Sorry, can't do that, Walt

 I can't remember if I have identified my oldest brother and primary sexual abuser by name here before. I'm pretty sure that last week was the first time to do so at Lifering's main email list. I also identified by name for the first time Tim, the third of my three older brothers, also an abuser after first being abused by Walt.

Ten months or so ago, Walt told his world, including me, that he had pulmonary fibrosis. It's kind of like an adult-version, progressive version of cystic fibrosis. Except that there's no new miracle drug.

He inquired in St. Louis hospitals about the possibility of a lung transplant. Apparently that's a no go.

So, early this month, Walt, after saying he almost surely has less than a year left (pictures confirm — he looks like dad about a year before his COPD death), asked for forgiveness for being "a poor brother," for not protecting me, and for otherwise nonspecific acts and actions. Nonspecific. Note that.

Eons ago, he copped to me and to sis about sexual abuse, only to say that his ordination as a Lutheran minister was proof he was "beyond that " now.

Well, here's my response to his request for forgiveness.

== 

Walt, the delay in response wasn’t deliberate. Rather, it was trying to figure out exactly what to tell you.

I could have given you a facile, a glib, or a multivalent response that would mean one thing for you, and anther for me. Some parts of what I see may actually still do that. That multivalent response would be, “whatever you really think you need forgiveness for, you have it."

The deeper reality is that, more than the cliché of “I was another person then,” that was another life then. Marie said five years and change ago that “this would have been dad’s 90th birthday” and I had forgotten all about it. Forgot that this year would have been his 95th until I started typing.

That’s an entirely different life, in part because my life today would have been different had that been different. Various overt and covert sexual abuses, physical, emotional, and religious abuse, mental illness in one parent which I recognized by or before I was 10 years old, mental health problems with the other parent which run on that side of our family for generations, and more, all made that life what it was. 

Within that, whatever you really think you need forgiveness for, you have it.

That’s an entirely different life for me in another way.

A few months ago, you asked me to pray for your outcome whatever the result. Well, I’m a secularist. I don’t do that. It’s not because of any animus toward you. It’s just that I don’t do that.

Life in general is massively contingent, but, I don’t think that either you or Tim protecting me from anything, or anything else in your actions or his, likely would have changed that part of who I became, although it might have. Since life in general is massively contingent, I don’t know for sure.

That said, since I am a secularist, per that “whatever you really think you need forgiveness for, you have it”? To use a medieval Christian term, if you are seeking not to die “unshriven,” you will have to find that elsewhere. Between the two of us, Lutheran pastoral confessional office / Catholic confessional booth / AA “fifth step” laundry lists haven’t been further discussed. We had brief long-ago communication about that.

“Closure” — and its value and worthiness — I know as a student of psychology to be more myth than real. Beyond that, personally, I never got it from dad, knew I never really could get it, and, still afraid of his anger decades after childhood, never did push that hard. Mom was too mentally ill — not her modest-yet-growing dementia but the mental illness she already manifested when I was growing up, mainly — to even understand that she had behaviors and actions from which any of us would have wanted to seek at least a degree of closure.

Ultimately, “closure,” to the partial degree it’s possible and of value, is an inside job. And, life has myriad scales of gray and ambiguity. I’ll leave it at that.

 ==

So, he's hoist back on the petard of his own ambiguity. I took neither the high road nor the low road but rather a sideways road. 

Sexual compulsion, PTSD, and control issues

 This piece from PsyPost, in talking about differences in PTSD symptoms between combat veterans and sexual abuse survivors, lays it out simply. Sexual compulsions for child sexual assault survivors in particular may well be about sexual control.

Ain't that the truth.

Childhood sleep, sickness and wellness and abuse

I am re-reading through parts of Bessel van der Kolk's "The Body Knows the Score" and at one point, he mentioned that child abuse survivors reported much higher rates of sickness than the general childhood public.

I did have some allergy problems in childhood, but nothing serious. I occasionally had some small asthma problems, but that was likely due to dad's smoking as much as anything.

Otherwise, I had no real sickness problems.

But, sleep patterns?

