Moving on

Home: Survivors: For Males: It happened to us

'I tend to transform the anger and frustration in peaceful ways. I don't get frustrated anymore. Last year I started making presents for the kids for Christmas. I don't go around smashing things.'

The survivors talked about ways they had developed as adults of making sense of their experience of child sexual abuse.

Positive techniques included talking about the abuse, recognising the need for time and space to heal and the healthy expression of anger. They also learned how to value and take care of themselves again.

Some survivors became immersed in their work or studies pushing themselves to prove their own self-worth.

'I think one of the things that I have done is to talk, is to say to my family this is what's happening, I say to my friends that this is what's happened and that has been the best strategy I have used, just to open up and that sounds like nothing but it is.'

'I am a workaholic. Would still tend towards that if I don't watch myself, to try and prove that I am okay.'

'I read, I just escape, that's my main way of coping or I go and find some other adults, out of sight of my family.'

'The only person in this world that is going to look after this part of me, is me. I'm the only one that knows what's going on here. I have to do it. There's a sense, there is a bit of power there that started to return. I think that's one of the things that is really important about this whole process for me is the fact that I feel a sense of power that I've never had.'

'Recognising choices and options, I can become who I want, I won't have to conform.'

'I can sit down now and not get tense about these things where there used to be always an underlying anxiety which was a terrible feeling. Now I can say "wait a minute, back towhere we were, relax". The world is not going to blow up.'

'I have to do something about it, I have either got to deal with it or I have to go and smack a punching bag or I have to go and swim a few laps in the pool, but not let it just keep building over time. That's the thing I have to do.'

'I guess in a sense it is part of my healing process I feel needs to happen for me is that I need to stop taking responsibility for things which aren't mine, I need to put the responsibility for things in my life where they belong and this event has had a major impact.'

'No one likes pain but you do often learn a lot from it. I have learnt more during the most intensely painful sessions. I have learnt more about myself and my ability and determination and resolution to achieve or to push through.'

'I don't feel like a second class citizen anymore.'

'What I've done is I have taken back my power, seized back my power and not giving up to anybody's abuse.'

'And this stuff is starting to form inside me, this sense of freshness inside me makes me, for instance, last year, I wouldn't have been able to sit down and talk like this, I wouldn't have been able to join a survivors group, I wouldn't have even envisaged ever getting anywhere.'

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