Gay Men and Trauma Recovery: Reclaiming Your Life
What is Trauma?
After being a gay menâs specialist therapist for 30 years now (in 2022), I am often humbled by the wonderful opportunity I have to be of service to gay men from so many different backgrounds, of ages, races, ethnicities, even nationalities, and in so many fascinating professions. And after doing this for so long, you learn a lot, not just about gay men and gay male couples, but also about the world and life in general.
One of these things I see over and over is our lives â for all of us â are some combination of good experiences and bad experiences. Sometimes in the same week or day! When I do client work, either in therapy or coaching, I help them leverage their strengths, in what we clinical social workers call the âstrengths-based perspective,â which informs much of the life/career/relationship coaching work I do, and cope with their challenges, such as in therapy and learning to cope with some kind of diagnosable psychiatric disorder (my background is as a certified psychiatric social worker, which came before my being an AASECT Certified Sex Therapist; I do a lot of both these days). Shakespeare said, âThe web of our lives is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together; our virtues would be proud, if our faults whipped them not; and our crimes would despair, if they were not cherished by our virtue,â (âAs You Like Itâ).
Others have theorized in a kind of religious context that living on Earth is dwelling somewhere between the Hell below us and the Heaven above us, so our lives are a mix of those. Even from a secular point of view, I see that point in this duality of life. We get up every day hoping for the good stuff, but, as we all know, shit happens. Itâs like in Bipolar Disorder: there is depression, there is mania (or hypomania), and there is baseline, and people can take a mood stabilizer medication to try to achieve that baseline of general well-being.
We are raised as kids to expect this. We are taught, in general, that our society is civilized; that there are rules, that we are safe. Weâre not necessarily barbarians or vicious animalistic creatures that devour each other and eat their young. And, yet, life teaches us â sometimes early on â that the sense of safety that we are collectively taught to expect from parents, teachers, bosses, clergy, cops, politicians, and so on â can be breached, horrifically, leaving our physical and psychological defenses torn from the experience. Itâs been said that that ripping of the fabric of our defenses (beyond our ability to cope) is trauma.
Trauma is when we get overwhelmed by an experience, either as individuals or collectively. At one time, it was defined as a âlife threateningâ experience, or âexperience outside the realm of normal human functioning,â but the term has evolved from that, in part because itâs culture-bound. What is âoutside normal human functioningâ for someone might be an everyday occurrence for someone else, such as someone living in a war zone.
In trauma, the experience overwhelms our expectations and our ability to cope. We donât know what to do with it. Nobody ever taught us that such things were even possible in this world. 9/11 was such an experience; collectively, in the United States and in the world; no one saw that coming. Itâs similar to the attack on Pearl Harbor by the Japanese in 1941; it was literally awakening to a new world. There would be plenty of non-Western examples, too.
Individually, trauma can take many forms. Iâve learned this in a heartbreaking way in my work with clients about what people (in my case, gay men) go through. Childhood sexual abuse. Severe acute or chronic illness.  Being born with a disability. Car or other vehicle accidents. Sporting accidents. Workplace injuries. Natural disasters. Violent crime. Even non-violent or âwhite collarâ crime can certainly be a trauma. Being âcanceled.â Being âdoxxedâ online. Being stalked. Being cat-phished. Having your identity stolen. Being blackmailed. Being abused by social institutions like a corporation, the court system, a university, an insurance company, a police force, the military, even a neighborhood homeowners association. The loss of a loved one. A relationship breakup. The loss of a fortune. The loss of a job. The loss of oneâs health, or appearance, or money, or housing, or functioning, or comfort, or dignity. Itâs anytime that the implied promise of that sense of safety that we were brought up with as kids gets shredded by an experience that shows us otherwise.
Breaking the Promise of Safety
We see that âimplied promiseâ everywhere. Fairy tales have âhappily ever after.â Cop shows on TV always get the bad guy in the end. Relationships kiss and make up. Lost objects are found. Courtroom dramas mete out justice just in the nick of time. Audiences like a happy ending. Parents around a dinner table teach not so much what life is, but what it should be, according to a very controversial (Western, imperialist, classist, religious, heterosexist, economic, gender, etc.) set of ideals. Doesnât always work out that way. And when shit happens to us, there is a certain, âHey! Wait a minute! This wasnât supposed to happen! What the Fuck is this?â. And sometimes, the perpetrators are the ones who taught us all about Pervasive Safety of the World in the first place, like people who were supposed to be the âcustodiansâ of that safety whom we put our profound trust in, like parents, or teachers, or coaches, or clergy. What a mind-fuck that is.
