and/or a trusted friend.
Men, 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
