the hardest things: sadistic fantasies/arousal, sexual dysfunction

the hardest things: sadistic fantasies/arousal, sexual dysfunction
If you know an EXTREMELY sensitive therapist in the northeastern US, I'm taking suggestions.
Click to expand...
Although, anybody with any referrals in NY/Boston areas, I'll take the contact info.
Click to expand...
BOSTON

Mike Lew (yes, that Mike Lew)
Agency/Practice Name = The Next Step Counseling & Training
Address = P.O. Box 1146
City = Jamaica Plain
State = MA
Zip = 02130
Country = United States
email = [email protected]
Web Site Address = https://www.abbington.com/smallwonder/
Business Phone = 617-277-7172
Fax Number = 617-525-9176
Degree = M.Ed.
School = Cambridge College
Year Graduated = 1982
Major = Counseling Psychology
Licensed in State = State
Type of License = Not required in Mass.
Certified in State = State
Licensed in Country = United States
Professional Membership = American Counseling Association
Member Since = 1981
Professional Membership = AGLBIC
Member Since = 1998
Professional Experience = c.25
Survivor Experience = c.20

Bio = I am a therapist/counselor in private practice at The Next Step Counselling & Training in Brookline, MA. My particluar focus is working with male survivors in recovery from sexual chilad abuse and other boyhood trauma, and those who care about them. I do individual, couple and group counseling, clinical supervision, trainings for professionals, and recovery workshops for male survivors and for male and female survivors together. I am the author of Victims No Longer: Men Recovering from Incest and other Sexual Child Abuse (1990, New York:HarperCollins), and Leaping upon the Mountains (1999 Berkeley, CA:North Atlantic Books and Boston:Small Wonder Books).

Notes = The Next Step currently offers general male survivor groups and a group for male survivors with issues of sexual addictions or compulsivity. We are about to start a group for male and female partners of male and female survivors. For further information about upcoming events, email us or visit our web site at https://www.abbington.com/smallwonder/index.html

I offer therapy groups for male survivors only. = Yes
I offer a sliding scale fee for survivors in need. = Yes

*** I attended Mike's "Leaping Upon the Mountain Retreat in July, 2000. His sensitivity and compassion are a Beacon in the Darkness.
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David Lisak
David Lisak, PhD is an associate professor of psychology at the University of Massachusetts Boston and director of the Men's Sexual Trauma Research Project. He conducts and supervises research on the causes and consequences of interpersonal violence, in particular, the long term effects of childhood abuse in adult men. His research has been published in journals in psychology, trauma and violence, he is the editor of the journal, Psychology of Men and Masculinity, and he maintains a private practice specializing in the treatment of traumatized men.

*** David was a facilitator this weekend at the NOMSV retreat. I only had the opportunity to speak to him for about a half hour. Previously, I spoke to him on the phone about the retreat for the same amount of time. The phone conversation was easy and comfortable.

This man emanates warmth and peace and power. Just seeing him there (before I knew it was him) was reassuring and calming. David made me feel that if anything bad happened, he could and would take care of it.
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Mikele Rauch
Mikele Rauch, MA is a licensed marriage family therapist in Boston. Over the last eighteen years, she has run groups specifically with male survivors of sexual abuse and the AIDS community in California and in Boston. Currently she works with the homeless community in Cambridge and is in private practice. She has recently finished a book of fiction about shame and restoration. When she is not writing, Mikele plays her fiddle, a hammer dulcimer, and a small talking drum.

*** Mikele was another of the 11 facilitators at this weekends retreat. She is open and caring. It was a pleasure to talk to her and be in her presence. By the way, her name is prounced Me-Kel.

