The world today is a hurtful place, and every single one of us is wounded. Our world is hurting, our communities are hurting, our families are hurting, and we are hurting. Given the intergenerational cycles of trauma and ecological damage that is occurring all around us, our woundedness is not only unsurprising, but also a mark of our humanity. As Krishnamurti puts it: “It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”
So, we are hurting.
This is true in both of it’s possible interpretations. When we are wounded, we both experience hurt and we also cause harm. This takes many different expressions.
For those of us, (usually men,) who have caused harm through verbal abuse, manipulation, domestic abuse, and sexual violence- it can feel unbearably lonely. Even though virtually every man you know has harmed women in his life, (whether he knows it or not,) the subject is taboo. Often, the only people who talk about it openly are men’s groups, and the vast majority of those spaces are somewhere on the spectrum between openly celebrating violence to downplaying and excusing this extremely serious issue. The other group of people who often speak about these issues seem to believe that anyone who has caused harm in these ways should be shamed and isolated from their communities. Neither of these approaches serve to actually reduce the ongoing harm caused by these patterns of behavior in our communities, and neither are helping men to heal in ways that lead us to have healthier self-images and lives, and therefore to cause less harm to those around us.
The MeToo movement is necessary, healthy, and deserves all of our support.
Also, these issues evoke such legacies of deeply legitimate pain and anger that in many instances, a man accused of any violence becomes not a wounded individual like ourselves, but a lightning-rod for all of the anger that the community feels about the pandemic of sexual and domestic violence. When this occurs, it acts as a warning to other men; not to heal themselves, but to avoid the MeToo community or any kind of public awareness of the harm we have caused at all costs, lest we too be violently ostracized from our communities. This is a profound tragedy, because the MeToo community and community of survivors at large contains some of the most well-developed and constructive analysis of these issues in the world, and perhaps more importantly, could share perspectives from lived experience that could help educate and heal those most likely to perpetrate these kinds of harm. The anger behind this pattern is righteous and holy; we should all be that furious. None of this is any kind of criticism, it is merely the pattern which leads perpetrators of sexual and domestic violence, especially in progressive communities, to feel wildly isolated and endangered when confronted with any of our own patterns of harm.
Because of this, people (usually men) who are becoming aware that we may have hurt people in our lives often feel that we have nowhere to go. No one to talk to who is neither going to excuse the harm we have caused, nor shame and judge us in a way that will leave us even more isolated, and therefore less equipped to heal and address our patterns of violence. Those of us who work in this field watch this sense of isolation drive men to addiction, even unhealthier communities of profoundly wounded men, flight to new places where no one is aware of their patterns, and all too often; suicide.
Emotional wounds are like broken bones; they generally take one of two paths…
The first is festering and passing-along of harm until eventually the wounded creature dies. For wild animals, a major broken bone is a death sentence, preceded by spreading infection, unthinkable pain, and ending in death. Emotional wounds are even worse, because if we don’t heal them they fester and spread out of us as individuals and harm the people around us, who in turn carry our wounds and often harm the people around them, and so the cycle continues.
A broken bone that heals, however, becomes the strongest part of the bone. In the same way, identifying that we have harmed people in our lives is an incredible opportunity. If you have harmed people, we desperately need you. Sexual and domestic violence are a pandemic in our society, and virtually no one is untouched by these patterns of harm. We need you to heal and then to become someone who can educate others and support their healing. The necessity of this is impossible to over-state. From the anarchist activist communities to the board-rooms of every corporation to the highest elected offices in the world, sexual and domestic violence are crippling us, and in doing so preventing us from moving the world in a healthier direction.
This page is a compilation of resources and support for those of us working on understanding and healing our patterns of harm, and for those of us working to support these individuals as they learn, heal, and grow.
“I didn’t know what exhausted me emotionally until that moment, and I realized that the experience of being a soldier, with unlimited license for excess; excessive violence, excessive sex, was a blueprint for self-destruction. Because then I began to wake up to the idea that manhood, as passed onto me by my father, my scoutmaster, my gym instructor, my army sergeant, that vision of manhood was a blueprint for self-destruction and a lie, and that was a burden that I was no longer able to carry. It was too difficult for me to be that “hard.” I said, “OK, Ammon, I will try that.” He said, “You came into the world armed to the teeth. With an arsenal of weapons, weapons of privilege, economic privilege, sexual privilege, racial privilege. You want to be a [healthy human being], you’re not just going to have to give up guns, knives, clubs, hard, angry words, you are going to have lay down the weapons of privilege and go into the world completely disarmed.”
Utah phillips
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.