Reunion Online

I was pleased to join the work of 1in6.org as a new Board Member in June. In the three-plus decades that I have been involved in the anti-violence movement, I have witnessed the movement grow to reach new constituencies, and embrace new approaches unique to the needs of particular client groups.

In my experience, one path to true happiness and freedom is forgiveness, which is why I love writing about it.

Earlier this year, Parul Sehgal wrote an essay examining “compulsory survivorship”—the tendency to label everyone who has had an abusive or unwanted sexual experience as a survivor.

I found an old photograph recently. It’s a flimsy, bent Polaroid print of myself as a child.

I found an old photograph recently. It’s a flimsy, bent Polaroid print of myself as a child.

I don’t normally associate hotels with great works of art. Yet there I was, standing quietly, intently staring at a tree in the makeshift gallery on the mezzanine of the Washington DC Hilton.

For the past ten years I have spoken openly and publically about my emotional, physical, spiritual, and sexual abuse, something I only did in the past in the way of justifying my behavior. I would tell my wife and friends, “If what happened to me happened to me happened to you, you’d be drinking or acting this way also.”

I was reminded recently of an important lesson about trauma recovery. The teacher was the son of a friend, a young man who spoke at his bar mitzvah about the competing motivations of fear and hope.

We’ve heard it takes a village to raise a child. In a way, these men, by connecting with each other, are recreating the network of support and nurturance idealized in the image of that protective village, which for so many men was unavailable in their own childhoods

I realize now I’d been unknowingly recovering for years before I acknowledged to myself that the unwanted sexual interactions I’d had with my parish priest were abusive.