One doesn’t overcome it without discovering what it was. Not to move on, but in to what happened to you as a child.
(Come prepared or not at all. I just love this picture of a strong child. I meditate and replace my own image with this pose to heal.)
- My parents both had drug and alcohol addictions.
- My cousins sexually abused me as a child.
- I was emotionally abused by my family.
- I was neglected.
- I was trained to please and accommodate others.
The counter-training was:
- That’s what happened to me. I had to learn how to not rely on drugs to take care of my pain like my parents did. I had to learn how to engage alcohol with control and moderation and enjoy it without overdoing it.
- I had to learn how to separate sex, abuse and sexuality. I had to learn that though my cousins raped me, they are rapists. They would rape anyone that they had the opportunity. It happened to me BUT it was not personal. They would rape anyone that they had the opportunity to.
- I had to learn to accept the dissonance of the actions at me and that it was not personal to me.
- I then had to learn to that the initiation into sex was not correct and that I had to reform what was the difference between abuse and my choices.
- I then had to discern that my sexuality was different than my experience of sex though the physicality may’ve been similar.
- I had to learn that my family was wrong. About themselves. About me. About their worldview. Even in love of my family I had to point to them as the wrong way to do things. It meant that I had to critically examine everything that they were presenting, had presented, thought of whatever I was or am doing. I had to understand that their wrongness meant that I would have to seek love, mentorship, guidance from other venues. It meant that I was alone in my life after basic care. It meant that I had to learn to fit in the pieces that my family didn’t know and acknowledge that spottiness. That meant that finances, real estate, business, entrepreneurship, education, higher education, etiquette, social class hidden rules, sexuality, sex, manhood, dignity, professionalism, computers, nature, love, etc.. had to be learned on my own or cleaned up form their lessons.
- They neglected me because of the distraction of their own dysfunction. They did not recognize when I needed attention, love, adoration, support. None of my family have read any of my books. Nor been to any of my classes or workshops. Yes, I’ve thanked them, dedicated work to members and have pictures of them with my work but no one I am blood related to has made any time or attention for my work. And that’s okay. Their lack of attention and inability to understand my value is not the definition of me nor my work. But whether I see it in compassion or with analysis, my Art cannot be seen because so many of them did not learn or have opportunity to create Art themselves. There were some that did and were able to assist and propel me in example, if not in direction support.
- I had to learn boundaries because it was to my family’s advantage, to my abusers benefit that I not know or have boundaries. I had to learn that again they were wrong and that I had to learn those boundary making skills both internally and externally.
To learn and change and accept the above based upon what happened it meant that I had to actively seek out ambrosia and pipe it directly to what happened, not to answer just feeling better. The difference that meant was:
- Two years of Incest Anonymous groups every week at The Center in NYC, just sitting silently in the back row, listening to what sexual abuse, sex, sexuality, manipulation, pain, confusion sounded like and what resonated and new strategies.
- In college I participated in a yearlong peer group on sexual abuse and then with the groups help constructed a magazine cover story that I wrote and went out all over the city.
- Further in college I did an all ages group around dysfunction and abuse.
- I took self defense and martial arts classes and began to exercise and control my relationship to food better because this is my body. I needn’t hide nor cower with it.
- In my teens my mother and I went to therapy to deal with the catastrophic divorce of her and my father and learning how to deal with trauma.
- In my 20s I did a year of therapy about boundaries, relationships, sexuality.
- Spiritually, I acknowledge the brief weeks I went to jail over a small violation as stripping me of every one and thing in my life and casting me into a pit with real wolves. And I used every trick, guile, threat and weapon in the impressive and well stocked arsenal of Kyle that I walked out without a loss of dignity and no one put their hands on me.
- In my 30s I did a year of therapy about my life choices and planning/goals.
