Atypical Transgender Late Bloomer

“Trauma decontextualized in a person looks like personality. Trauma decontextualized in a family looks like family traits. Trauma in a people looks like culture.” — @ResmaaMenakem https://t.co/FXBaXJMGxi — The On Being Project (@onbeing) June 6, 2020

Trigger warnings: rape, beatings, jail, prisoner, Catholic, priest, family. Scroll down for content.        Or Click here to go away . The adjective catholic (with a lower-case c ) means: universal, comprehensive, widely shared. Something that's catholic is bigger than you might think. I need to set down my own catholic experience. You might not know anybody affected by the Catholic systemic child-rape scandal . Maybe you do know a victim and you aren't aware of it yet. I'm one of them. I was raped by Fr. Arnaud in Brooklyn's St. Theresa of Liseaux, on Avenue D and Troy Avenue. I volunteered to became an altar boy because on school-day funerals, you got out of class and sometimes you got $5. It seemed like a good deal. My dad recommended it. The old GI rubric holds true: Never Volunteer. From September 1965 to June 1968 - Fourth through Sixth grades - I was repeatedly raped by a parish priest. It happened in the rectory on Monday afternoons, an...

Reading Healing Tasks: Psychotherapy and Adult Survivors of Childhood Abuse by James I Kepner. Re therapy I'm often questioning whether what we're doing is what we're supposed to be doing, so I thought I'd do some learning about what the process is supposed to be. This is a good read. There are, admittedly, some pages I don't get - either they're too abstract, or I'm not catching the nuance/implications. It's not a self-help book, it's much more a book for practitioners. There's a lot of good lessons for me. One lesson is the notion that prior trauma causes you to over-react to challenges. I did just that in an interaction while I was reading it, and it informed me to ask: Am I over-reacting? Why? and there was value in that. Another two lessons that I'm still pondering are: Depression is the result of long-unprocessed, accumulated, compounding-interest grief that hasn't been mourned, which presents as a general sadness or malais...

These are some movies I've come across that were helpful to me regarding being beaten as a child. Affliction . This is an amazing movie about the end-state of a dysfunctional family, showing the varying effects of trauma on people in their 50's, and the slow departure from mainstream priorities. I'm amazed that it was made as a commercial movie. Good Will Hunting . Although I tend to avoid Affleck-Damon movies, this was very good. Deals with the 22-year old vintage of trauma results.