Breaking the Silence of Male Trauma Survivors | Debra Warner | TEDxPaloAltoCollege

Harvey Weinstein Roy Moore Bill Cosby when you picture these names in your head you probably can envision the countless numbers of news articles and the women who have accusations against them 2017 was the year of the woman coming out of the shadows and talking about abuse and trauma with the hashtag need to movement which was all overdue and incredibly necessary but it left out other silent victims of trauma and violence when you think of domestic violence and physical emotional and sexual abuse you often think of a male perpetrator and a female victim but there's another silent victim that has been long overlooked male survivors of trauma one and six men are sexually abused and it's my work with that population that I'd like to share with you today now before I begin I want to give you a trigger warning I'm about to talk about in graphic detail physical emotional and sexual abuse so if you ever feel uncomfortable please feel free to leave the room now let me tell you about my life's work I am a forensic psychologist and a professor in Los Angeles and I get to research evaluate and treat male survivor trauma on any given day I am teaching or I'm in the courts talking to the legal system about clinical assessment and it's my experience with that population that I get to bear witness to their stories in 2017 the Bureau of Justice and Statistics stated that men have been equal chance as women to be the victim violent crime does that shock you I mean it shocks me but after hearing hundreds of stories I am no longer in disbelief to articulate this I'm gonna tell you the true story about a man I interviewed named Robert Robert is 49 years old today and he is 6 feet tall and he weighs 300 pounds now he sounds incredibly tough right but even the toughest and the strongest can be victims of abuse Robert was perpetrated against at three different points of his life by multiple perpetrators at age 4 at age 7 and as 15 by his maternal aunt by marriage and at each point he stuffed his pain deep down because he was taught suck it up be a man and he didn't tell anyone now with the last abuse his perpetrator actually convinced him they were gonna run away and get married now with most perpetrators he figured out this wasn't true and he slit his wrists at that point he told his mother now I want you to envision something for me your 15 year old daughter comes to you and says that her uncle is touching her would you believe her of course she would and he would be beyond furious the cops would be called arrest would be made and families would be split but Roberts mother she wasn't furious she actually said you couldn't force a teenage boy to have sex if he didn't want to you can't take sex from a teenage boy I could hear in my head now what did this teach Robert it is this injustice there are men go into the shadows one in six men are sexually abused Roberts a mother didn't even believe him I wonder if it has anything to do with how we in doctor name our children have you ever heard someone say to a little boy don't hit little by making this gender distinction in this way we are teaching that women are weak and that they need to be protected how come we don't say don't hit anyone women are applauded as the heroines that they are but men they're ostracized they're criticized and they're thought of as weak Roberts mothers thought of him as powerful not the 15 year old child that he was she did not believe he could be abused it's 1 in 6 Richard Gartner a famous child abuse psychologist said that society has a myth that men can be abused now how is this a myth if I just told you about Robert and he's not alone the film the mask you live in talks about this cultural phenomenon where we make cultural gender norms and we ascribe gender and emotion you know based based on masculinity and femininity but the thing is is that men are ascribed these cultural gender norms but they are told to be masculine they have to be all of these things they have to be the star athlete the entrepreneur the top executive the problem is men cannot be all of these things and when they are not measuring up to all those things that create this cultural blueprint of what is masculine or feminine that they cannot live up to and they feel like they are a failure and it affects their relationships with other people to further talk about this I'm gonna tell you about a man who greatly impacted my career I was once called into a prison to evaluate Marco now I've changed his name and I did to protect him well what I went into the prison he was there for domestic violence what struck me is that the day I walked in the day before he had slit his own throat from ear to ear and he had no history of depression or violence before his offense and I said okay something has to be going on here because it takes a lot of depression and self-loathing to slice your own throat so I said there has to be trauma so I called him into my office and I sat across from this incredibly gentle man whose wife actually visited every single week and we had two rubber chairs and our concrete walls and I said what happened to you and he looked at me and his guys got really wide and he said nothing nothing and then after about two minutes his eyes became downcast and he said to me he was raped at age five by an uncle at age 21 by a rival gang now see you have to understand something men or people who have been sexually assaulted they have something called post-traumatic stress disorder PTSD kind of like combat veterans when they come back from the war and they're triggered by loud noises but they can be triggered by touch sensation and sound sexual abuse survivors right well that day that he was arrested he was in the shower with his wife and she touched his butt and all of a sudden he was no longer there with her all of this molestations materialized and he was back with his perpetrators and as he told me this story he violently shook they cried and I said to him what I say to all of my male survivors who disclosed to me I say that was not your fault thank you for telling me your story you see because a male survivors story is guarded like a dragon protecting their gold and ever urging head Marco call his wife and tell her and she said to him why didn't you tell me I love you he said I didn't want you to think I was less than a man researchers O'Leary and barber state that 44% of men wait more than 20 years [Music] to disclose sexual abuse 20 years and this is because we're not listening business blueprint that we've created for our men of this culture of silence we have hashtag me - what about hashtag men - I wanted the opportunity to hear a brilliant speaker at Lincoln University mr. Greg halt Meyer who's a survivor himself and he told me that when a male survivor discloses it's the most freeing feeling that they can have because they can continue their journey of healing the problem is when a survivor discloses what's there for them to go to we have all of these resources for women what we have for our men and if they did it what would happen the media portrays male survivors so negatively when they do disclose I was once watching a popular news pundit and he was talking about a female teacher who molested a boy in her classroom he said the news pundit that he was lucky lucky I don't see how gender changes consent it is this atrocity why I continued my work of working with male survivors and to be proactive I created a conference each year in Los Angeles it's called script and every year we get together we celebrate the resiliency of male survivors and all of these people come from their own environments and they take back all that information to their individual environments and they implement it to stop this culture of silence to date we have trained over 800 people in male survivor trauma and this year for brave survivors came forward and told their stories and they were surrounded with support resources and love so they could continue to journey of healing the rest of the year I teach and I evaluate offenders and I realized something so very very profound not many people are writing about or researching male survivor trauma so I wrote a book it's called his history her story is about male survivor trauma and relationships now you remember Robert I interviewed him for my book he told me a story about when he went to Orange County with his wife because it was her birthday and they took their little boy to the Children's Museum now you have to understand something here Robert hated Orange County and when I say hated he never even actually told anyone how much he really just stained it and throughout the day he got more and more agitated his wife's like what is going on with you but they continued their day and that's the end of the day a car cut him off now the normally calm Robert would just let this car pass right he didn't he rammed up the engine and he almost crashed into the car and his wife yelled stop it and he said don't tell me what to do with such resentment and his wife began to cry and she was silent the rest of the way home because she was terrified she was terrified for herself she was terrified for her son but she was terrified that her son may see his father arrested later on she reflected on this day and she realized that that day was not about her at all because Robert began to share more of his story it was about Orange County itself because he Robert grew up incredibly poured orange Callias this incredibly privileged area and he used to dream of a day of privilege because his mom was a single mom which left him without a lack of supervision right but this lack of oversight is when he was molested so that day in the car all this was molestations materialized from being in Orange County and his wife saying stop it he realized how powerless he was over his own abuse his wife realized something else that her husband had so much pain because he had to go silent and in the shadows and see I should know this pain because I'm Robert wife and he's here today supporting me if I could dream of a day when people like my wonderful husband were not abused I would but until then let's listen let's stop tying emotion to gender let's think about the messages we send to our boys and our men let's look at our cultural norming my mission started with love love for my husband and love for all the survivors that I have had the pleasure to work with in my career I have a little boy who's here today with a full range of emotions in his little bitty pocket that he can express anytime he wants to because his ideas on gender are not set let's look those male survivors come into the light so they know they are not alone let's listen let's love let's break the silence together [Music] you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 39,044

