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
