Boy From the North Country: A Queer Therapist Looks Back at Overcoming Trauma With Mindfulness

By Dr. Jason Durant

Boy From the North Country is a humorous, poignant, and sometimes painful memoir. Written from the perspective of a gay psychologist who survived growing up in rural Northern New York after being abandoned by his father, this is a story about finding healing in mindfulness, accepting and recovering from trauma, and getting about the business of living.
In this powerful self-help memoir, Dr. Durant takes us from the winding backroads of Northern New York while describing white-knuckle tales of parental volatility. Told with the energy and suspense of a car chase, the book careens from stories of childhood innocence in Upstate New York, to the late-night parties in gay San Francisco in an attempt to tell us how one man finds himself navigating back from the isolation imposed by trauma.
It is a story of survival. Part Beautiful Thing, part A Place at the Table, Boy From the North Country is written by a clinical psychologist who learned how to survive as a gay kid in rural America…the hard way. Combining insights from his studies of trauma as a psychologist, his own meditation on the trials of his life, and from the personal narratives told to him by his patients at his Manhattan practice, Dr. Durant’s story provides both a cautionary tale on what happens when we abandon the needs of our gay kids, and offers a bit of hope for those struggling to survive.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Archway Publishing
• Release date: Apr 8, 2024
• ISBN: 9781665756860

Dr. Jason Durant

Dr. Jason Durant is a clinical psychologist in private practice in New York City specializing in LGBTQ issues, mindfulness and Relational Psychotherapy. Dr. Durant uses his experiences as a queer person to connect with the people coming into his office describing interpersonal struggles and identity challenges. Dr. Durant utilizes a relational model that patients can use as practice for deepening and strengthening their relationships outside of the office. Versed in Eastern and Western psychological models, psychoanalytic theory, and Trauma Theory, Dr. Durant is keenly attuned to how spirituality, the arts, music, and philosophy inspire and challenge psychological healing and growth.

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Copyright © 2024 Dr. Jason Durant.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This book is a work of non-fiction. Unless otherwise noted, the author and the publisher make no explicit guarantees as to the accuracy of the information contained in this book and in some cases, names of people and places have been altered to protect their privacy.

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ISBN: 978-1-6657-5685-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6657-5687-7 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-6657-5686-0 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2024903206

Archway Publishing rev. date: 03/22/2024

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Section I: THE PAST AS PROLOGUE

➢ Marriage Isn’t for Everyone

➢ Danny and the Dinosaur and My Pet Goat

➢ The Car up on the Flatbed

➢ Pop, The Power of Compassion, Mindfulness, and the Gift of a Gentle Heart

➢ The Bully Made Me Do It

➢ The Bus

➢ That First Crush

➢ Born Again with Mrs. Franklin

Section II: SETTING OUT ON MY OWN

➢ Evangel College and the Ozarks and

Everything in Between

➢ The Heartbreaker

➢ The Heartbeat Tunnel

➢ Grateful for Jerry

➢ The Music Saved My Life

➢ LSD and Psychedelics

➢ Living in a Rainbowland

➢ Garrin Benfield and the Power of Serendipity

Section III: CIIS, NEW YORK AND BECOMING AN ADULT AND A HELPER

➢ California Institute of Integral Studies

➢ Buddhism and Mindfulness

➢ We’re All in This Together

➢ Being With the Other, the Healer

➢ New York, New York and Trial by Fire in the Therapist’s Chair

➢ Becoming a Man Through Owning My Trauma

➢ Chop Wood, Carry Water

➢ Moving Beyond it All

➢ …And the Art of Forgiveness

➢ We Are All in This Together

About the Author

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I once read an unsourced quote somewhere, or maybe I heard it in a bar, over a Martini — who knows — it went something like: You are not here to enlighten others, you are here only to find your own light and shine it as bright as you can. Or something like that…heady stuff for a psychotherapist! In any case, this book has been about learning to mind my own side of the fence and to look deep within myself rather than to focus on what others could glean from a memoir by an unknown author. In order to do that, to write from a place that demonstrated a process of self reflection rather than from my natural instinct to didact, to instruct, and to therapize, I had to be blessed with teachers. And this is where my thank yous begin.

