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