Is Sexual Harassment Different for Men? (Part 8 of 9)

“It was my fault.”

That’s one of the most insidious lies of all. Too many of us believed we did something to arouse our perpetrators. Many women live with guilt over that same issue.

Years ago, I was part of a weekly group of adult males who had been sexually assaulted. In one of our early meetings, Al said, “If I hadn’t been so good looking, he wouldn’t have molested me.”

“No! That’s not true,” George yelled out. “He wasn’t looking at your face when he came on to you. You could have been the ugliest kid in town, and he would have done the same thing.”

Hank turned to Al. “I’ll bet your perp said that you were so handsome or cute he couldn’t resist you. Didn’t he?”

“Yes.”

“It’s like the bungling bank robber declaring, ‘The money was there, or I wouldn’t have tried to take it.’ That’s an example of the guilty blaming the innocent.”

Life Is Messy

(This post is from Roger Mann.)

Life is messy. Messier than I ever imagined. I grew up in a house that celebrated truth and honesty. At the same time, I was told/taught to keep secrets and lie. I was just a kid, but there was something about it that didn’t sit well with me. But being 9 or 10 years old, what did I know? “Father knows best” is what I was told.

Even as a kid I got an uncomfortable feeling in my stomach about what was going on, but I was conditioned to override that and obey my parents.

But stuff like that won’t stay silent for long. As a teenager I began to see that Dad was not so all-knowing and perfect as I had been led to believe, and that made me mad. I had been lied to, betrayed, and eventually set aside. He hadn’t given me much attention throughout my childhood, but what he did give changed to less and less as I got older. I think he began to worry about what I might say or do.

I let it go. There was nothing I could do that would not cause even more problems, so I left home as soon as I could. I think he was relieved. I thought I’d managed to get away and put all that behind me. I was wrong. All the secret abuse and lies didn’t stay buried. The older I got, the more problems I seemed to have until finally I had to deal with it all.

The anger didn’t go away. The flashbacks and the bad dreams that scared my wife led to my trying to deal with it on my own. That only made it worse. I was a lost soul, and the foundation I had so carefully laid began to crumble beneath me at around 45 years old. I needed help and I searched to find it.

When we reach a certain age, we often look back on things. That’s when the façade shows its cracks. For me it was 45, and I have talked to many others around that age with similar stories.

Whatever your age, get help. 

You can’t do it alone. 

The results are worth it.

“I Was an Object”

Even as an adult, I looked back on old Mr. Lee (my second perpetrator) as a grandfatherly figure. (All my grandparents were dead by the time I was five years old.) I even dedicated one of my early books to his memory.

He didn’t love me. To him, I was an object. I was there, and he used my body (and my soul) for his powerful lusts.

For me to say I was only a thing was tough for me. I thought I was special (often he said I was). They were lies.

When I told a friend how hard it was to use that word, he suggested I think of myself as a commodity. He used the word to mean an article of trade.

He said, “You were like something he bought by carefully grooming you. It wasn’t because you were special; it was because you were vulnerable and available.”

I hated to hear those words, but they were correct. They helped set me free.

I was a useful object to him;

I am a lovable human being to God.

Distorted Relationships (Part 4 of 5)

“It was all a lie,” Max, a 23-year-old, said to me. He told me of the leader in his church who befriended him when he was 10 years old.

“I was the only boy who didn’t like sports, and my classmates called me ‘faggot,’ even though I didn’t know what the word meant until later.

“The youth leader encouraged me. ‘You’re a nice, sweet kid. Don’t pay attention to what they’re saying.’ He spent time with me and he was the first adult who ever listened to me. After I cried, he hugged me and whispered, ‘It’s all right to cry. Let it go.’

“After that, we started with hugs and I felt so grateful to have a friend. I didn’t like it when he taught me to masturbate him and the other things, but I loved the man so much I would have done anything for him. ‘It’s our secret,’ he said. ‘Just you and me.’

“I thought he really loved me. The church fired him, and he refused to talk with me. So it was all lies. He hurt me, and I thought he truly loved me.”

Max and I met at the 2016 annual conference of “Hope for Wholeness.” He said that occurred during his teens. “For a couple of years I became that faggot my classmates labeled me.”

