Seeing myself as I am

A mirror breaks

This journey doesn’t end with me having my testicles removed: it has started me on a journey of self-discovery. I don’t like everything I find. In fact, the most useful discoveries seem to be ones where my assumptions of myself and the image I like to project are debunked – I am not the easy-going, lovely, kind, considerate, caring person that I like to think that I am.

Wholeness comes through introspection, reflection, inner struggle (soul work), and a personal system of morality and ethics, which must be constantly tested and revised.
The Deep Psychology of BDSM and Kink, Douglas Thomas, page 137

Another member of the eunuch community (I’ll call her Octavia, to make it easier to understand) and I are setting up a new set of servers to support the community. She has been preparing the infrastructure, I have given thought on how they community should be run – the intention is to have the community design and police its own framework to address some of the problems with existing community servers. Its something that another friend (whom I will call Marcus, again to make who I am taking about easier) and I discussed some time ago; he wants a platform for engaging politically as well. He cares very deeply about the community.

However, when I approached Marcus about this project, despite his passion and emotional investment in the community, he declined: he has matters more directly affecting his life at the moment and cannot risk diverting his energies – and when he commits to a project, or helping somebody, he fully commits. I was not happy, but I (thought) I respected his decision.

Octavia and I prepared a Discord server to create a space for the community to discuss the proposed “constitution”. When it was ready, we then invited people whom we knew and had some trust for in the community to contribute. They are welcome to trash whatever is there, as long as a consensus on how the new servers are run is reached. Hopefully, these folks will be the first batch of moderators. When I came to Marcus’ name I felt uncomfortable excluding him; he has been such a rock and has the sharpest mind and the deepest commitment. I thought to myself “he can get as involved as he feels able to” (justification), conveniently ignoring his propensity to fully commit to any project (exploiting a weakness here I think), I ignored the boundary he had clearly set only a few weeks previously: I sent him the invite. This was manipulation – perhaps he would contribute something, or just refuse. I put the responsibility onto him.

Immediately, he started doing exactly what I hoped he would do: he began raising concerns and criticisms of many of the suggestions I’d raised for running the site.

Then he messaged me to tell me (again) that he couldn’t invest in this project at the moment because he has other issues to contend with (survival is the first order of business).

Then the cracker that hit home and smashed the image I had of myself:

don’t abuse folks’ boundaries

I read it and wanted to cry. I could see myself and I do not like what I see. I was still running from uncomfortable emotions. I still justify. And now I see that these two traits allow me to ignore other people’s boundaries: people I claim to care about, people I claim to respect, people I claim to love. This is not a caring, respectful, loving trait.

I might have had hot flushes again last night, but that wasn’t what kept me awake … this incident with Marcus is not the first time …

The matter of the missing text

Many years ago, my husband’s eldest daughter posted a “thank you for an amazing dad” message on Facebook to her step-dad. My husband saw this message and was deeply hurt by it; not because she’d posted the message to her step-dad, but because she didn’t post one to him and he was the one who was spending time decorating her home, looking after the grandchildren, and supporting her in many other ways, decorating the bedroom for the baby that was due shortly. He felt like the shameful secret – the gay dad that was never talked about. I wanted to speak to her about it, but he said not to and that he would talk to her. He then went to work.

I was home that day and the feeling that I needed to do something to prove that I was on his side grew in me. He felt that I never backed him up, especially with my family, who I would never confront when they did or said things that hurt my husband. I was afraid of upsetting them, but I did talk to them about things, sometimes I was so circuitous they simply didn’t get what they’d said/done, sometimes more directly – but never openly – and it never resulted in an apology to him, so he never knew that I had stood up for him. Actually, no apology means that they never got what they’d said/done – I had not stood up for him adequately.

I felt that I had something to prove (I had to get rid of these feelings of inadequacy and guilt) … and this was an opportunity to do it (justification).

I took a screen shot of the Facebook posting and sent it to his daughter in a text with the words “so who is that man decorating your house then?”.

I immediately felt sick. What I had just done was wrong on so many levels. Firstly, I had a direct instruction not to say anything. Secondly, a text was not the way to say anything. Thirdly, this was a manipulative text.

When my husband came home, I had to confess what I’d done. He was angry – and justifiably so. He told me that I should phone her and apologise. Of course, he was right, so I did. I do not remember that conversation, except that the original text message had never been received: her phone could not receive media messages. So I had to explain what the message was and then apologise. She seemed OK with it.

The next day, my husband went to his daughter’s house to continue with the decorating. He was greeted by her murderously angry boyfriend. My phone call had done the damage the undelivered text had failed to do. The boyfriend threatened my husband with a knife for upsetting his pregnant girlfriend. I do not know how my husband managed to talk the boyfriend down, but my husband is still traumatised by being threatened at knifepoint to this day. He called me to come and speak with his daughter and her boyfriend immediately. I came.

