While attending Pomfret School as a senior in 1987, a teacher sexually molested me. It’s taken me almost 40 years to come to terms with that trauma. This is the story of my recovery.
A few years back, Pomfret spent some money to address its history of sexual abuse. This was a time in the U.S. when sexual abuse was having a cultural moment. The Catholic Church was undergoing a reckoning with its long history of sexual assault by its priests — and its persistent efforts to cover it up. The #MeToo movement had rocked Hollywood, then the wider culture. Elite east coast private schools were also wrestling with their own institutional consciences over revelations of abuse comparable to those in the Catholic Church.
Around that time, Pomfret hired a firm to conduct a survey of its alumni about its own history of sexual abuse. Once the investigation was complete, Pomfret issued a report. I don’t recall ever being invited to participate in that investigation. Perhaps they sent me a nondescript letter — not unlike the school’s regular requests for donations. Maybe the letter found its way, without being read, into the wastebasket. I don’t know. I do remember getting a letter summarizing the results of the investigation, as well as an official apology. As far as I recall, none of the perpetrators faced any real consequences. No one was truly held accountable. It felt tokenistic.
When all this was going on, why didn’t I speak out? At that time in my life, the abuse was something I recognized on an intellectual level, but I’d yet to face the underlying feelings. In spite of the cultural moment, I wasn’t ready.
I am now. I share my story for the sake of my own healing — to move beyond the shame. I’m ready to feel the feelings buried beneath the shame. I’m doing this publicly because I want to help others who may be suffering under a similar burden.
Who’s the perpetrator? I’m going to use a pseudonym to obscure his identity. I do this, in part, because, forty years after the fact, it’s his word against mine. I checked: There’s a statute of limitations on sexual assault in Connecticut. That, coupled with his adeptness at skirting the boundaries of legality, make it unlikely he’d be subject to formal justice. Further, he has wealth and the power that comes with it. For all I know, he may well be the litigious type. He may try to sue me for libel.
So let’s call him Mr. Neer. Mr. Neer was a humanities teacher at Pomfret during the time I attended. Prior to Pomfret, he did a masters at one of those pompous Southern liberal arts colleges where grad students wear academic gowns to class. He left Pomfret the same year I graduated — 1987. He went on to become a successful entrepreneur — and a leader in his industry. Since he resides and conducts his business in a city of national importance, there’s no doubt he has many politically influential friends. He makes frequent appearances on cable network news. He’s also published a couple books. I started to read one once — around the time of Occupy Wall Street. I found it to be sanctimonious pablum — typical of the pro-corporate country club conservative set with whom he, no doubt, identifies.
Before I detail what Mr. Neer did to me, I’ll describe my childhood. This background will give you some context as to why I was vulnerable to exploitation. My origins are working class. My father grew up in poverty in New England and New York. He was the only one of seven siblings to get a college education. My mother came from a family of Italian immigrants. Both families were highly toxic. My parents were 21 and 19, respectively, when I was born. A couple years later, they divorced. My father got custody of me. I have good reason to believe he drove my mother away. Why? Perhaps out of a compulsion to win. I spent much of my early childhood in the care of my paternal grandparents.
My father is an alcoholic. But I believe the daily drinking is a symptom of a deeper pathology. It’s not my place to diagnose. But symptoms include a need to always be right, fits of rage, and a lack of empathy. While I was growing up, he worked long hours. He partied on the weekends. He cycled through girlfriends. While in elementary school, I had a stepmother for a couple years. I spent a lot of time at day care centers. TV — and neighborhood friends — were my closest companions.
He was also physically abusive. One of my earliest memories is being in my bed at night wailing — in genuine distress. My father came into the dark room and punched me in the face. Stunned silence followed. At times, unexpectedly, he’d wrap my skull with his fist and tell me, “Don’t be obnoxious.” When I was in middle school, he caught me stealing a few coins from his dresser. I remember him calling me to the easy chair, where he sat rock still in his underwear. He asked me if I’d taken money from his dresser. I said no. He slapped me. He asked me again. I said no. He slapped me again. Eventually, I realized I couldn’t lie my way out of the situation. I confessed. He slapped me one last time. Rather than wonder why his child would steal, he tortured a confession out of me — a seven-year-old.
