Merle Yost: Unspoken Boundaries

I'm getting really old and I'm a specialist in a couple of things several , but two major ones that I'm known for is men who were sexually abused as children , and men with gun and comastia and those often go together , sadly enough and I've written several books , the last one being the Facing the Truths of your Life , and I recently launched a web online video

workshop called Seven Steps to Powerful Boundaries . So most people have terrible boundaries After they take the workshop . They won't .

She , we were isolated from the world because it was really a cult organized around her fantasies of being ruler of the universe . And we were allowed to have friends . We were told , we told them about it . We were , we were be killed and so really isolated from the world .

And it was just a family and we went on a farm , literally in the middle of nowhere , and we didn't really get a normal childhood . There was just so much socialization that was missed . And my father was not terribly bright and really angry and aggressive and quite physically brutal . I saw many animals beaten to death or shot .

In front of me is a child and family pets . And physically he sexually assaulted me for three years as a child in my bedroom and my dad at night . It caused severe dissociation , severe sexual trauma . It took me years to unwind what had happened and come out of that and there's still , even today . There's still pieces of that I'm still processing .

I wonder if there's ever an end to it .

On some level it doesn't stop me from functioning of a normal life , but it but when you get assaulted as a child , whether it's sexual or otherwise , it forms who you are , it shapes how you're going to be in the world , and so you spend your whole life undoing that , shaping and trying to reshape your life and yourself so that you can function in the world

in a normal way . But once you've been assaulted , sexually and otherwise , you never quite look at the world the same way and you never feel quite or completely safe . I think is the best way to say it . I've had lots of other trauma .

The big one another big one was that I picked up this guy who ended up trying to rob me with a rifle and we wrestled and rifle broke apart and he beat my head in with the barrel and so I had severe concussion from that . And yes , I've been sexually assaulted , by the way , and it's almost a part of being alive .

It's sadly enough , none of the others is severe , but it's all there . And the sad part is males . It's not even until later that we can own or recognize that we were assaulted .

It's just such a part of being a male and it's things in a very strange , sad way , that , yeah , you're going to have to fight people and you're going to have to fight people off , and there are people who do things that you don't want them to do and as a man , you're just supposed to buck it up and keep going and we're not supposed to admit that it

caused pain and changed our security of being in the world and changed how we see the world and experience it .

That's our training and a lot of stuff happened in surprisingly , a certain level that that's true for everybody and yes , and then that just sits , passed on to the next generation , to the next generation . That's why there's so much sexual abuse in families . It just becomes a norm and it's so ubiquitous in the culture .

All the focus is on women , and certainly women should not be sexually assaulted either . Men are just little . The moment a little boy pops out , he's told he's a little man , he's supposed to take care of his mother . Give me a break . He's never allowed to just be a little boy and be weak and defenseless and in need of protection .

He's supposed to be the protector and that gets programmed in from the beginning . And seeing vulnerable means not being a man , it means not being male , and that really , and then being gay on top of it , just is another whole , another layer of emasculation and disempowerment and it's just , it's criminal .

The short answer is that my older brother was my mother's favorite and the heir apparent to rule the universe , and when my older brother fell out of favor , I then became the heir apparent and suddenly my father's fight with my brother was done , because he got shipped off to the military and then I became the target and so it was a way of dominating and me

and also he was . I can just say this that my mother there was no boundaries in our household some of an understatement of the year but mother would bitch about him wanting to suck his dick and how disgusting that was . This was living room conversation with the kids , and so he wanted to get that need met and it was also a way of dominating me .

That's my way , I think , happened . Yeah , yeah .

Back in 1993 , I trained in EMDR with Francine Shapiro , who invented EMDR , and I since become an approved consultant , so I'm quite experienced in it . And so at the beginning , in the very first training , on the first day and this is like the first few years when they were teaching it , they said they were going to practice .

We had to practice on each other using the technique , and so they said to pick something small . I had always had a phobia of tall buildings . I'd look up and just about pass out and it made no sense at all . And so this thing's like a small thing , let's just pick that .

