Catran-Whitney: Hello.

Ramnani: Hi.

Catran-Whitney: How are you?

Ramnani: I am good, thank you. How are you?

Catran-Whitney: I am excellent. Excellent. Happy to be here.

Ramnani: I'm too excited to talk to you. Thank you so much for your time.

Catran-Whitney: Oh, thank you for having me. Okay, well, I have a story. I am looking forward to sharing it with you and your audience. Again, thank you for having me. Okay, and my name is Keeper Katherine Whitney, and I am the author of the book Helplessness: The Emotional Health Trauma Brothers Experience After Learning Our Sisters Have Been Sexually Abused by Our Parents. My story is one that is a 45-year journey of self-discovery, hope, triumph, guilt, betrayal. It has so many elements to it. And before we get into the story, I think it’s important that I share with your audience: child sexual abuse can be triggering for a lot of you listeners and viewers. It can raise emotional trauma. It could cause memories and things to resurface. My fondest wish is that none of you experience this kind of trauma. So I can tell you how my story began.

Ramnani: Yes, please. Okay. In 1977 my family were incredibly popular singers in Los Angeles, and we were everywhere. We were doing concerts. We were in magazines, all the teen magazines. My family consists of four boys, four girls, my mother, and my stepfather, and we were singing and doing absolutely spectacularly well. As I said, we were doing concerts. We were doing TV shows. We were with United Artists Records at the time. And in fact, this was our only way of making money. Growing up as a child, we were incredibly poor. I went to 11 grade schools before I graduated high school. I lived in 21 different places before I moved out of my family home. Three times we were homeless. Singing was our way out of abject poverty. And if I could go back a few years, in 1971 my mother and my aunt and uncle were also trying to make money. They were absolutely spectacular as well. They weren’t making enough money, so my mother, seeing her eight kids singing around the house, imitating her and my aunt and uncle, liked what she heard, and she asked one day if we would all like to sing because as a singing family we could make more money. We jumped at the opportunity. In 1971 Michael Jackson and the Jackson 5 were really big. You were hearing songs like “ABC,” “Who’s Lovin’ You,” “I Want You Back,” and all of that was just all over the airwaves, all over the country, all over the world. So, of course, we see them: “We can do that.” And so we decide to start singing. Next thing you know, we eight kids, along with my mother, are singing in nightclubs after hours all over Los Angeles. We sang in after-hour nightclubs. We got up, we went to school, we came home from school, and we rehearsed. That’s what we did every day, year after year. One day we are rehearsing on a Saturday, and the phone rings. My mother goes over to the phone and she picks it up and she says, “Hello? Who? Say that again?” And then she looks at us kids and says, “Michael Jackson is on the phone.” Yeah, that Michael Jackson, soon-to-be King of Pop, is calling us in 1971. He then asks to speak to my brother directly under me. Of the eight of us, I am number two. I have an older brother, then there’s me, then I have an older sister directly underneath me. So this brother is number four. Michael Jackson wants to talk to him. So he walks over to the phone and he gets on: “Hello? Okay… yeah… okay.” And he hangs up the phone. He turns around and screams, “Michael Jackson said he’s heard of me! Said I sing and dance just like him! He says for us to keep going, we will get there someday!” Living like we lived, we could barely eat. There were days I would go out into the streets and look for bottles to turn in to make money, just so we could get a bag of rice or a pound of ground beef. That’s what life was like for us. Rats, roaches you name it, they were everywhere. But now we’re being told by Michael Jackson to keep going. We’re going to be famous. Back to 1977. We’re doing concerts. We are with United Artists Records. That year in 1977 we had made the coveted Billboard Magazine Top 100 three months. We had arrived. So much that Motown Records, who had Michael Jackson and the Jackson 5, lost them three years earlier to Epic Records, and after an exhaustive three-year search, they found their replacement family, us. My family, the Whitney Family, had just been chosen by Motown to replace one of the all-time great groups in history. We were right there. Everything we could possibly want, dream we were about to become infamous, famous, wealthy, rich beyond our dreams. The week we were to sign with Motown, which was going to be on a Friday or Saturday, the week before that, the weekend on a Saturday, my sister screams