Garry Ingraham
“Lack of healthy connection with my parents and an early exposure to pornography caused me to reject my own masculine identity.”
I was raised in a small country town in upstate New York, the youngest of five children. My parents were in their 40s when I was born, and I knew I’d been unplanned early on. I could sense the lack of delight and excitement for my coming into the world, especially from my father. Aware of his disappointment, I was unable to develop a secure attachment to him. This insecurity, in turn, caused me to reject him to protect my own heart. To me, he symbolized what men were: disconnected and unsafe.
From that place of rejection, I struggled intensely with anxiety as a boy, which drove me to prioritize my relationship with my mom. As a result, I created an unhealthy emotional attachment to her. Finding nothing in men I wanted to emulate, I over-identified with her and the other women in my life. Though I believed boys weren’t safe, I was nonetheless drawn to my male peers. As a result, my need for acceptance grew stronger, and yet, simultaneously, I pushed other boys away in fear of rejection.
These feelings were exacerbated when at age 5 or 6 I was invited to play at a neighbor’s house after school. The older boys wanted to show me their dad’s hardcore pornography stash. Flipping page after page, they roared with laughter while I stood confused. I had neither the cognitive ability nor maturity to process such an experience. Worse, they engaged sexually with one another in front of me. Because my relationship with both parents was already strained, I had nowhere to turn to process this complicated and confusing experience, which I found deeply distressing.
Public school was no safer for me than being at home. Increasingly fearful and shy, I became a target for bullying from my peers. School became unbearable. Gym class, the locker room, and recess triggered great anxiety. Unable to contend with the other boys or to live up to who they were, I turned to pornography and masturbation to self-soothe. Eventually, my distorted perception of masculinity and my emotional and relational wounds drove me to same-sex sexuality. I felt starved for connection with other men. My pursuit of love produced a revolving door of unhealthy and emotionally-dependent short-term relationships. I spent years being so desperately needy that I sucked the emotional life out of whomever I was with, making every relationship unsustainable. I lived in a place of desperation with a need for affirmation. Like the relationship with my father, I attached to others insecurely out of fear of rejection. Full of self-hatred, I felt utterly unstable in who I was as a man and where I fit in the world. In fact, I felt like a shell of a man. Though I didn’t identify with being a woman, I didn’t feel like I fit as a man, so I felt ashamed. Fear became a self-protecting mechanism I used to keep people at a distance. If they only knew, I’d think.
After years of struggling, I eventually turned to my faith for peace. I began a process of self-discovery that exposed the pressures of my childhood and enabled me to find emotional healing. My faith became a cornerstone in my life, and I began building stable relationships with others by attending church and intentionally seeking positive emotional connections. Today, I can see the importance of belonging and the Christian community has become essential to my well-being. It has taught me how to have good, healthy friendships with men. I experienced transformation as trusted men shared their lives with me and listened to me fumble through my feelings and insecurities. Through these men, my masculinity has been affirmed and activated as it should have been by my father. Today, I cherish being a husband to my wife of 15 years, a father to my two sons, and a confidant to those needing the affirmation of a man and a father.