My father could be nice, even fatherly. On the good days, he treated me like a sidekick. I performed to win his approval. He encouraged me to excel at sports — soccer, baseball, skiing. He took pride in my academic achievements. I got straight As. But I never knew when the fist would descend. So, even on those good days, I was still terrified of him. On the bad days, I was a scapegoat — to blame for all his sacrifices. In effect, I wasn’t allowed to express anger, sadness, or even joy in his presence. It might be violently shut down.
As all young children naturally do, I equated expressing emotions with having feelings. Since I was afraid to express my emotions, I concluded I shouldn’t feel them. Many of my feelings grew to be unavailable to me — suppressed out of a perceived need to survive. Feelings are crucial. They provide important information about how to navigate danger in the world. We also need all our feelings to make important life decisions and to navigate intimate relationships.
Without full access to my feelings, without being able to trust my gut, I was vulnerable. When children don’t feel safe around their caregivers, blaming the caregiver is too unfathomable. So they blame themselves. Unconsciously, a child concludes: I’m not getting what I need. It must be because there’s something wrong with me. I must not be worthy. Lacking a safe bond to a caregiver, my sense of self was stunted.
On some level, resentment festered. A vital part of me retreated into a world of fantasy, lying, cheating, and stealing. I grew a double-life.
Worse than the abuse was the neglect. As I said, I spent at least half of my early childhood with my grandparents. I was dropped off at their trailer home in upstate New York each Christmas break and over the summers. In eighth grade, my father moved to Boston. I stayed behind in my hometown,Tolland, Connecticut, in the care, once again, of my grandparents. When I was living with my father, I spent much of the time alone — watching TV, wandering the grounds of the apartment complex where we lived, or hanging out with friends. I grew accustomed to the repeated abandonments.
I attended public schools through ninth grade. By that time, I’d joined my father in Boston. He was dating an upper-middle-class divorcée of aristocratic pedigree. All her kids had attended private schools. My father decided, with her encouragement, that I should too.
So that was me entering Pomfret as a sophomore — a high-achieving yet emotionally stunted working-class white kid, reeling from yet another abandonment and desperate to fit in.
I don’t know what Pomfret is like these days. But in the late eighties, frankly, the school was a breeding ground for trauma. As far as I understand it, North American boarding schools, in general, arose out of a centuries-long tradition among the European aristocracy of outsourcing parenting to their servants. I’ll come right out and say that boarding schools are a form of culturally-sanctioned child abuse. They’re an egregious dereliction of parental duty and a violation of every child’s inalienable right to a safe attachment to their primary caregivers. The parent-child relationship is of vital importance. No child, including teenagers, deserves to be separated from their parents. If I were an activist or legislator, I’d lobby to have boarding schools restricted to only the severest of behavioral cases. How can any child feel safe when their parents abandon them to the care of strangers, however invested they are as teachers and mentors?
In the late 80s, Pomfret School was rife with bullying, hazing, drug abuse, binge drinking, eating disorders, and sexual assault. The administration often tacitly endorsed peer harassment — in the form of elaborately orchestrated pranks. In the fall of my sophomore year, our dorm master organized a late-night “panty” raid on one of the girls’ dormitories. What a brilliant idea in an era of rampant misogyny. As you’d expect, during the incursion, numerous interpersonal boundaries were violated.
Pomfret’s ethos then reflected a broader culture among the privileged in America of sexism, racism, antisemitism, homophobia and classism. Boarders had a clear and largely unchallenged disdain for those who were contemptuously dubbed “day-gos.” These were day students from the surrounding community, who, though wealthy enough to afford the tuition, were largely clueless about the mostly unspoken affectations of bourgeois WASP society. This was a culture that valued the “well-rounded” individual. The subtext of being “well-rounded” was a suspicion, bordering on contempt, for anyone sniffing even remotely of a pointy head or blue collar.
