9. Time

This is my share for the day. I’m grateful to be out of a period in which I felt like incest and sex abuse was all I could think about.

Some of you probably know what I mean. For so much of my life I was more or less obsessed with those things, but only on a semi-conscious level.

Reading survivor stories surreptitiously in the library, scanning indexes of books on psychological disorders for the rape and incest bits, all that. And the only question I asked myself was why was I such an awful person to be thinking of those things so much?

Where I live there are ice-jams in the springtime. River ice begins breaking up and moving along with the current. The chunks of ice get clogged up and jam together at the narrows of the river. They pile up and pile up and the pressure builds…and then it lets go. The ice clears and the river flows. That’s what it felt like for me when I started saying outright “I am an incest survivor.” Like the ice was letting go and the river could flow again. You can’t step in the same river twice.

I remember that I was jealous of a partner I had who had been raped. Not jealous of the rape, jealous of the healing and attention she was getting. I mean I remember the fact of my jealous feelings. At the time I had no idea why I was jealous, or what of. I think the damaged parts of me wanted healing. First they had to be acknowledged. That’s why the words are so powerful.

I am an incest survivor. Cringy, those words. They seem attention-seeking to me everytime I use them. I’m sure they seem that way to others. In fact, I’m sure to some degree they are. I am a profound seeker of attention. Now I can have some compassion for myself; I think the damaged parts of my psyche…needed attention, so they sought it. Seek it. Make me better! I was screaming to myself and anyone who would listen, or didn't get far enough away from me.

I can’t be the only sex abuse survivor who has gone through an over-sharing phase. There was a period where I got in touch with people I had been close with at various times in the past and told them all about it. Uninvited, unsolicited, in some cases definitely unwanted. Some of those people now treat me with kid gloves stuck on the ends of ten-foot poles. Fair enough. It’s hard to grasp that not everyone runs around with intrusive-incest-thought-loops running constantly in their heads.

It’s a funny thing about sharing in any kind of meeting with fellow travelers of any kind. In the 12-step fellowship I belonged to I had the experience of sharing things I thought were my own private shames and failings, only to hear every single person in the meeting add their own experiences, similar if not identical.

I’ve had that experience in an incest survivor’s support group I attend. We sit with so many secrets and so much shame. We share things that seem ok to share, and hold back the things that just seem like too much, too intense, too…bad, too…that’s just me. I’m a man and women can’t relate, or don’t want to hear from me. Meanwhile I’m sure some of the women were thinking the same things. He’s a man, he can’t relate. But then someone shares something which is so difficult I can see they struggle to make the words come out. Or I share something so difficult I know beyond any doubt that I struggle to make the words come out.

What has happened every single time is that in fact everyone else in the meeting can directly relate, and I for one am glad someone else said it first. Whatever it is. In fact, I want to go on and share something else, whatever is even more shameful and awful to me, because I know they’ll relate. You’re only as sick as your secrets.

Us boys and us girls. So trivially different, so profoundly the same. We’ve all lived with sexuality shaped in ways out of our control. We’ve all lived with psyches and souls that were jerked out of their normal development.

Planets and other heavenly bodies orbit the sun. Sometime asteroids crash into them and send them careening out of those orbits, tumbling and falling and spinning out of control. Something like that happened to us boys and us girls. We tumble and spin and fall.

We tumble and spin and if we are very lucky, we fall into a new orbit with other tumblers and spinners and fallers. What a gift. What a thing to be grateful for.

I’m an incest survivor. If you are, you’re not alone. Call someone. However you’re feeling, you’re not alone. Tell someone, please. However impossible it feels, tell someone you trust, please. Call the number at the bottom. You’re not alone. You don’t have to tumble and fall and spin alone. If someone is hurting you, you’re not alone, and it’s not your fault. If you are reading this, then I can tell you that other survivors are reading this as well, and all of us are are thinking of you, right now, and we are hoping that you’ll tell someone. We are thinking of you, right now. You’re not alone.

I’m an incest survivor. That’s my share for the day. Thank you for listening.

8. Better

This is my share for the day. I wish the last thirty-three years or so hadn’t happened.

I wish I’d got all up in some fisticuffs with my old man when I was a teenager and lived as a hobo. I feel like that would have been truer to myself.

I wish I had been able to stand uo for myself.

I wish I had never absorbed the rampant narcissism and pervasive projection I learned from my mother.

I wish I didn't have to live with what it’s like to know that I’m that kind of guy. I hope I’m a recovering version of that now, because I try, but even that feels intolerable. It’s not quite intolerable, but man does it smart.

I wish there was some other way out than through.

I wish I had any sort of confidence that there is anything on the other side of ‘through’ and it’s not just an endless tunnel of knowing that at any moment in any conversation with anyone who matters to me I might be blinded by the personality goggles that make me feel betrayed and used.

I wish people would not tell me stupid kindergarten fortune-cookie advice like it’s that easy to fix things in your head.

See? If you try to show care for me, I might react like that, and despise you for being stupid. I despise everyone and everything for being stupid, sometimes. That’s the one thing I never thought I was.

