Feeling bored, the three of us decided to hang out in my room and play poker.
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One of the two dudes was out on campus. He offered to go down on me and the other guy as a bet. It was the first time I had ever experienced something with another guy.
When I was 25 years old, I took my little brothers on a camping trip to the northern woods of Wisconsin. We had been making the trek from Chicago for years, but after our dad passed away we decided to keep the tradition going. While we were staying at a state campground, one of the park rangers came by our camping area to warn us of pending severe weather. I think the guy was around 30 years old? We started talking, and I got the sense he was interested in me.
Hard to explain. When I gave him my number, I knew exactly what I was doing. Sure enough, when he arrived in town, he called. I ended up going to his hotel and we ended up getting it on. Nothing serious. After that happened, I never heard from him again. I think labels do more harm than good. Two years ago, another guy who was my age was put on the night shift. To pass time, we made small talk and gossiped about people in the building. One weekend around 2 or 3 in the morning, we were super bored and started talking about our hookup experiences.
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We ended up swapping head in a utility room. When summer was over, he got transferred to another building. When I was in college, I played football. Not that I was anything to talk about because I mostly sat on the bench. But there was a first-string dude that I was buddies with where things used to happen. It was never like we planned it or anything. One time, he showed up to shoot the shit — you know, like to hang out. I remember telling him my shoulder was messed up from a bad play and he offered to massage it to relax the muscle.
After that, the rest is history. We ended up messing around. Over the course of a year, it happened a few times. The dude is married now and so am I. When I was back in high school, I dated this girl from my neighborhood. She had a brother who was the same age as me and we became friends. One time while we were hanging out, he shared with me that he was bi. He asked me if I had ever been with another guy and I told him the truth — never. Are we are moving closer to or further away from good ways to be?
Do you think the effects of past negative experiences have prevented you from being the kind of person you want to be?
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Some of the things we really like and want — that is, things we strongly value — conflict with other values that we hold dear. Also, we all have unique genes and brains, which means that some values will fit with our personalities and others will clash. Another example: And another: On the other hand, you feel ashamed and guilty because the addiction conflicts with other values that you have, and because it conflicts with the value you place on being in control of yourself and free to decide what you do. Finally, as Dr. And these conflicts can cause problems for men with histories of unwanted or abusive sexual experiences in childhood:.
They go to the heart of who you are. It can be a big challenge to sort through your conflicting values, how they have been shaped by positive and negative experiences in your life, and how to prioritize your values and live up to the highest ones, so you can become the person you want to be. For some men with histories of unwanted or abusive sexual experiences, this will take some time, and some help from others, sometimes including professionals like therapists.
It involves feeling unworthy of respect or positive consideration by others, feeling like you deserve to be judged or criticized, and feeling embarrassed in front of others. Like guilt, shame can be hard to bear. It can make it difficult to overcome the negative effects of unwanted sexual experiences. There are times we should feel ashamed and try to win back the respect and trust of others. But shame can be a huge problem, of course. It can go too far, go on too long, and prevent us from relating to others in healthy ways.
Yet many men have found they can beat shame and leave it behind, using the tools of understanding and self-awareness.
Expectations Men Face
For men with histories of unwanted or abusive sexual experiences, such intense and long-term shame can become an unshakable part of life. Boys are told:. It affects what and how they think and feel about themselves. It leaves them fearing how others would see them if they knew what happened. This shame is felt to some extent by just about every man who had unwanted or abusive sexual experiences. Yet it can be overcome, and many, many men have managed to do so. But is also, sometimes even mostly, about shame learned in their youngest years and earliest relationships. Sometime during the second year of life, children become capable of imagining how others think of them.
They become self-conscious.
They also start feeling shame. When someone a child cares about expresses disappointment in him, rather than acceptance and enjoyment of his presence, he experiences shame. Suddenly, there is a disconnection in the relationship, and the child feels at a minimum less secure and less supported. When the person expressing disappointment is a parent or other important caregiver, the child wants to end the situation of disapproval and avoid having it happen again. In healthy relationships, this is just what the child tries to do, over and over again.
It becomes overwhelming. And it leads to extreme attempts to escape it. For a boy treated this way in his home, shame is not about how to manage his relationships with people whose approval he needs. At some point, even the most basic needs for love and attention — so often met with rejection, criticism and ridicule — themselves become sources of intense shame. Once this happens, until and unless truly loving and healing close relationships are found, shame will be a constant companion.
It will color all of his relationships and all of his attempts to find his way in the world. The two faces of shaming are rejection and contempt. Repeated shaming rejections in childhood can create a person who fears and avoids close relationships. Repeated shaming contempt can saddle a person with lots of anger and hostility for years. Repeated rejection and contempt, whether alone or combined, tend to create boys and men who fear and avoid asserting their needs in healthy ways.
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Many other men have done it. It involves feeling regret, and usually feeling critical or judgmental toward yourself, for having done something wrong or bad — something that conflicts with your values and with your view of being a good person.
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Like shame, guilt can be tough to bear. Feeling guilty can make it hard to overcome the negative effects of bad experiences.
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None of us are perfect. Not all guilt is bad. Yet for many people, guilt can spiral out of control. It can be misplaced. It can be harmful, in both their personal and work lives. For men who had unwanted or abusive sexual experiences, there can be extreme guilt about ways they responded to sexual experiences and the people involved. It is not based on an accurate or objective view of what happened. It does not reflect the fact that there was little they could actually have done — as vulnerable children or confused teenagers — to prevent what happened or to respond differently.
Much of the guilt is extreme and harmful. It contributes to problems like low self-confidence and low self-respect, to depression and constantly feeling judged by others — all of which can cause serious difficulties in relationships, school and work. If this sounds like you, you are not alone.