Men's Sexual Trauma

Hi, welcome to Sex Love Power. I'm your host, Michelle Lisenberry Christensen. I'm a relationship and sex coach. I've worked for 24 years with executives and business founders and by popular demand. I've been focused on their intimate relationships since 2009 as they sought my coaching to push the envelope on how good they could have it in life and love and sexual My extraordinary high performance clients have blessed me with a wealth of knowledge about how to create relationships that aren't just successful, but are truly great. This podcast is where I convene the conversations about love and sex that help every listener create those same world class results in their relationships. If you have a male partner who avoids sex sometimes or all the time, or who gets stuck in his head sometimes during sex or about sex, this episode is for you. If you or your partner struggle with what the industry tends to call sexual dysfunction, which is so pejorative. I do not like any of these medical terms at all, but I refer to them as things like erections that don't start or that don't stay. Ejaculating before you'd like to, not ejaculating when you'd expect to, then this episode is for you. If you are or your partner is a man who's comfortable with sex as long as he's in control or he's in charge, or as long as the attention is on the other person but not on him, this episode will be helpful. And really for anyone who's a man or cares about a man or walks through the world among men, I believe this episode is really important because it talks about something we don't talk about, and that's the underreported, under discussed epidemic of men's sexual trauma. This is such an important episode to me because time and again my male clients will tell me I've never told anybody this, or they'll say, nobody explains this the way you just did. And it feels like this huge burden has been lifted. Whew. I am on a mission to lift that burden, to give that relief, to help as many men as possible to feel seen and understood and that they're normal and they're not broken and they're not alone. So that's why we're going to talk today about a couple of key things. First, what sexual trauma is and how common it really is among men. Two, the ways sexual trauma is inflicted for men. Three, the ways that conversation gets silenced around men's sexual trauma. And last, signs that you or a man you love is having a trauma response in the sexual realm. Now, what this episode is not is a substitute for therapy. It is not a substitute for medical care. It will not diagnose you or cure you of any diagnosable condition. I don't even do those things in my work with men around their relationships. I'm a coach. I educate and I help people take the simple, repeated actions that change the trajectory of their lives and their loves. But if you need medical or psychological help, I really want you to get it. So please seek help. The show notes will list a number you can call for help with sexual trauma. And there are many wonderful helping professionals in your community. If sexual trauma is debilitating you, you are worth it. So please get your needs met. Now that we've got that cleared up, for most people, just this information can be relieving, if not entirely transformational. So we're going to move into what I mean when I say male sexual trauma. Some people tend to assume, and we'll talk a little bit more about this in a few minutes, but they assume that men can't have sexual trauma because men can't be raped. And they assume that rape is the only way to get sexual trauma. But sexual assault is just one of the ways that sexual trauma occurs. So there's that acute invasion of being assaulted. And statistics show actually that one in six boys is sexually abused before their 18th birthday. Now, sexual abuse is any contact that is sexual in nature between an adult and a child. Statutory rape is when one person is under 18, even if not very much, and the other person is over 18 because the power imbalance means that it's not possible to have a consensual sexual interaction. And developmentally speaking, it's up for debate when people are old enough to consent to sexual interaction with people their own age. But certainly people who haven't yet passed into puberty are not ready developmentally for sexual interaction with anybody. Their relations are still building the skills to be able to handle the intense sensations of erotic connection. The American Journal of Preventative Medicine reports that at least one in six boys experiences sexual abuse before his 18th birthday. But across their lifetime, at least one in four men experience unwanted sexual events, as reported by the national center for Injury Prevention and Control at the Centers for Disease Control. So you can see that 1 in 4 men, 25% of men or more, have unwanted sexual events of some sort. And that kind of brings us to the third kind of sexual trauma that I've identified, and that is wounding information or influence. So in growing up, boys are connected to their Peers. So other boys, the information they've gotten from their older brothers, from their parents, from magazines, from videos, from stories. The peers around a boy are influences that can be helpful. And they can also be harmful. Boys often exert peer pressure as well to do things to other people, to girls or to boys. Games of truth or dare, games of I never drinking, games and ways that boys engage in sexual play or sexual assault while under the influence of drugs or alcohol. Boys often swagger and compete on the basis of sexual conquest. So they're