But I wish I didn't think I was so stupid all the time now.

I wish I didn't have to embrace humility and chagrin as a way of life, but that’s how you go through the tunnel, even if the tunnel has no end. I hope that’s how it works.

I wish that when I finally actually did ‘disclose’ to my mother and tell her she wasn’t ok and my childhood was not ok, I felt better in some different way.

What I have is a feeling of relief at not maintaining the illusion in my mind that I have a mother, and not just a maternal organism.

But I also know that I was loyal to the part of me that’s a little boy and needed a Big Brother to protect him. That worked and I guess that’s why people tell you that if it’s at all possible, do some version of that. Tell the person who hurt you that they hurt you instead of denying yourself in order to maintain someone else’s illusion about themselves.

The little boy part knows that I finally stood up for him. That was like a magic trick, feeling a ton of bricks disappear off my back.

But I wish it were all different. But it’s not. I’m still me, and I have my own tunnel to get through, no one else’s.

Usually by the time I can consciously acknowledge a struggle I’m having, I have a fighting chance at success in dealing with it properly. Making things conscious in my mind seems to be the engine that moves me through the tunnel.

That’s my share for the day. Thanks for listening.

7. Ugh

I’m an incest survivor, and this is my ‘share’ for today, as they’d say in a twelve-step meeting. Going through The Courage to Heal and my own feelings about ‘disclosing’ is hard. My parents are both alive. They’re elderly but functional. My entire relationship with them has always been disfunctional and unboundaried, but it was a three-legged stool and I knew my role.

People who know me have been telling me for years that my relationship with them wasn't ok. I heard them, but I knew better. I thought they just meant that my folks were too demanding of me, and I was kinda too accommodating. Yeah yeah, sure, but they’d both been abused and I was really the only one who understood them. Ugh.

I’ve pulled back from them, put up walls, avoided, then sometimes been really friendly and great, just like when I was ten. Back when they were happiest-ish, and I was what they wanted.

What I hadn’t, and haven’t done in years is say anything candid to them about anything. I thought that was the best I could do. Just keep myself away from them emotionally by stonewalling when I see them. It’s near-daily; they live close by. I know I need to individuate from them, and I have been doing that from the other side of the stonewall I put between us as best I can.

But I still see them. I like them. I know how to be around them. A damaged ten-year old. That’s what I become around them when I see them and they say something that hits me the wrong way. I just clam up and don’t say anything to them. Then after a while I leave.

I used to tell myself that what had happened was just that they had been too annoying for me, and what I do when they become too annoying is I clam up and go silent.

Then I realized that physically there was more to it. I feel clammy when it happens. I don’t feel like it’s a choice to talk. I feel like I can’t talk, and all I can do is just wait it out. That’s not ok at all, not for anyone. For a 48 year old man it’s pegging my shame dial to see it. It just looks like a trauma response to me now. The other day, like 72 hours ago.

I listened to a passage in a book on trauma healing via martial arts yesterday. There was a bit about ‘long term complex trauma’ meaning an abusive environment that persists over time, and how exposure to that can lead people to develop an almost separate personality for when they are in that environment. At least that’s the clear idea that leaped out at me.

Oh, **** me. That seems like what actually happens when I am around them. I’ve been putting on a whole trauma-response personality, and then trying to deal with them while I’m stuck in that. It’s just never ever going to work.

I think sometimes that I am the only person in the world they need because I am the third person that keeps their dreamworld alive. That’s what I do, I guess, when that persona comes over me. I help maintain the dreamworld, and I do it because I want to protect them, I think. They were both very damaged, legitimately. And I was well and thoroughly conditioned to tend their needs.

Yeah. I can’t see much more healing happening for me if that just continues. Not with this in my conscious awareness. Now I know it’s just a choice to voluntarily walk back into the dreamworld where that little boy doesn’t get to exist. No. I’m becoming more integrated and think of myself as a single whole person pretty often.

But now this seems like a job for grown-man me to protect the little fella. I can’t be letting that little guy get re-traumatized by making him sit there and be quiet. I’ve been singing and taking lessons for my instrument, and writing stories and feeling peaceful and like I’m getting to know the whole man that I am. I can’t carve out a piece and leave it festering. The rest of my life is so much better now.

I know it’ll be a marker of something good for my heart to be myself with them. Maybe it just continues to be like this, the process of healing. You just move toward it. Like becoming your whole self. You just take another step. I don’t change things in my life until I can see how they are really holding me back from something I want. I want to be all integrated, to become myself.

I have to see that something is in my way before I can get past it. You’re not alone. Thank you for listening. That’s my share for today.

6. Parts of me that didn't make it…

I was reading the section in "The Courage To Heal' about grief this morning. If you are a survivor and you haven't read that book, please do yourself a favor and read it. Even if you're a man and see the word 'women' on the cover, read it. It's for all of us child sex abuse survivors. Some things are different, sure. But as boys and girls we all have something in common. Someone who was supposed to love us and look after us instead gave us profound damage and betrayal, and in doing so distorted our psyches at a very vulnerable age. It did extensive damage to all of us. I want all the help I can get.

