the windows are dirty
the doors are locked tight
the altars are built
of barbed wire and bones.

the wind blows through
the rain pours in
the bells don’t ring
the dead don’t die.

the child in the corner
looks for his shadow
his eyes are frozen
he cannot cry.

(PDF version)

I’ll be honest. Up until a day or so ago, I really hadn’t been paying close attention to the Penn State story. As an adult survivor of childhood abuse, I’m living and dealing with my own story every day. I don’t have to look to media for more.

I’ll be honest about something else, too. Just 24 hours ago, I’d never heard of Jon Ritchie. Then, yesterday afternoon, I happened to be channel flipping and ran across his conversation above with Bob Ley on the ESPN show Outside the Lines. Now Jon Ritchie is one of my favorite men. If you watch the video above, I think you’ll see why.

Jon speaks of his long history with Jerry Sandusky, a man he regarded as a role model, friend, and mentor from the time of their first meeting when Ritchie was 14 and Sandusky was recruiting him for the Penn State football program. Speaking about Sandusky, Jon says:

“I just felt like this man was so selfless, and so egoless, that he was what I aspired to be someday. And now, that foundation of what I thought was credible, and what I thought was important, and what I thought was good has crumbled. It’s decimated and it’s caused me to just reevaluate everything around me.”

A bit later, he says, “My whole lens has cracked.”

I understand exactly what Jon is saying because I’ve had a similar experience. Several years ago, I learned that an older man I’d known and admired my entire life, someone I’d loved and respected, someone with whom I’d spent countless hours as a child, had systematically sexually abused at least a dozen children over a period of around 25 years.

I was completely blindsided. I felt as if my entire world had been turned upside down. I’d never had any indication, not as a child and not as an adult, that anything so hideous was going on. He was, in my perception, one of the safest adults I knew as a child. I’d never received any inappropriate attention from him or heard of anyone else who had.

Shock is far, far too mild a word for what I felt and experienced in response to these revelations. As Jon says in the video, what I’d learned caused me to reevaluate everything. Not just my relationship with this man I’d trusted so much, my memories of my time with him, and my feelings about him, but everything. My sense of what I thought I knew and who I thought I could trust was ruptured down to the very root.

I was horribly disoriented for weeks, and it took a long time for me to come to terms with what I’d learned and to right myself again. Furthermore, I was unprepared to find that someone else I’d known and trusted all my life would do anything to protect this serial abuser’s reputation as a “great man”, to deny, to cover up, and to press his victims to keep the secret. This, to me, has been as appalling as the abuse itself, and has poisoned my relationship with that person as well.

Perhaps that’s why I’m so impressed with Jon Ritchie today. He could’ve taken the route of protecting, denying, and rationalizing on behalf of his long-time hero, or he could’ve simply stayed out of sight and kept quiet until things settled down. Instead he’s chosen to take the path of honor and integrity, to allow others to witness his walk through the flames.

I can see the deep pain in his eyes as he speaks, and I know it all too well. He’s obviously been shaken to the core. It’s not easy to accept that someone so close and so admired has done such awful things, much less to speak publicly about it so soon after finding out. Jon is sharing what is surely one of the most devastating experiences of his life in real time and in an incredibly transparent way.

The children who were molested and assaulted are the primary victims here, and that is where, as Jon says, the focus belongs. But Jon and others like him, who were close with Jerry Sandusky and saw him as a mentor, a hero, a role model, and a good man, are part of the collateral damage, secondary victims who’ve been deeply wounded by a horrific betrayal of trust and confidence that cuts to the bone and warps one’s sense of reality.

These men are in crisis, too. They’re feeling crazy, wondering how they could’ve been so thoroughly fooled for so long, and worrying that they somehow failed to pay sufficient attention to realize what was going on and stop it. They’re searching their own memories, wondering if maybe something happened to them as well, something they’ve somehow blocked out or rationalized away. Some are thinking they’re damn lucky it wasn’t them, and feeling guilty about the relief that comes with that. They’ve all been damaged and injured, too, certainly not in the same ways or to the same degree as the children who were molested and assaulted, but in ways that still matter deeply, and they’re going to need compassion, understanding, and time to heal as well.

