Thread by @shaunjlawson

This thread is about my experience of men. Toxic men. It's only based on personal experience so it's bound to be flawed - and I'm not about to hold all men responsible for those toxic men I've often encountered. I've been a victim of them too in my own way.

Before I start, I want to make one thing very clear. Nothing in this thread is intended to detract in the slightest way from what is, fundamentally, a women's conversation. Because women suffer at the hands of toxic men every day.

It's intended to ADD to it.

Because men also suffer at the hands of toxic men in a way which is more or less never discussed. Men who suffer from toxic men are essentially invisible. I know I've suffered as a consequence of that; so do others. Many of them.

Ultimately, so much in life comes down to who our role models are. Growing up, I had no positive male role models in my life. Zero. My grandfathers had both died. I was the eldest of four children. And my father? My father was - still is - a mess.

I will always refute that he's a bad person. He's a victim: of a childhood in which his mother could provide no overt emotional support. Why? Because her emotions had been literally crushed out of her by the Holocaust.

He was expected to grow up long, long before he was ready.

All the attention went to his sister - who'd developed very acute bipolar disorder - instead. His father died early from asthma-related complications; and my grandmother thought she was doing right by never telling him the slightest thing about her unimaginable experiences.

My father's childhood was barren. Empty. Emotionally, a complete void. Emotionally, he was abandoned - so he grew up, and became an emotional void himself. Utterly terrified of actually confronting his childhood - but carrying it around with him, always.

So he went on, got married, had four kids... and covered all of us in his shit. Which he wouldn't discuss, but we all had to suffer.

When someone won't talk about this sort of stuff, they'll go in one of two possible directions.

a) They'll shut down and withdraw

b) They'll be like a coiled spring, with a horrific temper

Somehow, he was both. Plainly incredibly unhappy with few if any friends, he spent decade after decade getting back from work and watching TV while chainsmoking until 2am.

He'd have the TV on while we had dinner in the kitchen. None of us were allowed to talk.

He'd go into the lounge and put the TV on there. None of us were allowed to talk there either.

So from a very early age, we all retired to our rooms when we got home from school.

It was like six strangers living under the same roof. With TVs installed in all our bedrooms to shut us up.

Because of his massive problems, my father was my mother's priority - and she had a house to organise and run. On her feet from 6am to 10pm every day.

Who became the emotional 'carer' of the house? That would be me, before I was even 10 years old. Because the way my father behaved towards all of us was incredibly damaging. I *knew* that. I knew we were all being abused in a way no-one would ever understand or even recognise.

Because it wasn't physical. It wasn't sexual. We were all being sent to good schools; we all had food on the table when we got home. But we all felt utterly unloved and unlovable - and when that happens to kids, they think it must be their fault.

Emotional and psychological scar tissue is unseen. It grows on the inside. Local doctors I've since spoken to about all this knew there was something terribly wrong inside my family, but thought getting social services involved would do more harm than good. They were likely right

All of us, my father included, were victims of the most profound emotional and psychological abuse and neglect. And from around age 10, it became my mission to try and protect my sisters. Be there for them, take care of them... but never of myself. I thought I was irrelevant.

And just like that, that was my childhood gone. At school, still aged 10, I was like an adult in a child's body: that's what I've been told since by someone who knew me back then. And yes, I was.

What I also was was sensitive, empathetic... and easy to hurt.

In all group environments, children and adults always sense when someone is vulnerable - and so often, they'll exploit it. So I began to be bullied. And to put on weight, tons of it.

At secondary school, I only stopped the bullying by ridiculing myself.

Not merely laughing at myself: RIDICULING myself. That stopped it in its tracks - but hardly with a positive outcome for me.

That was an all boys school. Full to the brim of arrogant, privileged, super-competitive boys. I hated every last minute of it.

And aged 14 or so, those boys started to become interested in girls... and all I knew was I was terrified. Beside myself with fear. All of which went back to never having been nurtured as a child; and my school did nothing about that. They just blamed me for struggling instead.

