Arts
Real Voices, Real Recovery, Real Hope for Men Survivng Sexual Abuse
Leaping Upon the Mountains:
Men Proclaiming Victory Over Sexual Child Abuse
by Mike Lew, Small Wonder Books
by Christopher Kaufman
Almost two months ago, the editor of Out in the Mountains asked if I would be interested in reviewing Leaping Upon the Mountains, Mike Lew’s follow-up to his seminal work Victims No Longer, for many years the only accessible book available to male survivors of childhood sexual abuse. I blithely threw out a “Sure, I’d be happy to review it” answer, knowing that the book was already on my shelf at home, ready for me to crack the spine. It had been sitting there since I bought my copy from Mike at a survivors’ weekend over a year before.
And there it had sat for over a year, on my bookshelf, next to my bed, looking forlorn, gathering deeply symbolic dust and waiting for me to brave the deep emotional waters it promised. And then my editor started calling, wanting to know whether she needed to replace my review on the publication schedule with something else, and I said, “I’m doing it, no problem – any day now, I’ll turn it in.” So I found myself, on the night before the deadline, going for a marathon reading session and writing the review the day of the deadline. I’m glad I have an editor that knows how to crack a whip, even as I sit here on the edge of tears, filled with the sadness of these men’s stories and overjoyed with their victory over their abusers.
Now, I tell this story not to demonstrate that I’m a champion procrastinator, but rather to note that reading a Mike Lew book is not a task to be lightly undertaken. It’s hard reading. It requires a strong commitment to conscious emotional work. When I found Victims No Longer in a remainder pile, I bought it blindly without really understanding the journey I was about to begin. I had never told anyone the full story of my own childhood abuse. I had no idea how deeply the hurt and pain caused by my abuse had affected my life, my ability to form healthy relationships, and my relationship to abusers of power. I credit Victims No Longer, along with an amazingly supportive partner and a champion therapist, with turning my life around and bringing me to a new, and healthy, understanding of my body, my sexuality and my community.
It took me almost two years to read Victims No Longer, but I plowed through Leaping Upon the Mountains in two nights. It’s a shorter work and it’s fully dedicated to survivors’ own stories of recovery. Unlike Victims No Longer, it’s not a clinical self-help guide to the process of recovery but rather a series of writings by male survivors on their own experience of recovery. Mike has created a vehicle for men to talk about what they did in their healing work; he allows the men’s voices to drive the work, and he does not analyze their words or try to fit them into a dry clinical modality. In so doing, Mike has supported our ability to understand boy victims of sexual abuse as real people, with a deeply human instinct for survival. We get to see the men who have contributed to this book as our friends, neighbors, co-workers, spouses and lovers. We come to understand that They are Us. We are Them.
With the Catholic Church sexual abuse scandal overwhelming the airwaves, it’s easy to forget that survivors of childhood sexual abuse are normal people who live in our communities, our neighborhoods and our homes. Boy victims of sexual abuse have never before received as much attention as they have in the last several months. It’s easy to start seeing the sexual abuse scandal, as depicted in the media, as a caricature or a parody.
With each news story of another fallen priest and another bishop in denial, the scandal starts to feel like an overwrought movie-of-the-week. We start to cheer each new revelation as growing evidence that an oppressive institution is crumbling. Some of us may forget that each revelation has a child or two children, or a dozen, or a hundred children attached to it. These children are real children – they grow up to be adolescents and men who are fundamentally confused about the relationship between sex and power.
Mike Lew’s writings bring us back to earth and show us the concrete work that male survivors are doing in their quest for recovery. With the help of the men whose writing he includes, we come out of the quagmire of litigious scandal and recognize that what is most vital in recovery is knowledge, understanding, communication, healthy touch, real connection, empathy, grieving, the ability to feel and the ability to love.
For Leaping Upon the Mountains, Mike Lew conducted written interviews with hundreds of survivors in every state, the District of Columbia, all ten Canadian Provinces and 44 other countries. He also used material gathered at survivor workshops and retreats that he conducts all over the U.S. and around the world. Much of the content focuses on making the recovery process accessible to male survivors no matter where they are in their healing. Men who are sexually abused, like other victims of abuse, are often made to feel isolated and ashamed of the violence perpetrated upon them. In Leaping, Mike Lew gives us a diversity of voices, some more eloquent the others, some seemingly banal. All of them are real and provide an opportunity for someone, somewhere to say to himself, “Yes, I felt that way. That person is like me. I’m not alone. I, too, can heal. I can release myself from the hold of abusers of power.”
While Mike’s Lew’s book gives us real voices, he does not shy away from noting the difficulties many men face in overcoming the lasting effects of their perpetrators’ actions. Leaping Upon Mountains contains voices of black men, crying out for solidarity with white survivors who hold onto myths about black sexual prowess and early sexual maturity. It contains stories of straight men who are so ashamed of their reflexive arousal at the hands of same-gender perpetrators that they can hardly speak to their gay comrades in survival.
Mike notes that, even today, well over ten years after its publication, Victims No Longer is still one of the few books available to male survivors – and virtually all mainstream publishers refused to publish Leaping Upon the Mountains. Counseling services sensitive to the needs of non-offending male survivors remain few and far between. To my knowledge, there are virtually no male survivor group services available in Vermont.
And yet, for all of the deafening silence that previously engulfed boy victims and the media sensationalism over clerical perpetrators that currently overwhelms the real needs of survivors, Mike Lew’s work offers love and hope. The stories of the men that he includes in Leaping Upon the Mountains demonstrate that a strong community of male survivors is available to support us, and to our brothers, sons, nephews, fathers, uncles and lovers.
“With each day I feel the burden lifting. / The burden of my secret. / Now I can tell my story. / Now I can let go of all the shame. / Now I can let go of the deep,
Deep,
Deep,
Deep
entrenched fear of being myself.”
– Excerpted from a poem entitled “Repressed Memories” by John, age 38, from Alaska, published in Leaping Upon the Mountains by Mike Lew.
Mike Lew can be reached at Next Step Counseling and Training, 40 Webster Place, Brookline, MA 02146, Telephone: (617) 277-7172 or at nextstep@jamaicaplain.com. Christopher Kaufman is the Executive Director of R.U.1.2? Community Center. He can be reached at pippin@sover.net