First, I want to make it clear that I was not physically abused. The abuse I dealt with was mental and emotional.
Second, I want to state plainly that I am not a psychologist nor do I have a formal education in the fields of abuse, interpersonal relationships, psychology, or therapy. I am writing based solely on my personal experience. If you feel you need professional help with any abuse or trauma you have faced or are facing now, please seek that professional help according to your own needs and preferences.
Now, let’s do one of the most important things the abused can do:
Let’s talk about it.
That’s hard, isn’t it? After writing the line above I have stared blankly at this screen for several minutes, afraid to move forward. For me, that fear to move forward is the fear to be labeled The Victim. I do not mean “the person who was abused.” I mean The Victim as heartlessly defined by society.
Society tells us several things about The Victim:
The Victim is to blame for their abuse.
The Victim needed the abuser’s strong hand.
The Victim is a lazy, worthless person who just wants to blame someone else for their behavior.
The Victim is lying, over-dramatizing, play-acting, imagining things.
It is all “in their head.”
Society, come here in a minute. Lean in, I really need you to hear this.
You.
Are.
Wrong.
You are worse than wrong: you are an agent of the abuser. You do their dirty work. You carry out the abuser’s highest aim: to keep the abused quiet. To shut them up. In any group of people, whether it is a family, a group of friends, a work environment, there is only one person the “tribe” despises more than the abuser. They despise the abused who tells the truth. They despise the person who rocks the boat by pointing out the boat has some rather awful stuff in it.
Fuck that shit. Fuck it. Fuck your coddling of abusers, no matter who they are. Fuck your excuses for them. Fuck your elevating of them to positions of respect and power. Fuck your “keeping the peace.” The abused know what keeping the peace actually means. It means don’t upset the status quo. Well guess what, sweetheart, the status quo is me suffering mentally and emotionally from the abuser. The status quo is the abuser getting their way and the abused getting no help or relief at all.
Keeping the peace leaves the abused three options at best. He can continue to take part in the charade and sit across the table from the abuser at gatherings of the tribe, pretending everything is “fine.” He can leave the tribe altogether, severing relationships with not only the abuser but also the rest of the tribe members. Or he can try to navigate a middle ground. He can try to have relationships with the rest of the tribe while shutting the abuser out of his life.
This last option is the path I have taken. Now that I am on it, I cannot imagine making any other choice. And yet, I must say, this path is exhausting - a mental and emotional challenge all its own.
Any gathering of the tribe that includes the abuser forces me to choose between the first two options laid out above: either I forgo the gathering altogether or I take part in the charade and sit across the table or the room from the abuser and pretend, for the sake of politeness to the host, that nothing is amiss. I pretend I am fully being myself and being present, but I know that in the presence of the abuser I am being neither. I pretend it does not bother me when visitors or tangential members of the tribe who do not know the history speak to me or the abuser as if our relationship is whole and healthy. I pretend I don’t think that other members of the tribe who do know the history are absolute fools for letting their children have a relationship with my abuser. They have their reasons and they have their rationalizations, but what they either don’t understand or are choosing to ignore is this: a viper is a viper is a viper. The hate that lives in that person, the hate from which I suffered, still lives in them fully alive, and any time the hate comes out any impressionable person in the vicinity can be harmed by it.
Members of the tribe still speak to me about the abuser as if our relationship is normal, even though they know that is grossly false. Members of the tribe pretend my suffering never happened, or maybe they don’t accept that it did or the degree to which it did. Whichever it is makes no difference to me. Acting as though it never happened, never talking about it, never seeking to understand, all translate to this: you are more afraid of losing the status quo than you are of losing me.