The other part of the ethos was the school’s unrelenting commitment to compulsory busyness. Classes were held six days a week. Sports were mandatory, along with art or community service. An endless string of other community events, including chapel, formal meals, and study halls, padded out the rest of the schedule. In keeping with the relative ignorance of psychology among the broader culture in the 1980s, as far as I recall, there were no trained counselors on staff. The staff had minimal training in child development theories.
With my incapacity to feel—let alone act on—appropriate anger and fear, I was an easy target for peer humiliation. As an incoming sophomore, the only adult with whom I felt safe was my English teacher. Her name was Marnie Keator, the wife of the headmaster. She was a caring person who welcomed all. When I ventured to her house to hang out with the other kids who took shelter there, I felt genuinely seen and appreciated. Her home was a haven from the hostile chaos rampant on the rest of campus.
In her class, we read J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, which resonated deeply. In retrospect, I suspect I loved the novel so much because I sensed a kindred spirit in its narrator, Holden Caulfield. Although at the time I lacked the conceptual framework to articulate this, Holden was clearly a child who’d been traumatized.
In addition to being kind, Marnie was a gracious guide to the mysteries of literary symbolism, which, I discovered, was a powerful way to tiptoe up to painful topics.
My other comforts at Pomfret were: blasting Led Zeppelin to get psyched up for soccer games, whacking a squash ball, and breaking rules with the handful of other misfits who’d have me as a friend. Desperate to be cool, it wasn’t long before I was binge drinking hard alcohol smuggled on campus to the point, on more than one occasion, of passing out and puking all over myself. By December of sophomore year, I’d regularly sneak off campus to rendezvous with a day-student friend. When we’d drained his parents’ bar, we broke into his neighbors’ homes to filch their liquor. Just before lights-out, I’d stumble home drunk and flop onto my dirty sheets.
Many students were participants in this illicit culture. It seemed to us that the faculty were oblivious to the misbehavior—expulsion-worthy offenses—going on right under their noses. Sure, some kids did get kicked out. But part of any teenage swagger is a defiance in the face to consequences. So, for the faculty, it was either obliviousness — or they turned a blind eye. Which is worse?
As Christmas approached, I was so stressed I got appendicitis. After a night writhing in agony on the top bunk, I had to be rushed to the hospital for an appendectomy. When I returned to campus, exams were over and only a few administrators remained. I took my Spanish final in an empty classroom. The lack of supervision allowed me to consult a few tricky vocab words I’d written on my wrist.
To sum it all up, the three years I attended Pomfret felt like this: I spent my sophomore year trying to fit in socially through clumsy mimicry. Junior year, having earned a reputation as a hard partier and, after getting contact lenses, having been promoted from thirds soccer to varsity, I enjoyed a modest measure of popularity. But I soon found the thrill of popularity, however meager, to be short-lived. I spent most of senior year disillusioned.
Reading A Portrait of An Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce was another revelation. I readily adopted Stephen Dedalus’s credo: “silence, exile, and cunning.” That year, I recall showing up to the honors award ceremony stoned. By graduation, despite the numerous academic awards the faculty had handed out to me in previous years, they’d grown wise to my double life. They demoted me from valedictorian to salutatorian, giving the top spot to a less intellectually gifted, but more well-behaved classmate.
I certainly didn’t rise above the chaos. I thrashed around in it. As I said, both bullying and partying were rife on campus. It prompts the question: Why were so many kids behaving this way? Was it because we were bad?