proving themselves to one another, jostling for position socially, using sex as currency and sexual interaction. So boys will often haze one another, using sexual interaction with a girl or with another boy as a way to initiate one another into their social circles, a way to tease one another, a way to amuse themselves. And in the absence of adequate guidance. Most adult males today were educated about what sex is by peers who were equally under informed and misinformed about healthy sexual attitudes and behaviors. And most men were witness to or engaged in, under duress or even ring led behaviors that were harmful to themselves and others simply because they were immature and trying to figure things out and inadequately guided. So all of these experiences in the aggregate leave someone not only with a developmental gap, so he's not confident and skillful and present with his future lovers, especially in long term committed relationships later in his life. But he's also left with scars of fear and insecurity and a need to protect himself in vulnerable situations like being naked with someone he cares about. And because in our culture we don't talk about any of this. So many men come to me really not knowing that that's what's going on. They don't realize, oh, I was educated about sex by misinformed and under informed other children. I never got training from adults, and in fact, I didn't get good training from the adults around me because they didn't get good training and still didn't have it. They didn't know how to create really healthy marriages or sex lives themselves. And they were not integrated enough with their sexuality to be able to talk about it in a comfortable, healthy, normalizing way with me. So that's how I got here. So when I help men understand that, then they can start to drop some of the shame and the wounding and step into their own mature sexuality. So the fourth way that trauma is inflicted for men is through neglect. And I referred to this earlier when I said that the parents are under supervising young people, but specifically as related to sex education, you know, A lot of parents really focus on helping kids learn how to brush their teeth. And when you have adolescent children, maybe taking care of their skin and looking out for acne and even helping them facilitate their social relationships may be something that's really of value to parents. Parents work really hard to make sure that their kids do well enough in school and are thinking about their future and choose a career path and choose a college possibly. But so many parents neglect their children's sexual development into mature, grounded, self regulating and self expressed sexual beings. So in the absence of positive guidance and modeling of healthy sexual behaviors, making space for young people's questions and concerns and difficult experiences, and in the absence of permission to be a fully self expressed sexual being, with the absence of celebration of wholesome sexuality, boys get wounded. They experience damage and wind up frankly traumatized. They wind up in a place where they show up for sexual experiences with their wives, even as fathers, you know, years later. Their sexuality has served its biological function, but it is still not really serving their hearts and their spirits and their bodies in its fullest expression. And they're stunted in their capacity to really enjoy that. So that can happen to greater or lesser degrees. But if you're resonating with what I'm saying, then that's what's happening for you. Just that you haven't been taken care of and well trained around this. So your parents might have taught you about money, they might have taught you about car maintenance, they might have taught you how to take care of a home, but they didn't teach you how to take care of the very worthy and wonderful sexual creature that you are, or how to engage in an intimate way with someone else. And so that neglect left a certain kind of trauma. The fifth way that men experience sexual trauma is from pervasive cultural messaging. Here's a few of the messages that our culture gives men that harm their sexual self esteem and render them vulnerable to stunted sexual and social growth. One message is, your desires are bad. You gotta reel them in. You're like an animal. You know that's liable to hurt people with your desire. You're straight or you're gay, you're male or you're female. There's no room for gender expression, sexual desire, romantic feelings, or anything else outside the very straight lines of being heterosexual and cisgendered. These rigid definitions of what gender is, what gender expression can be and what sexual orientation are are tremendously stifling to everybody, including heterosexual cisgendered people. Because by privileging being heterosexual and Cisgendered, everyone gets straight jacketed. If you want to preserve that heterosexual CIS privilege, then you have to make sure that you stay within the performative lines of what it supposedly looks like to be straight cis. And the bottom line, other message that goes with it is being gay would compromise your masculinity and make you less valuable as a person. That's a message that everyone in our culture gets. It's not the truth, but many straight men grow up with that pressure. They mustn't present as gay in any way. And the other there's a whole set of things that would mean you were gay. Does it mean you're gay? If you know there's lots of memes about that. And one of the biggies around sexuality is anal pleasure. So taking pleasure in some parts of your body is okay, that that