@allenderHealingWoundedHeart2016

> Allender, Dan B. _Healing the Wounded Heart: The Heartache of Sexual Abuse and the Hope of Transformation_. Baker Books, 2016. # Healing the Wounded Heart - Dan Allender has been a therapist for 25 years. - My personal comments will be displayed in yellow. - Accounts and stories shared by Allender will be in cyan. ## 1. The New Face of Sexual Abuse - ==**We all have suffered sexual harm, some obvious and severe, other subtle and normalized**== - God loves sex, but Satan, God's enemy, despises sexual joy and is perversely committed to marring it. - Allender looks at sexual abuse through the lens of Christianity; I do not believe in God but I find the metaphor relevant to the discussion so I'll keep his words. - Sex is meant to be both a sacramental gift and a rip-roaring sensual feast. - Girls have become far more sexualized in the past 25 years. - As pornography becomes more ubiquitous and acceptable, children become more and more exposed to it. - According to a 2001 study, 89% of girls and 60-79% of boys have been sexually harassed between elementary school and high school. - **40-60% of teenagers experience intimate partner violence.** - **13% of girls have been raped by a boyfriend.** - Hookup culture: - 90% of unwanted sex took place during a hookup. - 62% of unwanted sex occurred because of alcohol impairment. - ==**Sexual harm has been normalized in a sexually indulgent and demaning age.**== ## 2. The Role of Evil ### Allender's Core Convictions About Evil - Evil exists and is not infinite but is a creature that opposes God. - Evil operates primarily in darkness and secrecy. - Evil revels in fouling man's joy through sexual harm, gender confusion or dogmatism. - The effects of evil must be approached from many perspectives. - **Evil ruins parts our lives by tempting us to form a covenant with darkness.** - **Evil delights in sexual abuse because mere seconds of abuse can ruin the glory a person for a lifetime.** - Through Jesus, we are empowered to banish evil through faith, hope, and love - To me, this "evil" is an interesting personification of trauma. ### Evil turns us against desire as the enemy that got us into trouble - An abuser woos the child through reading their desires, their absence of care and attachment. Relational intimacy is deepened with touch, and when the will of the child breaks, the abuser crosses the line of honor and performs sexual abuse, ensuring silence through secrets and threats. - **==Most victims of abuse join the abuser in blaming themselves for what occurred.==** - **==Evil has bound the victim's heart to a hatred for the desire for intimacy, of the body's arousal, and of the sweetness of trust.==** - Covenants can be as simple as: "Your body is evil, and desire will always get you in trouble" or "You will never be loved because you are ugly". ### Evil wants us to spend our lives in worry or regret: its design is to kill hope, sap creativity and plunge the heart into despair - Consequences of despair: dissociation and indulgence. - Dissociation is a survival mechanism. - **We are not powerless: we must love life and embrace the courage God has given us** > Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die. […] \[A soldier surrounded by enemies\] must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it; he must desire life like water and yet drink death like wine. — G. K. Chesterton ### Evil plans to foul our beauty through shame: "Why did I trust him? Why didn't I stop it?" - Client's story: as a young girl, when her father walked with her hand in hand, she felt the touch of her uncle who abused her. She felt aroused, so she felt that she was a very, very bad girl. She vowed to hide those feelings, lest someone exposed her ignominy. ### We must become more awake, articulate, and story sensitive - Abuse severs the natural attachment bond of trust, but **the vow never to trust again is like a bubble that insulates and protects while simultaneously suffocating and killing.** - **Most of us tell our past stories without being transformed by our retelling: we allow details to be generalized and painful parts to be suppressed.** - ==**Reentering terrain that we have fenced off requires us to open our heart to remember, grieve, and ask God to engage our heartache with tenderness.**== - Indeed, it is when I began talking of my past traumatic experiences **in detail** with my close ones that I began to come to terms with those experiences. ### We must become angrier and bolder in our refusal to participate in the repetitive reenactment of despair - **Hope refuses to believe that the inevitable is so. What has always been and can't change is an illusion; ==if anything is true, it is that change is inevitable==, not that the inevitable will not change.** - The known is a safer enemy than the unknown. ==**Yet we were made for the unknown and to risk danger.**== "Be careful what you wish for; you may get it." - Couldn't say it any better. Good things happen to those who take risks. This applies to healing: it takes courage to explore one's own darkness. - Repetition of destructive or empty behaviors drains us of hope. Hope demands that we challenge reenactment with boldness, honesty, and kindness. - What changes us is not pain, but a passionate desire for goodness. ## 3. The Body's Response to Abuse - **==The body suffers from abuse and trauma well after it has ended.