upstairs, “Boys, come downstairs! Family meeting!” So I come running downstairs and I go into the living room. As I enter the living room, what happens is my oldest sister is pacing in front of the door back and forth, and she’s mad. That’s not all that odd, because my sister, the one directly under me, she could always be having issues with my mother. There could always be arguments. I’m thinking, okay, they had an argument, that’s nothing new. But I go into the living room, and sitting on the couch are my three youngest sisters, and they’re huddled in a corner not saying a word. I mean, we are about to find out that we’re about to become rich and famous, and they were talking and laughing and joking all the time. Something’s wrong. My two youngest brothers are also sitting on the couch, and they’re looking at their three youngest sisters and thinking, what’s going on here? This is not feeling right. My oldest brother is standing at the far end of the couch behind my three sisters, and we look at each other. And we are about to sign with Motown. We are so excited. Our lives are changed forever. Everything Michael Jackson said was going to happen was about to happen. In fact, the woman that discovered Michael Jackson and the Jackson 5 in Gary, Indiana, Suzanne de Passe she’s the one bringing us to Motown. So she knows we are the group. I take a seat on the couch. You can feel when something is not right. Shortly after I sit down, my mother and stepfather enter. We have a recliner in the living room, and when he sits down.What’s wrong? Something’s not right. My mother, who is like her kids, bubbly, effervescent, full of energy, walks to the center of the room and then walks to the window. And she turns around, and she’s not bubbly. She’s mad. She is pissed. She’s not saying a word. She is stoic. Now, earlier that day, my four sisters were going in and out of bedrooms, slamming doors, and you could hear behind the doors arguing going on, just angry. And I’m thinking, okay, it’s just the girls being the girls. Now I’m about to find out what all the arguing is about. My mother looks at her eight children and locks eyes on my oldest sister, who’s still pacing back and forth in front of the entryway to the living room. And she’s even madder now. You could feel the heat coming off of her. It was palpable the anger. Me and my three brothers have no idea what’s about to happen, but my sisters do. They had been talking about it all morning, and they are the reason we are about to be hit with three emotional earthquakes in a ten-minute span. Now emotional earthquakes, emotional trauma it never gets put back together completely. You can keep it hidden from everyone else, but you never fully get rid of it. What you learn to do is manage it. So here we are on the verge of becoming one of the greatest singing groups of all time. Motown had gone so far as to even create the TV show already for us. I have the pilot script in my office. The name of the show was going to be called At Wit’s End. It’s a variety show. My mother finally speaks: “Your stepfather has been molesting your sisters for years.” “What? Wait a minute. What did you say? No. What are you talking about?” I start emotionally tumbling. I start falling into this abyss of darkness and confusion. I have no idea what she just said. It wasn’t comprehending. It wasn’t making any sense. Not us. That’s other families. We don’t do this. We have been singing for years. I know everything that goes on in this house. Other adults say they want to be in our family. This is not us. That’s some other family. Me and my brothers have no idea what just hit us. My sisters knew what was about to happen because they had pressured my mother into telling the story that day, because as far as they were concerned, it was time for the boys to know before we signed any deal with Motown. All I remember hearing is, as my mother mentioned: my stepfather, liquor store, park, apartment, this sister, that sister. It was devastating. My mother then dropped earthquake number two. She said, “I have known all along.” “Wait, no, no, no, no, no. What do you mean you have known all along? That he has been molesting your daughters, and you let it happen for years?” My brothers and I don’t know what to do. I’m about 16 or 17. My reaction is one of being paralyzed emotionally. Guilt and shame start washing over me, and I’m sure over my brothers, because how could we not be aware that this was happening in our house, and yet we had no clue? As devastating as those two bits of information were, the most devastating and traumatizing and long-lasting is about to be shared by my oldest sister, the one pacing back and forth. She looks at her four brothers and says, “It only happened to us girls. You can’t talk about it. Ever.” And like that, relationships