In the “where were you during the Kavanaugh hearings” sweepstakes, I’ll have a unique entry: sitting in our AirBnB in Chiapas, Mexico, clawing like a crazed rodent at the crappy signal on my iPhone.  The Mayan cybergods did grant me a short window to watch Dr. Ford’s testimony, and to profoundly identify with her story.  But my reactions did not end there.  There are things about Judge Kavanaugh’s story too that paradoxically resonate with mine.

First, Dr. Ford’s story.  For her imprecise surrounding details, my shrouds of misty memory clouding that bright summer when I was five.  For her sudden island of crisply focused memory as she climbed the stairs and was pushed into the side bedroom, an itinerant gardener’s invitation for me to enter the little shed in our side yard. For her noise of the turned-up stereo, my smell of potting soil and spiders.  For the hand smothering her mouth, the wood grain of the workbench a half-inch from my eyes, the press of it against my cheek and nose, just before the blinding pain.  For the ring in her ears of the boys’ uproarious laughter, the man’s voice warning me not to tell anyone about our “little game.”  For her decades-later need to build a second front door, my angry run-ins with the gardeners I’ve hired, those few times I’ve brought myself to hire them at all.

Beyond this wrench of recognition, I took in the hearings with the weary disgust I imagine I share with other survivors, as yet another public man’s private abuse comes to public exposure.  While some predations were open secrets committed by powerful brutes, other deeds were truly concealed, done by men of outward virtue, progressive champions, people whom “you’d never think would do it.”  When exposed, like Judge Kavanaugh, they advance the principal defense of their outward “good character”, evidenced by the belief among those around them that they are incapable of such crimes.

I don’t believe it for a second.  For there is a third layer of experience I felt watching the Kavanaugh hearings, that is perhaps less common.  Mixed with my fury and disgust, there lurks in me a sad understanding of Kavanaugh’s cornered rage.  I think he suffers from a pathological case of one of the more common traits of the male psyche: the divided self.  I know something about this.  Although I’ve done none of the deeds of which he, or any of the other parade of recent perpetrators, have committed, I’ve lived with the pain of a split psyche for much of my life.

In my case, it was the trauma of the rape that did it.  The manipulative bastard who cleaved my little body also cleaved my young mind.  From that moment forward, I was not one person.  I was the sweet boy who remained innocent, who got good grades, was never angry, and remembered nothing.  And I was the angry, ashamed boy with dark thoughts, whom nobody knew.  As the years went on, my selves grew more distant still.

I’m no psychologist, but I can see less extreme variants of this divided male self all around me, not necessarily induced by trauma.  Boys are routinely shamed into rigid gender roles at very young ages.  Whereas girls are now encouraged into a broad spectrum of healthy gender manifestations, boys too often are forced to confront a narrow path of masculinity, from which deviation is punished and ridiculed.  Those aspects of the self which do not conform – perhaps, the feminine aspects of one’s personality that cannot be owned — are hidden, rejected, despised.  And a host of institutions, from the Catholic Church on down, offer prayers, rituals, codes, societies, sects, and traditions, to bring the “good” to light and keep the “bad” in shadow.

When threatened with exposure, the controlling, outward self will fight tooth and nail, because he perceives his survival to be at stake. Not only the survival of his career, or reputation, but of his core. I know something about this too.  A major obstacle to my recovery of the memory of my abuse was the tight grip my outward self kept on the explosive rage inside me, and the fear that if I let go I would be annihilated. I was nearly thirty before I finally broke through.  And I would be over fifty before I finally excavated down to the crucial memory, of a bathroom in the basement of my childhood home right after the rape.  I remembered standing there, looking in the mirror, and thinking, What do I do now?

In that desperate moment, a separate me emerged.  It was as though another boy was standing next to me, looking at me sorrowfully. A voice, that said, Give it to me. I’ll take it. And then vanishing like a woodland deer.  I don’t remember knowing what “it” was, but somehow I felt I could cope. And so I did.  I went on being the good boy who must at all costs remain blameless, and not remember. And my disappeared twin went on being the bad one, who must have done something to deserve what had happened.

Until finally, in my decades-later moment of remembrance of that moment in the basement, the wall between my two selves collapsed. From that time forward, I have no longer been two.  I have been one.   As a single self, I have felt a power, and a love, that up to that point had been denied me.

So now I am trying to hold some love and compassion for Brett Kavanaugh, and for those scared, brittle, fulminating old men who surround him.  Not for the damage they have done, nor for the decades of damage they will do if they succeed in embedding their poisonous brand of denial into our Supreme Court.  But for the struggle they would face – and the true public service they could do — if they were ever to move beyond their fear.