==** - Instead of tuning out the pain, we must listen to it as a gift that contains an important message worthy of being heard and honored. - Evil would have us believe that the pain is "all in your head", but mind and body are connected - We possess an intricate cocktail of biochemicals that send messages to receptive brain areas and drive us toward connection with one another — and signal fear when that connection is not safe. - Oxytocin (the "love hormone"), dopamine (see [[Dopamine triggers motivational salience]]) - We also possess specialized cells and structures designed to work in concert and provide unity within the body and mind within the context of a relationship. - Mirror neurons are motor neurons in the brain that activate when we observe the intentional action of another person, enabling us to read and identify the other's emotions. - **When connection happens in the context of safety and trust, these biochemicals and structures prompt us to approach our world instead of withdrawing from it**: the sympathetic nervous system increases heart rate and respiration and produces rushes of dopamine. - Then, the parasympathetic nervous system takes over, slowing the body down and reengaging long-term maintenance process (repair, digestion, growth, and rest). - **==When intimacy has been abused, we become divided, disintegrated.==** ### The Stress Response System - Our brain can be thought of as triune, _i.e._, comprised of three major systems: the reptilian brain (vital functions), the mammalian brain (memory and emotion), and the neocortex (executive function). - When the amygdala (the "smoke detector") detects threat, it signals the hypothalamus to activate the stress response. The system comes back into balance after the stressor is over. **==However, if we cannot restore safety, the deluge of biochemicals builds up over time, culminating in chronic illness.==** ### Acute Traumatic Stress - When test subjects are prompted to simply recollect a traumatic event, **the visual cortex activates as if it were literally seeing the event unfold.** - Meanwhile, **Broca's area (the area of the brain that processes language) deactivates: ==language goes offline.== This explains why we struggle to put into words traumatic events.** - Very interesting stuff right here. - Actually, much of the left hemisphere deactivates during a flashback: **the event loses its place in the context of time, making it seem as if it were happening in the present.** ### Chronic Stress - The body is designed to gear up for short bouts of stress and to come back into homeostasis. - **If this does not happen, this dysregulation becomes our body's new normal through _allostasis_, our body's attempt to adapt.** - With continued allostasis, our body begins to suffer wear and tear, or "allostatic load". - The amygdala grows and becomes hypersensitive while the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex shrink. - There is evidence that many, if not all, bodily systems suffer dysregulation and susceptibility to disease as a result of prolonged imbalance. - ==**Prolonged stress moves our body away from God's plan for health and toward accelerated aging and death.**== - This sounds like a rather strong argument for starting therapy, even though those who need it the most will probably not heed it. I believe everyone should give it a try, at the very least. - In a meta-analysis of stress studies, **powerlessness and shame triggered the largest cortisol response in research participants**, e.g. in public speaking. Sexual abuse probably has an even larger impact. ### Identifying the Damage - Naming consequences of past abuse can bring immense power: blisters, sores, arthritis, asthma, vertigo, hair loss, bed-wetting, sleepwalking, migraines, heart palpitations, eating disorders… - Symptoms can appear in relation to the onset of abuse or the physical presence of the abuser. **==Those symptoms can disappear after beginning the process of naming past abuse==** or the death of the abuser - Again, indeed, simply naming the traumatic events is liberating. - **Self-awareness is better described as sensory awareness, or interoception: the ability to feel and register how our body is engaging the here and now.** ### Hope for Healing - Evil's weapons to keep our hope from surfacing are multiple: **deceit** (self-doubt, illusion of control), **accusation** (self-blame, shame, self-contempt), **threat** (powerlessness, inevitable failure) - ==**Survivors have a higher level of responsibility in honoring their body than other people, requiring a more informed, proactive, and protective mindset. "Know thyself".**== - **Common health goals include: decrease stress and inflammation, balance hormones, increase serotonin (the body's stress buffer)** - Some healthy habits to consider: sleep (see [[Quality sleep guidelines]]), eating well (see [[Sugar is poison for the liver]]), exercise (see [[Exercise is critical to brain development]]), sunlight, prayer, gratitude, mindfulness, social support, sex… ## 4. Cursing the Body - **==The abuser's tactic is always the same: groom, arouse, shame, and condemn.