Meet Geoffrey: The Boy Who Refused to Give up

My name is Geoffrey. I’m a 65 year old man in my second round of recovery. 

At age 31, I entered therapy for being unhappy with my life course and feeling stuck. My therapist immediately suspected that I was a CSA survivor. I had no conscious knowledge that this was the case, but my therapist was right. Through dream journaling and a corroborating memory from my sister, I learned the identity of my abuser. She recalled being in our living room and hearing me cry out from the first floor bathroom. She called out to me to see if I was ok, and it was my abuser who answered her from behind that closed bathroom door. His name was Gene, a work friend of my father’s who did handyman jobs around our house. Gene abused me starting at age 4 and it continued until sometime after I turned 9.

I do not have episodic memories of my abuse but I have body memories of being anally raped. I also learned through my dreams that I was orally raped, as well as forced to orally service Gene’s anus. I have one vague visual memory of being in that first floor bathroom washing blood out of my underwear with Gene standing behind me. 

I also clearly remember at age 5 using my trike’s hard rubber front tire to ram all four hubcaps on his truck, denting them beyond repair. I was fortunate that the hubcaps were made of soft, lightweight aluminum because this meant that they could not put up too much of a fight against my determination to “leave my mark” on them. I didn’t even really know why I was doing it at the time but I knew I was very angry with Gene. I must have already been starting to lock away conscious knowledge of the abuse episodes. He laughed the whole thing off. Now I see that this was to prevent my parents from looking into what might have been behind my destructive behavior.

So for 34 years I’ve known that I’m a CSA survivor. I am going through this second round of therapy and recovery now because of issues that I’ve been having about my father’s connection to my abuser and therefore to my abuse.

I don’t know if or how much my father knew about my abuse but he has always been associated with it in my mind since uncovering the truth. I now suspect that Dad and Gene had some kind of sexual attraction to each other. I have a lot of anger toward Dad for bringing Gene into our family realm and putting me in harm’s way. I’m in the midst of processing this anger. I feel in my tissues and bones that he sacrificed me to Gene, whether knowingly or not. I feel like he trafficked me. It’s only now, close to 4 years after he died, that I am able to strip away the pretense of him being this wonderful father. I was his biggest fan, but I was hiding from, and lying to myself about, the pain of his ongoing betrayal and abandonment.

I am doing well with Recovery 2.0. I have a great male therapist. I’m listening to other survivors’ stories on YouTube. I’m doing some dream journaling. I’m writing poems, and I’m really processing all of my thoughts and emotions about all of this. Also, a part of my journey is searching for safe places online where I could potentially share my story and some poems that I’ve written relating to my abuse. This is how I found MenHealing and started reading members’ stories and learning about in-person group retreat experiences that have clearly helped so many of them in profound ways. MenHealing feels, organically, like a safe space for me to share my experiences. I feel a strong need to do this at this point in my continuing recovery because I want other men like me to know that not having visual memories of their abuse does not somehow disqualify them as survivors of sexual trauma, and that they absolutely do not need to have visual memories of their abuse in order to heal.

Before learning of my abuse at 31, I had deep self loathing and had a premonition on my first wedding anniversary that my life would end in suicide. I didn’t even know why I hated myself at that point. I know now that it was because of being physically, psychologically, and spiritually shattered to bits by the CSA.

I then suffered a second bout of suicidal ideation after the birth of my first child, a boy. I believed then that I was no kind of positive male role model for my son and that he’d be better off without me on the planet. My wife and her parents loved me through these darkest of times and I checked myself into a psych ward to save my life. There I met a wonderful psychiatrist who helped me understand that I was not worthless and that I could take on the jobs of being a good father to my son, being a good husband to my wife, and finding meaningful, good-paying employment to pursue for the support of my little family.

It’s been decades since I stopped hating myself. And I so easily could have been a suicide before the birth of my first child. I lay that round of suicidality, and probably most of the second round, at my father’s feet.

I am grateful for my wife, her parents, my psychiatrist, my little newborn son, and my own small kernel deep down inside of me that refused to ever give up. All of these elements combined to help me stay here on earth and to continue to live and love no matter what the future could ever hold.

This has been my story.

The Future Holds My Past

I wake from my dream,
weeping
for a time that is long over
that is never over

I pour tears and memories
into the chasm,
but they cannot mend it

I travel forward in time,
only to learn
that my past still waits for me