My poem “absolute zero” is the featured “Poem of the Issue” in this week’s edition of The Austin Chronicle. This one has its origins in a journal entry from early 1989 which was forgotten and then rediscovered in October 2010 when I was working on the Iron Man Family Outtakes project. I can’t remember now in what state of completion this piece was when I found it, but I don’t think I had to do a whole lot of work to finish it.

I have extremely vivid memories of writing many of my poems: what was going on for me in that moment, the time, place, circumstances, etc. For others (like this one), I can’t recall much more than a general context and a time frame. Then there are those pieces, some of which are quite significant, for which I have no recollection whatsoever of the process of creation after some time has passed. Why I would remember writing some so well and others not at all has always been a mystery to me.

As I’ve been reading this one right now, it seems to me that it started with me feeling like I was too blocked to write anything (first two lines), which is kind of ironic in retrospect. I toss off a few lines in a journal, forget about them, and 22 years later I have a published poem. What a crazy, mysterious, unpredictable process this is.

rescue
twisted
ever
after

user
liar
bent
deceiver

root
trunk
branch
leaf

fall
leaf
branch
trunk

root
deceiver
bent
liar

user
after
ever
twisted

rescue
stranger
lover
phantom

mother.

(PDF version)

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.

too far gone
I can’t go home
poisonous feast of
fingers and tongues.

empty universe
primal isolation
I can’t find love
so I settle for meat.

strange meat in my mouth
my meat in strange hands
she is meat
I am meat
we are meat.

I feed on her
she feeds on me
I feed on myself
I violate myself.

I strangle myself
I choke on dark flesh
hungry and sick
killing my soul
trading my life
throwing myself away
over and over
for meat.

(PDF version)

* 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.

Sadness scares me. Grief, the experience of grief and grieving, scares me. But I also know that grieving, that being with grief and sadness, is one of the most powerful and effective ways of being with and transforming pain. When I let my grief and my sadness speak, when I allow those energies to stir in my belly and my chest, to move up through my heart and my throat, to enter the world as tears and moans and sobbing and wailing, I am cleansed. I am lifted. I can see again. I feel real again. Human.

But entering that process is challenging for me. It’s tricky. Sensitive. I almost have to be taken by surprise. Like so many men, I’ve been conditioned not to feel such things (not directly anyway) and certainly not to express them, not even privately. The messages are clear: “Be a real man. Take charge. Control yourself. Don’t cry. Be tough. Don’t be a wimp.” If you are a man who is suffering, keep it to yourself. If you have to feel something, feel angry. Anger is manly and therefore safe to feel. Grief and sadness are not.

Grief work is hard for many of us as men, and so much has to be learned (and unlearned) in order to do it. You have to be tough and soft at the same time, and you have to be present with what you’re feeling without losing yourself in the intensity of it. It’s not easy. Healing is not for wimps. The real tough guys are the ones who can do the work …

You can read the full article at:

http://goodmenproject.com/guy-talk/healing-is-not-for-wimps

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.

Disowned Male Rage and Its Impact on Society

Disowned male rage is pervasive. It is reflected in the violence in our streets and in the wars we wage, the many battered women and children behind the closed doors of both our tenements and picturesque white picket fenced homes, the many homeless aimlessly wandering our city streets. It is even reflected in the function of our government; on a deep psychological level, our public policies are created and implemented to create separation and to support the denial of one’s (especially men in position of power) own destructive capacity.

We all suffer (disease, depression, addiction, violence) when we, as men, do not identify and take responsibility for the rage we are taught and develop from various childhood traumas.

Origins
Male rage is passed down and is a response to the environment. The parent who fails to deal with his (or her) own childhood rage either shuts down or attacks his own son, simultaneously passing on rage and teaching him that rage is dangerous and is to be feared. The absence of fathers in boys’ lives is an epidemic. Partially as a result, many men are still attached to their mothers, continuing to try to win their love (with their girlfriends and wives) while simultaneously being enraged about the resulting lack of personal freedom. For many, public policies and violent suppression of one group of people over another contributes to the existence of rage. The origins of rage, much of which has not been mentioned here, are both personal and societal.

Resulting Psychology
As a result, men internalize this original relationship to caretakers and the emotion of rage. Many hide from their own rage, repress it, fear it, find any substance or activity they can to distract themselves from it, while others act out, expressing rage violently. Depression is an epidemic in our culture, partially due to the unconscious repression of rage. Despite these efforts, we see the subtle and blatant evidence that male rage cannot be fully contained: car fatalities, school shootings, rape, beatings, gang violence. Instead of acknowledging and being with the truth of their own rage, many men deny it and project it onto others and then distance themselves from, and vilifying the other, while exalting themselves.

