Sorry I'm so fragmented now, I can't manage to write coherent answers some days.
@MO-Survivor, I really wanted to talk about your thoughts in the post I quoted above, but I just couldn't do it at the time. I actually slept most of the afternoon, so maybe that will help. All of this ... is getting to me, and I'm really run down. But I'm trying to fix things, I don't want my life to spiral downward, I want it to get better. So there's that, a positive in my mind.
OK, what I actually wanted to talk about is your comments about the layers of the onion and about how therapy is often about trying to fix things that aren't the root of the problem. I liked your onion graphic, it's so true, all of those things are complicated and interrelated. You put three issues on the bottom of your image that all connect together for me, addiction, soothing, and repetition. I do all of that in my own version of "acting out" - which for me has been a life-long pattern of very irresponsible spending. I've had enough money slip through my fingers in my lifetime to live very comfortably and instead I live always wondering what will happen in 2 weeks or 2 months if I don't have an income coming in. I see all three of those things in my spending I habits. I definitely am very impulsive and definitely get an emotional benefit from spending money, it's like a way of feeling some kind of short-term power, even though I know I can't afford it, or I don't need whatever it is I'm buying. And it's always framed within a self-conversation about how I "deserve it" just this one last time, it will make me feel better, it's been a rough day, etc. Then when I have the item, whatever, I often hardly ever look at it again or use it. My house is full of unused, unnecessary belongings. And the pattern just repeats over and over again. Repetition - always, I just keep doing this. I've discussed this over the years with many therapists, and it never really changes.
My other addiction is food. I have an "on-paper" diagnosis of an eating disorder, many decades ago. In fact, when I first when to a therapist, in the late 1980's, it was because of issues related to my weight. I've been thin and fit, and I've been fat and horribly unhealthy, and everything in between, in almost every decade of my life. The childhood existence was such a mindfuck because it was full of contradictions and ironies, all based on lies and coverups. There was what the outside world saw, and what happened when the doors were locked and curtains pulled in that house. I guess one reason nothing happened to change things in my childhood was because the outside world believed the lies and the stories that were told to it. Part of that was keeping up the facade, and my mother did, for whatever reason, keep it up. I don't blame her for that, I know she did what she could do, we talked about it years later, after he died, and she was very remorseful that she didn't run, but she always said he would have hunted her down, and that is true. I guess the other part of it was that it gave my mother something to focus her energy on. So, the outside world saw this "perfect family" in the perfect suburban home. My mother was the 1950's/1960's stay at home, Donna Reed stereotype, and she overcompensated for my suffering with food. So that got all of that started for me, food was love that she could safely show when he was around, and food was comfort when things were bad - and things were bad all of the time. His side of the equation was picking on me, teasing me, and denigrating me about my weight, my weakness, in later years his perceptions of my sexuality (which he got wrong). And all of that was pretty much a guarantee that I would have these tremendous battles all of my life with food and weight and my health. Once again, addiction, self-soothing, and repetition, the bottom part of your onion diagram, all there in a little bundle known as my lifelong struggle with food.
@MO-Survivor - the top two things on your onion diagram, adult sexuality and connection with self. Those are interesting to me, too, but I can honestly say I only struggle with my connection to my real emotions. I've said this before, and honestly, I'm really grateful for it, that my sense of sexuality, orientation, attitudes, behaviors, and history, I think I'm pretty ok with that overall in the sense that I'm not ashamed of anything I've ever done in my life. Some part of me wishes I had "less" integrity when it comes to that, because there was a point, about 30 years ago, when I met a woman, a co-worker, who became a very meaningful person in my life, and looking back, I can basically say we had an emotional affair over a number of years, but it was never physical because she was very religious and one of her religious tenants was that divorce was wrong and marriage was forever. She was in a very unhappy marriage, and to be honest, it got the point where she and I contemplated taking it to a physical level, and I told her I just couldn't be that kind of man, either. Now part of me wishes I hadn't been so "moral" but I still believe I made the right choice, and no, I wouldn't want to be the guy that a married woman - with 2 kids no less - was having an affair with. I mean -- who knows, maybe in a different lifetime, under different circumstances ... I just know that, emotionally, it's still kind of hard to think about walking away from someone that I really, really connected with emotionally, and I guess it's just one of those "if only I had met her at a different time in her life" things, although that wasn't "real world" possible because she was quite a bit older than I am, it would have been, in the eyes of the law anyway, an entirely different kind of CSA experience if I had met her before she was married.
