For some years, I was an active participant on a forum called Metafilter. I was badly mistreated and ultimately banned and they are very much in the wrong, a thing I have written about in a few other places.
Metafilter is likely the single best potential audience for a site like this and my work is not likely to ever show up there due to my acromonious personal history with them. They position themselves as very LGBTQ-friendly but they are, unfortunately, a case of "the blind leading the blind."
They would like to be a supportive place for the LBGTQ community but they end up basically openly hating on cis het males and wallowing in anger instead. I've had some years to think about it and most likely I was the dog everyone kicked in part because I was further down the road than them on some things, I was homeless at the time and these were mostly people still trying to sort their stuff and very hurt and scared.
Someone being more open about such things, more okay with such things and homeless was likely nightmare fuel for a bunch of mostly upper class kids (so to speak) whose families couldn't accept that they were LGBTQ or whatever. So I was more or less run out of town by a bunch of folks with pitch forks.
Below is a piece I posted elsewhere while still an active member. The original title was Having A Sad.
There was an Ask on Metafilter recently. Two of my three replies were deleted. This is the Ask: Resources for Husbands of Rape Survivors
And this is my most recent reply, that got deleted:
From an article recently posted to the blue:
Please note, my first example is not fictional, it is a real world example, and it was his sister, not his wife or girlfriend. I am pointing that out to say explicitly that part of your upset has nothing to do with the fact that your wife is your sex partner. Yes, that is part of it, but part of it is just someone close to you was hurt. My experience in recovering from sexual assault myself is that making those fine distinctions is extremely helpful in sorting things out and moving forward. Don't let anyone make you feel like this is just because your wife is your sex partner. If it were your daughter or your sister or your mother, you would likely still be enraged. It may help you move forward to be clear about that.
Although I think it will remain hard for you to find the specific information you are looking for, I think those two examples might help you figure out what sorts of stories, both fictional and non-fictional, to look for that might be helpful to you.
I personally do know a couple where she was raped while they were still dating. They later married. They have been together a long time. She and I were close and I talked to her a lot about my therapeutic process while I was still in therapy. She later told me it protected her psychologically from the worst of it even during the actual assault. From things she told me later, it sounds like their sex life was impacted a lot less than is typical, even though this was a brutal assault and she suffered PTSD with flashbacks. So, yes, I think it can be gotten past. I happen to know they were sexually intimate (not piv sex, but sexually intimate) within a couple of days of the assault while she was still covered in bruises. So, yes, with the right support, it is possible to get past this and reclaim your sexuality for yourself as a couple.
I once posted an ask looking basically for songs about emotional conflict where the man does not blame the woman in question. I posted it to try to help someone I know and I think it did help him and that helped me since I am the target of some of his conflicting feelings and he was very angry at me and blamey towards me at one time. Those songs in particular may not be helpful for you in this specific instance, but perhaps reading the ask will help you figure out what you need to do to sort out your feelings in a way that will help both you and your wife. I offer it as a resource, an example of how one may be able to successfully sort out very complicated feelings in a way that does not blame you and does not blame your wife.
As someone who was molested and raped as a child, I applaud your efforts to deal constructively with your part of the emotional puzzle. I spent a lot of time in therapy and, to this day, I still find myself helping men deal with their big emotional reactions to learning the details about what happened to me when we become intimate. No man who was intimate with me ever sought therapy or the like for his reactions to my story and I find myself often feeling burdened and aggravated by having to help them deal with their feelings and having to tell them "Yeah, look, this happened to me a long time ago. I know it's new information for you, but please do not do x, y, z." So I think you looking for a way to cope with your own feelings will likely make this much easier for your wife. I think it is one of the more loving, supportive things you can do for her at this time.
In my twenties, I spent a couple of years or so watching tear-jerk movies with certain themes and wailing like a banshee. Over the years, I have also gravitated towards music, literature, et al that has a cathartic purpose for me. Do not underestimate how helpful it can be to watch or listen to certain things. If you find yourself gravitating towards unpleasant themes in movies or other forms of art, consider the possibility that this may be an important emotional outlet with a constructive purpose. After watching these movies and crying my eyes out for two years or so, I stopped being sad all the time. It helped me move on.
Your sense of rage is likely rooted in feeling helpless. Decent people often find themselves wanting revenge, wanting to hurt the people that hurt their loved ones and so on and it sets up a lot of internal conflict with regards to "I am just as bad as these people" and moral crisis of that sort. Rest assured, there are a great many things you can do to make her and you feel (and be) more in control and safer and most of them do not require you to hurt anyone, or learn martial arts or carry a gun. If you can arrange to be safer and feel safer, you will likely feel a lot less enraged.
