The piece below was written by retired English professor Michael Hickey who taught at South Seattle College for thirty years. As a volunteer with the Pongo Teen Writing Program, Mr. Hickey has helped youth process and heal from their traumas through writing.
What I Know Now That I Didn’t Know Then
I’ve learned a lot about domestic violence and abuse because I’ve lived it.
The oldest of eleven children, I was raised in the Midwest in a loud, religious, middle-class family that strictly adhered to the concept of “spare the rod, spoil the child.” Even when there was no immediate sense of emotional chaos or physical violence, a virulent cloud hovered overhead and permeated the atmosphere at 115 Columbus Drive.
I had my own desk in a corner of the basement. It became my refuge and sanctuary where I’d try to hide from family trauma — which wasn’t easy in a modest-sized house filled with so many people. What I didn’t realize at the time, however, was that in hiding from the turmoil, I was also hiding from myself.
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To realize my life’s potential and improve my self-worth, I knew I had to extricate myself from that environment. After earning an associate degree, I applied for a student loan and relocated 2,000 miles away to a university out West. It was my great escape.
In time, I made the conscious decision to stop living in the problem and start living in the solution. Rather than wallowing in self-pity about the past, I’d use the past as fuel to stay motivated in the present. I began to thrive. I lost 90 pounds of fat, and I completely transformed my attitude. Eventually I became so immersed in academia that I decided to make it a career.
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I recently retired after teaching English at South Seattle College for thirty years. In that time, after a long-running intellectual discourse with approximately 10,000 students, I was surprised to discover that my fierce family history had actually been an advantage in the classroom.
After receiving tenure in 2009, I started to volunteer on Tuesday afternoons for the Pongo Teen Writing Program. This non-profit organization served people in psychiatric hospitals, homeless shelters, and King County Youth Detention. The latter was my assignment.
I was trained (and subsequently trained new volunteers) in facilitating people to write about their trauma. A documentary film about the program won a local Emmy award in 2014, and it was clear that the Pongo method was onto something. Eventually, I employed these principles in my English classes at South Seattle College, where my willingness to share about my personal hardships helped my students be braver in their writing.
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Whether it was behind a desk or behind bars, my main suggestion to students was always write from the heart.
In the classroom, the first assignment of the quarter was a narration/description essay: “Write at least 500 words about a time in your life when you learned a difficult lesson. Be sure to include direct dialogue and lots of sensory images in order to paint pictures with words. Show, don’t tell.”
The thousands of students who took on this challenge over the years did so with varying degrees of success, but they were almost always willing to give it the old college try. For me, this meant building classroom trust, authenticity, and rapport from Day One. I had to establish and maintain a safe space where they could write from the heart and share their work with others.
No judging – that was imperative. As for writing about experiences of domestic abuse and violence, I noticed this was more arduous for male students because, after all, they lived in a world of big boys don’t cry.
Stigma, stigma, stigma.
I recall one particularly talented young man who described how his wife had taken over his life and his soul. She controlled his every move. She repeatedly slapped him in the face in front of his young son and daughter. “I was so broken and emasculated that I didn’t even know who I was anymore,” he wrote.
This student had served two tours as a Marine in Afghanistan. He struggled with the idea of being called a “victim.” A victim was someone a Marine saved, not someone a Marine was. Writing this essay required real courage, not altogether unlike that found on the battlefield.
“Domestic violence against men isn’t always easy to identify, but it can be a serious threat. Know how to recognize if you’re being abused — and how to get help.” — Mayo Clinic
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Every quarter on the last day of class before Finals Week, I asked students to write an honest summary of their experience in the course. Good or bad, I assured them that this summary would not affect their grade.
I started to notice that every single quarter, I had at least one student — sometimes male, sometimes female — who wrote about the cathartic effects of writing “that essay.” Writing from the heart meant writing from the subconscious portion of the mind where all the real power was subjugated and concealed. My Marine student wrote, “After that essay, I felt like I had just taken off a flak jacket filled with concrete.”
Releasing trauma and pain starts with having enough hope and bravado to believe change is possible. The mounting evidence relating to boys and men who are targets of domestic torment is alarming: suicide, crime, poverty, homelessness, and other social ills.
As for me, I am determined to never stop reaching out to others who are suffering to offer writing as a form of healing and therapy, just as it was for me. Will the recipient be able to overcome his fear and save himself from a world of big boys don’t cry? Some will, some won’t. But at the end of the day, fear means one of two things: Face Everything And Recover, or F*** Everything And Run.
That’s what I know now that I didn’t know then.
Also read: Bellevue dad opens up about experiences with OCD and depression, aims to help others