First, to my family. I am grateful to have been born where I was born and into the family in which I found myself safely ensconced. Without my mother, brother, sister, stepfather, grandparents and endless cousins across the North Country I would have learned nothing. Each and every one of the folks who nurtured me, scolded me, and taught me a lesson or two created the person who is alive today and is able to tell this tale. Thank you!

To all the boys I‘ve loved before, I also offer gratitude. Learning to accept myself as a gay man simply would not have happened without the affectionate push-back and teaching of Ryan Hayes and many others who showed me how to love them with small nudges and big boundaries and by revealing their own characters to me. For Jason Seiler and Reid Kendall who have been beloved best friends, neighbors, late-night companions, and fellow journeymen, I offer thank you for revealing the lessons in love that only chosen family can provide. And with that in mind, there is Joe Rivera, Michael Wolchansky, Joey Ereneta, Josh and the rest of the Bay Area crew for offering loving notes to help me grow along the way!

For Garrin Benfield, my lifelong teammate, my most trusted man of conscience, thanks for all of the mind your business, figure out your own shit and back off comments that any man in search of his soul must hear. Without your depth of self-reflection, forthrightness, candor, and your loving instruction it is doubtful that any self reflection at all would have been possible. Thank you!

Finally, thank you to Rob O’Shaunessy for book advice, Don Weiss for editing, Christopher Gagliardi for photography, and Archway Publishing for putting these words in print. It takes a village to get words on a page and I am thankful!

INTRODUCTION

Silence. It is often a space between my patients and I that has the greatest impact. It hurts to think about how much I need him…It hurts to think that one day he may be gone. In silence, I wait. I do not offer what I do not have to give. I can see a patient looking at me with a sense of longing for me to reach out and take the pain away. I see that he is looking intently at me and looking for the eyes that can be the responsive father that he never had. I feel as if the pain he is feeling is in my body as if it is my own. I feel the desire to be seen, to be heard, to be loved. I see the desire to be anywhere but here in this moment in the pain that he is in. He often just wants it to stop.

Last night we had a fight. We started out great and then he told me that he wanted to have a weekend with his friends…I freaked out. I listen. I think I know what is coming but I say nothing. I told him that he didn’t love me. I told him that he wasn’t treating me right…actually…I screamed that at him. He is beginning to get emotional, his pain is bubbling to the surface. I simply nod and try to hold a supportive expression. I want him to know that I am listening and that I care. I know that he wants to get away from me. Why else would he want to spend a whole weekend with another person? When we are not together, I know that he is cheating on me and talking badly about me. It is going where I thought it might. He is going to recount another night of relentlessly projecting his fear onto his boyfriend. He begins to cry. It turned into a huge fight and I told him that we should break up if he wasn’t going to love me.

I watch him cry as his fear that his possessiveness, masquerading as love, had gone too far. This unease is now rising to the surface. What if my fear, my clinging, my anger has already driven him away? he asks. Silence. He wonders aloud if his unhealed trauma has destroyed another bond as he pulled ever closer in an attempt to merge with him or at least to get him to fix him. He recalls a story of coming home from a bar when his boyfriend flirted with a bartender, another on a dance floor, and a third time with a stranger. When he looks at other men, I see desire in his eyes that I do not see when he looks at me anymore. His face is lifeless, tears stream down his face, his eyes remind me of an actual boy and not the man I have been working with for years. More silence.

I wonder if he’s right. After all, this is at least the tenth time he has told me a story of an evening out with his long-term partner that has ended this way. One time it was when he looked into the iPhone of his boyfriend while he was in the bathroom. He found Grindr, the gay sex app. In a rage, he demanded to know why his companion of several years would need a hookup app. Offended by the intrusion, his partner left him at a Brooklyn gay nightclub. Another time, his boyfriend had come home late and smelled of unfamiliar cologne. That night, things got physical and the police were called. In another incident, a failed three-way resulted in overturned furniture, a drink in the face, and a week’s separation. I wondered if he was right. Maybe this time things had gone too far.

