Unmasking Shame, Myths, and Healing for Male Survivors of Sexual Abuse: An Interview with Jeremy Sachs

Curt and Katie chat with Jeremy Sachs, integrated therapist and Narrative Exposure Therapist, about working with male survivors of sexual abuse. We explore the myths and stereotypes that perpetuate shame, the developmental impacts of sexual trauma, and the systemic and cultural forces that make healing harder. Jeremy shares therapeutic strategies for early disclosure, building safety, and tailoring interventions for complex trauma, as well as how transformative justice can support survivors in reclaiming dignity, community, and a sense of agency.

(Show notes provided in collaboration with Otter.ai and ChatGPT.)

About Our Guest: Jeremy Sachs

Jeremy Sachs is an integrated therapist and Narrative Exposure Therapist from London, UK, now based in Glasgow, Scotland. Since the 2010s, he has run services that support individuals living with trauma or marginalisation, helping them to connect and find community. He has worked with homeless young people in London, families of men who are detained in Brixton Prison ahead of deportation and he managed and facilitated the UK’s first and only HIV aware service for 10–12 year olds, as well as a HIV aware service for over 300 young people aged 12–19 years old. In 2016, he focused on developing therapy services for men, boys, and trans people who have survived sexual abuse and rape. He runs recovery groups and a private practice both online and in-person.

In this podcast episode: Male survivors of sexual abuse, shame, and transformative justice

This conversation addresses the often-overlooked experiences of male survivors of sexual abuse, why harmful myths and stereotypes persist, and the different ways trauma impacts survivors across developmental stages. Jeremy shares insights into how therapists can effectively hold space for clients during initial disclosure, dismantle shame, and integrate trauma-specific work like Narrative Exposure Therapy into long-term healing. We also discuss transformative justice as a way to move toward repair outside of the criminal justice system.

Key Takeaways for Therapists on Working with Male Survivors of Sexual Abuse

“I think particularly on some of the topics we’ll talk about today: sexual abuse, masculinity—these things thrive in the dark when we don’t talk about them. One of the perfect antidotes to that is community, whatever that looks like, whether that’s community in group therapy, whether that’s for gardening club down the road, whether that’s, you know, whatever holistic intervention that is.” – Jeremy Sachs, Integrated Therapist

• Myths such as “men always want sex” or “they must have enjoyed it” are damaging and often reinforced by misunderstanding physiological responses.
• Sexual abuse rarely occurs in isolation—grooming, deficits in care, and systemic oppression often surround these experiences.
• Shame is amplified by societal stereotypes, systemic invalidation, and failures in criminal justice and healthcare.
• Impacts differ across childhood, adolescence, and adulthood, with each stage presenting unique therapeutic challenges.
• Early work should focus on containment and building safety before introducing trauma-specific interventions.
• Narrative Exposure Therapy can help survivors organize and integrate traumatic memories into their life story.
• Transformative justice offers community-based, non-carceral approaches to address harm and promote healing.

“It makes it so fraught for men to come forward not knowing what they’re walking into, because they’ve already survived an experience where their agency has been taken away from them, and they’ve been subject to something that is minimizing and squashing and potentially humiliating, and the systems that are put in place are not fit for purpose. So why would they walk into another situation where their agency is removed and they can feel humiliated and they can not be believed?” – Jeremy Sachs, Integrated Therapist

Resources on Male Survivors of Sexual Abuse and Transformative Justice

• Jeremy Sachs Website: www.jeremysachs.com
• An Intersectional Guide for Male Survivors of Sexual Abuse and Their Allies by Jeremy Sachs

Relevant Episodes of MTSG Podcast

• Understanding Sexual Trauma and Hookup Culture in Therapy with Gay Men: An Interview with Michael Pezzullo, LMFT
  
• Navigating Incel Culture: Therapy Approaches for Manosphere Clients
  
• Why Men Don’t Stay in Therapy
  

Meet the Hosts: Curt Widhalm & Katie Vernoy

Curt Widhalm, LMFT

Curt Widhalm is in private practice in the Los Angeles area. He is the cofounder of the Therapy Reimagined conference, an Adjunct Professor at Pepperdine University and CSUN, a former Subject Matter Expert for the California Board of Behavioral Sciences, former CFO of the California Association of Marriage and Family Therapists, and a loving husband and father. He is 1/2 great person, 1/2 provocateur, and 1/2 geek, in that order. He dabbles in the dark art of making “dad jokes” and usually has a half-empty cup of coffee somewhere nearby. Learn more at: http://www.curtwidhalm.com

