Inability to Form Healthy Relationships

Incest robs children of their childhood, forcing upon them a sexual awareness before there is any context for having such feelings. It undermines any sense of safety or support within the family and home and fragments the child’s developing sense of self. In all cases, physical and emotional, the child experiences a harmful reversal of roles in which he is asked to fill adult functions in order to take care of some inappropriate need of the so-called adult (Gilbert, 1993). In sexual abuse, a victim is forces or expected to behave in ways that satisfy the offender’s emotional and sexual desires. The survivor’s emotional and physical feelings are ignored. Victims get the message that their sexuality exists to benefit others (Maltz, 1991). The survivors is left with a warped concept of sexuality and his place in that construct. He comes to believe that sex is uncontrollable, hurtful, and secretive, that there are no moral boundaries, and that sex [and his body] is a commodity, something to give, get, or withhold (Maltz, 1991, p. 89/93).

Feeling that he is going to be betrayed if he actually lets down his guard and becomes vulnerable is a profound fear for many sexual abuse survivors. After all, when he did love and trust his caregivers, they used that trust against him by violating his boundaries. As a result, many survivors of sexual abuse have little sense of personal boundaries, either their own or a knowledge about those of other people. Survivors exhibit this lack of knowledge of appropriate boundaries by:

1. •not knowing how to protect themselves
   

2. •feeling constantly used, abused, or victimized by others   
   

3. •not knowing how to say not to others or set limits with family, friends, or in job situations
   

4. •being fearful of being exposed or hurt and presenting a false front of security
   

5. •being intensely distrustful of others, overly cautious and suspicious of other people’s motives
   

6. •using sex as the only indicator of closeness in a relationship (Wills-Brandon, 1990).
   

Sexual problems, not surprisingly, manifest themselves in adulthood as a result of this trauma. Specific sexual problems, such as hypersexuality or lack of sexual desire, or specific sexual dysfunctions, such as impotence or premature ejaculation, can result from childhood abuse. Loss of sexual desire can come about either from uncomfortable feelings during sex or uncomfortable feelings, flashbacks, or negative associations that do not occur during sex but affect it. Hypersexuality, like most addictions, can also be a way of avoiding thoughts and feelings about childhood abuse (Sonkin, 1992).

The male sexual abuse survivor, having a confused concept of sexuality due to his abuse, has on one hand the notion that his only value is sexual, and on the other the cultural knowledge that refusing sex offered by a woman carries maximum social risk, because he is then labeled as gay, regardless of whether the charge merits attribution. So, the imperative, both from his abuse and from larger cultural demands, are that he ‘put notches on his belt’, that he perform in a culturally accepted ‘manly’ way.

While these cultural demands make for an empty emotional landscape for many males, due to their continual striving for sex at any cost, for the male sexual abuse survivor this imperative produces an additional problem. He doesn’t know how to live his life without sex in some form, and if he can’t manifest or maintain adult sexual relationships with women [or, if his orientation is homosexual, with men], he will turn to other forms of sexual release. Given that the maintenance of adult relationships is often painful and inaccessible to him, as a result of the mixed messages about his own sexuality, the sexual abuse survivor often feels a profound sense of personal emptiness when attempting sexual relationships, but feels compelled nonetheless to engage in them. The sexual addict often makes his partners an obsession. Both partners lose the freedom, fun, and intimacy of mutual loving sexual play. Addiction renders a relationship with another person empty, joyless and demoralizing. At issue for the addict is the fear of having to live without sex (Carnes, 1983/1991).

For the sexual abuse survivor, being a sexual addict is simply a familiar script to play out; since his only value (at least the messages given him say) is sexual, having to live without sex means that he doesn’t exist or even shouldn’t have the right to exist without being a sexual person. Further, his value is in the sexual servicing of his partners, so if he is not engaged in that servicing, his right to existence is undermined.

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Mariposa Men’s Wellness Institute was founded in 2001

to help men become emotionally healthy.