When Max was 20 years old, he was a miserable drug addict, a college dropout, and isolated from his parents. He attempted to take his own life and obviously didn’t succeed. A wise therapist suggested that he attend the “Hope for Wholeness” conference.

That was three years before we met, and he said that group saved his life and he’s finding others who strengthened him.

“My classmates were wrong about me,” he said. “And for the first time in my life, I’m happy and like who I am.

“I can define myself,” Max said, “And I don’t give anyone else that privilege.”

Why Me? (Part 8 of 8)

I was targeted.

I was chosen by my perpetrator.

Those two sentences were so freeing to me. During the early days of my healing, I regularly repeated them.

I could now add:

• They were bigger and more powerful.

• They didn’t have the right to hurt me or take advantage of me.

• They were hypocrites. They tried to manipulate me into believing the lie that they did this out of love for me. Instead, they were doing it to meet their own addictive craving.

If my perpetrators were still alive, here’s something I would like to say to them: You kept saying you loved me, and I know it was a lie. Love never hurts or destroys another.

Why Me? (Part 7 of 8)

In the previous blog I introduced David*, a registered sexual offender who has been working toward his own healing.

He told me that of the many boys he had molested only three of them later confronted him. They asked him, the perp, why he had chosen them.

Naturally, he wasn’t going to incriminate himself, so he had four standard responses.

* “You were such a wonderful child, and you wanted me to do it.”

* “You kept hanging on to me, and I did it to make you feel better.”

* “You were such a lonely kid, and I felt sorry for you.”

* “You said you liked it, or I wouldn’t have touched you.”

Before I responded, David said, “I was able to make them feel guilty for what I had done.”

Yes, we were chosen. And manipulated.

We did nothing bad;

something bad was done to us.

"I Can Handle It Myself"

No one heals alone. You may challenge that statement, but I'm convinced it's true. We're survivors, but we need others—at least one person who cares.

As human beings, we're built to relate to others. We need them to love, rebuke, encourage, and inspire us. Those who are willing to hear, who can understand our pain, and assure us that we matter, are the people who help us realize the healing we receive from others.

We need other human beings to help us confront the lies and deceptions of our perpetrators.

I need others. 

My denying that fact doesn't destroy the truth.

(This post was adapted from Not Quite Healed, written by Cecil Murphey and Gary Roe.)

"You're Nothing"

I don't recall that anyone ever said, "You're nothing," although I believed I was worthless and a really bad kid. My baby brother, Chuck, whom I am sure was also sexually assaulted, once said—in a moment of rare insight while drunk—"I'm nobody. Nothing. Worthless. And I hate my life."

We were at a family gathering at a park and Chuck turned and walked away from me. That incident happened about six years before memories of my abuse sneaked out of the hidden caverns. And yet I vividly remember his words and the pained expression on his face. Chuck was hardly the introspective type and that was quite an admission from him.

Since then I've met many men who received that message of worthlessness—some being told, others absorbing the concept. Regardless, we believed a terrible lie.

None of us is worthless, but I can't convince anyone of that by words. As I see it, only by our being loved and valued by someone who cares about us can we escape that untruth.

When I know I'm loved,

I know I'm of value.

Secrets

In our family, sexual abuse wasn’t the only thing we didn't talk about, but it was the most important. Although no one ever instructed me, outside the house we were an average family with normal problems—no worse than anyone else.

We were also liars and frauds by our silence and cover-ups. And yet had anyone said that to my parents, me, or any of my siblings, we would have been aghast, even angry. The hidden reality was so deeply ingrained in my family of origin we didn't know a different way to behave.

I broke the silence and brought my sexual assault out into the open. After talking to my wife and friends about my childhood, I gained the courage to talk to my surviving siblings. It was the most difficult conversation I ever had in growing up.

To my amazement (and delight) they were open to me. In addition, and even more important, we no longer had to guard the family secrets.

Secrets trapped us in the past;

now we're free to live without secrets in the present.

That Was Sexual Abuse?

To support his wife, Wayne Jamison attended a two-hour presentation I called "Healing4You." At the end of the evening, as I was packing up my books, Wayne came to me.

He leaned over and said softly, "I—I'd like to ask you something."