Let’s return to Mr. Neer. I suppose I appeared on his radar my sophomore year. In the spring, I tried out for baseball. Mr. Neer coached the JV team. At first, he seemed friendly and kind. I played third base on his team and batted leadoff. The next year, I took his class. One of our regular assignments was to journal. He would collect and read them each week. Because of his encouragement, naturally, over time, I came to open up more of my inner life in my journal writing. He was also my dorm master. I would hang out in his apartment at the other end of the long hall. He seemed to appreciate my company. He would even, at times, treat me like a friend, confiding in me, for example, the troubles he was having with another teacher he was dating at the time. I grew to trust, even confide in him. I played on his baseball team junior year as well.
When it came time to choose a dorm for senior year, I wanted to dorm across campus with the cool kids. Mr. Neer tried to persuade me to move with him to another dorm he’d been assigned to. He wanted me to serve as a dorm proctor there. I hesitated. He persisted. I was afraid of losing his approval. Finally, I relented.
Next year, the frequency of contact picked up. I would hang out in the living room of his basement apartment nearly every night. When I was avoiding the social anxiety of the cafeteria, I’d use his kitchen to make myself a box of mac & cheese.
I recall debates about the existence of God. At the time, I was an atheist. Why? Perhaps a deep suspicion of father figures. Even then, I found his theological arguments to be trite. But knew not to go too far in my rebuttals.
In the winter, I tried growing my hair long. It was my own little act of fashion rebellion. Tying what I could into a ponytail, he mocked my look. In retrospect, it was a subtle form of control — a manipulation to which I, in my insecurity, easily succumbed.
By spring, I was disengaged from school, in part, because I was already anticipating my escape to college. I didn’t even want to play baseball, a sport I’d always liked. In part, this was because I knew by then that I wasn’t going to make varsity. I could hit, but my fielding was flaky. I learned from those in the know that cross country was a chill way to spend the afternoons. Marnie was the coach.
Once again, Mr. Neer aggressively recruited me to play JV baseball. He promised I’d have a chance to pitch, something I’d never done but wanted to try. Again, I resisted. But he importuned. He cajoled. He made me feel like it was important to him, that I was important to him. Once again, I gave in.
I was a flawed pitcher. Plenty of speed, but no control. One game I walked ten batters in a row. Mr. Neer had to pull me from the mound.
I was also a terrible dorm proctor. Stoned, I’d often sneak into the underclassmen’s rooms and steal the precious care packages from home they’d stashed in desk drawers.
Late one weekday night, a teacher made a surprise inspection of the dorm. After a quick knock, he burst into the room and caught me and two other seniors drinking. At the disciplinary hearing, I was able to successfully lie my way out of expulsion. But I lost my proctorship and had to return to waiting tables at dinner. Through all this, Mr. Neer was understanding, even supportive.
It’s clear now — after all these years — that he was grooming me. For what? I don’t remember the exact date, but some time in the spring, after all the other students had cleared out of his living room, Mr. Neer invited me into his bedroom. I resisted. He cajoled. I found myself, paralyzed from shame and fear, lying on top of him as he rubbed his stubbly cheek against mine, stroked and caressed my bare skin. This went on for an hour or so until I feigned sleep.
It’s also clear now that not only was he adept at crossing boundaries, he knew how to not go too far. It was never explicitly sexual in the sense that he didn’t try to kiss me on the lips, touch my penis, or penetrate me. It may not even have been statutory rape, technically, since I was seventeen years old. But it was definitely a violation. He was abusing his authority as a teacher and dorm master to coerce me into sexual acts. I recall stumbling out of his apartment in the early morning — he probably told me I should go — and back upstairs to my room. I felt stunned, numb.
Over the following weeks, this scene repeated itself several more times.
Why didn’t I avoid him? Why didn’t I tell anyone what was happening?
The simple answer is shame. I was too ashamed. Having no access to healthy anger or disgust, in the stress of Mr. Neer violating my boundaries, like with my father, my response was to freeze. It was a survival instinct gone haywire. I complied out of a deep fear of being abandoned. I just didn’t know what it felt like to have a protector.
