“Abuse and Silence: Male, Female, and Family Perspectives” Comments, Page 1

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2 Comments on “Abuse and Silence: Male, Female, and Family Perspectives”

  1. Hellingers method sounds great. Especially as it doesn’t emphasise talking – which can be a problem with shame.

    Fortunately I have never been physically or sexually abused. The men’s movement, I think, is about a generation behind the women’s movement. So, I think it will be a generation before we can even start getting realistic figures.

    The biggest taboo is the female sexual abuse of children. To begin to deal with this is a very long way off I think.

    I do think that support groups of the kind you mention in your previous post could be very helpful to the males who have suffered. There are at least the foundations for this in some of the men’s groups that are around now.

  2. There is actually a trend amongst survivor support networks to reach out to male survivors, and it is an important step. Men and Women from my experience have almost a ying-yang like opposition in their reaction to sexual abuse.

    Women, for instance hav a tendancy to “cling” as a result of abuse. (Mening that after intercourse, they will kind of ball up, and not want to be touched. In contrast Male survivors have a need for reassurance.

    It’s sort of a strange response, after abuse, sex is often viewed as a bad, or a harmful thing, and so sex is viewed as a type of assault, which makes the male feel as though they have become the perpetuator of the crime that they hide inside. This is why they want reassurance. (This is also why relationships between male and female survivors can be quite a roller coaster.

    Another fear of the male survivor is that they will be percieved as weak. This leads to somewhat of an aggressive manner, and an inclination to avoid doing things that could be percieved as “womanly” because this becomes an assault on the inner-child.

    In regards to therapy, I would suggest that there has been inadequate study between the connection of PTSD, Dissasociation and Memory repression. I think the only true way past the issues, is to go through them, and literally rip the blocked memories into consciousness, from the sub-conscious mind.

    For further reading, I would reccomend The phsychological Impact of Sexual Abuse: Content analysis of Interviews with Male Survivors

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