So about 30 seconds into doing the EMDR , all of a sudden my head went back , a cock went down my throat and I dissociated from here for a long time , and that was the beginning of the memory coming back , because I had all the symptomology of being sexually abused . But we had no memory .

And one of the things is that shutting off air is one of the ways to create dissociation . That wasn't his intent . But the suffocation and that's why these kids in the suffocation now is just sex play just drives me crazy , and they're killing brain cells . But that's a whole nother discussion . But I'm just appalled knowing what physiologically is going on there .

And so he's very convenient . And so I remember the next morning something had happened , and every time I thought about getting on the school bus I got sick to my stomach , and so my sister went off to school . I have a twin sister and I just wandered around all day and a days and I was wandering outside naked .

I had all these feelings going on in my body that I'd never experienced before . It was my whole introduction to sexual energy and I was completely overwhelmed by it and with the occluded memory I had nothing to tie it to , and so it was great . It took me a week or two before I could go back to school . I was so overwhelmed by the experience .

And then I get back to school and say welcome back , thank you for sharing . Right , nobody knew what had happened . Here we go .

But my sexual assault , completely at 34 years I was 34 at the time , at 34 years old completely changed my definition of sex , and so when I think I speak to so many trauma survivors that were their trauma or sexual assault happened in them as a child and knowing what I went through as an adult , when my brain was fully formed and I knew what sex was and

had healthy set in the past , and how it completely changed my definition and what sex was to me , and to think of that happening to a child who probably doesn't know what sex really is at the time , and the creation , the definition that's creating of sex becomes it's not pleasure , it's not something you share with somebody , it's punishment .

But if pain is connected to your first sense of sexual pleasure , then they get married .

That's why that first sexually experience is so important that it be with a peer , that it be consensual , that it be innocent and that there's an exploration there going on where , if something's being forced upon you or somebody much older has a much greater sexual charge , and so then you get overwhelmed by that energy coming towards you and it's like plugging a

110 into a 220 outlet and you have this explosion and so , and then you're just looping around that until you process that , and most people never process it , and that again where sexual compulsivity comes from , because they're attempting to process that material and until they do , they're just going to keep looping around that .

When I got to a physical , mental , stable-ish place after my attack and was able to go back to my apartment and continue to live as a man on his own because I had to go back home for a little while to be taken care of I found that , where I didn't remember what happened to me , I was trying to force memories and triggers and I was putting myself in

unhealthy sexual situations , trying to relive that night and that moment .

night . That's exactly what's going on , and you're not even doing it consciously , it's an unconscious drive , and you can get in really dangerous situations that way and create even much more trauma on top of the trauma on top of the trauma .

And that's why it's so important to get really competent help after a sexual assault and process it , so that you don't have to go out and attempt to do it on your own and create more injury .

When and how did that stop ? And then , as you were getting into that teenage hormonal time , those people less than years , what did you ? Did you act out ? Oh , again .

It was like he became a different person and never anybody ever trusted that . And not a funeral that I went to , I might add , and of course that was confusing too . And plus , that was when I really hit adolescence .

And so I went literally from isolation to the middle of the ghetto in Tucson , arizona , in this big Latin ghetto , and it was just a whole free for all of it . And not that I was participating in anything , but one kid tried to force me to give him a blow job in the bathroom and school .

But again , once you've been victimized , you have this tattoo on your forehead that bullies want to take advantage of , and so I was overwhelmed by the amount of open sexual energy that was happening . I was completely naive , I had no sexual education at all and I just didn't have much to do .

I had all these feelings amplified by a thousand times at that point , but no understanding what to do with it or how to handle it at all .

and choosing to be here and interacting with this and that's what a lot of BDSM is it's a way of taking back your power , whether you're the top or the bottom , and so that can be liberating . It can be freeing in a sense . I mean , we want to pathologize BDSM , but it's a consequence of the abuse in our society .

So to doubly pathologize the person who's already been abused seems a little stupid to me .

But if you don't have all of those things in place , then you're just throwing the dice up in the air and who the hell knows what's going to happen .