As a pre-teen kid, I regularly stayed up until midnight, and irregularly read under the covers in bed until after that. Once, after previous warnings, my dad caught me and gave me a "spanking" that was more a beating. This was part of his bad parenting, and in her own way, mom's bad parenting, too. Neither one asked WHY I was staying up that late. Neither one talked more to my teachers or principal about gifted classes or anything else that a semi-poor school district in New Mexico might do, either for me individually or me and a few others. (I never even knew others of my level of "geekness" or beyond in elementary school, to be honest. Only in junior high, for a town of more than 15,000, did I start seeing others.)

I also got up at 6 a.m. every weekday to watch the "Today Show" when it was still broadcast live. Again, neither parental unit asked why, let alone talked to me in more detail about this.

Per van der Kolk's talk about feeling unsafe at home, I felt moderately unsafe, or mildly-moderately unsafe, no worse than that, with dad's emotions and anger. Maybe about the same with my two sexually abusive brothers. With mom? Other than worries that she would be so solipsistic — bingo, the word popped into mind at the right time, and it's better than narcissistic — to forget about me (and no, not joking), I felt safe otherwise.

But, safe only in the sense of not being actively threatened. If feelings of abandonment are part of lack of safety, I had that in spades. And I've just realized that.

Beyond a lust for learning, I think both the late sleep start and early sleep end were in part environmental control issues, as my brothers, for the most part, were sexually abusive of me in bed during night time sleep time. Staying up later meant — or was intended to mean — staving that off. Getting up early was meant to keep them from coming in too late. (At the same time, the younger of the two abusers taught me to sneak out of house, including out my bedroom window, to go down to a former Denny's 24-hour restaurant at 2 a.m. On our bikes. Why the restaurant staff wasn't calling police the few times this was done, I don't know. And people think the good old days were better? Not even always for white people.)

At the same time, I surely had sleep anxiety issues. Why this didn't translate into a general somatoform anxiety, with symptoms like, say, a semi-regular spastic colon, I have no idea.

I'm glad, and that may be part of my resilience that led me to survive as well as I did without surrogate parents. (I would have been a mess, and either dead, a druggie, or a male butt-boy prostitute, had I succeeded in running away from home.)

Finally, the degree of abandonment I surely recognized, but also surely didn't actually consciously recognize or feel, is in turn surely related to my ability, as well as my desire, to live alone as an adult.

Yes, I don't have a high degree of "connectedness." And it may prove troublesome down the road. But, it works well enough now, and has for some time.

Twenty years ago today

Twenty years ago today, I quit drinking. And, at some point not too far later, actual sobriety set in, and stayed.

I got, if not drunk, half-drunk, for the first time when I was 10 years old. On liquor, not beer. And drunk straight, or as close to straight as a 10-year-old me could stand.

There’s a story behind that, which is part of the story with why I sought out alcohol more and more for nearly 25 years after that.

I’m a “survivor.”

A child abuse survivor.

A child sexual abuse survivor.

An incest survivor.

My primary sexual abuser led me to where that liquor was at. And encouraged me to get drunk.

In addition to being a survivor of child sexual abuse at home (and yes, there, not some grandparent or step-grandparent who lived elsewhere), I am also a survivor of a fair amount of emotional and verbal abuse, along with some other psychological abuse, and a modest amount of physical abuse.

I’m old enough to have been watching John Wayne movies before he died. I knew that “real men” like John Wayne drank straight whiskey, so I drank it as straight as I could on an empty stomach to show the neighborhood kids — acquaintances all of them more than friends, and sometimes bullies and even abusers themselves on an occasion or two — that I was a man.

And threw up 30 seconds after I met two of them.

Gradually, those memories faded more and more. Along with more and more alcohol, helped by me going to an “18-state” on beer for college. Repression may not be the right word, but something like that is real, and Elizabeth Loftus is wrong more than right on this. I know.

I drank more after graduating college and doing traveling church construction for a couple of years. That said, I had alcohol poisoning in college, along with bouts of depression, and didn’t learn.

I eventually tried to follow in my dad’s footsteps. But, before I was through graduate divinity school, knew I couldn’t be a pastor, even as part of the reason for trying it, other than to please my physically, emotionally and psychologically abusive dad was to be a Protestant Christian minister’s version of “married to the church” and escaping other things.

