My Story
My Story
*** Trigger Warning***
I was molested when I was 7 years old. My abuser was a female babysitter 15-17 years old. My memories are fragmented, but I think it went on for a few months, probably the whole summer. I remember in my bedroom, she locked the door and turned off the lights. She took my hand to her breasts. She showed me her vagina. I don’t remember much more, including how I felt about it, but we must have been in there for a while because my older brother came looking for us and knocked on the door. I could see she was panicking, and she called out to him in response but I can’t remember what she said—we’ll be right out, or I’m reading your brother a story maybe.
Another time, we were camping in a tent in the front yard of my childhood home. I remember her again showing me her breasts after fully disrobing and her guiding me by the wrist to cup them. And then she laid back and told me to put my penis in her vagina. I was completely flaccid, but I still tried. This last image is seared into my mind. I’m 39 now, and on occasion I’ll have sexual dysfunction. It started out as delayed ejaculation (taking forever to climax if at all), and more recently, plain old fashioned ED in spite of taking both Cialis regularly and Viagra beforehand. When that happens, I get flashbacks of that image.
It happened again last night. I was with a gorgeous man who has become a good friend (with benefits) over the past year. I made sure he got off, but when it was my turn, nothing. We even got out some porn and I just tried to bring myself to orgasm but it didn’t work. And I don’t have any trouble if I’m alone. Eventually I gave up and then I started crying, which became sobbing, almost hyperventilating, until bedtime. I’ve never cried after sex. Today I’m still kind of a mess.
I can’t remember what I felt back in that moment. Disappointment that I couldn’t do what she was asking me to do? I think so, because disappointment and shame and a feeling of not being good enough usually accompany the flashbacks when they intrude on my sexual encounters.
The last incident I remember is hazy. I had one of those bed tents from the 80’s—basically like camping in your own bed. The lights were turned off. My perspective is from outside the tent, but I know we were both in there. When I try to peer inside the bed tent, all my memory can recall is darkness, a great black haze. For a few years after I had recurring nightmares: I was in pitch black but I could barely make out the walls. I was in a big space, like a large cathedral, but it was growing. The walls retracted from me until I couldn’t see them anymore. The darkness was oppressive and never since have I felt so small. After that, I slept with a bright light on until I was about 12.
But my issues around sex and childhood trauma didn’t end there.
For as long as I can remember, my Mother was emotionally abusive to my Father and cast my brother as the black sheep while I was the golden child. Typical behavior for a Narcissist. It was unheard of the time, but she had two nose jobs, and my dad revealed recently that back in my youth she spent two weeks in a treatment center after shoplifting from designer stores. The thing is, we had money, but perhaps not enough. The arguing and the antics between my parents were so continuous, so loud, and so out of hand that I spent most of my childhood in my room or the woods, and as a teenager put myself in every sport and club I could just to stay out of the house. She would often call the cops on my father but never once did I ever see him lay a finger on her or get nasty the way she would. As an adult, I’m pretty sure she’s bipolar and certain that she has narcissistic personality disorder, with a complete inability to understand the consequences of her actions on other people’s emotions.
In fact, one time I had been having some age-appropriate consensual exploration with a rather aggressive girl my age (I was around 11) and we took one of my mom’s shoulder pads and put it in the front flap of my underwear. I wanted to see if the extra padding felt good. Well, I guess I forgot to take the shoulder pad out because one day while the family was sitting at the dining room, my mother produces the padded underwear for my Dad and brother to see. I can’t remember if it was my mom or my brother who asked: “You’re going to school stuffing your underwear like a girl stuffs her bra?” I was so ashamed. Mortified. To this day, I have trouble with nudity even though by all measures I’ve got a pretty good body (gym 3-4 times a week), and having been with enough guys I know I have well above average endowment. But it’s one thing to know these things intellectually and quite another to have them sink in emotionally and heal the lingering shame and feelings of inadequacy.
These days, my Dad tells me how horrible she is getting in their golden years, and for my Dad to actually say something to me means it’s really, really bad. She respects no boundaries—she used to get out of her bra without a shirt on at least once a week in front of me until I was 12. I beg him to leave, and I help him chart next steps, but he won’t take them. Seeing this relationship dynamic made it hard to exit relationships that weren’t good for me. Moreover, both of them neglected me in terms of emotions and time because they spent all of theirs working or fighting. They’d frequently forget to pick me up from school, or pick me up hours after the school had closed. I recognize my abandonment issues stemming from being left like that.
