Beyond Neverland

The documentary Leaving Neverland has shown a light on the darkness of what happened behind the closed gates of Michael Jackson’s heavenly world. 

It sparked debates and sometimes aggressive insults from the fans of the star. It also opened conversations on the unsettling topic of sexual abuse. 

The Neverland Process

Michael Jackson’s Neverland story is an extreme one due to the level of his stardom which strongly survives his death, but it is also consistent with the millions of other stories of childhood sexual abuse, all of them with a Neverland process: why? Because the Neverland process is what sex offenders use to abuse. 

The Neverland process is sex offenders creating a world of distorted beliefs for their victims and the adults around them with specific steps:  

1-   Blending in society looking kind, caring, benevolent and trusting. When we think of sex offenders or child molesters, we are invested in having an image of an undesirable, monstrous and disgusting man we can spot a mile away. This image is partly so that we foster a sense of knowing how to protect our children. However, the reality is much different. Most sex offenders blend very well in our society, especially in places where children are accessible. They look good, they look fun and they look very friendly. 

2-   Friends of parents. Most sexual abuse happen in the child’s home by someone whom the child knows well and even loves. It is often one of the parents or both, or a grandparent, uncle, cousin, childminder, and so on. Occasionally, it is someone outside of the family who makes lots of efforts to befriend the parents. They pretend to be kind, loving and caring so that the parents have no suspicion of the hidden agenda. They eventually persuade the parents that they are the safest person to leave their children with so that they can have a much deserved break from parenting. This is called grooming the family. 

3-   Love. The sex offender makes the child feel very special, the chosen one, they make the child feel very loved and safe. They desensitise the child with lots of hugs and seemingly innocent bodily contact to normalise close physical proximity. And very gradually move towards inappropriate sexual touch, which they manipulate the child into believing it is a special kind of love. This is called grooming the child. 

4-   Distancing the parents. By fostering the sense of a special kind of love with the child, the sex offender also creates a wedge between the child and the parents: the child starts to believe that the offender loves him more than his own parents and therefore wants to spend more time with the offender than the parents. Most often, the parents perceive it as the child creating a bond with others, which is usually seen as healthy socialising development. If it is one of the parents abusing the child, that parent will make the child believe that the other parent is the unkind one and the child should have a special secret relationship with the ‘better’ parent. 

5-   Psychological abuse. The sex offender manipulate the child into staying silent, lying to the parents and keeping the secret of the abuse to protect themselves from reporting and also to ensure they can continue the abuse multiple times. They often say something like: ‘nobody understands our special bond, if you tell you will hurt everybody and you will be taken away from your family. You’re safe here, this is our secret’. 

As you can see, all of these steps above were eloquently described by both James and Wade in the Leaving Neverland documentary. The Neverland process happens in most childhood sexual abuse, including with the ones involving a celebrity. 

The intoxicating Stardom 

What makes the childhood sexual abuse by Michael Jackson stand out is his fame, obviously. His stardom status such that the grooming is made very easy as it started even before Michael Jackson met his victims. Wade was already a big fan of his, he was primed to respond to him so well. When I saw Wade dancing on Michael Jackson’s stage, I saw a child who wasn’t just being made to feel special, like the usual sexual abuse process, but a child who was intoxicated by Jackson’s stardom, a feeling that nobody else in the world could ever offer him. Nobody can compete with that kind of attention. Wade himself said that Michael Jackson was his God. 

It was a little different with James. As a child he wasn’t a fan of Michael Jackson, he was unlucky enough to be cast in his Pepsi advert. Soon after meeting him on set, he found him in his home, put posters of him on his walls, which is essentially like manufacturing a new fan. James being young and vulnerable got trapped into the Jackson dream web.

Both set of parents got trapped in the same web too. There is no precedence for a mega star to turn up in your humble home and wanting to be friends with you. James’ mother was flattered that her family was the chosen family of his friendship, and because of his child-like persona soon considered him as one of her children. This would have not happened if an ordinary fully-grown man turned up at your front door wanting to be your son’s best friend. Wade’s parents wanted their son to live his dream and be a friend of his favourite idol, making very bad judgements of the situations. As it was explained in the documentary, the normal judgment process went out of the window because he was a huge star. 

Michael Jackson’s callously used his stardom and his child-like persona to bypass parents’ guards. ‘How could such a sweet child-like man harm another child?’ people would say to reassure themselves. Jackson was both a child and Santa Clause, as James described: he would take him to toy shops and allow him to fill his trolley with whatever he wanted: it was magic!  

