Sex, Masculinity, trusting women and finding a higher sense

[Logan]

Hi everybody,

I am new to this forum and I am glad to join here.

I do not want to make the introduction part to long, so I just tell you
what my ruminating thoughts and triggers are:
- topics like sex, pick- up, party and youth
- Masculinity
- Mixed Martial Arts, Soldiers, Warriors
- People who live theis life like they want to be
- old age

I am 40 years old and male. Even though I had some erotiv interactions with a few women before, I had sex just at the age of 29.
I had panic attacks, anxiety and felt most of the time pretty down all of my life.

I felt I have not lived like I should have. My father was a pretty "manly" man and he bragged about his way of being when younger: lots of women, bar-fights, after this he still mannaged to become a doctor.
I had a lot of trouble with racism when I was younger: skinhead, schoolteacher, and bullies.

If something like the above mentioned gets triggered, I feel lost and alone, I feel pain, sad and somehow really not safe.
I feel like a total looser, in these moments.

I have the feeling to counterballance all of the above through
- having more sex with women, which does not happen
- fighting some kind of full-contact sport
- and being succesful in life, means going my own way.

Sometime I just want to relax and a part of me tells me everything is actually okay, have compassion for yourself,
but immediatly a part comes up and destroy it.

It feels I have to do all the things above, to heal the cptsd, which I think will not work.

I would love to hear your opinion about cptsd and masculinity etc.?

Thank you so far!

Best,
Logan

[Three Roses]

Welcome, Logan, I hope you find your stay here informative and educational. I have some things to say to you which I hope you will read, and know that I sincerely want them to be a growing, healing experience for you (which you may not see at first, but I hope you come to understand).

Healing comes from the inside, and expresses itself outwardly. It's an "inside job", so to speak. The things you believe about yourself are what causes you pain, not the way the rest of humanity sees you. If people say to me that I'm worthless, at some level I have to believe that in order for it to hurt me. If I don't believe it, hearing that someone sees me in a negative way would be as hurtful as someone calling me a loaf of bread. It would just bounce right off of me.

Dysfunctional ways of coping with our pain include outward behaviors, such as:

• sexual dysfunction, i.e., being promiscuous or viewing pornography
• denying ourselves food
• harming ourselves, cutting etc
• drug and alcohol abuse
• anger issues

...and the list goes on.

Healing from CPTSD will include learning to treat ourselves and our bodies with respect, treating others with respect, the healthy expression of our thoughts and feelings, identifying and shrinking the inner and outer critical thoughts that we all seem to have, relational and emotional healing, and so on.

As a woman, I felt invalidated, objectified and dehumanized by your post. Having sex with women is not a way to heal yourself; a sexual relationship with a woman (or a man) is a relationship with a living, feeling, human with her/his own likes, dislikes, opinions, and way of being. I'm sorry for you if you've never experienced a deep, intimate relationship with a lover before.

There is nothing wrong with MMA as a physical outlet and expression of health and well-being. But just engaging in physical activity like this without going thru the more difficult inner emotional healing will get you no where. It's just a band-aid for the pain that you're in.

I hope you stick around here, and do some research into the origins of your pain. We're here to answer any questions you may have about our own personal growth and development and the ways we've found to heal ourselves. Good luck in your journey, I sincerely mean that. 

[Kizzie]

I had a lot of trouble with racism when I was younger: skinhead, schoolteacher, and bullies.

Logan, you felt the sting of racism so you know how it feels when others devalue, objectify or degrade you. Here you have an opportunity to recover from CPTSD and lead a deeper,  more authentic and connected life than your father.  I'd encourage you to take a first step towards that by challenging his sexist, manly version of masculinity perhaps, seems good place to start.   

[BlancaLap]

Seems like your father was a toxic person... which kind of person talks about fighting in bars like it is something you have to be proud of? Having lots of sex with women? Being more successful? It seems like you have a list with which you think that if you "complete it" people will finally love you, but I think you already know that. If you really wanna be happy, you have to let go of that, but I know you don't want to (otherwise it would be easy to let go), because your father raised you that way (which is horrible, no man or woman should be proud of being aggresive and violent, because it doesn't make you more of a man, it makes you more stupid). Why don't you check videos about toxic masculinity and the alternatives? Here, check this one: https://youtu.be/Gha3kEECqUk