So itâs in that moment, the first time âthe rulesâ of expected safety get broken, that trauma happens. And then weâre left there to just deal with it, not only for what it is that has happened to us, but also with that feeling of âHey, wait, what is this? You never said anything about this.â
Trauma as Neurobiology
Trauma can be seen as a cultural, social, and psychological thing. But itâs also, actually, a neurobiological process in our brains. Thatâs one of the biggest differences in how therapists are trained between the time I was in school in the late 80s and early 90s and when Iâve taught psychotherapy practice intervention models now, is the role of neurobiology. Itâs not that the psychotherapy world âneedsâ to be somehow âlegitimizedâ by making it all sound more âmedical;â it doesnât; it was always âlegitimate,â especially if the practitioner is using what we call âevidence-based practice models,â which is what I taught for over 15 semesters at USCâs graduate school of social work (which, unfortunately, has long since deteriorated and courses like that have been eliminated, along with its formerly-top rankings, I might add, though years of unfortunate and chaotic management). But evidence-based practice models that I taught, then, and better institutions still teach now, are methods of intervention that psychotherapists of all kinds (psychologists, clinical social workers, professional counselors, marriage and family therapists, etc.) should be using, which have been studied and proven to be at least somewhat effective in having good clinical outcomes with the client or patient cohort studied. Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy is evidence-based. Psychodynamic therapy is evidence-based. Dialectical Behavioral Therapy is evidence-based. Treatments like âsex addictionâ are not. And viva la difference. Evidence-based practice protects consumers from charlatanism.
Trauma is so important to the human experience, and to the human brain, that a lot goes on in there, especially if we consider brain hemispheres. Being a Brain-Wise Therapist by Bonnie Badenboch is a great resource on this. She describes how traumatic experiences are ârecordedâ in the right hemisphere, like a recording device or a video camera, and then these images, memories, feelings, themes are âprocessedâ into a coherent narrative by the left hemisphere of the brain through language (âtalk therapyâ) or other expression (the âexpressive therapies,â like art therapy drawings or collage or one of those). In therapy, âmirror neuronsâ between the patient and the therapist get activated, and they are really connecting on a brain-to-brain level, which all informs the therapeutic work (in addition to the good stuff like rapport, trust, and the healing relationship, preferably in a culturally-competent context for the therapist, such as being a specialist in working with gay men when you are, indeed, working with gay men).
The fact that the human brain has so much going on both during and certainly after trauma tells us something. It tells us that humans know when they are facing a trauma and coping with its aftermath, just like our immune system knows what to do when faced with a foreign pathogen of illness, or if we fall down and scrape our knee. All the systems get activated toward our defense and healing. The mind has its own version of that.
So if weâre brought up with hopefully at least some sense of safety, living life means that we eventually have to deal when there are exceptions to this sense of safety. All the systems within us â body, mind, and many would say soul â have to rally to mount an equal and opposite defensive healing response to be restored to the equilibrium of a past level of functioning. In the meantime, we cope, we âfake it til we make it,â sometimes for years after, but that only goes so far before the full impact of the traumatic experience comes home to roost, and we get either Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) symptoms, or some variations on it (developing a substance abuse problem, compulsive habits, or some other âmaladaptive coping strategyâ that needs to be replaced by something more benevolent and more enduring in service to our own healing.
Perhaps thereâs a paradox in that part of coping with that default âsense of safetyâ in the world is just to expect, and accept, that there will be exceptions. There will be times when the people we previously trusted betray us, emotionally or physically. There will be times when our generally civilized society breaks down. There will be times when the general goodwill nature of humankind is shown to be false when dealing with someone selfish, aggressive, greedy, incompetent, violent, sadistic, or just plain careless, and at our expense. Exceptions to the rule, are part of the rule.
