I had a relationship with my mother & male cousin...

Hey Steve, props to you man for your openness and how far you've come! All that you've gone thru would crush most guys. Instead you're standing and even have found forgiveness for your mom. Thanks for sharing some of your journey. Hope you find MS a place that helps.
 
I am so sorry for what you have gone through! But it takes a lot of courage to admit it. Please continue your healing process.
 
Hi Steve,

Sometimes we feel like we need to see our abuse from the abuser's point of view or make excuses why the abuser was just doing what s/he thought was the right thing, etc. I held my own abuser blameless for years because she had been abused in her childhood. Sometimes we need to find something good to hold on to about the abuser to prove to ourselves that our abuse was "normal" in some way.

The problem is ... that's minimization of our abuse and excusing something that should never be excused. A good mother and a perpetrator of incest are two opposite things - one cannot be the other.

An obsession with "fairness" for a perpetrator is a way of telling yourself that you should just let it go, it wasn't that bad, others had it worse, etc. And that's not an attitude that will help you heal in the long run.

Your abuser always had the choice to NOT abuse you. And she made the choice to abuse you instead.

Might be something to think about.
 
I wanted to point out one other thing, and this comes with a trigger warning. In the title of this thread, you say you had a relationship with your mother and cousin. In the posts you say you gave her sex, you had sex, etc.

It would be much more accurate to say that they raped you. A five year old, a 12 year old, and even a 19 year old who has been gaslighted into believing incest is normal behavior cannot consent to sex. And sex without consent? We don't call that having sex. We call that rape
 
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