between brothers and sisters that were so tight were broken, and they were on the living room floor, shattered. When brothers learn about this, there’s nothing we can do. We don’t know what to do with that. We are emotionally broken. Betrayal is floating in all over the place. My oldest sister, in saying that it didn’t happen to us because it did happen to us. We became aware of it that day, but it had been happening to us for years. We just didn’t know about it. Because when sexual abuse happens in the family, particularly child sexual abuse, it happens to the entire family. In 1977 there was no support for brothers. You could go to a library and find books and articles for women. Every now and then you’d get a documentary about a woman sharing her story of sexual abuse. You could get a movie-of-the-week story about it. You could get an interview. You could have someone be on some talk show. But never anything for brothers. And the same holds true today. When brothers are traumatized like this, we have no resources. There are no documentaries. There are no movies. There are no interviews. There are no articles. There are no books. There are no 12-step programs. In fact, there’s not even a one-step program. Where do brothers go? Certainly here in the United States, there are estimated between 50 to 60 million adults walking around who have been victims or better yet, are survivors of child sexual abuse. We are now seeing more celebrity men be them singers, actors, activists, influencers talking about their direct trauma. But the collateral damage, which is brothers, there’s nothing. I’ll tell you this: six years before my sisters, their sexual abuse began in 1971, which is also the same year that Michael Jackson calls our house, my older brother and I, we were sexually abused by our babysitter almost daily for six months. And I say that only to say: in a speaking engagement, which I do a lot of on this topic I am the voice for brothers oftentimes before I get to this story, invariably there’s some woman who will tell me, “Well, yeah, you can’t talk about it. It only happened to your sisters.” And then I tell them, “Well, it did happen to my family, but I will share this with you: this is what happened to me.” And then they say, “Oh. You do understand.” Yeah. I understand. But just because a brother might not be the direct victim, does that mean our trauma should be normalized? That it should be put on a scale and weighed between how much trauma my sisters or women experience compared to the trauma a brother experiences? The trauma is the trauma. The healing needs to happen for everyone. And in this case, anywhere you look, there is nothing for brothers. Because after we learn about what happens, no one ever asks, “Are you okay? Do you need to talk?” No one ever checks on the brothers. We are shunted to the side. Our emotions have become disposable. We are not important. Everyone else is important. We need to address the predator. We need to bring support and tools of healing for the sisters. But no one ever asks, “Do the brothers need any?” And when we’re told we can’t talk about it, what we hear is: We don’t matter. You don’t matter. None of you matter. So that began my journey to try to find who I am and what I’m about, and the struggles to try to talk to my sisters, and the would-have, could-have, should-have that I didn’t do to help my sisters, and that I could have done but didn’t do. And me putting them back into a traumatized situation trying to help the situation. And so there’s guilt. There’s remorse. There’s shame. There’s just so much that I carry. And that’s what brothers do. We are forced to carry because the people we need to speak to the most just told us they want nothing to do with us. And so my story, as is my story in fact, my sisters’ and my brothers’ story is a story of triumph. Because now, after 45 years, I’m finally able to have a relationship with my sisters. My sisters three of them contribute to my book Helplessness, and two of my brothers, which is an unheard-of situation: a collaboration between the victims and survivor brothers and sisters. Never happens. But you get a full family view. And Helplessness is not an easy read. It’s very dark. It’s very gritty. It’s very ugly. But it is the absolute truth. It is designed to give people insight to what really happens pain-wise and trauma-wise and how you struggle through it. Helplessness is book one of a three-book series: Helplessness, Hopefulness, Happiness. And I’m writing Hopefulness now, because it will focus on how do you go from helplessness to hopefulness. And they will also contribute to Happiness because we all have our degree of happiness. So that’s the story. And there’s so much more to it. There’s so much ugliness to it. But there is the context.