I have never once in my 37 years seen another member of the tribe defend me against the abuser. I am aware there have been occasional conversations, mostly theoretical and philosophical in nature, at which members of the tribe have told the abuser their views in support of me. But I have never been witness to those conversations, and when the tribe gathers again I have never seen any change in the tribe’s or the abuser’s behavior. I have never, not once, seen a member of the tribe stand up to the abuser right in front of me and speak the truth of what I’ve dealt with. To any reader who reads that and thinks oh how awful, I beg you - no, actually beg you - to pause and reflect on your own tribes and your own behavior. I will not say it is likely you are doing the same to someone in your tribe, but it is not unlikely.
You may have noticed up to this point I have not described the abuse. That was not an oversight on my part. Everything you have read above can be true of any abused person. It doesn’t matter what the abuse was or who perpetrated it. I want anyone who has been abused to be able to read that and see they are not crazy and they are not alone. I want anyone who has a connection to someone who has been abused to have a glimpse of the shit we deal with that is not even the abuse itself but its ripples and effects on our lives even after the abuse has “technically” ended.
I will explain what I went through, but the reader must be informed that I am under no obligation to explain it. I lived it, I still feel its ripples, I know it is real. I discuss it here not to prove anything to anyone or even to be seen or heard for my own sake. I discuss it here because I know without a doubt others are suffering this same abuse even as I type it. They may never read this. But you are. And you might know them. Or you might know someone like my abuser. So let’s do one of the most important things we can do:
Let’s talk about it.
I am a member of the LGBTQ+ community. I am a gay man. I have been since birth. And since birth, or at least since full consciousness, it was made clear to me by a member of my wider family tribe that members of the LGBTQ+ community are not worthy of being alive.
I refuse to operate with the same hate my abuser perpetrates, so I will not name or identify my abuser. I wish my abuser a long and happy life, but I do not want to be a part of their life nor do I want them to be a part of mine. I will call my abuser Morgan and refer to Morgan as ‘they.’ This gender ambiguity is a further measure to not share their identity. If for some reason Morgan’s identity were to ever be discovered, I ask that they be left alone and given the same grace and tolerance that all individuals deserve.
Morgan made my mental and emotional development difficult at best and a living hell at worst. Morgan’s words of judgment and hate, frequent and passionate, made me think I was not worthy of being alive.
Morgan is a deeply religious person. Religion and faith can be immeasurably beautiful pillars in a person’s life, but they are only beautiful to the people around the religious individual if they are centered in love. Morgan will claim their interpretation of their religion is the most loving force in the world. If that is true, and it is not, then the definition of love has been twisted and poisoned to mean all people are worthy of love if they would just conform themselves to the mold of what Morgan says is a good person.
I will not dwell on religion here, because it is not the point. The actions of individuals is the point. Just know that Morgan would claim any judgment or harsh words they spoke against the LGBTQ+ community were not just their opinion but also the opinion of God Himself. Morgan’s depth of belief in this dark side of their religion is such that they believe homosexuality is not real. They believe it is a choice brought about by the devil.
Morgan is not a gay man. I am a gay man. Morgan is not a giraffe. That giraffe over there is a giraffe. Which of the two do you think actually knows for a fact that the giraffe did not choose to be a giraffe? Let us be done with this question of whether members of the LGBTQ+ community choose to be as they are. We do not. We are born this way. With all the hell that people who believe otherwise put us through, I ask you, why the FUCK would we choose it? I am a male who is attracted to males because I was born a male who is attracted to males. To insist that I be anything contrary to that is to ask me to live an empty life - a life without love, without intimate touch, and without true affection, let alone a life in which I am only a fraction of my true self. As silly as my example of the giraffe is, I promise you it truly is that simple.
I know no other way to communicate the mental and emotional abuse Morgan put me through than to share some episodes of how it manifested.
As early as my elementary school years, Morgan would comment on how disgusting or worthy of ridicule gay people were. No one in my family tribe outwardly disputed this or contradicted Morgan’s words. Sometimes they went along with it. I recall eating in a McDonald’s once at a very young age just after me and a group of relatives had visited relatives who were in their second marriage. The ex-wife of our relative’s new husband was now married to a woman. We never met that woman or her wife. Yet several comments and jokes were made about them while eating in the McDonald’s. I will make up their names, but I know one started with an M and one with a P, so we’ll say Mary and Paula. Mary had a child from her first marriage. So the joke at the table was to wonder aloud if they go by Mama Mary and Papa Paula. There was much laughter at the table.