Michael Jackson’s father robbed him of his childhood and he had traumatic early years. But let’s make no mistake: Michael Jackson was not a child trapped in a man’s body. He was a fully grown man who was a sex offender. Only adults with a fully functioning brain are capable of such psychological abuse and manipulation that was described by both James and Wade. A combination of his fame and child-like persona was his way in into children’s lives and their parents for accelerated grooming. 

Trauma, the brain and psychological abuse: why survivors don’t report 

As we see in the documentary, and as I see in my consulting room every day, the impact of childhood sexual abuse is far reaching. One of the hallmarks of trauma is that parts of the brain becomes impaired during the abuse. The Broca’s area responsible for speech production and language processing goes offline which means that it is sometimes hard for survivors of sexual abuse to verbalise what happened to them. It may be after a long psychological treatment that some words to the abuse can return. 

The prefrontal cortex is also impaired so it is difficult for the brain to formulate a coherent story of the abuse, often missing many elements to it, with some fragmented memories or complete loss of memories. These brain impairments that are normal faced with trauma are some of the reasons why some people don’t report straight away. They fear that if they are being asked questions, they won’t have all the answers and therefore won’t be believed. 

Another reason why people don’t report abuse is the silencing effect of the psychological abuse that goes with sexual abuse. Both James and Wade didn’t’ suffer memory loss but they both said that it was easier not to talk about it because they couldn’t make sense of it all. If you can’t make sense of it yourself, how can you start a conversation about it with someone else? 

It is common for survivors of abuse not to have a coherent narrative. Even if survivors remember everything they doubt their own reality. As Wade says: Michael Jackson was a God to him. How can he make sense that his God, the one who opened the gates to Heaven for him and his family be also the one sexually abusing him? How can he make sense of such a God telling him that it is how love is expressed? 

How can survivors make sense that the unwanted touch felt loving and pleasurable too? 

How can they make sense that the man they love and allegedly loves them back also threatens them if you tell anybody? 

As Oprah Winfrey points out, when Michael Jackson says to a child: ‘the best part of the holiday was to be with you, I mean it’, how can you not feel so loved? 

With psychological abuse, the narrative of what happened becomes distorted. As both Wade and James said, they didn’t realise that what was happening to them was abuse. They just couldn’t identify the word ‘abuse’ with their story. 

This is why many adult survivors of sexual abuse never speak out, and never report. And the longer they wait, the more they fear not being believed: ‘Why did you wait so long to tell? Why did you keep hanging out with the abuser? Are you sure you remember right? Why did you change your story?’ The longer survivors wait, the less likely there will be evidence, and the more likely they fear not being believed. 

But not talking is isolated. Isolation is where sex offenders want survivors to be so that they can be protected from being reported and continue to abuse. 

The trauma of being sexually abused doesn’t go away and, unfortunately, time doesn’t heal it. In fact, time can make the trauma fester and it leads to people hating themselves more and more towards self-harm to the extent of suicide. Both Wade and James described their self-hatred eloquently. They could connect well with hating themselves but not connect with feeling empathy towards themselves. They could only connect to it when they saw their own children’s vulnerability. 

Forgive and forget? 

It is not possible to forget. Survivors will never forget what happened to them. James said in the Oprah Winfrey interview: ‘forgiveness is not a line you cross, it’s a road you travel’. It is usual for survivors of sexual abuse to be very angry at the adults who allowed the abuse to happen. In the case with James and Wade’s parents, perhaps they made gross bad judgements being blinded by the star. In some cases, the parents intentionally turn a blind eye to prioritise and preserve other family relationships and not ‘rock the boat’. In that case, the parents also become abusers. 

If survivors are willing, they can go on the long journey of forgiveness, and some can forgive. But they will never forget, and the relationship with those adults will never be the same. However, forgiveness is not necessary for healing. Forgiveness is perceived as the ultimate good thing to do, sometimes, it is seen as the superior thing to do. Survivors of sexual abuse do not need to forgive their abusers or those who have wilfully enabled the abuse. True healing can happen without it. I think it is an important message because survivors are often reluctant to start therapy fearing that the therapist might ask them to forgive when they don’t want to. 

It is not the child’s fault, ever. 

When there is sexual abuse, it is always the abuser’s fault. The adult is always the one holding the responsibility to protect a child, never the other way around. It is not the child’s fault if he felt sexual pleasure. It is a normal physical reaction. It has nothing to do with him liking or wanting it or not. It is not a child’s fault for loving his abuser. It is what the abuser manufactures so that they can continue abusing. It is not a child’s fault if he wanted to stay with his abuser: abusers makes a child love them so that they can ensure access to him, and continue to manipulate him into staying silent. It is not a child’s fault if he wanted to protect his abuser. It is the normal reaction of survivors who have been psychologically abused into doing so. It is not a child’s fault if he has been sexually abused. He was not the seducer, he was a child, only the adult is responsible for it. 