TRIGGERING - More Suicidal Ideation
Connection to self - well, to be honest, I think that is the most important thing on your diagram, at least to me. The bottom three things, addiction, self-soothing, and repetition, are all symptoms of the lack of connection to self, I believe. What says lack of connection to self more than hating yourself so much you believe you should be shot execution-style in the back of the head for trivial things that no one in the real world cares about? I spent years believing that about myself, and even now, a large part of me hates myself to the extent that a bad experience - a trivial bad experience at that - gets me right back to the place where I imagine feeling the gun in my hand and the barrel pressed into the side of my head. And I have been really working to understand those thoughts, feelings, and images and unravel those strands and how they connect to my feelings of grief and loss over not having a real father in my life, which is one issue, and my feelings over being abused, betrayed, and tormented by the same man who should have been that father that I needed, a separate but interconnected issue.
I'm trying to learn what loving myself, instead of hating myself, feels like, because I don't think I've ever loved myself. There have been times in my life I've liked myself a little bit, and times in my life when I've actually been proud of myself - although of course, those are even hard to accept when the fundamental core belief is "you are an abomination before God and the Universe." But it's a challenge to learn to love yourself, to think you have value, to be ok with who and what you are. I see that struggle in the words of so many guys here when they talk about their sexuality and question it, and to be honest, I just want to say to a lot of them that I see them as beautiful human beings just the way they are, and that they should just love themselves and be proud of themselves whether they're gay, bi or straight. But I understand that struggle in them comes from the question of "am I this way by nature, or because of abuse?" and I know that's as hard for them as "do I hate myself so much I deserve to die" has been for me. I think for men struggling with that question of "did abuse make me gay?" - the question that comes from the upper left of the "onion diagram" it's really kind of the same fundamental question as mine, which comes from the upper right. And really, no matter how I phrase it, "am I an abomination? Do I deserve to be shot? Am I the worst piece of scum to ever walk the earth?" - the basic question is "am I good boy or a bad boy" - and that was the "subliminal mindfuck" (to borrow a phrase from a song by Green Day) that my father did to me as a kid. I think that I was always told "you are a bad boy, and because of that, you deserve this pain that I am about to inflict on you." And I bought into that message all of my life - I'm a bad boy, I'm a bad boy, I'm a bad boy. And to make it worse, he set the bar so low - I was a bad boy, in his eyes, for just doing anything normal that any little kid would do. I remember one time, at Christmas, I was probably about 8 or 9, my oldest sister, who was out of the house, married, and had her own daughter by then, gave me a pack of Uno cards, and my mother and other 2 sisters were playing it Christmas night in the kitchen. Well, we made "too much noise" and he came down and took them away, never saw them again. We were just having fun, talking and laughing. I guess even now, when I think about that, it's hard for me, because he made me feel so bad about myself, and I hate that. I didn't deserve it then, and I honestly don't deserve it now, even though I am the one doing it to myself.
After the PHP experience a decade ago, I really went off the deep end with "I'm a bad man and I deserve to die" because, face it, if getting a speeding ticket 20 years before that made me hate myself so much I cried for days (well, nights, alone, always in private, I never got over the "put on the happy face for the public" thing) - ending up in a psychiatric day program for a few weeks really pushed me over the edge into dramatic "I'm the scum of the earth" territory. Ultimate self-stigmatizing behavior. I came really, really close, literally, to killing myself over that, loaded weapon in hand and a long, weepy conversation with God over whether I deserved to die. I used to be the prosecution in my mind, judging my own life, and the funny thing was, I never had any concrete, rational evidence of my "crimes" that merited the "death penalty." In the real world, I've tried to be a good man, I know I have shortcomings, but I've only ever harmed myself. Right now, writing this, it's still a struggle between the big part of me that says "you're a bad man, you need to put the gun to your head, it's what you deserve" and the part of me that's trying to say "no, it's not you, it's him, you deserve to live, and you deserve to be happy." Because it is still his voice telling me I'm a bad man, like it told me all those years ago I was a bad boy over nothing at all. I really am trying to fight that voice, right now, I feel like I want to go off and cry my eyes out, again, because it makes me so sad for those parts of me that felt like a bad boy and a bad man when I know I wasn't and I'm not.
). When you talk about your desire for non-sexual intimacy in relationships, and about having close friends in the present, make that a goal for you and your therapist: to develop 1-2 close, male, non-sexual friendships over the next year. Then spend time with your T talking about male friend experiences as a boy. Maybe talking about them before and after the abuse happened (if it's relevant). There is a lot of value reflecting back on your memories and feelings in the past to understand why you relate or don't relate the way you want to now. See if you can get to the center issues of the onion you are peeling together - because that's how real, lasting change happens. Change won't really happen by trying to repeatedly pull off the outer layers of the onion.
Go for it!
