We’ve had great interest in the My Name Is Project and are waiting with much anticipation for you to submit your survivor video stories in support of this project.
Recently I had the priviledge of participating in the Oprah two-part event on male survivors of child abuse. The first show aired last Friday and began with an emotional opening where the entire audience of 200 male survivors held up pictures of themselves at the age when they were first abused.
It was a powerful moment, standing amongst all those men, holding up a picture of who I was before my life changed so traumatically.
(Wo)Men Speak Out has an idea based on that powerful moment on Oprah. We are working on a new video montage which will hopefully include pictures of all of you. We all have our individual stories. But we have a collective story of abuse that is worth telling to everyone who has felt trauma in their lives, and to those who haven’t.
So this is a call out to ALL SURVIVORS. If you are interested in participating in this montage, send us a high resolution picture of you holding a picture of yourself at the age of your abuse under your chin. Also, include the age of abuse and you can optionally include your name as well. We will collect all of the submissions and create a video montage telling a shared story of abuse.
We need as many submissions as we can because we want this to show the magnitude of abuse and at the same time the human face of survivorship.
Also, keep your personal video submissions coming in. We need to create our video community of survivor stories to inspire all of our brothers and sisters who are right now suffering in silence. The only way we can do it is with your stories.
Thank you for participating in this project. Break the silence. To live.
It’s been a few years since I first posted the video My Name is Chris on Youtube. I wanted to create a snapshot of my life. I have been silent about my abuse for over 2 decades and this video is my admission that it has affected almost everything about me. I wanted that happy childhood dream. But I finally knew that there was nothing I could do to take my childhood back, to wipe away the abuse. I couldn’t even pretend anymore that the abuse didn’t exist.
So I made My Name is Chris, and I cry just a little every time I watch it. Recently I had the privilege of taking part in a two-part Oprah special on male survivors of child abuse. Oprah wanted an audience of 200 male survivors to show a face to the millions of men who are abused and never talk about it.
Shortly after the filming I received an email from Jarrod Marcum Noftsger. He was among the 200 men. He wanted to let me know that My Name is Chris helped his recovery. In fact, he made is own version of the video, called My Name is Jarrod, as a way of coming to terms with his own horrific abuse.
There are millions of survivors out there who want to tell their stories. Yet, we feel isolated and unable to express the deepest pain in our lives. The My Name Is Project is there to provide a survivor a way to express it.
So our project is simple:
1. Create your own My Name is… video. There are many programs to make nice montages. I made My Name is Chris with One True Media. If you have any production questions feel free to email me at christopher@womenspeakoutnow.com. I’m no video wizard but i’ll do my best to help. I want your video to be as representative of your voice as much as possible.
2. Post your video on Youtube as a “response” to My Name is Chris. Our video can be found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MYBkMzQrknk. This way, we stay connected and others can see all of the videos in the project stream.
Click here for a quick tutorial for those who aren’t sure how to add a video in response to ours.
3. Feel free to incorporate what elements you want from My Name is Chris, but your video should have the taste of your personal experience to it. We want to learn about your personal adversity and growth. It can be happy, it can be sad. As long as it is real we want it to be a part of this project.
4. Email Chris along the way with your thoughts, experiences, and questions and to let us know that you have contributed to the “My Name is…” project.
Our goal is to create a community of “My Name is…” videos which tell the collective stories of abuse and trauma in our communities. The short term goal is 50 before the end of 2010. 50 videos. Men and Women. Together. Starting with My Name is Chris and My Name is Jarrod. We need 48 more before January of 2011. We can only do it with your voice.
Sharing your story is the greatest gift you can give to another survivor. When I made My Name is Chris I was only trying to heal from my pain. Imagine the impact our collective montage of stories will have on survivors who need to hear that they are not alone and that their pain matters.
Just gonna stand there and watch me burn
Well that’s all right because I like the way it hurts
Just gonna stand there and hear me cry
Well that’s all right because I love the way you lie
I love the way you lie
Videos have always been a very powerful medium for me. I have read hundreds of books on trauma. I’ve attended countless conferences and worked in the field of abuse for almost 10 years. But nothing says “this is your life” like seeing an abusive relationship played out on camera. Eminem and Rihanna collaborated in a music video called “Love the Way You Lie.” It is an amazingly accurate portrayal of the cycle of violence that exists in abusive relationships. It mirrored so closely to my own past experiences that I needed to walk away from it the first time I watched it.
A paradox is a situation which defies intuition and presents a seeming contradiction. To me, love and domestic violence is one such paradox. I can count the intimate relationships I have been in that have been abusive. Relationships where I fell in love with partners who continually abused me. Growing up in a family that was emotionally, physically and sexually abusive, it’s not surprising that I would find myself living what I learned to be “normal”. Somehow though, contrary to my actions, I always knew that “normal” shouldn’t include suffering.
I fell fast for a man who, from the first day I met him, treated me like I was disposable. He had an extremely violent past with jail time to prove it. Everyone viewed him in his circle as unpredictable and dangerous. One day he was the most loving, funny, charismatic and romantic man I’d ever dated. Like the flick of a switch he could be a womanizing, drug using, alcoholic, male chauvinist.
