On Monday November 2, 2015 I completed my book Healing the Man Within. 

A friend of mine asked me how long it took me to write the book.

 “Forty-six-years,” I told him. “It has been forty-six-years in the making.” 

The reality is the book took me two intense years of writing and about three years of contemplation and planning. It was my therapist that finally pushed me over the edge to actually start writing it. Prior to writing this book I had absolutely no knowledge of what it would take to write one. Oh sure, I had written hundreds of pages in my journals, but a book? 

I had been speaking publically about being sexually abused as a child for seven years with a group called It Happens to Boys.” I talk about how it affected me as both a child and an adult, as well as and most importantly, how I was able to heal the wounds from my abuse. Now it was time to put it in a book for the whole world to read. 

It is not so much that I needed to, but I wanted to. I wanted to be the voice of the hundreds of thousands of men that feel they have no voice, and I wanted my book Healing the Man Within to be an instrument to find that voice, to gain the courage to finally talk about the secrets they were going to take to their graves. So with the encouragement of my therapist Deborah Meints- Pierson, Carol Teitlebaum, and my wife Cathy, I started writing. 

The journey of writing this book was not easy - not from the standpoint of writing, but from the standpoint of feelings and emotions that were constantly challenging me. There were countless times I wanted to quit and walk away form the book, but it is too important of a book to just walk away from. 

Besides if I did walk away, that would mean that the people who abused me won. After all, it was their voices I heard telling me, “Who do you think you are? Nobody’s going to read this book.”  

Then there were the overwhelming feelings of shame that would pour over me. Even though I had done intense inner-child and shame work with my therapist, I still became overwhelmed with feelings of shame at times. 

What kept me going was my desire to let other men know they’re not alone in the way they feel. Add to that. the tremendous support and encouragement I had from people like Dan Griffin, Dr. Allen Berger, John Lee, Jerry Moe, and many others in the healing field who would remind me of the importance of this book, and how it was desperately needed in the healing community. So it was the voices of these men that I learned to listen to rather than the voices from my past that were constantly trying to discourage me and lie to me about how my voice is meaningless. 

So just over two years after sitting down and putting pen to paper, or in todays world, my fingers to the keyboard, my book Healing the Man Within is complete, published and released. So far all the reviews have been nothing but stellar. It’s available on my website at  www.courageoushealers.org, amazon.com, and it is also available in a Kindle format. 

 - By Randy Boyd

Randy is a licensed California Alcohol and Drug Counselor, the founder of the Courageous Healers Foundation, and an associate of "It Happens to Boys." He speaks at conferences, schools, and treatment facilities, about the effects of abuse on men, and how men can heal from those effects. Randy is the author of the new groundbreaking book addressing the sexual abuse of boys entitled Healing the Man Within, a book for male survivors written by a male survivor.

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