We sit in silence as he sobs, continuing his posture of begging. I know he must accept that I cannot take this pain away from him. He is begging me for answers as to whether or not his trauma had destroyed something he loved so much. Suddenly, he rebounds, and goes into a tirade over how his boyfriend is a cheater anyway, and that he was right to snoop, to scream demands, to slap him. This energy continues for a few moments, and I can feel its power coming at me. It is the power of his pain in full enactment. The burst is short lived. Within a few moments, he is crawling again. This time, through his tears he talks to me about his father. He tells me about watching his father take his older brother out to play a game of catch in the backyard. He notices Dad does so only after glancing back at his effeminate son and expressing the slightest mannerism of sadness, of frustration, of disgust. Trauma is like that. We learn to read an expression so faint that it amounts to mind-reading.

He moves on to two other failed relationships. Each revealing a pattern of love bombing, of desire for fusion, of erasure of the self, and ultimately of desperation. Each moving through predictable cycles of ecstasy and agony, love and hate, of gentleness and rage. I wonder who could survive the intensity. I wonder if any of these partners ever existed beyond his projections. The feeling I have very strongly is that each of these men exist only as objects in his mind and never as subjects of their own. I wonder if he ever connected with them at all or if he merely held them all at arm’s length so he could reenact this abandonment trauma again and again only to prove that his love is too toxic for anyone to survive it. I wonder if he has ever loved at all since all of this feels like fantasy more than reality. More silence.

I feel his rage turning toward me. I feel his glance moving from an attempt to quietly beg me to a desire to punish me. He is beginning to feel that I am simply watching all of this play out. I am certain that he feels like a spectacle, he feels distanced. I do my best to communicate my empathy, my affection for him, my total acceptance of him with my eyes, my nods, my gentle uttering of mmmm…hmmmm… I don’t want to suggest I can take away the pain. I don’t even want to suggest that I will try. I want us to have this honest moment but I also have fear that when he finally turns on me in his fullness, he may say something that will trigger me into feelings that I don’t want to have. He will want to not only show me what he is feeling but transfer those feelings straight into me so that I can feel them too. I already do. But he doesn’t know it. In a sense, I don’t exist either. We are in the middle of his acting out a trauma response, and the intimacy we are sharing is why we are here in the first place. And so, I wait in silence.

Finally, the tension breaks. Have I killed it or not?, he demands. He wants to know if he has destroyed another cherished relationship. At his request, I gently break my silence too. I don’t know…I really don’t. I can see that he is feeling a mix of emotions. He is terrified by the truth I have just uttered. He knows that I am unable to know the answer and it scares him that I cannot reassure him. He may even know that I suspect that he actually has killed it even though I don’t say it. He is also angry, my words have shattered the fantasy that I can truly reassure him enough to take his pain away. It is a complicated moment. My feelings are also complicated. As an empath, I want to hug him, to hold him, to tell him it is going to be OK. As a therapist, I know that there is a better way. And in my own pain, I identify with his feelings and must be keenly aware of them so as not to blur the lines between us. And so, there is more silence.

There is another emotion that I can feel coming from him. This one is less terrifying for both of us. This one has the faintest note of optimism. I can see that he feels seen. I can see that he knows that I have witnessed his pain and that he sees that I have not been destroyed by it. I have told him the truth, ugly as it might potentially be. I believe we are sharing this moment in its totality. I believe that this moment is more real than the moment he described with his partner the previous night. The one that brought us to this crucial moment. He begins to calm, his gaze has softened, he is using the tissue to clean the tear stains from his cheek.

