Creating Safety, IV: "Why Me"
roadrunner
Registrant
Why me? I think all of us have asked ourselves this question in some form or another, and of course it cuts to the heart of the terrible pain that a survivor feels. He wants to know why he, of all the boys with whom he mingled, was singled out for abuse. Was there something about him that attracted the abuser? What sort of world is it that allows or rather, forces a child to endure what he has suffered and condemns him to shame, silence and doubt?
Part of the problem is of course that there is no validating answer to this huge question. Nothing can be said to the survivor that will satisfy him and make him see some sense in what happened to him. In fact, while the question is one the survivor has every right to ask, it often has terrible consequences. As a child he needs to have sense in his world, and this needs to be a sense comprehensible to a childs mind. So most often when an abused boy begins to consider the why me question, his answer is the incredibly destructive solution that he is at fault or deserved abuse. He didnt say no, he didnt run, he wanted it, and so on.
Unless this issue is addressed when he is young it will continue into adulthood. Why should the survivor feel differently just because he has turned 18 or 21? The childs anguish is still with him; it lives as he lives. As an adult the survivor hits upon variations of the I deserved it solution that caused him such harm as a child. He may feel that he was an abuse magnet, or that his appearance or personality brought the abuse on himself. Where there were multiple abusers I think the survivor is even more tempted to see things in this terrible and false light. Even a wonderful decent man can conclude that he was available to all comers because he was weak, needy, a whore at heart, whatever.
When the why me question hit me it felt like one of those Grand Prix scenes where the race car hits the wall and instantly flies into a thousand pieces. And it wasnt something that came up and then could be resolved and put away neatly on the shelf. From admitting to myself that I had been abused as a boy, I had to come to terms with the fact that I was abused more or less weekly for four years, then that the abuser was a sadist who was as anxious to humiliate me as to molest me, then that some of my worst memories were of being abused together with my best friend, and then most recently that a gym instructor did enormous damage to my self-esteem with his constant ridicule and contempt for boys who were quiet dreamers rather than jocks. My point here is that the why me issue is one that keeps coming back. It cant be put to rest by telling ourselves theres no answer. Like all our other issues, we have to work on it.
My own effort to create safety for myself and move on is, as in all the other things I have talked about in this series, a very personal statement. What I am trying to do is not to dance around the problem and reshape it into something less threatening. The problem is there, it is part of our Truth as survivors. What I am trying to do is suggest alternative approaches that can make the task of coping and healing easier. Our job isnt to deny the existence of the mountain, but rather to find the safest path to the top and then beyond. Is recovery our goal? Well, sure it is, though I like to think of it as a path leading us somewhere. What we really want is to live our lives as joyfully and as fulfilled as possible. Is it even recovery if what we are doing leaves us battered and torn to pieces? No. What we need is a path of recovery (and this is why we need a T) that brings us to a point where we feel safe, renewed, worthwhile and validated and recognize that this was always our right.
What follows is what has worked for me, at least so far. But like all of us I am a project in the making. I may change my thinking as I continue to heal; in fact, if I see a better solution I hope I will have the wisdom and maturity to set this one aside and accept the better one. If any of you here have comments or other ways of dealing with this issue, please, lets hear them.
One of the first things I discovered about the why me question is that it isnt really a question. When I am engulfed by it Im not really looking for an answer; in fact, I think I would be furious if someone showed up and tried to offer an answer, as if anything could possibly justify what was done to me. There is always the response, Well, you were just in the wrong place at the wrong time, you were a target of opportunity. Thats probably true enough, but it begs the question doesnt it? I already KNOW I was in the wrong place at the wrong time! But so were lots of other boys.
What I eventually came to see was that when I am hit by this problem Im not really asking a question, I am crying out in confusion and pain. Not Why me? with a question mark, but Why me!, an exclamation. I am crying out my hurt and fear. And what do I want? Not an answer surely. If anyone offered me some scenario explaining why I should have been brutalized and terrorized for four years I think I would be outraged, as I just said above. Can any of us imagine sitting down, listening to an answer, and then saying Oh okay, thanks for that, now I get it, and then whistling our way home, satisfied at last?