At the time, I didn’t know I myself was gay. Society assumes everyone is heterosexual, so all gay kids grow up assuming they are too until they eventually understand they are not. This understanding can arrive at any age. For me it was fifteen, but some gay people understand it as early as preschool.
So sitting there in that McDonald’s, hearing my family laugh at gay people, I did not understand that I was like the people they were laughing at. But I did understand what they were laughing about, and I understood both that it made me uncomfortable and that for my own protection as a member of the tribe I needed to go along with it. This is because even before gay kids fully understand and accept they are gay, we often have a spidey-sense of sorts that we are different. We may not know how we are different, but we can sense that the world around us does not necessarily reflect who we are inside. Or at least I could sense it. And because of it, I never forgot that time in that McDonald’s. I never forgot the words or the laughter. And I never forgot how it made me feel: like an outsider in my own family. In many ways, that feeling has never gone away. Some hurts can never be fully healed.
Please understand that is only one example. It is one that stands out distinctly in my memory. Negative comments and jokes about gay people were as common when I was growing up as comments about politics or world events.
This is why I cannot comprehend Morgan being a part of any child’s life. Children listen, even when we think they are not. And they understand everything. One unkind joke, one cruel statement out of Morgan’s mouth, and the harm it could cause that listening, comprehending child could be irreversible. The child doesn’t even have to be gay. Children hear hate. They understand it. Then they either imitate it or come to assume it is acceptable. And Morgan’s attitudes are not restricted to gay people. They are available for any “other” who doesn’t fit their idea of what a person should be.
Once I understood that I was gay, I stayed in the closet for a long time. My coming out was slow, gradual, a person-to-person basis for several years. And all the while, just as before but now I understood the words applied to me, I heard Morgan’s frequent verbal attacks on the gay community. I will offer a sampling, but understand this is a drop in the bucket.
Gay people would all go to Hell.
Gay people were disgusting. On more than one occasion, if Morgan were part of a conversation in which others mentioned having seen a gay couple out in public, Morgan would dramatically fake a gagging noise as if they were about to throw up.
I remember a gay man being a contestant on Wheel of Fortune. The contestant mentioned his husband as part of his introduction on the show. Morgan commented about the host Pat Sajak’s ability to interact normally with “people like that.”
Every now and then, because I was a teenager and was discovering and exploring my political and moral identity, I would end up in philosophical conversations with Morgan. We would sometimes talk about homosexuality in a theoretical tone. Looking back I realize how bold that was to engage in these chats. Now I see it as further proof that I was always fighting, I was always striving to survive.
One such conversation stands out to me the most. Morgan was explaining to me why gay people were unnatural. “They can’t procreate. If you lock them all up in one place, they would die out because they can’t have babies.” Presumably you are reading this as an intelligent adult, so please set aside for a moment the inclination to laugh at that logic. Try to see it instead through the eyes of a, at the oldest, 17-year-old closeted gay boy whose relative just said this to him. It was in that moment that I first truly understood Morgan’s opinions were not just inhumane and cruel, they were dangerous. I heard “lock them up and they’ll die out,” and I instantly understood that it was a genocidal sentiment. I am not saying that is how Morgan intended it in that moment. But to this day I do not doubt that if a leader declared all gay people need to be locked up for the good of society, Morgan would agree and act accordingly with their vote and their dollars.
All of this leaves out Morgan’s other personality traits that impacted me mentally and emotionally: emotional neglect and a selfishness few who know them would believe they possess. All wrapped up in an honest, folksy demeanor that would make anyone who met Morgan think they are the nicest person in all the world. There is truth to that niceness; it’s not fake. But it is misleading. It hides the judgment, the holier-than-thou, the hate that I and others like me are the targets of.