means you're straight, but other parts of your body mean that you're gay and that therefore your straight male cisgendered privilege is at risk. That whole set of beliefs is stifling. Here's another set around women and who you should want and who you shouldn't want. So there's one story that there's a certain look that men should be attracted to. And where do we see that look in pornographic magazines and videos. And the message that men tend to implicitly get growing up in those immature years when they're looking at porn with their buddies is that women who look like that are desirable and that's who you should want. And women who don't look like that are second tier choices for sex. You can have sex with them if that's what you have to do to get sex, because what you need to do is get sex. But having a partner like that makes you less of a man than having a partner who looks like the girl in the magazine. And so boys are taught to pursue partners who look a certain way, even if that's not the kind of person that they actually want to have an intimate relationship with. And they're also taught that women are there for their gaze. Women are there to be evaluated by them visually and approved of or not approved of. And so a particular woman, if she works with what she's got to make herself look more like the magazine, then she's doing right by him. And if she doesn't, she's not. So the other piece that goes along with this is as women are pregnant, as they give birth, as they age, they become less attractive as sexual partners. This is what men are taught. I'm not at all saying that Every man believes this or lives by this, but this is the toxic sludge of what everyone in our culture eats. As cultural messaging. This is all there for people. And to the extent that we look at it directly, dismantle it and shrug it off, we can be liberated from it. But it's there. And this is a part of what may be getting in the way. For any given person who's having challenges with their sexuality, with their intimate relationship, one of these beliefs might be stuck down there in your craw and you wouldn't even know about it. Here's another one you shouldn't want women you live with. So many little boys at some point have some sexual fantasy about or desire for erection around because of either a sister or a cousin or their own mom. And they're often shamed for that, either overtly or covertly. They're told, you're not supposed to want the women you live with. These people are your family. They're not for having sex with. So then when a woman becomes your family, when she becomes your wife, she becomes your person. She's the mother of your children. There's something kind of weird, kind of backward about wanting her, about having sex with her. And again, I'm not saying everybody has this, but sometimes that kind of belief surfaces for my clients and they realize, like, oh, yeah, all my life I've been trying not to be turned on by the person who's right there, close at hand, because that was wrong is what I was told. And now I do want to be turned on by the person who's right here, close at hand. But I find it much more easy to be turned on by complete strangers, by two dimensional images, by video girls. So this is a part of what that man has to liberate himself from when he recognizes that. Here's another pervasive cultural message. Sex is basically dirty and love is clean and pure. So mixing sex and love is not good. That's kind of messed up. We shouldn't do that. So we have to start to deconstruct these pervasive cultural messages to truly liberate ourselves of this. You know, this is the subtlest form of sexual trauma, but I think it really does fit in as trauma, because it is what in sexual situations will often trigger a trauma response. And you can go back to previous podcast episodes, like six and seven in particular, to learn about what trauma is and what a trauma response looks like. But it's really when we go into a reaction of fight, flight, freeze, or fawn, and we aren't able to really be responsive and present in the moment. There are many, many more pervasive cultural messages. But I'm going to pause here. I just hope to point up the truth that men are given some really messed up, mixed up messages about sexuality and intimacy, and that causes a traumatic response for many of them in at least one area at some point later in their lives. And why don't we talk about this? Well, there's a number of ways that this crucial conversation about men's sexual pain gets silenced. For one thing, we've held that men are the aggressors, that men are the agents in sexual interactions between men and women, that men are at cause and women are at effect. And that is in itself a traumatizing viewpoint because it says that a man always has to be sort of on. He has to be the aggressor, he has to be the leader, and that puts pressure on him. And also it means that should a woman turn toward him, he's going to feel like he's doing something wrong at some level, to whatever extent he believes that. So as a result, when we're talking about having an equal partnership, when a woman is sexually empowered herself and turns toward her husband, a lot of times that can trigger him in a way that he doesn't totally understand, but it's really this belief that's getting in his way. There's another reason we silence it. A man who's hurt has been seen as somehow less a man. So when a man knows that he has a painful sexual experience, whether it was with a girl in his teens or his twenties who forced herself on him in some way that he didn't want, didn't feel good about, or a