I learned emotional suppression early.
I remember the feeling intimately—the lashes of my pop’s belt across my butt. Arched over my childhood bed, I felt trapped by the wall ahead of me and the intimidating man behind me. With a dozen or so lashes, he struck me.
He didn’t do this often; I might even say rarely. But enough for me to remember my confusion as he said, his makeshift whip in hand, “You know I love you, son. This hurts me more than it hurts you.”
I never understood how this could be true. The words rattled around in my brain for a couple of decades. This hurts me more than it hurts you. I resented him for it. But 20 years later, I believe him.
For years, I watched my father silence himself and others, used disappearance as a weapon to disarm any who wished to confront him. I witnessed him wash his pain back with cold beer and action flicks. I am still unlearning his passive insistence on ruggedness and detachment, the only steady thing I’ve ever known about my father’s guiding hands.
I have some sense now of the pain of this dissociation with self. Though my father isn’t feeling the sting of a belt, the underlying pain that caused him to lash out reverberated through him. It is an intimate anger and hurt that stems from emotional vanquish. He hasn’t given himself the space to speak—to use his words as a force for healing. He suppressed it all; every bad memory, every traumatizing experience from youth, every fear and insecurity he harbored.
My father’s lack of communication contorted my notions of love.
Trauma is like a can of soda, as it was once explained to me. It shakes, over and over again, until the pressure builds. In one way or another, the pressure will find a way out. Without the proper release valves, like healthy conversations about what he feels and has endured, the can will explode.
My father’s lashings were an unhealthy release valve and the expressions of a man who hadn’t cultivated other ways to deal with his anger. Many of an earlier era received belt beatings regularly; this was not uncommon. But it also indicated an emotional stifling many men endure that often turns corrosive.
I witnessed this corrosiveness become destructive to my family’s infrastructure. I saw firsthand, and later came to embody, the ways in which men’s pride, stubbornness and anger turn the possibilities of joy into the promise of bitterness.
My father’s lack of communication contorted my notions of love. I accepted love as bittersweet—comfort and tenderness only as trials by pain. And I spent two decades unlearning the minutiae of self-loathing as a result.
I wonder how different my life would have been if my father just sat me down on occasion and spoke with me. If he had demonstrated to me what healthy communication looked like as a young man, would I still have turned myself inward? Would I still have succumbed to a decade-long depression? Would our relationship be stronger today?
It wasn’t until I invited my father over in adulthood and began asking him questions about his life that his world, and mine, began to open up. Phone recorder pinched in the couch cushions between us, he shared all the stories I’d always been curious about—his childhood, his many jobs, his start in music, his start in food, his fears, his insecurities. The longer the conversations extended, the more contemplative he became. It was as if he was remembering himself through the reemergence of long-forgotten memories. As if the chains that had held him down for 60 years, like his abusive stepfather before him or the absent biological father before him, had finally been freed. As if a weight had been lifted; it was finally okay to speak.
I believe that few things are more important to life than how we express ourselves. This is why I write. On these pages, through these words, I excavate all that I never had the opportunity to explore in full. I build bridges between worlds I thought were disparate—like myself and joy. Word by word, brick by brick, I’m building a new foundation upon which all future generations of my tribe can stand.
Question for the Community
What is something you’re still finding the courage to talk about?
To read more of the “On Living” series, visit the Overture archive here.
I’m continually seeking the courage to speak about a lot of childhood trauma, especially as I question what kind of relationship I want with the people who had a hand in it. I often wonder if healing would be simpler if I cut off most of my family; it’s the hope of connection that keeps me attached.