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Dissociation, Part I
One of the ‘outcomes’ that affect all sexual abuse survivors, male or female, is the problem of dissociation. Dissociation is the act of spitting off a part of one’s ego into a personality that can experience horrific trauma – and, as a result, making some kind of ‘sense’ of it, without the ‘primary ego’ having to ‘know’ about the abuse. In the dissociative process, the individual can become several different personalities, each with its own needs and desires. Each part, based on it’s experience of the child’s (or adult’s) world, plans for the betterment of the ‘basic [or aware] ego’ with whatever sense of love it can manifest for the individual, based upon its rather limited knowledge about what ‘love’ is and how it can be acquired on a more or less continuous basis.
It is not necessary that one experience sexual abuse to be thrown into dissociation. Trauma survivors of many varieties experience this kind of ‘splitting off’ protective process - survivors of severe beatings, emotional neglect, warfare, genocide, torture, or anyone who has seen or experience an event that was so disturbing that the person needed to ‘break off’ or ‘break out’ of the primary sense of self in order to tolerate the experience and still continue to function, at some limited level, in the relational world.
For myself, dissociation has, since early childhood, been the ‘refuge’ to which I escaped to tolerate the horrific nature of my childhood. As I am now aware (from many years of psychotherapy and dream memories), I was sexually molested and raped by both of my parents, albeit when they were in their own dissociative phases. Many people who perpetrate sexual abuse are doing so when they are mired deeply in their own dissociation rather than ‘acting out’ of their rational mind. It’s not that they are unaware of their own behavior – at least, it’s not that (generally) they are in a ‘trance’ state – but rather that their ‘normal’ sensibilities about morality and proper behavior toward their children (or toward other youth) is ‘suspended’ in a rather unconscious manner while they engage in sexual molestation of children, their own or others.
In my own family, I had no one to turn to for assistance or protection. To the extent that my mother may have been a protector from my father’s abuse, she spent so much of her own time in dissociation and denial that when I went to her for assurance and support, she either denied that my father had behaved brutally toward me, or – as I’ve learned over the years of therapy – was the very person who ‘set up’ the beatings by not taking day-to-day disciplinary issues into her own hands. And then, as I suspect from psychological data I’ve determined in recent years, became sexually incestuous with me in my early puberty, due, I further suspect, from whatever sexual angst she was experiencing in relation to my father.
But without going into extensive analysis of my parent’s behavior, what is important, for me, is that I began, at a very early age – in fact, they are some of my earliest memories – to dissociate ‘from my Self’ and want desperately to “not be who I was born to be”. Like many children who try to figure out why they are being molested and beaten, I came to the conclusion, early on, that it was my gender that was at fault. (Many female children think it’s their gender that is the problem also.) From around the age of 6 forward, I felt an enormous amount of shame about my maleness, about my being a boy child, and hoped that someday that would come to an end. Come to an end? In my family, it appeared to be the case that the only person who didn’t get beaten, who had some degree of ‘power’, was my mother and since she was female, my child thinking processes formulated the assumption that if only I were a girl child, I would have been safe. (Again, as noted above, female children who are abused often think that if only they had been male children, they would not have been abused – a child’s attempt to find a way to have a degree of safety in their lives.) It was, as I now realize, magical thinking, like the ‘cargo cult mentality’ of South Sea islanders, who thought if they prayed to a airplane god, more goodies would come their way. My child self thought that if only I could be a girl (and later a fully functioning adult woman), I would be safe.
Of course, it was faulty thinking and simply not true. If I had been a girl child, I would still have been abused and possibly even more sexually abused by my father than was the case (pedophiles are sometimes gender-specific in the choice of victims, but often pick victims simply because of their vulnerability and lack of protection, regardless of gender). But, as a child, that was the only perspective that felt even marginally rational – in the irrational, crazy-making world of my family. At the age of 6, when asked in kindergarten what we wanted to be when we grew up, I knew that, more than anything else in the whole world, I wanted to grow up to be a woman and a housewife; but knowing even at that age that the answer was inappropriate to the question – and classroom social setting – I answered that I wanted to be a fireman.
By the time I was in my early stages of puberty (and as I now know, was being sexually abused by my mother) – and as I was beginning to have some basic knowledge of sexuality, however stilted or inaccurate – I desperately wanted to start, like the young girls around me in school, to develop into a young, sexually mature female, with attractive female secondary sexual features. That I was a boy and that that wouldn’t happen – couldn’t happen – was a source of immense angst for me. I often dreamt, in a state of profound dissociative thinking, about being at the teen swimming pool, in a bikini, gaining the attention of the boys. I had no positive sense of my maleness, in spite of rapidly growing into an unusually tall male body. And then, as I began dating in college and later, but experiencing great emotional pain around my ‘sexual sense of self’, my dissociative thoughts about wanting to be female only increased.
I was surely able, at a minimal level, to ‘sexually perform’ like a man, and I was not, in any overt way, an effeminate male, but I felt enormous conflicted feelings about my maleness and what I perceived to be the relative sexual and social advantages of females with whom I interacted. From my perspective, they had all the power. I read hundreds of books on women’s issues and came to clear knowledge about the relative powerlessness of females in American society (and worldwide), but my own personal experience of females – heavily predicated as it was on my powerlessness as a male child – was that they had the only ‘real’ power in interpersonal relations and that I was helplessly subject to their unilateral demands. Until I was 39 years of age, I could not ‘experience’ orgasm “from my own body-sense” unless I dissociatively placed my ‘sense of self’ in the body of the woman with whom I was having sex. It was simply not safe, emotionally or sexually, to experience sexual release from my male body. Further, my ‘sense of the world’ was that my ‘job’ was to service women sexually, without ever expecting or receiving pleasure in return. And, having given that message, however unconsciously, to the women I was dating, indeed I was rarely ever ‘pleasured’, in return, by my female partners.
To say that this was painful – emotionally, sexually, spiritually – was to put it mildly. I spend, on an emotionally intact level, very little time ‘in my own body’. Rather, most of my mentally aware time was spent in a dissociative place based upon my desperate wish to be female, however irrational or unrealistic that was. (Again, it was based on ‘childlike magical thinking’, not on any realistic assessment of my potential advantages as a male in this patriarchal society.)
It was only when I began to ‘rise above my pain’ and discovered the men’s wellness movement, in the mid-1980’s, that I was able to begin, however fleetingly, to see that there might be some positive benefits to being male and, more importantly, to feel any degree of comfort being and acting like the male that I was born as.
More about this on Page 2.
Or return to the Gender Socialization page.
Mariposa Men’s Wellness Institute was founded in 2001
to help men become emotionally healthy.