If I could thank Jon in person for this brave, honest, articulate, and very moving interview, I would. I hope it’s widely seen and discussed. It’s an incredibly helpful, vital part of the conversation for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is that, even in what must be one of the darkest moments of his life, Jon Ritchie is still showing us what it means to be a good man.

This post originally appeared on 11/12/11 on the Good Men Project website.

* My video poem “secret children”.

* My video poem “falling though” with my accompanying written commentary about my fear of feeling and expressing grief and sadness.

* My poem “use everything” (video version is available here).

For a complete listing of all of my work on the Good Men Project site, you can visit my author page at http://goodmenproject.com/author/rick-belden.

House Rules

Sit up straight don’t slouch.
Stop crying I will give you something to cry for.
Don’t answer back.
Pull yourself together.
Do as I say pay attention.
Don’t fidget sit still.

Those who ask don’t get.
Those who don’t ask don’t want.
If the wind changes your face will stay like that.
Speak when you are spoken to.
Little girls should be seen and not heard.
You must make the best of yourself.

If you don’t abide by my rules you can leave.

Don’t stare it’s rude to stare.
Stop that now rude girl.

I am not staring I am looking.
I am searching I am yearning.

Where are you?

Kathleen Freeman

Choosing one poem from among the many fine pieces Kathleen has written so far was a rather hard decision. You can see more of her work and keep up with her latest posts at http://kathylambie.blog.com.

http://goodmenproject.com/fathers-day/broken-bones-and-the-father-wound

This article is an updated version of a blog post I originally wrote in November 2009 while recuperating from a broken shoulder and wrist. Many thanks to the folks at the Good Men Project for including it in their Father’s Day 2011 series.

I wrote “secret children” just about 20 years ago and knew I had something of universal significance in my hands, but I couldn’t get anybody to look at it. I really couldn’t get anyone to look at anything I’d written at that point. Discouraged, I put “secret children” away and more or less forgot about it until I started writing again in 2008. Quite a long wait, to be sure, but it’s finally getting out there.

(PDF version)

Today’s selection, another product of my ongoing experiment with automatic drawing, serves as a reminder that messages received in childhood embed themselves deeply in soul, body, and psyche, well below the level of words, rational thinking, and life experience as an adult. Sometimes art making is the truest and quickest path to bring these unconscious imprints up to the surface where we can see them, know them, own them, and (hopefully) transform and/or release them.

When I look at this drawing, I am reminded of a fingerprint (associated with identity) and a disrupted brain (faulty thinking), a combination that suggests a pattern of false belief about myself so deeply embedded and imprinted within me that it feels like part of my identity even though it really isn’t.

I’m also reminded of a labyrinth. This has some interesting connotations as well, especially in conjunction with the title, a phrase that came to me, as is usually the case, just as I was completing the drawing.

Today was Mother’s Day. I spent about an hour late in the day sitting on the tailgate of my truck in a field east of Austin, listening to the wind and watching cattle, horses, and birds. I drew a few pictures while I was there. This was one of them.

It was not an easy day.

Today’s poem on video, “face my ghosts”, is from my upcoming book Scapegoat’s Cross: Poems about Finding and Reclaiming the Lost Man Within. I wrote this poem in response to a question (not so much a question as a demand in many cases) that I suspect many adult survivors of childhood abuse have heard at various points along their healing journeys: “Why can’t you just get over it?”

For more poetry on video, visit my YouTube channel at http://www.youtube.com/user/rickbeldenpoet.

Today’s poem on video, “falling through”, is from my upcoming book Scapegoat’s Cross: Poems about Finding and Reclaiming the Lost Man Within.