Katie Vernoy, LMFT

Katie Vernoy is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, coach, and consultant supporting leaders, visionaries, executives, and helping professionals to create sustainable careers. Katie, with Curt, has developed workshops and a conference, Therapy Reimagined, to support therapists navigating through the modern challenges of this profession. Katie is also a former President of the California Association of Marriage and Family Therapists. In her spare time, Katie is secretly siphoning off Curt’s youthful energy, so that she can take over the world. Learn more at: http://www.katievernoy.com

A Quick Note:

Our opinions are our own. We are only speaking for ourselves – except when we speak for each other, or over each other. We’re working on it.

Our guests are also only speaking for themselves and have their own opinions. We aren’t trying to take their voice, and no one speaks for us either. Mostly because they don’t want to, but hey.

Join the Modern Therapist Community:

Linktree

Patreon | Buy Me A Coffee

Podcast Homepage | Therapy Reimagined Homepage

Facebook | Facebook Group | Instagram | YouTube

Consultation services with Curt Widhalm or Katie Vernoy:

The Fifty-Minute Hour

Connect with the Modern Therapist Community:

Our Facebook Group – The Modern Therapists Group

Modern Therapist’s Survival Guide Creative Credits:

Voice Over by DW McCann https://www.facebook.com/McCannDW/

Music by Crystal Grooms Mangano https://groomsymusic.com/

Transcript for this episode of the Modern Therapist’s Survival Guide podcast (Autogenerated):

Transcripts do not include advertisements just a reference to the advertising break (as such timing does not account for advertisements).

… 0:00
(Opening Advertisement)

Announcer 0:00
You’re listening to the Modern Therapist’s Survival Guide, where therapists live, breathe and practice as human beings. To support you as a whole person and a therapist, here are your hosts, Curt Widhalm and Katie Vernoy.

Curt Widhalm 0:13
Welcome back, modern therapists. This is the Modern Therapist’s Survival Guide. I’m Curt Widhalm with Katie Vernoy, and this is the podcast for therapists about the things that go on in our field, the things that go on in our profession, and a lot of times talking about the things that aren’t talked about. And I’ve worked with a lot of men over the course of my career, some of whom have been the victims of sexual abuse, the victims of a lot of things that in our classes, as we learn about domestic violence, we learn about sexual abuse, the part of the field that kind of gets overlooked under talked about. And I am so thrilled to have somebody on to help us with this conversation. We are joined by Jeremy Sachs, licensed psychotherapists, to help facilitate and talk about the parts of our field that many of us aren’t quite aware, that we’re not even aware about. So thank you very much for joining us.

Jeremy Sachs 1:11
Oh my goodness, it’s such a pleasure to be here. Thank you. That’s a very generous introduction, too. Thank you, Curt.

Katie Vernoy 1:17
We’re excited for this conversation, but before we jump in, we want to ask you the question we ask all our guests, which is, who are you and what are you putting out into the world?

Jeremy Sachs 1:27
Yeah, I mean, it’s also, I think, the question I found the most intimidating. So my name’s Jeremy Sachs. I’m a psychotherapist. I’m originally from London, UK, but I live in Glasgow, Scotland, and I think for the purposes of this talk, I’m a therapist who really tries to put out a sense of community into the world, because I think particularly on some of the topics we’ll talk about today, sexual abuse, masculinity, these things thrive in the dark when we don’t talk about them. And I think one of the perfect antidotes to that is community, whatever that looks like, whether that’s community in group therapy, whether that’s for gardening club down the road, whether that’s, you know, whatever holistic intervention that is. So I think through my work, I try and really platform different forms of community. So that’s in a nutshell, what I hope I put out anyway.

Katie Vernoy 2:26
I love that.

Curt Widhalm 2:27
We often start with a place of care and a place of learning with this question, it’s not a place of shaming. When we look at mistakes that therapists make along the way, when working with male survivors of sexual trauma, what are some of the mistakes that you hear about or you see pretty prevalent in our field when it comes to working with people from this population.