Rating: 4.9603958 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Global Issues, Men, Psychology, Sexual Assault, Social Change

Id: I3SyzQJJhvA

Length: 16min 20sec (980 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 15 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/NaptimeMVP]

She basically goes over how, even though 1 in 6 boys are victims of abuse, most of them don't disclose it because of the expectations we put on men. She gives a couple of examples of men becoming abusive themselves, not as a conscious choice, but as a PTSD reaction due to being unable to process their abuse. I thought it was interesting how she told a man who was in jail that the instance that landed him in jail wasn't his fault. Thoughts?

[u/Contranine]

I have never really thought about the PTSD aspect of it. Which is weird, because I thinking back have experienced that. I felt something which lead to a rising panic within me I couldn't explain and I just had to get out of there. I've been though it, and I even identified where it came from.

With a lack of support it is not surprising people act out in their normal life. With a lack of understanding.

The thing this didn't touch on, because it was a personal story, is that his fear of her not being understanding was a very real possibility. It's great she understood, and was there with him through it. You can see it going the other way so easily though. She decides that he is unstable and has a son to watch out for. He has everything to lose.

People, men and women, do look down on male abuse survivors. You hear it joked about in the world, you see it as a punchline on TV, and if that is the only places you hear about it, that is how you internalise it. Not only victims internalise it that way, everyone does. We are trained to see these people as weak, or deserving it.

I honestly struggle to think of even a handful of places where it even attempts to deal with this in the media. Without representation of survivors as people, how do we expect anyone to respect them? In too many conversations on these topics the men are cast aside, because they can fend for themselves. The group that people admit have no outlets, and no support structure are too often thrown aside because they are inconvenient. They're not respected as people.

[u/CurrentClimate]

I am a male survivor of rape and I can attest to almost all of this issues discussed in this video.

When I was raped, I told one friend who responded with toxic masculinity: "Women can't do that to men" and "You must have wanted it" and "Don't be a pussy." So I buried the events deep down and basically blocked the whole memory out for years. While I didn't have an active memory of the event itself, I did carry around the trauma and it impacted all aspects of my life, but remained undiagnosed and un-dealt-with for almost a decade. My drinking worsened and I ended up with an alcohol problem which got really scary after I triggered the memory of my rape and struggled to deal with it. I still have not told most people in my life because I am afraid that they will see me differently, or worse, not believe me. I still feel the pressure to "be a man" and "suck it up" despite knowing better. I still feel very alone, as if nobody will understand what I went through.

It's been 10 years since I was raped and I am just now learning how to deal with the traumatic effects. I'm sober from alcohol and in therapy, but I still have issues, from sex hangups to involuntary trauma responses and anxiety attacks.

It sucks that this happened to me, but the thing I wish for most of all is an environment where male survivors can feel supported, embraced, and not judged.