I stopped boxing my books. Haltingly, Wayne told me about an older cousin who "did things to him" when he was 12 years old. He described what took place, and added, "It happened maybe four or five times, but we outgrew that, and I forgot about them." He hesitated and asked, "Was that abuse?"

I stared at him, not sure how to answer and then I said, "It was and if you're now aware of it, it says you didn't forget."

He admitted that and went on to say, "I just thought it was things guys did until they were old enough to date girls. That's what my cousin said."

Sounds naïve, doesn't it? Yet I occasionally hear stories from men who didn't recognized that they had been sexually assaulted. The predator made it seem like something natural—as the cousin did to Wayne. As one man said, "It felt normal because my dad came into my room at least once a week. He told me he loved more than he loved my mother and my sister."

Normal. That's just one of the ways we don't face our sexual assault as children. Or perhaps we think that if we could convince ourselves that it was normal, it wasn't really abuse.

On some level we know. And we don't forget.

We Were There

Many of us were groomed by our perpetrators by their showing interest in us and paying attention to us. They lured us by making us feel loved.

They deceived us.

Those who sexually assaulted us didn't see us with eyes of love and compassion. We weren't truly individuals to them. Despite their use of words like "You're special" or "I love you," they lied. We were targets for them to satisfy their lust or addiction.

If we hadn't been available, they would have found some other vulnerable child. That last statement is crucial to our healing.

We were there. We were needy and they took advantage of us. We weren't special. In fact, the statistic I've read in several places is that pedophiles abuse up to 200 kids in their lifetime.

We were there. We were available.

Now we have to learn to forgive those who targeted us and stole our innocence.

"I Need to Be Healed."

"I need to be healed," *Eric's email began. "I want to stay in the fight, but I'm tempted to turn back. I want to forget what happened, to ignore the problems, and lie to myself that everything will be all right if I turn my back on the healing process."

Eric went on to say he was worn out trying to overcome the struggles, the pain, and "my own shame and failures." He wrote to me because he said that the struggle doesn't end for him. "The shame eats at me from the inside, and I feel like a failure."

We emailed back and forth five or six times, and on one of them, he wrote, "This remains private. I can't tell anyone."

"That may be part of your problem," I replied. "You probably can't do this alone. If you had a tumor, wouldn't you consult a surgeon to cut it out?" I tried to point out how much all of us hurting survivors need to connect with others who have the same background.

The first time I spoke publicly to a group of six men, I told my story with many tears—but only after I heard theirs. For the first time, I knew I wasn't the only one. Certainly other boys had been molested and I knew that intellectually. I didn't realize their pain and struggles were like my own.

In my last exchange, I reminded Eric that he said, "I need to be healed," in his first email. "If you realize your need to be healed, please face it. Get help. Don't try to do it alone."

His last email to me said, "I need to be healed. I'm determined to do it alone." I never heard from Eric again. Twice I emailed to ask how he was doing. He never responded.

I share this downer account because not everyone recovers. Not every man has the courage to keep fighting through the threshold of pain. But to those of us who do, we know we did the right thing to keep on.

I wish every survivor would keep on. As one friend said, "I tried to pretend that everything would be all right if I just stopped struggling. But it doesn't go away. This is going to be a lifelong journey, isn't it?"

And yes, it is a lifelong journey.

And it's worth it.

Vulnerability and Weakness

For a long time I was afraid to be vulnerable—I didn't want others to see my weaknesses. If they saw me for who I truly was, they'd surely despise me.

But one day, a group of church leaders held an open discussion on sexual abuse. A recently retired professor from a seminary talked about sexual abuse and defined it exclusively as males penetrating females. Penetration was his primary word, which he used several times. When someone asked him about males being molested, he refused to admit that possibility.

Finally, one man stood and said, "Sir, maybe men can't be molested, but boys can. And they are molested! And your ignorance and closed-mindedness only perpetuates the myth."

Spontaneous clapping broke out before the man added, "I was six years old when I was molested—by my aunt—so don't tell me males can't be abused, and I refuse to submit to your macho BS."

More applause broke out. The old professor stared stonily ahead and didn't say another word.

That courageous man who spoke up did so much for me. I had only been dealing with my abuse a short time before that meeting. It must have taken great courage for him to speak up, especially to refute an authority figure.

He isn't weak, I thought. He's strong. It takes deep, inner strength to do what he did.