time when he hurt someone that he feels badly about, or hazing from another boy. Any kind of experience that he's had that causes him hurt, if he sees it as making him less of a man, then it's stigmatizing for him to speak up about the ways that he was hurt. So we need to change this as a culture. We need to make it right, and we need to honor how brave it is to speak up about your pain. Third, men's male privilege rides on the performative masculinity of being invulnerable. So it's not just being male, it's performing masculinity. It's showing up in a particular way because just because you're male, if you show up as vulnerable, you sacrifice that privilege. Now you seem kind of less male, less dominant, less on top of our cultural Pyramid. And this right here is exactly what psychological patriarchy is. I talked a lot about this in episode 29. It says that men get more perks in our culture, but only if they qualify as men by living out the so called masculine qualities and never demonstrating the so called feminine ones. All of that is made up and none of it serves any of us. But this is another of the reasons that men have a hard time talking about where they got hurt. A fourth reason. We've historically dismissed sexually abusive behavior that boys inflict on one another as eh, boys will be boys as much as we do, perhaps more than we do when they assault people of other genders. So there's this huge permission for awful hurtful behaviors and we don't address them and we don't address the hurt next. There's a prevailing narrative that if we derive pleasure from an experience, then that pleasure connotes consent. This is not true for anyone. The body derives pleasure unbidden. Pleasure doesn't mean that we wanted a particular touch or a particular experience. And feeling pleasure doesn't erase the experience of violation or protect us against a trauma response. It's just what the body does. So many survivors of sexual assault or sexual abuse will feel badly that they liked it on some level, that they derived pleasure, that they got an erection, that they lubricated that thinking that that meant that there was something wrong with them, that they had done something wrong, that they had brought it on themselves. None of that is true. There's what you want and then there's what your body responds to. Bodies just respond. Just as you can't control a tickle or a blink, you can't control your body's sexual response. So many men will hide, even from themselves the violation that occurred because they had penetrative sex, for instance, that they didn't want to have. And it couldn't have been, you know, to their thinking, it couldn't have been non consensual because, you know, I was penetrating. Well, it could have. You absolutely have a right to say no, even if your penis is saying yes. And that brings us to the last way that this conversation is silenced. And that is this bottom line, injurious myth that a man can't be raped if penetration by his penis is involved, that if his body part penetrates, he has agency and consent and he isn't wounded by the experience. That's just not true. So any unwanted sexual experience, which in my experience with men is pretty universal, almost every man has had something happen in a sexual situation with another person. And I work mostly with heterosexual men. So for most of my clients, a woman has at some point done something hurtful, upsetting, violating, not okay with him, and scared him or hurt him or made him wary and want to protect himself. And that's what I'm talking about when I talk about male sexual trauma. So how do you know that you are or that a man you love is dealing with sexual trauma? At the top of the show, I mentioned some of the ways that this shows up. I see experiences inside couples sexual relationships all the time point to some kind of trauma reaction happening. For a man, the trauma doesn't always originate in the sexual realm. It can manifest there later, even if it was a relational or physical experience that overwhelmed his nervous system and imprinted the trauma reaction in the first place. But some of the signs of sexual trauma being a factor can include erectile challenges, your penis not responding, you're turned on, but your penis doesn't want to go there, or you have an erection and then you lose it when you don't think anything has changed for you, or you get fatigued in sex and then your erection goes away or your ejaculation will not come, no pun intended. Another sign is things are great when you know what's happening sexually. But then if your partner's energy turns towards you, if she starts to pay attention to you, maybe she starts to go down on you, or she's admiring and looking at you, she's giving you sexual pleasure in a unilateral kind of way, and that causes you to freeze up. You go into your head, you lose your erection, you lose interest or become really uncomfortable when the attention is on you. That can be a sign that we want to kind of look and see what kind of sexual trauma may be at play. Some men avoid sex entirely and don't want to have sex with their wives. They may have an active masturbatory life, they may have an active porn life. And often this gets mischaracterized as porn addiction. And certainly porn can become habit forming and porn addiction is a real thing. But I think looking underneath, like, why are you avoiding sex with the real person right there in three dimensions in your bed when they're saying that's what they want. And often that comes back to some way that being with a real person in the flesh is uncomfortable. And there's a root in