When graduation came around, the polite conversations between Mr. Neer and my father felt surreal. He showed no embarrassment around my father, a burly, intimidating presence. I guess he knew me, his victim, well enough to know I wouldn’t expose him.
After graduation, his cajoling continued. In a new city, he was establishing himself in a new profession. As a first-year college student, I visited him once or twice, taking the train from Manhattan. I shared a bed with him in his sparsely furnished studio apartment. The pattern repeated: the sexually charged contact that never crossed over into overt sex. What do you even call that? Molestation? Pederasty?
One morning — this may have happened more than once — I woke up with a wet spot soaking my boxers. I’d had a nocturnal omission. I slunk to the bathroom to clean it up — desperate to hide the mess. In retrospect, it’s possible he did something to me while I was asleep — contact that did cross whatever line he made a show of respecting.
I just don’t know. The memories are fragmented, hazy. I wonder at the mental state I was in at the time to tolerate this treatment. It was like I was hypnotized. In a trance.
Now I see that I must have been dissociated. I was mentally detached from my body, stuck in the illusory safety of a freeze response.
By my sophomore year in college, I was able to break free from his spell. One afternoon, Mr. Neer called me on the landline in my dorm room on 114th Street. He told me he was getting married. He wanted me to attend the wedding. I told him I couldn’t afford it. He said it was very important to him that I be there, that it meant a lot to him. He suggested I splurge by charging the cost on a credit card and worrying about paying for it later.
Consider the hypocrisy of this suggestion: someone who’s professional reputation hinged on fiscal responsibility was pressuring me, a poor college student on financial aid, into spending money I didn’t have. I held firm.
It was a relief not to have to go. Just what did he expect from me at his wedding? Comfort? Some twisted validation?
For a few years, we lost touch. In my mid-twenties, I recall another phone call — I don’t remember who made it — around Thanksgiving. I confronted him about what he had done to me. He insisted he’d done nothing wrong, that what had happened between us was completely normal. I let it go. Why? Although I knew what he’d done was wrong, I only understood that on an intellectual level. I hadn’t come to terms with the ordeal emotionally. That reckoning had to wait another 30 years.
Around that time, though, I do recall telling my father about Mr. Neer’s transgressions. His reaction was essentially passive. I got the impression he didn’t want to think about it. He just wanted the issue to go away.
I’m a father now — of two beautiful children. If I found out, even years later, that one of them had been sexually assaulted, there’d be hell to pay. My father’s seeming indifference then strikes me now as yet another betrayal.
In the decades since, I’ve had recurring nightmares of both Pomfret and Mr. Neer. One variation has me attending the school — with all the associated stress. Then, mid-dream, I realize I’m an adult, that I’ve graduated from college, and don’t need to be there. With relief, I wake up out of what felt like an imprisonment.
Another has me being attacked by an erotic male demon. I have to fight him off, often by stabbing him with a knife. Or I dream I’m having sex with a desirable woman only to have her shapeshift into a man. I feel tricked into and trapped in the relationship.
Both nightmares bear with them a feeling of being pressured to do things I don’t want to, then feeling guilty about not complying.
All this time, I’ve lived with an abiding emptiness — of feeling lonely and being unworthy of love. I’ve searched for relief from this feeling. I studied philosophy. I wrote poetry. I read self-help books.
When I was thirty, after an all-night bender in Madrid discotecas of rum, hash, and MDMA, the next morning I quit drinking — cold turkey. Over the following years, I traveled to India several times to study ashtanga yoga. I attended half a dozen or so 10-day vipassana meditation retreats. Though these introspective practices have offered some relief, the core sense of emptiness has persisted.
So why now — almost forty years later? What has happened recently that feels like a genuine breakthrough?
Six months ago, like a bolt of lightning, I had a profound realization of the magnitude of the abuse and neglect I’d suffered as a child. As I said, I’ve known on an intellectual level that my childhood wasn’t exactly normal. But the pain remained unresolved.