Ramnani: What is it about mental health and wellness that you want other people to be aware of?

Catran-Whitney: That term “mental health” is one I don’t necessarily agree with. And I understand what it is meant to do and meant to describe, but it doesn’t come close to describing what’s going on, which is why my book is about the emotional health trauma. “Mental health” says logic there’s a logical explanation. It says you’re alone. It’s your problem. Singularly it’s yours, and you have to deal with it. And it also says isolation. “I don’t need to be a part of your healing.” In fact, mental health, certainly as it’s done here in the United States and how I’ve seen it across the world, means, “Let me write you a prescription. Here’s a pill. This will help you with your anxiety. Here’s a pill. Let me just do this. Go to counseling. Go to this and go to that. You and only you need to go.” For the most part, it’s emotional health. Because before you can get to a mental health issue, you have to have experienced the emotional trauma first. Most people don’t just jump to a mental place and just they’re there. Something emotionally triggers what is going on. And I think emotional trauma is something that deals with feelings. It deals with inclusion. And it requires other people be involved. It is about a shared experience. For me and my brothers, it is about emotional health. Emotional health is not something you can give someone a pill for, write a prescription for. It requires work. It requires time. It requires commitment. It requires other people be involved to help you. Because none of us live in isolation. Everyone’s life impacts someone else’s life in one way or another. And so that’s where the inclusion comes in. That’s where the connective tissue of the emotional relationship comes in. That’s where the shared experience comes in. And this is why we need to begin to look at these things from an emotional standpoint. So to answer your question, I think the emotional trauma is how it needs to be addressed. And so for me, as I went through this experience and there were things that I had done, that I could have done, that leave me with a lot of regret because my sisters had said, “You can’t talk about it,” which was also to say, “We don’t want you involved in this.” But if you’re carrying all this and you’re a brother and to me the definition of being a brother is protecting your sister’s honor. That is ultimately what it means to be a brother to look out for your sisters and protect them. When you’re not allowed to do this, you start to suffer tremendous grief. We suffer loss: loss from the family being what it was, what we thought it was. And we suffer loss of our sisters. We suffer loss of our world, our environment, just being crushed and tossed away. And this emotional loss requires other people to help see us through to the other side. Because the only way to get to is to go through but you can’t go through the darkness alone. Things I had to go through was confronting my stepfather years later. Because even after all this happened, my mother continued to see him. And with my mother, after it happened, saying telling us “I will take care of this,” for me as a brother, and then prior to that being told you’re not involved in the conversation, I’m still carrying the guilt. I’m still carrying the shame. I’m still carrying the betrayal. So I confronted him one night, and that was almost a situation where I had set out to murder him that night. And right before I got ready to do it, I decided to tell him, “You have 24 hours to leave this house. Because if you are here by this time tomorrow, I will kill you.” But I had gone to such a dark place. And this was three months before I was to get married. But all I could think of was guilt and shame and betrayal. And this is not a mental problem. This is one of emotion. Because I always could imagine what my sisters were going through. I had vivid imaginings of them being pulled into a closet, and my stepfather unzipping his pants and his pants dropping to the floor, and then him having his way with them. Or him pulling them into a bedroom, which is what he did, and having his way with them. As one of my sisters, who read my book Helplessness, she said, “Everything you wrote about what you imagined happening is exactly the way it happened, over and over again.” And this is what brothers carry. So the challenge becomes one initially of not being invited to the conversation, but then being expected to answer for our non-participation. And so where do you go with that? Today, as I said, there are no systems or tools in place for brothers. And what I have learned over the years is the healing part of it begins with acceptance: that you are a victim, that you are now in survivor mode, and that without this acceptance, healing has very little chance of happening ever if at all. And so which is very difficult for men. We are accustomed to believing and being told we are King Kong. We are everything. There’s nothing that can stop us. We are the ultimate. We do the hunting. We do the gathering. It’s the women who are all emotional and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah which nothing could be further from the truth.

Ramnani: What are some effective ways to encourage men to seek professional help when needed?

Catran-Whitney: That is a good question. Because I have, over the past, sought out help from family therapists, psychologists, counselors. The response has always been, “I don’t know how to help you because you’re a brother. I’ve never dealt with this situation. I’ve never experienced a situation where we are talking about how do you help brothers overcome learning what happened to their sisters, and then trying to figure out a way to deal with their shame and guilt and trauma and all of this.” I have spoken to top so many and usually it goes like this: “Well, I don’t know what to do. This is not my area of expertise. If you were a woman, I could help you. I could tell you all the things that a woman should be doing. But you’re a guy. And not only are you a guy, you’re a brother. And I don’t know.” And so then I will ask, “Do you know of anyone who could help a brother with this sort of trauma?” And they all say no. Which means there is a gap in the system that must be filled. Because brothers have no voice in the conversation. The tools and systems and those people, people who could come in and help us, do not exist. So when they tell me that they can’t help me, I immediately get this degree of frustration because I say to myself, “This cannot be.” If you’re talking about healing the family with this, you have to heal everyone. It just can’t be the sisters. You have to take into account the trauma the brothers are experiencing. Someone has to ask, “What is it that you need? How do we help?” Because the example that I give is this. I say, “Okay, I get that you don’t know what to do with a brother. But help me out here. Let’s say my entire family is in a car crash and I lose everyone. I’m the only one left. Could you help me with that?” And they all say yes. I say, “Well, it’s the same kind of situation. I’ve lost my sisters. I’ve lost my parents. I’ve lost my family. My life is devastated. It’s the same kind of trauma. But it requires that you spend the time to delve into what it is I’m dealing with.” And they all say, “Can’t do it. I don’t know what to do with you.” So to your question, where should brothers go? There is no place. There is nothing. Which is why I’m spending time which is why this is what I do elevating the voices of brothers so we can bring the help that we need. Because without some advocacy, without some sort of activist going out and talking about this, brothers will never be heard. The things that we go through will never be dealt with. And here’s another way of looking at it: If I’m a boy and I’m going through life from boy to manhood and I’m on this trajectory to adulthood, there are things I’m going to come up against that are going to trigger me. It could be a song. It could be a movie. It could be a conversation. A situation that I’m in with women or girls, and I am triggered. And I go to this place of darkness. Or I go to this place of guilt and shame. So the man that I grow to become will directly be related to the support I do or do not get. It’s that simple. If a brother is going to be able to help their sister, we must be involved in the conversation. Because this is what I know: at the end, man or woman, brother or sister, boy or girl we all want the same thing. Everyone wants the same thing. We all want to be seen. We all want to be heard. We all want to be understood. And we all want to heal. We all want to go forward in our lives in a positive direction. And we require other people’s participation in that. And this is an emotional situation that requires a lot of help. I began to figure out ways that could help me. Number one was understanding that I am in trauma. Understanding that I am a victim. Understanding that I am not in isolation. I began talking to more and more men over the years and learning about them experiencing the same thing, and them having this hidden grief like I did. They just hid it. Because who can they talk to? No woman wants to talk to a brother about this. And obviously men aren’t going to talk to each other about it.