We spend the next fifteen or so minutes processing what has happened. We talk about rescue fantasies, about abandonment trauma, about hard truths related to triggering and healing in relationships. It is a good conversation; theoretical but high quality. We are able to hold the emotion of what has happened and make space to better understand it all from an observing perspective. Most importantly, we are in the moment. We are in the now together. There is hope here. There is an awareness that all we have is this present moment and in this present moment, there is no problem. There is just this moment…and the next one…and the next.

I glance at the clock. We are crossing into the five minutes left category. It is always a complicated space in some ways. I want him to take some of the emotion home with him on the subway…to continue processing. I do not want this event to underscore the fantasy that therapy (or I) could ever heal him. I want him to understand that the only way out is through. This is therapy. Together we can identify the necessary journey, but ultimately, he must walk it alone. He must learn how to do this, how to be in the moment, experience it, and then let it pass. I know that this is the only way and I want him to know it too. Right now, he does. I am hoping that he continues to know it when he walks back from the train to his office, and again tonight when he gets ready to fall asleep.

The only way out is through… I try to say. I get halfway through the line that I have uttered to him a hundred times and he is now saying it in unison with me. Ha! he guffaws. You’re killing me, Doc.., he says. I smile. "We’ll have to pick that one up next time…, I say. Our time together is up for today. As we stand and begin to move toward the door there is a shared awareness that something has happened here. I know that this is not the first time and that it will not be the last. But I know that at least we have moved the ball down the field and it is a good feeling. We have felt pain, spoken of its truth, and let go of the outcome in favor of moving into the present moment. This is why we are here. I open the door, we say goodbye. Waiting in the chair outside my office is another patient. Before the door to the office suite closes behind him, my next patient stands and begins to walk toward me as my next conversation begins. It’s been a rough one, he says. Boy, do I need this today." We sit. The next moment begins.

Encapsulated in this recounting of the therapeutic experience is the heartbeat of what I hope to communicate with this book. While for many of us much of the healing does not happen on the therapists’s couch, what happened here does contain the elements of a process that happens in every heart that finds its way to the present moment and into the realm of healing. Here we see a man allowing himself to feel some of his deepest anxieties around his ability to be loved, around his fear that men aren’t to be trusted, and that he is alone in the world. By making space for it, he is seeing his own strength, his own ability to survive this pain, and he is learning how to tolerate the experience as it happens in the present moment.

While this book is not an attempt to describe a therapeutic process or even an attempt to describe in detail how therapy can be helpful, it is a story of healing. Told in the form of memoir with an eye for attempting to describe how learning to stay present can be transformative, this book is an attempt to tell the story of my own process of learning to live with myself. At the heart of it, this is a book about honesty, about presence, and about learning to live in the moment. In a way, it is about the faith of the human being to heal the self through trusting a process embedded in living in the now. It is about my healing as a person, my work helping others heal as therapist, and about the engrained ability of the human spirit to find its way back to the self and to love. The process is often painful but it is also hopeful.

As described in the opening passage above, the therapist’s consulting room is as much a healing place for me as it is for the patient. While the focus is always on the person who sits across from me, I am learning from their stories as we walk through them together. While their experiences do not always mirror my own in ways as powerful as this one does, there are always similarities. I recognize the emotions from the inside out. Their tears are mine. I know from my own pain the nuances of what they are describing. I know abandonment. I know rejection. I know what it feels like to shut others out and to live in a world of recreating my own trauma in my actions, in my thoughts, in my emotions. We are all in this together.

One truth that I have come to know about healing is that it is not a one-off experience. It is an ongoing process. I frequently remind my patients that there will be no moment when it is all over. There will be no catharsis so great that they do not have to feel their pain ever again. I tell them that while we may get better and better at working through all of it, and that the pace of the process will quicken as they learn to sit with uncomfortable emotion as it passes on to the next moment, it may always return. I tell them that we are here to learn a process of healing and that there will be no cure. And I also tell them that this is good news; that their pain is part of their humanity and that it is beautiful and that it is what makes them who they are. I tell them that love is at the heart of overcoming and at the heart of living in the moment. I tell them that the only way out is through.

