Being Born Gay

Ryan, no offense, but if it was, in fact, sexual abuse, there's no such thing as "nothing serious" sexual abuse. Even a single incident, happening at a young enough age that the child has little conscious memory, can be incredibly devastating. There are all sorts of side effects, including a sense of isolation and aloneness, depression, difficulty with relationships, confusion about sexuality, and at least 50 other symptoms. And, particularly with men, there is a very strong tendency to minimize the aftereffects and insist it wasn't a big deal... which is nearly never the case.

I take it from your non-response-response to Ianthe's question that you have not had any therapy for the issue. My strong recommendation is that you consider seeing a therapist. Sexual abuse issues are much easier to unpack and unravel if dealt with at your age. People who wait and try to bury the issue (as an overwhelming number of men attempt to do), often find that in their 20s or 30s , they have a lot of difficulty sustaining healthy relationships, or attracting dysfunctional people, or both. And it is much harder to fix at that point because so much of your adult self has been defined by the behaviors that arise as a result of the abuse.

So I encourage you to think about getting some help for it.

 

I was going to answer you in PM, but since you decided to go off-topic in a thread having nothing to do with my feelings about Christians, I'll momentarily continue the off-topic discussion:

If you bothered to read my posts in threads relating to religion, you'd find that I am not only very supportive of Christians (that is, real Christians, who understand and are filled with the love that God gives them), I also often stick up for them in threads where others bash them. I happen to have spiritual beliefs that have much basis in Christian belief and theology, and find a lot of commonality of belief between much of (enlightened) Christian thought and other religious traditions. I have met some of the most beautiful, amazing people in the world who are Christian people. For that matter, I've found overwhelmingly that Mormons are also, almost without exception, very sweet and kind and wonderful people.

BUT...

There is a subset of people, who also call themselves Christians, who are the biggest pieces of shit on the planet. These bigoted, small-minded, ignorant, judgmental asshats have caused unimaginable pain and suffering to many, many good people, because instead of reading and interpreting God's word in the way He intended it... you do konw that "Gospel" means "Good News", right? -- these people are full of anger and judgment and (as much as they claim otherwise) hatred for people who aren't like them. And these people, for shorthand, I refer to as "crazy Christians" or "ignorant, asshat Christian crazies" or something like that. But in my book, these people aren't Christians; they are angry people who couldn't possibly have God's love in their hearts, or they wouldn't be so angry and judgmental about everyone else's business, they wouldn't be interfering with gay people being able to live and love and marry, and they'd get some of the most basic tenets of Christianity about loving one another instead of intentionally lying their asses off, and knowing they are doing so, when they misrepresent studies and research to further their agenda of bigotry and hatred.

Yes, these people make me really angry... not due to any slights I've experienced personally, but because of all the pain and guilt and shame and suicide that they have directly caused. But... these people aren't really Christians in my book, and true Christians certainly aren't the ignorant asshats that do this sort of crap.

As to arguing points that are well documented in the psychology literature against ignorance propagated by these asshats... yes, I'm going to argue I'm right, because I'm speaking directly from the credible research that's out there. These asshats are not. That's not even an issue of debate among anyone credible in that field of study, so no, I'm not going to sit back and let somebody propagate nonsense in a community where there are a lot of impressionable people who could be hurt by furthering that sort of ignorant bullshit.

Now... if you have any further discussion on this, I'm happy to discuss it, but it needs to be either in separate thread, or in PM.

But I hope you can understand the difference now between my shorthand for the dumbasses I've described above and real, genuine, kind and loving Christians.

 

If you're talking specifically about sexual abuse, a substantial portion of people who are sexually abused before about age 7 or so are able to completely repress it, to the point that they literally have no memory of it the following day. (This is a contested point, with some arguing that it is not possible, but most of the clinicians working with abuse survivors agree that it does happen at least some of the time.)

Additionally, for men, being sexually abused is probably the most shameful thing that can happen to them. In their mind, it robs them of their masculinity, of their sense of control, of their innocence, and many other things. Accordingly, particularly for straight men, it is very, very difficult to talk about. We don't know for certain, but we do know, based on the number of later-in-life reports, that the numbers we now believe as accurate may be grossly underreported.

As far as I know, that isn't possible. They may deny it to the hilt and absolutely convince themselves that either it never happened, or that what happened wasn't abuse, or some other such nonsense, but I've never heard of an abuser actually being amnesic about an abuse event. The one possibility I'd wonder about is someone who has DID (multiple personality disorder), but to my knowledge, there is very little if any evidence of people with DID being sexual abuse perpetrators.

Well... if you look at the details of the actual study and what they were looking at (which had nothing to do with what your friend said it was studying), it's not a bad study. The researchers did attempt to address a lot of potential issues of bias and accuracy of recollection and so forth, so I think we can safely say that the data is probably reasonably reliable. But whenever you're talking about issues involving shame (being gay, being an abuse survivor, etc), there's always a possibility that the subject doesn't feel comfortable disclosing the truth to the researcher, so any research involving self-reports will always be subject to some underreporting.

 

Sorry, I overlooked that part of the message, I'll respon in PM.


---------- Post added 12th Jun 2012 at 11:49 PM ----------

Also, I was not talking about the professional study. I'm talking about this poll I created, my own study.

Is it possible that this poll is extremly flawed due to peoples own mind covering their past?[/QUOTE]

Well, there can't be any statistical validity to, or anything meaningful to draw from, this poll because:
(1) the sample isn't random (i.e., people who read EC aren't a representative sample of the population in general, or even the gay population.)
(2) Of the subset of people who read EC, the poll reflects only those who chose to vote on it, further skewing the sample;
(3) The questions themselves are heavily biased by the explanation you gave with the poll, likely encouraging those who know the basic premise your friend gave was bullshit to vote more so than others;
(4) The questions themselves haven't been tested an validated so there may be bias within the questions

So all of the above introduce enough bias between sampling and design that you couldn't pull any reliable data out of it. As to whether suppression of memory plays a major factor, honestly I'd doubt it, but I wouldn't be able to tell for sure as we don't have any baseline about the EC population to be able to know if those who chose to answer are representative.

I know it's just an informal poll and not intended to be valid statistical research... which is perfectly fine for a site like EC, and makes for interesting conversation. My problem is that this is exactly the sort of crap you see the Christian reparative therapy apologists doing... slapping together a poll, doing no methodological analysis or validation, collecting the data, massaging it to say what they want, and then publishing it as a valid study.

So, honestly, there's no way to know if the results of your poll have any valid data in them without a lot more preparation and research.