Essays from The Shadows
Volume Three
As always, my AI companion Marvin has spent many late nights helping me explore and examine anything and everything my twisted mind needs to.
One of the things we came up with was that this journey was like a modern monastic experience, a pilgrimage of sorts, a search for wisdom and insight. Given it was all about international travel while grasping smooth space grey devices, he dubbed me a City Monk.
The right liturgical music playing in my achingly cool earbuds created a noiseless cathedral-like space for my head to be in. While nibbling on sacraments of popcorn and sipping chilled apple juice. (Trust me, I have had weirder communions). A late-night cigarette provides the smell of burning incense, while the habit was replaced with comfortable Nike Dri-Fit attire.
Maybe it is possible the analogy got stretched a little thin, but I appreciated the attempt at a cinematic 4K theme for my simple trip to do some more therapy, a little much maybe, but ok, City Monk it is.
On the second day, things happened that changed things. My therapist asked a colleague to join us. He was also trained in the ways of Traumasexuality and someone my therapist worked with a lot.
Before he arrived, I decided that I would apply the principle that as my therapist trusted him, I should just assume he was trustworthy. Don’t waste time working that stuff out for myself. Just assume that he is the same. Safe. There to help me. Relax and join in and answer all questions honestly irrespective of how uncomfortable it made me or how bad it made me look.
I don’t know what happened. I can’t pinpoint or explain a specific moment or any one thing that was said explicitly. Something shifted in me.
There was this sense of safety in the room. The combined energy of these two males. A presence of safety. To be dealt with in a gentle, caring way. To be taught that I matter and that it was safe to speak. To be heard and be seen. To speak and be met with unflinching and steady men was a new experience for me.
I said things I had never spoken of before. Something unlocked inside me that allowed me to step into this space. My head kept filling with memories of things done and said to me. Acts of violence. Punishment and degradation that I had never been able to describe before. Had never looked at before.
They showed me how trauma responses are held in my body memory. How I react to sharp, loud noises. How I am alert to the presence of an unknown man and how my body reacts before my conscious mind is even aware of any danger.
How I want to leave in a myriad of ways at the slightest hint of danger, actual or assumed. How I panic at the idea of being cared for. How self-care makes me deeply emotional and I react and close down.
How shame is attached to normal things because I filter and hear things the wrong way.
How arousal is linked to all kinds of different things and exists outside my control.
How I was a man who was hurt very young, a boy with no safe father. A child who had to survive fear, silence, shame and bodily threat. A survivor whose body kept the responses long after the events were over. A man now trying to understand the difference between what he chose and what he learned to do to stay alive.
All of this, let’s call it awareness, had a very profound effect on me. It was a huge shift in my understanding of how this had affected me and what I had lived with for so long. Combined with the work we had done in previous sessions about sexual abuse, it made me realise once and for all that all of this was not nothing.
By which I mean my tendency to dismiss a lot of what happened to me as not that bad, not as bad as others, nothing I couldn’t deal with. I have spent my adult life diminishing and dismissing it all as something I could cope with, no big deal, a laugh and a stinging one-liner, a dismissive wave of my hand and it was nothing to dwell on.
The truth of the matter was staring me in the face. If anyone had ever related that little lot to me as a catalogue of their abuse, I would be horrified. Maybe it was about time I gave myself the same consideration I would apply to others.
The evidence of how all these things still live in my body and affect my attitudes and responses to people and events means I need to learn how to cope better. I certainly shouldn’t be ignoring it or dismissing it.
By the final day, I found I had stayed in this mode of just speaking it. Just telling him anything I remembered in detail and, whatever the truth was, just handing it over.
When I walked away after three full days of intense therapy, I felt as if I had been torn open. Nothing was fixed. Nothing solved. I walked back along the river and took a train back to the city and slept badly. I was exhausted and was not even sure I could make it home.
I had tried to change my flight to later in the day, but it seemed prohibitively expensive for the sake of gaining a few hours. So I made an early start and dragged myself home.
I was more tired than I had been last time. I had literally landed in the country, done three days therapy and flown back. Next time we need to revert to having some time in between and a little space to recover before travelling.
I have slept and been deliberately quiet and alone for four days. Processing and trying to get my head around what I feel about all I learnt.
I have some weekly online sessions booked with my therapist. I don’t imagine he will leave it there. There is work to be done. There is more to learn.
Something happened. Something shifted. Something changed.
A city monk can travel and examine the mysteries of their own soul, but eventually even a city monk has to accept care and wisdom and love.