Just this morning I read an account in that book by an elderly woman who it seemed spoke directly to me. She shared that she had no memory of being a virgin. All her life she'd missed out on these feelings she knew she would never have, and an experience of innocence that was just simply not possible for her. Yes, she is correct. I hope she had delightful experiences, whole experiences, love and connection with another soul, all of those things could be and I hope were hers. But it's just a fact that she lost out on a one-of-a-kind experience, and the loss hurt her. After maybe 60 years it hurt her. Maybe she'll read this, although it seems unlikely. But if you do, thank you for sharing your experience. It spoke directly to the heart of this middle aged man. My experiences and my body are not exactly the same as yours, but I love and want to love and feel tender feelings with a cloudless heart. I lost that, and it sounds like you probably know how I feel about it. It's not fair and I'm angry. I deserve that and I can't have it and there's just not anything to be done about it.

Except, I guess, honoring myself by grieving the loss. Grief is very clever: it tricked me into having some self-esteem. See, in order for me to grieve the loss of my innocence, I have to really feel that that little boy deserved to have that innocence, and that the fact that he lost it is worth mourning. Maybe I don’t yet quite exactly feel that I need all this…I mean, after all I’m a grown-up man. But that little boy needs it. That little boy deserved to be able to have that, but instead he missed out on it. That sucks. But it’s no longer something I can hardly face. Neither is the lost time that I thought I myself would get lost in just a few days ago.

As far back as I remember, my dearest daydreams were of playing with my best friend in a playdate that would just never end. It’s still that, really, with very slight modifications. That’s when that little boy must have been at his most abundant with life. It’s still when he is, as a grown man. (Therapists: yes, I too am somewhat disturbed by all this switching from first to third person. Complain to the little boy about it, not me. )

So when I heard that survivor’s grief over her virginity, I decided that in my daydream land, maybe that boy chances across a farm girl whilst he’s looking for tracks in the imaginary woods. and they go off and have themselves a grand ol’ time for a few thousand years of peace and quiet, and no one will bother them, or make them go home, and together they can have all the innocent times they like, and they’ll have nothing to grieve until way way way later when they are little old wizened daydream people. Then maybe they’ll have a goldfish that dies, and they can grieve that. But that’ll be the upper limit for distressing experiences.

But back here in this dimension, we have to grieve stuff. I read in the book, and it seems to be how it's working, that when I straight-up acknowledge to myrself what I lost, and just accept that I lost it, then the feelings of pain and grief 'start to change' I think is the phrase in the book. Yes, that's what it feels like. Grieving lost time was harder for me than anything specifically sex related. I can't be sad about things-that-could-have-been without also kind of blaming myself for not 'getting more better more faster,' and when I start blaming myself it's easy to fall into a pit and stop moving forward.

It feels like after a while I didn't have any more cryng to do about it. It did not feel any different really than when I was five and had a scraped knee and cried until I noticed I didn't need to cry any more. And then I had some kind of room in my head for other thoughts.

It was like the grief actually took up room inside my head. It's absurd, but that's how it felt. And then after it had lessened I could say yes, I didn't have the first time I wanted. Since something in my heart now feels like it's cried about it, I can see it in a different light. It's a loss, but it's in the past. It feels like a loved one passed away and has been freshly buried. I'm still sad, but now it feels like a sadness that's part of life, like a departed loved one, not like lava scorching everthing.

Another phrase I read still rings in my head: "You might even grieve for a part of you that didn't make it." Wowee, did I cry at that. It was like the experience I just had with grief over sex and lost time and feeling that start to change gave my psyche a kind of confidence that it could look for more grief.

If my psyche thinks that finding grief means finding intolerable rage and pain, than guess what, my psyche doesn’t want to find grief. But if finding grief means that I'll feel better and heal, then I want to find it.

Healing is like practising a musical instrument. You want to play, but at the beginning it's hard and it doesn't sound good at all and it annoys everyone. But after a time, if you can make it over the hump, it starts to sound like music and you start liking practice, even. Or at least doing it more. I stayed away from even the word healing because it sounded like being made to learn a really hard muscal instrument I didn't even like. But somehow we make it to the point where at least we are looking for help. That's why survivor stories matter, I think. They helped me see myself and start getting help. I don't know what else to do than try and do the same for someone else. It's not that I want to feel grief or that I like it, but now I have some confidence that my life will be better the more grief I take on.

I can let myself look for the parts of me that didn’t make it. I can admit that I might find them. If parts of that little boy didn’t make it, I want us to find them and mourn them. I don’t know. If you have experience finding parts of yourself that didn’t make it, please share your experience. We’re not alone.

5. Grief

Grief is scary to me. I’m afraid when I feel it. Grief may be just another word for loss. Yesterday it was too much. In the first post I said that I had grieved losing things like innocent sex. I do, for sure. And when I acknowledged that to myself it was hard, and I felt a lot of shame and embarrassment. And now I don’t, really. After I acknowledged it, somehow it became much less charged.

