Mistissini men’s group turns pain into a positive

Wayne Rabbitskin knows too well what can happen when you keep your pain and trauma inside: eight years ago, he lost his job and his house, and ended up homeless. Now Rabbitskin is a certified prevention specialist with Oujé-Bougoumou’s National Native Alcohol and Drug Abuse Program. And he is facilitating a new men’s support group in Mistissini to help men deal with their darkest moments and begin to heal.

Rabbitskin’s alcohol and drug problems were a consequence of keeping his pain to himself. “I was seeing myself in and out of jail,” he told the Nation. “If I didn’t stop I’d probably have ended up incarcerated. I kept on drinking, even though I lost the home and the job and had no money.”

It was a painful encounter with his father that set him straight. His father was also homeless, sleeping on the ground in an alley in Val-d’Or.

“That’s when I knew where I was going,” Rabbitskin recalled. “I told my partner, ‘We have to find a way to help ourselves.’ That was six years ago – that was the last time I drank, when I saw him.”

But it wasn’t just his own life that he managed to change. Rabbitskin opened his heart to his father and told him what was happening in his life.

“I told him, ‘I’m destroying my life, I’m into drugs, I’m struggling with addiction. This is what’s going on. I miss you, dad, and I know something happened to you at residential school,’” he recounted. “My parents, they were separated for 14 years. About two days after we left, there was a knock on the door, and it was him. He said, ‘I thought about what you said, and I want to come home. I’m tired of living the way I’m living.’ He quit. That’s the last time he drank.”

Rabbitskin said his mother waited 14 years for his father to get sober and return home, and they have been together ever since. This story, for Rabbitskin, goes a long way toward explaining the importance of speaking with an open heart – the very reason he’s working with the Cree Nation of Mistissini’s Building Healthy Communities program to create a men’s support group. He wants to get men in Mistissini talking through the pain in their own lives.

“I’ve been doing some men’s sharing circles going on five years now, and there’s a lot of First Nations men who have experienced physical and sexual violence as children – within their families, or in residential school, or in the communities,” Rabbitskin explained. “Being a victim of violence has a direct impact in their lives in things like addictions, depressions, difficulties in relationships and parenting. And violence, as well. In many cases, the men become part of that cycle of violence by hurting others. There’s a lot of our First Nations men, too, who have committed suicide and a lot who are incarcerated because of what happened to them.”

So much of this continued suffering could be redirected into more positive outcomes, Rabbitskin believes, if men are able to express their unresolved traumas and issues. But that doesn’t always happen naturally.

“They haven’t been able to have an environment where it’s safe for them, where they feel okay to let it out instead of suppressing it. When you suppress your emotions and pain, what happened to you in your childhood, if it’s not resolved, it’ll have some effect in your life.”

Holding in the pain, shame, and despair that comes from trauma is toxic, Rabbitskin said, and it will eventually find a way out on its own. But not in a healthy way.

“It can come out verbally,” he said. “You utter words to hurt other people, verbal abuse. That’s how I started off. I wasn’t able to shift that behaviour to something healthy. I was very toxic. I was looking down on people. I had normalized a lot of negative behaviours and attitudes, even toward women. I was seeing all this going on in my community, and I figured, ‘Okay, this is how we treat our women, and each other.’ That mentality was so prevalent in our communities and in the home.”

For Rabbitskin, it took expressing his feelings and confronting the pain that he lived with, and being willing to ask for help, in order to help him imagine a healthier future.

“By talking it out, and crying it out, I was able to address some of those issues where I had been hiding from my own mother, from my loved ones,” he said. “It had become very destructive in my own growth.”

He hopes other men can have a similar experience together. A previous men’s group he worked with in Nemaska ultimately banded together to create the Return of the Nishiyuu Walk to End Violence against Women.

“That came out of that program in Nemaska. When we started there were three men. By the sixth month we were up to eight. When we started that journey, there were five men. By the time we got to Mistissini, there were 20 men.”

The first meeting of the Mistissini support group started small, with four men, but Rabbitskin expects it to grow quickly.

“There are other men who want to go. I know this kind of stuff – it evolves. I’m hoping it’ll come out into another walk or a journey, another program. It usually comes from them.”

The Mistissini group meets every second Wednesday at the Maamuu Building, next to the post office, at 7:00 pm.