Jeremy Sachs 2:49
It’s a really it’s a really nice question, actually, because I think it facilitates some really interesting challenges for our sector. So some of the big and maybe maybe obvious, but still worthwhile talking about mistakes are this very old fashioned idea that in order to work through sexual abuse, there needs to be some sort of admittance of enjoyment or wanting it, you know? And this, this comes right back to sort of ideas around shame and Freud, who you know would would say that shame is in some way, a defense of something we secretly want, and shame and sexual abuse and masculinity are so synonymous with each other, there can be a real sense that male survivor, well, all survivors, right, but male survivors need to somehow acknowledge part of this was enjoyable, and this myth is perpetuated through sort of physiological responses to sexual abuse. If man is aroused or ejaculated this can be really confusing. But I think it becomes really far more confusing in the sense that sexual abuse, particularly for men, rarely happens in a vacuum. You know, there are lots of factors around it, and sometimes this can this can mean abuse from somebody close to a man. It can be a parent or a teacher or somebody, and circumstances are such that this man or boy or teenager could absolutely want attention from an adult, and that attention is given to them by a perpetrator of sexual abuse. This doesn’t mean they wanted the abuse to happen. This means there was a deficit of care in in the man’s world, and a perpetrator could come along and coerce somebody and and really make somebody feel like there is appropriate care there, and then take advantage of that. And this is, of course, really difficult for our survivors. And really perpetuates that, that myth that that men need to somehow come to terms with the part of the shadow part of themselves, that that some somewhat wanted this kind of abuse. And that, you know, that branches off into the idea men always want sex and they’re always thinking about, you know, lots of sort of, it sort of dovetails into lots of different problematic areas. So I think that’s one of the key ones.

Katie Vernoy 5:24
When you’re talking about that, I think the stereotype that you just mentioned, that men always want sex, that this is something that they need to admit that they wanted, or those types of things, I feel like that’s another way of diminishing the impact of the sexual trauma, especially if it’s, you know, an older woman, and it’s, you know, in that kind of typical masculinity, like, Oh, you’ve, you’ve, you know, you achieved something beyond your age. This is such a great thing, and it can be very invalidating to the experience. How do you I we’re going to jump into a lot more, but I just want while we’re on this point.

Jeremy Sachs 6:01
Yeah.

Katie Vernoy 6:01
How do you address the shame piece of that? Because I feel like there’s the invalidation and the shame that go hand in hand with, Hey, you got to have sex with an older woman, or whatever it is that becomes, I would imagine, extremely confusing, as well as completely invalidating to the experience.

Jeremy Sachs 6:21
Absolutely, and I think you’re, what you’re alluding to is a experience of abuse in adolescence, which perhaps is one of the areas where male survivors are most missed, because we know, absolutely the ‘lucky boy’ you know attitude, and then also, you know teenage boys are not a monolith. We know different identities will be pathologized. So if you’re a black teen boy, you may already be your race may be fetishized. You know this idea of black men being hyper sexual, or gay men being hyper sexual. So how could they be survivors of sexual abuse when we we believe this about a group? Or conversely, you know, autistic men who or autistic teens and men who often have their sort of sexual selves erased. And you know, well, you should definitely be lucky, because who would want to have sex with you? Or, you know, or Asian men who have the sort of, sort of feminized stereotypes, so all these different things into play with, with how you answer that question, or how we, how we combat that. And I think there is something really delicate in the work of working out what that unique trauma looks like, particularly in adolescence, particularly because it may intersect with a young man’s natural experimentation in sexuality. So distinguishing what is trauma in a loose sense, or what is inappropriate, what is abusive contact and what is maybe developmentally appropriate contact often is led by a real sort of semantic sense of what is right and what is wrong. And of course, this can change as a patient learns more about themselves or understands the context of their lives more. So I think it’s really tricky work. That is, I think the the way I tend to approach it is, is, because it is so highly complex, I will keep my interventions as simple as possible to allow exploration. You know, discovery, reflections, opportunities to change one’s mind. Yeah.