My aunt says that both my parents had already started ridiculing how sensitive I was by the time I was six months old. As a kid, my Mum would tell me I was "like an old man". So inevitably, I grew up feeling weird, out of place, and that it was all my fault for being so.

And the thing about being around teenage boys - especially boys as arrogant as they were - is you can't compete. Your sense of inadequacy just follows you around day after day. That was all I knew. I took it on with me too: to university and onward.

By this point, I was so overweight (24 stone by the time I was 22) that not only did I not socialise. That fear I've seen so many women express about walking home? I had it too.

That must sound weird. But I was in fear of being ridiculed, verbally attacked (which I very often was: people yelling across the street at how fat I was mostly), and I imagined I'd be physically attacked in the end too. People HATE fat people. They despise them and are disgusted

So yes, that was my childhood and young adulthood. And as my father was such a monumental misery about everything, I also grew up believing that the 'big bad world' was terrifying too. Full of miserable people; full of bullies; full of a few winners and many losers.

I didn't think adults were allowed to have fun in that world. I thought it was all about being 'responsible' - because that's all I'd known.

And in such a world, uni and afterwards, it's not like young women were kind to men as sensitive and troubled as me either.

Because they grow up conditioned to expect men to be big and tough and above all, confident.

Confidence is the most attractive thing in the world. Shyness is not. Self-consciousness is not.

And the more inadequate you feel - because of your own experience of being seen as inadequate - the worse it gets. It's like a conveyor belt... which I fell off no later than when I was 12 or so, and never caught up with again.

I didn't have many friends... but I knew I preferred female company. Because at least we'd TALK about stuff. Stuff that actually mattered. Not cars, or getting drunk, but life itself. I'd talk on the phone with my best female friends for hours on end. Male friends were baffled.

But in my mind - because it was all I'd known growing up - my role in life was to 'protect' and 'save' women.

So if they had a relationship breakup, there I always was to be a shoulder to cry on and tell them they'd been liberated from a toxic boyfriend. Which they had been.

If a female friend of mine needed help of any kind, there I could invariably be found... even if I really didn't have the time. Remember: as far as I was concerned, I had no needs or feelings. I had to be 'strong', so I was. Always.

Only now do I realise how patronising my view of women was for so long... and that by and large, I had them on a pedestal. That wasn't fair to them.

Women are not sweet, sugary angels incapable of wrong. They're humans, just as capable of wrong as men.

Meanwhile, things back home were incredibly out of control - and for reasons I'm not going to go into detail about here, I essentially sacrificed my 20s and my PhD dealing with them. Dealing with more ongoing fallout from my toxic father and the consequences of his behaviour.

On any PhD, you HAVE to be focused and singleminded. It takes up all of your emotional energy. But mine was spent being there for my family. Oxford suggested I take a year in Edinburgh; I rejected it, saying my family needed me and I'd be far too far away.

All the while, I was falling further and further and further behind, and just did not know what to do. If I walked away, I'd have no vocational background and this massive black hole on my CV. But I just didn't have the chance to focus on finishing.

My supervisor described what was going on as "the most compelling circumstances he'd ever known". Oxford did everything they could to help me. But Oxford, too, was full of arrogant, cold, competitive peers; an obsession with alcohol; and that same old sense of inadequacy.

There were formal occasions there where we'd have to wear dinner suits and bow ties. I felt incredibly constricted; suffocated frankly.

And at those ghastly occasions, the men would hold court and be funny and confident while the women would... expect this. Or seem to, anyway.

This was not a place for me. I realised that horribly quickly after starting there. One woman, in particular - glamorous, attractive, popular, extremely intelligent - plainly held my shyness in complete contempt. More bad experience; more scar tissue.

It's like a cycle. It starts from birth and early childhood. What happens to you then is so massively important in how you view yourself, how you project yourself, and how others respond to you.

