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In 2009, while a client at the Men’s Resource Center of West Michigan, Jim Musial —an avid runner— wrote a guest post about how “running could be hazardous to your emotional health.” He only hints at what it is he was running from; at the time, emotionally able to share just part of his story. More than a decade later, Musial sits down with Randy Flood, psychotherapist and director of the Men’s Resource Center to share where he is now in life and what he discovered about himself after years of navigating the trauma and life-altering effects of his father’s death by suicide.
Flood notes that Musial is “a former client of mine, having spent six years doing the work necessary to deal with his past trauma [and] to gain emotional maturity that we later discovered was alluding him, despite his dogged and disciplined approach to life.”
He and Musial delve into Musial’s life journey including the arc of emotions and impacts his father’s death had on his life and his relationships. Musial reflects on how his experience in men’s support groups and experiential therapy helped him hone a deeper understanding of himself and motivated him to change. Flood refers to their conversation as one man’s story of having the courage to do the inner work necessary after years of compulsions, broken relationships, and running away from pain, hurt, and anger.
You can listen to the entire conversation on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, or Stitcher. Excerpts follow below (edited for length and clarity).
NOTE: If you or someone you know are having thoughts of suicide or self-harm, please reach out to the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline by dialing 988 or online at https://988lifeline.org/.
The “Sin” of Indifference
Musial’s journey of self-discovery and healing began a short time after his long-time marriage ended. “She asked for a divorce. She was a great wife. She took care of the family and was a wonderful giver. … She gave and I took and I took some more and I took some more …And I committed maybe the greatest sin that I probably could in the marriage and that was indifference.”
The indifference wasn’t intentional, Musial says. “I felt scared of revealing myself. And a lot of that has to do with growing up in the alcoholism, unfortunately, of my home and my father. It wasn’t apathy that I meant to do. It was a perniciousness of me just being afraid and being found out.”
“I think that’s a remarkable label to put on it,” notes Flood. “Most people would say, ‘the sin of domestic violence or severe alcoholism.’ ‘I drank up all the income in the family’ or, ‘I beat up our children.’ But you were able to recognize that as the sin of indifference. Of just being guarded or shielded from her.”
Musial relates that he couldn’t share his deepest, darkest emotions with the woman he loved. From the start of their relationship when she jokingly asked him to “tell me a secret,” he says he cowered. “I know what she wanted. Deep down. I knew what she was asking. You know, she just wanted to be with me. And, that’s a sad part of it. I just pushed back and I pushed back.”
Foundational Trauma
The foundation for Musial’s trauma was laid early on. “…The things that I should not see as a child that I grew up with from the moment I came home [from the hospital]. I was breaking up fights, in preschool, coming out of the living room and, ‘Hey, stop [hitting] each other!’ And I had this hypersensitivity and this need of protecting myself. I felt isolated. I didn’t feel unloved. We had food. We did family vacations. But through each of those incidents, there was always maybe some traumatic event where the driving home was a disaster.”
“I grew up with that,” he continues. “Consequently, went into life, made all the big decisions on my own. College, getting married, finances, anything was all done by myself.”
Flood calls this the laboratory of life. “It’s these early family relationships where we learn a lot about basic things like safety, trust, and autonomy. Do we rely on others to be in our lives because they’re gonna be there in a way that feels safe, feels supportive? Or do we learn that in order to be safe, we have to figure out how to live life on our own and to be able to go it alone?”
Being One’s Own Man Isn’t Easy
“I think you took on that kind of masculine mystique,” Flood observes, “of being able to be your own man and able to find your way.”
“I look at my early days as I was playing defense,” Musial says. “I was playing the cards that were dealt to me. And I didn’t know that there were other cards that I could play. Ultimately the work that we did, I end up playing offense now, and I’m dealing my own cards. Because the choices that I made, I’m making, is this the better route for me? Is this the better version of myself if I go this route or this route? And I never really thought about it, never really dawned on me that I was making bad choices.”
Reconciling with Shame
“So, my father had been through two rehabs already,” Musial starts. “My mom got a call that he was at work. … He came back from lunch and he was inebriated. They called my mom and my brother to come and get him. … And just the shame, the thought that he was probably going to lose his job because this is the third time.” His father was found deceased a week later, having lost his life to suicide.
