We`re all in this together

As the final installment of my series on males and trauma, this blog will look at the final, and perhaps most controversial, of the three points identified in my first installment:

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.

This development was not bad, per se. But our failure to acknowledge this incredibly important detail has significant impact on the current framework and the delivery of trauma services. More than any one fact, this has limited the effectiveness of our understanding of trauma, from our initial awareness to training to design and delivery of services to how we fund the services and even support individuals in their recovery.

As I mentioned in part two of this series, when the trauma movement began it happened on two mostly distinct paths: The VA began creating services for veterans, and then there were the community-based services. The VA reinforced the idea that when it comes to men, the ones who have trauma are the veterans, the soldiers. I hear that idea reinforced everywhere I go—whether it is some of the putative experts on gender and/or trauma, or professionals working in the field. There is no question that these services are not only necessary but also are in dire need of more resources to serve a population that is being decimated by the toxic intersection of trauma and hyper-masculinity.

At close to the same time as these developments in the VA was the development of community-based services. This was driven primarily by women rightfully fighting for effective services and finally talking about some of the most horrific abuses human beings perpetrate against one another: sexual assault, sexual abuse, domestic violence, child abuse and other significant abuses. These were—and still are, mostly—services that are designed for and delivered by women. This is nowhere more evident than when it comes to the disproportionate allocation of resources for domestic violence and child protection and the biased policies and overall lack of awareness permeating both of those systems. The biases built into these two systems have caused hundreds of thousands of men to lose their families, be kept out of their children’s lives, be branded as “batterers,” and, most importantly, be slowly destroyed by the trauma very few see or address. Perhaps what is most frustrating and sad is the number of wonderful people with truly good intentions working in those fundamentally broken systems.

The irony is that while so much of the addictions and mental health fields is still being run at the top by men (mostly white men), the people on the front lines—making a lot of the decisions about services, curricula, policies, etc.—are overwhelmingly women. In fact, both fields, addictions and mental health, are made up of approximately 80% women. Social welfare and child protection is even more dominated by women. I see this phenomenon all the time in the trainings I do around the country and in Canada as well. Again, there is nothing wrong with this, per se, but we cannot pretend that a field of thought dominated by women, women’s experience, and women’s perspective is not inherently biased against men’s experience. Add to that women who still feel that their experience, contributions and wisdom are often marginalized in the programs and the fields as a whole, and you can get a lot of mixed attitudes about men. That is what I and my colleagues have found, over and over again. Men’s experience has not only been mostly absent but sometimes has been ill-defined, as I explored in my piece on “The Male as Perpetrator.”

I have talked about “The Water,” the reality in which we are constantly immersed and of which we are often unaware, throughout these articles. What is most powerful about this concept is how subtle and insidious it can be, and how rarely it is consciously created or perpetuated. Whether we want to admit it or not, this phenomenon of trauma being from a heavily female-influenced perspective is definitely part of The Water. We absolutely have to give up the idea that because women are/were a marginalized and oppressed group, they understand us better than we understand ourselves; they see us more clearly than we see ourselves. This attitude is absurd and sexist in its own right. I have heard an expert on women’s issues make this statement numerous times, as recently as last year. Such a comment is an explicit example of a way of thinking that men experience all the time in subtler ways—from women and men.

We also have to let go of this myth that women inherently understand men. That we are simple. Not complex in our experiences or who we are as human beings. Just because someone has been working with men for 10, 15 or 20 years doesn’t mean you automatically “know how to work with men.” Or because you grew up with 18 brothers. If that were the case, those same people would not be having the profound shifts in awareness and in how they provide services after being trained to work effectively with men. These ideas are all part of The Water. The truth is: We don’t know what we don’t know.

When I talk about these various concepts, sometimes people hear me saying words and expressing ideas that I absolutely am not. They say these ideas are sexist. Or that they ignore the power structures and marginalization of those more disenfranchised. Or that these ideas and this work is somehow implying that we should focus on men instead of women. There are those who still want to divide us and say that this is men against women. Others say it is women against men. This is not about oppression and oppressed. Both are wrong. None of us has the market cornered on human suffering. I am for men; I am not against women.

These people are listening out of the false binary of: either/or. There are few cognitive structures that have been more damaging to human beings than this type of thinking—what we also refer to as “black or white” thinking. I am coming from the both/and. Everything, and I mean everything, that we have done up until this point for women is absolutely necessary, and we need to do far more. And, we must address the lack of awareness in our field about men’s trauma, the built-in biases in research, training and rhetoric that deeply affect the creation and delivery of services.

A world without trauma?

I will end this series of articles with my vision of where we might be able to go in our efforts to help others and ourselves heal from the impact of trauma on our lives. We are all in this together. There are those who understand this. These are the men who understand that there has been a built-in bias against women in the dominant model of addiction treatment. That there is still a vast “good ol' boys” network that permeates the field, marginalizing women and people of color, transgender individuals, and anyone else we tend to see as “other,” especially in the private treatment world. These “conscious” men understand that violence against women is still epidemic in this country. That a part of The Water is the sexualization of girls and women, where young girls learn very early that their bodies define who they are as they constantly struggle to live up to those unrealistic requirements. That women’s bodies are a means to an end—men’s sexual gratification. These men understand that being a girl or being feminine is still undervalued and even dismissed—as are women and girls a lot of the time.

There are also the women who understand that violence is the real issue. These are the women who understand that we cannot just talk about violence against women and children—we have to talk about and speak out against violence to all. These women understand that men have been seriously underserved when it comes to having services that speak to their unique issues and needs, especially in dealing effectively with trauma. These are women who know that the current model for domestic violence and intimate partner violence is fundamentally misdirected and on the whole has failed to make a real difference in ending violence, and has destroyed the lives of far too many wounded men whose trauma has been systematically ignored. These are women who know that all of the experiences they carry with them from their lives—both positive and negative, joyful and painful—deeply affect how they see and work with men.

First, we have to understand that we are all in this together. This isn’t about women and it isn’t about men. We are all in The Water. Imagine all of humanity as fish in a giant fish tank; that is The Water. Now imagine that for the last 40 years the way we have been trying to keep the fish healthy has been mostly by cleaning out only half of the fish tank. Over and over again. Then we wonder why the fish aren’t getting better. That is what we have been doing with our current trauma interventions, for the most part: only cleaning out half of the tank by focusing primarily on women, viewing it primarily through the lens of women’s experiences, and marginalizing so much of men’s experiences. Yet, we are all in The Water. How can we ever expect any of the fish to be healthy and survive if we are only cleaning out half the tank? We truly are all in this together, and it’s time we created a comprehensive framework that reflected that reality.