Taking Our Turn
When âbad things happen to good peopleâ as the old saying (and book title) goes, I call that âour turn.â Itâs very unusual, some would say impossible, to get through this lifetime unscathed. Shit happens, either because of the above-mentioned darker nature of some human beings toward others at some times, or because Mother Nature is a bitch and can harm us with a good natural disaster that causes loss. Taking our turn at having a trauma can take many different forms, but somewhere, someday, it happens. Maybe multiple times in a lifetime, and for different reasons. Just because weâve been through one doesnât mean we wonât go through another. A Holoocaust survivor might have her purse snatched while taking a leisurely walk down the street 70 years later. Somebody whoâs just been laid off from their job six weeks before retirement eligibility can come home to a house thatâs been burglarized. A childhood sexual abuse survivor can discover their law partner embezzled and theyâre now facing criminal prosecution. Those are taking their turns, and itâs frustrating how itâs true that some people, through truly no fault of their own, have more than their âfair shareâ of trauma. This is something Iâve worked with a lot of clients on, and it’s an existential dilemma. Because Iâve seen that itâs true, that some people have just had more than their âfair shareâ of shit happen to them, and it truly is through no fault of their own. Iâve also seen the opposite, where someone seems to be born under a star and had consistently uncanny good luck over many years and is essentially free from trauma.
This is the existential challenge we all face. No matter what âitâ is, as trauma, it happens. We canât always prevent it, but we can cope with it after it happens.
Some of my favorite adages for this come from self-help books. Jack Canfield, in his book The Success Principles, discusses how âEvent + Response = Outcome.â We canât prevent the event from happening to us, but itâs our adaptive coping response (versus a maladaptive one) that makes the difference in the ultimate outcome. New Age author Louise Hay had another adage of facing any challenge and just saying to yourself, âHow can I take a positive approach to this?â to guide you on your own best cognitive and behavioral choices that make the most of an admittedly bad situation.
Life After Safety
When we cross that threshold after a trauma, at whatever age, and in whatever circumstances/experiences, it is said that we âlive in a different worldâ from the one we knew before. Itâs a sense of loss innocence (certainly thatâs been illustrated in discussions of 9/11). Somehow, life goes on. We have to make a go of it in survival, as there really is no other choice, except to live a broken, shattered experience â as some, sadly, do â and find a way to go on, even if itâs just with a little more cynicism about the world and its people, or certainly its circumstances. And, as the great show tune from âRagtimeâ says, âWe can never go back to before.â Life moves in but one direction: forward. And, as Lady Grantham said as the last line of the regular TV run of âDownton Abbey,â âYes; if only we had the choice!â She would have gone back to a âsimpler timeâ if she could.
âLife after Safetyâ means living with not so much a sense of safety all the time, but with a âmodified safetyâ that while although we continue to live in a world where bad stuff happens â either to us, or someone else we care about, or even people who seem very remote to us â but with a sense that despite the âbad stuffâ that happens in our lives, there can be many â some might say most â moments certainly worth living.
We live with the notion that as people go, in general, it is human nature to be sane, reasonably well-behaved, basically law-abiding, and generally of goodwill, to most people, most of the time. The odds are in our favor, in the majority (although this is certainly questioned in the current political climate in the United States, where nearly half its people support a disgraced former President who supported a violent coup attempt or are willing to revoke civil rights from women and others). We know that âstuffâ can happen, but we can go along hoping that it doesnât, and doing our best to influence that in our favor, which generally can work (wear a seatbelt, lock your doors, watch your back, take care of your health, manage your finances, etc.).
Reclaiming Our Rights
The number-one word I use in sessions with clients who are trauma survivors is âreclaiming.â How do we reclaim our right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness after some schmuck (or the personification of a natural disaster or some other non-personified force) has messed it all up for us?
In my clinical work, I talk about the importance of rallying external resources like therapists, books, videos, commercial product vendors, service providers, supportive others, and materials that help stabilize us (medications, a good bed, good food, etc.). And, I talk about rallying our internal resources, such as determination, stamina, courage, persistence, tenacity, resiliency, and resolve. It is when we activate our ability to rally these both internal and external resources that we begin to fight the good fight back to functioning.
