Chapter Eighteen
Touch...
The First Time
There's one issue I rarely hear talked about concerning male molestation survivors. It's probably too sensitive. It's about touch.
Everybody needs to be loved, and touched, and held. You die if you don't have that.
For male survivors, it's not that easy. Because who touches you, and for what reason, are always painful issues. For a lot of us, our first genuine touch and affection and attention was mixed with genital stimulation, sensual pleasure and counterfeit "love".
For us who suffered repeated molestation, a pattern, a horrible trapdoor pattern emerged. We were conditioned. If we were touched by a molester, (1) We froze, (2) We felt powerless, (3) We felt wanted, desired, liked, (4) We got erections, (5) We were fondled and caressed, and (6) we were forced to perform sex on our molester. It can be 10 times as complicated and confusing if this first molester forced us to experience our first orgasm. It's wrong...but I feel good feelings.. he's hurting me...but I trust him ...but he's an adult and I'm just a little kid... What a nightmare! We end up feeling like trash to be used and discarded. And the shame and fear is overwhelmed by fear of the molester's anger, or by the fear that he will not love us and reject and abandon us and we may lose the only person who's ever showed us any attention or "love".
If the molestation happened as a child (and was not violent), we tend to grow up to crave affection, approval and being liked. If it happened as an adolescent, we've got to deal with the confusion of having sexually new experiences exploited by an expert molester who knows how to bring intense and overwhelming and addictive pleasure out of a sexually awakened and naive young kid who knows no better and is unaware that this explosive experience will change him forever.
If it happened as a child and a teenager, it's living hell.
Do you know why many of us end up promiscuous with women? We've got to prove the experiences we can't talk about didn't make us "queer". Funny how we're always paying the price for someone else's crime. Some of us even end up promiscuous with men, or as street hustlers, not because we're gay, but because it's the only thing we knew. We were conditioned.
My molestations were by both men and women, some violent and some "affectionate" and seducing. So I ended up neither promiscuous nor aggressive just flat paralyzed. Unable to touch. Unable to be touched, or to stop from being touched.
I was devoid of any touch that was real or healthy or nonsexual until I was 15. The walls of hate and fear kept everybody away by then.
I became a Christian that year, and my whole life changed. God became a safe place for me. People, well that was another matter! Despite my fears, a boy & girl my age befriended me, and slowly the walls crumbled.
It all came crashing down one day after church when we'd gone to one of their homes for lunch. They wanted to pray with me, and they believed in putting their arms around each others' shoulders when they did, and when they did this to me, I was suddenly hit by an overpowering sexual rush. I ran crying into the woods, feeling dirty and ashamed and evil. "Why, God?" I didn't expect an answer, but I got one: You're not dirty or evil. Sex is all you've known. You responded to touch with sexual feelings because you've never been touched without sex being part of it. You will heal. You will know that touch is good, and clean, and it doesn't mean sex is next." I did heal, and soon the ability to hug someone or be close physically without an erotic "Pavlovian" response was mine.
The fact that great healing can come through nonsexual affection from the same gender that abused us can't be understated. Finding that among recovering molestation survivors is a godsend. Not finding it leaves you untrusting, always on the attack and always doubting your own needs, feelings, sexuality, selfhood.
For married men, it's pretty rough. Sex, as a friend told me, is a sacrifice. You end up always having to be in control, and if your wife is aggressive, you freeze if she desires sex, you read "demand" and think, "I'll just lay down, be a victim and get it over with" and you resent it, and she senses it, and she's hurt and feels rejected and resents it too. How do you explain that being desired for sex can make you feel dirty, and powerless, controlled and 5 YEARS OLD?
Learning touch as healthy, healing and necessary takes time. But don't give up God can heal even the deepest wounds, and change touch from something sinister, painful, frightening and awful into something warm, healing, holy and good.
