The hidden reality of men`s trauma

I was 12 years into my own personal recovery from alcohol and other drug addiction when someone finally helped to put all of the pieces together of why recovery, up until that time, had felt like such a struggle. I had improved my diet significantly, added regular exercise and a discipline of meditation, increased attention to my personal recovery discipline, and experienced much better sleep. Now, most people didn’t know it was a struggle—including me. It was simply my reality, but I knew that it didn’t have to be as hard as it was at the time.

The analogy I used came from the Lord of the Rings during the Battle for Helm's Deep. No matter how hard I fought, no matter how many times I was able to fight off the demons and the attack of the forces that seemingly wanted to destroy me, they just kept coming—line after line. Recovery, ultimately, felt more like a fight than freedom. That was not what I had been led to believe, or even had a glimpse of when I first started the journey. The different diagnoses I had been given, the ongoing challenges with rage and depression, and the deep wound of feeling unlovable were finally put into another context: trauma. Suddenly my whole experience of the world changed. Actually, it was transformed! Nothing was as it once had been.

My experiences of trauma were hidden from me, my family, and many of the professionals whose services I sought out to help me. The reason I share this part of my story is because in the years since I started that journey that has deeply affected both my personal and professional life, I have come to learn that there are legions of men for whom this story resonates. It is such a sad and unnecessary story of suffering that has led to so many men with addictions losing their marriages, finding themselves in various programs for dealing with abusiveness, relapsing, developing other addictions, and even ending their lives. That is assuming they were not kicked out of treatment or left their first recovery support meetings because they weren’t able to navigate the intensity of the experience. When recovery support meetings are safe, they are wonderful places of healing. When those rooms are not safe, they simply reinforce people’s traumas.

In my work I talk about “The Water,” the reality in which we are all immersed but of which we are often unaware. The term refers to a parable of the two fish at the bottom of the ocean when another fish swims up and says, “How is the water?” and then swims off. The two fish look at each other and say, “What the hell is water?” That is how gender, in particular, shows up in our lives. That is how gender has shown up in the addictions and mental health fields for decades. And most of us don’t see The Water because we’re in it. Once you begin to see it, you see it everywhere and you begin to appreciate how incredibly deep it runs.

One of my mantras is: “It’s Us, Not Them!” It is not the men who are failing treatment. We have failed them by creating a whole infrastructure of services that does not speak to their needs and that does not see men’s trauma. Our systems still spend a lot of time reacting to men, kicking them out of treatment and executing their sentences to jail and prison for exhibiting the symptoms of trauma that we trigger, and not creating a healthy or compassionate space for men’s anger, and even rage. At least for women there is a whole system of thought, streams of funding, and service frameworks that support their special needs. Not so for men, particularly as relates to men’s experiences of and with trauma.

Why is men’s trauma so hidden? There are numerous reasons, but here are three of the biggest reasons I have been able to discern over the years of immersing myself more and more in the complexity of The Water:

1. Embedded in the framework of trauma that was developed 40 years ago is the idea of the male as perpetrator (as discussed in Agreement #5 of the Eight Agreements on Males, Trauma, and Addiction Recovery). Why care about the trauma of a perpetrator?

2. We raise men not to see trauma or see experiences in their lives as traumatic, difficult, or painful. It is against the code of being a man and so, as young boys, we and others convince us over and over again that it wasn’t trauma.

3. The community-based services framework in which most of the trauma services in the addictions and mental health fields were developed was created by women, for women, and normed on women’s experiences.

These three elements combined have rendered men’s trauma essentially invisible. As it relates to the addictions and mental health fields, up until recently when we spoke about “gender,” what we were really talking about was “women.” Many of the programs and professionals that deal with trauma attempt to deal with it in a gender-neutral way, which often actually ends up being a more “female-focused” way.

My interest is not at all about taking away from the work we have done and that still needs to be done for women. We have backslid significantly. Everywhere my colleague Rick Dauer and I go providing training on men’s issues, we always ask how many have had extensive training on women’s issues, and it is amazing how few people raise their hands. Now, with the lived experience of transgender individuals at the forefront of our attention, the issue is clearly even much bigger than the limited dichotomy of masculine and feminine. However, my passion is focusing on men. It is my singleness of purpose in many ways.

Over the next three months I will discuss the three elements regarding male trauma mentioned above in much more detail. I look forward to your comments and hope that this helps to continue a long-overdue conversation.