It Was My Best Friend
OrgelMeister
Registrant
My story is below. The first thing I did when I decided it was time to share my story and tell anyone what happened to me was to write this story. I know it is long, but I just wrote what came to me. I want to start sitting down the burden I've been carrying. I really appreciate the safety of being able to share this here.
(40M) I was repeatedly sexually abused, molested, and raped over a period of 5 years in my adolescence by my best male friend. These incidents all occurred at otherwise innocuous sleepovers. I don’t know exactly when my abuse started, but I can estimate the time period quite well based on details from repressed memories that are starting to resurface. I know the first time was before I hit puberty. My abuser and other kids in my class hit puberty before me. Now I know that boys often hit puberty between 9-14 and I was not weird, but at the time I felt like a wimp and a freak for not maturing as quickly. I had not had the “sex talk” from my parents or my school yet. I didn’t have any knowledge of sex other than it was a “bad word” that we didn’t say in my house. I haven’t told this story to anyone in full. I only recently told my wife of 17 years that it even happened at all, but never in detail.
Recently, I had a trigger that allowed me to recognize and acknowledge it. Even then it took a bit to be able to speak it out loud to my wife. I know for sure that the first incident occurred at my abuser’s old house, before his very wealthy parents built the biggest fancy house in our town at the time, up on the hill overlooking our school. That new house has been there for a long time now. I remember the first sleepover occurred when the SNES (Super Nintendo) video game “Aaahh!!! Real Monsters” was new. This game was based on the Nickelodeon television show of the same name, which I loved. My parents were strict and thought the show was stupid and “low brow” so I never could watch it at home. One of the appeals of going to my friend’s house was being able to watch it and do other normal kid things that my parents wouldn’t let me do at home. I had played the demo of this video game at Toys ‘R Us and when my friend got the game, I was incredibly excited to go over to his house to play it. The music in the game was awesome. Until this first episode of SA our playdates had always been during the day, but he got the idea to ask his parents for a sleepover, so we could try to beat the whole game in one sitting. I was so excited about this. So, based on these details and Googling when that game was released for SNES I am estimating this occurred in 1995, so I would have been ten years old. I’ve been hit hard by repressed memories like this one recently. I had not allowed myself to remember the show or the game even existed until recently when I was at a retro game convention with my wife and saw a copy of it for sale. It triggered these memories. I’d say it was the first time I really understood what people mean when they talk about “triggers”. I had to sit down and be alone for awhile. I told my wife to keep checking out the “dealers room” while I sat down. I told her I was just dehydrated and overheated. I think to some degree I was trying to convince myself that was all it was too.
I’ve been reading a lot of excellent books for survivors since that day, and I’ve come to understand how important it is for me to remember and share some of the things that I really do remember well but never wanted to. I need to address them. Even now I tend to have survivor imposter syndrome and tell myself I’m “making too much of it” or “other people had worse” and basically downplay all of this. I know cerebrally that it is not at all true and that my story is one of the worst I know of, based on the frequency and intensity of my abuse, but that I don’t want to acknowledge it because I’m afraid it will give it too much power over my current life. I also tend to minimize my experiences because they are not the norm even for abuse. For men it is “supposed” to be a priest, or a coach, or a father, etc., that abuses boys, not a friend your age. However, I’ve come to understand through reflection and knowledge about grooming that I was really being groomed with material stuff like video games that I didn’t have access to. I also realize now that we were both the bullied nerds in our school, and I really didn’t want to lose my only friend. I didn’t feel like I had a choice. I used to blame myself for not “telling on” him or fighting back more, but I always knew I would lose my whole school identity and my only real friend if I did. So, even though he was not older than me, he really did have power over me. I think the materials for helping men with sexual abuse don’t really address or give validity to experiences like mine, the way they do if your abuser was an older male. It has taken me a long time to even understand that idea, that just because I wanted to be friends didn’t mean I was consenting to sexual abuse. I still struggle with this, but I think many survivors do. It still feels weird for me to even refer to myself as a survivor, but I know now that I absolutely am.
It happened so many times, that don’t know precisely how many times I was molested, forced kissed, raped anally. I know it escalated from groping and fondling to full fledged rape, and that it occurred many times. We kept having sleepovers and I never told a soul. I still enjoyed the rest of our time together, playing video games, watching movies, playing board games with his parents, going on trips with his parents, and that made me (still makes me) feel guilty for enjoying those parts of our relationship.