Curt Widhalm 8:47
There’s a lot that we’re already covering. And my going going into several different places here. On this topic of shame, I know one of the areas that I hear about a lot, I read about a lot in survivor stories is just in ways that even the systems of reporting tends to diminish the experiences. Some of the legal definitions around what is rape versus sexual assault when it comes to who the perpetrator is, and some of the ways that the laws end up really diminishing what a male’s experience is in this you’re nodding pretty profusely here. Can you kind of expand on what I’m trying to say, as far as the amount of shame that’s not just about the act, but also about some of the barriers that men run into when they’re trying to process this.

Jeremy Sachs 9:42
Absolutely. I mean, you’re onto something. So this is the real place where it’s sort of our jobs as psychotherapists, is is made, certainly not simpler. But it really helps to have an expansive sense of this issue beyond the therapy room, because there is systemic oppression that is informed by stereotypes, toxic masculinity, all these sorts of things. So I can, I could give you examples from the UK, and I don’t think it would be wildly different in the US, you know, but sort of reports very recently, in the last two years into the police service, have found the majority of police officers will look at rape cases and just assume they’re a reporting of bad sex. You know, there’s a real sort of minimization of that. There’s also reports of gay men turning up dead, and the idea that police have this attitude that, well, gay men just die because they party and they use chem sex drugs, and this is just an unfortunate thing. And the case I’m thinking of, it was a it was a serial killer who would rape and kill men and left their bodies in the same location, the same graveyard, three bodies was left in. One body was left on the doorstep of the killer, and the police didn’t connect the dots, you know. There is mishandling of evidence often in cases. So even if you’re not a man who is part of a minority group. We know that rape cases are not taken seriously. You know you might, your case might be taken, kicked out of court because of the mishandling of evidence, because of attitudes that are systemic within our sort of criminal justice system, or even the healthcare system. So it makes it so fraught for men to come forward not knowing what they’re walking into, because they’ve already survived an experience where their agency has been taken away from them, and they’ve been subject to something that is minimizing and squashing and potentially humiliating, and the systems that are put in place are not fit for purpose. So why would they walk into another situation where the agency is removed and they can feel humiliated and they can not be believed? So, yes I completely agree. But I think it’s not just for psychological battle, but there is a social battle as well.

… 11:27
(Advertisement Break)

Katie Vernoy 12:24
At this point, I think it may make sense to step back a little bit, because I think we’ve dive, we’ve doven in, diving in whatever the word. We’ve dove in to men, teen boys, that kind of stuff, where we’ve where it becomes clear, at least to me, how hard the stereotypes are against those age groups. But I think when we’re talking about the broad spectrum of experiences, it seems like there’s going to be different impacts across developmental stages. Can you talk us through the differences, the impacts, you know, childhood, adolescent, adulthood, like what, what are we looking at, and what are we looking for when we have a client, a male client, coming in and discussing sexual abuse, sexual trauma, sexual assault.