The subject of today’s poem is grief, or more to the point, my fear of feeling and expressing my grief. Actually, fear is much too mild a word for what I feel when I get close to my grief, sadness, and pain. A far more accurate word would be terror.

The source of this terror is not a mystery. I clearly remember the words I heard countless times as a child: Stop crying or I’ll give you something to cry about. This was not an idle threat, as I had the great misfortune to discover many times when I was unable to “control myself” in time to avoid the consequences of my own tears. Crying only brought more pain. Tears only meant more tears. Any open expression of grief, sadness, and pain was a potential threat to my very existence, and over time I learned to hold those feelings tight, deep inside myself, to survive.

This conditioning against explicit expressions of grief and sadness didn’t end with home and family. It continued in school, with teachers and coaches, on the playground, and with friends. Like every other boy, I knew that crying was the worst sin I could commit in public. On those few occasions when I was unable to avoid doing it, the shame, the isolation, and the horror I felt were beyond words.

By the time I was into my teens, I pretty much had the crying thing well under control. It just didn’t happen anymore, not around others and not when I was alone either. But I still had one more defining experience ahead of me.

When I was almost 23, I was going through a very long and difficult breakup with my first girlfriend. We’d moved across the country together when I was 19, from New York to Texas, and lived together for several years, but now we were each living in our own places for the first time, and I was finding it very difficult.

One evening she came over to visit, and as we were talking, I began to cry. I’d never cried in front of her before, not even when she’d cheated on me, but this time I simply couldn’t help myself. I missed her, I was struggling with school and finances, and I was just so damn lonely. Her response was immediate: “If you don’t stop crying, I’m leaving.” The last thing I wanted in that moment was to be left all alone, so I buttoned right up. And I stayed buttoned up for years afterward.

Those were the lessons I learned about feeling and expressing grief and sadness. I learned that crying brings pain, punishment, violence, shame, rejection, isolation, and abandonment. I learned that crying only makes things worse. I learned to fear my own grief. I learned that tears can be like death.

Many years of hard personal work have shown me that allowing myself to feel and express my sadness and grief is a healthy and necessary part of being fully human. It is liberating. It’s completely natural. It’s cleansing. It brings peace and perspective. It is a source of great strength, an answer and an antidote to anger, and a door to forgiveness.

I’ve cried, wept, sobbed, moaned, and howled through tears many, many times, and it hasn’t killed me yet. To the contrary, I always feel much better, much freer, and much more present with myself afterward. And yet that deep conditioning I described still holds some sway over me. I’m still afraid to cry.

Sometimes that fear stops me and sometimes it doesn’t. As expressed in today’s poem, the key to accessing my grief and sadness, to moving it up and out, is always right here with me in my body. The challenge is to feel the energy below the surface and let it rise even as I am feeling my fear. Maybe someday my tears can come without having to struggle through all that fear. That is my hope.

For more poetry on video, visit my YouTube channel at http://www.youtube.com/user/rickbeldenpoet.

Today’s poem on video, “lost man”, is from my upcoming book Scapegoat’s Cross: Poems about Finding and Reclaiming the Lost Man Within. This is the poem that opens the book.

For more poetry on video, visit my YouTube channel at http://www.youtube.com/user/rickbeldenpoet.

Today’s poem is “secret children” from my upcoming book Scapegoat’s Cross: Poems about Finding and Reclaiming the Lost Man Within.

This is a previously unpublished poem that I wrote in September 1991. The next poem I wrote (“shadow world monsters”), also included in Scapegoat’s Cross, came to me over a year later in October 1992. I wouldn’t write another until August 2008, nearly sixteen years later.

For more poetry on video, visit my YouTube channel at http://www.youtube.com/user/rickbeldenpoet.

Update (06/11/11): Exciting news! My video poem “secret children” is now featured on the “Survivors Speaking Out” page on the MaleSurvivor website at http://www.malesurvivor.org/speaking-out.html.

