For a long time I struggled with an attraction for any man who reached out to me. As a young adult, I didn't yield but the feelings and the temptations were there. Of all the residual effects of sexual abuse, same-sex attraction has been for me the most shameful.
I blamed myself for being needy and vulnerable.
As an adult, I've learned to say that I had what someone has called "a father wound" and another refers to as his "father hole." It's that inborn need for a healthy, significant male figure in my childhood. I needed affection and the loving physical touch of a caring man.
If that hole isn't filled in a healthy way, acting on same-sex attraction is one way to get a temporary fix—a very temporary fix.
I think of a woman who came to my office years ago. She had gone through countless affairs and said, "I wanted love and I settled for sex."
That's the sad story of too many abused men.
The things that have an unhealthy attraction for me
point to those unmet needs of my childhood.
(This post was adapted from Not Quite Healed, written by Cecil Murphey and Gary Roe.)
3 comments:
That pretty much describes me. I thought that was the way to gain what I didn't get from my father. He led me to believe, patterned it actually, that I could find it in another man. It was all a lie because it has nothing to do with love and everything to do with sex and need. It took me awhile but I found out and got out.
You nailed it. I lived in terror that others would find out I had had sex with men. The predators can spot the lonely and rejected. In my case it was in a bus station in Alabama. I was being sent away to a religious boarding school. A grown man showed interest in me, in ME, a boy who had needed male bonding but had not been allowed to participate in any school stuff. In the men's room of the bus station, he took me into a stall. What happened is blocked out, but he probably gave me oral sex. That's what I went looking for when I was lonely, or rejected, or depressed....the list could go on. As I have faced my abuse and my past, I have realized I was "looking for daddy" in any men's room I came upon. For all my life I wondered what I did to start it, and my counselor help me to accept that I didn't start it; an evil adult male saw a lonely boy and took advantage of it. The evil man started it; not Joseph.
That's Joseph, not Josepoh! LOL
Post a Comment