Ramnani: Really?

Catran-Whitney: We’re just not there yet, even though we’re getting better, we’re getting closer, we’re starting to make inroads. But what man is going to sit down with a guy and say, “Yo, man, this is what happened to me. And I should have done this, and I could have been better with this”? We don’t do that well. Women do that so much better than we do. To me, men and women have feminine energy and masculine energy, and women tend to be much better at managing both sets of energy. We’re not that good at managing our female or feminine energy. So we have to, number one, recognize and then accept. And then we also have to look at what we are experiencing, because it is emotional. It is part of our DNA. It is a part of us. It's not going anywhere. And like DNA, which is self-replicating, this can replicate in ways we have no idea. It can replicate in anger. It can replicate in anxiety. It can be fear-driven. It can be pain-driven. It can impact every relationship that not only we have, but particularly those that we have with women and girls. It will impact our work environment. It will impact our education. Because we were so poor and we moved so much, and I went from school to school to school, I was trapped in this situation where: How do I help my family get out of this? That started to become all-consuming for me. And so work… and I’m trying to go to college, which I didn’t finish because it became so hard. And there was no place for me to go. So you’ve got to understand that this sort of thing is self-replicating. And then you have to be willing to take you've got to find someone who you trust, who will not judge you, but will allow you to talk and let you share what you’re going through. You don’t want someone telling you, “Dude, you should have done this,” “Girl, you should have done that,” because all of that is noise to us. That doesn’t help us. We just need someone who’s going to say, “I understand. You can tell me.” Yes and we need that. Finding the courage to talk to someone which, between me and my brother, we didn’t talk about it for 45 years because we took what our sister said (“You can’t talk about it. It only happened to us girls.”) and we took that to mean we weren’t even going to talk to each other about it. Forty-five years. It was so difficult. It wasn’t until I started writing Helplessness in 2013, because I felt my family’s experience did not need to end in tragedy, as so many families do. I didn’t want our experience to be on the dung hill, just piled on top of so many other families’ experiences, and it never come out. I want our experience to be able to help, to educate, and to protect. Because this is what I know about child sexual abuse: it crosses racial lines, gender lines, religious lines, political lines, wealth. It crosses oceans. It is everywhere. But it’s one of those topics no one ever wants to talk about. Everyone’s afraid to talk about it. It’s like going to a family gathering and what are topics you don’t talk about? You don’t talk about religion, politics, who’s having an affair that’s what you don’t talk about. And you certainly never talk about the child sexual abuse that’s taking place. When it comes to brothers, we’re not even allowed into the conversation.

Ramnani: Traditionally, boys are encouraged to hide their feelings. We often say common phrases like, why don't you man up? Which implies they are weak. Can you explain how these might affect men psychologically?

Catran-Whitney: Psychologically, what it does is it gives us this false narrative that we cannot be vulnerable. That we must be strong all the time. That we cannot cry. That we cannot let our feelings come to the surface. So psychologically it is causing a tremendous amount of damage. Because as a young man especially if you’re a boy, and you are going through emotional growth, going from a young man to a man there are many questions and many things that you’re grappling with, and most of them are emotional. So when you are told that you cannot be vulnerable and you have to be strong all the time, ultimately that makes you weak, because you don’t get to express the full range of who you are as a person. And certainly you cannot express the full range of who you are as a man. Your ability to be tolerant is taxed. Your ability to compromise is taxed. Your ability to feel and understand and have an emotional depth about you is challenged because you’re put in a box. And men and as society creates this environment for us, we are just as responsible for society in making sure that it happens. The truth is: men like knowing and hearing that we are the king of the jungle. That we are the overseer of every domain, our domain, someone else’s domain. We are always in control. But that control comes at a cost. You are never allowed or expected to just be who you totally are. We are starting to see cracks in this as we see celebrities and we see sports figures and influencers and things like this begin to talk about how they no longer want to be trapped in that bubble. We are seeing more and more even as LGBTQ comes forward in a really strong way, or just the entire diversity of people starts to take shape and become a greater part of the conversation. But it is something that men desperately need to experience more of. Because the trauma of believing that they’re all-powerful impacts everyone. It’s part of that DNA thing. It impacts us in ways we don’t fully understand, and we certainly can’t.