By the time I got there, the situation had de-escalated significantly. I sat with the daughter and boyfriend and apologised. They were fine at that point. In fact, they were quite relaxed about it all. I didn’t have to deal with the consequences of my disregard for my husband’s request. Indeed, things became so relaxed that we were even laughing about it; I asked the boyfriend to be my guinea pig for my personal training qualification.

My husband could hear the laughter from the room he was working in upstairs, and that hurt him even more: he had been faced with an apparently homicidal man, whereas I got laughter. This has been a sore point ever since.

That is the first example that I can think of where I disregarded my husband’s wishes to ease my own uncomfortable feelings, and crossed a boundary.

The next example has much worse consequences …

it is the disavowal of our own capacity for evil that leads to projections and the justification to perpetrate evil acts.
The Deep Psychology of BDSM and Kink, Douglas Thomas, page 136

My husband was in the middle of a major mental health crisis that had resulted in hospitalisation. There were multiple sequential attempts to take his own life. This was in late October that same year. He had fallen out with his daughter after not taking her to the theatre on her birthday (he was ill) and she had decided that she didn’t want to see him (she told him not to contact her and that she would talk to him when she was ready), even in hospital knowing his state. I was sending messages to his three daughters (including the eldest that he’d fallen out with), trying to work, all while terrified that I was going to get a phone call any day telling me that my husband was dead.

I settled upon a plan to give him something to live for. He loved his granddaughters as much as life itself and I managed to agree with his eldest daughter that even if she didn’t want to see him, that she should allow her children to see him – we arranged that for Christmas Eve. I’ll ignore for the moment that I was using the grandchildren.

In the meantime, my husband wrote to his other two daughters. His eldest found out about these letters (and forgetting that she’s told him not to contact her), she texted me saying “if he can’t even be bothered to write to me, he’s not seeing his grandchildren.”. This threw me into despair: my plan to show him that he had a reason to live was thwarted. I immediately phoned her, forgetting everything that my husband had said about talking to her himself, I had to get her to see reason! Shouting at her down the telephone was not the way to make anybody see reason. She hung up.

I was stunned. I didn’t know what to do, but I felt I had to stand up to her and make her see that she was endangering her dad’s life. I sat and I thought about it. I though that this could at least prove to him that I cared and that I was on his side. I thought that I could fix it. I thought that I knew better. I forgot what I had been told and decided to go and see her (trying to manage my feelings of failure on a number of issues – that I hadn’t arranged for the grandchildren to visit, and that I had lost it with his daughter). She was wrong and I was right (justification). This is the worst decision I have made in my entire life.

I banged on the door demanding to be seen. Any sane person would refuse. I resorted to emotional blackmail, to attempting to apply guilt: “if I had a daughter like you I’d try to kill myself, too”. I forgot that there might be children present (there wasn’t). I shouted. I cried. Her boyfriend came out; he was taller and wider than me. My courage left me. It was one thing to shout through the letterbox, it was quite another having somebody shouting back at me and looking (and sounding) like he could rip my head off. I can add “coward” to the list of changes against me.

My anger collapsed. I released that I had lost. I was going to have to tell my husband that he was not going to be seeing his grandchildren. I was going to have to tell him that I had acted like a lunatic outside his daughter’s house. That I’d most likely ruined all chances of him resolving things with his daughter. That he may have lost his grandchildren forever. That all this had happened because I hadn’t listened to him and respected the boundary that he had laid out for me: that he would deal with matters relating to his family. I thought I knew better. I had no right to speak to her the way I did.

I will say that his devastation wasn’t immediately apparent. That became clear over the succeeding weeks … as the situation got worse.

My husband’s other two daughters started texting me saying how angry they were over my behaviour and saying they no longer wanted anything to do with me. That was bad. I felt that they had written me off without asking what had happened – I painted myself as a victim.

The worst bit was they also wrote to their father saying that they didn’t want anything more to do with him.

The effects of that afternoon’s outburst outside the husband’s daughter’s house provided his daughters with all the excuse they needed to cut their gay dad out of their lives.

That was many years ago. My husband has attempted to take his own life more times than I can remember. He has never managed to re-establish relations with his daughters, although one of the grandchildren did get in touch once because she wanted to spend the night with her boyfriend … with only her boyfriend.

As far as my husband is concerned, the only two times that I have stood up for him were against his family, where he had explicitly asked me not to intervene – and where he had the greatest to lose. I would not stand-up for him against my family – I was too afraid of upsetting them. This has cost him dearly.

I have always denied my responsibility for the events of that day and for the reverberations over the years.

The Pattern

I try to escape from an uncomfortable feeling
Crossing somebody else’s boundary is easier than dealing with my own emotional discomfort; I justify this choice somehow
Somebody else gets hurt
I continue to deny and justify the boundary transgression, persisting the hurt already done
I forget that I was running from an uncomfortable emotion, so I don’t learn anything

This behaviour stops NOW.

I have a long way to go on this to make amends and atone for the pain I have caused people, much more meditating, and I need to reclaim the pain my actions have caused others.