Anybody ever seen the “Frasier” Crane show?

I’d never watched it.

I’d been healing from a traumatic sexual trauma. I was molested as a kid. Not that I didn’t watch tv growing up, it’s just that I’d never seen the show until I got sick from my trauma.

I started teaching at a school, right after the pandemic. Gutsy move, but I needed the money. I love kids with the 💕 emoji, but the rigors of school against the expression of youth is a hard task even for a task master. But I started teaching to begin a community project to heal poor and Black communities, and I needed the discipline. But research from Black narratives of the Great Migration and the rigors from work triggered trauma from my childhood. I got overwhelmed and couldn’t finish my residency.

It kinda bummed me out.

In my bummy state I binged on 90s tv shows, caught up on my cartoons and prayed a lot.

One of the shows I binged was Frasier Crane’s “Frasier.” It’s a really good show if you haven’t seen it. Definitely a mature show. They talk a lot about counseling, therapy and mental health. It helped me sort through some really heavy stuff during a really dark time. Stuff I wasn’t really comfortable talking about with other people.

There’s this episode where his Dad confessed he had trouble saying “I love you.” Marty, Frasier’s dad, retired from being a cop after being shot on duty. He’s a man’s man born in a World War II generation. So psychology is not Marty’s thing. In the episode Frasier tries to get Marty to open up about his experiences, and to better understand why it’s so tough for his father to say “I love you.” Anyway, they talk about trauma from losing Marty’s wife. It reminded me of past relations that were broken because I hadn’t healed from being abused. It made me think about how being coerced into sex helped to develop trust issues, and become guarded. How that broke down communication and ended relationships. It made me really think about my sexual motives. How I expressed frustration, anger and fear. It also made me think about my sexual drive and how it I had started substituting joy for sex.

Aren’t You Joseph’s Son

There’s no way to prepare you for what happens to you when you lose your innocence at a young age.

I tried my best to describe the feeling, but if I’m honest words can’t express the anger, the hurt, the pain and frustration I feel from being robbed of the joy of being a kid.

It changed me.

I don’t know if you’ve ever been taken advantage of before, but it makes you second guess yourself. It makes you question whether you can trust the decisions you make - whether you can trust other people.

Being molested did that to me.

At an early age.

At first, I didn’t think too much about it. But as time grew and I became aware of my sexual urges and the nature of sex, it began to bother me. Memories of harmful and confusing moments became embedded into my mind.

I thought I was naive for being taken advantage of that way and I hated myself for it.

I felt dirty in a way I couldn’t rub-off.

I remember writing about it as a kid, describing it as monster growing inside me. It wasn’t until I became an adult that I was able to name the monster as shameful feelings and thoughts of guilt. Up until then, I’d repressed most of my memories. The monster was my unconscious representation of the hurt I felt from not being able to protect myself.

It was overwhelming.

Recovering From Pain

Even though it wasn’t my fault, I felt that people could see through me and were judging me for not saying no. In all honesty, I didn’t even know anything about sex and was tricked into it. For a long time I wrestled with the thought that I ‘wanted it’. I became overly self-conscious that whatever it was about me that attracted the abuse would cause me to be taken advantage of again.

It was hard to talk about, even in therapy.

It made romantic relationships difficult. For the longest of time I had to publicly contend with questions about my sexuality; while privately tend to the resentment I carried from my first sexual experience. I had trouble reconciling the two and was growing frustrated with the experience. It made intimacy with friends difficult and maintaining a healthy sex life nearly impossible.

I was tired of coping.

Outwardly I was successful. I had a lot of things going for me. But inwardly, I was falling apart. More and more, I was dealing with harmful thoughts that were sabotaging my life. I was growing angry with general attitudes towards men around sex. It was hard to reconcile my experience with dominant perception. And I was struggling to finding a space to honestly deal with a common problem.

Finally, I made resolve to organize an effort to engage solutions to that problem. But that resolve swept me on a journey to discover the broken pieces of my life and begin healing from them. It brought me face to face with the monster, those sabotaging emotions, that I carried with me. It’s helped me to better understand scripture and purpose over my life. It’s also given me a better definition of mental health.

I’m still recovering.

I’m not sure if memories from my abuse will ever stop haunting me. Writing about it helps. I’m not sure what my life looks like going forward but it feels better being open about my experience.

Here is a work in progress.

I’ve been writing about recovering from trauma. I was molested as a kid, and have been on a journey to recover from that. Part of what I’ve been sharing is that painful emotions are agreements with past trauma. But that’s a bit topical, and only deals with coping with harmful experiences. How do we begin disagreeing with the environments that produce these experiences?

This is how Jesus starts his ministry.

Jesus is at the edge of the wilderness. Something happens that triggers a painful childhood memory and he begins to wrestle with the decision to continue coping with adversity or begin changing the circumstances that lead to adversity.

It’s humanity’s quagmire, or the ‘curse’.

Jesus eventually leaves the wilderness and begins a gospel called the Beatitudes. It’s a call for repentance from painful decisions that cultivate our environment.

The memory Jesus deals with has to do with his relationship with his parents. Reminiscent of the garden, Jesus is wrestling with the seed of conflict promised to drive a wedge between man and woman.

Jesus begins awakening to the reality of that conflict and is forced to deal with the underlying emotions that gird his environment. The story shows us that through his own experience, Jesus becomes aware of how subversive those emotions are. St Luke tells us that Jesus’ monster, the devil, begins to taunt him about what he’ll eat, where he’ll stay and how he’ll make money if chooses to change his environment.

It’s a subversive attack used to incite fear in order to perpetuate the business of harm underlying our day to day interaction. In Jesus’ case, it brought him back to a shameful childhood memory of him preaching in the temple. For many of us, it brings us back to moments where we made critical decisions that altered our lives. And to difficult memories of hard experiences that drove us to those moments.

Jesus’ story shows us how decisions made well before our time impact us today. It emphasizes the importance of being able to mature in a healthy environment, away from the harms and abuses we experience today. It shows us how being ready for mature relationships, and the experiences that they bring, is important in removing those harms from our lives. It also shows us how the business of our day should be about tending to our environment.

In a separate series, I write about the Great Migration. The largest internal movement in the history of our country. The forces that drove migrants were similar to those Jesus wrestles with in the wilderness. The migrants suffered horrible atrocities. My grandfather (Joseph Martin) moved to Buffalo, NY from Little Rock, AR. He and his wife and their family packed-up and moved thousands of miles away from their family and friends to help my great grandfather run a boarding house.