Violent men need ‘rewiring’
Martin Gibson
Television might “add 10 pounds”, but Vic Tamati is a bigger man in person than he was on television.
He arrived here yesterday to spread the word on non-violence with the same urgent passion he once used to spread violence.
This was captured on an ad he made as one of the public faces of the Family Violence: It’s Not OK campaign.
“I thought violence was love, and so I left home at 14 and got LOVE tattooed on my right hand, and went out to spread as much love around as I could.”
Last night he met with men at Relationship Services. Today he was on the East Coast, speaking on Radio Ngati Porou, at Ngata College and St Johns.
His life has changed since his wife and kids persuaded him to join the campaign, and sometimes he has found it a lonely path.
“I’ve been on this path of non-violence since 1992, and there’s nowhere for me to go. If I want to meet another non-violent man, I can go to an anger management group that’s in progress, but there are no maintenance groups.
“A lot of the groups that have been set up isolate guys like me, because the guys running it are all these do-gooders, born in the hippie generation, and they love everything, including trees, and what use is that to guys like me? Where can we talk and share our ideas and our frustrations?
“I want to set up local champions, guys who have gone the same pathway as me and who have had a significant amount of time in recovery, which is substantiated by partners and children.”
A violent childhood “hard-wires” people differently, and it is important to understand this, he says.
“With anything that’s a veneer, we can quickly break through it. But for us we have to make new pathways and go around our wiring, but we do have this other side.
“I’ve found since doing the recovery I’ve got this really soft side, but that soft side was never encouraged, it was never nurtured or acknowledged. I had to be this bad, sad mother. I had to be harder than hard.”
After he stopped being violent he was shocked to discover he didn’t need violence to discipline his kids.
“I was shocked, but I was more shocked at how thick I was that I couldn’t see it before. My kids have kids now and they tell me about the naughty step and time out, so I’m still learning.”
His daughter said she didn’t want him to play rough-house with her kids any more last year, and he asked her what else he could do.
“She said: ‘Why don’t you read her a book?’ and my granddaughter cuddled up to me and I read her a book, and it felt really strange.
“I had to look in the rubbish bag, to see what it was triggering off me thinking like that, and the first rubbish I pulled out was whenever the old man would bash me up he would punch and kick me until I was unconscious, then the old lady would yell at me until I got up, and then they would do it again, and then he would make me go and get the bible and read the bible.”
Feeling these triggers go off, even at his age, and even after more than 17 years of non-violence, makes him despair of getting free of the wiring, but also lends urgency to his work helping violent men to change.
“When am I going to start thinking ‘this is as pure as it gets?’ when my grandkids cuddle me, and I read to them.
“That cycle of violence that started when I was four is still there at 54, wired into me.”
• Tomorrow Vic Tamati will speak on Uawa FM between 9-10am. He will then address a public Tairawhiti Abuse Intervention Network (TAIN) meeting at Te Wananga o Aotearoa at 11am, before another speaking engagement with Turanga Health men’s group and Poverty Bay Rugby Union at 6pm.
On Friday he speaks at Boy’s High from 9.40am, and on Saturday he is one of the presenters at the Men’s Health Seminar at the Showgrounds Park Event Centre, which starts at 9.15am then again at 1.30pm.