Translating Pain into Victory
When I was a child, I fell in love with ideas. My parents fed me a steady diet of complex middle-school level novellas and an unlimited supply of chart paper to draw upon. It was a brilliant childhood in a theoretical sense, for a creative academic. Something that I ultimately became.
Yet, a limitation lingered so pronounced and insidious and virulent, I hardly knew what it was until I’d made my first $300k.
It was doubt. A wretched lingering doubt planted via years of fettered time and wasted dreams. The dreams weren’t wasted because I’d stopped having them, they were quashed. My dreams were compared to the same dreams of other people and dissembled. My ancestors had cloaked their fears of social rejection and poverty in the self-demeaning reflex of dismissing their own kin. It was historical, intergenerational. Looking down and watching others “put their noses to the grindstone,” knowing the feeling of landing safely only intermittently, unreliably being cared for fully.
And lastly, justice: that thing we work for other people to have.
But not ourselves. We hide from shame, we keep our gaze fixed on the spot straight ahead of us and we rattle our own cages; we bark like loveless devils into an ancient sepulchre of long-buried trespasses.
I looked up. I bit back; I threw faith into my own hat, and penniless, attempted to regain my footing. If I couldn’t afford good therapy, then I’d become my own therapist. And to treat someone like me, I’d have to become good. Really good.
I remember thinking those words when I was around 17. I knew it would be hard, and I knew it would take a long time. But for me, I needed to understand what it would feel like to enjoy existence, and it would be worth it. I was right, and it is (for anyone reading this and wondering).
My parents wanted to protect me from charlatans; they justified all manner of coldness with that concept. They were charlatans, so it didn’t work out well. They ultimately couldn’t protect me from themselves, they had such a limited perspective or level of courage to do the introspective work necessary to do the right things at the right times. They couldn’t reject themselves so they simply projected their frailties onto others and demanded I demonize those others in a similar fashion so I could bond with them (the less-charlatan of the charlatans). Essentially, their greatest advice was to out-charlatan the charlatans (except themselves, lest they lose face, or be asked to change their style of relating). But that is exhausting, and there is freedom in knowing how to discern, and when to let go, without punishment to anyone. So, as a kind of psychic protection from their bizarre backwards connection, I cultivated my intrapersonal (knowing oneself) and interpersonal skills to compensate. I made it one of my life’s missions to know thyself, as well as know and connect with people who could stay in the present moment with me.
I sorted and sifted through many a graduate program, group of professors, tutorial lead, supervisor (faculty and practicum). One of my most painful moral injuries while still a counselling student was when a psych nurse betrayed me after a man flashed me his penis while he hallucinated in one of our sessions. She asked me flatly if I was traumatized, asked if I needed time off (I wanted to please her and show I could bounce back from such a setback), then used me for my labour in writing massive reports for court before marking my performance “incomplete” due to her own bullshit.
I would never have entered into the profession had I not known in my bones it was my only way out of purgatory.
That word: justice. Evasion, secrecy, denial, fear, self-doubt, self-denial, and repetitive gaslighting.
After studying the collected works of hundreds of family violence specialists, and upon seeing the same tired tropes play out again and again as a domestic violence therapist and clinical supervisor, it is dizzying in its repetition.
You see, the research has been out and successful models of TREATING and ENDING family violence using the Duluth Minnesota model of interventions for MEN as well as women, has been accessible via text since the 1970’s. That’s 47 years. That’s a Gen-X-er.
Why isn’t it commonplace? Why did the Johnny Depp and Amber Heard garbage-show get such great ratings? Because it pays to have men be violent.
Women and gender non-conforming folx who can afford to sue whoever attempts to disempower them, are rare. The rate of victim-blaming, gaslighting and DARVO-ing in families where women, trans or genderfluid people stand up to abuse, is still incredibly prevalent. A whole lot of people are still economically dependent on those Depp’s who think it’s not that big of a deal if they x, y and z, because darling, look at your house I bought you!