some kind of trauma of the type that we've discussed here. Another sign of sexual trauma is this losing interest in your own wife after she has a baby or gains weight or loses weight or gets older and is subject to gravity. There are lots of ways that our cultural trauma can come between a man and his own natural feelings and connection with his wife and create a whole set of cognitions that, you know, ways of thinking about her and her body and his own desire that are artificial, that aren't really his, that he's subjected to. So these are just some of the many ways that cultural and familial and friend group trauma, as well as the trauma of sexual abuse or sexual assault, can harm men and their sexual development. And these are just some of the ways that they show up. So if there's another situation occurring in your life as a man or in your sexual relationship with a man that you are wondering now, hmm, I wonder if this is a result of some trauma. Feel free to ask me inside the conscious couples Society. The link for that is in the show notes, and I'm happy to talk a little bit about it there. But what you need to know is that so much of this is subclinical that men avoid thinking about it because they think it's going to take months or years of arduous eviscerating therapy to get to the bottom of it. And they're going to have to do some horrific looking in the eye of something that they can't face. But in fact, it's often with pretty straightforward cognitive and behavioral skills. Just getting clear on what's happening, what we actually want, and what we're going to do about it can be tremendously transformative. That's what I love to do, is help unlock the potential inside people for their innate erotic intelligence that has gotten buried underneath all of this cultural conditioning and all of these difficult experiences so that they can have the natural, easy fun, frankly, experience of sex. And sex can be fun again. It's really sad to me that it isn't fun for so many people. So that's what I wanted to say about men's sexual trauma in this episode. I hope that it's been helpful for you. And if you or a man you care about is experiencing some kind of trauma reaction, some. Some kind of freezing or going away or getting fighty or fawning and just wanting to please other people inside a sexual situation. Now you have some new perspective on what might be happening and how it might have begun and how very understandable and normal it is now. In other episodes we've talked about, and we're going to continue to talk about how to be with yourself when a trauma response is activated and how to be with someone else who's having a trauma reaction and how to heal your nervous system. Now, with regard to sexuality, because sexual connection with our partners is such a primal need, and because inside the agreement of monogamy, our primary partner is the only person who's allowed to meet us sexually and emotionally, what happens is that a man's trauma, when it's not named, can cause his partner a ton of pain. She might question her own adequacy as a partner, her her desirability, his love for her, his attraction to her, the compatibility between them, or all of the above as she searches for an ever elusive explanation for his withdrawal or his lack of interest in sex, or the way that his genitals behave around her. But the truth is, it often has very little to do with her or with his attraction to her or with their relationship. It's simply a pattern set up in his nervous system that's going to continue until he unlearns it. So that's something I help my clients create inside the Legacy Love Studio. The education, the practices and the skills that I teach help both partners to unlearn the patterns that don't serve them, and they build the capacity for tremendous amounts of pleasure and sensation, grounding playfulness and closeness. So if that's something that interests either of you or both of you, there's a link in the Show Notes to apply for a consultation call. And if your answers to these questions take tell you that I might be able to help you, then we can set up a free consultation and pinpoint what's happening now, what you desire, and what's stopping you from moving from where you are to where you want to be. And then we could look at whether you would like to work together in support of your goals. Now either way, don't forget to join the Conscious couple society@society.lizenberry.com so that you can ask your questions, share your experiences, and join the conversation about creating the sex and love that you deeply desire in ways that evolve you both. So all that's happening@society.lizenberry.com that link is in the show notes@lizenberry.com Episode 030 if you've enjoyed this or other episodes, what would help me and the podcast immensely is if you'd leave a review, particularly an Apple podcast, because those are a huge help in finding new listeners and growing the positive impact that these conversations can have. So please go leave a review right now with just a few words about what the show gives you. I would so so appreciate that. And hey, have you subscribed to the podcast? You're going to want to so that you never miss an episode. Please go to Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen and hit that subscribe button so that you always get notifications of new episodes each week. I will be back here next week with the next episode. And for today, thank you so much for listening. I'm Michelle Isenberry Christensen. This has been Sex, Love Power. Until we meet again. May the light within you illuminate the world around you.