A Return to Your Genuine Self

October 19, 2016

Out of the Grip and Into the Driver Seat

This week, James shares with us his up and down journey as a filmmaker and how this has led him to today, creating a film that chronicles his own story of abuse.

---

Welcome to my third post for the Rachel Grant blog. If you’re joining this conversation now, previously I discussed coming into awareness at age 45 about the sexual abuse experienced as a child and then how I turned a three-decade struggle around.

At age 15, I saw a film called Fanny and Alexander by the prolific Swedish director Ingmar Bergman and felt a powerful call to the film business. It’s the only profession I’ve ever had and becoming a director was the coveted goal. As I grew up, opportunities opened up in front of me everywhere I went.

I made my first film in middle school. The second came during a summer program. An introduction to critical analysis by a high school media teacher blew my mind. I spent four years gaining a double degree in film production and screenwriting at a university acclaimed for filmmaking.

Eager to excel, I scraped my way into the industry between my second and third years. By the time I graduated, I had successfully established myself at the very bottom of the industry. My days as a Production Assistant started before everyone else and finished last. I was driving my own car picking up directors and actors, then working with the technical crew and making $50 a day. I felt lucky on the days they remembered to reimburse me for gas. The environment was brutally stressful and blossoming with all kinds of abuse. Alcohol, drugs, unpredictable explosive anger, sleep deprivation. I felt at home. (*Parents, be wary: things haven’t changed. The film industry is notorious. If your child goes in this direction, stay vigilant)

Being an athlete in high school left me well equipped to become a grip. You want a scaffold around that house? Sure, no problem. You want it up to or above the eves? Gassing 5-ton trucks at 14 left me with confidence around vehicles. Grips also operate camera dollies and cranes. They are the cowboys of the industry and most social rules don’t apply because they know they are needed. I was in heaven.

Ten years later, I could look back on what most people would call an enviable life. I had worked with stars and future stars on movies, tv shows, rock videos and commercials across Canada and in New Zealand. After a year down under, I turned down an offer to stay and returned home to resume my long delayed passion to direct. Many of my crew-mates went on to work on Lord of the Rings.

I began using filmmaking as a tool to heal in 1988. Learning the Hard Way was a school project where I documented the first conversation with my parents about my brother Mark’s suicide eleven years prior. Still gripped by unresolved grief, I struck out to make my first professional drama and help myself at the same time. I managed to convince our national broadcaster, CBC, to commit some money in advance (very rare for a first-timer) and The Stone Skipper was born in 1999. It is a story about a family in the aftermath of a suicide, through the eyes of a young boy. And that’s when things went sideways.

I pulled many a favour to get The Stone Skipper made. My friends from the industry really rose to the occasion. The broadcast money paid for union actors, bought the film stock and had it processed. Everything else came from generosity, which is another hallmark of the film biz. So when the film attracted little media attention and didn’t open any doors for paying directing gigs, I was devastated.

Bottoming out is a very personal phenomenon. You don’t have to lose $50 million dollars or overdose with a needle in your arm to get there. You know it when it happens. For me, it was returning to the only trade I knew. For the next five years I lived a slow-motion nightmare, playing out my most humiliating shame in front of the very people who had supported me. I had reached for my dream and failed. And I couldn’t even get it together to write the next film.

By 2004, I had bought my first video camera. Having never mastered cinematography in university, I had given up on ever becoming a cameraperson. Learning how to expose the film properly eluded me, so I gave up because of the false belief that I was stupid. But with video, you see the results immediately. So I began shooting everyday things happening around me and the results were pretty good. My pals in the camera department were convinced the footage was HD, even though that had only just been invented. (I wasn’t). The real opening was when desktop video editing became available.

I met Jules Koostachin around then and we became fast friends. She was a single Cree mother from James Bay, just south of the Arctic Ocean. Jules wanted to be in front of the camera and I wanted to make something. She told me she wanted to make a ceremonial dress for dancing at pow wows in honour of healing her mother and grandmother. I didn’t know what a Jingle Dress was and had never heard of Indian Residential Schools, but I trusted Jules so we began with the understanding that the project would take a year to film.

Six years and two children later, Jules danced for the first time at a pow wow with her mother at her side in the Ojibwa territory of western Ontario, where the traditions of the sacred healing Jingle Dress originate. Four years after that, I completed Jingle Dress – First Dance. Over that time the amount of trust Jules and her mother placed in me slowly dawned. Jules’ mother was interred against her will as a child for ten years in the Canadian Native Residential School system, a federally designed and funded, deliberately racist tool of assimilation. Posing as education for over 100 years, First Nations children who were forced to live away from their families were chronically subjected to horrendous physical, psychological and sexual abuse.