Children who are nurtured grow up believing in themselves and not afraid.

Children who aren't nurtured grow up hating themselves and terrified of the world: which can manifest in all sorts of ways. Through addiction, through bad behaviour - or in my case, through simple withdrawal.

My bedroom was my only safe place growing up. My room at uni became the same. Where, because none of us had been allowed to talk in the kitchen when I was a kid, I was now extraordinarily uneasy about mixing in the shared living spaces at uni. The cycle perpetuated itself.

I was almost beside myself with nerves at introducing myself on the first day at uni. And I made such a mess of it that sure enough, everyone scarpered! Which confirmed my worst fears (but what I didn't realise was how our fears become things - and it was all about my projection)

Something similar happened in Oxford too. Few things changed; it just followed me around instead. My ghosts, my demons, my self-loathing... and at no stage did I ever blame anyone else for this. Only myself. Mentally, I attacked myself viciously. I just wasn't acceptable.

When I was 15, I was sent to a counsellor. Within one minute, he got out six coins: two 2p coins representing my parents; 4 1p coins representing us kids. He immediately honed in on one of the 2p coins - my father. I immediately started defending him.

I would not hear a single word against him. "Oh, he means well... he always does his best..." By contrast, I would hear every word in the book against me - because as far as I was concerned, it was my fault. It had to be, right?

Wrong, as I ultimately realised when I was 23. Cue a period of several years of absolute rage towards my parents... but much more because of how my siblings had suffered than I had.

And cue, after that, two years of depression and suicidal thoughts.

I'd been trying to be far too strong for far too long. I'll never forget when the depression first hit; it was like sinking into quicksand. I spent the subsequent month completely oblivious to everything; in my own world, but feeling like everything was in slow motion.

Not washing. Not cutting my hair. Gorging on junk food. And whenever I went for a walk, the same message went round and round my head:

"You are a failure. You are a joke. You are pathetic".

It took two years to re-emerge from that.

I did what I should've done many years previously. I walked away from the PhD. And thanks to the support of the still intact welfare state, I found my vocation - teaching - and began planning to move here. Which I did after saving up for a year first.

I'm still withdrawn even now; it's just that I'm infinitely more accepting of myself and things than I once was. Uruguay, sad to report, is also a deeply machista society with attitudes and pigeonholes about men and women which are ridiculous at times.

But what all of this experience means is as follows.

- When I see reports about male suicide being as high as it is, I take it seriously. I've been there.

- When I learn about how women desperately need safe spaces, I take that equally seriously. I've been there too.

- When I hear about how women live in fear of toxic men, I instinctively empathise. Most of my life has been spent trying to help them

- When I read about men complaining about how they're expected to 'man up' and 'be strong', I empathise there too. Because that's been my life.

- And ultimately, whenever a group is labelled as all being guilty of something, it drives me up the wall.

Because not all men are like my father. Most of those awful bullies at school will have grown up. Women are in huge disagreement over trans rights. And so on, and so on.

That's one of the biggest dangers of all here. If you make men ashamed of being men, it won't get us anywhere.

If you make women ashamed of wanting to protect their rights and safe spaces, that won't get us anywhere either.

There's 7.7 billion people on this planet - and we're all UNIQUE. We're all products of the complex forces that make us and shape us; you can't generalise by labelling half the damn population as this or that.

But here's what you CAN do. You can focus on all the horribly iniquitous forces which create such a brutal, selfish society. You can reach out and listen to others. You can try and be kind - not divisive, but inclusive.

Toxic men, toxic women, kind men, kind women... we all exist. And my background, while painful, is quite literally nothing when set against millions (maybe billions) of others.

So many discussions on this platform are EXclusive. "You're not allowed to comment because you're..."

It is so, so divisive: willfully so, much of the time. In practice, there's bazillions of perspectives out there which can add to the conversation. Mine is just one of 7.7 billion out there: no more nor less important than anyone else's.

Thanks for taking the time to read it.🙏