05: Trauma, Part II: Sacrificing my Authentic Self
“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”
[Important foundational reading for this post can be found in Trauma Part 1: What is trauma?]
I willfully ignored my sexuality for 15 years. My first memory of being attracted to the same sex occurred at the age of 6, while watching the Disney animated movie Aladdin. I remember feeling curiously drawn to the handsome, dark-featured man with a twinkle in his eye — and envy toward Jasmine, the object of his affection.
Subtle, and not so subtle, messages from the community and culture around me taught me that my attraction was not normal. Nor was my tendency to imitate female mannerisms and ways of speaking. As a child, I was a screamer. I remember my Dad, annoyed by my high-pitch shrieks, telling me I scream “like a girl.” At the age of eight, I made a lisp-y joke in front of my best friend’s dad, who was also my baseball coach, and he walked away from me, shaking his head in disgust. I looked to my friend and he confessed his father often asked him “why does he talk like that?”†
These experiences elicited shame, teaching me that I needed to repress these expressions of my personality. As I later learned, I was sacrificing my authentic self in order to receive love from my caretakers, and acceptance from my community — a damaging form of emotional repression and trauma.
Dr. Gabor Mate‘s perspective is that humans are “bio-psycho-social” creatures. We are more than just our biology (bodies) and psychology (minds). As mammals, we are wired for, and thrive on, connection with others. However, especially as children, we often feel we need to sacrifice our authentic selves in order to receive love from our caretakers (with love being essential to our own survival, a necessary precursor to needs like food and shelter being met). Being forced to make these sacrifices in childhood, in his view, lays the foundation for emotional trauma. [If you have five additional minutes I highly recommend watching the video below in which he explains this in illustrative detail]:
(*When he says we are the “least developed of all creatures” he means at birth. Human babies born at the normal 9 month mark are, by necessity, premature, as our large heads would not fit through the birth canal past that age).
And so throughout my childhood, and the formative years of adolescence, in every interaction with others I made a conscious effort to deepen my voice, and subsume traits and expressions of masculinity. Straighten that wrist. Furrow your brow. Walk around with your chest puffed up and your fists clenched — went my internal dialogue. I began lifting weights at 14, and pushed myself to excel in the most masculine hobby I felt drawn to, soccer, practicing footwork in my basement and running sprints on the field in our neighborhood.
My hard work paid off when I made the varsity team as a freshman in high school. My reward for this was even deeper psychological damage, as I was thrust into a world of hazing and heteronormative jock culture.
“SAK-A-RAK YOU FAGGOT”
Was not an uncommon refrain from the upperclassmen. This was not said in malice towards me, more in jest. Still, the subtext of epithets like this, is that who I was, was bad, wrong, not normal, and not acceptable.
I’m ashamed to admit this, but I actually adopted this kind of language in jocular banter with my teammates at some point during my four years of high school — a learned behavior, and a product of striving for acceptance to the fraternal community. And a further betrayal of my authentic self.
“Trauma... overwhelms the central nervous system, altering the way we process and recall memories. Trauma is not the story of something that happened back then. It’s the current imprint of that pain, horror, and fear living inside people.”
“THE HOT SEAT CALLS SAK-A-RAK”
I felt my chest tighten and a lump form in the back of my throat. I thought I was going to vomit, and I’m sure my face was flushed as I stood up, and slowly made my way, trembling, to the back of the darkened school bus. “SAK-A-RAK! Hurry up and get back here faggot!”
The “Hot Seat” was tradition — a hazing rite of passage on the North Mecklenburg High School men’s soccer team, passed down by generations of seniors that came before. After the first away game, freshmen were summoned one-by-one to the back of the bus by the upperclassmen. Even before my name was called, I knew what was coming, and knew the punishment would be worse if I refused to participate.
Sitting down in the “hot seat” — the last seat on the bus, far from the safety of the coaches and my fellow underclassmen — I found myself surrounded by nine seniors, all much bigger than I. Almost immediately came the barrage of questions, rapidfire, and seemingly from all different directions of the darkened, scowling faces surrounding me: How many girls have you fucked? Ever get your dick sucked? By who? How big’s your dick? Who’s the hottest girl in school? What position do you want to fuck her in?
Delay in answering any of these questions was met with a swift punch on the arm or leg. Any answer that was perceived to be untruthful, or even was just to the disliking of the group, a punch. Any answer that was truthful but outside of the accepted norm, was met with ridicule — ridicule that might become a running joke, or worse a nickname, that would follow you throughout your high school soccer career.
The punches weren’t hard, not even enough to bruise. No, the bruising, was to my psyche. Each question was triggering, confronting my deepest, darkest secret — the thing I had been hiding, and hiding from, my whole life. I now realize the sensations I experienced that night — the nausea, gut turbulence, fever-like symptoms — were a product of my nervous system being thrust into fight-or-flight, and there was nothing I could do about it.
To the best of my recollection I believe this episode to be factually correct. However, I have to caveat my recounting of this event, because I now realize I dissociated. Dissociation is a nervous system response known as “freeze.” When an organism cannot “fight” or “flight,” the parasympathetic nervous system takes over.