As such, men retain their wealth and power unless survivors can pair with law firms who take them on a contingency basis, or pro-bono. And everybody wants to eat, win big, or simply not have to think about the worser-off’s while they enjoy their lives. We saw how slow and tedious the process was for the #metoo movement to pickup steam and get Oprah Winfrey’s seal of approval in announcing to us all at an award ceremony that #timesup. I have a great deal of respect for Oprah and her incredible abilities to leverage her power in multifaceted and mostly ethical ways. It is hard to do that and even “credible” witnesses with detailed accounts and analyses of their sexual assaults and trauma, when facing against a powerful offender, still lose. But to see the effort inspires us all. I didn’t forget Dr. Blasey Ford’s efforts and I watched her speak and have Kavannaugh cry and bring his daughter into it like an exploitative dad using his child for clout, and remembered that some games, no matter how skillfully you play, you still lose. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t play them.
I am the defector in my military family. I had to bide my time and wait until I would get some kind of veteran’s benefits (metaphorically) before I checked out for good. Johnny Depp, John Lennon, etc. etc., mentioning all of the examples of a guy who sings about peace while committing acts of war against his family is tedious for me now. I used to take some kind of vindication in revealing the idiot behind the curtain of alleged wizardry. Depp once was, allegedly, a great man. I think he was always a POS who played soft boy until enough women trusted him to discount the credence of their other sisters. It doesn’t take much for the internalized misogyny to kick in and damn women-folk from the inside-out. It really just takes promotions, wealth and babies more often than not. We too can be bought. And how.
I was 34 years old when I learned that Prince, a person I worshipped from age 12 after his music delayed and thankfully extinguished my own urge to die, beat up a similarly potent musical idol of mine, Sinead O’Connor. She divulged this in an interview around 2014 while she was on tour singing her incredible single “Church.” I may be an elder millennial and slightly aged in my references now, but I was shocked. A part of me wanted to DARVO Sinead. And then I remembered. I remembered watching some other interviews Prince had recorded while he was filming Under the Cherry Moon (I really, really liked Prince as a young person so watched and listened to everything he ever made), and can remember thinking that he was being an asshole to women in how he answered certain questions about his costars.
So, here is some very good advice from someone who has had their brush with wealth and success and coping with exhaustion and people-pleasing:
Sometimes, you use substances to numb-out because taking care of yourself seems counterintuitive to what people and “the world” expect you to do with such “good stuff.” So, people get tweaked out, they drop out of therapy and support groups, they ignore their good friends and focus on the shitty ones, and they lose their goddamn ethos.
Johnny Depp’s best defence was that he was such a great guy. And I don’t doubt he was. All of us are, for the love of butter. But he chose to use violence and abuse to exert power and control while binging on drugs and alcohol. And Amber Heard later sued him, acknowledged using abuse herself against him in their relationship, and here we are. There is no right or wrong, good or bad. There is only abuse, the absence of abuse, and actual love.
As a warrior (to continue on my military family legacy) of all kinds of forms of family violence, many people — creative, intelligent, innovative, constructive, etc. — take the absence of abuse in relationships for love.
Kahlil Gibran did a good job of encapsulating love’s essences; Anne Lamot, in her own right to self-love; heck, even Louise Hay, bless her hippy-group-laughter-therapy loving heart, had it in hand.
Love is knowing when to pull back and when to come closer, depending on how healthy you are, how much time you’re able to give to yourself and to others in a constant flow of staying with. Love doesn’t lie to save face, and it doesn’t go to war with itself.
Love deserts when it’s necessary, and that’s a tough one to accept, because people are valorized and given medals and trophies and anniversary parties and gifts when they sacrifice their dignity, their bodies and minds for war.
For many of my ancestors, that was enough. Now that we all can agree that women are people, men have feelings and children and youth deserve to mature in an environment not dictated by the constant threat of scarcity, it’s not enough anymore.
War is not love. Peace is not the absence of war. Love is peace and and peace is in essence, love. Now, think how many people (including yourself) you’re actually at peace with. If you counted more than 3 or 4, fantastic: you’ve found love.
You can’t love until you’ve come into peace with yourself and who you’re with. And sometimes you have to fall back in love with the things that aren’t heavy again, in order to value your recovery.
Is it tough to leave the war behind you in place for more peaceful people and realities? Absolutely. Is it important to soften up after you have had to be so hard out of necessity, or because it is part of your job? Yes.
That’s why so many soldiers do multiple deployments, to progressively more challenging scenarios. And to anyone who is a family member of a professional soldier (in whatever field), thank you for being there. We’ll come home for good, soon enough. Sometimes we need some time to remember how.