There are more listed in the Boston Area. Go here. https://nomsv.org/resource/resource%20directory.htm
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ALBANY, NEW YORK
John Crowe
John F. Crowe, MS, CRC, BCSA
NOMSV Member = Yes
Agency/Practice Name = John F. Crowe, MS, CRC, BCSA
Address = 560 Delaware Avenue
City = Albany
State = NY
Zip = 12209
Country = United States
email = [email protected]
Business Phone = 518.439.0160
Pager Number = 518.424.2724
Degree = MS
School = State University of NY at Albany
Year Graduated = 1979
Major = Rehabilitation Counseling
Licensed in Country = United States
Type of License = Certified Rehabilitation Counselor
License Expires = September 2005
Professional Membership = NYS Coalition Against Sexual Assault
Member Since = 1999
Professional Membership = NALGAP
Member Since = 1997
Professional Experience = 21
Survivor Experience = 13

Bio = John F. Crowe is a therapist in private practice who has more than 21 years of experience working in the fields of addiction, grief counseling, assisting people living with chronic illness and in assisting trauma survivors in their journey of recovery. He specializes in providing services to male survivors of sexual assault, rape and incest. John is a popular workshop facilitator and was invited to present on male survivor issues at the statewide conference for the New York State Office of Mental Health in 2000.

Notes = Board Certified in treating sexual abuse by the American Academy of Experts in Traumatic Stress. Certified Clinical Hypnotherapist.

I offer therapy groups for male survivors only. = Yes
I offer a sliding scale fee for survivors in need. = Yes
Accept Terms = Yes

John F. Crowe, MS, CRC, BCSA is a certified rehabilitation counselor with more than 22 years of experience providing therapeutic services to individuals who have experienced trauma in their lives. He began his career working with people living with physical challenges and with people with histories of psychiatric hospitalization. John has worked in educational and employment settings where the focus was on mainstreaming adolescents and adults into the competitive workforce. It was when he became a certified alcoholism counselor and began working in the addictions field that John shifted the focus of his work to people who have experienced trauma. His particular specialization is working with male survivors of trauma including: sexual abuse, incest, rape, sexual assault, and being raised in physically/emotionally abusive environments. John is presently in private clinical practice in Albany, New York and was recently invited to present on male survivor issues at the annual conference of the New York State Office of Mental Health.

***Another of the facilitators this weekend. A gentle, powerful man. I would hire him in a minute if he were local for me.

All of the facilitators this weekend were incredible. All. Incredible. They came from all over this country, unpaid, and gave their time, their energy, their wisdom, their strength, and their tears to 34 wounded souls who left in a better state than when they arrived.

And you have three of them within the area you specified, as well as Mike Lew.
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New York City

Richard Gartner

NOMSV Member = Yes
Name = Richard B. Gartner
Address = 27 West 72nd Street #708
City = New York
State = NY
Zip = 10023-3498
Country = United States
email = [email protected]
Business Phone = 212 580 3187
Fax Number = 718 499 3231
Degree = PhD
School = Columbia University
Year Graduated = 1972
Major = Clinical Psychology
Degree = BA
School = Haverford College
Year Graduated = 1967
Major = Psychology
Licensed in State = NY
Type of License = Psychologist
License Expires = 6/30/03
Certified in State = State
Licensed in Country = United States
Professional Membership = American Psychological Association
Member Since = 1974
Professional Membership = National Register of Health Providers in Psychology
Member Since = 1975
Professional Experience = 32
Survivor Experience = 22+

Bio = Director, Sexual Abuse Program and Center for the Study of Psychological Trauma, William Alanson White Institute, New York City; Member of NOMSV Board of Directors since 1997; Program Chair, NOMSV 2001 Conferennce in New York City

Notes = Author, Betrayed as Boys: Psychodynamic Treatment of Sexually Abused Men (Guilford, 1999); Editor, Memories of Sexual Betrayal: Truth, Fantasy, Repression, and Dissociation (Aronson, 1997); Author, seven articles about male sexual victimization in juried professional journals since 1996

I offer therapy groups for male survivors only. = Yes
I offer a sliding scale fee for survivors in need. = Yes

*** I have no personal knowledge, but he is well know and respected in this field. I have heard, from someone who knows him, of his passion and dedication to Male Survivors. Richard is the current President of NOMSV.
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If New Jersey is an option (Lambertville - directly across the state line from New Hope, PA), then I can highly recommend my therapist, Ken Singer. His information can be found at the dirctory link I provided above. He is a past President of NOMSV and a current Board member. He wrote the following, which you should read. https://nomsv.org/resource/consumer.html

May I offer you some advice?

