What happens when you’ve been hurt, but the world has taught you that “real men” can’t be victims?

In this episode of Embracing All of Me, host Ross talks with social worker and trauma specialist Rick Goodwin, Managing Director of Men & Healing and lead trainer with 1in6, an organization supporting men who’ve experienced sexual violence.

Rick shares a study that still haunts him: researchers interviewed men and women in their 30s about whether they’d been sexually abused as children. They already knew every participant was a survivor from police and child protection records. Two-thirds of the women said yes. Only 16% of the men did. The rest couldn’t—or wouldn’t—name what happened to them as abuse.

That gap, Rick says, is the “male code” at work. Many of us were raised on rules like:

• Men must be invulnerable.
• Men must be in control.
• Men must not show “feminine” traits or anything that looks queer.

If masculinity demands invulnerability, then you can’t be a victim. So the pain gets buried under anger, jokes, hookups, addictions, workaholism—anything but the truth. For some survivors, that buried shame boils over into rage, especially when conflict touches old wounds.

Rick calls it the shame–rage spiral: the more ashamed you feel, the more explosive you can become, and the worse you feel afterward.

So what breaks the spiral? Not perfection. Not toughness.

Dignity.

And dignity, Rick insists, is almost impossible to grow alone. Healing starts when survivors risk breaking secrecy—maybe by whispering the truth to a journal, saying the words out loud in an empty room, or listening to other survivors’ stories online. Eventually, that path can lead into support groups and community, where something powerful happens:

Men who have spent decades hating themselves turn toward each other with softness.

“I’ve been there, too.”
“You’re not crazy.”
“You’re not alone.”

The turning point, Rick says, is when a man realizes: “Why can I offer compassion to everyone else in this circle but not to myself?”

For anyone who’s ever had to split themselves to survive—especially bi+ men and men of color navigating faith, family, masculinity, and trauma—this conversation is an invitation: you don’t have to carry it alone, or forever.

Listen to the full episode with Rick Goodwin on Embracing All of Me to hear more about shame, masculinity, and what it actually looks like to start healing in community.

Listen to the full episode below