This duality also messed with my emotions. If friends and other relatives spoke praise about Morgan, I struggled to hold back from wanting to say, “Morgan is the most hateful, selfish person I know. Do you not see that?” I am sure I did say this on some occasions, but I think it was only to other people my age - people too young to get it unless they dealt with a similar person in their own lives. Hearing people speak Morgan’s praises made me question my own sanity, made me struggle to love myself because if Morgan was so loved and spoke so horribly about people like me then maybe I was wrong. Maybe I wasn’t worthy of love. Maybe I wasn’t worthy of life.
It is a blessing in my life that the abused can see the abused, and by the grace of the cosmos I was gifted a friendship in first grade that saved my life and is saving it still. That friendship and good times with other relatives, in other words anything that suggested to me I was worthy of life and of being loved, saved me from Morgan. My Grandma was one of those relatives. When I was still in the closet, she and one other person were the only relatives I ever heard say positive, accepting things about gay people. Those little affirming comments, whether from relatives or family friends or teachers or celebrities, those were required ingredients in the recipe that kept me from harming myself. Remember that the next time you’re around children and comments of ridicule or hate arise. Remember that when people threaten to ban books. Remember that when you’re sitting in church. Remember that when governments threaten to ban certain topics in school. You and your voice may be all that saves a child in your family or your community.
Other gay people reading this have probably already been nodding their heads and finding themselves back in their memories that mirror mine. But for any of you who have not lived it, please try to understand what I am saying to you. I spent all of my formative years questioning whether I was worthy of life or of love. Some days, I more than questioned it: I assumed I was not. Yes, society as a whole made me question it, but in Morgan I had a proverbial intravenous needle that fed that hate directly into my veins.
As I got older and increasingly came out of the closet and began to live my life authentically, I slowed the flow of that IV. But it never stopped altogether. My foundation was poorly built. And I did what I could to build a life on top of it.
Morgan found out I was gay when I was eighteen. Not from me. Someone I told then told Morgan. At the time, that bothered me. That quickly turned to mild relief that the matter was done and that I didn’t have to be the one to do it. I had assumed Morgan would dismiss me from their life. They did not. I wish they had.
If they had disowned me, there would have been an end to the falsity of our relationship. The core of that relationship was not love. I would argue it was never even tolerance. If they had disowned me I would not have suffered through two decades of having to sit across the table from my abuser.
You see, upon learning that I was gay, none of Morgan’s attitudes changed. They may have become more quiet about it, but I always understood the opinions were the same. The hate was the same. And now I existed in the same space as that hate as a known target of it. Even if it wasn’t spoken, I knew how Morgan felt. And I am sure there are many who would say I should be content that Morgan holds their tongue around me. To that I say, if someone hurt you so deeply as to think you should be dead, even if they stop saying the things that made you feel that way, would you want to be around them? Would you want to share a meal with them? It is one thing to be around a stranger or a neighbor who thinks your life is immoral, but to be around someone who has been a part of your life since birth and thinks your life is immoral? That’s not sustainable. I know, I’ve tried. I did it for twenty years, in fact. Twenty years of family gatherings always being covered in shadow. Twenty years of questioning how much other relatives did or did not care about me all because of Morgan’s presence in our shared lives. No, present silence does not cure past words.
