Hidden within the calm can be an unexpected storm.

By Juliet Bonnay

Many of life’s opportunities, I have found, often hold within them a chance to heal past painful experiences, or gain new insights and understandings. Both occurred when I accepted a rare invitation to sail on a night race to Kawau Island over Easter, in 2005. Little did I know, as we sailed off into the sunset that weekend, that I would learn a lot about how an unloved child within can take control of our actions and lead us into further into bad feelings, and even shame.

It was a warm night and the sea was flat. We set sail under spinnaker and it strained in its usual way against the lines and pole which held it steady. But in the light and fickle winds it repeatedly collapsed and kept us busy playing the lines until it caught the wind again. Ten minutes from the finishing line the spinnaker sheet (line) mysteriously unhooked itself from the spinnaker.

Tony, a new and inexperienced crew member, who had joined the skipper and me at the last minute, set the spinnaker free of the pole and it flew up into the air. After some effort, I managed to locate the other line in the dark and pull the spinnaker down with Tony’s help, without it falling into the water. But unbeknown to me, the skipper had let the line at his end run free and it had gone overboard to drag in the water. I felt the pull of the line and could see the skipper winding up a rope in his hand and thought he was winding in the spinnaker sheet, so unhooked it from the spinnaker and let it go, only to discover later that it was lost overboard.

In his smouldering anger, the skipper decided not to set the spinnaker again. Besides, he would have to find another spinnaker sheet. It cost us first place in the race, although we were first across the line.

The following day we went sailing in the light wind to give Tony a chance to learn to sail. The skipper chatted on and on about politics and social issues. To my differing points of view he was quick to retort “rubbish!” dismissing what I had learned and wanted to share from my life experiences as meaningless and irrelevant.

Sitting in the cockpit after a barbecue on the beach that evening, Tony poured strong rum and cokes and we chatted with a visitor from another yacht. When the skipper went down below to his bunk to sleep, Tony began drinking a bottle of white wine left by our guest.

I can’t remember what led into the subject of martial arts, which Tony had done for twelve months with his son, but at one stage he reached for my hand and held it, and tried to impress upon me that it was an experience I really needed to have. I didn’t need to do martial arts, I told him, although I knew it could be a very spiritual experience. When he flatly denied there was anything spiritual about it, I said that he hadn’t been doing it long enough to know. I told him what I had learned from a young Maori man, who had a double black belt in martial arts, when he gave a talk about its spiritual aspects to a class of fourteen-year-old boys I had taught and how I was impressed by the boys’ response when at the end, he asked each student, “What is the colour of your anger?”

I sensed that Tony was a long way from grasping that anger could have a colour, let alone that he may even be angry inside, or that martial arts could lead to inner peace. He told me I couldn’t possibly feel what was inside him because I was not a man. So I told him a story about walking with the little girl I once was along a beach and how a friend I met on my way home decided to give it a try—and all because he stopped me to ask why I looked so happy that day. The next day his broad grin told me that he, too, had had a similar experience of connecting with the little boy within him, and I was delighted to hear him say he was going to make big changes in the way he treated his son.

The story struck a chord with Tony, who had two sons of his own. He admitted not loving the little boy inside him and I asked how he could love his two sons if he couldn’t love the boy he once was. His eyes glazed over and he swilled down more wine. I thought about the men I had known who took out their anger or self-hate on their sons and how it created problems for them in adulthood with work and intimate relationships. When he again insisted that I couldn’t possibly know how a man feels inside, I told him that my father had sexually abused me as a young child and because I wanted to come to peace with this, I had had to feel at a deep level the pain of the little boy inside him to understand why he did the things he did.

Tony was silent for a few moments and then reached out to give me a hug, saying that I should hate men for all the horrible things they do to women. While he continued to drink the wine I told him about learning how to love unconditionally, and that it meant accepting each other as we are with no conditions or expectations attached. He looked at me with surprise and said, “You are far more intelligent than I had given you credit for…” He admitted then that he had made judgments about who I was while I was talking with the skipper that day, and that what I was saying now had shattered them. He finished the bottle of wine while I made coffee.

Afterwards, when we went below to sleep, Tony appeared at my bunk wearing only his jocks. He wanted to kiss me. Then he took off his jocks and rubbed his penis against my leg, like my father had done. Thankfully I was still fully dressed, which enabled me to calmly ask him what he needed to learn from this. I cannot recall his reply. He then asked me what I was learning and I said that I was reversing the situation with my father.

“Love the little boy inside you,” I said. “You only want sex to pacify his pain of feeling lonely and unloved. Take back your power and learn to love him yourself.”