Jeremy Sachs 13:12
I think that’s a really important question. I also really like how you include, again, adolescence in that, because it is such a distinct developmental stage, which I think gets overlooked a lot in sort of pediatric care. But um, so I so as a child, you know, a prepubescent child hasn’t developed a sort of sexual awareness of themselves, so abuse at this stage makes no sense to them. You know, abuse before an emergent sexuality means that that child will grow up never really understanding their sexual selves without the experience of sexual abuse, which is deeply disturbing and can really affect them throughout their lives. But the way that a child manages that experience can can diversion in really different and complex ways. So, one, a child might then not have the language to describe the experience of sexual abuse. So then choose to show another child what’s been done to them. Let me show you how I’ve been made to feel. And then we get that really tricky situation of a child who is a victim and a perpetrator, you know, which goes overlooked. It’s often written off as sort of natural development and play, and I suspect, because it feels so difficult people people really ignore it. There’s also the really complicated matter that children it is an existential threat for children to imagine that the adults around them could do them harm. You know the idea that mommy or daddy, or whoever are the surrogate parents, you know the teacher, the swimming instructor, the idea that they could do them harm is too much of an existential threat. But what children do understand is the feeling of wrongness about the abuse. So instead of being able to go, well, this person has threatened me through sexual abuse, they go, Oh, I must be the wrong party. I’m the thing that’s bad. And this is the real implanting of shame, the shame that should be with the perpetrator, the child metabolizes, you know, and often perpetrators double down on that, you know. If you tell anybody, I’ll be in trouble, you’ll be in trouble. This is our secret. Or, you know, differently, say nothing at all, you know. So, so this, I this really confusing experience of going, I don’t know what this is, and it feels very bad, and these people are meant to protect me, because they’re hardwired to believe parents are going to protect them. It just is, is internalized, you know. For teens, it’s it’s a little different, because teens already exist in a world where they’re either over sexualized or punished for being sexual, you know, so all genders are vulnerable to this idea of like, Well, you shouldn’t, shouldn’t dress like that, or you shouldn’t act like a slut, or you shouldn’t get that drunk, you know, all these sorts of things as well as you know, shows and TV and film really sexualizing teenagers sexual selves. And again, the the idea of, as we’ve spoken about, different teens are received differently in society. So what it is for, you know, a teen of one identity to come to terms with abuse might look different for another teen. And I think this is this is really tricky when we’re thinking about that adultification, how some young people aren’t allowed to be young and childlike because they’re presumed to be older, even if they act older. And it’s such a common defense in the court, isn’t it? It’s, oh well, they’re mature for their age. So this is really difficult, and teens particularly vulnerable to grooming. And you know, the teenage mind and body is going through changes that are faster than any other time in their lives, except for maybe toddlerhood. So they are vulnerable. So if somebody comes along and promises them connection and money or affection or all of these things for the coercive grooming of sexual abuse can be really difficult to to navigate, and if teens are having sex, so it’s not uncommon for gay men to have their first sexual experience as a teenager with much, much older men in, you know, a public toilet. And this is a really gray area. It’s like, well, you know, if this is illegal, where does consent come in? Where does power come in? What you know, so this is all hugely complex, and I think for adults again, we’ve talked about the stereotypes of adults and how they may internalize certain social messages about themselves. But also, I think that for adult men, it is, it is a break in a connection with the world. So suddenly, what is, what is safe? And men, more or less walk around in a in a sort of position of relative privilege and safety. Suddenly, this, this thing can happen to them, which is so psychologically unsafe and society often makes a joke about it. You know, there’s so many films that that, you know, put male rape as the premise of a joke. There’s like was it Get Hard with Will Ferrell and Kevin Hart, that film that came out in 2015 the whole premise of the film is that the Will Ferrell’s character doesn’t want to be raped in prison. And that’s, that’s the entirety of the joke, you know? So I think that’s extremely difficult for for male survivors, and the shame, too, the shame of going, Oh, maybe I was doing something I shouldn’t have been doing, and maybe some sense of going, you know, sort of internalized homophobia. Oh, everybody will think I’m gay if it’s a straight man. And, you know, all these really complex thoughts about oneself comes up that really permeate with permeate shame.

Katie Vernoy 19:58
Well, and I think there’s even this additional piece of men are typically bigger than women or or those types of things. And so when we’re not talking about being raped by a man, but being raped by a woman or someone from a different gender, I think there’s this element of, you could have stopped it. This is you wanted it. There’s there’s so much shaming, like external shaming and and diminishing of the experience, especially, I think, within relationships where you’re supposed to want to have sex with your wife, or you’re supposed to want to do these things. And so I feel like there’s, I mean, we could go on and on about this, so I’m sure that that we probably need to move through the questions. But I think there’s this, this element of maybe not even knowing what their experience is because of of societal messages and the shoulds of the world.

Jeremy Sachs 20:52
Yeah, absolutely, absolutely, I think you’re right. And what a what a lovely point too you make of not even knowing what this is. We think of sexual abuse often as this huge trauma, but actually, what about these, as you say, these gray areas of going, Oh, I don’t want to do this, but I am going to do this because I don’t know whatever options I have, and there’s a societal pressure and what that does, what that does to erode one’s sense of sexual self, one’s sense of safety in a relationship or in the world. So, yeah, I think that’s a really good point.

