Murky Edge

Tag: Mental health

  • Men: Toxicity, Pornography and Troglodytes

    Yesterday I met a beautiful man who spoke about men and love. Most of what he spoke resonated, moved and inspired me. A few things unsettled and disturbed me. This is my attempt to expand on the bits that left me unsettled.

    He started the talk introducing all of us as ‘toxic males’, and ended with the same message. This was said with humour (possibly tongue-in-cheek) and as a passing reference, but it unsettled me for a few reasons.

    I feel like we need to dive into our toxic maleness if we are to understand what it means to be male, and to help with the ‘toxicity’. It’s not enough – in fact it’s dangerous in my view – to make passing reference to it, as some kind of shared ‘known but unspoken’ theme. A kind of ‘nudge nudge, wink wink’. We keep doing this, and it’s not working. The undercurrents continue; the toxic river festers.

    I don’t know what it means to dive into this. It feels scary and unknown. But I notice a difference when we do this well, or do it poorly. Here’s an example: A few months ago I sat in a circle with men of all ages where we were asked to talk about violence. 

    Before the circle started, I was ready to enter some intellectual debate about what I think needs to happen – what I think about it all. To basically crap on about a wider issue that I know little about. I felt fired up, but I was awash with words and poorly-thought-through ideas. It was all brain and no heart. All out there and not known or felt or within me. 

    The first man spoke. A young man. I looked at him, and thought he might speak about his pain at being labelled a ‘toxic man’ and getting lumped with all the other ‘bad men’ out there. Instead, he spoke gently about his own challenges with subtle violence. How he felt he had applied pressure on his girlfriend in ways he regrets, how he had spoken poorly to her, and ways in which he hadn’t shown her full respect. I was completely disarmed, and moved quickly from my head to my heart. By the end of the circle, an Elder spoke – a gentle man from a long-term relationship – and he talked of his regret at what he now considered his form of violence: how he pulled away from his wife at times – through his work; his activism and his emotional withdrawal – when she needed him.

    It was breathtaking, tender and raw to hear these men speak. It made me look inside; slow down and stop conjecturing and start feeling and listening. It feels like these are some of the things we need. 

    Through Rites of Passage, we work with men of all ages, but a big focus is on teenagers becoming men. So later in this talk, after so many rich and wondrous things had been spoken about men and love, somebody asked this expert: how can we bring this to the teenage boys? He sat back slightly, and answered: “I wouldn’t. I would work with teenage girls but teenage boys will not cope with this.” He then went on to speak of teenage boys who are ‘damaged’ by pornography use, and labelled these boys as ‘troglodytes’ who couldn’t be worked with in these rich ways. The only answer was to send them out to the wilderness, to have some reckoning; to live life and then somehow reach some wisdom, where they would – finally – be able to start to be taught some real lessons of understanding masculinity, femininity and how to love well.

    One of our men called him out on this, since these are the young people we strive to work with – these ‘damaged’ teenage boys. These are the ones we want to help; to transition; to move away from ‘toxic masculinity’ and towards ‘healthy masculinity’ and an understanding of their own healthy femininity too. We don’t want to wait. 

    If we label people as ‘too damaged’ to work with, are we also relegating parts of ourselves as ‘too damaged’ to heal? If we have to wait until people are ready, are we forever waiting and stalling the hard work? The now work? Meeting someone and seeing someone where they are; as they are?

    To tackle some of the hardest work, I feel like we need to witness; uncover and speak the shadows and the darkness: the hardest; the yukkiest; the most shameful bits. And to help uncover and witness others’ shadows and darkness – to move towards a place where these festering things can be aired and examined; held to account and at times painfully and wondrously released –  it feels to me that we need to uncover and speak – strongly and truthfully – our own shadows and darkness.

    Love from Step xx

  • My ‘Alice in Wonderland’ relationship

    When I was young I would occasionally get this weird sensation, where things seemed ages away, and then very close up. Sometimes I’d get it when reading intently. The book would loom large, with text massive and in my face, and then might zoom out – slowly or quickly – and seem to fade into the distance. Or it might happen with a line on the ceiling or a speck of dust on the carpet. It was pretty disconcerting, but I never told anyone about it. It was the worst during a fever, with disorientating zooming in and out, and with noises too – a quiet crunching in the distance, and then a booming, excruciating crescendo of white noise as ‘it’ (whatever it was) approached. And that was in blackness or with my eyes closed. It was my worst childhood nightmare, but I never once told my parents, or anyone. I imagined it wouldn’t have made any sense and they wouldn’t have understood why it felt so dramatic. I didn’t have the words for such a thing.

