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Date Posted: 11:40:32 01/15/16 Fri
Author: Kel
Subject: They may look at it due to trauma....
In reply to: Melissa 's message, "Re: Run like your hair is on fire...." on 23:48:05 01/14/16 Thu

...but I think it's more likely that sometimes trauma is the tipping point for "becoming" gay.

My personal opinion is that being gay isn't necessarily "purely" inborn. If you were to do a study on all the men who had been sexually molested/abused as children by men, I'd bet that there are a significantly higher portion of homosexuality in that group than there would be in the straight group. I think of human sexuality as a metal plate. You're born with a clean slate. Normal, healthy things start to glide over the plate in a predictable way. Let's say that a nursing infant starts to associate warmth and fulfillment from nursing at his mother's breast. That's like a finger on the metal plate - going in a light but continual circle. It's not marking the plate, per se. But over time, it'll make a clearly defined pathway that is distinguishable from the rest of the plate. Add more to that over time - a boy finding his mother beautiful, maybe liking the feminine smells of a woman, feeling giddy eventually around girls. And if you were to look at the plate at that point in time, it's got more of a rubbed path now - like water starting to wear down sandstone. Over time, the boy will start to have something more hard make that circle. Maybe he sees the females around him get budding breasts, or notices the beauty of other women in public. Now you've got a fingernail on the plate. It's making a slight but perceivable scratch. View some porn, the nail turns from a fingernail into a real nail. Then comes holding hands and kissing, and the nail is now definitely scratching harder. There is a clearly defined groove now. As the boy matures and his hormones come to fruition and he cops a feel and fantasizes about females, the channel becomes deeper. Until finally, he has sex. Now the channel becomes deeper and crisp. It would be difficult for the nail to jump out of the channel now. I view that as normal, healthy human sexuality.

Now by contrast is molestation / abuse. You take the plate, which just has some rub marks on it, and you take the nail directly to it, and you haphazardly scribble all over the plate in senseless, deep, burr-ridden scratches. They cross over each other and make no sense. The more abuse that happens, the more horrid the plate looks. Until when that person goes to follow the channel later in life, there's no way to clearly do so. Their sexuality has been engraved, but it's in a senseless, reckless, confusing pattern. There are all kinds of patterns on the plate - some for straight, vanilla sex. Some for gay sex. Some for being overpowered and "taken". It is easy for the nail to jump out of the channel and just pop over to another part of the plate. It would be very difficult for the boy - now a man - to understand his sexuality, or to be defined by any part of it other than it being a mess.

It's not the fault of the boy that he had a nail taken in a terrible manner to his plate. But it is what it is. He can never undo his scratches. But he can work on trying to understand what different parts of the plate mean, how he feels about them, and work at defining the pathway that he wants to be his strongest, most clearly-defined pathway. Unfortunately, all this means going back over the damage - something that he does NOT want to do. He will not do it unless he is interested more in getting healthy than he is in any other part of his sexuality. Unfortunately, sexuality is like a beast that just wants to be fed more and more ("Feeeeed me, Seymour!"). If he only continues to feed the beast rather than trying to figure out which beast to feed and the right food to feed it, he will be its slave.

It's not YOUR fault the boy was harmed - any more than it's his fault that you went through whatever you've gone through (in all areas of your life - not just your sexuality). You cannot fix him. Only HE can fix himself, and he must be willing to face the pain and do some hard work. We have lots of these plates - one for how we communicate, one for how to treat a spouse, one for our spirituality, one for how we interact with money, another for our work ethic, and one for food. We have others for how we deal with stress, joy, and for self-regulation. We all have some that are messed up, and others that are great. My "eating" plate is f'd up beyond belief. And you know what? No one but ME can fix it. It requires going over how I got this way, what my assumptions and weaknesses are, and then doing the hard work of changing those ideas. It requires physical exercise. It IS doable. We often don't believe it is, and so we do little to fix the plate. We become a slave to the plate - and the side effects it produces - the feelings that come from having that plate, the people in our lives that revolve around who we are on that plate. We are ALL damaged. It is an imperfect world, and we are imperfect humans - even with the BEST of upbringing and experiences.

In the end, we are responsible for being honest about our plate collection. Those plates make us who we are. If we lie about our plates, we WILL hurt others. AND ourselves. If we continue to lie about the condition of our plates, we do ourselves and those around us an injustice. The only path to healing is through honesty and HARD.FUCKING.WORK.

Kel

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