Questioning my masculinity

Questioning my masculinity
S

sportinrucks

Registrant
As I move further along in my road to recovery, I am beginning to question my masculinity. My thoughts are not of it much yet it seems like my internal dialogue i.e. feeling less of a man, I used to have thoughts like, ''I should have punched him and run'', other 8 years would have'' or ''Ive heard of 8 year olds doing extrodinary things and....'' or ''I can't beleive I was uneducated enough to see through this'' I mean, these thoughts seem unrational yet I feel like I was less than others. I am seeming to have a guilt plauge or something lately.
 
Sport,

Doubt is a terrible thing. We can look back at what happened to us and judge our actions through adult eyes. The problem with doing that is we are holding our 8-year-old selves to an adult standard that could not possibly have been met by him. In this, in my opinion, one learns to cut the kid some slack and forgive the child for the adult actions he did not take.

Hand in hand with doubt goes guilt, one of the most destructive and counterproductive emotions we have. Some of the guilt I feel as a survivor is directly related to the adult/child disparity. My 10-year-old self didn't understand what was happening, and he couldn't have possibly fought off a man over twice his size. I can look back and feel guilty that I didn't fight or do some harm to my perp, but I know that I was a small, terrifed boy who had no hope of controlling the situation.

I don't know if this helped or not, but there it is.
 
if you had fought you might have got killed ,and if you didnt get killed you woulda got beat up and molested any way ,took me a long time to understand that . i did fight and i'm right here with you trying to get over it. but tuesday i;ll be having surgery on my head to fix dameage done ten years ago ,thats what fighting got me. if they are gonna break your mind anyway why let them break your body too . adam
 
Sport,

These guys have given great advice. Think about it. Also think about something my therapist told me.

Put yourself in the position of an adult that was listening to the exact same story from a child. In other words, if an 8 yr old boy was telling you that he had been abused, and felt guilty because he didn't fight back, OR less of a man because he didn't fight back, what would you tell that 8 yr old? Would you tell him that, yes, in fact he was less of a man now? Would you tell that 8 yr old that he should have fought off his perp? Would you tell that 8 yr old that what he did in order to survive was the wrong thing to do?

I didn't paticularly feel any better when my therapist first told this to me, BUT as I began to think about it, everytime I had these thoughts, I began to feel better. I realized that I was a kid, and I did what I did in order to survive. Right or wrong, it worked for me.
 
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