Each year of my life as a therapist feels like a gift. When we are in the thick of a seemingly ancient trauma rising to the surface of our consciousness, it can feel like we have learned nothing at all. In my own life, an off-handed comment, a stray glance, a friendship that has grown too close for its own good can happen in a flash. Arguments can take off like brushfires and in an instant, my sense of calm, present, in-the-moment awareness can dissipate without warning. I suspect this happens to all of us. By having the privilege of working with people as they learn the facility of living with their own pain, I move from the abstract to the present again and again and I get to do it working in partnership with my patients. It is a constant reminder that the pain that we accumulated in our childhood can linger for decades even after we have gathered insights to understand it, learned processes for safely feeling the emotions, and perfected behavioral strategies for avoiding the worst of the consequences of acting out. It reminds me that the temptation to drift back into the past is ever-present. It reminds me to stay awake to the present moment.

We are all in this together! I often say this to patients when a shared moment happens and either by insinuation or by direct expression, I let them know that I understand what they are trying to tell me and even what they are feeling. In those moments, we are no longer separated by the formalities that divide the clinician from the patient; the healer from the wounded. There are times when I even use disclosure from my own experience to make the light created by our shared connection shine brighter in our co-created frame.

There is something about shared trauma, especially between two gay men who have grown up in America, that allows for such disclosure; maybe even demands it. In some moments, to not do so feels like cruelty. When I do decide to share, I want them to know that we are not as far apart as it may seem, that our stories are intertwined just as all human stories are. Our joys, our sorrows, our challenges, and our achievements share layer after layer of emotional resonance and it is here that I believe our ability to help one another heal gets its power. When we let one another know that we see each other and the pain we are experiencing (and surviving), we know that we can survive whatever challenges we may be currently be confronting.

If you are reading this, I have no doubt that your life has contained struggle. Your exact narrative might not match mine but in an archetypical fashion, the journey from pain to joy, from trauma to recovery and from a sense of lostness to a desire for presence probably feels the same. I hope that by taking the time to read this that you will find the motivation to keep persevering and to continue to seek ways to help you continue your path toward growth. We have all been hurt, but with a little work, a little hope, and a whole lot of luck we can all find a path that supports us in our endeavor to live fulfilled and joyful lives.

Ultimately, this book is an attempt to illustrate how a human story (my story) that opens with tragedy found its way through life’s challenges. This is a tale of learning while in the wilderness as Carl Jung might put it. Throughout each chapter, I have hoped to illustrate how the various misfortunes, difficulties and setbacks of my own life have served as both sources of pain and instigators of insight. I hope that by sharing my life story, as traumatic as it has been at times, that there is an opportunity to provide signposts, recognition, and even universal connection in order to make you, the reader, have an easier go of it. While it is not possible to preempt any person’s pain with insight from another’s story, and your path is for your steps alone as Robert Hunter said, there is aid and comfort to be found along the way. And here, you might find some comfort along your journey.

By sharing this story, I hope to offer a glimpse into the process of learning to accept our feelings as belonging to us, of learning how to feel them without dwelling on them, and of learning to let them pass. At the heart of this process (and this book) is a trust that we are capable of living with who we have come to be and to embrace all of what that means, even if sometimes that is a painful process. If we are to heal, grow, and begin to live our lives with joy and an ability to live in the present moment, we must learn to tolerate all of what has brought us here. It is precisely the painful feelings that we are avoiding that can become the portals to our healing; doorways into joy!

Additionally, by sharing what I have learned from music, from lovers, from friends, from Mindfulness, and from my training in Psychotherapy, I hope that you will find a method or two to help you imagine your way to a healing path with more joy and more skill. I have learned much in the process of my healing and one of the most important is that someone has been here before and taking a hand that has reached back for you does not take away from our own progress. It aids in all of our progression but also adds to a body of knowledge. We are all in this together, after all.