Intimacy is the act of being vulnerable with another person , is exposing a part of yourself to another person that may be rejected or ashamed , and so you do this in little bits and that's how you deepen intimacy with another person .

So when you're exploring sexually with somebody and you start sharing some of your story or what your interests are , that's getting vulnerable and , depending upon how they respond to that , it's the whether you build enough trust to actually go down that road , and but too many people just jump into the deep end of the pool and then they get rewounded all over again

and more traumatized and get layers and layers . But we don't teach people about how to go about having sex , and so , consequently , we're setting them up to be damaged even more .

And I said oh , oh , yeah , I'm out of here . I went to compulsive sex route . I was very sexually compulsive in my 20s or , yeah , late teens , early 20s but I happened to meet the love of my life and that really stopped it in a lot of ways . We each married our father .

He was it I always say you're gonna marry your parent , just find a healthier version . And he was a healthier version . I was a healthier version of his father . So that kind of worked out and we both went into therapy and I think he clearly was sexually abused as a child as well .

And that's the other piece that nobody tells you about is that sexual abuse survivors find each other and almost every case where I've had a woman who was sexually abused , their husband was too , but that isn't ever talked about , that isn't acknowledged , because he's not allowed to be a victim and she gets to be the victim and he's stealing some of her show or

something , and but because I think it's so common that for men to be sexually abused but not talked about of course , and so they just , and then they wonder why they're compulsive or they're cheating and doing these other things because they've got all this stuff going on . It's not , it's never , ever been addressed . Yes , it .

And so for me I got was very sexual compulsive and I came out pre AIDS . So it was a very different universe into the world , very different . You get these guys they have no idea . Like I could tell stories , lots of stories about that , but I didn't really enjoy it all that much because I was dissociated through most of it .

It would just I was there , my body was there and a part of my brain was there , but most of me was somewhere else , because it was so overwhelming and on an unconscious level that I'd even know was bringing up all these feelings that I didn't understand or how to deal with or process .

And so getting in the relationship really allowed me to that 98% of that really went away . We really were soulmates and but . And then when I finally got into therapy . That helped a lot . And then , when the EMDR came along and we discovered the sexual abuse , concretely what happened , that really was a total game changer .

I just totally changed my sexuality because suddenly Everything made a whole lot more sense all the BDSM , all of the fantasies and all the sexual compulsivities , the bookstores , the bathhouses , that you name it . And I was very busy boy in my early 20s .

Sexual addiction is the way of shaming people about their sexuality , the whole old moral stuff that's just been repackaged in a convenient thing and saying that you're a sick , evil person and you're never , ever going to be Well , this is just a burden that you have to carry the rest of your life and it's total bullshit Because it's actually compulsive .

People have a wound , they have a sexual wound . They're unconsciously attempting to process that wound and so my experiences and I've worked with tons of guys and I've been in SLA and SA and all these other things and they come to me , we process the trauma and their sexual compulsivity goes away without being shame for having a sexuality .

And it just Impuriates me what's being done to people around their sexuality inappropriately and necessarily and causing more harm , frankly , and it's just not acceptable to me and it's just the America is this period technical sexual society . It's never gotten out of that .

And there's all of this judgment and shame about sexuality and Everybody has a certain degree in my experience where I say most people have some degree of eroticized shame Because it's such a ubiquitous part of the culture . It's your claim that sex is bad and you're going to enjoy it , but it's bad . So it's a setup for BDSM . It is from a little to a lot .

That's just a total setup . So until we develop a healthy sex culture and Recognizing it's a really natural part of us and it's a natural way to express ourselves with other people , we're gonna keep creating this , killing us over and over again . And and boys just aren't allowed to be sexual .

These survivors either and I've worked with so many young men who were sexual , had these long-term sexual relations with female school teachers they're considered lucky . They're not considered victims and they're really screwed up Because it's that to a one make . Look at me and say it's my job to service every woman in the world .