I talked to dear friend and Boulder-based family therapist Luciana Gravotta about this recently:
“This response engages when we know we are done for. It’s mitigating suffering for the whole organism. Dissociation occurs as a nervous system response in preparation for perceived death and annihilation. When the gazelle is caught in the jaws of the lion, it goes limp. In the case of humans, we often experience dissociation when we are facing something overwhelming or painful not just physically, but also emotionally. When we dissociate because we are experiencing trauma, it becomes our survival mechanism — endogenous opioids activate, and we leave the experience that’s happening to us.”
I have no idea how long I was in the hot seat. When it was finally over, I remember standing up wobbly-kneed, and making my way back to my seat. But the emotion I felt was not relief — only “pain, horror, and fear” that continued living on inside me.
College Jock Closet-Case
I went on to play soccer in college, further steeping myself in machismo locker room culture. It was at this point that my physical body finally started to tell me it had had enough. The stress of hiding my sexuality — and the physical exertion of consciously stiffening every joint in my body to feign straightness — erupted out of me in the form of cystic acne. The skin on my face and chest became covered in dime- and quarter-sized red pustules, elevating a centimeter off the skin. The cysts were a deep red color, and so inflamed they felt hot, painful, and itchy. Each morning new spots would appear, and grow in size and intensity throughout the day. There was no escaping them.
I was so distraught by this sudden failing of my immune system, an obnoxious and loud announcement to the world that I was not a healthy human. I remember standing in the closet of my dorm room, in front of a mirror, with a knife held to my face, considering self-mutilation to rid myself of the cysts. I am glad I did not go through with it, and sought medical help instead, for which I received a lengthy course of oral antibiotics. I will cover this and the other physical manifestations of CPTSD and toxic stress in more depth in a later post, but dealing with this episode was a prominent theme of my first year of college, when my body finally started sounding the alarm bells.
Running Away
The acne faded, but the stress did not. Joining in the larger collegiate binge drinking scene allowed me to numb out, probably at the expense of my soccer career. As my athletic performance suffered and playing time dwindled, I found an out by taking a season off from soccer to study abroad in China. As my semester there was coming to an end, I could not fathom returning to Wofford — the jock life, the drunken frat house parties, the stress that came with it. From my one-bedroom apartment in Beijing, I applied online for a transfer to UNC-Chapel Hill, and was accepted.
But whether at Wofford, the small South Carolina liberal arts college, or the big state school UNC, the wounds from childhood and adolescence kept me deeply closeted. I convinced myself I wasn’t gay, I couldn’t be. I told myself I was too masculine, and believed I could exert free will to stifle my attraction towards men, believing it would disappear with enough “positive reinforcement.” And so I obstinately forced myself to date women, in an emotionally detached way that caused confusion and pain on both sides of my relationships.
I was 21 when I finally came out to myself, reaching a point I could no longer feign straightness. Almost a year passed, and I was still not out to my friends or family. Fortunately for me, a close friend and former roommate came out during this time, which gave me the safe space I needed. On one drunken evening while visiting him back at Wofford, I worked up the courage to tell him. I confided in him, and revealed the dread I was feeling over coming out to my family — the moment I would have to finally confess to them that I had been living a lie my entire life. At the time, I thought it was going to be the most difficult thing imaginable. To which he replied:
“No Jon, the hardest person to come out to, is yourself.”
My first 21 years of existence are a testament to this truth. A lot has changed in the 12 years since I came out, but I believe this statement still is all too true for a majority of LGBTQ+ youth — both in America and abroad — condemning these individuals to emotional repression and psychological trauma in the most vulnerable and formative years of their lives.
Resources for LGBTQIA youth and allies:
Genders & Sexualities Alliance Network: GSA clubs are student-run organizations that unite LGBTQ+ and allied youth to build community and organize around issues impacting them in their schools and communities.
HealthyChildren.org: Health Concerns for Gay and Lesbian teens: Information for LGBT teens on sexual activity, substance use, mental health, discrimination, and violence.
It Gets Better Project: The It Gets Better Project inspires people across the globe to share their stories and remind the next generation of LGBTQ+ youth that hope is out there, and it will get better.
Q Card Project: The Q Card is a simple and easy-to-use communication tool designed to empower LGBTQ youth to become actively engaged in their health, and to support the people who provide their care.
Q Chat Space: Q Chat Space is a digital LGBTQ+ center where teens join live-chat, professionally facilitated, online support groups.
Stomp Out Bullying: Making Schools Safe for LGBTQ Community: Schools should be a young person’s primary center for learning, growing, and building a foundation for success in the world. High school can be challenging for any student, but LGBTQ youth face additional obstacles of harassment, abuse, and violence.
The Trevor Project: Crisis Intervention and Suicide Prevention: The Trevor Project is a national organization providing crisis intervention and suicide prevention services to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and questioning (LGBTQ) young people under 25
Notes:
†: Now, anyone who knows my father knows he is one of the warmest and most loving people on the planet. And I know he loves me very much. I believe the socio-cultural conditioning he was transmitting to me here was instilled in him during his childhood, and was passed to me, consciously or not, as a protective measure as I was beginning public school. To a young psyche though, these subtle “conditioning” messages can have profound effects.
Dad and me, ca. 1987
Me, age 7, Final day of baseball season.
This picture hung on the wall of my childhood home for years. And for years I despised it — and even plotted to secretly take it down and throw it in the trash. To me, it screamed gay: the close-legged stance, the limp wrist, the cocked head and cutesy smile. I felt exposed by this picture, like people would find me out, just by looking at it.