I got my degree, but not ordination. After a year of not getting full-time work, yet not grasping in my mind how manipulative my dad had been in the past, I accepted his offer to move back in.

He lined me up with the possibility of contract adjunct college teaching, which idea I liked, and even more when I got it. And with the job of working part time at a convenience store as well, which I dreaded and made me feel more a failure.

My third suicide attempt was the day before that interview. Yes, third. One at around the time of my first drunk, in childhood, when tormented by the second of my two sexual abusers at home one afternoon. Another in college, after rebuffs from a woman who in hindsight may have been like my third, covert sexual abuser. And then this.

A year later, I was the victim of an armed robbery at gunpoint at the convenience store. And my drinking took off from there. Drinking on the job there, I got fired.

Fortunately, my dad was going to move, and I had nothing keeping me in Flint, Michigan. So, I went with him to Texas. Got my first newspaper job. Then got one in another town. Not great pay, but enough to live on my own.

And the drinking got worse. The last year or so, the only thing I rationally thought about was whether my stomach could handle a straight shot when I got up, or if I needed to start the day on beer.

For non-drinking reasons that weren’t all my fault, I was fired there. At the risk of boss-employee issues, I had asked my office manager out, for coffee, the week before. That removed that problem.

I had it “easy” on drinking. Both a Walgreen’s and a grocery within three-block walking distance and another grocery less than a mile away. After we’d been dating a few weeks, my former office manager saw me walking back to my apartment with a case of beer one afternoon. When she was over that evening, she told me how it made her feel.

Something in my listened. That was a couple of days before July 28, but … after I finished off the booze I had at home … I didn’t buy any more.

And soon, memories started coming back. And more. I talked some with her. Later, I talked more, as yet more memories came back, with the only other person I could talk to at the time.

I soon got a new newspaper job, in a new city. While driving there from Hobbs, New Mexico, I got gas in Amarillo, Texas. A voice inside me said “open the phone book when you go inside.” One AA group was the “Hobbs Plaza” group. I was a secularist of some sort then, and even more, now. But. That caught my eye. I went to a meeting in 15 minutes and an emotional dam started to break.

Then? The move, the stress, the sobriety? The memories came on more — with more emotional content. I would have to stop driving because I was crying.

Eventually, in the next town over, I found out that the pastor at the Methodist church had experience with counseling children. She’d never counseled an adult survivor before, but she helped, with EMDR, and some other techniques.

Eventually, after losing that job for various reasons, I got to Dallas. I found some secular sobriety meetings there, and got involved with Lifering online.

I also, crucially, found a organization called The Family Place which had a lot of women at risk services and then, with a grant, started its first group therapy for male survivors.

The Methodist pastor had diagnosed me with PTSD. I had first figured that was mainly a diagnosis to give an insurance company something as an entry for billing purposes. But, I found out it was real. Very real. And still is today. I even learned that something like this is considered "complex PTSD."

Along with those emotional returns came about two early sobriety years of semi-regular flashbacks and silent scream nightmares. Occasional “body memories” and actions. That’s pretty much faded away, but I had a silent scream nightmare earlier this year. Had a flashback from another trauma last year, over the car accident that badly displaced my left hand two years ago. I may have some genetic susceptibility to this, for traumas beside the sexual and other abuse, as well as that abuse priming me for other PTSD reactions.

I’ve had a hard life. I don’t mean this as a “poor me, pour me” moment per the old AA chestnut. And my life isn’t as hard as someone born into poverty. Nor have I suffered the worst sexual abuse. Trust me, from The Family Place, I know that in person. But, it’s been hard enough.

After a couple of years at The Family Place, I started facing parts of my past. Even before that, I had mildly confronted my dad over the physical and other abuse. He denied it, then minimized it while outsourcing blame.

I then confronted my primary sexual abuser. After initial non-comment, he admitted it, but said the fact he was in the ministry now was a sign he was beyond it. In turn, that only adds to the idea that in some cases, religious abuse can be a real issue.

I’ve never confronted my second abuser, but … while having less interest in confronting him before, I have less interest in accepting his apologizes for not defending me from the older abuser of the two of them as an apology, or even an unconscious admission, of his own actions. The other family member, who said I have false memory syndrome once long ago, I’ve ignored since then on family dynamics issues.