… 21:30
(Advertisement Break)

Curt Widhalm 21:32
There’s a particular vulnerability that comes up when clients are talking about this for the first time, and some of the stories that I’ve heard from clients who’ve tried to work with this in other therapists, is further expanding on what Katie’s talking about is kind of putting this back into terms of female victims and and my sample size on this is small, probably less than 10 clients over the course of my career have done this, but it has been, in particular with female therapists that are trying to, I don’t know, respond to kind of a situation that, because we’re not having these larger talks about working with this, that does speak to this particular vulnerability. You mentioned earlier about just kind of having some very simple kinds of responses as kind of a first step. Can you expand more on what is it that you actually do with some of the clients? And rather than talking about this just from kind of, here’s all the problem standpoint, let’s turn this into something helpful and productive. What do we do in these situations?

Jeremy Sachs 22:40
Yeah, that’s it’s I’ve been talking about this recently, I think very often when it comes out for men, there is a need to purge it. It’s almost sort of the I’ve swallowed something poison, and now I need to just vomit it up and get it out of my system. And having worked with all genders, I think men particularly feel that, because I think what happens a lot, and I’d be really interested to hear about your experiences. But with the male survivors I’ve worked with, they have reached a crisis point, and that’s the point where they come to therapy, because a lot of the sort of social things around therapy and men going to therapy just don’t allow them to to go for a bit of a check in. So they’re at this, this point where something has happened, and it could be they’re fighting a lot with their partner. It could be some other type of trauma. It could be an invasive medical procedure. It could be a child in their lives has got to a certain age where they were abused, but something happened, and they just, they need to come to the therapy, and they need to just get this all out. And that is sort of the first part of that, I think, of just containment. You know, if they can walk away, probably quite destabilized. But go, do you know what? I will go back next week. I felt like that guy kind of, maybe didn’t understand me, maybe did, but at least, at least my worst fears didn’t annihilate him. He seemed like he was still in the room, you know? And I think this is the first stage is to withstand the torrent of it, the pain of it, and then I think you can afford to slow it down. I think there’s something about you know, in therapy, we used to say, well, you really need to talk about your trauma in order to heal. I think it is wonderful that one person in the world knows the most difficult thing about you, but I don’t think it is a prerequisite to healing from trauma. I don’t think we need to do that to people. So then it is about sense making, and that can be a really slow process of going, okay, what are the circumstances, and often, because men are rarely abused in a vacuum, there’s lots of other things. There’s there’s difficult childhoods, there’s hard relationships with work, there’s, you know, substance abuses, there’s all these sorts of things. And then for me, I might, after that stage, move to something like narrative exposure therapy, so some sort of very trauma specific therapy, I might say, shall we do a course of this and see how it goes, and then go back to the more person centered therapy afterwards to go, you know, has that made sense to you? What what has happened? Let’s reflect on what it is. So I that is a sort of very rough pathway that I might, I might use, but I know for other people, it will be about going to therapy and then maybe referring on to group work, referring on to some sort of behavioral therapy, or just staying with the person in sort of traditional psychodynamic or analytic therapy, just unwinding what, what this story means. You know, how they make sense of it for their lives today.

Katie Vernoy 26:11
I have a lot of male clients, and actually quite a few of them are male survivors of sexual trauma or abuse, depending on, you know, kind of where they come in, they aren’t usually coming in for that. And sometimes it’s discussed matter of fact, sometimes it’s they’ve already done the work. Sometimes we’re actively doing the work. And I just wanted to comment that I think that there may be differences when a man is disclosing to another man versus disclosing to a female therapist. And and so I just wanted to add that to the conversation is that sometimes I think men have chosen to come to me because they feel like they because of the societal issues around masculinity and men crying. They don’t feel they can do that with a male therapist. And so it’s I just wanted to put that out there. Feel free to comment on it. But my question actually is around narrative exposure therapy. I do some narrative in trying to understand the story, rewrite the story, that type of stuff. But I hadn’t heard of narrative exposure therapy, so I’d love a little bit of information, or a place that we can send our listeners to learn more about it, because it sounds pretty fascinating to me.