For some reason, at the ripe age of 54, I was ready to feel that pain. I’m not sure exactly what triggered this realization. I wouldn’t call it a nervous breakdown. Its intensity never grew to a point where I felt like I lost control.
At the time, I was working the weekend night shift as a security guard at an auto auction lot on an island that sits in the middle of the Columbia River between Oregon and Washington. The lot is 35 acres, packed with all manner of vehicles. It’s surrounded on two sides by water. In the back, there’s a busy rail line, then behind that, woods. The lot is also surrounded by a ring of concrete barricades, as well as a ten-foot-high, 7000-volt electric fence. At that hour, I was the only soul on the premises. In an odd way, despite the threats lurking beyond the fence, I felt safe.
I’d been using the time to work on a middle-grade novel. But I was stuck. I couldn’t find the right narrative voice for a comedy fantasy called The Kingdom of Fief. I’d struggled all my adult life with writer’s block. I had various strategies for working through it, but I always remained on the lookout for new tricks. I was browsing YouTube when a video popped up on my feed entitled, “CPTSD: Breaking The Toxic Shame/Procrastination Cycle With Self-Compassion” by Heidi Priebe. Curiosity compelled me to click play. I watched the video with a growing sense of self-recognition. In my journal entry for April 15, 2024, I pasted a link to the video and wrote, “This is me.”
I’d never heard of C-PTSD. But now I felt driven to learn everything I could about it. I watched more videos. I read a couple of books that Heidi recommended — first John Bradshaw’s Healing the Shame That Binds You, then Pete Walker’s Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving. This impromptu education felt like a homecoming, blasting my heart open. I finally had a name for what I was certain I’d been struggling with all my life.
So what is Complex — or, as it’s sometimes called — Childhood PTSD? As you may know, PTSD stands for post-traumatic stress disorder. When many of us think of PTSD, we imagine soldiers in battle or victims of rape. The trauma is usually an isolated experience that, while vividly remembered, leaves behind unresolved psychological after-effects. With Complex PTSD, the traumas are multiple and often occur at a young age. These traumas elude or confound memory, because the brain simply wasn’t fully developed enough to form them coherently.
Some of the most common symptoms of C-PTSD, in no particular order, are:
Hypervigilance — A feeling of being unsafe causes a child to be on guard, attuned to how our caregivers are behaving in order to anticipate and avoid mistreatment. This pervasive sense of danger and need for attunement persists into adulthood.
Dissociation — A survival response where we psychologically absent our body into fantasy, intellectualization, or other forms of mental escape.
Minimization — C-PTSD sufferers tend to downplay the extent of the abuse or neglect we endured. This is because, growing up, we lacked a model of healthy parent-child relationships. Abuse just seemed normal.
Minimization is exacerbated by the society-wide taboo on challenging parental authority. Parents often control the narrative of their children’s upbringing. Attempts by children to push back on that story are dismissed or ridiculed.
Chronic dysregulation — Being easily triggered into a fight/flight response. For C-PTSD sufferers the sympathetic nervous system is often on high alert. Symptoms include elevated heart rate, shallow breathing, and adrenalization. We default to behaviors that felt necessary for survival in childhood but now, as an adult, are no longer appropriate to the situation at hand. If effect, we may perpetually recreate the trauma through current circumstances — or what’s sometimes called repetition compulsion. In effect, we get “stuck” in the past.
Pete Walker and others also include two more dysregulated responses: freeze and fawn. In a freeze response, we become paralyzed and unable to act. With fawn, we try to play nice to please and appease an aggressor.
Depression — An enduring feeling of emptiness or worthlessness. This feeling is also accompanied by a deeply-held conviction that the abuse is the child’s fault — that we deserved it. This clinical term for this low-grade depression is dysthymia.