Jane Jacobs wrote that "eyes on the street" is the single most important thing for making city streets safe. You need foot traffic at all hours of the night and day. Simply being present, being a potential witness to a crime, is the single most powerful thing someone can do to deter crime. It usually in no way involves confrontation or ugliness. Your simple presence and awareness is enough to deter most criminals in most circumstances.
I know this first-hand, from both sides of the coin. My sister left for college when I was 11 and my mother began working full-time when I was 12. I was molested from age 11 to age 13.5. It escalated and became basically a daily thing once my mother began working. The physical absence of my sister and mother gave someone opportunity to do bad things to me. In contrast, I have been homeless for nearly three years and not been assaulted even once, sexually or otherwise, even though women on the street are generally at high risk for assault (both sexual and other types). I am on the street with my two adult sons, so I am rarely alone. There is safety in numbers. There is little opportunity for anyone to start shit with me. Most men will not even try to chat me up if one of my sons is around (the only man I can recall doing so was drinking alcohol at the time and was easily deterred).
So I will suggest that one of the things you and your wife can do that will help both of you feel safer is simply be in the same room as much as possible. If one of you is cooking, the other can be at the kitchen table (assuming your home is set up this way) with the kids doing crafts or something. There is safety in numbers and, also, your simple constant companionship can help her feel cared for.
My medical condition causes me to sometimes be suddenly suicidal because of screwed up biochemistry. When I suddenly become a whack job, my sons arrange to not leave me alone. One of them remains with me at all times. Their simple presence is a deterrent to me actually attempting suicide -- like crime, suicide is something discouraged by simply having a witness, even if they don't do anything in specific -- and it also makes me feel cared about, which helps me feel less despairing. So I know firsthand that even without digging around in the big feelings or that sort of thing, that someone cares about my welfare enough to act as guard dog for me during times of crisis does a lot for me emotionally. And I know I recovered as well as I have from what happened to me as a child in part because my husband was good about things like not leaving me alone after sex. For many years, I just couldn't deal with being left right after sex and he was very considerate of that and it helped me a lot.
So, as much as possible, just be there in the same room with her.
There are a lot of other things you can learn to do to help keep her safe and reduce the odds that something like this could happen again. I am reluctant to talk more about that at the moment in part because I am often accused of victim blaming when I try to talk about what people can do to try to keep themselves safe and it sounds like your wounds are still fresh and raw, so I am not sure it would come across constructively. But just start with being, as much as possible, her constant companion. When both of you are ready, you can look for other ways to increase your actual security and the sense of security that goes with it. (You are also welcome to contact me at any time, anonymously if you wish.)
Best of luck.
Using the Contact form, I wrote the mods and asked very nicely as to what the deletion reason was. I was told it did not provide the resources they requested and was "tangential." Meanwhile, this reply stands, which provides no resources and has (at the time of this writing) 76 favorites and strikes me as rather man-bashing. A man's beloved wife of 16 years has been raped. He asks for help and this is the shitty reply he gets and that's apparently fine and my attempt to be genuinely supportive is deleted. There has been no further mod reply to me saying, essentially, "Well, this other thing did not provide resources and has not been deleted and I think I did supply resources."
It is an anonymous Ask and they provided no email address, so I cannot contact them privately to offer my support. I am disinclined to start a MetaTalk over it. This isn't about me and a MeTa would be interpreted as me making it about me. It's about some man needing support and not getting it because of what looks to me like a hostile, man-bashing environment.
I find myself very sad and frustrated today. I was molested by two different people from quite an early age and raped at age twelve. I think I have done a good job of putting down my baggage and I think I have something of value to offer someone trying to recover from something like this, regardless of their gender. But, apparently, the world does not want to see men get support. There are too many people angry over what women go through to have any compassion for a man with this kind of problem.
I'm just really, really sad.
Addendum:
I had a happy surprise when I logged in today. The individual in need of these resources contacted me to let me know he found my blog post and he very graciously thanked me for it. I had posted it mostly in hopes he would, someday, somehow, stumble across it. I am really thrilled he found it so quickly and it's very nice he let me know.
Metafilter is likely the single best potential audience for a site like this and my work is not likely to ever show up there due to my acromonious personal history with them. They position themselves as very LGBTQ-friendly but they are, unfortunately, a case of "the blind leading the blind."
