of pain and, not surprisingly, often becomes a factor in their addictive behaviors down the line. That was also the experience of the men I interviewed for A Man’s Way through the Twelve Steps.
Knowing that abuse and violence against boys and men and the resulting trauma are so strongly linked with addiction, and knowing that if they are left untreated the aftermath of these experiences can cause undeniable psychological, relational, physical, and spiritual destruction, it seems not only logical but also mandatory that we should offer help and healing opportunities not just for the addictive behavior on the surface, but for the trauma-based pain and fears that underlie and feed it.
The challenge for men is in being able to overcome years of socialization and, in effect, training that have reinforced separateness, isolation, emotional illiteracy, and varying degrees of relational incompetence. Bobby said, “I have had to challenge my internalized ideas of masculinity around strength and self-reliance in order to examine a self-defeating pattern of automatic responses that did not serve me or others in seeking healthy outcomes.” When men get into intimate relationships and find their partners wanting, even begging for, communication, vulnerability, and openness, they often freeze up or are deeply scared by that level of intimacy.
Although men and women may come at relationships from different perspectives, they both want and need relationships and desire connection, authenticity, emotional openness, and vulnerability. One of the primary purposes of this book is to support men in looking at all of the barriers that keep them from cocreating and engaging in healthy relationships. These barriers are more than just trauma, but there is no question that trauma plays a central role. Importantly, as Ray pointed out, some of our ideas about being men actually help us: “They [these ideas about being a man] have given me the courage and the desire to go through the healing process.” Remember, the Man Rules have some positive aspects.
