Testimonies from Hades

Heavy-hearted emotion and grief was in the air last night at the weekly home group meeting of AA, a men's meeting populated by anywhere from 70 to 120 men every Tuesday night, at various stages of recovery, both chronologically and spiritually. It's one of those 12 step meetings where, when you look out across the room, you are astonished by the diversity of the crowd, a lot of guys fresh from work wearing fancy clothes, or oil soaked mechanic's uniforms, or biker gear, or casual shorts/t-shirt/sandals, a lot of the attendees tattooed, weightlifters, wild looking, as if barely domesticated, but many also groomed. Overall, you know the entire Valley is much safer with all of us in recovery. 

A guy with 90 days got his ticket called to share and spoke about how his friend, who had just been in our meeting a couple weeks ago, had died of an overdose. He got the phone call from the guy's mother in Illinois and called a cab, went to the airport, bought a plane ticket and flew out to the funeral. The family was deeply moved to have him there. He could barely contain his combination of grief and gratitude. 

Then a gigantic weightlifter tattooed guy with a very heavy Brooklyn accent had his ticket called, and he talked about having heard the news of the mass shooting in Las Vegas and starting to sob so hard he had to pull his car over and sit for about a half hour until he could see well enough to drive again. 

Then a tough, cynical salesman who almost always has some kind of snarky thing to say had his ticket called and talked about picking his brother up at the Mayo Clinic, where his brother is getting stem cell treatment for cancer. If the treatment doesn't work, his brother has about 30 days to live. And this man completely took off his snarky exterior and shed tears. 

Then a guy originally from Philly who still has that Philadelphia swagger and accent got up and shared that one of his children had been arrested that day on federal charges and how he had been practicing not flipping out and not getting involved but getting into non-action and letting the process take its natural course, and he choked up. 

One of the great blessings of recovery for me is being with men who are finding ways to feel. The men I most want to spend time with are casting off inherited notions of manhood, diving right into the core of shame learned through years of personal and cultural abuse, and working to emerge with more wholeness, greater range and less rigidity. I've always been super sensitive, empathetic and emotionally hypervigilant, and my feeling life has usually been far, far more roiled and active than I have been able to express, especially to other men. 

I have long sought out women for this reason. Recent awareness of the way men burden women in the expectation that women will perform their emotional labor for them has had me reflecting carefully on my pattern of only opening emotionally to women and of being resolutely guarded and defensive around most men. The same sex sponsorship tradition in AA makes it imperative to at least begin there-- with one man with whom one makes the commitment to be completely honest and as real as possible. 

My experience has been that it is a very slow and painful process. As much heartbreak and betrayal as I have experienced via women, I am still willing to open to them. The wounds dealt by men have gone much more deeply into my sense of self worth and dignity, clearly, since I am usually not at all willing to be vulnerable with other men. 

In the arts, I have always longed for the approval and admiration of men, and rarely gotten it, but have often gotten the appreciation of women. I used to use writing and music as part of my woo kit for that reason-- and I always appealed to women who were inclined to be impressed by those things. Men have often rejected or been unenthused by those aspects of my expression. This goes back to the primal pattern of getting a lot of encouragement from my mother and absolutely none whatsoever from my father, an imprint that I have been reiterating with zombie-like regularity for awful decades.

This realization and the desire to grow in this area and take some risks led me to choose a men's group as my home group in AA. I realized that my gendered patterns of emotional experience were holding me back and causing an imbalance. I've been going to this meeting for more than two years now and I still feel guarded and wary. Obviously, it takes time. 

But a meeting like last night's, where guys who look outwardly like the kind of terrifying figure you'd hate to encounter in a dark alley, get up and show depth of feeling in front of 100 other guys, definitely help.