Make Peace With Your SSA

For SSA men, we begin by coming to peace with our same-sex attraction. We may try to understand it. We may try to manage it or minimize it or even “overcome” it (whatever that means). But the one thing we cannot do is vilify it. SSA is not our enemy. It’s not our “battle” to fight or our “cross to bear.” It doesn’t require a “cure.”

• Creative and artistic
• Spiritual (especially when it comes to calling on God to help us through this confusion!)
• Emotional and sensitive
• Empathic and relational

Allow yourself to feel grateful for these gifts (and they really are gifts!).

You may realize that what may need to change, if anything, is not your same-sex attraction itself but

• your distress and inner turmoil about your SSA
• and possibly any unhealthy, harmful or distressing thoughts and behaviors (such as same-sex lust, perhaps).

In this way, you may be like anyone else who has some personal-improvement work to do. There is nothing wrong with you. There may, however, be something harmful about some of what you think or do. That doesn’t make you a bad person. It just makes you human.

Challenge Your Self-Critical Thoughts

The way you perceive yourself and others, and the beliefs you form about these perceptions, create the reality in which you live your life.

For example, whether you see other men as safe or threatening, honorable or suspect, accepting or rejecting, your beliefs create the world of men as you experience them.

Whether you see women as controlling and demanding or relatable and kind, your beliefs determine whether you will want to draw closer to them or push them away.

Whether you see yourself as equal to other people or somehow defective and less than them, those ideas become the truth in your inner world.

In Brothers Road communities, we refer to our perceptions or judgments about ourselves or others as “the stories I tell myself.” Because they really are just the stories that we create in our heads to make sense of the world around us.

Now here’s the good news: Our thoughts, beliefs, perceptions or judgments are really quite malleable. In fact, we teach at Journey Into Manhood:

Change your beliefs … and you change the world as you know it.

Challenge the stories you tell yourself about yourself and the people around you … and you change the inner world in which you live.

A major focus of our peer-led Journey Into Manhood program is to invite participants to look closely at and then challenge their beliefs, judgments and perceptions of other men, of manhood, and of themselves as a man. When they sincerely do that, they often find that they are, in fact, already “man enough,” already a man among men, after all.

 Resource: See the “Challenging Distressing Beliefs” questions and worksheet in our Tools & Resources section.

 Resource: One of our favorite sources in our community for challenging distressing internal stories is “The Work” of Byron Katie, and her book, Loving What Is.

Heal Old Wounds and Painful Feelings

Often, low self-esteem or a sense of inadequacy is driven by a history (real or perceived, it doesn’t matter) of rejection, betrayal, sometimes brutal criticism and even abuse. These experiences can result in crippling shame, fear of trusting others, and an inability to think of ourselves as having any inherent value beyond our accomplishments or what we can do for others. They can take a terrible toll on our self-worth and make it seem impossible to restore our innate sense of value.

Truthfully, healing this kind of pain can be long and difficult work. There are no shortcuts. It usually entails counseling or intensive emotional-healing weekends or comparable efforts, sustained over time.

But the good news is that healing is possible. Eventually, we have found a new sense of self-compassion, self-respect, and self-worth through:

• the loving and patient support of others,
• our own willingness to courageously face and heal the past
• and, often, an eye-opening encounter with the love and grace of God.

 Resource: Journey Into Manhood has been a turning point in countless men’s lives for (re)discovering their innate value and self-worth.

Align Your Behaviors With Your Values

Learning to accept and love yourself requires a healthy, encouraging thought-life as well as significant emotional healing from past pain.

But it also requires us to change any behaviors that may be out of out of sync with our values. We could never fully like and respect ourselves as long as we kept doing things we regretted or that hurt ourselves or others.

This kind of change usually starts with a personal inventory (a “searching and fearless moral inventory,” the Twelve Steps call it): “What am I doing or not doing that may be harming myself or others?”

• You may need to bring your sexual life in line with your values or your spiritual life. When you’re “clean and sober,” you’ll see yourself in a whole new light. You’ll almost certainly like yourself a lot more.

• You may need to reach out and build new friendships and create a vibrant support network. People who like themselves thrive in the company of other happy, healthy people.

• You may need to discover a renewed sense of purpose for your life. People feel better about themselves when they are serving a cause greater than themselves.

• Or it may be time to start working the life-changing “M.A.N.S. principles” — healthy masculinity, courageous authenticity, genuine needs fulfillment and humble surrender to God’s will.

Consciously working to live a more value-centric, purposeful life will bring you a sense of self-respect and self-worth unlike anything you otherwise could ever know.

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