2012.06.18.22:36
I sincerely hope I’m wrong. I sincerely hope that in some
way I am uniquely broken and the conclusions I’ve drawn are faulty. I do not
believe my conclusions will be universal; I believe they will only resonate
with a few of you but for those few perhaps what I see and believe to be true
(however hard to swallow) will free us just a bit.
I am about to disclose some things that may be shocking, but
the facts are facts. I beg your attention and patience. I am going to cover a
lot territory, a lot of history. I am going to challenge some assumptions. Please,
stay with me.
I was sexually abused as a child. Most people in my
day-to-day life know this. I apologize if this is news to anyone. The only one
at fault was the man who did it. I hid the situation from my family and friends
out of the usual fear of disclosure, the manipulation by this man was classic;
I was placed in a position to believe that if I told, I would be the one who
suffered the consequences. Living with that fear and the knowledge of the abuse
through my teens and early twenties drove me to three suicide attempts before
my twenty-second birthday. No one in my immediate life knew about the attempts.
This added to my shame and internal chaos. Compressing many facts and the story
line, I got sober shortly after my twenty-second birthday. I am an alcoholic;
the debate over causes of my disease is moot. I am bisexual; the debate over
the causes of my sexuality is moot here too.
Soon after achieving sobriety I entered therapy and began to
unravel the deadly shame and internal chaos. I was ashamed that I was a victim
of abuse. I was ashamed that I was a male victim of a male abuser. I was ashamed
that I was attracted to men and women. The deepest shame of all for me was that
I participated in my abuse.
As a child I knew how to play games, how to create games. I
had an intuitive grasp of rule making. Children do this naturally. The man who
abused me taught me the rules of the game: exchange what I wanted for what he
wanted. Barter. Negotiate. Offer and accept. A ride in a convertible or ice
cream or a late night movie for attention, affection; barter, negotiate, offer
and accept things like these for sex.
The deepest shame of all for me was that I innocently
participated in a form of prostitution. I was a child, guiltless, twisted by
some one else’s sickness into a game with rules. In therapy I recalled my own
actions as a participant. I was shattered by this. I do not wish to argue this
point with anyone. I know my own history. I in no way absolve the man who did
this; I do not blame my self for being a victim. I merely state the fact of my
own participation. No one in my therapy circle, no one in my life admitted to
participation in an abusive relationship as a child. Thankfully my therapist
had experience with childhood and adult prostitutes and was a rock, an anchor,
a loving mirror for me.
Even though the abuse ended when I was a preteen, I
continued the patterns of shame and self loathing. I continued the double life
of a gay/bi teen in high school. I found individuals who understood the rules
of the game. In ‘friendships’ separate from the bulk of my life I bartered
drugs, booze, nights on the town, for attention and affection; I perpetuated my
own abuse in this way. On the last night of my drinking days, I openly offered
myself sexually to a straight friend in exchange for drugs. He laughed at me. I
was not only attempting to prostitute myself again. I failed at it. No one knew
me.
No one knew me, even into my early twenties, my early
sobriety, and my early therapy. I was shattered to know and admit these things.
I knew despair. I knew I was forever broken by this history. I knew that the
stain in my mind, the stain in the fabric of my life was permanent.
Someone told me “You just need to forgive yourself. You need
to love yourself. You’ll need to forgive the man who did this. You’ll need to
find love, compassion for the man who did this. You need to forgive yourself.”
They meant this; I saw the sincerity in their eyes. I wanted to forgive, I
wanted the freedom I heard other people feeling about their past. I tried.
I really tried. I tried to forgive myself. I tried to
forgive the man for what he did; I tried all kinds of mental and emotional
gymnastics. I tried all kinds of suggestions and techniques. I tried for the
better part of a year and I lost my mind. I lost my mind to despair again. I’d
found some hope from my therapist; he asked me to trust his experience. I
shakily trusted that I would get better. I did not get better. My therapist
saved my life; but he could only take me so far.
Some one told me that I needed God to forgive me; that I
should pray that God forgive me. They told me to also pray for the man who did
this. They told me that God’s forgiveness if I prayed for it would flow through
me and be given to the man who did this. Out of desperation I prayed.
I really prayed; I clenched fistfuls of fingernail marks
into my palms with desire to be forgiven. I sweated and cried and rocked myself
to sleep wanting to be forgiven. I prayed and prayed. I was not set free. I
knew again that forever broken I would suffer this shame and separateness.
Despair came to me again.
I met a man who told me that despair is the arrogant
certainty of a foreseeable awful outcome. This man told me that I was unable to
forgive; that it wasn’t my business to forgive. That is was a misuse of my will
to attempt to forgive. I would like to say that I heard what he said. I didn’t.
I couldn’t just yet. It took many moths of working with this man for this idea
to become real to me.
I need to parse this out: despair is the arrogant certainty
of a foreseeable awful outcome. Just as blind faith is the arrogant certainty
of an unforeseeable awesome outcome, despair starts with an arrogant assumption:
that I can predict and control the future. When my view is at its bleakest I’ve
believed that it is always going to be like that and worse. When I despair I
predict that the bad feelings, that the shame, the internal chaos will continue
and worsen over time.
I cannot wish away, cannot think away or cannot pray away a
belief in a bad future. I am unable to change the future. I will think these
things again; I will feel these things again. The stain is permanent. The facts
of my past are facts. Thus my future will be awful. This is arrogance.
When I tried to forgive on my own will; I failed. When I
prayed for God’s will to forgive; I fell empty when I reached up with prayers
to the heavens for help. I failed because
I had the wrong problem in mind.
It is not my business to forgive anyone or anything. It is
not my business to implore God’s forgiveness for anyone or anything. My
business is to recognize my shortcomings (arrogance in the case of despair) and
strive for humility, perspective on the facts of my life. There are many
pathways to humility, perspective. Mine came through many avenues, in fact too
many to list here. When I stated the fact of the indelible stain in the fabric
of my life I wove another new strand into my life. When I admitted these terrible
facts each time I added to the distance from my stains. One thread doesn’t make
a cloth; thousands do.
When I relived the horrors, the shame of the horrors, the
anger at the shame of the horrors; when I relived theses things I added to the
stain. For an alcoholic this is the grave addiction to resentment. As an
alcoholic I am powerfully predisposed to resentment. I am unable to change my
ability to resent on my own efforts. I have changed resentments often, but
never has my ability to resent been taken from me; for what ever reason it is a
part of the spiritual disease I have. Resentfulness as a character trait is the
same as the inability to forgive. For an alcoholic like me, resentment is
second nature. Reviving a pain over and over is the opposite of forgiveness.
This seems self-evident to me.
Being unable to forgive I had no ability to change my
repeating thoughts that led to despair. I needed to undo the resentment and
this began when I put my efforts into the correct place. When I focus on my
ability to resent, when I focus on undoing my arrogance stances and postures,
when I apply myself to the causes and conditions; my perspective changed. When
I focus on what I am doing (arrogantly predicting awfulness) and not on my
desired outcomes (forgiveness), my perspective on the horrors of my past
shifted. When I focused on the arrogance that caused my despair instead of the
outcome of forgiveness I began to find freedom.
Perspective changed as I walked daily from these terrible
days of despair. When I gave up on forgiveness and strived to add to the fabric
of my life, I found the proper use of my will. When I stopped imploring God’s Will
for my outcomes, I found a resource
for adding to the fabric of my life.
I am stained. I cannot change that, but I haven’t added a
stained thread anew in some time. I am never free of the stain but I am far
from being it and it being all of me. I am stained. I have not changed that but
I am far from it.