Rumination — Much moment-to-moment thinking dwells on past experiences or anticipates future events. For me, this manifests as a habit of “playing back the tape” — reviewing in my mind’s eye past conversations, however trivial, to assess whether or not I did or said something wrong. Another is rehearsing: I anticipate disapproval or conflict and find myself practicing what I’ll say or do to make sure it’s correct. Thoughts also tend to drasticize or catastrophize what for others would be perceived as run-of-the-mill problems. We anticipate the worst.
Poor boundaries — An inability to claim space, physically and emotionally. This includes not knowing, nor having confidence in what we need or want. We often have a hard time saying no or advocating for our own needs out of a fear of disapproval, rejection, or abandonment.
Harsh inner and/or outer critic — A relentless inner critic — usually internalized from a toxic caregiver. A tendency to criticize and judge others harshly.
Toxic shame — A hyper-sensitive self-awareness where we feel exposed, vulnerable, or vilified. Often we feel like social interactions are only performative — what Holden Caulfield called being “phony.” Not knowing how to let down our guard in a relationship and be our authentic self. The self feels fragmented, incomplete.
Self-abandonment — An inability to stick up for ourselves, even when justified.
Suicidal ideation — According to Walker, most C-PTSD sufferers don’t actively pursue suicide. We experience what he calls “passive suicidality.” This is an enduring feeling of wanting to die. But the feeling isn’t so acute that we’d actually follow through on it.
Emotional flashbacks — Intense feelings provoked by traumatic experiences, especially early in life, often, as a matter of seeming survival, get repressed. It was simply too painful, too threatening then to fully feel them. These suppressed feelings may emerge later in life when we’re triggered by similar experiences. These reactions may accompany a loss of both reason and control. From an outsider’s perspective, such flashbacks may seem wholly inappropriate to the situation at hand.
At one time or another, to varying degrees, I’ve experienced all of these symptoms.
It wasn’t long after I began learning about C-PTSD and recognized myself in it that I started having intense emotional flashbacks. Late at night while alone at work, tsunamis of terror, sadness, rage, and loneliness crashed over me. They were overwhelming. I was drowning. The riptide in their wake felt like it was pulling me out into an abyss.
Yet I promised myself that I’d welcome what was coming up from deep within — no matter how scary. That for me, at last, there was no turning back. My meditation practice helped. I breathed into the feelings. I tried my best to ground them in the felt sensations of my body. Rather than fight the feelings, I relaxed into them. This afforded me enough buoyancy that I remained, just barely, afloat.
Over the course of several months, as I felt my way through them, the emotional flashbacks diminished in intensity and frequency. I learned to recognize them for what they were — unresolved reactions to trauma stuck in my nervous system — then to calm the hyper-arousal that accompanied them. I realized that I needed a therapist and, luckily, on the second try, found a good one.
I came to see that healing was finally beginning in earnest. I was doing what Pete Walker calls “grieving” a lost childhood. I was reclaiming all those repressed feelings in a safe way so that I could reintegrate them back into an embodied self. This entails sessions — as many as needed — of angering, crying, and venting. It means accepting what I’m feeling — however dark — and treating myself with loving kindness. It means learning to accept that what happened to me as a child was absolutely not my fault. And as an adult, I have the capacity to self-parent — to care for myself in a way that I didn’t get as a child. I can finally let go of the past and become more fully present, more fully alive.
I continue to educate myself about childhood trauma. One of the underpinnings of many C-PTSD treatments is what’s called attachment theory. Attachment theory posits that, for every child, forming a safe, secure bond with a caregiver is essential to healthy psychological development. Physician Gabor Maté asserts that children have four “non-negotiable needs.” The first is a safe, secure attachment with a primary caregiver. The second is what he calls “rest.” This means that the child needs to do nothing to make the relationship work. Some might call this state of “rest,” unconditional love. The third is that a child is free to express the full range of their emotions. And the fourth need is ample opportunity for free spontaneous play, preferably, out in nature. When I think back on my childhood, I only really got the fourth. I spent a lot of time — alone or with friends — roaming the woods in the back of the apartment complex, doing whatever came to mind.