Domestic Policies Reflect Disowned Male Rage
The dynamic of denying male rage is reflected in our domestic policies. Our economic, health and education policies empower one segment of society while disempowering others in order for those disempowered others to serve as receptacles for others’ rage. For instance, the credit system (as part of modern day capitalism) as currently constituted is a spiraling downward trap for the non-wealthy. Meanwhile, as stress levels increase, access to health care is diminished and children are expected to learn to be (and are labeled if they cannot be) compliant, focused, and well behaved in school so they can grow up to be compliant, well behaved, “adult” consumers. These policies are developed to create a perpetual collective psychological split, where the Haves can live a serene life devoid of discomfort while the Have-nots live with the chaos of the collective male rage.

Societal Implications
We all are suffering from the imbalance from disowned male rage. No one is immune from the affliction that men are experiencing today. Women are treated violently and/or are neglected and dishonored. Pervasive depression, disillusionment, nervous breakdowns, sexual dysfunction and cancer are the consequences of disowned male rage just as the bullet wounds, overdoses and heart attacks are. We over-consume to not feel our rage, destroy our environment, hoping that the newest technology will protect us from our raging selves. We are out of balance with a part of the collective male psyche. The destructiveness of this imbalance is more evident every day.

What Can Be Done?
All men are responsible for acknowledging their own rage and finding the support to understand and change their relationship to it.

There are resources out there to help men. Individual, one-on-one psychotherapy, with a therapist can be quite effective. There are a variety of other modalities (acupuncture, energy work, body work) out there that can be of help as well. Men’s group work is often a powerful method of understanding not only one’s own rage but of the collective male rage that exists. There is a desperate need within each man to gather together with other men and talk about this with each other, to support, listen, advise, particularly around rage.

I am drawn to working with men around their relationship to rage, because there is a tremendous amount of creative, sexual, alive energy freed up when we acknowledge and accept rage. My approach is to help men become of aware of how they relate to rage, by either hiding from or attacking blindly. This awareness allows for deeper self-acceptance and vast opportunities for personal growth and expression.

I think Ben makes a lot of very useful points in this piece, not the least of which is this one (emphasis mine):

“All men are responsible for acknowledging their own rage and finding the support to understand and change their relationship to it.”

For me, the statement Ben is making here is particularly important. I’ve seen some very disturbing information on the web recently, information written by men and aimed at men, that asserts that for a man to be conscious, he must apologize (i.e., take responsibility) for every bad thing that every other man who’s ever existed has done. That is wrong, toxic, and harmful for all sorts of reasons that I’m not going to go into here.

But Ben, in his statement above, gets it right. If we are truly honest with ourselves, we know that we can only take responsibility for our own feelings, our own actions, our own behaviors, and our own wounds. For most of us, that is more than enough to handle in one lifetime.

I also like Ben’s emphasis on the importance of group work for men. I just finished a 10-week men’s group and it was a great experience for me. It wasn’t my first men’s group, but it was my first in a long time. I may share more about that in a future post, but for now I’ll just say that my personal experience over many years confirms Ben’s statements about the need and the unique benefits of group work for men.

To learn more about Ben and his work, visit his website at benringler.com.

(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.

On Sunday, April 10, Mike will facilitate a one-day recovery group workshop for male survivors of sexual child abuse. Mike describes the workshop as follows:

This group workshop is for non-offending adult male survivors of child sexual abuse. Our goal is to offer a safe, encouraging, respectful environment of shared healing for men who have experienced the pain and shame of being sexually abused in childhood.

For complete details, click here to view a printable PDF version of the flyer for the event.

Mike’s time in Austin will also include a one-day professional training entitled “Working with Male Survivors of Childhood Sexual Abuse” on Saturday, April 9. Information for that event is available at:

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=124953380907641

Mike Lew has worked with thousands of men and women in their healing from the effects of childhood sexual abuse, rape, physical violence, emotional abuse, and neglect. The development of strategies for recovery from incest and other abuse, particularly for men, has been a major focus of his work as a counselor and group leader. He conducts public lectures, workshops for survivors, and trainings and consultations for mental health, medical, human service, clergy, law enforcement, and other professionals throughout the United States and Canada and in Europe, Australia, and New Zealand.

You can find out more about Mike and his work at Next Step Counseling. His full schedule of events for 2011 is available at:

http://www.nextstepcounseling.org/upcomingevents2.htm

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, “charley horse”, is from part six (“the unclaimed soul”) of Iron Man Family Outing.

I refer in this poem to a broken leg I suffered as a child. The circumstances of that event, its aftermath, and its profound impact on my relationship with my father from childhood onward are explored more fully in a piece I wrote a while back called “broken bones and the father wound”.

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.