Let's talk about sexual compulsivity , I think , but it's just , it's their way of dealing with that overwhelm of this older woman and this intense Sexual energy coming toward them before they're ready physically or psychologically to process that . Do they get off ? Do they have a good time ?

Yes , but it's creating great damage to them Psycho , sexually and in their sense of who they are . And yes , I think that we need to stop calling people sexual addicts .

We need to call them sexual victims and encourage and support them and getting treated for that , so that they can have a life that that doesn't include being driven by something that they don't understand .

And then when I went to college and I had some roommates , and one of my roommates who had a terrible crush on , who's also a game in , was seeing this woman for therapy and he thought I might , it's that I'm seeing her .

He turned out to be right and I remember in that very first session I'm sitting there talking to her and she says you seem anxious , are you afraid of me ? I said no . He says what are you afraid of ? I said what's inside of me ?

The therapy began and began roughly I've since five years with her and 17 years with one , and so I had about over 20 years of psychotherapy , really top drawer psychotherapy , and I needed all of it . So I'm a Buddhist . I was raised in a Christian cult Southern Baptist-ish , you understand . I went to graduate school .

I did a three years master's there are other ways to be masochistic that are much more fun but I went to graduate school . I really got introduced to all these different religions because it was a transpersonal psychotherapy program and transpersonal means that you incorporate the spiritual into the other , and I had been on this quest of new age stuff .

But this really formalized my inquiry into a lot of these things , and so what I've come to believe and this is my truth is that as a Buddhist , I believe that we pre-plan our life , that this was all chosen , for whatever reason , for our karma to do whatever we're supposed to do , and that it's clear to me that I chose this path of the cult , of the abuse

, of all of the crap that happens to me along the way , so that I could become the healer that I was to become , and so I don't really consider myself a victim .

That's not excused their behavior because they had free will and so it just and that was really in that first therapy , that first therapist , that it got clear to me that this was what I wanted to do , because I'd never been exposed to this . It was really a late . I was gonna . My mother wanted me to be a doctor , wanted me to be a professional singer .

I never became anything she wanted me to , but I did become the one thing she didn't want me to be .

It just turns out I didn't know this till later , but it was really just in experiencing my own healing and being fascinated by that process and loving the vulnerability and the ability to be completely honest , for the first time in my entire life Could I be totally honest .

And it profoundly changed me and it changed the whole experience , Because I was in business and it was very successful .

And then I , when my partner and I moved to Oakland I wanted , we moved there because I wanted to go to graduate school there and that's he needed to leave because he couldn't find work and we were in Tucson at the time and it just evolved and in graduate school I was just a pig in mud . I just had .

It was exactly where I was supposed to be , and it was not always easy because I was still pretty dissociated . I didn't really understand how dissociated I was at the time and all that , and I was very strange . I was this very odd character .

But you can't grow up in that kind of situation and come out normal on the other side , and I'll probably be always slightly odd my entire life because I didn't experience the normal childhood . I didn't experience the things that most people are supposed to experience , and so I don't look at the world in quite the same way , but in a very weird way .

That makes me a really good therapist .

So let me explain why . People , how many times have you watched somebody on TV their child has just been slaughtered , or somebody did something cut off their arm or something , and they said I forgive them ?

I can tell you from having worked with a lot of people they said I said it , but I don't really need it Expected in society that you're going to forgive this asshole who just destroyed a part of your life , and I think it's dishonest to you and to them .

And the core of it is that I think that offering some and so I also distinguish in between big hurts and small hurts my husband says something means me spring , but I forgave him . How trivializing is that ? Totally , and that's not how you solve those problems anyway .

And so there's the chapter on small hurts that goes at length about how you deal with that stuff . But the big stuff is they killed the child , they cut your arm off , they did something and then alterably changed your life Like the things that happened to us .

We're never going to be the same person we might have been because that happened to us , and we incorporate that into who we are . And so our job is to come to terms with that what happened . And everybody gets victimized in their life Everybody in some form , from a little to a lot . But living as a victim is a dead end .