So when we ask this question what do we want? I can only say what I think I want, but I bet others will discover that they feel the same way. I think that when I cry out Why me, what I want are basically two things. I want, first of all, to be assured that I am not alone in my pain. I need to know that there are others, that I have not really been singled out. And second, I need to know I am not alone not because misery loves company, but because I need to know that there are others who really understand. I want to know that if I need to talk there will be those who will LISTEN. I need to know that they will be with me through my hurt just as I will be with them through theirs. As a wonderful friend of mine, a very learned rabbi and scholar of Judaica, once said, People are the language of God. That is, when God wants to help us in our agony, He sends us people.
Once I came to this realization my next step was a bad one: I began to blame myself for torturing myself needlessly. Why had I put myself through all that pain of asking why me? That was a turn in the wrong direction because my question comes from the most natural inclination I have from my childhood. All children, even those raised in loving families, learn to blame themselves. I dont mean this in a negative sense. As a boy grows he has to learn that there are consequences for his actions and that the world does not revolve around him alone. For certain things, he IS to blame. He forgets to do his chores, and then is blamed and denied television for the evening. He disobeys instructions, something bad happens, and he is blamed. He is exploring and learning, of course no more and no less. But part of this is learning about blame and the pain and confusion of being at fault. As an abused boy he will of course blame himself for what is happening. He sees no other explanation to hand, and the abuser will often help him to understand how culpable he is. Its ironic perhaps, but I think that once we give up on Why me?, our first inclination is immediately to run around the corner and reclaim the blame in some other way.
I said above that there is no validating answer to Why me. But that doesnt mean there is no answer at all, just that there isnt one that will help us. When we ask Why me we are assuming that the world is a place where the good are rewarded and the evil are punished. But the world isnt like that. The world follows natural laws like those of motion, thermodynamics, magnetism, and gravity. The same principle that guarantees that a river will flow downstream and provide power for a million homes also guarantees that a child will fall to his death if he leans too far out the window. The world isnt FAIR, it just IS. If I want to dwell on my past, I can ask for all the rest of my life and get no satisfying answers to the questions I have about my abuse. I need to recognize that justice and morality are ideas imposed on the world by brave people of the past and present who have refused to accept the world the way it is and aimed for some higher order of things. But even good people are fallible and society is always far from perfect. So if I insist on an answer focused on my past, what it comes down to this: Bad things happened to me because bad things happen all the time. Not very helpful.
But when we demand justice we are addressing our present and future situation, not our past. Can I change what happened to me between 1960 and 1963? No. If is true, of course, that I have to come to terms with those terrible events and the effects they had on me, but if I DWELL on the past and search for answers there I will just be spinning my wheels forever. So what can I do? How can I remain in touch with the reality of what happened, and yet still empower myself and create safety?
I can move that question from the past, where I am powerless, to the present, where I can address it and seek answers that will help me. Why me (in the past) becomes Why should I have to deal with this problem (in the present)? Now I have a question I can answer. I have to do the work because I was the one who was robbed. Because it is MY life that I want back. Because no one else can do this for me. Because even though I did not start as early as I would have liked, the rest of my life is too precious to waste in confusion and shame. Because if I give up the abuser wins. Because I am needed by others as their husband, father, son, brother and friend. Because if I give up I lose everything Little Larry fought for as a terrified child.
In other words, I can empower myself even in this terrible question. I can also turn it into the sort of question I always needed it to be: a matter of right versus wrong in which, right here and right now, I can fight back against the terrible things that were done to me years ago.
That doesnt mean I should just forget the past. Not at all. Its just that I cant respond in the past. But as I respond now, in the present, I begin to understand more about myself in the past. I will begin to see how innocent I was, how defenseless, how decent and deserving of love and joy. I will understand how much courage it took to keep going through the abuse and afterwards. I will believe I did my best with the meagre resources a child has in the face of terrible evil.