Over the next few days, I pondered that event and realized something: It takes the greatest amount of bravery to be transparent. It took a man of immeasurable strength to stand defenseless in front of others and expose himself.

From that time on, I wanted to be like that strong man.

Lies I Believed

(This is an encore post from "J".)

Among the worst of the many lies I have believed about myself is that the abuse in my childhood was my fault. It's common among victims to believe they brought the abuse on themselves or caused it to happen. I've learned that the abuse was the sick choice of the abuser and not my doing.

I was about 16 before I understood that men had sex with women and not just with other men or boys. I knew that men liked to look at women, but the abuse was so pervasive in my life that I didn’t understand the basic physiology of the human body.

Gender confusion and identity struggles haunt me to this day. A therapist had to tell me I had been abused. It didn't occur to me that something was wrong with the people who touched me and used me.

The lie that I caused those broken people to have sexual contact with me has affected me throughout my life. The sexual confusion alone is devastating, but there are many more consequences that victims experience because of that distorted belief. Here are a few of mine:

* A sense of chronic failure; 

* The feeling that I have no control over my emotions or my body; 

* Problems making decisions;
* Compulsive behavior.

The best thing that has happened is gaining the understanding that I did not cause the abuse—not any of it. I participated at some level because I didn’t know that it was abuse or that I was being taken advantage of.

I was a child. I didn’t understand what was happening. It was not my fault.

Lasting Effects

(an encore post by Cecil Murphey)

The impact of sexual abuse can be devastating and it is long lasting. Because you were a child, and you were victimized by someone—and most of the time it was someone you trusted.

The first thing you need to know is this: The sexual abuse was not your fault. You may even be told that you did something wrong, but that person lied. You were a victim; you were an innocent child.

Most of the adult survivors with whom I've talked told me that they grew up feeling something was wrong with them. They believed they caused the abuse and blamed themselves.

You may have tried to talk about the molestation and no one listened. Until recent years, too many adults refused to acknowledge that such things occurred. If that happened to you, you have probably felt inadequate, embarrassed, isolated, guilty, shameful, and powerless. Then you probably reacted by suppressing this as a shameful secret.

For example, I was once involved with a men's group. One member, Greg, said that when he was seven, he wanted to tell his mother that his own father was sexually abusing him. One night at dinner, he said, "Daddy has been pulling down my pants and doing bad things to me."

"Eat your dinner," his mother said.

His two siblings said nothing; Dad continued to eat. That was the last time Greg opened his mouth about his abuse until he was thirty-one years old. That's when he joined a group of survivors of male sexual assault.

Research now affirms the link between the abuse and the effects. Each of us needs to be able to admit that the long-term effects are powerful and include poor self-esteem, difficulty trusting others, anxiety, feelings of isolation, self-injury and self-mutilation, eating disorders, sleep problems, depression, self-destructive tendencies, sexual maladjustment, and substance abuse.

Grieving

From Cec: Roger sent me a personal email and, with his permission, I'm posting this. It's probably the saddest story I've read. It's hard for me to realize how much some males suffered.

I am reading your book, Not Quite Healed. So much of it reads like my life. That said, the chapter on grieving really tore me up. As I read it, I realized that I'd never grieved what happened to me and the subsequent effects and their impact on my life.

It wasn't just the molestation. That in itself was bad and went on for decades. It wasn't just the lies I was told, or came to believe, or even those I told myself. It was also the person of my father.

He was a Bible-thumping, legalistic, fire-and-brimstone preacher, teacher, evangelist and pastor—the essence of God incarnate to me. I believed every word he preached. When his words didn't add up in his actions, it caused great confusion in my immature young mind. I felt betrayed not only by him, but by God Himself.

For decades I lived full of contradictions and conflict and in dreaded fear that I would turn out like him. I was a man of two minds and very unstable. Then he had the nerve to die and leave me that way.

And not just die, he had to get himself caught with another child relative. In his fear and despair, he killed my mother in her sleep then took his own life, leaving me a note and the mess to deal with.

In having to deal with everything, I had to keep it together and get things done because everyone else, except my wife, was a basket case. I had no time to grieve. For the next two years, I blamed myself for not saying something sooner, not warning people sooner, not confronting him, and for not saving my mother's life.