The vitriol of Michael Jackson’s fans

This blog will probably be criticised by Michael Jackson’s fans. As Oprah Winfrey says in the interview with James and Wade: ‘We are all going to get it!’. Most people don’t understand what it is like to be a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, and they much less understand the psychology of sex offenders. Therefore, it is easy for the public to make up their own stories, ideas and judgements about their star. For the fans, changing Michael Jackson’s image would be a painful process of re-thinking what they had felt in their own childhood about their idol. Some fans can be aggressive, as Wade explained receiving death threats from them. That is unacceptable. But when we think of Michael Jackson’s fans’ vitriol, let’s remind ourselves that they are not talking about the survivors of sexual abuse, they’re talking about themselves and their inability to regulate their anxious emotions of change. It doesn’t make the aggression acceptable to survivors of sexual abuse, though. 

I would suggest not to allow those aggressive people deter survivors from speaking out: they can choose a safe person to tell first: usually it would be someone who can understand them, like a specialised therapist. Or it can be a good friend whom they trust to be believed and supported. It is good to start with one safe person, and then decide what they want to do next. In the UK, there is no expiry date for reporting a sex offender to the police. 

Hope and healing: effective trauma treatment

If you have been sexually abused as a child, there is good treatment available and there is great hope for healing. Find a therapist who is trauma informed and specialised in sexual abuse. Some of the effective psycho-traumatology treatments available are: 

Somatic trauma psychotherapy 

Trauma-focused CBT

EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitisation Reprocessing)

There is a life beyond the Hell of Neverland. There is a vibrant, exciting, thriving and safe life for you to enjoy. Be courageous and start the steps of healing. 

Silva Neves 

How to think about pornography

There is so much confusion about pornography at the moment. It’s easy to be scared of it because there seems to be a cultural and social panic about it. 

Much of what is online and in books on the subject demonize porn, creating fear. The instant access to pornography through devices is relatively recent. It is easy to be in panic about it if we think that porn is everywhere, only a few taps away, invading the private space of our homes. 

People are free to think of pornography whichever they want to think of it, watch it or not watch it. It doesn’t bother me. I’m neither pro-porn or anti-porn. However, what bothers me is the vast amount of wrong facts about porn that is grossly misleading the public and is unscientific. There is so much misinformation that the real science drowned in so much noise. The focus of this blog is to bring some facts back to the debate. Some of these may be uncomfortable truths. But as a clinician, I’m led by clinical evidence rather than personal opinions or popular views. 

It is popular to demonize porn and to point the fingers at it for everything that is going wrong in people’s relationships or sex lives. Focusing on porn is definitely looking in the wrong places and, unfortunately, focusing on stopping watching porn will not fix your sexual issues, your relationship problems or your sense of well-being. Most importantly, focusing on stopping watching porn won’t teach you anything about yourself, your erotic mind, how to achieve psychological well-being and psychosexual wellness. It won’t teach you anything about what is really going on in your intimate relationships. It will only teach you to repress some important things about yourself, which only set you up to face them again in the future, in other forms, maybe even worst forms. I’m sorry to burst the bubble.

Firstly, allow me to de-bunk some myths. I would like to stress again that these are not my personal views, there are my clinical understanding based on the real scientific research: 

1-   ‘Porn makes a bad society’. Wrong: data shows that sexual crimes are lower in areas where there is greater access to porn. This phenomenon is observed widely: it is common knowledge that when sex is repressed, people can demand it in ways that are inappropriate. 

2-   ‘Porn creates objectification’. Wrong: objectification is focusing on a body parts and making it an object of sexual gratification, without considering the whole human being. Research in sexual fantasies show that men and women, even those who do not watch porn objectify. In fact, it seems that objectification is a part of sexual desire and sexual arousal. Some people may objectify more than others, but, it is largely a normal human thing to do. However, when men objectify, it can be perceived as being more threatening, understandably, because of the number of men being sexually violent to women. Another interesting study shows that many men focuses on the performers’ faces rather than body parts, as what is most arousing is the look of pleasure. Men and women both have fantasies that have emotional component, but we tend to express it in different ways. Men are not from Mars and Women are not from Venus. We all are from the same Erotic planet.

