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.