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