A few years ago I slowed the flow of the IV of hate more than I ever had previously. In 2021, roughly nine months after my first battle with cancer, I decided to have an honest conversation with Morgan. I was getting married to the man I love the following year, and I wanted to figure out how to handle Morgan when it came to the wedding. The honest conversation confirmed, out loud, that Morgan’s attitudes about gay people, about me, were the same they had always been. For the first time, I told Morgan to their face that their hateful words about gay people when I was growing up made me think I wasn’t worthy of being alive. Morgan insisted that was all in my head. And then Morgan proceeded to say the same hateful shit they had said all my life. Morgan complained out loud to me about how society tells people that being gay is acceptable. They gave the example of the Disney company, during their holiday TV special, gifting two gay dads and their kids a trip to Walt Disney World. “Of all the people in the world,” said Morgan, “why would you give it to people like that?” “People like that?” I replied. “You’re talking about ME! You’re talking about me and my husband-to-be and our family if we ever choose to have kids. Do you GET that? Do you get that you’re talking about me?” Morgan did not get that they were talking about me, because Morgan insists being gay is not real. Morgan pointed to something gray and said, “This is gray. That’s just a fact. You can say anything you want to me, that’s not going to change the fact that this here is gray. It’s the same about being gay, it’s just a fact that it isn’t real.”
In that conversation, more than once, Morgan insisted that they love me. I know what Morgan means. They mean they love the “correct” me. They love the me they imagine will someday admit I am not gay, because gay isn’t a real thing. If that is love, I’d hate to meet someone who says they hate me.
In that conversation, I asked Morgan why I would want someone in my life who feels that way about me. All I got was further insistence that being gay isn’t real, it’s wrong.
I told Morgan, a relative, they are the reason I had thoughts of suicide when I was young. And that relative’s response was not remorse, was not apology; it was to tell me I had imagined it and then to double down on the messages of hate that had made me have thoughts of suicide to begin with. Morgan even offered me a book on the subject right in the midst of the conversation, a book they just happened to have in hand’s reach, a book to help me “see the truth.”
I’ve seen the truth my whole life. The real truth. And thank God. Or else I’d have been dead before I graduated high school.
Needless to say, Morgan did not wish to attend my wedding and I did not wish to have them there. They were not invited. Close friends were told to escort them out if they had shown up. They did not show up, as I knew they would not. Several months after my wedding, I started to hear the stories of relatives discussing at my wedding the fact that Morgan was not there. There was shock, there was disgust. I am grateful I was not pulled into these discussions on my wedding day. But I do wish I could have responded to the shock and the disgust. “Now you see who Morgan really is.”
A couple months after my wedding, about a year after that honest conversation with Morgan, my cancer came back. Up to this point, I had changed nothing about my relationship with Morgan. I still saw them at family gatherings and engaged with them in empty conversation just as I had for the previous twenty years. I still received the occasional text message from them.
Then, a week or two before I was to start chemo again, I received a text message from Morgan saying they heard my cancer was back. I don’t remember the rest of the message other than that it was some well-wishing of some kind. It’s amazing what cancer does to cancer patients. At the very least, it narrows our vision to what is real and what is true. I was not going to play the game of pretending everything was fine and get well-wishes from my abuser while I was fighting cancer for the second time. It was the emptiest wishing of good health and encouragement I could have ever received. If you do not love me fully for who I am, then you do not love me. That is true whether I am healthy or sick. I was determined that Morgan was not going to play the loving family member during my cancer journey. Not again. Never again. Not in sickness and not in health.
I text Morgan back. I reminded them of our conversation the previous year and explained, as a statement this time rather than a question, that I did not want someone who feels the way they feel about me in my life. I said I would be polite to them when I had to see them at family gatherings but beyond that I did not want them in my life. I sent the message, made sure it went through, then I blocked Morgan’s phone number.
I had thought all my life that I avoided the conversation with Morgan in order to protect my heart from having to hear the truth. Then I realized the silence wasn’t to protect my heart; it was to protect Morgan’s heart from hearing the truth. I had the honest conversation, I told Morgan the truth. Their response was to attack my heart all over again with their hate and vitriol. A year after that conversation, when Morgan text me about my cancer, I realized something even more important: I don’t need Morgan to disown me. I can disown Morgan. I can disown who has irrevocably hurt me. That person has no remorse for inflicting that hurt, and they would inflict it a hundred times over if I gave them the chance. That person, a relative who ostensibly should build up my well-being and my sense of love, made me think I could not be loved and should not live. That person has no place in the happiness I have built - the happiness I had to fight tooth and nail for because of all the ways they tore me down.