Safety, rest, and freedom are the prerequisites for a happy, healthy childhood. This strikes me now as the opposite of the credo I embraced from Joyce: “silence, exile, and cunning.” The remedy to feeling tongue-tied, isolated, and resentful is speaking out, coming home, and sincerity.
Feeling safe, seen, and heard in therapy feels uncomfortable but transformative. I’ve also sought out community. I joined a couple support groups. I started training in a kind of mixed-martial arts called Mo Duk Pai. I’ve reconnected with old friends, opened up to them, and been humbled by their understanding and kindness.
In my recovery, I also discovered the work of Peter Levine. He developed a powerful trauma treatment he calls Somatic Experiencing. In Somatic Experiencing, a compassionate guide gently leads a person on an exploration of uncomfortable sensations in the body. This attentiveness can stir up strong feelings, which, in turn, may release traumatic memories. The guide has the person “pendulate” into and out these feelings. The aim is to feel them safely, then take the appropriate actions to “complete” them. This means to act out in a way that the person may have felt the urge to do during the traumatic experience, but for whatever reason, couldn’t. Trauma, Levine theorizes, is a strong sympathetic nervous system response thwarted, at the time, by immobility, whether physical or psychological.
Somatic Experience is most effective when done with a trained practitioner, but Levine teaches ways to practice it on your own. I decided to try it for myself. One early morning a few months ago, I was lying in bed thinking about those late-night encounters with Mr. Neer. I noticed that when I tried to recall those experiences, I saw the scene in my mind’s eye from a remove. I was hovering over and behind the bed, looking down on my body writhing in reaction to Mr. Neer’s toxic ministrations. I see now that this was dissociation. Confused, terrified, and ashamed, I’d sunk into a freeze response. I felt utterly disarmed, unable to define — let alone defend — my own boundaries. At the heart of this paralysis was a profound alienation from my capacity to feel anger and disgust.
Alone in my bed, I gently reminded myself that I was now an adult, forty years removed from the trauma. In the memory, I allowed myself to reinhabit my body. Immediately, those intense feelings of shame, fear, and anger welled up. Somatic Experiencing encourages us to reenact the appropriate survival response — through gesture and words. The appropriate response in that dangerous situation was to fight or flee. I held up my arms and pushed my assailant away. I shouted angrily, “No! Stop! This is wrong. Don’t fucking touch me. Get away from me.” I pumped my legs, rose to my feet, and ran away. As I did this physically, I felt myself, in the memory, exiting his apartment and ascending the stairs to the safety of my dorm room.
Reexperiencing the trauma in this safe way liberated me. It accomplished this by allowing me to do what needed to be done then to keep me safe. It gave me a way to release the pain of those trapped, fragmented memories.
But the healing remained incomplete. I needed to tell a trusted protector. For me, now, that’s my therapist. I see that my teenage self — that scared, lonely kid struggling to survive in what felt like a menacing environment — deserves justice. He deserved — and still deserves — to be protected. He should feel safe enough to feel the full spectrum of his feelings. What happened to him is not his fault. He’s worthy of love and protection. And so am I.
So that’s why I’ve written this essay.
Now I’m going to address Mr. Neer directly:
Since Pomfret in 1987, how many vulnerable young men have you groomed so that you could molest them?
No doubt you, as with all abusers, have extenuating circumstances. You too, in all likelihood, were the victim of sexual abuse. But that’s only an explanation, not an excuse. You may even still believe your intent was pure. But what you did to me was wrong — gravely wrong. You were the adult, the one in a position of power. You should have known better. With transgressions like this, it’s not the intent that matters, but the impact. You hurt me. And for that, you should be ashamed. This would be a healthy shame.
You call yourself a Christian. I exhort you, as a man of good conscience, to confess your sins and make a sincere effort to repent.