==** - The tenderness and pleasure of care and gentle touch, especially genital arousal, are more tormenting than the original fear and pain. - Friend's story: she befriended a married man in a church, who became a source of arousal, shame, condemnation, and obsession. She reenacted an abusive dynamic similar to the one she had with her father, and she handled her childhood trauma by escaping into fantasy because it brought her comfort. She knew there was something wrong about the man's care, but she felt attracted to it. - **The closer one gets to one's shame-filled story, the harder it is to remain kind or desire kindness.** - **The abuser grooms the child by watching to see what they need that is so often missing in their primary caregiver's nurturance.** - Allender's story: he was flying home from a trip and his flight was cancelled. He was irritated and spoke in a condescending tone to the lady behind the counter, who told him that he was "clearly irritated and a man not to be trifled with." She indicated that she was neither returning his condescension nor apologetic; she was direct and strong. Allender then apologized and relaxed, acknowledging that he was exhausted. She then smiled and told him that it was her job to "deal with important customers who sometimes feel entitled and extra-irritated." Allender felt like "a puppy that had been both scolded and then given a warm blanket." - **If a stranger could alter his mood and circumstances that quickly, what match is a child who is read well?** - It is one thing to be read well, but it is even more special to be _chosen_. It is the deepest hunger of our heart to be chosen above all others. ### Arousal → Shame - The abuser was a better picture of God than one's parents or other primary caregivers. - **By saying this during therapy, Allender allowed abuse victims to see the dark reversal that occurred.** - The touch of sexual parts is bound to fear (cortisol), bonding (oxytocin) and pleasure (dopamine and opioids). - The victim of sexual abuse then curses their body if they felt arousal during the abuse. This inability to understand and name the damage leads the victim to turn on both self and others with violent contempt. ### Shame → Contempt - Shame demands hiding and isolation. Contempt is the shield that blocks the gaze of the other, diminishes desire, and warns or threatens the inner world to remain quiet. - **==Other-centered contempt, or _projection_, involves turning against the other because of something that we fear or despise in ourselves.==** - This is why it can be so hard to help an abused loved one. In order to assuage their self-hatred, they can become very cruel to us. - Our mockery of a gay man reflects some fear regarding our own sexuality. ### Contempt → Vow - **A vow binds our heart to whomever we make it and to its content. If that vow is made to one who will keep their side of the oath, it is secure. ==If it is made to a liar whose motive is to ruin, then the vow is disastrous.==** - _"If I'm at fault because I'm too attractive, then I will never be attractive to a man again."_ The vow may then get lived out through gaining weight to hide one's beauty. - If men only want "one thing", then the judgment that men are sexually driven egomaniacs may lead to a vow like _"I will never give my heart to a man who desires my body."_ - **==Those kinds of vow lessen the pain and serve as a map to guide the heart in a world without trust nor hope.==** - It links the heart in loyalty to the kingdom of darkness, but this is not possession. It is more akin to giving the deed of property to a squatter. - Very interesting points here. ### Vow → Curse - A curse calls down wrath and disfavor; it is a desire to see something ruined. - Allender's story: a man insulted him during a plane trip because Allender asked if they could share their armrest. For the next several hours, Allender tried to go back to writing but he felt like swimming in a fog. He never recovered his equilibrium on that trip, distracted by his rise of cortisol and his desire for vengeance. - And yet, this passing encounter bears minuscule impact compared to the power of sexual abuse. - **It often begins with the failure of a parent's attachment bond and their failure to read the substance of a child's trauma.** Parents may assume that their child was just having normal adjustment or adolescent issues: they read "trouble" but misread its cause. Parents may also defend themselves by taking the stance of ignorant innocence: "I simply didn't know and you didn't tell me, so how could I know?" This implies that the victim is at fault for keeping the secret. - This stance is a subtle curse: "I would have acted if I'd known, but I didn't, and my innocence is far, far more important to me than your heartache or anger." Often this is tied to a religious prescription to "forgive and forget." - This unleashes immense harm against honest victims trying to address the trajectory of their story in light of their family of origin. - Client's story: She masturbated several times a day and was sexually active throughout her teens, 20s and 30s. She married and found marital sex tedious. She remained faithful, except for one-night flings on business trips, where she was highly orgasmic. She finally named her frustration with her husband: "Sex with him is boring and gentle." - The curse wasn't against an orgasm but against any "gentle arousal." - Client's story: A man who knew he "should" want to have sex but wasn't often aroused. He acknowledged that he had sexual fantasies about being held by a man, where he felt a man's strong chest and he held an erect penis. - This man hated the power he had to bring pleasure to his wife. His vow, formed in the crucible of his abuser's dramatic and climactic orgasm, was _"I will never bring any human being this kind of pleasure ever again."