A Friend In Need Of A Friend
These are short essays about survival, trauma, recovery, and the ongoing work of making sense of it all. Each piece is first posted within a survivor community, where it is read and discussed, before being shared here.
Essays From The Shadows ~ Vol 1
Is there an app for finding a friend, something you can put in filters and parameters and narrow down your search to a very specific person?
I’m asking for a friend.
No, you misunderstand.
I am literally asking for a friend.
I would like to find one.
WLTM/M/GSOH/40+/FBTCOH
I know. Proper old-school Time Out lonely hearts, the kind you skim read on the tube while pretending not to.
Would Like To Meet/Male/Good Sense Of Humour/Aged 40 plus/Father Beat The Crap Outta Him
I don’t lack friends — no, really — he says protesting too much, but I need one to shoot the breeze with, and this one needs to understand the genre. I have met one online who is great but a long way away. Sometimes you need the human warmth of passing them a cup of tea and seeing their smile. Reading a smile lacks something.
It might seem on the surface that this is a strange and unusual thing to go looking for, but imagine trying to explain why you like the soulful sound of Marvin Gaye to a friend who only listens to Goth Metal, like talking French to a Spaniard, pointless.
Sometimes it helps if you speak the same language, experience the same things, gets my drift. It saves time. Once you have learnt the importance of validation, it becomes an essential ingredient in your daily nourishment.
It’s not that I want to compare notes. No, I think you will find my father hit harder! Or discuss technique or injuries I have sustained. Something happens to children who are beaten. We are damaged in a very particular way. In many ways. Ways that are not apparent to the naked eye, and we spend a lifetime hiding and licking our wounds.
If you are British, it adds a layer of nonchalance and self-deprecation that becomes a masterclass in joking your way out of awkward moments. We would rather make knob jokes than for example finding it ‘hard’ to show our feelings, he says, making a knob joke!
There are no groups for this. There are groups for domestic violence, rape, sexual abuse. I reckon it is a large group of men who have survived this treatment.
You find them sometimes, in idle conversation on long car journeys in the dead of night where it is touched on and nodded at, but there is little actual support or accepted structure for dealing with the aftermath.
This is all new to me. I am like most of the others who grew up under this kind of regime. It was just how it was … he had a temper on him, he could be angry, he was a bit strict, it was different times. It was accepted back then. As if all of that explained anything.
As if every father had just graduated from the school of hard knocks when in fact some of them were just sadistic bullies and a bit free and easy with their fists.
I went to a therapist with the intention of dealing with sexual abuse and he was astute enough to start at the beginning. Tell me about your father. Do I have to? He won’t like me talking about him. I thought your father was dead? Good point.
One of the basic problems is that if you mention it lightly, people think, ‘Well, we have all been smacked, let’s not be a drama queen; ‘a bit of discipline never hurt anyone.’ Sure, I get that. Silence. How do you even start to explain?
I never understood how he never broke bones. Maybe there is a knack to hurting small boys. You punch and kick hard enough to hurt but in places and with enough restraint to not do lasting damage. If you avoid hospitals and tell everyone that I fall out of trees and over my own feet, I become clumsy, and it is my fault.
Thing is, and I say this as someone who is only just learning and understanding this himself, it is not just the physical damage. It does things to you, really bad things. It has a tendency to really damage your self-esteem, I mean grind it down to practically nothing.
It leaves you with a cold dread about anyone even slightly angry or volatile. If, like me, you start dissociating from a young age, you can keep that up for decades. Once you learn it is better not to be there for this, it becomes your number one choice for dealing with flailing fists.
It doesn’t stop there. Years go by, and you start to wonder why you never fought back, never stood up to him, or swung a punch, and your self-worth takes a nosedive. You forget that compared to him, you were knee-high to a grasshopper and couldn’t fight your way out of a paper bag.
As a child, I was subservient, submissive, obedient, and compliant. I never questioned his right to do this to me. I Had no concept of it being wrong.
In my case, he added his own twist where he would lock me in my room for days at a time. Isolation and loneliness were just my normal life. I was a problem, and I was to be punished. Apparently, I looked at him in the wrong way or something equally offensive.
Speaking about it, explaining it, and describing it is shocking. The carnage is still in your mind; it was locked down, not erased, and you can relive the reality of those moments. It helped having a therapist, someone to teach you that it wasn’t your fault, that you did nothing to deserve it.
It helped to come to terms with what it does to you, to learn words to describe things, to have language for the dark corners. It is not the kind of thing you can just talk about, and have it all okay again. There are bits of this that you will always carry around, but it enables you to cope and gives you tools and understanding. Understanding something allows you to breathe and feel a little more than nothing.
I understand now what he did, the impact on me, what I carried, the damage he caused. Well, I am learning, I am still unpacking and examining the subtle damage and the wounds. I am also starting to see how I process my world and the things that make me collapse under the weight of his abuse. I am getting there. There is a lot.
I think a friend would help. Just to drink tea and understand. Someone who knows what it feels like to be thrown to the floor by a grown man and have to get up and let him do it again.
Who knows how it feels to finally get out from under that. Who knows how to walk away from it and feel the sun break on a new day and maybe learn together how to cope. How to survive that.
Somewhere around here, there must be someone … somewhere.
If that sounds like you, well don’t just sit there, answer the ad, reply to Postbox no. 1732