Ramnani: Can I ask how romantic relationships impact men's mental health both positively and negatively?

Catran-Whitney: Statistically speaking, men who have experienced child sexual abuse in their romantic relationships suffer greatly, because they don’t fully understand the emotional impact and how to navigate those relationships. Because oftentimes when people think of men being sexually abused, they always tend to think that it’s a man sexually abusing another man. Well, statistically speaking, about 30% of all particularly boys that have been sexually abused have been sexually abused by a mother, or a female caregiver, or a sister. So we go through this, but society thinks it’s just something that a man does. So from a romantic standpoint, it can impact you sexually because you aren’t sure of who you are and what you’re about. It can impact whether or not your relationships with women center around anger and can cause you to act out physically. It can center around your ability to be confident in romantic situations. It can cause you to be in romantic situations and you then become emotionally triggered. You’re not really sure how to navigate your way through that particular relationship. So there are plenty of statistical data out there that supports this idea that men who have been sexually abused carry a lot of this trauma with them in their romantic relationships. And oftentimes for their partner, they don’t know where it’s coming from because we are keeping it a secret. I will give you an example of not only keeping it hidden but keeping it secret, for that understanding. When I was writing Helplessness, I was writing a particular passage, and I was in bed with my wife one night, and we were talking. And I was sharing with her this particular situation because it was really difficult for me to write this particular part of the book. And I’m telling her what I’ve just written, and she looks at me and she says, “You know, you’re a victim.” I said, “No I’m not.” “Yes you are. How can you say you’re not a victim?” And I said, “What are you talking about? I’m just telling you what I’m writing about. I’m just telling you this is what’s going on.” And she says, “Look at you. You’re sweating. You’re shaking. You are an absolute mess. How can you not know you are a victim?” That’s when it hit me. I had no idea. And this is being at age 57. I did not know what I had experienced was impacting my relationship with her. I didn’t recognize it for what it was. And there was no one to tell me how to overcome it or how to deal with it. We’ve been married for 38 years, and I’m writing this, and I’m thinking: if I don’t recognize this, there are millions of other men and young men and boys growing up who don’t recognize the trauma and how it’s impacting their romantic relationship. If it wasn’t for my wife, I didn’t even recognize or even admit until I was 57 that what my babysitter had done to me was sexual abuse. I never recognized it for what it was. Because there was no one to say, “This is what you’re dealing with.” Even though I had told my mother what our babysitter was doing and this is just another story of her failing and betrayal, but if the people who I should be able to go to for help are the ones who are doing it, and these are the most important people in your life as a child, you have nowhere to go. There’s no one to trust. So to your question, how does it impact your romantic relationships? It could have tremendous impact on your romantic relationships. And then, if you end up having little girls, it could have great impact on your relationship with them.

Ramnani: You felt your feelings were ignored by your mother. How did this make you feel?

Catran-Whitney: There’s a chapter in my book called “The Parent-Child Contract.” It is a chapter that resonates with so many men because it talks about when a woman has a baby and she locks eyes on her baby for the first time, it’s divine. It is so powerful. And when you are a father, you have the same experience. When you see your baby for the first time, there’s nothing that can describe the emotion. And certainly with my mother, she had it eight times. And when you see your baby, one of the things that immediately comes to mind is: I will never let anything happen to you. It is my solemn oath to you, as your mother. I will protect you at all costs. I will walk through the fire with you. I will make sure you are always loved and always protected. So when I told my mother what had happened to me and my older brother, we were in the kitchen and I told my mother what our babysitter had been doing, her response was: “Well, baby, there’s nothing I can do about it right now.” And I think my stepfather saw her reaction and recognized, “Oh, if she’s not going to protect her sons, then I can do anything I want to her daughters.” So when I told my mother, that’s all… and she said, “That’s all I could do.” I’m seven years old but I knew there was betrayal. There was loss. There was the sense that: I don’t matter. For me to describe what it was like when she, to me, cast me to the side as a little boy you can’t make sense of that. You just know something is wrong. And after she did that, the babysitter continued to have her way with me for another three months, even though I told her what was going on. And so when we get to 1977, and me and my brothers learn about what happened, you see patterns develop. There’s the betrayal. The loss of love is what you start to experience. And you start to create that: this is what’s going on I don’t matter enough. So it’s just a feeling of betrayal.

