Shame, not on me but in me

During the last practicum I started with how difficult it is for me to cry. I've long admired, even envied, women who could access tears so easily. And then there I sit. For years.

I've learned in childhood not to cry..."please don't cry"
I learned as a boy and young man that "men don't cry" and plenty of times it wasn't safe (accepted) OF course my golden hot button around acceptance sealed that one.
Then in a cult I learned to be happy, be full of joy, be in the joy of the Lord. So greiving was not allowed, let alone crying.

So when my fiance said, "I think I'm not sure that I want to marry you," I bucked up and I believed in a fantasy-faith that we'd come back together. Within a couple of weeks, while she was on a date with another guy, a drunk driver in a station wagon veered over the steel grated road bed of a bridge and slammed head on into the Volkwagen they were driving. The guy she was with died immediately having had the steering column driven into him. Kathy didn't die on the scene. In a hosptial she laid for days in a coma, her face so swollen that it was hard to know it was her right away. She had dried blood from her ears and moaned from time to time. I, still very much "in love," "bucked up," had to be strong and tried to comfort her, calling her by my nickname for her, "bunny-bear."

After 10 days she died. I went into some place between genuine faith--transcendent of the temporal world--and fantasy, that God would bring her back to life.

It was nearly 10 years later, after adding my father's death, and many other painful episodes that I had a very strange experience...or series of experiences...that were nothing less than miraculous. For a number of days I watched God's grace and love and I was a pawn (seer?) in the midst of it all. And in the love and in the grace my hardness thawed. The grace of God was greater than any possible idea of right and wrong I could have imagined.

And in my thawing all the pain came up at once. I call it a thawing but it was really a battle between the grace and the hardness I'd held. All the grief and suffering that I'd put off came up and I was beyong disoriented. Everything I believed in was up for grabs. So much so that I didn't know what to keep and what to throw out. It got to where I even started to wonder whether I could trust myself that a wall in front of me was really there.

I took a couple days off work. I couldn't really function. Then one day while staying home with my kids. I took a bath. I could keep an ear out for them in the back yard. They were fine playing and I allowed myself to take care of myself with a hot bath.

I turned on a radio and listened to a Christian music station. A song came on about a boy, now grown up, who'd lost his dad in Vietnam. He sang about how his dad would sing he and his brother cowboy stories, then in the corous he'd sing that in Vietnam his dad had, "laid down his life for his friends." In my hardness, my bitterness, I became cynical thinking, "how do you really know that? Maybe he was shooting up heroin. Maybe he did something stupid. How do you know?" My hardness was a protection--or so it would seem--from vulnerability. But I didn't know that. I was finding this song pathetically naive.

Then the lyrics changed. It told of how the wife, his mother, and these two little boy got word that their father was dead. The pain of that snuck up around my cynicism and reached into me with a smash. It didn't matter what had happened in Vietnam. What happened to this woman and her little boys was tragic. And it was undeniably painful. I started to cry.

I sat in that bathtub, on my knees in a fetal position crying for two hours. I would cry about all kinds of things. At times it mutated into a prayer for some friends who were in greater denial of pain than I'd been in.

At some point, my son--maybe 5 at the time--came in and asked if I was laughing. He looked a little concerned (what a heart!) I let him know that I was crying and that it was okay, no, it was good, for men to cry. He left and I continued to cry for some time. Eventually, I felt "clean" and asked God to take me. I didn't want to remain in a world where I could get "dirty" again with hardness of any kind.

Needless to say, I wasn't taken. And I'm not always sure remaining was the best thing. By the time I got out the water was completely cold...and I couldn't have cared less.

Over the years I would love any movie I went to that I could loose myself in it, suspend any disbelief, and get so in it that I could find my self and cry. If I left the theater with tears down my face...into my beard, it was a great film and I would either seeing again or buy the video.

My first wife of 25 years didn't see me cry until we were parting. The pain of it for me, even though I was insisting on the separation and eventual divorce, was overwhelming enough for me to cry. More to the point there was some combination of feeling safety/trust with her at the moment, and somehow moving beyond any notion of shame.

I could cry in a darkened theater. Or, very rarely I could cry alone. It wasn't until I was with Karen that two things happened. I started experiencing a phenomenon where I'd laugh in my sleep, usually waking myself up (or if not waking me I'd wake up Karen.) I'd laugh like a little boy, even giggle.

The other thing is that I would occasionally cry. IN the most momentous occasions I'd get edgy for days or weeks before I'd finally go over the ledge and cry. Karen would witness me with her compassion and empathy, but I'd be in the grips of painful shame, unable to look her in the face.

I held a post as volunteer "botha." A botha is dressed in black, padded, huge thick helmet and groin protection and assume the attitude of attacker against workshop participants for an entire day. All I gave any of them was a stare of disgust, or worse. And in my "method acting" state my words were poisonous. It was my job.

And as I did this job I would watch them. Some had little problem seeing through what I was doing. But there were others, usually those who'd been brutally attacked or systematically abused in their past, and they were utterly terrified.

And my job was to help them go back to the place they'd lost themselves, right to that very place, and find a way to connect with their power and ability... But until then I would watched them shrink, and I would up the ante. It was my job. Sometimes I made my self sick. It was my job to serve them by being their worse nightmare and all the time, beneath the mask I wore for them, I was paradoxically more in touch with empathy than ever before. Sometimes I'd barely have my helmet back on before I'd start to cry.

Without disclosing all the details of the finale, by the next day each of the participants would have seen me crying openingly in public, flooded with empathy for them...having held it in so long. And they--yes, even the one who while watching me stand off with another participant had shaken to the ground and wet herself--would come up to me full of gratitude, understanding who I really was and fully understanding that it was my intent that in the midst of each scenario we'd set up, they'd find an opening, get a bit of space and kick me in the head until I was dispatched. For some, truly reliving their nightmare, they went to places where they'd have killed another attacker. And that was okay with me. Rewarding in fact. They'd found a measure of their power again.

So, here we were starting our 3rd practicum and I'm very aware of how much I need to cry...Robert notes my flagility, but I can't cry. I half joke to Robert about males and their corpus collosum...you know we men are brain damaged prior to birth. okay, we're not, but it seems a good excuse. Males do in fact get an acid wash that limits the corpus collosum, that part of the brain that communicates between the two hemipheres. ...Robert didn't buy it. "Blame biology" he jokes with a knowing smile."

So all I'm left with is the teaching on shame...how it hurts with searing pain and how it binds me from releasing the searing pain. I can't readily cry because I'm ashamed to, and ashamed to admit that I'm possible defective. Vulnerability, the higher road to health, is not trusted in a world of shame...vulnerability is shameful.

And as I went through the curiculum weekend I would find where shame was intertwined withing me, layer upon layer, going deep, and parhaps back to the womb.

The legacy of our last practicum weekend for me is my ability to sit in the swiming head and searing pain of shame as it comes up here and there, amazingly--I'd been so blind to it--nearly everywhere in my interactions with others.

I need to cry. But I'm too bound by shame.