Donald
 
Don, thanks very much for the therapist listings. I appreciate so much knowing that you've had firsthand contact with these people, because that removes a lot of the hurdles in my mind. I've actually already contacted Mike Lew and he said he has a place available, but he is in Australia for September giving a retreat and other stuff there. I must say, gratefully, that this posting is a tremendous help to me. It's what I wanted, and what some others have given me in private messages, just the contact information and something to make me trust that I won't be laughed at when I get to the therapist's office.

Well, Don, I'm not good at taking advice, as I've posted. The most effective thing to do with me is to entice me. Instead of saying, "You should go to a therapist," say, sharing from your own experience, "I was initially very reluctant, if not hostile, to the idea of going to a therapist. I was unconsciously afraid of being treated by the therapist in the same way that my father had treated me, with ridicule and contempt, and I knew that I couldn't handle it. This problem was exacerbated by my first few experiences with therapits, both formal and informal, in which I had to defend myself from their bad ideas/theories and their well-meaning but ignorant manipulation. Eventually, I got myself to go and the benefits were the following..." This is something I've never found a good explanation of. In Mike Lew's book he talks about all the misperceptions of individual therapy that prevent people from goin, but he doesn't discuss at length and persuasively the benefits of talking to a therapist. And there are lots of articles on picking a therapist and on therapeutic schools of thought.

I think what I need is to accept my own hostility to the notion of anybody ever again looking at me and seeing inside of me. This is part of what I hated so much about being a kid, is that my parents seemed to be able to see inside my soul to determine whether I was being bad or not. They eyes and their vision were unescapable. And they hurt me a lot by punishing me. Ironically, my parents are stupid and obtuse, as I can now see as an adult, and never had any understanding at all, or only a very minimal understanding of what was going on inside of me, but when I was a baby, I assumed they knew what they were doing, that they could see me clearly, that they were right, I was wrong, and that's why I needed to be and justly got, punished. Now, as an adult, I'm hostile to everybody who tries to get near me or understand me (see what I said to poor Roy up above). I hate this about myself, but I'm more bristly than a barbed-wire fence. Talk about transferrence. What should I do? Accept that I'll hate myself while I try to prove to myself that I'm better than the therapist and while I'm angry and sarcastic with them? That I'm smarter than the therapist, that I know more about therapy than he/she does, that I could do it all myself, that I will make a better therapist than them when I'm done with all this, that they can only see what I let them? You can see that with all this ugliness inside of me, of which I am ashamed to the point of flight from society, I am hesitant to show it others and am trying to fix it myself.

Another thing I need to accept is that even though I was only sexually abused once, and I got out of it before he penetrated me or I did anything to him, that this is enough. That I am not a weakling, sissy who just can't/couldn't take it. I'm embarassed to even admit that this is how little happened to me and that it caused me this many problems. I know that minimizing the effects and the rest of exactly what I'm doing is common. And I'm feeling it. The shame. I'm afraid nobody will take me seriously anymore. And I feel compelled that my father was physically and verbally abusive and my mother either neglectful or abusive herself, in order to justify the extent of my own problems to myself and to any other I might hypothetically wish to be understood by. Maybe there's just something wrong with me. Maybe my father was right, I'm a sissy, faggot, wimp, nerd, geek who just can't hack it.

Anyway, there's some shame for you. And I haven't even got the Healing the Shame book yet.

Ryan
 
ryan, your lasrt para. really spoke to me. I went to shrinks for years and sneered knowingly to myself while divulging nothing. And, of course, getting nothing out of it. What a bunch of horseshit, I thought. And now I realize that attitude sprung from the shame of very judgemental paresnts and not feeling like what little SA I could recall was enough to justify "a problem".
Boy was i wrong. And had I cared enough about myself earlier I may have spared the total breakdown that eventually, and thankfully, drove me into constructive therapy.
What I'm sure you know is that you hesitate to go because your self-loathing inner critic doesn't want to be kicked out on his ass. He's still got you by allowing you to feel "superior" reading the books and doing it on your own. But you're not on your own. You are inhabited by a demon who is wily and manipulative and does not want you to get help, to love yourself, to humble yourself before another, to take control of your life and tell this demon to fuck off.
Now's a good time...
lol,
-Al
 
Yeah, needing to feel superior, be independent, and despising and hating myself are really big emotional problems for me. I should say that again. And again. And again.