Had I confronted my mom with what I earlier called covert abuse, she would have been clueless, even with a detailed explanation, but then might have had a fatal heart attack years earlier than reality. I don’t want to go into more details; I still feel bits of shame about the weirdness, along with everything else in my family. And, again, with all of this being full blood — no "steps" or "halfs."

With the two people I have confronted, just as described in some books of survivor narratives, I’ve learned that there’s not much healing there.

Do I still have bitterness today, inside the mild-mannered self that many know in person and some Lifering friends have probably sensed just through online contact? Yes.

Bitterness over a stolen adulthood as well as a stolen childhood, not so much from alcohol, but all the family abuse and dysfunction that led to the psychological battering that led me to start getting drunk in the first place. Bitterness over knowing that, in things like a family life for myself today, or not one, a career path that isn’t my original idea or my ideal — not my ideal creatively and “spiritually” even more than not my idea or ideal financially — gets harder to change as I get older, especially in a country like ours.

All I can do ultimately is stay sober and “trudge,” as Yenta the Matchmaker says near the end of “Fiddler on the Roof.”

And, with that said, a couple of closing thoughts, for people with me now, or working to be with me now, on this journey.

One is how huge luck is in our lives. A middle class minister’s family shows blood is not thicker than water. A girlfriend’s comment at the right time “sticks.”

Related to that? Per the old medieval Church’s rhetorical question, “Cur alii, non alii,” I don’t know why sobriety, and sobriety support, “sticks” for some and not for others. I’ve tried to become more careful in insights I offer, or claim to offer, over the years, because of that.

Speaking of, I offer a few “call-outs” to those who have passed.

I mentioned Robert “Itchy” Bradley recently in another post here.

Kat Wyke, aka Kishimojun, was little known even to “oldtimer” Liferingers outside the online meeting and chat room. She stayed sober through the pain and intestinal surgeries of Crohn’s disease for more than a decade herself, until a recurrence of feminine cancer was too much.

I think of Thailand Chani (never learned her real name) and Kenya Johnson, who stayed sober through years of bipolar disorder and other mental health challenges.

Sadly, I think also of those who “succeeded” on one action where I “failed,” because they were frustrated by not staying sober. Or, those who may have thought marijuana was OK, even if marijuana smoke may not have agreed with other health issues.

Cur alii, non alii? As Brahms, Ein Deutsches Requiem, plays here in the background.

All I can do is stay sober, while being honest and true to myself. That's part of what non-steps sobriety offers, including on dealing with issues behind sobriety, and recognizing that they, not "sobriety itself" in a sense, may need to be the primary focus at times.

==

On a related issue, I also don't know why on "cur alii, non alii" on child sexual abuse and recovery. That's both as to why some children are affected worse by it and why, some recover better than others.

I'm going to offer a few bits of speculation, though.

First is that, if it's just a one time, or even more than once, a very occasional abuse, that may lessen its effect.

Second is that, per the ACES evaluation, stability or instability of a child's family life in general is a factor.

Third is if a child is able to, or not able to, find some sort of surrogate parents.

Jared Fogle

Why? Why?

Why did Subway's pitchman become a child sex abuser?

Some people might say, it doesn't matter.

Well, in the hands of a bad narrative, it does.

If he was sexually abused as a child himself, it's possible for the ignorant, including among major media, to simply report that fact without reporting that fact that the majority of sexual abuse survivors — boys as well as girls — do NOT become abusers.

It matters, too, in that maybe he wasn't a child sex abuse victim himself. Maybe he's just a sociopath whose sociopathy focused on child sexual abuse. Such people exist.

Neither one is an "excuse," of course. In either case, Fogle clearly knew what he was doing, and that it was wrong.

And, "creative" punishment wishes, like castration, or hoping that he gets sexually abused in prison, are misguided.

If there is any chance that Fogle can either deal with the results of child sexual abuse on him, or with a sociopathic personality, those punishments aren't it. And, they won't help heal his victims.

In my personal history, anger has pretty much run its course. But, per what I just noted, my lack of trust has not diminished to any great degree. For any perpetrator to regain such trust, the burden's on them, and in actions and attitudes, not words.