Man, I am hoping it works the same with this scary grief-monster that I can see is coming next. This one is named “lost time.”

I went to tractor pulls as a kid. They’d harness a heavy sled to tractors, and see which one could pull it the farthest. It feels as if I’ve had a sled like that harnessed to me for most of my life. This is another place I’m aware is victimy-sounding, but that’s how it felt. Years in therapy, and still it just seemed like everything was way way harder than it was supposed to be. It feels like some kind of healing to be at least partly free of it. But whenever I think of that, I think of years and years dragging that sled. And then come other thoughts of what might-have-been. Oh I know we all have this grief. There’s nothing special about it. There doesn’t have to be. It sucks hard enough just plain and regular.

Who in their late 40’s doesn’t think about this? Of course. But that doesn’t make my grief any easier. Or yours, survivor or not. If you’re reading this and you have some experience to share abut grief, please write in so I can share your experience here.

I don’t know why or how it works like this, but survivors of all kinds of sex abuse seem to have a similar experience. Until I acknowledged the truth to myself, I just wasn’t ever going to be trying to heal the right wound, but just treating symptoms of it. And until I started being willing to do that, the people who were trying to help me had their hands tied. Maybe they’d all been able to see that something else was wrong, but they couldn’ read my mind. Neither could I, really, I guess.

Have some peace today. You’re not alone.

4. Lava or Healing?

In this post I'm going to share in a little more detail about my earliest memories. They are of my mother and naked naptimes. It hurts me that that's the first thing I remember about being a boy. It hurts a lot, now that I try to let myself feel that pain. It hurts, but all I can say is that the actual pain hurts me so much less that anything I would to to avoid it. When I avoid the pain and go straight to anger, It feels like the pain just sits there in my heart like a volcano, always oozing the lava that burns up my relationships, plans, and dreams. And me.

If you're a man, it might really take some work on your part to feel actual pain. It was worth the effort to me. It doesn't sound like fun, no. Not to me either. But fun isn't really one of the options I have in front of me. Lava or healing is what it my options seem to be. I don't want the lava anymore.

This was when I was about 6. I always remember her in the same position, on her side. I would snuggle in. We played a game. She wanted me to know there wasn't anything wrong with any body part, and so we could take turns touching any part we wanted, and she would tell me their names. She was seducing me, offering herself and excitement. She was sharp, negative and nearly always critical, but I remember her being silly and laughing in bed. No one's mother should have been doing any of that. It is not ok for any adult to play naked games with a child, or take naked naps with a child.

She didn't "make" me do anything, she "let" me. She "let me do what I wanted." That's how she manipulated me into feeling about it. That got in my head and stayed in my head. She just let me do what I wanted to anyway, that's maybe what she thought, and for sure what I thought. If that reminds you of anything in your life, please know that a child cannot choose these things, or want them, or even understand them when they happen.

But it's still your mother. It's like I tried to make room in my head for the mother I loved, and then also I had to make room for this hot mess of feelings and reactions that I could not process, and which made me you alone with secrets and a head full of troubles. I think that's probably what I mean when I tell someone my head is buzzing. It's like there's a whole other psyche in my head that's made of buzzing and scars and self-hate.

If I want to talk about my own lava, I have to talk about erections. That's not dark humor, it's a hard vulnerability to share. I'm a man. I cannot think of anything that's more central to my identity that my erect penis. As important, yes. More important? No. That's candid. It's also true that as my body sends blood to my penis, shame and thoughts that I'm a monster come into my head. Images and thoughts of abuse come with them. I don't know how often an average male gets erections, but it's not a special event. If you miss one, the next will be along pretty soon. And all of them made me feel like a pervert.

Every time I got hard I had a reminder of something I could never ever ever let anyone know. It was exciting to me as a six year old when I was with her and I got an erection and she could see it. She would react in a way that motivated me to keep exposing myself to her. I had no words for any of this, just the mother that's meant to look after you, and finally she's laughing and silly, and not mean and telling me everything I do is wrong. This hurts a lot, present tense. She made me interact with her sexuality. After that, for years she was my fantasy life. No dark humor here. I’m too busy trying to keep my face from bursting into flames from the shame I'm feeling. I'm sure hoping and countng on the idea that I'm not the only one, and that men and women surivors both might find something relateable in that.

But you know what? Maybe no one in the history of the world has had exactly the feelings I did. That's ok, because I had them. I have faith there is a survivor out there who can at least relate somewhat to my experience. I think that person would tell me that it's ok. My mother decided that she could treat a six year old like a little mini-me lover. A very unthreatening and malleable lover, one she could control.

Looking at it all just hurts pretty hard. Too hard for me to joke about it and feel it at the same time. There's no way that I can process the reality of what she was doing to my psyche if I'm trying to protect myself against the pain. It feels like drinking lava to imagine myself as a little boy just desperate to keep her happy, and figuring out that she was silly and laughing when she hurt me, and so if I wanted to have an exciting feeling and a non-cruel mother, I knew how to get them. Not consciously, of course. I was six.