    When my son was about five he told me he felt the same kind of thing when reading a book one day. So I took him to our family doctor. This doctor, known for her no-fuss approach (mixed with a good measure of competency too), said, ‘Oh yeah, that’s Alice in Wonderland syndrome. He should grow out of it soon. Don’t worry too much.’

    Alice in Wonderland syndrome? So is that what I had all those years ago? How many other people have had this? How dramatic does it get? Apparently it’s a known thing, as Wikipedia and the interwebs will attest.

    Alice in Wonderland. The big and the small. The close and the far…

    Lately I’ve been doing a heap of soul-searching on my childhood and my attachment style. As I’ve found things out, it’s hit me like a tonne of bricks. There are things I’ve always known about my childhood and my responses to things, but some of these have never had any framework or reference points. Led lately by some childhood therapy, a powerful men’s circle, a supportive (and triggering!) partner, and a bunch of power books including the incredible Hold Me Tight (Sue Johnson); Polysecure (Jessica Fern), some vagus/breath work and meditation, and a few big fevers thrown in the mix, I feel like I’m searching some fertile ground.

    In Hold Me Tight, Johnson argues it’s important to identify your weak spots, your big triggers, and where they came from and how they feel in your body. Where and when they hurt. She asks us to look for a ‘base emotion’ when you can get close to identifying the big hurt. Is there anger, sadness, shame, fear? Now here’s where I got stuck lately. I couldn’t identify any of these, or maybe a weak mix of all of these. Nothing clear to pinpoint.

    Now, being a ‘murky edge’ follower, I feel like the end-point is not some clear and packaged revelation of exactly ‘what’s what’. It’s kind of missing the point to try to identify these base feelings/experiences with a microscope and our precise English language. We instead want to aim for what’s not so clear. We want to touch the murky edge. It’s more of a body reaction that we’re looking for. A primordial ‘aarrrrrrrrggggggggg’ … now that’s getting closer. If we can wrap it up neatly, we haven’t got it. So there’s that.

    But hunting towards the big feeling… this feels like an important journey. What happens when I get triggered? And then trying to reference that back to some of the early moments and how that feels/felt in my body/mind. What were the feelings then? Anger? Sure of some kind. But not a heap, and anyway, is anger really a base emotion? I feel like anger is a transitory emotion between two states. A quick, simple message rather than a base emotion. But maybe I don’t understand core anger yet?? Fear? Yes for sure, probably the strongest, but this doesn’t feel like it. Shame? Definitely, that’s there too, but it doesn’t feel like the big thing. Sadness. Yes, I’d say sadness is there, wrapped up in a big dose of loneliness.

    So this doesn’t feel like it helps. It’s all of these big emotions. It’s none of them as the one.

    My revelation today is that the biggest feeling is a kind of ‘Alice in Wonderland’ feeling when I’m triggered. I pull towards, I zoom away from. It puts me in the liminal space between humanness and soul, and dangerously swinging between the two.

    It’s a loved-one’s face, looming in my face, saying ‘explain yourself; use better words’. It’s me hiding away, backing away, finding a cubby or a bed to climb into. It’s me wordless, disconnected, voiceless, unable to communicate. It’s the safety of my own body, the retreat into myself. My soft toys, my doona. It’s ‘flight’ rather than ‘fight’. It’s anxious attachment and avoidance attachment rolled into one.

    The yearning I feel for my partner is like the zooming in of an Alice in Wonderland feeling. Full of anxious (and beautiful) attachment. My partner is huge, filling the vista. Filling my consciousness. Everything is microscopic. Everything is in sharp focus. I’m consumed by the moment and my senses are heightened, tingling. Fully ‘on’.

    When the trigger happens – whatever that is – the zooming starts. I zoom out. The sharpness blurs. The chasm looms. The distance goes from microscopic to kilometres, to aeons. To scary, empty space between. I retreat the other way. I feel myself talking but I’m not there, not present. I’m sheltering in myself, down to the atomic level, folding inward.

    Does that make any sense? Do you think this is the first step and I still need to identify core emotions underneath? How do I progress from here? I feel like this is a big revelation, but I want it to lead to the next step, I’m just not sure what that is!