His Name Was Charlie

My memories of Charlie from my teenage years are that everyone loved him. By then, he owned a pizza restaurant with cold beer on tap and two pool tables for entertainment. On weekends, he would take a few kegs of beer to the county lake and throw a party after closing hours. Everyone loved it! I spent a lot of time evenings and weekends working in the kitchen preparing pizza for customers… didn't get paid a dime!

Charlie was the fifth of six children born into a German Catholic family. They were farmers, like most people in western Kansas at that time. They practiced Catholicism, as some family members were in the priesthood, and nuns lived in convents and taught in Catholic schools. I seem to remember a cousin of his mother who eventually became Bishop of the Wichita Diocese. Despite their religious beliefs, there were clearly issues passed down to the siblings that they carry with them for life, not before passing them on to their children and grandchildren.

Charlie left home during the Korean War to support a radar site in Alaska for the military. He fulfilled his duty and then returned to Kansas to attend business school, where he met a woman who caught his eye. They had a sexual encounter, and suddenly she found herself pregnant with their first of nine children. This meeting was an unfortunate event for both of them, as neither was in the right mindset to start a family. As time went on and they had children, it became clear that they brought a lot of emotional baggage into the relationship that had not been addressed before, revealing many problems neither of them knew how to handle

Charlie was a very wounded man medicating his pain, an alcoholic, abuser, and cheater who fathered nine children. He spent a lot of time at the local American Legion, sitting at the bar with his fellow drunks. He had many friends who met him there, and I'm sure they all complained about everything they could. They were not happy men by any means. He was lost in pain and trauma memories from a time long ago, as a child living in western Kansas during the Dust Bowl.

“The truth about our childhood is stored up in our body, and although we can repress it, we can never alter it…[The body] will not stop tormenting us until we stop evading the truth.”

~ Alice Miller, Polish-Swiss psychologist and philosopher

Charlie carried trauma and pain, a form of complex PTSD as we understand it today. This trauma stemmed from his childhood in a seemingly dysfunctional family, where he struggled to survive the Dust Bowl and endured abuse from a drinking father, along with other issues shared by his siblings. It's difficult to pinpoint exactly what fueled his emotional struggles, but the trauma and pain were very real to Charlie, and he went out into the world carrying a heavy burden he never knew how to handle.

Charlie was one of many men of his time who bore similar burdens. This was my father. He passed down his epigenetic footprint of anger, pain, and trauma from eight generations of German families fleeing their homeland to a country that was difficult at best to make a living in, only to be suddenly faced with an environmental catastrophe after everything else. The acting out, if you will, of the “inherited” pain and inflicting it on one's offspring is the part that is allowed to happen when no one has the courage to intervene and stop the damage. This is why I am writing this piece.

Charlie was my father. He was the man who often beat his children and his wife. He spent his evenings in the bar with friends, drinking and trying to forget his pain. Many men of that time suffered the same. The alcohol didn't really ease his pain, but made him into an uncontrollable, angry, abusive alcoholic. His mother committed him for nine months when I was barely old enough to drive, but it didn't help much. He wasn't a good candidate for Alcoholics Anonymous. (I later joined an AA program myself to cope with the trauma I couldn't medicate away.)

“The attempt to escape from pain is what creates more pain’

~ Gabor Mate, author, physician, and renowned speaker specializing in childhood development and trauma

Charlie was one of thousands of men who never had the good fortune to love or know love. They were men who were abused as children and grew up to be monsters that no one knew what to do with. Many were religious men who genuinely wanted to do good, so they followed the rules and took their children to church on Sundays, with their shoes polished and wearing their Sunday best. Charlie often took us all to the local restaurant and ordered cinnamon rolls for everyone before taking us home for Sunday dinner. After dinner, the three oldest boys would be taken to the restaurant to sweep the floors and clean up after a Saturday night of pizza and beer. So, he tried to be a good dad, but the painful memories just wouldn’t go away. And they don't leave; they need to be resolved and dealt with, yet no one seems able. Author Gabor Mate wrote about this in his book “The Myth of Normal” regarding trauma memory for several years now, and he is clear that abusive trauma leaves the psyche in pain until measures are taken to resolve and heal this kind of abuse memory. He also speaks to how these memories of the traumatic events in a person's life impact a person's health in many other ways besides the effects of alcohol on the body. There are physiological, emotional, and behavioral impacts.