I was just beginning to compulsively eat. That looks like an addictive spiral to me, already there when I was six. My psyche was overwhelmed, I ate to cope, I felt bad for being chubby, and so I sought a way to feel better. Like something exciting, and with an erection and my silly fun-time mother. She was revolted by chubbiness and regarded it as a sign of low moral character. I wonder if some part of me was trying to keep her away. I have to suspect so, even though other parts of me were excited by her.

This is still all glowing lava for me, right here today. But it helps me to share, and now I'm looking at the lava, and how much I would like healing. To get there, I feel like I need the willingness to deal with the lava. It's scary. The willingness is not always that easy. Sharing with you helps. If you talk to someone you trust, you might have a similar experience.

Sometimes I just want to say screw it. I’ll throw in the towel and just forget about it. I’m not that bad, I’ll just deal with it and try harder and read more self-help books. I’ll have however many more weird flings until I’m too decrepit to attract anyone anymore, and then time for extra cats and bird feeders and neuroses and crossword puzzles and World War Two documentaries and more of what I’ve had my whole life, and my little boy will be lost forever.

But that will never stop the lava from burning me. It still works for me right now to use my little boy as motivation. He needs me to do this. I might give up if it were only me. But, you know, I’m a man, and someone I dearly love needs me. To get my little boy back I’ll drink all the lava in the world and come back for free refills.

See, I’m prone to being dramatic like that. I’m sorry if the bravado in that seems silly or off-putting. I’m a man, and I might not be the only man to motivate himself that way, and maybe it helps another man to hear it.

I think for many people something in the psyche lets us push ourselves harder and be braver and bolder for the sake of someone we love than for ourselves. For me today if I think of the little boy inside me, I can activate the part of me that lets me see I can do it.

That’s how this man writing to you is loving himself as a man. I’m also trying to get to a place where I can be some kind of mother to that little boy and give him what he really needs. I’m the best mother he’s ever going to have. It’s all inside me.

If you're an incest survivor or survivor of other child sex abuse and are willing to share your own experience with others, please contact me. I would love to share your story on the blog.

Thank you for listening. It was good to share with you, and for the rest of the day I will be thinking of our common struggles. Wherever you are in your life, if you are a survivor, you've come a long long way. It's hard to find connection in some ways, but in other ways it's right here.

I'm writing this, and you're reading it. That makes two of us. I know of one or two other people who have read this, so that makes any least three. Two people might just be some friends talking, but three people, that's a community. We're a community of incest survivors who can help support each other, just by knowing we're alive.

Send me your story, your experience, things that have helped you on your journey. There is some survivor who will resonate to your story more than mine, and that person might get some help because of your courage. Like me! I would love to hear how things have been going for you all this time. I need the help.

If you send me your story, I know my day will be better, because I’ll have met someone new to me in this community of ours. It’s as old as humanity, our community. It’s as old as those fathers, and those mothers, and us girls, and us boys.

I’m not alone. Neither are you. Or you, or you, or you, or any of us. We’re not alone.

3. After Hours: On Dark Humor

Therapists of the world who don't like dark humor, I get it, but hold on a minute.

For me or any survivor to heal I've got to learn how to recognize what 'pain' even is. I don't mean that like "I'm so tough nothing hurts me." The opposite. I'm a man raised by a combat soldier. He raised me to be rugged and stoical as he could manage. I'm OK with that in a lot of ways. It's a fine way to be for physical discomfort, and it has a lot of pros. But it's a horrible, awful, no good, very bad way to handle emotional pain.

My head often just skips emotional pain and goes straight to aggression. I'm learning how to feel the actual pain. I remember a breakup, for example. A partner confessed infidelity. Sucks, right? Well, yeah, but I only felt actual 'pain' for a brief second. My throat tightened, my stomach clenched and I felt an electric buzzing shoot through me. This was the worst thing I could have heard from her. But after less than a second I was just numb. And then I went through a litany of other feelings. I assured her I understood and some other humiliating caretaking malarky, and then I had no feelings at all for maybe five minutes. When I did have a feeling again, it was rage. And it still was a long time, at least days, maybe weeks before I felt the pain again. Rage, betrayal, all that. But not the pain.

We men need to talk about rage and pain. Rage is part of the human experience. I suspect it has profoundly useful purposes in some circumstances that aren’t hard to imagine. Physical defense, that sort of thing. There are lots of situations I can imagine in which it wold be great to move immediately from injury to aggression without dillydallying at the part where you cry. If you’re a man, you might be especially equipped for that move, the one where your mind just skips pain and goes to aggression.

Feeling pain seems almost like it’s a good skill to have. One of the best things my father ever did for me was to tell me over and over that prisons were full of hurting men who never learned how to deal with anger. He was a hurting man who sort of learned to deal with anger.