I remember the first and only time I fought back was when we were at his parents’ cabin (yes they were that rich to have multiple homes), and we went on a gator ride (The John Deere Gator, not the animal). I loved being allowed to drive it myself, which his dad let us, and my parents would not have ever allowed me to do something like that. We were in the middle of the woods and he tried to grope me and I slapped his hand away. It was the only time he tried to do it in the daytime. Every other episode was in sleeping bags in a dark basement in the middle of the night, or in his parents’ camper that they have us sleep in during sleepovers. I never thought about it until now that we were very isolated from them in that camper. I’m pretty sure this one daytime attack occurred when I was in 10th grade, so the abuse would have gone on for about 5 years. We had sleepovers often, at least several times each school semester. He was an only child, and his parents always wanted me around to keep him busy while they lived their lives. That one time I fought back was the end of our friendship in effect. He stopped inviting me places, stopped telling me things that best friends told each other, and started hanging out with all the popular girls in our class instead of me. I still remember one time after this that he invited the girl I had a crush on to his house without me to play a video game. It was sort of a veiled threat that he had control of my life and could get her alone too. There was this implied threat that he would abuse her too if I didn’t let him have me. This girl is now my wife. I see now just how manipulative and toxic he was. Soon after my fighting back he came out to the school as gay and treated me like I was a homophobe, which I was not and never will be, but it was a way to hurt me for denying him access to my body. It was confirmation of all that I had feared, that if I didn’t let him abuse me, I no longer had value to him, that we could no longer be friends. I’ve only recently realized how that impression has formed my idea of self-worth and romance in a deeply twisted and unhealthy way.
Many therapists have said that people like me need to face details to help reclaim my life and my memories for myself. I need to know that I am not at all to blame and that I am truly a survivor, that didn’t want or ask for anything that happened to me. So, although I feel a lot of shame, I’m going to try and go into some detail of what happened to me as far as I can. I have snippets of strong memories. The first time I was abused I was not mature enough to get an erection when stimulated, in fact I didn’t even know about erections…I didn’t know they were a thing, and I was more confused about why he was touching me than I was alarmed. As things progressed, I have a strong impression of being in a finished basement room where his mother did laundry. She would have a clothesline with her bras hanging on the laundry line. I would often dissociate and stare at those bras while he was groping, molesting, or raping me. I was using a woman’s underwear as an escape from the homosexual rape that was going on. To this day I find women’s bras to be more erotic than most men do. I think I made them a sort of totem--a protection from these memories and a way to assure myself I was not violated from my own nature as a heterosexual. It is very confusing to have your first sexual experiences be homosexual abuse when you’re a straight male and don’t even know what that really means yet. I used to obsess over what it would be like to someday have a loving wife voluntarily wear a sexy bra for me instead of this. Eventually after I hit puberty myself, I was more aware of what these nights of rape really were and what they meant. I think he realized this himself and could sense I was much more uncomfortable and now more aware of what was going on. He would give me his dad’s Playboy magazines to look at before we would “go to sleep” so that I would have seen naked women before he would start abusing me. Eventually even this would not placate me, and he would start telling me to just relax and imagine I was one of the girls I liked at school. Like most boy best friends we would often talk about girls we liked, but I didn’t understand that it was manipulation in his case. I believed he was straight too for so long because of this. I think I talked myself into thinking this was all normal and that other boys did this sort of roleplay at sleepovers to learn how to have sex with their eventual girlfriends. I always remained completely passive regardless. He certainly tried to get me to be active and participate in various sex acts, but I never would and I would tense up so much that I thought I’d puke. To this day its hard for me to have sex without dissociating or fantasizing about a bra or a super attractive woman. My wife is a very attractive woman, but I still can’t feel comfortable without relying on dissociation. I know I was trained to believe my body is just an object that has stuff done to it. It’s hard to break out of that.
I have this intense need to feel that my partner is completely in control so that I know for sure that they really want to have sex with me. I don’t want anyone to do what I did and silently let unwanted sex occur. The only way to feel sure is to have my partner do it all in sex so I’m sure that they aren’t lying to me and secretly feel abused by my wanting them. I am also extremely sensitive if my wife ever seems uninterested in me even for a moment. It seems like I need to be perfectly sexy to her at all times or else I’ll be discarded entirely just like he did.
As I finally start to face this stuff, I hope my healing journey can lead me to seeing and feeling differently about sex. Hopefully I can reorient myself to a different view, but I know from therapists that I need to be able to accept myself as I am. I can’t get rid of the cliché of believing I’m hopelessly broken, ruined, weird, permanently a freak. I need to be ok with my story as is even without healing perfectly.
I hope sharing this stuff with more fellow human beings will be a big step in my healing. I understand that I need to be angry about this. It really is unforgiveable, and I need to feel these feelings and then let myself move on. I want to be able to feel like I am worth more than being a sex object and I need to let myself be allowed to enjoy consensual sex with my chosen partner, and most of all that I am sexually enough as I am—trauma and all.
