The impact and effects of child sexual abuse are not widely understood by survivors, or by the general public especially in the case of boys. And, while the experiences vary widely, there are some common psychological processes that, if understood, can be helpful in making sense of ones own or another’s experience, and in alerting the public to the social costs. This is a casual article, minimizing psychological jargon and the conventions of professional papers. It is meant to serve only as a preliminary view of some of the issues.

Please understand that talking about these psychological processes may seem cold and abstract in light of the actual impact of flesh and blood experience, and the often intense and long-lasting impact on individuals, families and other relationships. There is only space here for a brief glimpse, which is meant to provide hope and some light to those who struggle with these issues, and to promote public understanding. It is also a contribution to a wider effort to lay a foundation of understanding, which can then be combined with knowledge about the development of male identity in our society to show the linkage between the issues of mens wellness and male sexual abuse survivors.

Perhaps the most common molestation experience is one in which the victimizer has power over the victim, by virtue of age and other factors, and the threat of violence is at least implied, if not made explicit. This may be somewhat disguised if the victimizer is a family member or friend. Almost always the child gets the message that this must be kept secret. The secretiveness then becomes a trap, which isolates the child, leaving him to make his own adjustment to an experience that is frightening and confusing, and that forever changes his understanding of himself and of the world. A heavy sense of shame tends to pervade his consciousness.

This kind of experience is traumatic. Trauma studies have now shown that traumatic experience, unlike normal experience, becomes lodged in one part of the brain, and doesn’t get processed by other important areas of the brain, such as the prefrontal cortex. So, instead of processing the experience, the child has to build defenses around it in an effort to contain it, to wall it off, and to prevent the intense feelings from threatening his safety or interfering with his life. The isolation makes the child feel abnormal. Intense effort then goes into trying to appear and act and feel normal. Unfortunately, the child’s ability to appear relatively normal can prevent parents or other adult caregivers from realizing the child has been traumatized. As a result, behavioral changes in the child are either missed or misunderstood by the parent.

Acting up is a common reaction in boys. If parents react punitively, the punishment tends to interact with the child’s guilt and confusion to create a vicious circle that is frustrating to both parent and child. Rather than jumping too quickly to labeling the behavior as "Oppositional-Defiant Disorder," mental health professionals need to explore the possibility the child has had an inappropriate sexual experience. Both parent and child may minimize the seriousness of an exposure to sexual experience if there is no violence or sexual penetration involved, and therefore fail to mention it to the therapist.

It makes an enormous difference to the child if there is an adult who believes him and can confirm his innocence. Few adults, however, can allow the child to do any but the most cursory processing of the experience. Adults usually experience extreme anxiety in the face of emotional pain in a child, because it tends to evoke primitive fears of helplessness and loss of control. Instead of experiencing the anxiety, the adult rushes too quickly to smooth it over or to distract the child. Children tend to be easily distracted, so the adult is left thinking the experience wasn’t serious after all. Thus the adult reassures himself or herself, but the child is left with the message that the experience wasn’t so bad. This confuses the child, and may lead him to believe either that the experience shouldn’t matter, or that its too frightening for his caregiver.

Problems for the child can also be caused by a parents hysterical reaction to the child’s abuse experience. If this happens, the child feels the additional burden of taking care of the parents feelings. It is very important to the child to have a stable parent who can help him feel safe.

Without therapeutic intervention to help him process the experience the child is thrown back on his own internal methods of keeping himself together following an event that has shattered his sense of safety and personal identity, and has saddled him with a sense of shame. His age, stage of psychological development, certain constitutional capacities, characteristics of his family and environment, and whether he feels safe from the victimizer will all influence how he deals with this experience.

This then sets the stage for consideration of the internal processes that commonly occur. The child struggles to wall-off and exile intense feelings of helplessness, fear, pain, sadness and anger, which threaten to overwhelm him. Although he’s not feeling normal, he must maintain an appearance of normalcy that, of course, makes him feel he’s faking it, and further undermines his self-image and self-esteem. It also commonly results in the development of an overly critical conscience, which tells him he’s being dishonest, and that he, in some way, may actually have invited the molestation experience. A common misconception of the child is that he is gay, which may or may not be the case, and this misinterpretation may interfere with his relationships and with the development of sexual identity.

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Mariposa Men’s Wellness Institute was founded in 2001

to help men become emotionally healthy.