Jeremy Sachs 27:17
Yeah, it’s, it’s a lovely, lovely, it’s a trauma intervention, but I found it love. It’s lovely because it was developed in refugee camps in different parts of Africa by, I think, psychiatrists from Germany. And the idea of it is that you don’t need to be a clinician to be trained in it. And it’s evidence based. It’s shown that it, it does work, nice guidelines, World Health Organization, all that sort of thing. And it is specifically for people who have survived multiple different traumas. And it, it says, here’s here’s a piece of string, and here are different symbols to symbolize good memories, difficult memories, losses and traumas, and they’re symbolized by like a rock, a flower, a stick, a candle. And this can be drawn. This can be the physical things. I’ve done it on a PowerPoint for people online. And it is developing for chronological as much as possible, because trauma isn’t kind to us when we try and recover memories chronologically, but as much as possible, and reorders these memories by a set of questions that attempt to take people right back into the trauma. This is the exposure bit, but also some of the questions saying, what’s happening now? What do you see? You know, it’s sort of one foot in the trauma, one foot with the therapist. And so the exposure session goes through the trauma in great detail, and then the next session, afterwards, the therapist reads back the transcript of what’s happened. We see how that feels, see if there’s dreams or nightmares, or, you know, CPTSD symptoms, and then move on to the next the next trauma. So you hopefully just take the volume down from 11 to somewhere where it is a bit more manageable for the trauma, put it, put it from the amygdala into somewhere more manageable in the brain. And it’s, it’s a short term intervention, perhaps 10, 12, sessions, depending on on what you want to work through. I think it’s a really effective and simple tool. I’ve never used it in isolation. I’ve always used it within long term work. And that is, that is the way I prefer to use it, because then you’re sitting with such a wealth of information about your your patient, and you’ve really shared such a journey, you know, going through this sort of, this autobiographical look of their lives. And you’ve left space for the good, you’ve left space for the losses. You’ve left space for the difficulties. So you get a really holistic sense of them too. It’s not all about the worst things they’ve suffered. It’s about going, let’s, you know, let’s talk about your daughter being born, or let’s talk about you arriving in this new country where you were persecuted all this sort of stuff.

Curt Widhalm 30:34
Or a lot of victims, and I don’t think that this is necessarily just tied to male victims, but for those who were abused earlier in their life, whether it be childhood, whether it be teen, lot of the effects that come with mistrusting just people in general or relationships in general, after you go through this process with clients, how do you work on closure and working on some of those secondary effects of, kind of the relational mistrust that further ends up developing.

Jeremy Sachs 31:07
Yeah, that’s, that’s a lovely question, and I wish I had a model of how to do it. You know, I think, I think I, personally, I prioritize, as I said, sort of ideas of community so much, but it’s so easy to say, you know, so I think it is about looking at patterns, looking at cognitive distortions, saying what is true now, what was true then, and being affirming, being affirming that actually there may be really hard and difficult situations you find yourselves in, particularly with relationships in the present after trauma, but but let’s keep trying to understand what’s going on. And I hope that our subconscious is a really meeting and weathering things like small ruptures or even big ruptures, and they’re sitting in front of a therapist who is saying, I will be able to weather all of the sort of projective identifications and transferences you want to throw at me, and it’s not going to scare me away, and I’m going to be and I’m not going to punish you for it. I’m going to, I’m going to be here and and weather it, and we’re going to dissect it and unpick it and understand it. And so I hope this sort of a dual process of this conscious going what’s happening in your life now, can we spot patterns? Can we spot these cognitive distortions? And then the unconscious, our unconscious is speaking to each other, going, Hey, this, this, of course, this is difficult. We’re two human beings, but I’m turning up. I’m trying to make it safe enough. And if you can keep turning up too, we can, we can co create something that hopefully is healing, you know.

Katie Vernoy 33:04
In the in the therapy room, it sounds like there’s showing up, being able to hold the space to look at and really dig into all of the of the client’s experience in front of you and really understanding them as well as possible, getting to the place where they understand themselves, feel fully seen and accepted, to the best of the therapist’s ability, right, and to their their own best of their their own ability. And yet there’s still this injustice that has happened to them. And so I know we’ve talked about how the criminal justice system has not served men well in this. Are there alternative forms of justice? Like in the question that you sent us, you know, transformative justice. You know, what, what are we looking at as far as, how to how do we help, kind of that external closure in the world?