Rage reminds me of testosterone. If you’re a man, remember when it happened? Utterly bananas. It was like magic, from one day to the next. You have no experience being horny, and now you want to put your dick in anything and everything. We all have to figure out how to handle it when you’re all worked up and your body is fully expecting to get laid, then something happens and it’s off. It's hard. (ba dum bum) I'd be angry, frustrated, and humiliated. And also, still horny and wanting to get off.

It's a whole process for me to feel pain. I'm getting better at it, but man is it a sucky skill to practice. Sometimes I feel it immediately and can recognize it. Oh, that's pain! What is it exactly that is hurting me? But sometimes I realize I'm getting really angry and I don't know why. Now I generally assume that probably something hurt me, so I sit there and ask myself and try and be honest about what it really is. Sometimes I find myself really compelled to be jokey about something, and often there's pain there too.

If I just squelch the desire for humor, what happens is that I also squelch the thing that tells me I have pain. Plus, you know what? I just like dark humor. I like it even if I developed my taste for it out of survival. That's what humor is to me: survival. Humor was how I raised my fist to the world that hurt me.

See, this is so vctimy, right? I'm owning it. If I rewrite this until there's nothing victimy or neurotic in it, it'll take a month and the post will be three words long: "Call the Hotline."

I couldn't control much about my life. But when my parents were harsh, I learned that if I could say somethng cutting to them that would draw blood, it would stay in their head and let them know I didn't give a fig for them or their god or their rules or their anything. They were nothing but rather stupid prison wardens to me. I watched Cool Hand Luke, and One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, and Papillon, and anything else about prisoners scoffing at their jailors. That was a way I could see myself and find some dignity. I was shamed that I didn't run away from home or attack them in their sleep, but at least I could show them with my humor that they hadn't had any effect on me (Hahaahahahahahahaha) by being witty. I felt like Cool Hand Luke: "What's that, Boss, only thirty days in the hole this time? You're getting soft."

Do you notice the humor that covers the shame I feel for knuckling under, for doing what they said? I do. It’s real, current, live shame I’m working on. The thought in my head is that I should have run away or physically attacked them, or failing that, give them a rousing speech about the universal dignity of man or something. But what I mostly did was develop a whole personality just designed to keep them happy and off my back, and I was meek and obedient most of the time. I watched those movies and thought if I had been tough like those guys, I would be free. But instead, I’m disgusting and weak and so here I am.

Of course that’s all hogwash. I was a child. I was victimized and there was nothing I could have or should have done about it.

So I'm working to get better at feeling pain. I don't like pain, but it doesn't hurt you. Something else hurt you. The pain is just a messenger. Feeling it is one of the first steps to healing the wound. Humor tells me where I have pain. And also, I could be a little easier on myself. It's ok if I kinda lean a little too hard on humor sometimes. It's about getting better. It’s also about being myself. Any version of me that is authentic will be searching for something witty and/or histrionic to say right up until the universe grows cold and the lights go out. All the humor will be dark then.

2. After Hours: Come With Me On My Journey

I'm calling this an "After Hours" post. Like a lot of survivors, I've been to plenty of twelve-step meetings for addictive behavior. The meetings themselves were life changing. But a lot of what was really helpful to me was the stuff I talked about with other people like me after the meeting. After Hours.

In the meeting we would read and share about staying clean and off drugs, or sex, or eating, or drinking, or whatever. You're fairly polite when sharing in a meeting. You talk about the real things, and you try and do it in a way that's ok in that setting. But after the meeting I could talk to people like me about our struggles and hang-ups in real life. That helped me see myself, and that they had struggles I could relate to. We talked real, because if you're in a twelve-step meeting, you need people to talk real with. When you talk real, sometimes it's victimy, and attention-seeking and full of dark pain-masking humor.

That's what After Hours posts are. Me trying to talk real to you. It's like we're hanging out after the meeting. If you didn't want someone to talk real with, you'd already be in your car going home. Since you're still here, I know you're ok with it. Survivors who are grown adults have lives and struggles in common. It’s hard to find community, and I know from twelve-step how much a community helps.

I have a vision of this blog becoming a place where other survivors can share their own journeys, strength hope, and experience, and move toward some sense of community. If you’re an incest survivor and would Like to share your experience as a post, please drop me a line.

In twelve-step meetings, the most important person there is the newcomer, the person who has never asked for help or been to a meeting before. Others in the meeting know that the struggles of those of us who have asked for help and are getting it are very real. But the person who hasn't asked for help yet, that person needs it the most.

The most important reader to me is a survivor who hasn't started getting help yet. The main posts to me are like sharing in a twelve-step meeting. The “newcomer” who isn’t getting help is the most important reader.

Newcomers aren’t the only people at twelve-step meetings, though. There are people with five years clean, ten years, and real old-timers. But everyone in the meeting needs the meeting. Old-timers have different needs. They need connection and support from others. Most old-timers in twelve-step meetings will shut up and sit down if they see that a newcomer needs help, but they need it too.