Today’s poem, “easter”, is from part seven (“hints of daylight”) of Iron Man Family Outing, and is one of the final poems in the book.

The dream recounted in this poem was a real breakthrough for me in the course of what has proven to be a journey of many years toward greater reconciliation with my experience of my father and a more complete comprehension of who he is (and was) as a human being, with his own fears, failures, dreams, and disappointments.

In the years since this dream came to me, I’ve gradually worked my way to a deeper, fuller appreciation and understanding of the circumstances of my father’s life, which has helped me heal myself in relation to my inner father, the father I internalized as a child and carry with me at all times. But my relationship with my outer father, the man himself, has never improved, and I don’t believe it ever will.

This is a paradox I hadn’t expected. I would have thought that being able to see my father’s life through his eyes, as best I could, would have gone a long way toward improving the relationship between us, but I finally realized that a deeper empathy and understanding for him on my part did not imply the same from him for me. Ultimately, I had to come to terms with the fact that he wasn’t going to change, nor was his treatment of me going to change, no matter what I did or how I transformed my view of him and his life. At that point, I knew my outer relationship with him was over. But my work on the inner relationship continues, as I expect it will for the rest of my life.

As I wrote at the conclusion of “broken bones and the father wound”:

… his life continues to influence mine, even across the distance of time and space, in ways both obvious and mysterious, as I continue to work toward resolution and completion of my relationship with him, that distant point on the inner horizon of my psyche toward which I am always aiming and always moving, but may never reach.

For more poetry on video, visit my YouTube channel at http://www.youtube.com/user/rickbeldenpoet.

Today’s poem, “body memory”, is from part seven (“hints of daylight”) of Iron Man Family Outing.

For those who are not familiar with the term body memory, here’s my brief take on it from a post I wrote a while back called “the body is the gateway”:

The body is a container, a vessel, a vehicle for the expression of energy. Sometimes energy gets stuck or trapped. This can result in physical pain, discomfort, structural problems, or illness. A story is also a container, a vessel, a vehicle for the expression of energy. Energy can be trapped in the body in the form of a story. Some stories that emerge from the body are literally true and verifiable in terms of one’s real world experience. This type of story is often referred to as a body memory.

Today’s poem came to me quite spontaneously one afternoon many years ago as I was lying on the bed having a little rest. In another previous post entitled “poetry, dreams, and the body”, I wrote about the changing nature of my relationship with my body at that time in my life that opened the way for this poem to express itself to me:

I was also, at that time, coming into a new form of relationship with my body. I’d been treating my body like a mechanism for most of my life, a strange and mysterious other that felt external and separate from what I thought of as myself, an unreliable machine that suffered from all sorts of inconvenient problems and breakdowns that no doctor I’d seen could explain. I know now that this sort of separation and dissociation from the body is very common among men and boys in my culture. I also know now that it’s common to another demographic group of which I am also a member: adult survivors of childhood abuse.

Somehow, and I honestly can’t say how this came about, I found that my body was, like my dreams, another rich source of imagery and information that expressed itself well in poetic language. I believe this discovery was largely stimulated by the emotional processing work I was doing at the time, in which I was taught to tune into my body as a way to locate and unlock the psychological and emotional energy I’d been forced to repress as a child. As time went on, I gradually began to see my body as a partner rather than as an adversary. I also found that my body had something to say. I only had to give it the time and the space to speak.

The violent incident recalled at the conclusion of this poem is explored again from a slightly different perspective in a poem called “out of body” from my new book, Scapegoat’s Cross: Poems about Finding and Reclaiming the Lost Man Within.

For more poetry on video, visit my YouTube channel at http://www.youtube.com/user/rickbeldenpoet.

Today’s poem, “fused at the wound”, is from part three (“dance of the unloved child”) of Iron Man Family Outing. This is a poem that seems to resonate very strongly with a lot of people, men and women alike, perhaps more than anything else I’ve written so far.