(40M) I was repeatedly sexually abused, molested, and raped over a period of 5 years in my adolescence by my best male friend. These incidents all occurred at otherwise innocuous sleepovers. I don’t know exactly when my abuse started, but I can estimate the time period quite well based on details from repressed memories that are starting to resurface. I know the first time was before I hit puberty. My abuser and other kids in my class hit puberty before me. Now I know that boys often hit puberty between 9-14 and I was not weird, but at the time I felt like a wimp and a freak for not maturing as quickly. I had not had the “sex talk” from my parents or my school yet. I didn’t have any knowledge of sex other than it was a “bad word” that we didn’t say in my house. I haven’t told this story to anyone in full. I only recently told my wife of 17 years that it even happened at all, but never in detail.
Recently, I had a trigger that allowed me to recognize and acknowledge it. Even then it took a bit to be able to speak it out loud to my wife. I know for sure that the first incident occurred at my abuser’s old house, before his very wealthy parents built the biggest fancy house in our town at the time, up on the hill overlooking our school. That new house has been there for a long time now. I remember the first sleepover occurred when the SNES (Super Nintendo) video game “Aaahh!!! Real Monsters” was new. This game was based on the Nickelodeon television show of the same name, which I loved. My parents were strict and thought the show was stupid and “low brow” so I never could watch it at home. One of the appeals of going to my friend’s house was being able to watch it and do other normal kid things that my parents wouldn’t let me do at home. I had played the demo of this video game at Toys ‘R Us and when my friend got the game, I was incredibly excited to go over to his house to play it. The music in the game was awesome. Until this first episode of SA our playdates had always been during the day, but he got the idea to ask his parents for a sleepover, so we could try to beat the whole game in one sitting. I was so excited about this. So, based on these details and Googling when that game was released for SNES I am estimating this occurred in 1995, so I would have been ten years old. I’ve been hit hard by repressed memories like this one recently. I had not allowed myself to remember the show or the game even existed until recently when I was at a retro game convention with my wife and saw a copy of it for sale. It triggered these memories. I’d say it was the first time I really understood what people mean when they talk about “triggers”. I had to sit down and be alone for awhile. I told my wife to keep checking out the “dealers room” while I sat down. I told her I was just dehydrated and overheated. I think to some degree I was trying to convince myself that was all it was too.
I’ve been reading a lot of excellent books for survivors since that day, and I’ve come to understand how important it is for me to remember and share some of the things that I really do remember well but never wanted to. I need to address them. Even now I tend to have survivor imposter syndrome and tell myself I’m “making too much of it” or “other people had worse” and basically downplay all of this. I know cerebrally that it is not at all true and that my story is one of the worst I know of, based on the frequency and intensity of my abuse, but that I don’t want to acknowledge it because I’m afraid it will give it too much power over my current life. I also tend to minimize my experiences because they are not the norm even for abuse. For men it is “supposed” to be a priest, or a coach, or a father, etc., that abuses boys, not a friend your age. However, I’ve come to understand through reflection and knowledge about grooming that I was really being groomed with material stuff like video games that I didn’t have access to. I also realize now that we were both the bullied nerds in our school, and I really didn’t want to lose my only friend. I didn’t feel like I had a choice. I used to blame myself for not “telling on” him or fighting back more, but I always knew I would lose my whole school identity and my only real friend if I did. So, even though he was not older than me, he really did have power over me. I think the materials for helping men with sexual abuse don’t really address or give validity to experiences like mine, the way they do if your abuser was an older male. It has taken me a long time to even understand that idea, that just because I wanted to be friends didn’t mean I was consenting to sexual abuse. I still struggle with this, but I think many survivors do. It still feels weird for me to even refer to myself as a survivor, but I know now that I absolutely am.
It happened so many times, that don’t know precisely how many times I was molested, forced kissed, raped anally. I know it escalated from groping and fondling to full fledged rape, and that it occurred many times. We kept having sleepovers and I never told a soul. I still enjoyed the rest of our time together, playing video games, watching movies, playing board games with his parents, going on trips with his parents, and that made me (still makes me) feel guilty for enjoying those parts of our relationship.