I have also endeavored to tell my own story in such a way that one finds a relief from isolation within their own pain. Trauma, depression, anxiety and many other sources of suffering are almost always experienced in isolation and while there is an existential component that must be reckoned with, it is also true that when we see ourselves in the eyes of others who have gone before, that aloneness is tempered. It is mitigated by love, by compassion, and by shared optimism about what life can offer. And just when we feel the most alone, the most like giving up, by recalling a shared glance, a story told that touched the heart or simply by knowing that someone else has survived, we can find the strength to push through to another day.

It is with this belief firmly in place that I set out to create a memoir with the potential to help in the healing process of whoever might be reading. While those who have experienced similar traumatic events will find this work compelling in part because the parallel stories will resonate with their own, this book will hopefully also be of help to anyone who has lost their way at some point in life and had to work their way through their pain and back into a space where they might comfortably experience their emotions without checking out. I have seen it work in my professional practice and it is my intent that this book be an extension of that work. My own healing has been a result of finding my own way back to connecting to the human world after many years of self-imposed isolation and much of the credit for that process belongs to those who have shared their stories with me. And so, I hope that in sharing my own story, I open up the possibility that others will find their way back to feeling fully present in their lives, to feeling closeness to the others in their lives, and to feeling connected to the human world at large. I offer this version of my healing path as a gift to those who are able to make use of it.

My journey has been a long one. In fact, it has been developmentally challenging and marked by significant obstacles since its inception. While none of us is guaranteed a free ride, the price I have paid has felt exorbitant at times. I am the child whose first memories consist of cursing at God out of an upstairs window on the day that his father abandoned him, and of memories of begging my mother not to sell my pet goat at the auction necessitated by the bankruptcy that followed his disappearance. It is the journey of a kid who’s first notions of the world were marred by a total upending of what was intended to be a stable family created in love and joy. The days of my early childhood were not happy days of familial connection, mutual recognition, and connectedness. Instead, the marrige felt marred by discord, frustration, and a sense of chaos and dissolution; at least as best as this young boy could understand it. The lasting impact has been one of self-doubt, deeply-internalized resentment, and an intermittent inability to connect to others despite feeling desperate to make contact.

Did I mention I am gay? Not that it matters much anymore but growing up poor, fatherless, and gay in rural America in the 1980’s and early 90’s was about as close to an actual curse as one gets. There was little support for my growing self; in fact if there was anything, it was antipathy and even open hostility as those close to me were undeniably aware of my big secret and yet were compelled to distort and quell everything about it. It may have been concern for my well-being or it may have been their own self-loathing. Either way, it really didn’t matter much at the time. Rejection was rejection and that was my humble beginning.

And so it is here that this book begins. I have travelled many roads since leaving Cold Springs Road in Bombay, New York in the 1980’s but in many ways there is no telling the story of me becoming a healer without starting there. It all began at that decaying farmhouse marked by infidelity, marital discord, and economic failure. While this is no rags to riches story, it is a narrative about perseverance, humor, and overcoming challenge. And of course, the ending is not yet written. The end of the story remains as much a question as it is an answer; a grand choose your own adventure of my own making, just as it is for each and every human being.

This is my attempt to describe the voice of a child learning to love, the voice of a psychologist trying to understand, and the voice of a therapist seeking help all in one book. Is it even worthwhile to use this means of understanding to advance a kind of emotional healing that ultimately will be beyond what a series of facts or cause and effect theories can do to help a person heal? It may not matter in the end. This book is a memoir meant to entertain and enlighten as much as it is to instruct and hopefully any real learning will be self-evident.

As a memoir, this book attempts to be truthful. The names have been changed in order to preserve the dignity of those who I have encountered and those who continue to push forward on their own paths. And of course, in telling the story I must concede that the events described are seen through my eyes with the benefit of my healing process firmly in place. Some of the people I write about may see themselves in the narratives and find the details at odds with their own recollections. That cannot be avoided. When I wasn’t sure about a detail or sequence of events, I would ask someone who was there for their version. When I couldn’t gather consensus, I would do