_ - **The work of a good therapist is to cross the boundaries of vows and curses, knowing full well that havoc will ensue. ==A therapist is like a thief whose work is not to steal the significant family jewels (vows and curses), but to enlist the vow keeper to take them to the vault where the jewels are hidden to discern whether or not keeping them safe is worth ruining or losing one's life.== Then, they entice the vow maker to break their curses and open their heart to the blessing of God.** - I like the image. Speaking with abuse victims does feel like a very delicate work. ## 5. The Damage of Covert Abuse > There is nothing more erotic on earth than a boy in love with the shape and touch of his mother. It is the most exquisite, most proscribed lust. It is also the most natural and damaging. — Pat Conroy - **All abuse is traumatizing.** 1. **==The more subtle the abuse, the more likely it is ignored, denied, or minimized.==** 2. The devil lies in the subtle, unaddressed, daily pinpricks of abuse that seldom capture our attention. 3. The sweep of subtle abuse is seldom a single event; instead, it is like a dark current moving through one's life, with inexorable consequences. - Allender addresses two forms of subtle sexual abuse: emotional incest and pornography. (There are many more.) ### Emotional Incest - **==The more there is a loss of intimacy, passion, and purpose with one's spouse, the higher the probability a child will be used as a spousal replacement.==** - Emotional incest usually involves three key factors: **boundary violations**, **enmeshed intimacy**, and **resentment from other family members**. 1. **Boundary violations**: emotional and physical intrusiveness. The child doesn't feel like their space or inner world is their own. 2. **Enmeshed intimacy**: the child feels like they have to accurately read and responsibly respond, or the parent will not be able to function well. This requires the child to be highly intuitive and sensitive to the nuances of the parent's emotional life. - Oh boy, this hit way too close to home when I read it for the first time. 3. **Resentment from family members**: siblings and the other parent resent the bond. Envy spawns cruelty and mockery. The child is pressured, empowered, ambivalent, and unable to name their privileged burden. - Four types of interaction: critical/demeaning, dependent/fragile, sensual/sexualizing, and infantilizing/hyperprotective. When the tension in the marriage dyad is too dangerous to be engaged directly, a "third" is chosen to both hide the tension and provide an alternative resolution. Alas, the triangle often becomes a sticky and unliveable web, especially for the chosen child. 1. **Critical/Demeaning:** - An angry, demeaning parent often entangles a child in a network of guilt and performance. ==**The parent idealizes what the child "ought" to be and then critically evaluates the child against this ideal.**== 2. **Dependent/Fragile:** - An "underdog" parent will make a child the wise decision-maker and protector. This setup, where the child is needed by their parent, disrupts the child's ability to ask for help or admit weakness. - ==**"I need to be strong to keep you strong so that I can be a kid, but I can't afford to be a kid if I am supposed to keep you alive."**== 3. **Sensual/Sexualizing:** - Clients' stories: A man whose mother used to let him watch her undress at the end of the day, or put on makeup in the morning. A woman whose father made her sit on his lap while he watched pornography. She reported that her body's lower half felt frozen, until she finally remembered the horrifying sensation of her father's erect penis. - **==Both clients were adamantly defensive against seeing their parents' behavior as sexualized.==** No adult wants to enter those dark waters: **it is easier to deny intent or even inappropriateness.** - Client's story: A woman who gets treated like a girlfriend by her father when they go out to eat together. When Allender asked her about what if felt like to be used as proof of her father's sexual prowess and desirability, she looked at him as if he were perverse and insane. 4. **Infantilizing/Hyperprotective:** - When the child is seen to be in danger due to real or imagined threats, the parent can overstep appropriate care by spinning a suffocating cocoon. - **==The child is conditioned to believe that no one understands or will care for them like Mother or Father. And that is true, in the sense that the parent's emotional investment in the child is out of bounds.==** ### Triangulation and Attachment - Triangulation is often met with abandonment or hostility from the other parent. - **==A securely attached child has a caregiver who can read and respond to the child's needs with appropriate and compassionate care.==** The child has a sense of containment that provides clear and comforting boundaries. - A secure parent knows how to contain their own distress without requiring the child to take it away. Kindness toward oneself and the other is the core of the ability to bond. - Early insecure attachment to a primary caregiver makes it more difficult for a person to trust the goodness of relationships. **There are 3 styles of insecure attachment: ambivalent, avoidant, and disorganized.