While preparing this post, I stumbled across a transcript of a video I made a couple of years ago in which I discussed this poem. Both the transcript and the video have been unpublished up to this point. The video was made with a webcam on my old PC and the quality is not too good, so it’s not likely I’ll ever use it. But I think the transcript is worth putting up as a companion to the more recently recorded video reading of the poem that I’m posting today.

Here’s what I had to say about this poem:

The stuff that was going on in my home as a child, the dynamic between my parents, between myself and each of my parents, was not good training, not a very good education for me as I went into adulthood and attempted to form my own intimate relationships, my own partnerships with women. Things really didn’t go well, and they went spectacularly unwell a lot of the time.

And so this is one of the poems that I’ve written about a situation where I was living with a woman. I really loved her; we loved each other. It started out great, but it was going south and both of us knew it and neither one of us wanted to admit it. And neither one of us knew what to do about it either. Sooner or later somebody was gonna have to go. But at the time I wrote this, we were still in that state where the decision about who was gonna go first was undecided.

And typically for me, I’d rather let the other person go first ’cause I wanted to be the good guy. I didn’t want to be the one that walked out, the one that gave up, although I certainly acted as if I didn’t want to be there a lot of the time, which is a good enough reason for somebody else to leave. But I just didn’t want to be the bad guy. I’d grown up with a man who was, that I perceived as, a bad guy. My mom basically did everything she could to reinforce the belief that he was the bad guy, and I didn’t want to be that guy. I didn’t want to be the one that ruined everything.

So anyway, this poem is about that uneasy state when both people have realized that this isn’t gonna work out but nobody’s ready to go yet.

I guess the additional aspect of what was going on here was that I had started my healing process, I had started to recover, but it was still very early in the process and the relationship was not moving in the same direction that I was moving in personally, and I didn’t know what to do about it.

As I said, I had strong feelings for this woman, but the whole premise of the relationship, the way that I entered it and what I thought it was all about and what I thought I was supposed to do, I had realized that was false and that it wasn’t going to work. But I still wasn’t at a point where I knew what to do instead.

So that’s basically where things ended, unfortunately. I guess fortunately for her, and I guess for both of us. I mean, she moved on and she went to somebody else and has a very nice family now and that’s what she wanted. And I went … I went somewhere else. I went somewhere where she didn’t want to go and didn’t need to go. So it worked out the way that it should have.

For more poetry on video, visit my YouTube channel at http://www.youtube.com/user/rickbeldenpoet.

Today’s poem, “half-life”, is from part two (“hungry wounds”) of Iron Man Family Outing. This poem was written one night on a couple of bar napkins at an Austin skin club called The Red Rose. I still have those napkins, but The Red Rose is long gone and largely forgotten, demolished to make way for a freeway, erased and replaced by pavement and speed.

For more poetry on video, visit my YouTube channel at http://www.youtube.com/user/rickbeldenpoet.

I finally have some video readings for poems from my two books (Iron Man Family Outing and Scapegoat’s Cross) loaded on my YouTube channel (rickbeldenpoet) and will be posting them one at a time here on the blog over the next few weeks.

Today’s poem, “little iron man”, is from part one (“life behind this mask”) of Iron Man Family Outing and is the poem that opens the book.

To listen to an audio reading of this poem during my September 2009 interview with Dr. Chris Blazina on his show, The Secret Lives of Men, click here.

My “About” page at rickbelden.com now includes a link to the recently recorded video posted above. I’ve been experimenting on and off with a Flip Video cam I picked up last summer and I think I might (maybe) finally be getting the hang of it. Well, at least I’m getting better with it.

I may take a shot at doing some video readings of a few poems, just to see how it goes. So, look out ’cause you may be seeing more of me in the near future if it goes well.

I’d like to take this opportunity to send out my thanks once more to everyone who’s taken the time to read the book and post a review. You’re the ones who made today’s news possible.

The complete archive of reviews for the book, at Amazon as well as from other sources, is available at http://rickbelden.com/reviews.