I have a massive superiority-inferiority complex. I simultaneously feel inferior to everybody, inadequate, and jealous, underneath the ground other people walk on; and superior, contemptuous, floating godlike in the sky above everybody else. Neither is true. I think maybe they represent my childhood image of me and my father, respectively. Or maybe the inferiority is how I felt in relation to my parents and the superiority is an emotional defense against the inferiority. Anyway, I'm an arrogant hurt little boy.

Ryan
 
But back to one of the original serious problems for which I am working through the most shame: sexual problems, sexual dysfunction, I'm not a man, whatever you want to call it.

Having sexual problems certainly makes me feel like I'm not much of a man. It also makes me dread trying to get into another relationship, or even meet women. All I can see is the look in their eyes when I explain to them to I do or, hopefully, did, have sexual problems. I see them seeing me as less of a man, or worse pitying and despising me. This is, of course, how I see myself. But I am so ashamed of this. I am so ashamed of this. I am so ashamed of this. I cannot integrate into my conscious self-awareness as an acceptable aspect of myself. Sometimes, as a dodge, I try to think, well I have other attributes to offer--sensitivity, intelligence, whatever, and I suspect that my money-making/success drive has been intensified by the hope of having enough to offer to compensate for my otherwise inadeqaute manliness.

I think a big part of the problem is that the shame grips me so tightly that I can't even face the problem. As I'm working through this, I'm beginning to be able to imagine having sex again without anxiety. It is remote, but it occurred to me and I actually instantly had a slightly arousing image. Some small progress. The shame that binds.

Ryan
 
This could be embarrassing if it wasn't so funny! :o

In the "Dark Fantasies" thread I was saying I'd not seen this topic in this forum before, how glad I was this kind of thing had come up, that I needed to start dealing with it again.

Well, I (re)discovered this thread and saw I had posted here on September 15th! I didn't even remember doing it! Well, maybe I wasn't ready to deal with this stuff any further till now. Maybe I can blame it on fibrofog! :confused:

Ryan:

"Having sexual problems certainly makes me feel like I'm not much of a man."

That I can relate to. In fact, my own acting out is a counterproductive but very driven attempt at regaining (or gaining, or finding) my manhood after years of abuse by (mostly) women & by men. It's a misguided effort to "do it right," to correct my past screwed up "sex life."

"I think a big part of the problem is that the shame grips me so tightly that I can't even face the problem."

I'm 45, I've had sexual fantasies and compulsions since I was 10 or less, and I only started facing the problem last year.

But as I do I believe that, for me, the obsessive compulsive sexual fantasies (I have OCD) are a normal reaction--to abnormal (very) actions, sexual abuse. It was a way for me to escape & cope as I grew up.

But now, for me, I no longer consider these reactions healthy. After all, I'm not being abused anymore, tho I'm needing therapy to convince my "inner child" of this. Also, I'm now an adult (at least chronologically) and very happily married; and my compulsions and fantasies have been interfering with my life, marriage & work, sapping time & energy better spent for me.

However (refer if you want to my post in "Dark Fantasies") I found spending too much time trying to deal with this is just another unhealthy compulsion that can be counterproductive to what I'm trying to do.

Still, a forum like this is a good place, I think, to deal with this crap as it relates to those surviving sexual trauma, which is after all the root of my problem.

There are of course several good online forums for sexual compulsives/addicts etc, and I've used a few. There are also some good books, tho again I find the best are those dealing with this problem from a survivors perspective. Mike Lew ("Leaping Upon the Mountains") is good here.

Well, enuf (too much?) said. I could tell you that you are a man, but I know from experience that's something you've got to discover and feel and believe and live for yourself. But I do believe you have it in you!

Take care Ryan, and all

Wuame

PS And clearly you are making progress.
 
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