Man, Oh Man!

Violence breeds trauma, and part of the trauma that spawned my depression and anxiety is the domestic violence I regularly witnessed when I was a child. My father was a brutal man when we were children. There were eight of us total that lived through that nightmare. What it taught me was that men aren’t safe. That your “protector” can easily be your tormentor. Now, my father was a different man by the time he passed. He became more gentle and understanding the older he got, and by the time he became an elderly man, he was so different that none of the grandchildren could believe the stories we kids told of our childhood.

Nonetheless, the scars remain. One of which is the fact that I suck at relationships. I’ll admit it, I don’t trust men, and I’m deathly afraid of a committed relationship. I tend to keep a few men on call when I want to experience intimacy or need to be around masculine energy, but I don’t trust them to love and care for me.

Unfortunately, brutal men run in my family. My great-great-grandfather beat my great-great-grandmother to death and went on to raise their children, including my grandmother, until his murder. So part of me believes that this attraction to toxic men is, in fact, a generational curse that I’d love to break during this lifetime. I broke the chain of domestic violence because I have never experienced it, and I’m so protective of my sons that outside of their fathers, there are few men that I’ve ever introduced to them. They are both gentle boys with kind spirits that don’t harbor the anger at the root of domestic violence. My father carried a rage that he never healed because he was brutalized by his mother. Part of the remnants of slavery is the notion that you must beat a person into submission to elicit obedience. When your parents aren’t your protectors and don’t make you feel respected as a human being deserving of understanding, even when you’ve done something wrong, something in you breaks and is laid shattered forever. My mother is an angel. She’s the gentlest spirit I’ve ever encountered, and while my father was brutal to all of my siblings at some point in time, he never hit me. So while I made the mistake early on with my eldest son, I later concluded that he responded better to being talked to than being spanked. That when he felt heard, he complied. So I stopped spanking him and have never spanked my youngest.

In my adult life, I’ve met men so gentle that they’ve been able to heal some of my wounds. I haven’t found a committed, monogamous relationship that made my spirit feel safe and secure and amplified my light. Still, I have had intimate relationships with men committed to protecting my heart and being so physically gentle that I could never say all men are dangerous. A couple of them might even read this blog. I’ve since convinced myself that maybe committed, monogamous relationships aren’t for me. I can’t say whether that’s true or just a defense mechanism against the type of relationships I’ve experienced. I grew up in a poly household, so it might just be what I know and what makes me feel most comfortable, being outside of the confines of a traditional relationship. But I think if I found someone that supported me as fiercely as some of my male friends do and loved only me, I’d change my mind. I’ve discovered soulmates. They just aren’t romantic soulmates. They’re soulmates because I recognize their spirits. And whether we’ve been intimate or not, a traditional relationship has never grown out of that recognition.

I guess the lesson is that while our traumas develop who we are, they don’t cement it. There’s always room to unlearn wrong lessons and live in a new truth, to live and breathe a new reality. I hope that this dysfunctional relationship with men will be one of the generational curses that I lay to rest within this lifetime.