I can’t tell you what it really is, I can only tell you what it feels like
And right now it’s a steel knife in my windpipe
I can’t breathe but I still fight while I can fight
As long as the wrong feels right it’s like I’m in flight
High off her love, drunk from my hate, it’s like I’m huffin’ paint
And I love it the more I suffer, I suffocate
And right before I’m about to drown, she resuscitates me, she f**kin’ hates me
And I love it, “wait, where you goin’?”
“I’m leavin’ you,” “no you ain’t come back”
We’re runnin’ right back, here we go again
So insane, cause when it’s goin’ good it’s goin’ great
I’m superman with the wind in his back, she’s Lois Lane
But when it’s bad it’s awful, I feel so ashamed I snap
Whose that dude? I don’t even know his name
I laid hands on her
I never stoop so low again
I guess I don’t know my own strength
I was attracted to the “bad boy.” The guy who would both protect me but inadvertently would become more and more obsessive over me. The label of “abusive” and “obsessive” did not exist in my reality however, not until later. This is because on some level I believed all the things he said to me about who I was and how I affected the relationship negatively. Each violent outburst was a direct consequence of something that I had done to invoke it. That’s the cycle of domestic violence. Ever escalating. Manipulative. Demoralizing.
You ever love somebody so much you can barely breathe
When you’re with ’em
You meet and neither one of you even knows what hit ’em
Got that warm fuzzy feeling
Yeah, them those chills you used to get ’em
Now you’re getting fucking sick of looking at ’em
You swore you’d never hit ’em; never do nothing to hurt ’em
Now you’re in each other’s face spewing venom in your words when you spit them
You push pull each other’s hair, scratch claw hit ’em
Throw ’em down pin ’em
So lost in the moments when you’re in them
It’s the rage that took over it controls you both
So they say you’re best to go your separate ways
Guess if they don’t know you ’cause today that was yesterday
Yesterday is over, it’s a different day
Sound like broken records playing over but you promised her
Next time you show restraint
You don’t get another chance
Life is no Nintendo game
But you lied again
Now you get to watch her leave out the window
I guess that’s why they call it window pane
There was a moment in the relationship that, to me, was the beginning of the end. We had gone out for a night of drinking and dancing with friends. At the end of the evening, I playfully threw a pretzel at him as he walked away from me. Before I knew what was happening, he turned and lunged at my face with his fist. I knew in that moment that if he would be that violent in front of others, there was no line he wouldn’t cross behind closed doors. The violence had in that moment become unmanageable and I knew I had to get out.
There are people who would ask why I didn’t leave at the first sign of violence. Why it took him becoming violent in public for me to decide I had enough. Pointing out that violence whether in private or public is unacceptable. It’s true. It seems so black and white, but it’s not. For me, abusive behavior was intertwined with love. The first man in my life, my father, was a violent man. His behaviors laid for me an understanding that love and violence were normal. My mother herself was abused. I saw this day after day in my home. That all was forgiven and forgotten until the next time that it was forgiven and forgotten.
Now I know we said things, did things that we didn’t mean
And we fall back into the same patterns, same routine
But your temper’s just as bad as mine is
You’re the same as me
But when it comes to love you’re just as blinded
Baby, please come back
It wasn’t you, baby it was me
Maybe our relationship isn’t as crazy as it seems
Maybe that’s what happens when a tornado meets a volcano
All I know is I love you too much to walk away though
Come inside, pick up your bags off the sidewalk
Don’t you hear sincerity in my voice when I talk
I told you this is my fault
Look me in the eyeball
Next time I’m pissed, I’ll aim my fist at the drywall
Next time. There won’t be no next time I apologize even though I know its lies
I had been in relationships that were non-violent but could never function properly in them. I didn’t love myself, didn’t believe I deserved to be loved and couldn’t receive that which I know now to be real love. I did everything I could to get out of those relationships, to hurt before getting hurt myself. Though I didn’t know it at the time, it’s these relationships that reminded me that there was something better out there.
Abuse doesn’t just start the first day you meet someone. It is a gradual, ever changing pattern of events that are rationalized and forgiven until the next time and the next and the next. Until one day, you find yourself so entrenched in the pattern, so emotionally dejected, that by the time you realize you are in a domestic violence situation, you feel powerless to leave. Hopeless.
I wish I could tell you that after that experience, I never again found myself in another abusive relationship. Years later, I would find myself in another pattern of emotional abuse. I recognized it, I excused it. It repeated itself. This time though I reached out to friends and when I did, I was able to get the help I needed to start a path to healing myself and open up to healthier relationships.
It saddens me to think that I wasn’t strong enough to see through the piles of teddy bears and chocolate the second time around. That I didn’t love myself enough to demand respect. That I rationalized again and again for behaviors that were completely unacceptable. Despite these feelings, I know now that I was not responsible for their behaviors and that none of what happened was my fault. Because I reached out for help I didn’t stay as long the last time, recognizing more readily what was happening to me. I left and made a promise to myself that I would never again be in a relationship with anyone who would treat me that way.
If you are in an abusive relationship it is important to know that you are not alone and that the abuse is not your fault. There is a better life waiting for you. One free of suffering.
No one deserves to be abused. Get the help you need and deserve. You are not alone.
National Domestic Violence Hotline 1−800−799−SAFE(7233) or TTY 1−800−787−3224
We’ve had great interest in the My Name Is Project and are waiting with much anticipation for you to submit your survivor video stories in support of this project.
Just gonna stand there and watch me burn
(Wo)Men Speak Out's Blog 