** 1. **Ambivalent attachment** results from a caregiver's misreading or ignoring the cues of distress, and then being intrusive and controlling. **==This unpredictability makes the child less able to soothe their own inner distress and more likely to oscillate between being demanding and shutting down.==** 2. **Avoidant attachment** comes from a caregiver's being distant, formal, and unavailable. The child learns not to express emotion, not to ask, not to want. ==**They become an adult who is dismissive and contemptuous of both their own and others' needs.**== 3. **Disorganized attachment** is formed amidst regular bursts of rage, threats, or displays of violence. ==**The child shuts down emotion and desire while focusing on danger cues and oscillates between hypervigilance and dissociation.**== - 65% of the population is thought to have a secure attachment. ### Aftereffects of Emotional Incest - **The primary effect of emotional incest is confusion.** It feels too subtle to name without overwhelming consequences. When harm is overtly clear, it is difficult to name, but when it is subtle, one is left with nagging doubt that any harm was done. - A good rule of thumb for this is: "When in doubt, there is no doubt." In other words, if you doubt any harm was done, it probably was. - Perhaps worse than confusing and lonely, it is crazy-making. There are so many inherent contradictions in being the chosen child. One is empowered to bring about life in one's parent, and yet it is a losing game. ## Pornography - **Exposure to pornography happens so regularly that we have come to call it a normal developmental passage for both boys and girls. ==But to call it normal is not to call it good.==** - Three primary means by which pornography is delivered: sexual drama, accidental discovery, or haphazard placement. 1. **Sexual Drama:** - Client's story: As a child, he joined his older brother and a friend of his in a tree fort. The two of them began to masturbate over a porn magazine, and he was forced to join them. This experience felt deeply humiliating to him, even though he didn't understand exactly what was happening. - **The drama requires prior planning, a powerful director, and usually a number of intermediate actors who serve as the chorus** — the ones who watch and attest to the humiliation. 2. **Accidental Discovery:** - Client's story: As a child, she accidentally found the porn magazines of her father. She went back to it several times until her father told her at breakfast that "girls shouldn't look at dirty magazines." She came to Allender with a long history of sexually dangerous and demeaning relationships. During therapy, she would balk, calling herself a "little perv" for being interested in pornography at such a young age. - In reality, **the presence of pornography binds the heart of the child not merely to the pictures but also to the one who is aroused by the images**: _"If this is what aroused my father, then I wanted to be what he wanted if I was going to be loved."_ 3. **Haphazard Placement:** - Client's story: She grew up in a household where her father would leave porn magazines lying around, and would compare her breasts to her mother's. Her brothers were free to grope her and peer at her while she took a shower. - More than "sexually liberated", this environment was sexually abusive. And yet, the client thought this was normal. - ==**Few who have lived the insidious intrusion of pornography name this experience as sexually abusive.**== Evil makes sexual harm seem common and innocuous, but nothing could be further from the truth. - ==**Pornography is not primarily so much about sex as it is about the freedom to offend, to deprive the other of dignity and honor, and to indulge one's dark desire.**== # 6. Men at War - Three core socializing currents are pounded into men: 1. A true man is independent, in control, and masters his world; 2. A true man is eager for and always bent on initiating sex; 3. A true man is logical, not emotional, and focused on the external world. - **==In other words, a true man is 1. never a victim, 2. always up for sex, and 3. never like a girl.==** - Sadly, this sounds about right. - Whereas a woman's arousal may be slightly hidden or subtle, a man's arousal and orgasm are blatant. **Male victims are made to believe that their arousal must mean the they enjoyed or wanted the abuse.** - **The abused man feels at odds with being a man: to address victimization and arousal sets up a condition where the cure feels worse than the disease. ==It is easier to power through the harm, ignore or deny it, and turn against anyone who exposes the debris.==** - Generally, women will jump into their internal and relational struggles until the cost of what is being faced is named, and then there is panic and defense. Men, on the other hand, fight first, or withdraw and retreat, and only later begin to engage the real war. - Wives of abused men tell Allender that when the husband doesn't run, he fumes and becomes extremely angry. This gives him a sense of control and lowers his stress chemicals (cortisol and adrenaline). **Then, the man feels calmer and more open, but the wife feels scared and withdraws.** ## Sexual Struggles of Abused Men - Abused men experience five different sexual struggles: **compulsion, aversion, perversion, danger, and dysfunction.