In his intoxicated state I had to repeat this message several times. Finally he fumbled and crashed to his quarter berth, reaching out his hand to me as if the little boy in him was asking his mother for comfort. I kissed him on the forehead after he was safely in his bunk, spoke gently to him and stroked his hair while he drifted off to sleep. It reminded me later of what I had done with my father as a child when he was drunk. In a short while Tony was snoring and I returned to my bunk. I fell asleep with a deeper appreciation and understanding of the loneliness and insecurities and fears of the little boy within my father who had often sought sexual comfort from his lively and innocently coquettish daughter after arguments with my mother.

However, depression descended upon me the morning after I arrived back home—despite the fact that the skipper gave me the helm for most of the way back to the marina. I kept my appointment with a counsellor and related the events of the weekend. Together we probed what had triggered the depression. I thought it had something to do with what happened with Tony, but finally traced my bad feelings to the spinnaker sheet going overboard and the skipper blaming me. His angry silence had become my father’s guilty silences after he did things he knew he was not supposed to do, and I…well I had blamed myself for doing something ‘wrong’ to upset him.

Sitting in a child’s chair, my counsellor said to tell my father how I felt about what he did and how it impacted my life. Then she asked me to sit in the chair where my ‘father’ was ‘sitting’ and respond to what ‘little Juliet’ had said. Just as I had remembered from the past, he denied that he had done anything to me and said I was making everything up. He was cold and steely as if imprisoned behind an iron mask. I realized then that my healing did not depend on him acknowledging what he had done, but rested on my ability to feel what was inside him through my love and understanding and compassion and, at the same time, to reinstate my boundaries to stop any further abuse.

My experience with Tony, therefore, was a powerful opportunity for more healing work in this regard. I cried a lot during this session, completely swept into grief over the permanently fractured relationship with my father. My counsellor told me to hold onto that grief and go through it. It felt like I was disarming a time bomb.

Ultimately it freed me from the abuse that had been replayed several times in my adult life, named the “repetition compulsion” by Freud, referring to the unhappy situation that when a person does not understand their history, they are doomed repeat it. This is often because early abuse disarms one’s internal alarm system that warns when one is in danger, or in a compromised situation.

Most of the men I attracted into my life were emotionally and/or physically neglected as children. This was my father’s background that, as a child, I tried to ‘fix’ when I sensed his emotional neediness in his unhappy marriage. As an adult, when I finally saw the pattern I was struggling with, I came to understand that many men habitually use sex in a vain attempt to get the emotional nurturing they did not receive as a child. Often it led them into sexual addiction where women became mere objects for a ‘fix’. Sometimes it led to rape and other abuse. A prostitute I counselled told me that she was surprised when one of her clients didn’t want sex, but just wanted to talk. It is interesting to note that most prostitutes were sexually abused as children.

Alice Miller highlights in her book, Thou Shalt Not be Aware: Society’s Betrayal of the Child, that…

The consequences of a trauma are not eliminated by repressing it but are actually reinforced. The inability to remember the trauma, to articulate it (i.e., to be able to communicate these earlier feelings to a supportive person who believes you), creates the need to articulate it in the repetition compulsion.

It is important to understand that while some people re-enact their original trauma/s as a victim (usually women), others re-enact them as perpetrators, that is, doing to others what was done to them (usually men) because of the way we are culturally set up with men needing to be seen as having power and control. Also, sometimes the abuse can change form. For instance, a boy who experiences emotional and psychological ‘rape’ in childhood can re-enact it as physical rape in adulthood, and vice versa.

I acknowledge that it is often excruciating painful to re-experience the repressed pain of childhood trauma and abuse. However what is even more painful, I have experienced, is to lose the vitality my life once had through depression, PTSD, repeated broken intimate relationships and disruption to family life caused by repressed pain ‘leaking out’ as anger, the loss of my career due to ill-health and, leaving talents and gifts discarded as unopened presents I lost interest in pursuing.

By remembering my father’s abuse and reliving the intense emotional pain it caused on many levels, I can now feel compassion for men while at the same time setting firm boundaries to protect me from further abuse, fully aware that within needy or abusive men is a hurt and lonely little boy I cannot ‘fix’—like I tried to fix my father. Also, I now understand that rather than a man seeking a woman to pacify him with sex as one might use drugs or alcohol to numb emotional pain, he needs to take a journey inside himself to learn to love the little boy still hurting within, for ultimately it will enable him to acknowledge and feel the pain still there so that he can heal.

This choice ultimately leads to the development of healthy, mature and emotionally fulfilling relationships.

You might also like to read:

The Joy of Connecting With Your Inner Child
Mystical Experiences that Heal the Soul
The Importance of Loving Yourself Unconditionally
Forgiveness Heals the Past
I’m Sorry. I Love You…
PTSD
Be Positive About Mistakes
Then Hidden Consequences of Child Rape

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