It just keeps you trapped into that drama and drama forever . And so the task is to go in , experience the pain , move through it and take back all of your power . You don't give any power to this person again to shape who you are , how you choose to be in the world , and seeing them is nothing , because it's not about them .

You're not giving them the power anymore to make you feel bad , because as long as you do that , you're still engaged in that experience with that person and that's not healthy for you and it doesn't do anything for them , and it's their job as a human being to offer an apology and to make amends , and you can choose to accept that apology , but in the event

that they don't , letting them off the hook , giving them absolution , which is what forgiveness means , is doing them a disservice and it's dishonoring yourself .

And so our job is to deal with what is done and make the best life we can out of that . And that generally means not having them in your life for starters , and certainly pulling back all of your power and giving them no more power to hurt you or haunt you or to make that .

And I've seen people go crazy , particularly ministers , when I talk about this , just absolutely go nuts when I talk about this . Because if you take away forgiveness , what's Christianity ? I think self-love is what people use as this barrier to self-soothe and so forth . But love is something I give you and you give me . It's not something I give myself .

But what I can do for myself is accept myself , and I accept that I'm a different person because this happened to me . I accept that I like this kind of sex . I accept blah , blah , blah and that makes me whole , and that's not a judgment .

And the gift of self-acceptance is that if it is something you want to change , once you accept it , then you can decide whether you're going to change . That is the essence of Alcoholics Anonymous . You can't deal with being an alcoholic . You first accept that you're an alcoholic , then you can do something about it .

But until you accept it , then you can't do anything about it . And maybe the acceptance is that I'm OK with being an alcoholic and that's fine . It's fine , stop beating the crap out of yourself . There's no benefit in doing that . So that's where I come in , as that's why .

So I would say it sounds to me like you finally accepted yourself and how you are , and that's the greatest gift , because then , if you want to do something different , you can do it different , and forgiveness is like saying that you were bad . And you weren't bad , you were simply being human .

Psychotherapies become cognitive behavioral therapy , which I'm not a huge fan of . It's a nice way to put a band-aid on something and send you back out to the war , but it doesn't resolve anything . And insurance companies like it , which is why it's become the predominant paradigm .

But I think you need to get an old-fashioned psychodynamic , humanistic therapy , preferably a combination of the two , because you have to go unpack this stuff , you have to examine it , you have to own it , you have to really get to the pain of it so you can move through it and stop carrying it around inside of you .

And EMDR was a paradigm shift in psychotherapy . It opened the whole door to quickly and effectively moving through really severe trauma . It can change things in a single session . I do mostly at this point , not so much lately because people don't seem to want to do it , but I switch from doing weekly therapy to intensive .

People come to me for five consecutive days . I see them for two consecutive hours a day and they do a whole lot of homework before . So I know what I'm getting into and we can just go boom , because I know what the lay of the land is . Most people don't want to do the homework . It's too painful , that's fine , but I like that be able to go in .

I've worked with so many women and cleaned up rape after rape In a single session . I can just simply make it go away . I can't tell you how many women I've worked with around rape that went out and got into a relationship for the first time in a long time , if ever , because that was no longer in the way of keeping them from doing that .

And that's wonderful . And to be able to do that so quickly and so cleanly with something and , frankly , with a minimal amount of pain . You don't have to drag it out over six months or 10 years in order to process that . You just go into it and it changes the wiring in the brain and that's amazing .

And so I was trained by Francine Shapiro , who founded EMDR back in 1993 . I'm an approved consultant . I've assisted in training in it for years , so I have a reasonably good understanding of the paradigm and how it works .

But and the gestalt is about just being human I'm just one human being sitting here with another human being and I'm witnessing your pain , because pain has to hurt , has to be witnessed in order to heal .

And my job is to be that profound witness , not to feel it for you , not take it on for you , but to witness and validate your experience so that you can then own it and move through it and past it .

There's all this stuff buried in our unconscious that we've forgotten and we didn't make the connection and all of a sudden the neural pathways start connecting . But that's how you resolve it . There's self-soothing techniques so that you could de-escalate when you got upset , and there's a bunch of them on my website .

