I am not an abuser

I had a therapy session a few days ago. I shared with my therapist how I had sexual thoughts about children. I have no desire or urge to do anything sexual to children so these thoughts make me grimace and feel dirty and full of shame. I know they have to do with the abuse that was done to me but still I feel horrible every time these images enter my head, I feel like a monster when they come.

After I finished the session, I spend half an hour crying and wailing about how I didn't want to become and abuser and that I am not an abuser. I would sooner kill myself than harm another child, it's too painful to even imagine doing to somebody. After I finished crying in my bed I got angry at dan (the man who abused me - lower case intentional) and started beating the shit out of my bed. I imagined him lying helpless on his back and me strangling him feeling tons of rage. It is because of what he did to me that I have these thoughts, I'm not a monster but he ruined me for now. He stole my childhood and innocence. I hate him with every ounce of my being. I am not an abuser but these thoughts still get to me.

I deserve it!

So I had two rough days and thanks to the advice of someone on the forum at Malesurvivor.org, I snapped myself out of it. I have now chosen to focus on me and doing things for me because I deserve good things to be done for myself by myself. I have chosen to become a healthy person by balancing out my various needs: physical and mental health by eating well and exercising and being social, playing (video games, sports etc), work (writing essays) and recovery (talking to other survivors). I try to do each of those things every day so that when I reflect on my day I have positive things that I can say I have achieved.

The last few days of doing this new balance for me thing so that I feel good about myself has been amazing. I have started giving myself hugs to give myself some love and affection (something I have never done). I have been repeating to myself from time to time, look you just did something good for yourself because you deserve it which makes me weep tears of joy. I have spent too long destroying myself, I finally deserve to good to myself and live a happy and healthy life. I am learning to love myself and it feels great because I realize, I never truly have.

Every survivor deserves self-love. The love you receive from yourself is probably the strongest and most fulfilling. When you give yourself love I think you are more willing to receive love from others. Until now I have never felt I deserved love from others and couldn't understand why people even liked me let alone loved me. Now I am discovering how strong and inspirational I am and what I have always offered to other people (kindness, helpfulness) and I can finally see why people want to have anything to do with me (teary-eyed). It feels great, everybody should give self-love and self-hugs :).

I didn't fuck it up

Recently I went to a Mike Lew workshop for male survivors and he played us this song before we got started. This song made me want to cry but I held back my tears since I wasn't ready to weep in front of my peers. This song made me realize that I am not to blame for what was done to me as a child. He abused me, it's his abuse but my wounds. This is something I think many survivors battle with and if a simple song like this can help anyone realize what I did then that is very powerful. When I listen to it now it makes me shed healing tears every time, it wasn't my fault, not at all, it's his abuse to bear and my wounds to heal.

What I realized later was also pivotal. In our society (at least Western ones) I have always felt that a lot of emphasis is placed on individual responsibility which is hard to reconcile with being abused because naturally we are responsible for own actions. However, as a child I had emotional needs that were not met by my loved ones, so naturally when someone else offered to fulfill my basic human emotional needs whatever I had to do in order to have those needs met seemed logical to a child trying to survive in his emotionally absent home.

Like many survivors I have abused myself with drugs and alcohol, hurt others emotionally and done other regrettable acts. What I now realize is that while I am responsible for my actions after the abuse, I am not responsible for the actions that were done to me that led to my future abusive actions towards myself and others. That to me is the way to reconcile society's expectations of responsibility with being a survivor. And to me that's huge, so huge that when I read these words I still get teary eyed cause I'm still processing how I didn't fuck it up. So now it's up to me to go unfuck it up with all my survivor brothers and sisters.