Fathers and hidden, little-t traumas
- Amy Baker
- Mar 11, 2019
- 5 min read
After the end of my partnership with my son’s father, I went searching. The first question on my mind was, “What are fathers for?” It wasn’t pretty, and I am not proud to admit, but I wanted empirical evidence from psychology, sociology, economics, and anthropology that fathers were pretty much just sperm donors, plopped here to smear some genes and move on to wage war in love, the free market, and Afghanistan. Even though I had spent the previous 20 years telling families that fathers were irreplaceable and provided necessary ingredients for developmental growth in children, I wanted that not to be true because I was deeply hurt. My hurt place went to the irrational desire to rationally banish him. Lesbian moms do almost everything better, so why couldn’t a single mom?
It was sort of nebulous anyway, right? I mean, fathers provide bigger actions, bigger activities. They rile them up, moms bring them down. They take them to the edge of safety, moms stop that nonsense. Honestly, with that story, moms are gatekeepers and a drag.
But in tandem, in balance, the masculine and the feminine get an opportunity to rise together, to show what is possible when you take things to your edge and keep a mindful awareness on the edge.
Yep, that was what going back to school did for me: confirm what I already know. But it did it in a way that was beyond my wildest thoughts because beyond finding that my son did need his father, I also found that fathers need their children and that not having a father even a tiny bit active in their lives creates a trauma in children that imprints on everything—much like not having a mother does. It leads to lower self-esteem, more distractibility, more trouble in school, more instability in the maternal household (when high conflict and DV were not involved) often due to higher levels of poverty in maternal households than in male households. It leads to higher maternal depression, and hopefully everyone knows the detriment that has on kids. If not, I’ll write an article on it and give you some links.
I suspect, too, that gatekeeper moms become really tired of the struggle with their world of “shoulds” that they cut off one last possibility for men to gain redemption and to heal themselves of earlier life little-t traumas. Children become an avenue—right or wrong—for parents to redeem themselves, to do it better, to be the parent their own wasn’t, to begin to fix and love themselves. That’s a lot riding on children, especially when it’s not their responsibility to fix parents, but in study after study, children become the motivation necessary for people to get their lives together. They may still not want to look at those old wounds or they may begin to fixate on them, but whether someone has children or not, those old wounds always come calling.
In that research, I began studying studies of ACEs (adverse childhood experiences study by Kaiser Permanente and the CDC from 1995-1997), family systems, trends and outcomes in family systems according to socio-economic status, geography, gender/sex, and ethnicity, and neurochemistry according to sex. In studying fMRIs in adult males and adult females who had marginal, little-t traumas (not full-blown ACEs) as children and adolescents, what I found remarkable was that in the adult male brains, there were fewer areas that lit up when subjects were exposed to mildly stressful situations than in female brains, and they were mainly clustered hemispherically and toward the cerebellum. Female brains lit up cross-hemispherically, in all lobes.
Those two studies I found were not conclusive about what these results meant, except to say that the corpus colossum appeared to be less plastic in the adult male brain. It gave me lots of questions, though. One hypothesis is that women problem-solve cross-hemispherically, and have several centers at play when there is stress or tension. This may mean women could overload on possibilities and possible outcomes and, therefore, not reach a conclusion, or it could mean that the conclusions women finally reach are well-considered. It could explain the sex-based phenomenon of some men thinking women are flighty or indecisive. It could explain women’s inability to understand testosterone responses that seem “trigger happy.”
The other hypothesis I have is that, due to less plasticity in the corpus colossum in adult male brains, males may have a more innate drive to problem-solve. This would explain male refrigerator blindness, as well as the ability to stay on task when executing a mission, such as taking the garbage out or raking the leaves. It might also explain why Primo Levi ruminated for the rest of his life after leaving Auschwitz on why, and, finding no humane, logical answer, left this life in a dubious way. It may explain the certain execution of gun violence when there is no why for other men, young and old alike, and it would certainly explain the extraordinary suicide success rate among men. It may also explain why men may prefer to simply leave some things to rest, leave them unresolved, leave them to either die in a wasteland of their minds, or abandon them as forever buried and be able to execute that command from the PFC.
Whatever the answer is, I feel certain that grace is a way through this, whatever the answer is to the structure of the family, marriage, or sexual unions and liaisons. Understanding that there may be neuro-linguistic structural processes that are more defined as masculine or feminine, and that neither is wrong; they simply are.
When we have childhood or adolescent stressors that were painful, it is important to remember that if we are still avoiding them, they are very much still with us, subconsciously or unconsciously. The only way out is through, so at whatever point in the journey a person is, I encourage them to embark on the “through” process. With grace. Self-compassion. Equanimity.
This was what I came to know about my own little-t and Big-T traumas, and it's what I came to know of my son's father's little-t and Big-T traumas. We both brought those to our relationship, and we both had everything riding on it. For the sake of our son, the sake of our own young selves within us, and for the parts of each other that we will always love, we did this work. We still do this work. Every week. Even though we are no longer in intimate partnership in love and sex.
You can’t go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending. ~C.S. Lewis
~Amy
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