“I can’t imagine what he felt,” Musial says, “but it was enough that he saw no daylight. He saw no outlet. He thought that was the end. He was a provider. He worked two jobs. … I’m a provider. I don’t fall far from the tree and so I kind of understand maybe how he felt that there was no way out.”
“There are many different reasons that suicide can occur,” Flood offers, “and for men, oftentimes, we know it is shame. … Your dad, here he was, the provider, back in the day when that was his job. And then he was going to lose all of that. The profound shame that he felt. The drinking wasn’t working anymore. And now it feels like his life was not working. And so, he came up with this concrete idea that most suicide people do is that that means my life needs to end rather than I need to change my life.”
His Father’s Son
During a conference for survivors of suicide loss, Musial came into direct contact with his repressed emotions and fears. The speaker asked participants to write down some attributes of their loved one and share them with those gathered. Musial says, “I didn’t want to play the game. I said ‘No. No. This doesn’t work for me.’ I was almost feeling relief that I didn’t have to put up with the Jekyll Hyde -ness of all the things I had gone through.”
Flood suggests that Musial wasn’t ready to celebrate or acknowledge any positive attributes or memories about his father because of the pain, anger, and resentment he was holding on to.
But sometime later, Musial found himself writing a letter to his father. It was cathartic. “It was heart-wrenching, but heart-clearing. …Since then, I’ve looked at my dad and looked at what he’s offered me. He had a great sense of humor. He wasn’t a sports guy. He was more of a current events guy and he was a provider. And that’s what I did.”
Flood sees the exercise of writing the letter as a spiritual process of forgiveness. “And then, when you were able to forgive him, it provided a gateway into seeing your dad as a human and seeing the nuances and the breadth of who this man was and having compassion for where he grew up and his struggle. It freed you up to be able to see him with a different lens and an open heart.”
Just like his father before him, Musial says, “I felt that being a provider, I’ve done my job. Not having relationship and good communication skills, getting to a deeper level was something I was missing.”
The Grieving Doesn’t End
But even with counseling and therapy, the underlying emotion doesn’t go away. “As I was preparing for this conversation,” Musial reflects, tearing up, “what hurt me more than anything is that loss of father-son relationship. …I wanted to go through the rehab with him.”
Flood reassures him. “As I always tell people, sometimes the emotion that we share and experience when we talk about these things is all part of the data. It’s all part of the story. And what I think is open, what’s beautiful about you is you’re not afraid of them anymore and they come in waves. This grieving process really never ends.”
“It doesn’t end,” Musial concurs.
Learning to Be Still and Feel
Musial reflects that it took him almost 25 years after the loss of his father to seek help. “I didn’t grieve. …I stuffed it, pushed it down, way down. In my 20s, I was drinking. In my 30s, I decided to run marathons. In my 40s, I really had to hunker down. I had a high position. I was providing. And then, it fell apart in my 50s. In my 60s, it’s recovery. So, I had these compulsions for 4 decades before I got into my work of only one day.”
Flood notes that, perhaps like his father, Musial was trying to out run his grief. “The drinking part was a way that your dad probably tried to outrun his own pain and grief. And then it killed him. But for you, you got off that one. And then you went into a more pro-social [compulsion] where you could get at least accolades and share, “Hey, I’m a marathon runner.” “I can keep my compulsions,” Musial responds, “but it’s one I can control. I can find one day out of the month to get my race in!”
Flood mentions that it’s not unusual for men to act out instead of going inward. “Sometimes, as men, we’re not trained to see our life transforming by going inward with introspection and facing emotions, pain, and grief. We’re socialized and trained more to get busy, to go tackle things, to go build something, to go fix something. And that’s great masculine energy. We need men out there doing that. But there is a time in life to sit, and pause, and reflect, and think, and cry, and wonder.”
Knowing Someone Has Your Back
Musial was used to handling everything on his own. He reminds Flood of what happened one day when he came to his psychotherapy group feeling anxious, rushed, and out of sorts. He decided to share how he was feeling with the group. They responded with an exercise that helped rid him of the anxiety he felt in that moment. But there was more: “Ken [Porter, Hakomi therapist and co-facilitator] said, ‘Jim, I want you to look at everybody one at a time. And not just a quick look. Look into their soul.’ I looked at each one of those guys for it seemed like 10 minutes each, it was probably 30 seconds. And you know what? They were all there for me.