Survivors on their journey need support and connection too. It doesn’t have to just stop with calling a hotline, telling some close friends, and finding therapy. I haven’t talked to that many other survivors, just a few. But the struggles were so similar, and so relatable, and it just felt profoundly good to know others who just knew. I’m a man, they were women, but still I felt like they just know something about what I was going through. I feel as if I know something about their struggles. The tight knots of shame and pain and love and desire and guilt and rage and just wanting some way to be seen. There’s an empty spot in my head where “mother” should be. Some women have empty spots in their head where “father” should be.

After Hours posts are like talking after the meeting with other survivors that are on their healing journey. So many of you have so much more experience, strength, and hope that would help me and other survivors on my way. I hope you'll hang out for a while so we can get to know each other. If you have something that’s been helpful to you on your healing journey, I’d love to post it so others can benefit from the work you’ve done.

We're grown now. We have lives we've put together. We share struggles non-survivors don't. I'm a man who's attracted to women, though I've slept with men. (I took off my cowboy hat). Shoot, was that dark humor to mask my vulnerability about sex with men? See! Dark humor can be good! It reminded me that I was raised at a time and place where everything homoerotic was … taboo. My earliest sexual experiences were being abused by a woman. There's no way in hell that didn't have a massive defining effect on how I have experienced women throughout the whole of the rest of my life.

Consciously I have no misogynistic feelings that I'm aware of. It's a hard word, because it just seems to suggest to my ears something conscious and willful, but that’s not the whole story. How can my experience not have effected what women are, in my psyche at some level, no matter how long ago? How can there not be effects now?

How can I find some healing and have a healthier, easier relationship with women? I don't know. This is my actual after hours topic, for me, the guy writing these words this morning. My current strategy for things like this is to say to myself, out loud "I would like to be able to see how the wounds I have are hurting my relationships with women? I am asking for healing for this." I named my subconscious. It's the name I had as a child, the name of the little boy who went away from me. If I use that name he listens.

Does that sound crazy? It works for me right now. One day maybe I’ll just be one big Me. But for today, the idea of giving that little boy inside me the healing he needs gives this grown man the motivation to do anything it takes to help that little boy, no matter how vulnerable or hard it is for my ego. I can take it. He needs help.

The journey toward healing is about going forward toward it, no matter how slow, no matter how many canes and crutches and wheelchairs and segways and names for my subconscious I need. I may need fewer crutches and canes as I go along. Or not. Maybe I’ll need more, I don’t know. What matters is to go toward healing and that little boy.

I spent a fair bit of time in the world of BDSM sexuality, and I met lots of women survivors of abuse right there with me. After a time it seemed like we could recognize each other somehow, survivors of sex abuse or assault. There are lots of different kinds of sexuality, but it seems like a lot of use as adults end up with libidos that are similar in a lot of ways. It seems to me kinda like just different sex-role expressions of the same general kind of desire. It's not surprising when I think about it.

My sexuality has always been a struggle for me. I felt broken and like I had reached the point where I may as well accept it. Is it just true that the only way I will ever be able to connect with my own authentic desire to be in some kind of master/slave relationship, where I'm in charge and she has to do what I say? Is it the same for her? Am I such a wreck of abandonment terror that I have to actually put a collar on a woman to be at ease that she won't leave me? That’s one of the reasons. Is she such a wreck of abandonment terror that she wants to wear one so I can't leave her? Do we have to have explicit roles and titles and rules in order to connect to our sexuality in the way that we want? Am I just busted? Doomed to that? Best case scenario, I find a partner who's the other side of the equation. We get sexual intensity and we get to be with each other, but the price we have to pay is using titles and having rules and explicit roles? And maybe both of us sitting there wanting the same thing: human connection without all that. But it seems impossible sometimes.

I said that to someone who knows me rather well, that I thought I was just busted. She asked me if I had ever sought healing. That use of that word in that conversation at that time penetrated. It was like I heard the word for the first time. I know for sure it was the first moment in my life ever that I even entertained the notion that I needed healing, from anything, full stop. So so so wrong, and I'm so grateful.

In that moment all the pennies dropped, like they had with the articles about incest. I need healing! Me? YES ME!

So that's how central my sexuality is to my psyche, and maybe it’s that way for everyone, I don't know. The idea that I could have actual intimacy and connection with a partner was enough to wake me up and get me moving.

We've all had to figure out what to do with our libidos and desires. I'm sure that hasn't been easy for any of us. Isn't for me, present tense. We have to figure out how find a partner that's good for us, and even what that means. And now I realize how very much work I have to do to be a good partner for the kind of woman I would want to be partners with. Ouch, but also I have a shot at becoming a good partner, because now I can see all the work ahead of me. That sounds a lot more promising than “trying to do it right this time” and hoping for the best.

Other survivors have other struggles. These are mine, right now. It’s what’s on my mind. Yours are yours. If you have something to share about life as a survivor, please, please consider sharing it here with others. Use the Contact form. I’d love to post it here for others.

I hope you have some peace today. You’re not alone. It’s After Hours. There’s always someone around. I’ll be back in a few and share a bit more.

