Living With Trauma 17

One of the biggest obstacles to our egress forward in the need to live with and heal trauma lies within half of the human species. That's right, Gentle Reader. The men. Women already get it, for the most part, being still the de facto or by default caregivers and nurturers. This is changing slowly in faltering tiny baby steps as men, in some countries, anyway, are beginning to play a greater role in the actual raising and nurturing of their children. I have always been a feminist, even before I knew the word. I was raised by a strong woman for a mother who had to struggle to give my father the heave-ho, given his absolute lack of interest in coming to terms with his alcoholism, or in conducting himself in a way that wasn't somehow neglectful and abusive. We were the classic toxic upwardly mobile working class family of the sixties. When my father moved out, he not surprisingly, morphed into the classic deadbeat dad. Having the resources to pay adequate child support, he usually didn't. His star child, my older brother, was already working part time, so wouldn't need any help. I, at thirteen, was quite another story. He did not want to know that I existed. My childhood was punctuated, as well as by beatings and verbal abuse from my mother and brother, by more verbal and also sexual abuse from my father. To him, I was something to be flushed down the toilet, and I knew this. This isn't to say that having no positive male role model has caused me to disown my gender. Seeing how my father's beloved son, my older brother, turned out to be an ambitious, rapacious, and heartless psychopath, alone suggests to me how blessed I have been not being close to or loved by either of those men. Neither did my close relationship with my mother turn me into a de facto female. I have never identified as either female or male, and have long known that I am gender-neutral, or a-gender or androgynous. Too sensitive and nurturing and fond of lovely things to be a man and too strong, pragmatic and combative to be a woman. When I became a teenage Jesus Freak, the whole takeaway was having a close relationship with God, the which has sustained and protected me all my life. The varieties of fundamentalist evangelicalism I was exposed to were something different. I simply was uncomfortable and even downright hostile towards the binary mentality towards gender and the insistence of the Christians I had seen as mentors and role models in fitting all humans with vaginas into one category and the ones with penises into another. At the tender age of twenty-two I left all this and spent a year attending a radical Mennonite house church, where people were asking all the same questions about gender roles and definitions that I was also asking, and they even helped me learn how to formulate and ask the questions, some of which I am asking still. The vast majority of the males of our species do not have this kind of grounding or insight about gender. Most of them are themselves very poorly mentored by their fathers or other men who could role model for them a kind of masculinity that is not toxic or destructive. The very worst properties of testosterone are channelled and unleashed for boys in the form of violent computer games and rap music and online porn, followed by the ambition to make shitloads of money on anyone's back. and their parents are generally so exhausted at the end of an excruciatingly long and thankless workday that they simply don't have the emotional energy available to properly invest in their own children, especially their sons, who simply end up raising themselves in front of their little screens and thus turning themselves into anti-social little scumbags. Fortunately that isn't all that is happening. Thanks to some very progressive attitudes in our education system children, boys among them, are being taught and role modelled to be kind, gentle, fair, inclusive and nurturing. We are also about to see the first generation ever to come of age that for the most part has never been physically assaulted by their own parents, now that physical punishment is now so widely disapproved of. Programs in schools to combat bullying and homo and transphobia are also a clear step in the right direction. I am cautiously optimistic. But we have more, way more work to do if we are going to see the kind of toxic and patriarchal masculinity that has made life frightening, intolerable and dangerous to persons who don't fit the grid, relegated to the Stone Age where it really belongs. If all children, boys as well as girls, are taught from the cradle to be kind, gentle, compassionate and loving, with a view towards being a positive and healing influence in the world, then I think we will see some major steps forward in the healing of our broken and wounded humanity. But right now, the onus is on the males to step forward and get on the learning curve.