3-   ‘Porn creates relationship problems’. Wrong: porn is the easy and convenient way to make an exit to avoid the problems in the relationship but it doesn’t create relationship problems. Other things create relationship problems. Like sexual shame, high morals, contempt, anger, power struggles, low self-esteem, distorted beliefs about sex and relationships, insecurities, and so on. 

4-   ‘Porn creates erectile dysfunction’. Wrong: this is a popular view promoted by anti-porn campaigns that is fiercely inaccurate and unscientific. Erectile dysfunction and other sexual problems pre-date watching porn: porn is the easiest area of enjoying one’s sexuality without the anxiety of performance, so it is more enjoyable. True scientific research finds that the erections and orgasms with porn can be of better quality: it can truly be a special quality sexual time with yourself. 

5-   ‘Porn pornifies the brain and re-wires it negatively, the brain needs to be re-booted’.  Wrong: this is another popular opinion that has no bases in sciences. It is so popular that there are some anti-porn, anti-masturbation organizations using the word ‘reboot’ in their slogans. I’m going to burst your bubble again: the brain is not a computer and there is no re-boot button. The brain never reboots as it continuously develops. Once we watch something that titillates us, it tends to stay in the brain and we tend to return to it. The same process happens if we watch something that repulses us, we tend to stop watching it and never return to it (which disproves another inaccurate view that porn watching escalates to places we don’t want to go to: wrong). The brain keeps re-wiring itself based on experiences that we have. If we keep having anxiety-filled experiences having sex with someone and anxiety-free watching porn, porn will continue to be more attractive. Stopping watching porn and stopping masturbating for 90 days isn’t going to reboot your brain. In fact it’s going to increase your sexual shame and your anxiety. And it won’t teach you how to have anxiety-free sex with partners the way you want to, which is the crux of the problem, actually. 

6-   ‘Watching porn leads to paedophilia, sexual offending and sexual violence towards women’. Wrong: this is probably the most fear-mongering propaganda against porn. In fact, proper research consistently proves the opposite. Paedophilia and sexual offending are specific areas of pathology and psychological disturbance. Watching porn and masturbating is not pathological and does not indicate psychological problems. 

7-   ‘Porn is addictive’. Wrong: this is also a very popular belief based on moralistic opinions rather than science. The use of pornography is being consistently rejected from all medical and psychological bodies as there is no clinical evidence of addictive properties to porn. the World Health Organisation (WHO) which has made a diagnostic criteria for compulsive sexual behaviours (ICD-11), and which is very much led by scientific evidence, has explicitly rejected the idea of ‘sex addiction’ and ‘porn addiction’. 

Anti-porn, anti-masturbation organisations often cite hundreds of ‘studies’ and ‘brain scans’ and words like ‘dopamine’ to prove their point and make the public believe them. Don’t be intimidated by all of that! Most ‘studies’ cited in those websites and books are not scientifically sound because they all fail to measure many elements that constitute criteria for pathology. They also fail to measure the relationship between porn, masturbation and sexual satisfaction. They ignore many important facts.

Dopamine is so often mentioned as way to make those inaccurate ‘studies’ credible. The truth is that dopamine goes up when the brain notices something is novel. Dopamine is not part of the pleasure experience (Schultz won a nobel prize for demonstrating this, so it is quite insulting when people keep saying the contrary). Dopamine is actually great and healthy, it means your brain is responding appropriately to novelty. Of course, there is a lot of novelty in porn. 

Also, these pseudo-science ‘studies’ that demonize porn most often make the basic error of confusing correlation and causation. Two things can be strongly correlated and have absolutely no causal relationship. It is this basic error that makes anti-porn, anti-masturbation preachers point finger at porn and blame it for all sorts of problems. 

If porn is not a problem in itself, then what is the real problems? It is important to recognise that many people struggle with their use of porn. If it is not a disease, a character defect, an addiction, like so many anti-porn campaigners say, then what is this problem? 

Whether we like it or not, young people aged 11 and above are curious about sex. We cannot change this. Children should not be watching porn because it is adult entertainment and not appropriate for underage people. But there is a massive lack of sex education. Parents feel awkward talking about sex. Teachers are equally uncomfortable talking about it. So where does it leave young people with a mind full of curiosity and questions? Of course, they turn to porn. And it is definitely the wrong place for sex education. The inappropriate lessons they get from porn is: ‘my penis should be big and hard all the time’, ‘vaginas should be hairless’, ‘men and women’s body should look perfect’, ‘sexual intercourse should last for 30 minutes at least’, ‘women should be screaming during sex’, ‘men should pound women hard’, and so on. All of these messages are so bad that they will set young people up for a lot of sexual and relationship problems. I can’t say it often: more sex education, please!