1. Come With Me On My Journey

I am a mother-son incest survivor. I'm in my late 40's and only now am able to say that. I know it will help me to share my experience with you. I hope it helps you too. If you’re a man or boy who has been abused, I hope you might be able to see yourself in another man’s experience. If you’re a woman, I hope something is helpful in hearing a man’s story. Abuse by women is often very different than it is when the abuser is a man. If you’re a man or boy and anything in my story reminds you of your own experience, please talk to someone. It doesn’t have to be rape to be abuse.

My journey toward healing started when I found some articles from psychology journals about mother-son incest. I read that when mothers abuse kids it often happens while they’re taking care of them. Mothers who abuse boys often use their sexuality to allure them. I remember two phrases: "unboundaried caregiving" along with "unconscious or semi-conscious seduction." That's when I finally was able to see that it wasn’t about how bad I was. “She did do something bad to me. Maybe it's not all just me, and how disgusting I am.” Then finally I started heading in the right direction, toward healing. I’ll share more later, but here’s the big picture.

My first memories are of her and our naked naptimes and a body-part-touching game. I was about six. Then as I approached puberty, whatever was broken in her seemed to activate. Then I had frequent rashes, and she used her caregiving as an opportunity. After I hit puberty, it was voyeurism and lots of incidental touching and brushing and giving me erections and making sure I kept them. This was a feature of bedtimes, when I slept naked under a sheet and lay there with my erection and her leering. All of that felt like my fault, because I was so bad, and so perverted. She taught me to tango with her. The last thing I remember her doing was putting her tongue in my mouth, when I was about fifteen. That stayed with me when I just thought I was disgusting and a sex-crazed pervert I was. I remembered that, and there was just no way to talk myself out of what it was. It was wrong. I knew that. She gave me a French kiss. My first one.

When I was a little boy I searched for incest stories at the library. Most of the ones I found were by women, and the perpetrators were all men. The abuse they described was awful, and there seem to be a lot of overt sex acts when the perpetrator is a man. It’s just different when the perpetrator is a woman. I guess Men are from Mars and Women are from Venus when they abuse kids, too. I thought since I always had an erection hadn’t been raped there wasn’t anything really wrong. Except me.

I’m a middle-aged man from cowboy country, and the way I was raised men dealt with pain like this: ignore it, deny it, laugh at it, die from it, then cry, THEN ask for help. I’m asking for help these days, and I hope you will too.

I felt alone and like a monster that had to work overtime to make itself pass as a human.

I remember reading long ago that survivors "often have confusing feelings." That’s absolutely true. But I didn't realize that “confusing feelings” included the fact that my own abuse was the most arousing thing that had ever happened to me. It's no surprise to me now that I was masturbating daily by the time I was eight or so, and that my own abuse was usually the main attraction in my head.

I sometimes wanted it, what my mother did. I often wanted it, really. That is in fact exactly the sort of thing that the writer was talking about. Except my feelings weren’t confusing. To me it was just iron-clad proof I was bad. But really, I wasn’t the one who sexualized me too soon and against my will, and what else was I supposed to masturbate to? Milfs? Oh, wait…

My sense of humor runs dark. I figure yours might too, and you wouldn’t mind. That’s why I gave the blog its name. I hope you take it how I mean it. I figure there’s enough heaviness to go around. If I’m addressing pain and looking for healing, I think it just feels like wearing a muzzle not to joke about it. To me it feels like defeat, not to joke about something. But when I notice that something funny comes to mind about abuse, if I stop and think about it there’s almost always something that hurts. Humor is a good pain-detector. I’ve learned how to handle the pain better than I used to be able to. I’ve struggled my whole life with substance abuse and bulimia, and disordered eating.

Now I know that masturbating about my abuse the way I was is very common, and some of you can directly identify. For a long time I kept that in the bank vault in my head, where I kept everything that proved I was bad. Maybe I haven't even said that to my therapist. I've said that I liked it sometimes, but never that I wanted it. I'm pretty sure you understand me, or at least can accept the fact that my psyche had that reaction, and not shame or judge me for it. I didn’t pick that reaction. Neither did you, if you have any shame like that.

I wanted to share that in the first post. They say you’re only as sick as your secrets.

Wow, did that make me feel sick the first time I heard that phrase. I’m made out of secrets. I don’t want to be, anymore. For me personally that little non-confession is really as shameful a thing as I know of in my own psyche. For someone else it might not be a big deal, but to me that was very hard to acknowledge. I'm telling you it because you might have something like that that's so shameful that you think it can't possibly be ok to feel how you're feeling. It is. Shame is like that. Different for everyone. If someone abused you, whatever feelings you have about it are ok. Please talk to someone you trust.

When I began saying out loud to a few friends that I was an incest survivor and that I need healing and help, everything started to get easier. It finally felt like I knew what the problem was. It was very hard, the first time I said that phrase out loud to another person who didn’t already know.

You know what? It felt good. It felt like the opposite of shame. It felt freeing and clean.

This was a little bit like saying hello and introducing myself. I’ll get a glass of water and share a bit more, if you don’t mind. Thank you!