Living With Trauma: The Healers, 29

I am going to focus today on one particular house I lived in for two years, 2000-2002. It was a crash course in toxic masculinity. No, there were no wild frat parties and no group sex nor mega-belching, fart tricks or dirty jokes on tap. This was even worse. This was a household of low-income and disempowered males, several with mental health issues, I think all of us on some level or other traumatized. I was living with undiagnosed PTSD, was really conflict-averse, and tended to hide in my room when I wasn't out. The kitchen, and one bathroom, were shared between five men, making some interaction a necessary evil. I made a point of being polite and accommodating, a lesson badly learned on my first day. I was waiting for the bathroom twenty minutes that morning with a very full bladder and the fellow occupying it got very angry when I knocked on the door and he yelled at me on his way out. Such a welcoming soul! Being already traumatized from a lot of other stuff, I of course withdrew all the more. The tenant who assumed the role of house dad was a man in his fifties with undisclosed mental health issues. He was quiet, controlling,intense and sometimes very angry. We did chat a bit from time to time but always there was a sense of mutual guardedness, and I quite frankly found this guy frightening, which isn't saying a lot given that, at that time I was afraid of almost everyone. He and another fellow, a recovering alcoholic who worked sporadically, had lived there for around ten years. They hated each other, talked only when absolutely necessary, and otherwise maintained a very cold civility with each other. The recovering alcoholic was quite friendly and more disposed to chat. He was also very judgmental and had nothing but loathing and invective for the two mentally ill individuals living in the house. The fellow who yelled at me about the bathroom was an auto mechanic who seemed chronically angry, though the recovering alcoholic seemed to like him because he didn't have a mental illness. The fellow next door to me upstairs was very mentally ill, reclusive and had a violent temper which I was on occasion on the receiving end of because I made too much noise unlocking my door. Everyone did their own thing and, of course, no one ever ate together. This was a rooming house and the tenants were always handpicked by our Pakistani slumlord, or scumlord, and he of course wasn't at all interested in whether the tenants liked each other or were compatible or not, he was only interested in paying his mortgage and skimming a profit. I am blaming this dysfunctionality in our household on toxic masculinity, rather on poverty or mental illness, and for one simple reason. Not one of those men appeared interested or capable in harnessing the feminine side of their nature. No one communicated, on any level, beyond the necessary and superficial. Each was hobbled by his own sense of independence, each was swallowed up in his isolation, which is a very succinctly masculine behaviour when it comes to dealing with disempowerment. Instead of reaching out and trying to form healthy connections and bonds with other men, each retreats into his personal man-cave, and even more so for having to live together at close quarters. I see this as a primarily cultural problem. Not all men, regardless of their sexual orientation, are going to isolate like this from one another. In North American culture, anyway, with its background in hyper masculinity and rugged individualism, this is a huge problem and among our males anyway, it is creating generation after generation of emotional cripples who happen to pee while standing. I think that had we managed to sideline the Pakistani slumlord, chose our own housemates, balanced the gender ratio by inviting a couple of women into the house, and actually shared some meals together, who knows? We might have ocme into a healthier or at least less dysfunctional environment. I don't think that sex or sexual tension would have been a problem for the simple fact that I had male roommates in that house hitting on me or trying to sexually manipulate me, and none of those guys were out as gay men. Certainly had the men living there had a healthier approach to the feminine side of their nature, and perhaps had I been less frightened and more well at the time in order to be present to help mentor the willing, we might have also pulled together more. Who only knows?