There's an emeraldyoscom website , but there's one on public speaking . Public speaking is the number one anxiety that people have , and so I put a list of , I think , five or six self-soothing techniques to calm you down so you don't have to do that .

And the workshop that I teach , the video workshop Unspoken Boundaries it teaches you a whole new level of how to do that . Actually , it's much , much deeper . So I have one workshop that I'm offering at this point . It's Seven Steps .

It's called Seven Steps to Powerful Boundaries , but it's not one where you can just stop and do part one or part four and you really . It's a cumulative building up into a completely different way of seeing how you experience yourself in the world and it starts .

The ugly truth about boundaries is it all goes back to your childhood , because your family teaches you about boundaries and so then you assume that's how the world works and so you have to go back and look at those relationships . And some people don't want to do that , but if you can't look at it , you can't heal it .

So you have to go back and really look at that . I'm not saying you have to go out and beat anybody up about it , but you have to come to terms with that inside of you about how you choose to be in the world .

And so the first step of the seven steps is really about taking a look at your childhood and who loved you and you didn't love you , and how they expressed love . All those are really important things . If you grew up in a family where being shamed and diminished and humiliated was how they expressed love , guess what ?

What you're going to look for when you go out in the world . That's what love means to you . And so once you really understand that and then step back and say , perhaps I can find another way to feel love , that's really changing the game .

But otherwise , unconsciously , and we unconsciously are looking for our parents when we go out there , because it's that dance of intimacy we learned and like , oh , this person feels like I've known them forever .

We just think we're both grew up in the same family , and so that's usually not a good sign because most of us did not have perfect childhoods with unconditional love . So , and then step two is just a very simple description of the different kind of about 15 different kind of boundaries .

You should be aware of a cultural boundary how one culture says hello is going to be completely different than perhaps another culture is going to say hello . And it's just simple . It's really just very instructional . Step three is an introduction . The first step , introduction to energetic boundaries .

Were all made up of atoms , were all energy , and so once you really understand that and how to utilize that , it changes the whole game and in terms of boundaries and so forth . And that's step one . Step four is called a guilt free .

No , because not that you know anybody has trouble saying no Mike , I'm sure you've never had trouble saying no and so I had to deep dive into guilt and chain and I do mean a deep dive into the shape . Those are the chain workshop . People come out the other side of this knowing themselves a whole lot better and done a whole lot of healing going through it .

And step five is the big introduction or the big dive into energetic boundaries . Step six I get into some more talk about karma . I talk about intuition and clairvoyance and interception , all these other things and the role that they play in energetic boundaries and who we are .

And then step seven is the advanced skills and how to really utilize all this and integrate it into your life . A boundary is simply where I stop and you start . It's no more complicated than that . But too much of our socialization is I have to merge with you , to feel your pain , to have empathy , and which is total bullshit .

And it's the wrong thing to do , because the moment that you merge , one , you lose contact with you , and two is you're absorbing all of their crap . It's not good for you , it's not good for them and there's a much , much better way .

And that's what the workshop is about Because the truth is , when someone is in pain , they don't need you to feel their pain . They need you to be a profound witness of their pain and validate that their pain is real . That is healing , that is comforting , that is helping move them through it .

There's a ton of information about buying gay men who were sexually married . Gay men are more likely , in my experience , to get married to women when they were sexually abused Because it gives them a justification that I wouldn't be having these feelings if that hadn't happened . That's been a really big part of my practice , interestingly enough .

Also , I've been in documentaries . Channel 4 and the BVs and London flew over and did documentaries with me . I've been on TV shows my last surgery was filmed . And then the workshop is unspokenboundariescom and that's the seven steps to the powerful boundaries . It's the first workshop on there .

I for years did a workshop called Shedding Light on the Sexual Abuse of Boys and the Men they Became , and so my goal is to turn that into another workshop similar to the seven steps of powerful boundaries , so that victims of sexual assault , as well as people who need to know more about this to support those guys can come at it with the knowledge and the

healing that needs to happen to go through that . So that's my next goal .