I remember the first and only time I fought back was when we were at his parents’ cabin (yes they were that rich to have multiple homes), and we went on a gator ride (The John Deere Gator, not the animal). I loved being allowed to drive it myself, which his dad let us, and my parents would not have ever allowed me to do something like that. We were in the middle of the woods and he tried to grope me and I slapped his hand away. It was the only time he tried to do it in the daytime. Every other episode was in sleeping bags in a dark basement in the middle of the night, or in his parents’ camper that they have us sleep in during sleepovers. I never thought about it until now that we were very isolated from them in that camper. I’m pretty sure this one daytime attack occurred when I was in 10th grade, so the abuse would have gone on for about 5 years. We had sleepovers often, at least several times each school semester. He was an only child, and his parents always wanted me around to keep him busy while they lived their lives. That one time I fought back was the end of our friendship in effect. He stopped inviting me places, stopped telling me things that best friends told each other, and started hanging out with all the popular girls in our class instead of me. I still remember one time after this that he invited the girl I had a crush on to his house without me to play a video game. It was sort of a veiled threat that he had control of my life and could get her alone too. There was this implied threat that he would abuse her too if I didn’t let him have me. This girl is now my wife. I see now just how manipulative and toxic he was. Soon after my fighting back he came out to the school as gay and treated me like I was a homophobe, which I was not and never will be, but it was a way to hurt me for denying him access to my body. It was confirmation of all that I had feared, that if I didn’t let him abuse me, I no longer had value to him, that we could no longer be friends. I’ve only recently realized how that impression has formed my idea of self-worth and romance in a deeply twisted and unhealthy way.
Many therapists have said that people like me need to face details to help reclaim my life and my memories for myself. I need to know that I am not at all to blame and that I am truly a survivor, that didn’t want or ask for anything that happened to me. So, although I feel a lot of shame, I’m going to try and go into some detail of what happened to me as far as I can. I have snippets of strong memories. The first time I was abused I was not mature enough to get an erection when stimulated, in fact I didn’t even know about erections…I didn’t know they were a thing, and I was more confused about why he was touching me than I was alarmed. As things progressed, I have a strong impression of being in a finished basement room where his mother did laundry. She would have a clothesline with her bras hanging on the laundry line. I would often dissociate and stare at those bras while he was groping, molesting, or raping me. I was using a woman’s underwear as an escape from the homosexual rape that was going on. To this day I find women’s bras to be more erotic than most men do. I think I made them a sort of totem--a protection from these memories and a way to assure myself I was not violated from my own nature as a heterosexual. It is very confusing to have your first sexual experiences be homosexual abuse when you’re a straight male and don’t even know what that really means yet. I used to obsess over what it would be like to someday have a loving wife voluntarily wear a sexy bra for me instead of this. Eventually after I hit puberty myself, I was more aware of what these nights of rape really were and what they meant. I think he realized this himself and could sense I was much more uncomfortable and now more aware of what was going on. He would give me his dad’s Playboy magazines to look at before we would “go to sleep” so that I would have seen naked women before he would start abusing me. Eventually even this would not placate me, and he would start telling me to just relax and imagine I was one of the girls I liked at school. Like most boy best friends we would often talk about girls we liked, but I didn’t understand that it was manipulation in his case. I believed he was straight too for so long because of this. I think I talked myself into thinking this was all normal and that other boys did this sort of roleplay at sleepovers to learn how to have sex with their eventual girlfriends. I always remained completely passive regardless. He certainly tried to get me to be active and participate in various sex acts, but I never would and I would tense up so much that I thought I’d puke. To this day its hard for me to have sex without dissociating or fantasizing about a bra or a super attractive woman. My wife is a very attractive woman, but I still can’t feel comfortable without relying on dissociation. I know I was trained to believe my body is just an object that has stuff done to it. It’s hard to break out of that.
I have this intense need to feel that my partner is completely in control so that I know for sure that they really want to have sex with me. I don’t want anyone to do what I did and silently let unwanted sex occur. The only way to feel sure is to have my partner do it all in sex so I’m sure that they aren’t lying to me and secretly feel abused by my wanting them. I am also extremely sensitive if my wife ever seems uninterested in me even for a moment. It seems like I need to be perfectly sexy to her at all times or else I’ll be discarded entirely just like he did.
As I finally start to face this stuff, I hope my healing journey can lead me to seeing and feeling differently about sex. Hopefully I can reorient myself to a different view, but I know from therapists that I need to be able to accept myself as I am. I can’t get rid of the cliché of believing I’m hopelessly broken, ruined, weird, permanently a freak. I need to be ok with my story as is even without healing perfectly.
I hope sharing this stuff with more fellow human beings will be a big step in my healing. I understand that I need to be angry about this. It really is unforgiveable, and I need to feel these feelings and then let myself move on. I want to be able to feel like I am worth more than being a sex object and I need to let myself be allowed to enjoy consensual sex with my chosen partner, and most of all that I am sexually enough as I am—trauma and all.