And now, through writing this, I have learned another lesson yet. This middle road that I have chosen to navigate, to shut my abuser out of my life but keep my relationships with other members of my family, this road should not be mine to travel. I want to have relationships with the rest of my family, and I assume they want to have relationships with me. But the burden of making that work should not be on me. It should be on them. I have suffered enough in my life - born with a heart condition, inflicted with relentless mental abuse from a family member, fought cancer twice - just to be alive. I should not have to continue to suffer sitting across the room from my abuser as the price I have to pay to spend time with my family. I am done walking the middle road. They can walk it from now on.
I am not asking them to not have a relationship with Morgan. They are welcome to have Morgan as part of their lives as much as they wish, but I will not be a part of their lives in the same moments as Morgan. I choose who gets to share in my happiness, and the greatest counter-agent to my happiness is not among that list. My family can have relationships with us both, but separately. If Morgan will be attending a family function, I expect my family to inform me ahead of time so I can make arrangements to visit a different day. I will celebrate holidays with my family separate from the main event in which Morgan is in attendance. I am not asking them to make a choice. In fact, I am taking that choice away from them. I am making the choice. I am not asking for Morgan to be uninvited to anything; I will uninvite myself when they will be present. The only exception will be weddings - events that by their nature only happen once.
I want my family to know me, the real me. I am not the real me when Morgan is present. Instead I am a shadow of myself, confused and betrayed by the expectation that I break bread with the person who hurt me so deeply and without remorse.
I am a strong person. No one who loves me should ask me to be that strong.
My strength is a great place to start for my family to know the real me. Many of them assume my strength comes from the medical challenges I have faced in my life. They think being born with a heart condition and all that brought with it prepared me for being a cancer patient in my thirties. This may be true in a practical sense - not fearing doctors, knowing how to think about something else when undergoing an unpleasant procedure. But in the sense of my spirit, my character, my strength was forged not in hospitals and clinics; it was forged in the psychological battle Morgan put me through. How would a hero, even one who is only a hero for himself, emerge without a villain?
Through my formative years, I built my own shield: a love for myself and a stubborn will to live. And I reached for the only sword that any of us can rely on when all is said and done: Truth.
I knew Morgan operated through hate and lies. I knew they were wrong. I knew they were lying to me about the things going on in my own mind.
All my life when asked what superpower I would wish for if I could have one, I have answered, “the ability to control water.” Some people laugh at that and wonder why I don’t wish I could fly or be indestructible. And I never had a good explanation. I just thought the ability to control water would be cool. About ten years ago I had a dream in which I could control water, and I summoned a whole lake of it to gather in the fields and pastures by my childhood home. By sheer accident, in that dream, Morgan drowned in the water I summoned. I awoke disturbed, frightened.
When I explained the dream to a close friend, their assessment was this: “It means you are afraid of your own power and what might happen if you harness it.”
Just a couple of days before sitting down to write this, I had an epiphany. In literature, in film, in art, water symbolizes truth. In the scenes where rain is pouring from the sky is when the lovers confess their love or someone lets out the great secret. All my life, I haven’t wanted to control water, I’ve wanted to control truth. Not conjure it, not make it appear out of thin air. I wanted to be able to summon forth the water, the truth, that already exists. I wanted to use it as a force of good to strike against the villains and to shield the innocent from their lies.
That is why I want to write and share it with people. The truth matters. The truth saves lives.
And this is true: Morgan abused me with their hate. I survived it. I disown Morgan now. I claim and acknowledge no connection to them.
To others who have been abused or are being abused now: hold tight to the truth. And remember it is okay to disown who has irrevocably hurt you. Build your happiness. And believe no one who tells you you’re required to welcome your abuser into that happiness. Don’t believe them if they tell you with their words. And don’t believe them if they tell you with their actions.
I am not afraid of my power any more. I am harnessing it. I am writing truth.