Mentor Abuse (coach, teacher, boss, etc) The Time For Denial is Passing

[Tbowe081]

I recently posted a comment in which I stated that I have been insensitive to the response of boys when I was young and men as adult to my unwanted touching. My declaration that I was insensitive has lingered with me. My dissociative experience of life has come between me and the authentic experience of the impact of my behavior. It is as if my own sense of myself can’t fully grasp that I would not really care how other people felt about my inappropriate behavior. The reality of my insensitivity is distilling upon me. To get that I have been emotionally checked out is bitter and needed medicine.

I can express my insensitivity on this site because for me it is a safe place. I can see that my denial of my insensitivity has been crippling me in my relationships. The healing and recovery are beginning to work in me. Thank God and thanks to those of you who take the time to be with me in this journey.

The reality of my insensitivity was brought home to me the other night when I saw a video depiction of two men in the military. One of the men was very angry because he thought the other man was hitting on him. He wasn’t angry because of what the other man had said, or because the other man had touched him. He was angry because he was under the impression that the other man was covertly sexualizing him. He articulated his anger with a fury I have never expressed.

Expressing my anger toward my high school tennis coach for setting me up for his abuse never occurred to me as an option. I stuffed down my sense of disgust and loathing for him when I met him in the hallway at school on the Monday after he had had his way with me. I was filled with rage when my high school French teacher taunted me for not getting into bed with him again. Yet I remained silent. Nothing came out of my mouth.

Afterward, I was able to talk about what happened with therapists, but the actual experience of how I felt ran underneath the surface of my life and was unavailable to my conscious experience. When I realized that for six years the Scout leader I respected had deceived me and betrayed my trust so that he could lure me into being his boy toy, I imploded. I walked out his door, and I began wandering around the city until I found a church. I sat and sobbed as I listened to the organist rehearse for Sunday. Day after day I found solace in sitting and sobbing in churches that I found in my wandering. I think because I could not express my anger over my abuse; when I have reenacted my abuse with others, I couldn’t feel their anguish and pain.

In the scenario which depicted two men in the military, the man angry man did not want another man interested in him sexually. Many times, I have felt that I have offended men because they I was interested in them sexually. Never was there expressed to me the kind of angry this man in the video unleased. I am familiar with men averting of their eyes or giving me a look of distain when they think I am interested in them. This man’s expression of anger landed with me as the unexpressed anger of men I had offended. And it landed as an expression of my own unexpressed anger. I am present to the force of this portrayal of outrage. I am ready to allow it to work in me to free me from the sense of anger directed at me and to liberate me from my own suppressed anger. What becomes available is the possibility of authentically relating to other men and the opportunity to bring it up with my therapist.

 

[Colorsupreme]

Good luck with your journey. Dealing with my own anger tonight.

 

[Dost]

I realized that part of my drift from Buddhist circles came from how often anger was labeled ‘unspiritual.’ For me as a trauma survivor—conditioned to freeze or fawn—reclaiming embodied anger has been a doorway back to agency. Not as a flare of rage, but as a steady, forging heat that strengthens and steadies me rather than scorching everything around me.

 

[Tbowe081]

Good luck with your journey. Dealing with my own anger tonight.

Colorsupreme, the color of anger is red. As you experience the red in your life, as you are in a safe space to get it just the way it is and just the way it isn't, may you find a measure of freedom and peace. Thank you for being a empathic witness to my anger. Dost quotes Peter Levine - Trauma is not what happens to us, but what we hold inside in the absence of an empathetic witness. T

 

[Tbowe081]

I realized that part of my drift from Buddhist circles came from how often anger was labeled ‘unspiritual.’ For me as a trauma survivor—conditioned to freeze or fawn—reclaiming embodied anger has been a doorway back to agency. Not as a flare of rage, but as a steady, forging heat that strengthens and steadies me rather than scorching everything around me.

Dost, thank you for your comment. Anger has its place in healing. I worked with a therapist for several years who taught me to harness my rage as a way to thaw the frozen energy that prevents me from experiencing my connection to my body. His approach was called bioenergetics. In group sessions and in private sessions, we pounded on pillows as we verbalized our anger. We screamed into towels with muffled outcries, and we stomped on pillows. It was a very helpful for me in moving from a crippled defeated me to a me that was ready to take the next step in my healing. T.