Jeremy Sachs 34:01
Yeah, I really thank you for that. So, you know, I’ll shamelessly plug a book in a second. But one of the things that I think I try and talk about is this idea of transformative justice, which is a huge you know, so I say a lot sexual abuse rarely happens in a vacuum. Transformative justice would say violence doesn’t happen in a vacuum, you know. And and so there’s, I think, if we are looking at our institutions, you know, just the other day, a guy said to me, or we went to the hospital after a rape, and the nurse said to him, Are you sure it was rape? There’s no bruises on you. You know, and if we can’t trust 100% we’re going to be cared for by these systems that are supposed to care for us. Where can we go? And transformative justice, you know, concerns itself with climate justice, with land ownership, with sexual violence, and it’s, it’s, it’s been going a very long time, but it’s very much been platformed and evolved by sort of people of color, women, sex workers, and it’s a way of finding reparative experience within community. So this can mean a lot of things. In the book and sort of in myself, right, I talk a lot about going, Okay, what am I accountable for? Because we know trauma and shame can make us act in ways that we we’re not proud of, and we’re reaching for whatever we can to help us get through the day and sometimes that can be messy, sometimes that can be harmful to ourselves and people around us. So it’s okay, how do we be accountable for these things without it consuming us, without it really overtaking us? So there’s that I also think unhooking ourselves from from capitalism, because I think capitalism is such a tool for for reinforcing ideas about masculinity that ultimately perpetrators can hide behind. If men are constantly supposed to be strong, if disabled men’s experiences are erased, if men aren’t supposed to age past 35 you know, because they’re supposed to be in swimsuits and muscular and drink this protein powder and all this. These are the things that stop men from reporting or telling people these ideas. So I say, kind of unhook from capitalism the best you can. You don’t have to start a commune and live in the in the mountains. But just be mindful, if you’re doing hobbies, you know, that’s a great you know, you don’t have to monetize them on social media. You can just sort of find groups, find community, find things that actually aren’t trying to get you to spend your money by making you feel like shit. You know. Who’s making money off you feeling bad who’s making money off activating your trauma? We don’t need that. We don’t need to buy into that. So finding these things that actually aren’t trying to exploit us, financially, emotionally, that kind of thing.

Curt Widhalm 37:21
Shamelessly plug away.

Jeremy Sachs 37:23
Oh, thank you. Yeah, that’s very kind. I’m not very good at it. I’m from the UK. We sort of, you know, squirm a little bit at this kind of thing. So I do, I have a book coming out called “An Intersectional Guide for Male Survivors of Sexual Abuse and their Allies.” The chapters are the main topics in which the men in the groups I run have chosen. So I’ve run groups with hundreds of men. Every group more or less picks the same theme. And so I was like, Well, this is a really, this is a win. I could these are the chapters. These are the 12 chapters for the 12 sessions over three months. The book, each chapter is introduced with a survivor testimony. The book has resources, so things like narrative exposure therapy, resources, grounding exercises, tools for therapists and for survivors, and it takes a transformative justice and intersectional approach. So it says men are not a monolith. They need different things in order to heal. They need the people helping them to understand the nuances of systems of power. And hey, what happens if we try and unhook ourselves from things that make us feel bad. So yep, that’s the book. There is some launch events. None of them in the US, so I won’t list them, but there is, there’s an online event way off in September the 19th, which will be recorded. So doesn’t matter what time zone you’re in, you can, you can find it, and there’ll be a discussion through the book. And you know what my aims are in writing it.

Curt Widhalm 39:07
And where can people find out more about you and where to purchase it?

Jeremy Sachs 39:12
Thank you for reminding me that. Yes, so jeremysachs.com is my website, and it’s got links for events. It’s got, you know, links to buy the book if you’d like that, and just general, you know, therapy gubbins on it. So all of the, all of the hoopla that you’d expect.

Curt Widhalm 39:32
And we will include links to those in our show notes over at mtsgpodcast.com. Follow us on our social media. Join us in our Facebook group, the Modern Therapist’s group, to continue on with this and other conversation, and until next time, I’m Curt Widhalm with Katie Vernoy and Jeremy Sachs.

… 39:50
(Advertisement Break)

Announcer 39:50
Thank you for listening to the Modern Therapist’s Survival Guide. Learn more about who we are and what we do at mtsgpodcast.com. You can also join us on Facebook and Twitter. And please don’t forget to subscribe so you don’t miss any of our episodes.