The Ethical Seduction of the Analytic Situation: The Feminine-Maternal Origins of Responsibility for the Other (The International Psychoanalytical ... Psychoanalytic Ideas and Applications Series)

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The sentence that stayed with her was this one: “The only course of action is for you to do something positive, like finish the PhD.” I AM very sorry I brought you so much pain,” Marcus* wrote in his final letter, “Thank you for caring for me. I know I didn’t deserve it.” When he was just 15, Hamish’s mother died. While making it clear he didn’t wish for her death, Hamish is blunt: “She did me a favour … I’ve always felt that it enabled me, in some respects, to get on with my life.” University of Canberra researcher Lucetta Thomas has interviewed dozens of men who have been sexually abused by their mothers. Picture: Ginger Gorman

For Ian, the childhood abuse “manipulated my sexuality and impacted my ability to operate as a person.” Far from healing over time, the impacts of this mother-to-son childhood sexual abuse seem to continue. Lucetta recruited the men for her research with relative ease. This may lead one to assume this type of abuse is common. Frustratingly though, there seems to be no reliable data on its prevalence — including the Personal Safety Survey conducted by the Australian Bureau of Statistics.

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She says: “Out of all the males that I spoke to I would say only one had actually come to terms with what had happened to him.”

The sexual abuse of “these men when boys is often highly traumatic and at times extremely violent and impacted on their psychological, biosocial and physical development,” Lucetta says. It’s an incredibly confusing situation for victims, explains Lucetta, because “the boys still love their mother” and just like Hamish, “they don’t want the family to break apart.”Since she met him, Lucetta had witnessed Marcus struggling to come to terms with what happened to him in childhood. Only in the last six years — and after decades of counselling and therapy — does Ian feel he’s started to recover. I love my wife and for a lot of the time we had a good relationship but this thing [the abuse] came between us,” Hamish says, “it did slowly poison our relationship.”

They have experienced the same forms of trauma, the same forms of sexual abuse and emotional and psychological abuse as any victim of sexual abuse or sexual assault and they need to be taken seriously and they need to be believed. If you’re a bloke who is impacted by sexual abuse, call Mensline 24/7 on 1300 78 99 78 or visit www.mensline.org.au How can you have a healthy sexual relationship? How can you become a father, husband, grandfather?” he asks. The truth is that Hamish had no one to disclose the abuse to — and even if he did, was terrified of splitting up his family.

She saw me as like some sort of de facto relationship, I’ve got no doubt about that. She’d say: ‘You’re the man of the house’,” he recalls. Society says that males are actually instigators of any sort of sexual relationship, so the child copes with the trauma by telling himself: ‘I must have actually instigated it,’” she says.

Our marriage was never the same after I told her about my mother … just telling her wasn’t enough, we needed to get help,” he says. You can’t just bottle it up and think that it will go away, because it doesn’t ever go away,” he says. And he would know. The family dynamic was complicated. Ian, his two brothers, mother and her husband — we’ll call him John — lived in poverty in rural South Australia. Ian describes “a paralysis” inside him and states: “I don’t think I’ve loved anybody in my life [and] didn’t know what love was.”He was not only sexually abused by his mother from a very young age but when he became older and was able to physically prevent her from abusing him, she engaged another friend to be her strong arm so she could continue the acts of sexual violence against him,” Lucetta explains. One gentleman, sadly, was completely house bound. He basically just felt that it was completely impossible to trust anybody or to be out in society because he had so little self-regard,” she says. There seemed to be a recurrence of the trauma building up over the years,” she says, “so from the late 30s onwards, it was really starting to become an issue for them.” I hated her because of abuse,” he says, “I had a list of people who I wanted dead and she was on that list.” I honestly believe she [his mother] had probably been sexually abused herself,” he says, adding: “I feel pity for her.”