They would like to be a supportive place for the LBGTQ community but they end up basically openly hating on cis het males and wallowing in anger instead. I've had some years to think about it and most likely I was the dog everyone kicked in part because I was further down the road than them on some things, I was homeless at the time and these were mostly people still trying to sort their stuff and very hurt and scared.
Someone being more open about such things, more okay with such things and homeless was likely nightmare fuel for a bunch of mostly upper class kids (so to speak) whose families couldn't accept that they were LGBTQ or whatever. So I was more or less run out of town by a bunch of folks with pitch forks.
Below is a piece I posted elsewhere while still an active member. The original title was Having A Sad.
There was an Ask on Metafilter recently. Two of my three replies were deleted. This is the Ask: Resources for Husbands of Rape Survivors
And this is my most recent reply, that got deleted:
From an article recently posted to the blue:
When the loan shark became dissatisfied with the repayment rate, he sexually assaulted Ramesh’s sister.There was also an episode of Law and Order where they ultimately conclude that a woman was raped because her fiancĂ©e was trying to get out of dealing drugs and his boss assaulted her to try to force him to keep dealing. (I have spent considerable time searching and, unfortunately, not ID'd the episode.) So this is a known thing that one way to hurt a decent man is to sexually assault a woman close to him that he cares about.
Please note, my first example is not fictional, it is a real world example, and it was his sister, not his wife or girlfriend. I am pointing that out to say explicitly that part of your upset has nothing to do with the fact that your wife is your sex partner. Yes, that is part of it, but part of it is just someone close to you was hurt. My experience in recovering from sexual assault myself is that making those fine distinctions is extremely helpful in sorting things out and moving forward. Don't let anyone make you feel like this is just because your wife is your sex partner. If it were your daughter or your sister or your mother, you would likely still be enraged. It may help you move forward to be clear about that.
Although I think it will remain hard for you to find the specific information you are looking for, I think those two examples might help you figure out what sorts of stories, both fictional and non-fictional, to look for that might be helpful to you.
I personally do know a couple where she was raped while they were still dating. They later married. They have been together a long time. She and I were close and I talked to her a lot about my therapeutic process while I was still in therapy. She later told me it protected her psychologically from the worst of it even during the actual assault. From things she told me later, it sounds like their sex life was impacted a lot less than is typical, even though this was a brutal assault and she suffered PTSD with flashbacks. So, yes, I think it can be gotten past. I happen to know they were sexually intimate (not piv sex, but sexually intimate) within a couple of days of the assault while she was still covered in bruises. So, yes, with the right support, it is possible to get past this and reclaim your sexuality for yourself as a couple.
I once posted an ask looking basically for songs about emotional conflict where the man does not blame the woman in question. I posted it to try to help someone I know and I think it did help him and that helped me since I am the target of some of his conflicting feelings and he was very angry at me and blamey towards me at one time. Those songs in particular may not be helpful for you in this specific instance, but perhaps reading the ask will help you figure out what you need to do to sort out your feelings in a way that will help both you and your wife. I offer it as a resource, an example of how one may be able to successfully sort out very complicated feelings in a way that does not blame you and does not blame your wife.
As someone who was molested and raped as a child, I applaud your efforts to deal constructively with your part of the emotional puzzle. I spent a lot of time in therapy and, to this day, I still find myself helping men deal with their big emotional reactions to learning the details about what happened to me when we become intimate. No man who was intimate with me ever sought therapy or the like for his reactions to my story and I find myself often feeling burdened and aggravated by having to help them deal with their feelings and having to tell them "Yeah, look, this happened to me a long time ago. I know it's new information for you, but please do not do x, y, z." So I think you looking for a way to cope with your own feelings will likely make this much easier for your wife. I think it is one of the more loving, supportive things you can do for her at this time.
In my twenties, I spent a couple of years or so watching tear-jerk movies with certain themes and wailing like a banshee. Over the years, I have also gravitated towards music, literature, et al that has a cathartic purpose for me. Do not underestimate how helpful it can be to watch or listen to certain things. If you find yourself gravitating towards unpleasant themes in movies or other forms of art, consider the possibility that this may be an important emotional outlet with a constructive purpose. After watching these movies and crying my eyes out for two years or so, I stopped being sad all the time. It helped me move on.