That said, I talked above about some myths related to child sex abuse.

There's another, and that's "stranger danger."

Either incest by family members, sexual abuse by trusted family friends, or sexual abuse by trusted public profile authority figures accounts for the great majority of child sexual abuse. Movies and TV episodes aside, even if based on true events, or true to life ones, like "Mystic River," that focus on "stranger danger" perpetuate this myth.

Family members normally don't even need to "groom kids." The parish priest, church pastor or synagogue rabbi do, though. As do the scoutmaster. As do the schoolteacher or principal. As do the next-door neighbor. But, these are all either trusted family friends or trusted public figure authorities.

Like Jared Fogle.

Jared Fogle didn't snatch any kids off the street. Instead, he befriended them, buddied up to them ...

And then raped them.

That's the last word.

It's brutal applying that adult word to child sexual abuse, but it's true.

And, both are in part crimes of violence. And crimes of control.

I'm clearly an introvert

This piece from Huffington Post about introverts has a 23-point "symptom" checklist.

Of them, the only ones that I totally "miss" on are:

1. Trouble with small talk. No, I'm a ham at times, and as a smally-town newspaper guy, more seriously, have had to learn this.

5. Not "too intense." That said, I think this isn't a totally valid check point in general.

12. Expert in one thing? Nope. And like No. 5, I think that's not totally an introvert's deal in general.



Some are spot on, like sitting at one end of a bus or train, wanting down times, and definitely on "networking." Geeze, that is SUCH an extrovert-salesperson type thing.

On the other hand, the "wanting space" factor, at one end of a bus, etc.? How much, with me, is that introversion and how much is that hypervigilance over abuse survival? Indeed, the question might apply to other introverts, and even be related to different responses to child sexual abuse, resilience, and more.

Others are spot-on, too. In a kind of funny way, No. 14, about screening calls is.

No. 16, about the constantly  running inner monologue, is much more serious. And, taking it as a legit marker for introversion, rather than the chicken-egg of "wanting space," nonetheless, this too has to relate to abuse survival, and how introverts and extroverts differ.

Even though I'm totally a naturalist, also, I totally get the "old soul" deal, and felt that way before I became a teen, let alone in my 20s. It added to the discomfort of dad's physical and emotional abuse, plus his failure to deal with the parents of neighborhood bullies. I felt like more of an adult than him.

But, is that also somewhat chicken-and-egg?

No. 19, on internal cues? Yes. Maybe introverts are more intuitional?

No. 20, indeed, on "big picture." I'd add that that picture is often more nuanced.

And yes, I am a writer.

Some more thoughts on sex and Internet pornography

This is not just about sexual acting out... i.e., inappropriately acting sexually on actual sexual feelings. That said, it's not just "acting out" as a process addiction, either, although it certainly is that in part.

Certainly, with a new job right now, it's in part about anxiety still here, anger still at losing my old job, anger at the way my old company was managed, anger about the state of the newspaper industry, anger about not being able to get a reasonable job back in Dallas and more.

But, there's one ogther factor involved.

Beyond Jung, there probably is some legitimate study of sexual splitting as part of our repressed selves, and I've started doing a bit of that with Nathaniel Branden.

And, I started realizing, or picking up on an old past thread, of how much I envied women being women. I don't think I'm a woman trapped in a male body, nor is the envy level high enough to want reassignment surgery.

But, in a number of ways, especially coming from a conservative family and religion background that "assigned" traditional, stereotyped roles to women, I recognized that I, as a person who feared the testosterone, anger and competition of stereotyped masculinity and felt beat down by it, that, I was jealous of the "passiveness" that stereotyped women could in some ways, seemingly enjoy, while working a backdoor, quasi-assertiveness angle as well.

And, short of male violence, nowhere did that seem more true than in sexual relations. And, now, part of me wonders if I'm not jealous of the pornstars and centerfolds, or the real women cammers, working that type of assertiveness.

Take child sexual abuse and child PTSD seriously

Let’s stop blaming priests, or dirty old men on park benches, and instead look inside the four walls of home, or relatives’ homes, a lot more. And, let’s recognize that this causes “PTSD on the home front” (now that, due to the Iraq War, we’re sadly aware of PTSD). That, and more, is in my annual April column.