- It meant acknowledging my relationships that were warped by my upbringing and not blaming those people but changing and sometimes eliminating those relationships. It meant that i have had to take 100% responsibility for my life and my choices, actions and thoughts. I have had to move from a time where I was without choice, therefore a victim, to an adult who had trauma from my childhood that had to be healed, changed, examined by me in order to grow up. My family did not get a say so in my healing nor did I get to live my life past the second I recognized their brokenness as a victim. It happened to me, I was a target, victim-hood is an agreed upon result. I do not agree to being a resulting victim. Big shift in consciousness. (It may have something to do with why I didn’t talk much at 19 in those IA meetings—-there was a lot of victim-identity confusion going on.) No matter who or what was done to me, my responsibility was to heal it. Forgiveness, apologies, repayment, none of that is in the package of my taking 100% responsibility for my self, my existence, my pain, my trauma, my life.
I often tell workshops on trauma the story of going to my terminal mother’s rehab/hospital where family had gathered for Christmas/her birthday party and one of my rapist cousins effusively greeting me at the party room door, hugging me, chattering on exhaustively from across the room, peppering me with questions. (Years before when I revealed to my mother that I was going to the IA meetings, she confronted my cousins parents and that particular cousin she was intending to give a large sum of money to for his help in a civil case. I felt compelled to reveal the truth and it changed the amount she gave him by two zeroes.)
Fast forward to the party and he’s doing all this performance and my stepfather knew he would be there and my mother is in a wheelchair and has had mild strokes and there are all these strangers and half strangers and unknown extended family—-it’s a lot of emotional manipulation, drama, good intentions, terminal illness, sadness, going on. And I felt nothing for my cousin the rapist, not rage or anger or let me give him a piece of my mind—-I hadn’t seen him in almost 20 years—-I simply felt nothing nothing. So I’m sitting there examining this space and I realized:
“Oh, he’s popping off all this guilt because he is not healed from the kind of person he was/is and he thinks I’m going to go apeshit on him. He does not possess the healing of how he was traumatized that would facilitate him traumatizing others so that he would even attempt to apologize (the second cousin apologized to my mother once but not to me. And that was their narcissistic handshaking that did nothing for or to me, who’d experienced the trauma. I had to learn that abusers and parents who were narcissists would steal even your apologies.) But I’m not going apeshit on him.
Why?
I am not his victim.
He did things to me that I investigated but can’t legally prosecute him over, he has no connection really to my life other than another cousin, his brother, being close to my mother and therefore him here. I’m here for an entirely other person/reason. My stepfather had shown a “tell”, a little psychological and physical “thing, earlier that day, that he knew my cousin would be there and in fact wanted it to “do” something to me. And it isn’t doing anything to me. I am not reacting as anyone is expecting of me. Look at my cousin. He’s poor, he looks like a meth addict, he has no job, he’s in his late forties, he has no real relationships now children, he has no discernible future. Not a good look for a Black man. He is for intents and purposes, dead.
I’ve got degrees, a hell-ah resume, a TV show in NY, multiple books, teach at Columbia University, friends, colleagues, respected work—-I have used my lifetime to amass things that matter to me and bring me joy in multiple spheres and I've got 50 more years to do even more!
Ahhh, abusers like my cousin (and stepfather) need to tear at that because they do not know how to create it for themselves. And I am no longer available for them to tear at in large, overt ways because that space of trauma, I have made assiduous effort to heal what happened. Therefore they can no longer touch “me”. I don’t wish him dead because they don’t “exist” to me.
They are not real, incarnated into my reality, of positive or negative value.
Some things in life move from negative to neutral. Indifference is worse than hate because it has no emotional investment, no interest in the target.”
You do not overcome it.
You detail what happened. As much as you know and can remember and then you organize systems to deal with each branch of the trauma tree and you infuse the whole tree, branch by branch, issue by issue until you have yet another tree in your Garden of Life that you can proudly take 100% responsibility for and visit, talk to others about, teach others with, use to discern others with.
The trauma was part of the spiritual and soul’s intention within your life, it cannot be exorcised. It must be acknowledged and nurtured to evolve.
Me rocking plaid for the first and last time! That’s the healed formerly trauma but indefatigable child inside, getting back to that blossoming, bright spirit tree.
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