Cognitively, we must reframe our experiences from being victims of othersâ (including Natureâs) behaviors, to being survivors. What they/it did to us is not the final word. We are not âdown for the count,â as they say in boxing. Cherâs song, âYou Havenât Seen the Last of Me.â (written by the prolific composer/lyricist, Diane Warren) that she sang in the movie, âBurlesque,â comes to mind. (There are many inspirational songs that help rally oneâs defenses to trauma and inspire us, especially for gay men who love our music divas; my article on that is here).
We live on to have internal âconversationsâ or even confrontations with our perpetrator(s), whether in reality (which is rare, or even impossible) or in our heads. We have to fight back that what they tried to take away from us, in their aggressive greed, selfishness, self-indulgence, entitlement, and sadism â is not the last word. We have the last word. We pick up the responsibility for the atrocity and absolve ourselves of any sense of âfaultâ about it, and drop it back squarely back into the lap of the perpetrator. This is where the word âvictimâ can be useful, at times; not to lead us into defeatism and despair, but to validate our feelings and the fact that we were minding our own damn business, doing our work, driving our car, walking down the street, sleeping, doing whatever â and they came along to mess it up by doing something they had no right to do, legally, morally, or socially. The fault lies with them. And while many survivors of trauma have trouble with this, itâs important to do the work of just clarifying that point. There are, actually, perpetrators and victims, and what they did to us was wrong. And thatâs in any religion, or social construct, or philosophy. Even our own brainâs neurological makeup knows that itâs wrong, because itâs not in line with how humans generally work, or should. Our defenses come from deep, evolutionary experiences. Even a child with no formal education (yet) knows that an adult should not be sexual with them; itâs developmentally inappropriate. Even if they donât know whatâs really going on, they still know itâs wrong. Itâs instinctive, not just social or cultural. In every society, harming someoneâs person is wrong; humans arenât built for that. In every society, taking something that isnât yours is wrong; we each have our own resources.
Even if in just our minds, we âspeakâ to our perpetrators, and I believe in the importance of a healthy anger that restores our dignity against someone who would cross us. Itâs not just âback off,â to reclaim our rights. It is âback off, motherfucker.â The healthy anger validates our inherent human rights which have been violated, which transcend demographics, cultures, nations, and historical time periods.
We affirm, in trauma recovery, that we have basic human rights. To live, reasonably comfortably. To be with those we love, if we want. To be left alone, if we want. To control our own resources of possessions, money, and domicile. To control our own bodies, and who touches them, and when, and where, and why. We had rights, the perpetrator violated those rights with their own sadistic self-indulgence, and we retaliate for justice to not only reclaim what was ours, but to punish those who would even attempt to take them away from us. Thatâs like âpunitive damagesâ in a lawsuit; they make others think twice before committing the same act against anyone in society. And maybe discourage others from even considering the same (which is our justice system, really, when it works â although thatâs another whole story). In our justice system, sometimes (often) justice isnât served, but we know the truth of it, in our heart of hearts. We know the truth of what happened, even in those times when we canât prove it, or even if we canât remember all of it, exactly. (I work with clients on this; they sometimes donât know the details as much as they just know the feelings the event caused, often many years later.)
Sometimes, the one with privilege (the boss, the elected official, the cop, the rich one, the connected/protected one, the powerful one) âwinsâ the battle and they âget away with it.â But even then, we reclaim in our own minds and hearts; we know the score. It would be nice if others, did, too, like in a court of law, but we donât need for justice to always be served for us to reclaim our rights and move on. We just have to trust in karma for their ultimate punishment, however long that takes, while we achieve that âliving well is the best revenge.â
In my work with clients, we identify ways to play out what âliving wellâ might mean after we reclaim our rights from whatever happened to us that seemed to take them away.
Living Well
Living well means that we assert the rights we always had, but with a renewed vigor. For a positive self-esteem and self-concept. For good health. For good relationships. For professional satisfaction. For opportunities for joy. For the opportunity to fulfill roles like adult child, parent, sibling, worker, neighbor, colleague, lover, friend, compatriot. If someone took those rights away for a bit, well, no longer. There is a new sheriff in town, and grieving time is over. (See Maya Angelouâs poem, âAnd Still I Riseâ for a wonderful expression of this feeling).
Forgive/Forget?
