The Anarchic* Psyche of Michael A Leavy

Warning: contains references to child sexual abuse.

We mentioned in the introductory post that we’re blogging mostly because we are writing a book and are informed by all of the best sources that we need a platform to make the book more saleable, and thus more appealing to publishers. This blog is part of our desperate attempt to build one.

Not that we haven’t wanted to blog for a long time, but this post is not where we’ll talk about that. Today we want to talk about one of the key challenges of writing the book, and one of the things that is stalling us in our efforts to seek out an agent. It is a challenge that is perhaps particular to the particular sort of book we have written, which is to say, a book about overcoming shame.

Not a Monster, our book, has three main threads running through it, as described in this passage from the book, written by some of the characters in my Inner Landscape:

* Li’l Honey: There’s the one that everyone wants to read, the story of recovery from horrifying childhood sexual abuse and a certain amount of psychological abuse, heart-breaking and funny in equal amounts.

            * Lilith: And then there’s the one about our Inner Landscape practice which is really helpful and seems to be affecting how our earliest readers see themselves, so that could be very important, too.

            * 17 yo: But then there’s the one that’s so embarrassing to you, and that a lot of us are really bugging you to write, and that will probably upset most of the people who enjoy the other two streams…

            * Law: But that’s the one that we have to include, because: A) it would be dishonest not to; B) our story would be incomplete without it; and C) there are people who need to read it because they have struggled with something like it, and if we allow ourselves to be ashamed to write it, we allow them to continue to be ashamed to have lived it, and that’s just wrong.

            * An Imaginarian: ‘zactly: Who but I will smash the taboo that surrounds the volcanic eruption of the hand?

            * Killer: The fuck?

            * Imaginarian: Best I could do.

            * K: I would have preferred a shooting metaphor, but then you all know that.

            * Dragon: Back to the subject at hand: [groans all around] we need to address the links between abuse, masturbation, bdsm in general and edging in particular, and how we used them (initially) to cope and (eventually) to transform. More particularly, we need to explore, for ourselves, the relationship of embarrassment to recovery, of making that transformation of the sexual to the spiritual which is at the heart of (apparently) numerous older sacred traditions.

            * Lilith: Or is it the recognition that the sexual is spiritual, which is so often lost?

            * Law: Either way.

I’ve been working on this post for 5 days, long enough that WordPress felt the need to shoot me an email headed, “Oops, did you forget to publish your post?” Nope – we just get tongue-tied talking about masturbation, just like my 17-year-old up there who described the effect, but not the topic, of the book’s third “stream.” (By the way, the “you” he addresses is “me” – the part of the personality that, for instance, writers like John Bradshaw or Nicole LePera address when they write about healing yourself.)

I’m still stalling, aren’t I?

Well, if you’ve read blogs or watched YouTube videos or listened to podcasts or accessed whatever media about masturbation, you will have discovered that both the act of masturbating and the discussion thereof are taboo. And that’s for people in general. If you start with the generalized cultural shame that gets described in such media, plus one or another particular religious forms (I got a Catholic school version, Irish variant), plus a family-specific version (the family disease of alcoholism and my mother’s specialized horror of the physical world arising from her history of illness), then toss in the unfortunate things your father did to you with his, and to your, penis… two things, perhaps, result:

The truth becomes taboo; masturbation becomes the master signifier of all things true.

One thing about growing up in a household where you’re taught to keep secrets and to tell lies, is that once you start to tell the truth you don’t know when to stop. Too much information, as they say. Once my Inner Children and the rest of the denizens of my Inner Landscape (and I shouldn’t wonder if you haven’t spent the last few paragraphs wishing I’d shut up about masturbation and tell you more about them – at least you have a better sense of why I toggle between “I” and “we” so willfully) – as I say, once we committed to talking about our addiction to masturbation there was still the struggle to know just how much to say. Admit it and be done with it? Give it context? Designate it’s effects? Connect it to our bdsm practices? (Kind of wanted to downplay all of that, too, but…) And what to say about how I eventually used it in my recovery? That was crucial, but it, um, takes some details to make sense. And then, when I converted it into a spiritual practice? Even more details! (Not to mention that I remain, at times, deeply embarrassed about having become spiritual at all, after a lifetime of skepticism.)

And that was all while writing the first draft. Which, over all, I like a lot; but while working on revisions, I keep thinking: maybe I should cut all that stuff out… As I say somewhere in the book, the mind has a mind of it’s own, and it’ll bite you in the ass.