In the end my victory will be all the greater as I learn to look back and cherish the determination and bravery of a kid who carried on, day after day, all alone. It is this, and not issues of Why me, that I can take up from my past and use to my benefit in my future.
Much love,
Larry
Part of the problem is of course that there is no validating answer to this huge question. Nothing can be said to the survivor that will satisfy him and make him see some sense in what happened to him. In fact, while the question is one the survivor has every right to ask, it often has terrible consequences. As a child he needs to have sense in his world, and this needs to be a sense comprehensible to a childs mind. So most often when an abused boy begins to consider the why me question, his answer is the incredibly destructive solution that he is at fault or deserved abuse. He didnt say no, he didnt run, he wanted it, and so on.
Unless this issue is addressed when he is young it will continue into adulthood. Why should the survivor feel differently just because he has turned 18 or 21? The childs anguish is still with him; it lives as he lives. As an adult the survivor hits upon variations of the I deserved it solution that caused him such harm as a child. He may feel that he was an abuse magnet, or that his appearance or personality brought the abuse on himself. Where there were multiple abusers I think the survivor is even more tempted to see things in this terrible and false light. Even a wonderful decent man can conclude that he was available to all comers because he was weak, needy, a whore at heart, whatever.
When the why me question hit me it felt like one of those Grand Prix scenes where the race car hits the wall and instantly flies into a thousand pieces. And it wasnt something that came up and then could be resolved and put away neatly on the shelf. From admitting to myself that I had been abused as a boy, I had to come to terms with the fact that I was abused more or less weekly for four years, then that the abuser was a sadist who was as anxious to humiliate me as to molest me, then that some of my worst memories were of being abused together with my best friend, and then most recently that a gym instructor did enormous damage to my self-esteem with his constant ridicule and contempt for boys who were quiet dreamers rather than jocks. My point here is that the why me issue is one that keeps coming back. It cant be put to rest by telling ourselves theres no answer. Like all our other issues, we have to work on it.
My own effort to create safety for myself and move on is, as in all the other things I have talked about in this series, a very personal statement. What I am trying to do is not to dance around the problem and reshape it into something less threatening. The problem is there, it is part of our Truth as survivors. What I am trying to do is suggest alternative approaches that can make the task of coping and healing easier. Our job isnt to deny the existence of the mountain, but rather to find the safest path to the top and then beyond. Is recovery our goal? Well, sure it is, though I like to think of it as a path leading us somewhere. What we really want is to live our lives as joyfully and as fulfilled as possible. Is it even recovery if what we are doing leaves us battered and torn to pieces? No. What we need is a path of recovery (and this is why we need a T) that brings us to a point where we feel safe, renewed, worthwhile and validated and recognize that this was always our right.
What follows is what has worked for me, at least so far. But like all of us I am a project in the making. I may change my thinking as I continue to heal; in fact, if I see a better solution I hope I will have the wisdom and maturity to set this one aside and accept the better one. If any of you here have comments or other ways of dealing with this issue, please, lets hear them.
One of the first things I discovered about the why me question is that it isnt really a question. When I am engulfed by it Im not really looking for an answer; in fact, I think I would be furious if someone showed up and tried to offer an answer, as if anything could possibly justify what was done to me. There is always the response, Well, you were just in the wrong place at the wrong time, you were a target of opportunity. Thats probably true enough, but it begs the question doesnt it? I already KNOW I was in the wrong place at the wrong time! But so were lots of other boys.
What I eventually came to see was that when I am hit by this problem Im not really asking a question, I am crying out in confusion and pain. Not Why me? with a question mark, but Why me!, an exclamation. I am crying out my hurt and fear. And what do I want? Not an answer surely. If anyone offered me some scenario explaining why I should have been brutalized and terrorized for four years I think I would be outraged, as I just said above. Can any of us imagine sitting down, listening to an answer, and then saying Oh okay, thanks for that, now I get it, and then whistling our way home, satisfied at last?