Trauma has a very special relationship to memory for us, as people. Itâs a neurobiological thing, too, as is the concept of âbody memory,â and some of the evidence-based psychotherapy models around that. We remember, even if some details are hazy many years later, or even immediately after. We remember because they are memories that we feel, often profoundly deeply. And, sometimes we feel so profoundly that our defenses âdonât letâ us remember all of it, the memories are set aside, even though stuff about âRepressed Memory Syndromeâ has been largely debunked as an illegitimate psychotherapeutic concept, which is its own discussion. For most of us, we actually do remember. We just donât want to think about it. âWhatâs too painful to remember, we simply choose to forget,â as gay icon Barbra Streisand sang in âThe Way We Were.â
So itâs hard to even think about âforgive and forgetâ when it comes to traumas and their perpetrators. So many philosophical, religious, and New Age books talk about the importance of forgiveness, and how âholding onâ to a resentment is a poison for someone else that we end up drinking ourselves. Iâm not sure I agree with that; many writings have discussed how âforgivenessâ as such is not a requirement for healing and moving on with your life. Your own circumstances, value system, culture, family, religion, etc. might dictate whether or not you consciously forgive your perpetrator. I donât really believe in forgiveness if there has been no justice and no accountability or remorse from a human perpetrator. This is why unremorseful criminals are rarely granted parole. Many believe there is no forgiveness without contrition, or at least an acknowledgement of the harm they caused and its impact on people. Gay men who have been the victim of anti-gay violence â physical or emotional â know all about this.
But whether you forgive your human perpetrator, or just perhaps learn to understand their behavior in a different context over time â such as a psychiatric disorder like a personality disorder or a criminal psychosis â we can still move on.
Coping with Others
Our adaptive coping after trauma involves a lot of work, especially in relationships. The relationship to ourselves, when we forgive ourselves of any aspect that we hold ourselves in contempt for. “Gee, if I hadnât been lazy and taken a short cut down the dark alley, I never would have been mugged by that gunman.â We have to forgive ourselves of that. We had a right not to be mugged, whether we went direction or took a hundred dark alleys.
We cope with professionals. When I work with clients, trauma survivors, I have to earn their trust. Itâs presumptuous of me to expect it or demand it. I have to earn it, through a professional working relationship over time.
We cope with spouses, partners, or significant others. We might have been the one who experienced the trauma, and have the symptoms and the dysfunctions as a result of it, but they are the partners of someone dealing with trauma, and that is its own challenge. I work with guys like this all the time, because the survivor needs support, but the partners and spouses of survivors need support, too. Itâs a whole system. This is why trauma sucks, because there is just a lot of work to do. Especially when it was all somehow preventable.
Life Goes On
After trauma, life goes on. The sun also rises. It doesnât care. âSometimes youâre happy, and sometimes youâre sad, but the world goes âround,â as the Broadway lyricist Fred Ebb wrote in a song for another gay icon, Liza Minnelli. âOne day itâs kicks, then itâs kicks â in the shins! But the planet spins, and the world goes âround and âround.â
So, how is our ârideâ on it going to be? Can we learn to live in a post-safety world? Can we take the good with the bad, even though we really â really â hoped it had been better?
We didnât want this fight. But we got it. It came to us. And we had to fight back, even though we didnât want the fight in the first place.
Making Meaning
We didnât want the fight. Weâre mad we were even put in that position in the first place. But weâre here. And maybe the next best thing to it not having happened at all, is that we learn to cope with it. We try to find meaning that even our challenges, even our traumas, might not be âpleasant,â but they can be educational, informative, fascinating, poignant, and meaningful. Maybe we knew something important that we didnât know before. Maybe we learned that we have something in us that we didnât know before. Maybe we just had to learn to trust, that the ruby slippers can take us home anytime we wish, but we had to learn it for ourselves.
How can I take a positive approach to this? Event + Response = Outcome. You havenât seen the last of me. And the world goes âround and âround.
If you would like help or support for the traumas youâve faced in your life, or help making your own world go âround, consider therapy (for residents of California) or coaching services in other states or countries. If youâre looking for a public speaker, I do that. If youâre looking for an expert witness in LGBT+ or HIV/AIDS issues, or others, I do that. For more information, email Ken@GayTherapyLA.com, or call/text 310-339-5778.Â