** 1. **Compulsion:** - Many men experience some sexual thought or feeling during an interaction with a woman. - Sexual compulsion is often fused with another addiction (food, alcohol, drugs, work…). 2. **Aversion:** - A man's aversion to sex is profoundly confusing for a spouse. In order not to violate the rule that a true man is always eager for sex, aversion is blamed on exhaustion, busyness, or relational tensions. - During lovemaking, a man may be triggered and lose an erection. **The kindness of the partner may terrify the man by reminding him of the abuser's kindness.** Many men then settle into hypoactive sexual desire. 3. **Perversion:** - A 0.81 correlation was found between sexual perversions (exhibitionism, voyeurism, fetishism, sadomasochism) and past sexual abuse. - Shame is most often shut down through a movement toward degradation of one's self or partner. - **==Telling your partner about your degrading images or fantasies sets you up for fear when making love. It is better to let a good reader of your story (e.g. a therapist) invite you to unpack meaning and grieve.==** - This makes sense, I guess. Ideally, I'd think I'd want my partner to know everything, but in that case it may do more harm than good. Better to tackle the issue with a therapist, and talk about it with my partner when trauma has subsided. 4. **Danger:** - Danger is both a draw and a terror: it is feared and hated, but also erotically arousing. - Many abused men flirt with or consummate affairs to test what they can get away with without getting caught. Others remain faithful but covertly use pornography for arousal. It is also possible to only rely on internal fantasy. - Client's story: He would adamantly refuse to change his children's diapers, even when his wife asked him to. He justified himself by saying "I'm a jerk." Later, he admited that it made him uncomfortable, and eventually he said: "I'd rather kill myself than do anything harmful to one of my kids." - **His fear was that he would replicate the past harm done to him by a babysitter.** About 47% of men who abuse have been abused. - This makes a lot of sense. It is terrifying to know that one's actions can cause terrible harm to others. - **Reminding the victim that he was only ten and it was not his fault is sincere and true, but misses the mark. ==The abused man has to face the true enemy, which is evil's desire for shame to be bound to pleasure.==** 5. **Dysfunction:** - Abused men may deal with premature ejaculation, secondary impotence, and lack of knowledge about a woman's body. **This leads them to feel like sexual losers.** - Client's story: He had an affair where, over many sexual trials, he eventually managed to sustain an erection and bring his mistress to an orgasm, despite never succeeding with his wife. He wanted Allender to pass judgment on his immoral actions, but Allender refused to play that game. The client later acknowledged that his war was connected to his hatred against his sister, who required him to perform oral sex on her when he was a child. He married a sexually closed off woman who abhorred oral sex. After connecting the dots, he cut off the affair and pursued his wife with integrity. He addressed his infidelities and past sexual abuse with his wife: this almost killed the marriage, but the wife went to seek counseling too. In the end, their marriage still stands. ## Female Perpetrators - **Social myth: a man should be grateful for being initiated into sex by an older female child or woman.** This is propagated by Hollywood films like _The Reader_. - **==It takes a radical, countercultural move for a man to say he was sexually abused, but is must be done.==** - 80% of male sexual abusers have a history of being violated by women. - Three recurrent issues are named by abused men: **feeling used, struggling with inadequacy, and sexual confusion.** 1. **Feeling Used:** - The abused young man at the mercy of a female abuser is ashamed of having lost the capacity for sexual initiation and choice. **This often evolves into a deep insistence never to feel sexually weak again and to be completely in charge.** 2. **Struggling with Inadequacy:** - Female women who abused boys named the power and pleasure they experienced in being better at something in which men are supposed to excel. **The abused boy is often frustrated not to be as good as his abuser, and this feeling can remain long after the abuse.** 3. **Sexual Confusion:** - Often, the man who was abused as a boy by a woman struggles with the same question as the victim who was abused by a man: _**"Am I gay?"**_ This seems to make little sense, but the underlying question makes it clearer: _**"If it felt good and is considered a prize, then why do I feel used, awkward, and ashamed?"**_ Sadly, the answer that the victim reaches is often: **"Something is wrong with me sexually."** ## The Calling of an Abused Man - What does it mean to be a man? **==Oddly enough, the strength of a man is seen in his willingness to own his fury against shame.==** - There must be a dying to self, during which one surrenders one's body and soul to the story of God rather than to living out the indulgences of a safe, vicarious, and manipulative story. - **==An abused man cannot move forward until he has the courage to return to the burnt ground of his abuse and learn how to grieve.==** - We always come back to the need to name the abuse. # 7. The Drama of Reenactment