“He [Porter] said, ‘Jim, we’re going to help you with this. If you, at three o’clock in the morning are on 131 with a flat tire, I’d be there for you.’ This is the feeling that I got by looking into their eyes. And the beauty about this, is this: My group buddies were electricians, a professor, a physician, an entrepreneur, all walks of life. And I see this in 12-step parking lots and 12-step programs. We’re all in there with one step and it’s to get our mental health prepared. … we were there together with no status. We didn’t care who it was or what you did except in that moment that we were working.”
In the Company of Men
“The power of what we do at the Men’s Resource Center,” Flood says, is that the healing often comes in those group experiences. We have the individual sessions, but the group experiences and being able to be vulnerable, and have a lot of pain, and a lot of anxiety, and a lot of panic, and experience it in a bodily way through those experiential exercises, somatic exercises … And then to be able to then experience it and then look at the eyes of the other men.
“There’s where healing is. Is that if you want to heal shame, you have to be seen. Shame grows in the dark. …And it grows in isolation. And the tendency is to want to hide the things we’re shameful about. That’s why it takes so much courage to be in a support group, or in a group like you were in, and to be able to expose all the things we have shame about.”
Flood continues: “That’s what you know killed your father, right? He was not able to face and be seen by your mom saying ‘What did you do to our family? You lost our income. Now what are we going to do?’ I mean, that shame is what killed him. It wasn’t anything but that. And so, then you, the next generation take that shame that he passed on. You take it in and you face it and you try to heal. And that is not work for weak men. This work is for a very strong and dedicated man.”
Acquiring Emotional Intelligence
“You know,” Musial says, “we grow up thinking that you gotta be independent. You gotta have independence. Get the apartment, get the nice job, and you’re on your own. … It’s the interdependence. It’s looking into those guys eyes. I can be out now, Randy, and be a little vulnerable to somebody. Not the clerk in the store. But maybe you’re out to dinner with a colleague or a friend … and if you say a little bit something and see if they acknowledge that or they go back to talking about the game last night. … I’ve had surprisingly very candid conversations.”
You led with vulnerability,” Flood says. “And, social intelligence. You’re not going to cram these intimate discussions down people’s throats, but you read the room, you read who you’re with, you take a risk, you lead with some vulnerability, and what we discover often is that people yearn for that.
“And when they see that you’re willing to go there, then you invite others to go there and you discover that there are a lot of people out there that have stories to share, vulnerabilities to share, and they’re looking for safe spaces to do that. And then you can find them in groups, you can find them in support groups, but then you learn to take that on the road, and you find them at dinner meetings with friends and colleagues in other spaces too.”
Life Waits
“If I did not bow out and seek to get help, I worry, I shudder to think where I’d have gone,” Musial says.
Where Musial is now is in a happy second marriage and in a bonus career as an entrepreneur (Duradero Work Boots). He’s on the board of West Michigan Survivors of Suicide Loss and a participant in the International Survivors of Suicide Loss conference held annually every Saturday before Thanksgiving. “All of us on the board have lost loved ones to suicide. And it’s very self-affirming to tell the story and talk without the stigma that you might have lost the loved one to suicide because they’re all a part of a club that we didn’t really wish to join,” he explains.
“That’s well said,” replies Flood. “You guys are not responsible, obviously, for your loved one committing the suicide, but yet you’re faced with having to heal yourself, get support, and take the responsibility to do that. This is a place where you can.”
As fate would have it, when Musial married for the second time, Flood was the officiant.
“We had this moment upstairs in the office where you did this incredible heartfelt, soulful work of healing yourself. And then you were able to bring this new man into this relationship with this beautiful woman that was there, providing you a lot of love, energy, and hope. And it all came together and now here you are. Living your life and having a realistic vision of it. It’s not always easy. You have —like today —waves of emotion. They always come. But you honor them. You’re not afraid of them. And you take your dogged and disciplined life that you came to me with and you applied it to this work of personal growth and introspection. You applied it to that and now you’re flying.”
Resources from this Podcast
Throughout the podcast, Musial mentions people and resources that helped him and could help others navigate the trauma surrounding the loss of someone to suicide. These include:
The Men’s Resource Center is here to provide counseling, consultation, and therapy for issues that affect men, including those discussed in this podcast. Our services are offered online and in person. For more information, contact us via our website or call us at (616) 456-1178. Also, feel free to contact us if you have questions about this segment, ideas for a topic, or would like to be a guest on the Revealing Men podcast.