So when we ask this question what do we want? I can only say what I think I want, but I bet others will discover that they feel the same way. I think that when I cry out Why me, what I want are basically two things. I want, first of all, to be assured that I am not alone in my pain. I need to know that there are others, that I have not really been singled out. And second, I need to know I am not alone not because misery loves company, but because I need to know that there are others who really understand. I want to know that if I need to talk there will be those who will LISTEN. I need to know that they will be with me through my hurt just as I will be with them through theirs. As a wonderful friend of mine, a very learned rabbi and scholar of Judaica, once said, People are the language of God. That is, when God wants to help us in our agony, He sends us people.
Once I came to this realization my next step was a bad one: I began to blame myself for torturing myself needlessly. Why had I put myself through all that pain of asking why me? That was a turn in the wrong direction because my question comes from the most natural inclination I have from my childhood. All children, even those raised in loving families, learn to blame themselves. I dont mean this in a negative sense. As a boy grows he has to learn that there are consequences for his actions and that the world does not revolve around him alone. For certain things, he IS to blame. He forgets to do his chores, and then is blamed and denied television for the evening. He disobeys instructions, something bad happens, and he is blamed. He is exploring and learning, of course no more and no less. But part of this is learning about blame and the pain and confusion of being at fault. As an abused boy he will of course blame himself for what is happening. He sees no other explanation to hand, and the abuser will often help him to understand how culpable he is. Its ironic perhaps, but I think that once we give up on Why me?, our first inclination is immediately to run around the corner and reclaim the blame in some other way.
I said above that there is no validating answer to Why me. But that doesnt mean there is no answer at all, just that there isnt one that will help us. When we ask Why me we are assuming that the world is a place where the good are rewarded and the evil are punished. But the world isnt like that. The world follows natural laws like those of motion, thermodynamics, magnetism, and gravity. The same principle that guarantees that a river will flow downstream and provide power for a million homes also guarantees that a child will fall to his death if he leans too far out the window. The world isnt FAIR, it just IS. If I want to dwell on my past, I can ask for all the rest of my life and get no satisfying answers to the questions I have about my abuse. I need to recognize that justice and morality are ideas imposed on the world by brave people of the past and present who have refused to accept the world the way it is and aimed for some higher order of things. But even good people are fallible and society is always far from perfect. So if I insist on an answer focused on my past, what it comes down to this: Bad things happened to me because bad things happen all the time. Not very helpful.
But when we demand justice we are addressing our present and future situation, not our past. Can I change what happened to me between 1960 and 1963? No. If is true, of course, that I have to come to terms with those terrible events and the effects they had on me, but if I DWELL on the past and search for answers there I will just be spinning my wheels forever. So what can I do? How can I remain in touch with the reality of what happened, and yet still empower myself and create safety?
I can move that question from the past, where I am powerless, to the present, where I can address it and seek answers that will help me. Why me (in the past) becomes Why should I have to deal with this problem (in the present)? Now I have a question I can answer. I have to do the work because I was the one who was robbed. Because it is MY life that I want back. Because no one else can do this for me. Because even though I did not start as early as I would have liked, the rest of my life is too precious to waste in confusion and shame. Because if I give up the abuser wins. Because I am needed by others as their husband, father, son, brother and friend. Because if I give up I lose everything Little Larry fought for as a terrified child.
In other words, I can empower myself even in this terrible question. I can also turn it into the sort of question I always needed it to be: a matter of right versus wrong in which, right here and right now, I can fight back against the terrible things that were done to me years ago.
That doesnt mean I should just forget the past. Not at all. Its just that I cant respond in the past. But as I respond now, in the present, I begin to understand more about myself in the past. I will begin to see how innocent I was, how defenseless, how decent and deserving of love and joy. I will understand how much courage it took to keep going through the abuse and afterwards. I will believe I did my best with the meagre resources a child has in the face of terrible evil.
In the end my victory will be all the greater as I learn to look back and cherish the determination and bravery of a kid who carried on, day after day, all alone. It is this, and not issues of Why me, that I can take up from my past and use to my benefit in my future.
Much love,
Larry