Let’s look at it another way: shall we say that fast food cause obesity and kill people? Shall we then ban all fast food and only have salad shops? Or is the problem in people not knowing enough about nutrition, not knowing how to use fast food appropriately, not knowing how to cook? What if there was more food education and what if we taught every child how to cook properly? I think it would be more useful than demonizing fast food. The same goes with porn. 

Porn can also indicate an insecure relationship dynamics. Many women fear porn because of their insecurities: they can’t compete with the porn actress: ‘if my husband watches a blond actress and I’m brunette, it means he doesn’t find me sexually attractive’, and so on. Research in sexual fantasies finds that most people fantasize about their partner, and they don’t pay that much attention to actresses or actors. For some, porn is a way to imagine themselves having great sex with their partner. For others, it is a private world that is well boundaried and doesn’t have an impact on their sexual feelings towards their partner. Most people don’t know that. Again, the misinformation fuels fear of porn inaccurately. There is a similar phenomenon with men being threatened by women using sex toys fearing it is a replacement of their penis and the toy can provide more pleasure than the penis: how can the penis compete with vibrations going for hours! Yet, most women enjoy their partner’s penis and their sex toys in boundaried ways, without any dark motives of replacing their partner’s penis. If it is absolutely unacceptable for your partner that you watch porn, you have two choices: you stop watching porn to keep your relationship or you change your partner. This seems simple and flippant, but it is not. One of the main ingredients for a good relationship is to have important shared values. If you have different values about porn and they are important values, you may need to consider finding someone with the same values. Let’s take another example: some people will only be in a relationship with someone who share their political values, or they dietary values, or their status values. The same goes with the porn values. 

Psychosexual issues. Most often, because of a lack of sex education and unpleasant or anxiety-filled first sexual experiences, erectile dysfunction, premature ejaculation or delayed ejaculation can be a struggle for many men. Most often, these psychosexual problems are what we call ‘situational’, they only occur in the situation where they are with a partner, not when alone. This is obvious as there is no need for anxiety of ‘not performing’ when alone. Porn does not create such dysfunctions. The dysfunctions come first and make porn a lot more pleasurable than partner sex. Resolving these psychosexual issues involves fostering an anxiety-free sexual space and full acceptance with the two partners, which can be almost impossible to achieve if one partner is very hurt by the use of porn, disapproving and angry. For sex to be good in a relationship, the partner who feels betrayed by porn needs to recovery, first. Then, the couple can work on their sex lives, as a team. 

Sexual shame. It is now well documented that the biggest struggle that people face with porn isn’t actually the watching it or masturbating to it, but the shame they feel afterwards. Shame is a strong and unpleasant emotions that can propel some people to try to find a ‘cure’ to their porn problems. The anti-porn campaigns fuel this shame exponentially. In my consulting room, I see on a regular basis sexual shame dissolving as soon as I normalise masturbation behaviours and present them with the real science behind it. Religious and moralistic opinions can increase sexual shame too. However, if you have important religious beliefs that are against porn, you either have to change your beliefs or not watch porn to match your belief. It is easier to choose a religion than to go against your natural sexual fantasies, I think, but it is entirely your choice. Anyone can do it. Stop watching porn does not cause withdrawal symptoms. 

For some people, watching porn and masturbation is a good way to soothe some emotions: stress, sadness, anger, boredom, for example. If it is the only method for soothing, porn watching and masturbation can feel like compulsive. Most often, it is not compulsive, but individuals need to learn other ways to self-soothe so that they can have different ways to deal with emotions, not just one. Porn watching and masturbation can then be one out of several methods of soothing and it will feel more in control. 

There are many ways you can watch porn ethically and safely for adult and sexual entertainment purposes and integrate it into a vibrant sex life both with yourself and with your partner. For more guidance on this, I recommend the book ‘Ethical Porn for Dicks’ by David J. Ley. For more information on interesting scientific research on sexual fantasies, I recommend ‘Tell Me What You Want’ by Justin Lehmiller. 

If this blog was challenging for you, I hope you can take some time to digest it and look after yourself. I hope I brought some clarity to some people and food for thoughts for other people. If you think this is a terrible blog, you can peacefully stop reading it. If you think this is a good blog, I hope it can help you towards your sexual development, sexual and relationship maturity and accepting your rich and vibrant erotic world, within the boundaries that feel right for you. 

Silva Neves