Ramnani: I'm so sorry to hear that. What was your relationship with your mother from then onwards?

Catran-Whitney: Well, I don’t have much of a relationship with her now because she refuses to acknowledge her role. She refuses to acknowledge that what she allowed to happen was not her fault. She believes that the trauma that her children experienced, it’s up to them to figure it out, and that “I don’t have any responsibility to you whatsoever.” That is her burden to carry. I have a couple of sisters that continue to maintain a relationship with her. They have their reasons for it. I talk about my views about it in the book. My mother, she had her own challenges growing up as a little girl. She wasn’t sexually abused or anything with her father, but my grandfather could be an overbearing gentleman. My biological father started dating my mother when she was 16, and she had all eight of her kids by the time she was 24. And so my feeling about her situation is one that she felt she had to do whatever she could to keep stepfather. And her way of doing that was to making sure that he had a place in her bed. And in doing that, the sacrifice was her children. So that is hers to bear. I used to think our role in this life was to bring great music to the world. I don’t think that’s it at all even though it would have been spectacular to do so, and life would be much different for me. But I think we were brought together, the madness, the fear, the anxiety, and the hurt and the pain. I think we were brought together to go through that so that we could share this experience with the world, so that we may help other children not suffer what we’ve suffered, and to educate sisters on what their brothers are going through, and to educate families on things that you need to do to protect yourself and to pay attention. Don’t discount your children when they say something is not right someone’s doing something to them. Don’t just say, “Well, you’re too young and you don’t know what you’re talking about.” Chances are they know what they’re talking about, and they know what’s wrong. Here in the United States, 160 children every day are sexually abused. That means last night some little kid went to school, they played with their friends, they were on the schoolyard playing, having a good time. They came home, saw their parents, ate dinner, did their homework, and went to sleep. And after midnight, someone opened their bedroom door and walked in and had their way with them. It will happen again tonight, and it will happen again tomorrow night. It is believed that seventy percent of all children that are sexually abused are abused by someone in the home mother, father, or sibling. Twenty percent are sexually abused by a caregiver, babysitter, counselor, teacher someone of that nature. The other ten percent are by people we don’t know. We like to think our families are so tight, nothing’s going to break us apart. We go outside, nothing’s ever going to break this family apart. We are just too strong. And usually that is the case. But it’s rarely the people outside the home that break the family apart. It’s usually what takes place in the home. That’s where we need to pay attention the most.

Ramnani: So if anyone who is watching this interview and is going through sexual abuse, what would your advice be for them?

Catran-Whitney: The first thing is to recognize that you are not at fault. All too often, we want to take on the burden of the predator and say, “I must have done something. I caused this.” Especially when you’re a child, otherwise why would Mom or Daddy be mad at me? Why would they be doing this to me? Then when adults go through this, we take on this burden of “I must have done something wrong.” The best thing that you can do, once again as I said, is try to find someone you can talk to. Do not keep it hidden. It protects the predator. Because what they want most of all is for us to be quiet. They don’t want us saying anything. As long as we are quiet and everyone we tell who does nothing is quiet they will be protected forever. The other part is: when you do speak, you get this sense of personal power has been returned to you. Where there was loss, you now get this sense of control. Where you otherwise do not have control emotionally, you must stand in your space and say, “This is who I am. This is what I’m about. This is what I’ve experienced. I don’t care what you think.” Because most people are going to tell you, “No, you must have been wrong. No, you read the situation wrong,” blah blah blah. Once I began to speak out, once I started writing about this, those shackles that had been burdening me those words, “You can’t talk about it. It didn’t happen to you”, they just started falling away. And it was so liberating. We live in this place of fear because it also comes with threats: “If you talk about it, I’m going to do this to you. I’m going to do this to your children. I’m going to do this to your brother. I’m going to do this to your sister.” Those usually do not happen. But those are threats that are either spoken or implied. Claim your space. Talk about it. And then you will find that the people that have caused all this trauma no longer have power over you.

Ramnani: How important is it for loved ones to listen to men without judgment?

