MHM Magazine

46 | MENTALHEALTHMATTERS | Issue 5 | 2021 MHM When you grow up in a dysfunc- tional home, you don’t really know its dysfunctional until someone shows you. Sadly, you tend to associate with the other children growing up in the same environ- ment, simply because it’s your normal. You can relate to them because they behave and react to situations in similar ways to you. It’s a level of discomfort that is understood amongst peers. Growing up in a middle-class Johannesburg suburb to immigrant parents, who themselves had a rough time during the war in occu- pied Holland, was at times blissful. I can remember one of the last times that I truly felt content and happy to the very core of my being. I was about age five. Other than that, there were sporadic interludes that stick out in my memory as joyous. Things changed from that age onwards in ways I simply did not understand. I became fearful of people. My parents would go out to visit certain friends and I would beg them to please not go. I was a child and in that era, children were seen and not heard, so my pleas were dismissed without further discussion. From a very young age I was taught that my feelings and emotions were not valid, my gut feeling about people was dispelled by none other than my own par- ents. They were of course simply doing their best with the tools they’d been given. Probably the biggest change was in my teen years and everyone wrote it off to adolescence. Some of the jokes used to explain away my erratic behaviours were “well he’s sprouting hairs now” or “yes his moods change as often as his voice does” or the even more crude and inappropriate “his balls are dropping you know” - a clanger my mother would drop when she’d had a few too many. The adults would laugh, and I would retreat into a shell that was becoming more and more calcified, reinforcing that my feelings and emotions were invalid. My first introduction to alcohol was at 13, on a late-night road trip with another dysfunctional friend, Wayne. He was already a seasoned binge drinker. He’d brought along a cheap bottle of whiskey and told me to take a sip. I was keen to show him how tough I was, and took a huge glug of the brown liquid. It hit the back of my throat like a braai coal, slid down my gullet leaving what felt like scorch marks all the way down to my gut. It hit the bottom and began to warm me from the inside out. It was a feeling like none I’d ever had. In that moment I knew, despite the seared oesophagus, that I’d met my new best friend, and thus began my journey to a bottle a day alco- holism. I struggled with the booze, depression and suicidal thoughts into my mid 20’s. It still never struck me that something was wrong. Five suicide attempts and loads of near-death incidents on motor bikes and in car accidents, and it never occurred to me that I had a problem. I had in mind that if I pursued that societal dream and got my- self the wife, the house, two cars a TV and a dog, I would finally be happy. I got those all, yet I was still depressed. Added into the normal feelings of ‘I hate life’ and ‘I don’t want to be alive’, came a new friend, rage. He was an odd bed fellow, making me feel both better and ashamed at the same time, but I needed him, he kept people away from me and stopped them taking advantage of me. Many businesses were started and failed, many jobs that didn’t last because of the perceived dumb bosses, and still I didn’t see any- thing wrong. It was my midlife crisis that saved me. At around 43 I stopped drinking; I remember it was my younger brother’s 40th birthday where I got so bent I embarrassed even myself. That was enough; I couldn’t take the shame. It was relatively easy to stop the act of pouring bottles down my throat, bar (pun intended) the horrible near death feeling in the first three months, but nothing changed, only now I wasn’t only depressed, I had to do it sober. AA didn’t work - nothing seemed to pull me out of the abyss. In 2010 I came home one day to the Oprah Winfrey show playing on TV and my wife said, “You’d better watch this” and promptly marched my daughter and herself out the room. I sat there watching a whole bunch of men talking about me. It was a surreal outer body expe- rience; one I didn’t understand. It was baffling, how could a bunch of men 2000 miles away know me so well. At that point it still hadn’t struck me that I was a victim of sexual abuse. It was only when one of the men at the end of the show said, “If you’re a father, I promise you that you would never hurt your children or do something bad to them, you’re a good father despite the fact that you were a victim of sexual abuse.” BAM. I began to cry and in that one- hour show, began the best healing process I’d ever experienced in my life. It was painful. I regained su- THE STORY OF MATRIXMEN FOUNDER AND MALE SURVIVORS OF SEXUAL ABUSE By Martin Pelders LIVING WITH...