Don’t Compare Hells

Years ago, I found myself living in Dayton, Ohio. It was during what I call my ‘Highway to Heaven’ years. Those were the years I spent moving around the country for about a year, trying to learn how to be better. (Highway to Heaven was a television show from the 80’s for those of you born this century, and those of you with actual lives.) The original show was about a ‘probationary angel sent back to Earth’.

Anyway, it was about this guy going around doing good deeds in order to earn his place in heaven. You know that old chestnut. Having come from the childhood I’d come from, moving around and learning, was the only way that I could keep from committing suicide. For those of you coming from dissimilar backgrounds, it was one filled with physical abuse, like being beaten with extension cords, hammers, irons and the like, to rapes, to being constantly belittled, and told that I was gay, and therefore had even less reason to live according to my family. This actually got marginally better after I was sold to my great-grandparents.

During these years, as I began to interact with others who were not as broken as my family or I, I began to slowly, and I mean over years, very slowly understand that even though I had been lucky enough to have died when I was 4, and even luckier to have been directly told my purpose, there was still a lot of damage done. Even though I swore I would never be like my for-fathers, there were thousands of things that I had no way of knowing were wrong. Because for me they were normal. For instance, I don’t believe in singular monogamous relationships. I saw my mother, who had ‘done what she had to do to survive’, as she put it, and my many ‘uncles’, some of whom I met briefly, once, for about an hour or two, and never saw again. Some of whom touched me, or made me touch them, only to be followed by a new uncle. While my father took me with him ‘fishing’. Which meant over to one of his girlfriends’ houses. These were Aunt Patrice, or Aunt whatever. I didn’t understand why people just didn’t say that they wanted other people at the beginning. When I broached the subject with the adults in my life, they would call me faggot, or stupid, and usually either beat me, or end up sexually abusing me. Even as I entered relationships, I thought it was weird that none of them would initiate sex without either my being asleep, or without either of us being angry. I literally had a girlfriend explain to me, much more patient than I ever had a right to expect, that we didn’t have actually have to fight before sex. It took me quite some time to get that through my muck. After several such relationships, I decided that I needed to travel. During that time, I learned a lot of valuable lessons. One of those was when, as I said, I lived in Dayton, Ohio, and was roommates with a really great guy I’ll call Mick. One night, as we sat in our duplex, having some beers, Mick told me about the time that his mother had abused him. It was during their nightly dinner, during which, Mick had said from his perch on teenage angst mountain, that his mother found frustrating.

So, she threw a fork at him.

She didn’t hit him, but the fact that she’d thrown it, directly at him, had hurt his feelings beyond measure. I watched as the tears welled up in his eyes, as he described crying over the course of the next two hours. His father, had actually taken him to the store in order to try to talk to him and calm him down, Micky began to cry as he explained to me that the thought that his mother, even though she had not hit him, had for the first time in his life, tried to hurt him. I laughed. Not because I thought it was funny, but because I couldn’t believe that such a simple act had had such an effect. She’d just thrown a fork offhandedly. My mother…

And there it is. There is where many of us go off the rails. What I learned that night with my friend was that what he was sharing was his personal hell. It didn’t matter at that moment what anyone else’s experience was, because it’s not a contest. When someone shares something that is meaningful to them, I constantly hear the first words out of people’s mouths. It’s almost always “Well, I” … It almost immediately becomes about the other person. In the case of Mick, compounding his own feelings of hurt, and betrayal of trust, by having someone else betray that trust.

Now, some years later, I have a rule about such things. Every one of my clients build their own personal list of protocols. Protocols are the rules by which you govern your interactions with yourself and with the people around you. Especially, around those whom you say you care about or love. (If you’ve been in an event with me, either for personal coaching, or professional training, you’re already aware. If you know, you know).

One of the points of this blog, and of my personal coaching is to use the experiences of each individual in order to put into place guides for how they will respond in most situations.

These protocols change with each person, but most are similar. If you’d like to, I’d like for you to take a journey with me as I explain each of my protocols starting with this one:

Don’t compare hells.