In 2008, the Canadian federal government apologized and paid a nearly $2 billion settlement and established a series of Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) hearings, based on those in post apartheid South Africa. The completion of Jingle Dress – First Dance coincided with the TRC and was invited to debut at the final hearings in Edmonton, 2014.

Jules’ wisdom, leadership, compassion and friendship have profoundly benefitted my life. After sustained attempts over decades to heal myself using filmmaking, a major breakthrough happened by way of the collaboration with her. And it opened the way for me to embrace my own healing journey from child sex abuse as a positive thing to do.

You can help complete Picking Trauma’s Pocket, the documentary by contributing to our crowd funding campaign until November 10, 2016.

Go here to support this amazing project: https://igg.me/at/ptpthefilm

Read Part 4...

Picking Trauma’s Pocket

October 11, 2016

Into A Better Place

This week, James Buffin continues his story and shares about his first step into a support program that opened up much more than he could have ever imagined.

---

For those of you joining this blog thread now, in the last post I shared about being triggered into awareness in 2011 about sexual abuse I endured in the 1970’s; that the shift in consciousness began with the arrest of my son’s teacher on child pornography charges.

The investigating officer in my son’s case was very kind. She pointed me in the right direction to make my own report and then referred me to a place called The Gatehouse in Toronto, where peer facilitated group programs have been running since 1998. It’s been said that the stairs to the entrance there are some of the hardest three steps you can ever take, but my intake meeting was even tougher.

Until then, I had assumed that the chronic stress I was living with on a daily basis was simply a function of career choice. I had been a freelance technician in film and television since 1988, where the long days and months were either filled with diabolically chaotic scenarios at the mercy of extreme seasonal variations or mind numbingly repetitive banal studio shoots where we were chronically deprived of sunlight and fresh air. One of my favourite sayings about the film industry is, There’s only two kinds of people in the movies. Those who are dying to get in and those who are dying to get out. Remember, by this time I had a couple of decades under my belt and was struggling to get my own projects off the ground, but was either totally consumed by the work which I needed to pay the bills, or the worry about where the next gig was coming from.

It was during the intake meeting at the Gatehouse where I began to recognize that the feeling of being trapped was actually something inside of me, not a real function of my external circumstances. That my inability to catch a full breath and the constant body sensations of heightened alert were not just due to a constantly changing landscape and lots of coffee.

A crack in my perception of the world opened up in that meeting. Through it I caught a glimpse of something better. But it wasn’t easy. The cost of this new and intriguing possibility was vulnerability.

There I was sitting in a room full of teddy bears and kids books, sharing my story with a total stranger. I was suddenly overwhelmed with a wave of fear. Would I be turned away? Or worse, would this be just one more time where after reaching out for help, the professional on the other side of the table would blankly hand me a pamphlet and invite me to another session I couldn’t afford in either time or money?

Accessibility is a key principle at The Gatehouse. Founder Arthur Lockhart has ensured that this is upheld, so that there is never a financial obstacle to people who want help. Their core support model is peer facilitated group programs. The first one is 15 weeks, two hours a week. The second phase is co-ed (a first in Canada). After that, a constantly evolving array of programming is available that includes, but is not limited to, a partners program (another first) and art therapy.

Tone is perhaps the greatest element that separates The Gatehouse from any other support I’ve ever experienced. The work that is done there involves going into very dark places and shining a light. And it’s one of the happiest, most welcoming environments I’ve ever experienced. I think that lightness is the foundation that allows for the heavy lifting to happen. It’s not an attempt to gloss over, ignore, displace or minimize the struggles of survivors. For example, during the phase one men’s groups, it would be typical for Art to respectfully check in by poking his head through the door. Imagine a group of 8 or 9 guys sharing hard stuff. We’re talking tears and snot. And in comes Art with a smile to say, “Hey guys, how’s it going?” To respectfully pull that off, without breaking the integrity of the meeting is what I’m talking about. That tone is contagious. I’ve never seen a happier group of traumatized people than at The Gatehouse.

Lockhart had already been doing work with documentary filmmaking prior to my participation at The Gatehouse, so he was familiar with the power of the medium. By the time I arrived, I’d already been self-documenting my story for several months. It seemed a natural fit to do some work together. One of the ways I’m giving back is to produce a video blog of empowered survivors, The Turn with James Buffin, filmed at The Gatehouse. You can see it here.

In the next episode, I will share about the genesis of the documentary film Picking Trauma’s Pocket and how it went from doing a selfie outside a police station to telling a global story. The international phase of shooting has gradually evolved into a global odyssey where I have met incredible survivors, scientists and specialists on several continents and counting.