Your sense of rage is likely rooted in feeling helpless. Decent people often find themselves wanting revenge, wanting to hurt the people that hurt their loved ones and so on and it sets up a lot of internal conflict with regards to "I am just as bad as these people" and moral crisis of that sort. Rest assured, there are a great many things you can do to make her and you feel (and be) more in control and safer and most of them do not require you to hurt anyone, or learn martial arts or carry a gun. If you can arrange to be safer and feel safer, you will likely feel a lot less enraged.
Jane Jacobs wrote that "eyes on the street" is the single most important thing for making city streets safe. You need foot traffic at all hours of the night and day. Simply being present, being a potential witness to a crime, is the single most powerful thing someone can do to deter crime. It usually in no way involves confrontation or ugliness. Your simple presence and awareness is enough to deter most criminals in most circumstances.
I know this first-hand, from both sides of the coin. My sister left for college when I was 11 and my mother began working full-time when I was 12. I was molested from age 11 to age 13.5. It escalated and became basically a daily thing once my mother began working. The physical absence of my sister and mother gave someone opportunity to do bad things to me. In contrast, I have been homeless for nearly three years and not been assaulted even once, sexually or otherwise, even though women on the street are generally at high risk for assault (both sexual and other types). I am on the street with my two adult sons, so I am rarely alone. There is safety in numbers. There is little opportunity for anyone to start shit with me. Most men will not even try to chat me up if one of my sons is around (the only man I can recall doing so was drinking alcohol at the time and was easily deterred).
So I will suggest that one of the things you and your wife can do that will help both of you feel safer is simply be in the same room as much as possible. If one of you is cooking, the other can be at the kitchen table (assuming your home is set up this way) with the kids doing crafts or something. There is safety in numbers and, also, your simple constant companionship can help her feel cared for.
My medical condition causes me to sometimes be suddenly suicidal because of screwed up biochemistry. When I suddenly become a whack job, my sons arrange to not leave me alone. One of them remains with me at all times. Their simple presence is a deterrent to me actually attempting suicide -- like crime, suicide is something discouraged by simply having a witness, even if they don't do anything in specific -- and it also makes me feel cared about, which helps me feel less despairing. So I know firsthand that even without digging around in the big feelings or that sort of thing, that someone cares about my welfare enough to act as guard dog for me during times of crisis does a lot for me emotionally. And I know I recovered as well as I have from what happened to me as a child in part because my husband was good about things like not leaving me alone after sex. For many years, I just couldn't deal with being left right after sex and he was very considerate of that and it helped me a lot.
So, as much as possible, just be there in the same room with her.
There are a lot of other things you can learn to do to help keep her safe and reduce the odds that something like this could happen again. I am reluctant to talk more about that at the moment in part because I am often accused of victim blaming when I try to talk about what people can do to try to keep themselves safe and it sounds like your wounds are still fresh and raw, so I am not sure it would come across constructively. But just start with being, as much as possible, her constant companion. When both of you are ready, you can look for other ways to increase your actual security and the sense of security that goes with it. (You are also welcome to contact me at any time, anonymously if you wish.)
Best of luck.
Using the Contact form, I wrote the mods and asked very nicely as to what the deletion reason was. I was told it did not provide the resources they requested and was "tangential." Meanwhile, this reply stands, which provides no resources and has (at the time of this writing) 76 favorites and strikes me as rather man-bashing. A man's beloved wife of 16 years has been raped. He asks for help and this is the shitty reply he gets and that's apparently fine and my attempt to be genuinely supportive is deleted. There has been no further mod reply to me saying, essentially, "Well, this other thing did not provide resources and has not been deleted and I think I did supply resources."
It is an anonymous Ask and they provided no email address, so I cannot contact them privately to offer my support. I am disinclined to start a MetaTalk over it. This isn't about me and a MeTa would be interpreted as me making it about me. It's about some man needing support and not getting it because of what looks to me like a hostile, man-bashing environment.
I find myself very sad and frustrated today. I was molested by two different people from quite an early age and raped at age twelve. I think I have done a good job of putting down my baggage and I think I have something of value to offer someone trying to recover from something like this, regardless of their gender. But, apparently, the world does not want to see men get support. There are too many people angry over what women go through to have any compassion for a man with this kind of problem.
I'm just really, really sad.
Addendum:
I had a happy surprise when I logged in today. The individual in need of these resources contacted me to let me know he found my blog post and he very graciously thanked me for it. I had posted it mostly in hopes he would, someday, somehow, stumble across it. I am really thrilled he found it so quickly and it's very nice he let me know.