Men Facing and Discharging Perpetrator Distress
From a talk by Tim Jackins at a men’s workshop on the sexual
exploitation of women, in Warwick, New York, USA, March 2019
The purpose of our day together is to figure out how to work on the distresses installed on us that lead to the sexual exploitation of women. It would be nice to have a long time to build a good foundation for this work—and we don’t have it. We’re going to run roughshod over you [go forcefully ahead], because it’s important that we do this work now.
Without enough context, it’s confusing to look at the unaware, oppressive, and harmful role we men have been forced into. We need a chance to look at the context—how hard we tried and how we were defeated by society in our efforts to resist the oppressor role. If we just jump to our current condition, we get a very inaccurate picture. We need to be reminded again and again that our confusions were installed on us. We tried hard. Every human mind tries hard against distress for as long as it can. No human mind gives up easily, ever. And we are in a situation of having been defeated in our efforts.
Part of what we have to face is the defeat itself. That’s a big part of the early work—facing the fact that we got defeated. We gave up on a lot of things—in particular, on getting to use our minds to make things go the way we thought they should. Part of that is looking at the relationships we tried to have with women before the corrosion got in.
We feel like it is worse to have perpetrator material [distress] than victim material. We seem to be guilty. However, we are just as much trapped by perpetrator material. In a real sense nobody is to blame for any of it. We all had no way to avoid it. None of us invited it. None of us chose it. And here we are. It’s ours now. Nobody can undo it except us.
It’s not useful to try to figure out which role in the pattern is the “better one,” the “more honorable one,” or whatever piece is safer to talk about because it will re-stimulate people less. That doesn’t matter. What matters is that we get a chance to look at and discharge whatever piece we carry. And we eventually need to get rid of all the pieces.
I want you to let your mind go to the hard places. I want you to know that in a sense it’s all right that you acted out perpetrator material. You are not to be condemned. You are not lost and damaged forever. You are not untouchable. In whatever form the shame and sadness and disappointment play in your mind, they are all recordings. You get to recover from them.
Until we do this work, it can be hard to be proud of ourselves. We are vulnerable to being restimulated about the mistakes we’ve made. We blame ourselves for them: "I should have been able to . . . ." Well, it’s a mathematical argument. There is always the possibility of not acting out our material. There was a good possibility—once. Five challenges later, it was still possible that we could hold out [resist] all five times. Ten thousand challenges later? Whoops. (laughter) The odds that we would slip are pretty [quite] good.
We can always take on [undertake] a challenge, and we always have a chance to win. That doesn’t mean we always win—but we need to know that we always have a chance. It’s also important that we not condemn ourselves because we haven’t always been able to do it perfectly. Whatever happened, happened. It’s over. It’s done. There's no way to change it. And it doesn’t need to be changed. One thing that does need to be changed is the effect it had on our minds. Changing that is our job with each other.
Our job is to get all of life back. We lose a little aliveness each time we can’t hold our ground [prevail] against our distresses. Whatever happened to you, whatever effect it had on you, whatever got played out [acted out] by you or by those around you—I don’t care about those things. I just want you free of the distresses.
We can’t cover up the oppressor material; it shows. So as we work through this, we get to forgive ourselves for where we haven’t yet been perfect against it. Forgiving ourselves will make a big difference—in our own minds, with each other, and for women who have contact with us.
We are doing this work to get everybody back together. We simply have a particular piece of distress because of the way society aims things at guys.