You can help complete Picking Trauma’s Pocket, the documentary by contributing to our crowd funding campaign until November 10, 2016.

Go here to support this amazing project: https://igg.me/at/ptpthefilm

Read Part 3...

Picking Trauma’s Pocket

October 4, 2016

Heal Myself – Help the World

James Buffin is no joke! He's an advocate, father, survivor, and director. When I learned about his upcoming documentary film, Picking Trauma’s Pocket, I knew immediately that I wanted to bring James on as a guest blogger to share more about his journey and this amazing project. In today's post, he shares what led him to take on creating a film about sexual abuse.

---

All through adulthood I’ve tenaciously sought professional help. Alcohol. Relationships. Anxiety. Depression. Under-productivity. Alienation. Trust. Financial struggles. Anger. Overwhelmed by these problems, I would leave the helpers offices no better off and sometimes, much worse. Despite well-known professional studies linking childhood sexual abuse to all of the symptoms I was living with, until recently none of them asked if that was part of my history. My sustained efforts to get the help I needed only resulted in reinforcing the imposed belief that I was a flawed person, destined to work around problems too big to resolve. I was blindly living with the full impact of trauma from sexual abuse three decades prior and time was not healing it.

Sexual trauma is incredibly difficult to articulate. One of the best descriptions I’ve heard is that your spirit goes into hiding. It did more than harm me in the present. As a child it scarred my future by leaving me unable to fully advocate for myself about the things that were most important to me because underneath it all I had no sense of belonging. All of this resulting from a malicious attack by a sexual predator masquerading as my caregiver on a rural overnight trip.

One of the most painful parts is career. On the outside I appeared to have an enviable life. Rubbing shoulders with movie stars. Travel. Time off between gigs. But on the inside I was forever churning with shame at not having reached a coveted goal…to make a living creating my own films. Despite a university degree in filmmaking, hundreds of connections who would certainly help me and decades of professional experience, I had the inner experience of being voiceless. What I am talking about is not entitlement. It is the impact of criminal actions that stole my innocence 39 years ago and to this day affect my ability to follow through on my most personal goals.

Make no mistake. This is not a sob story.

Uneducated and unaware of the link to my prolific suffering, I did not break the silence until my son’s teacher was arrested on child pornography charges in 2011. Outraged at the school administration’s elevation of their self-preservation above the needs of the students, a raw nerve was touched in me. In a hot, overcrowded sweaty gymnasium filled with anxious angry parents, my own experience was validated for the first time. I finally experienced what the appropriate response is to my own abuse. The most proactive thing I could do while I waited three months for police to confirm that my son’s image was not in the teacher’s collection of 40,000 files, was make the long overdue police report about my own abuse in the 1970’s. Just in case something had happened and my son was not able to disclose. He’s ok. Nothing happened. But for me everything changed. And that’s when I began filming Picking Trauma’s Pocket.

For five years, I’ve been self-documenting my attempts to articulate what the experience is of living with an invisible injury that rendered me churned up and fragmented on the inside yet calm and together on the outside. On this journey, I have interviewed hundreds of empowered survivors of child sex abuse in Canada, the United States, Guyana, Bolivia and Taiwan. Whether it’s Bolivian lawyer Brisa D’Angulo with one child in her arms and another in tow, best selling author and prolific neuroscientist Bessel van der Kolk in his office, or yoga practitioner Sat Dharam Kaur, the stories reinforce each other and yet highlight the ugly truth that there is no magic bullet solution. This film is my global odyssey to gather up stories from the corners of the planet and show at the same time how big the problem is and the beautiful diversity of our collective struggles to create a better world.

Picking Trauma’s Pocket is courageously inspirational evidence that healing is possible. And for a world where on average one in five people are sexually abused in childhood, yet go on to adulthood without proper support, Picking Trauma’s Pocket is vitally important because many people are suffering in silence. Right now. That many of over a billion people around the planet who have been sexually abused in childhood should feel alone is deeply ironic. Sexual trauma is real. It is an invisible plague. It isn’t going away on its own. And it is scared of the light inside each and every survivor.

Voice is more than words. For me it includes my work in filmmaking. In the making of this film I give birth to my own voice. This journey is about nothing less than emancipation. And I want you to be my witness.

You can help complete Picking Trauma’s Pocket, the documentary by contributing to our crowd funding campaign between October 6th and November 10, 2016.

Go here to support this amazing project starting October 6th: https://igg.me/at/ptpthefilm

Read Part 2...

Picking Trauma’s Pocket