Catran-Whitney: It’s incredibly important. Men tend to think that when it comes to things emotionally that if we want to share, our loved ones don’t want to hear about it. Because they expect us to be strong. They expect us to solve everything. And it wasn’t until I started sharing my story with my wife, and then I started even sharing it with my son and my daughter, that they began to fully understand who and what I’m about, and why certain things, in certain situations, I react a certain way. I could be watching a movie with them, and the next thing you know I’m just in tears because I see something, I hear something that reminds me of my childhood when we had great times, and then we had horrific times. And when you see something on TV, or a song comes on the radio and there would be plenty of times even to this day when I’m driving down the street and I will hear a song and I have to close… because I’m just in tears. One of the songs that does it to me the most is Gladys Knight and the Pips’ Midnight Train to Georgia, because it talks about going back to a time when things were great, and I just remember my little sisters and their little ponytails and my little brothers. I wasn’t always able to share that. And it wasn’t until I started writing and began to get this sense of personal empowerment that I just kept it in. And so I know in talking to many men they want to be able to share. Right before I started writing the book in 2013, I went to a writing conference put on by the great motivational speaker Lisa Nichols. And she was doing a conference on how to write a book. And they wanted different stories from people. And I was the last one, fortunately, to be called. I had gone there to talk about a different book, but as I got on stage, Helplessness just poured out. It was just too emotional. And the room was silent. And when I was done, I went and sat back down. The next thing you know, I am surrounded by so many women saying, “I had no idea me not talking to him and he not being able to talk to me what you’re saying? what you’re feeling? this is what he was dealing with.” There were so many women. And I didn’t know what to do. So I got up and I left the hall. And I closed the double doors. And I’m just standing out in the hallway, and I’m hyperventilating, and I just had to get away. The next thing you know, the double doors burst open, and so many more women poured out, and they’re just surrounding me. But it was three women separately who told me the thing that had the most impact. These three different women, who didn’t even know each other, who came and spoke to me at different times, said: “I didn’t know that’s what my brother had been carrying when I told him he couldn’t handle it.” And each of them told me their three brothers, they took their life, because the trauma, the pain, the guilt was so much. And these are men who were just holding it in, that they had no one to talk to. So to your question, how important is it for loved ones to allow men to talk? It is incredibly important. We need to know we have a space in our family and with our loved ones to just let it out, whatever it is, without judgment. Because we aren’t all-powerful, but we keep feeling that we have to be this way.

Ramnani: What can we do to break the stigma surrounding men and mental health?

Catran-Whitney: Allow us to talk. But it’s not easy. And what makes it not easy is men getting in our own way. It’s us believing that we have no vulnerabilities, when in fact we have plenty of vulnerabilities; we just don’t like to show anyone. It comes down to communication. It comes back to that emotional health situation, which to me is about inclusion. We must allow men to allow their feelings, whatever they are to come forward. Because if we don’t, then we get into that realm of mental health. I am not a doctor. I have no psychology or clinical degrees. I’m a brother who’s experienced a lot. And so going from the emotional, the mental starts to take over. And the mental part of it is what drove me to almost committing murder. I had to start to go from the emotional to the logical. So there’s got to be a logical reason for this. My logical reason and my logical outcome can only be one thing: I’ve got to commit murder. That’s where the challenge comes in. And men, we can strike out. And we are forced to do something. And we mentally create this environment create these opportunities and so that’s where it becomes a mental issue. Because we are caught in this mental trap in our own head. We can’t get out. And when we do find an outlet, it is usually not a good outcome.

Ramnani: So do you have any final thoughts?

Catran-Whitney: My final thoughts: as I said, my mission is to elevate the voices of brothers in the conversation. Brothers need an outlet. We need tools. We need systems. We need someone that will give us the time. Because part of my journey even when I was around my sisters was hearing the little whispers of, “How could you not know? How could you not see my tears?” And if we’re not allowed to participate in the conversation, we can’t be held accountable. Because not being allowed to participate in the conversation and then being held accountable those two ideas cannot occupy the same space. And yet we are expected to do this balancing act of occupying the same space. Brothers and sisters can become allies in this fight for child sexual abuse. And it is my goal to make sure that we do. We do not need to be enemies just because, as an innocent brother, I can be held guilty just through gender proximity or I have, between my legs, what the predator has between his legs does not automatically make me guilty. And we can’t continue to be treated as guilty or non-interested bystanders. We are incredibly interested in what happens with our sisters, but we must be allowed to participate in the conversation. And so that’s what Helplessness is about. That is what this conversation is all about. And I’ve got to tell you, I have thoroughly enjoyed this conversation.

Ramnani: Keeper, I feel the same. It has been an honour and a pleasure to talk to you and to have you on the podcast.

Catran-Whitney: I appreciate it. It has been an honor. Thanks for having me. Thanks for allowing me to speak.

Ramnani: Thank you.

Catran-Whitney: You too. You be well. Bye.

Ramnani: Bye.