Even now I sit here writing this with no emotion. My irritability, anger, rage—all inappropriate to the circumstances I see now as evidence that I have not dealt with this. For years, I didn't understand why I couldn't control my anger. Now I see that I can't go on like this. I need to process all the pain that I have suppressed.

Fears of Intimacy

(This post comes from a reader named Roger.)

Surviving sexual abuse left me confused about intimacy. I want it and need it, but it brings up so many negative things about physical touching and being pressured to surrender my body in ways I didn't understand and seems so closely related to what should normally happen when two people love each other.

What happens if I meet someone else with the same issues? What happens if I meet someone with normal feelings about this who becomes hurt and confused by my reactions?

This has been a painful struggle for my wife and me. She tends to interpret my reactions as negative toward her. That colors the rest of our interactions, making honest communication difficult at best, grossly misunderstood at worst. We both end up feeling rejected by the other.

It takes patience, understanding, and a desire to fight through the fears of rejection to learn how to approach each other lovingly. Those aren't traits my parents gave me. They are traits that I'm desperately trying to develop and, with God’s help, I may master someday.

My wife finds it difficult to understand that I love her and yet at times can appear inept at showing it. Lies and fears are chains forged long ago that take time and effort to replace with honesty, truth, and trust.

Why can’t I just get over it? Maybe because it's not a broken bone that needs healing; it's a broken soul. That healing may take some time. A wounded soul or a broken spirit can't be placed in a cast for six weeks and be good as new. It's complicated by the deep infection of a fallen nature, which only God can deal with.

As the serenity prayer goes, "God, Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can and wisdom to know the difference."

Knowing Our Bodies

(an encore post by Cecil Murphey)

I'm sure that caused my distorted concept, but it now seems strange to write that. When I looked in the mirror I didn't see myself as fat, but I thought I was probably a little overweight. If you knew me, you'd realize how silly that sounds. My assistant, Twila, teases that I have zero body fat—exaggerated but close. I am thin, or sometimes people called me wiry. But I didn't know I was thin.

That's one of the strange things that happens to us survivors. Many of us carry around distorted perceptions of our bodies. And most of us know it affects our behavior and attitude.

After 20-plus years of dealing with abuse I've been able to look at myself and see what I look like. About a year ago I stared at myself in a mirror and thought, my legs are thin, aren’t they?

Right after Christmas I saw a picture of myself when I was about 30 years old, taken in Africa where we lived, and long before I faced my molestation. "I was thin!" I yelled out, hardly able to believe that I had always been on the slim-and-trim side.

As I stared at that picture I thought, if I couldn't see my body properly, how much of myself did I see incorrectly?

I can answer only that each day I see my true self a little more clearly. And even better, I like myself more than ever before. Or is it the other way around? Because I like myself better, I have a true picture of who I am.

More on Recovery

This post is from an email Roger sent:

There was a huge disappointment and a lot of anger too when I was told it would probably take over ten years for me to recover from what was done to me. All my life I had minimized it. It was not violent or painful most of the time, and it was my father, so how bad could it be? And yet here I am 15 years later and still struggling with the effects of PTSD from it. ALL of my relationships have suffered and continue to at times be difficult.

When you are in something like what happened to me, there is no reference to "normal." What is, is just what is, and you live with it as if it were normal because it is all you know and probably all you will ever know until someone or something reveals the lie. It can turn your life upside down, and maybe that is a good thing. 

Getting around "healthy" people and learning what healthy relationships are like can make you envious and sad by comparison, but it can also help you navigate back to healthier life choices. 

Mike

(an encore post by Cecil Murphey)

His name is Mike and he sent me his story (which I've condensed).

The deacon, who was also my Sunday school teacher, started visiting me to help me understand the Bible. My folks liked him because he was friendly, and so did I. At first. But that changed.

He molested me and kept doing it every week or so for about two years.

You know what he told me? He said I was a terrible sinner and I was heading straight to hell, but he was there to help me get rid of evil thoughts and to be pure. It sounds crazy now, but I did what he told me and that was supposed to make me into a good kid.

"He was the sinner!" I told my wife just four weeks ago.

She said, "Of course he was." She seemed surprised that I hadn't figured it out.

I thought I was the one who had failed God and been evil. For more than twenty years I hated myself because I believed his terrible lies.