Men like Charlie were often not offered counseling for their condition due to the guilt and shame associated with discussing such past abuse. They frequently found themselves being gaslit and made to feel responsible for the abuse that occurred. From my experience, he truly had no one to turn to, whether to the parish priest or a therapist, because for a long time there was little understanding of how to help individuals like him. It is only in recent years that therapists and counselors have gained insight into how to support men like Charlie, who carry emotionally painful memories that cause CPTSD. This trauma has damaged their nervous systems, making their behavior not a choice but a raging fire simmering beneath the surface of daily life and conversations, with triggers that can suddenly unleash uncontrollable rage. After these episodes, Charlie would experience overwhelming shame and guilt, adding another layer of anger to his pain, leading him to suppress it, rather than begin to address or resolve it.

They simply couldn't ask for help because there was no one to turn to. The best they could do at the time was try an AA program and hope to find a good sponsor to assist them with the work needed. Even then, if you don't start the program early, you might not have enough time to do the work required to experience relief from the memories.

I wanted what Charlie wanted, but we both ended up disappointed. (As I wrote this last sentence, I found myself in tears for him and for myself.) I wonder if he ever managed to shed a tear for himself. I do know he drank many shots of whiskey to forget the pain of whatever happened back there in western Kansas as a boy.

“ We cannot heal what we cannot feel. So without recovery, our toxic shame gets carried for generations.’

~ John Bradshaw, author and counselor

To this day, for many of us, it's taboo to discuss family dynamics, starting with Charlie's family struggling to survive the Dust Bowl and his military service before he attended school in Wichita, Kansas. The timing of meeting the woman who would have his children was certainly poor for both. Any details about his life and later relationships, including epigenetic influences, are off-limits to those of us who aim to tell the truth and help future generations get a better start. For many families, it is very difficult to have the necessary conversations to break the cycle of abuse. There seems to be an unwritten rule that tells humanity you are marked by the generational curses passed down for the last eight or more generations. In other words, we're cursed whether we like it or not. It's one thing to attend the Sacrament of Reconciliation and confess to one's beliefs, but God forbid saying anything about the pain and abuse inflicted by a father or mother, and shame on you if you don’t honor them in the same breath. I remember being told this very thing about honoring parents while I was trying to let an adult know what was really happening in our home.

It's a lie that you had to live with your pain, Charlie, and it's a lie that you pinned it on your children, and they most likely won't be able to do anything about it either. You are not allowed to express your disappointment, your anger, or your trauma memories—no one wants to hear about it. So Charlie spent evenings in a bar washing away memories that just wouldn't go away, and the men sitting beside him were engaged in the same behavior for the same reasons. I knew these men by name and watched them for years drink themselves stupid and attempt to drive themselves home in the middle of the night. These same men ruined their lives and their families’ lives, resulting in divorces, suicides, and despair.

Latest statistics I've read show that current numbers are tragically high for child abuse, and now we're learning that abusing children and young teenagers is quite widespread on this planet. I've also learned that up to 40% of the female population in America is living with CPTSD due to abuse primarily by the male population. The sexual revolution didn't do us any favors. And the numbers for boys and young men are equally high since sending them to wars we fight for the financial elites of the planet.

There are many Charlies in our world, and it's time to address child abuse. In fact, it's time to confront this barbaric behavior honestly before we are left with a generation that only knows violence and destruction, and nothing about love, joy, or peace. Yes, I will say it's not hard to understand why we were sent a messiah when we needed one. Without our messiah, I’m not sure where we would be today!

I want to say I wish Charlie had known peace and love in his lifetime, but he didn’t. Let’s do what we can to offer healing for those Charlies and their female counterparts someday… soon!

God Bless!