And then there’s my older brother. Like my mother, he had no boundaries. When I was a teenager and exploring my body in a locked bathroom, he would routinely use a pin to unlock the door from the outside and barge in to see and then tease me. Violence and the threat of violence were constants with him. He threw me through a glass table once, the whole thing shattered. And he regularly waved knives and guns in front of me and even some of my friends’ faces. He’s a woman beater, has committed arson, assaulted who knows how many, 3 DUIs, and is now an alcoholic slowly dying in some hovel of an apartment. We’ve been estranged for many years, so I have to arrange alternate days for all of the major holidays with the rest of the family. Most of my rage is directed toward that sociopath. Almost ten years ago he was diagnosed with MS and there is a very angry part of me that is glad for it.
In spite of that, I still prefer men over women. Sexually they seem safer. But like most survivors, there are questions around sexuality in my head. When I was in the fourth grade, my best friend at the time, Jason, got together with this guy who had a reputation as a hoodlum. They prank called Jason’s father, and pretended to be me by imitating my voice. They told him, “I think I’m gay”. And then Jason’s dad calls my dad. I was asleep at the time and my dad rushed into the room and woke me up in a fit to ask me if I had called Jason’s father. I said no, I’ve been sleeping. Then he asked if I had told Jason’s dad I was gay. Before I really knew what gay meant. He looked relieved when I confirmed I hadn’t. I eventually found out the rest of the details after Jason fessed up to it. On the bus Jason and I shared to go to school every morning, I imagined myself a robot because robots don’t feel. For many years I wondered if I was really gay or if the molestation and betrayal had led me down this path by force.
Still, I did date and sleep with women in high school and college. My first time with a girl, I completely dissociated, and it was as if I was watching the whole scene from an upper corner of the bedroom. Dissociation and getting in my head has been pretty steady since I started having sex, even with men. My Mom was pretty horrible to me when I came out. I told them over the phone while I was studying abroad. She was never religious—in fact, when I was in high school, I went through a phase for a year or two where I was super involved in the church, probably in some misguided notion that I could pray the gay away. While I wrestled with my sexuality then, I don’t think my parents ever attended a sermon. But when I came out, suddenly my Mom decided she wanted to be a devout Baptist, and it wasn’t long before I was getting calls telling me I’m an abomination, that I’ll go to hell, that I’ll contract AIDS. That continued every other day for about a year until I said to her one day, if you want to have any further relationship with me, you’re just going to have to drop it.
Owing to these incidents and others, most of the time when I’m intimate with others, I alternate between dissociation and feeling like a spotlight is on me.
Though it’s not all bad. I had a couple things going for me. I had smarts, good looks, and got out of there with a scholarship to a top school. And when I came back, I met my husband within a week. It’s probably due to the aforementioned abandonment issues that I clung to him so quickly—within two weeks, I moved into his condo, and within two months we bought a house together. Luckily, he turned out to be a great man, and helped me work through a lot of my trauma. We separated amicably after 17 years back in February. But for the last two years together, we didn’t have sex, and his job didn’t leave anything left for me. After this period is when I started having problems with delayed ejaculation. Coincidentally, I also started having sexual fantasies about women and I started to masturbate to straight porn around this same time, which leaves me with lingering questions about my sexuality. Anyway, I was really looking forward to living alone for the first time in my life. I knew it would be hard but I never suspected I’d be doing it in relative isolation on account of the pandemic. The pandemic has also seen me put down my cat, and help my best friend through stage 3 breast cancer. It’s been a really difficult time.
But I’m reminded of my strength. I’ve been working with a therapist for the past three years, and last week I joined an online support group for male survivors of sexual abuse & assault. It gave me the courage to share my story here. I’m learning about complex PTSD (CPTSD), and after I read about it, everything started to make sense: the dissociation, the flashbacks, the trouble I have with emotional regulation, startle response, passivity, and negative self-perception. I experienced a trifecta of sexual, emotional and physical abuse in childhood that robbed me of normalcy and joy. I’m 39 now, and sometimes the prospect of starting over and defining what normalcy and joy will look like for me is daunting, terrifying even. But I don’t want to center my identity around trauma. There’s so much more to me. Playing piano and singing take me out of my head the most, but I enjoy writing, gaming, meeting new people, and hanging with friends too. I think that maybe these are good places to start shaping the role joy will play in my life and to help me finally reach that state of mind that acknowledges I am, in fact, deserving of love.
*** Trigger Warning***
I was molested when I was 7 years old. My abuser was a female babysitter 15-17 years old. My memories are fragmented, but I think it went on for a few months, probably the whole summer. I remember in my bedroom, she locked the door and turned off the lights. She took my hand to her breasts. She showed me her vagina. I don’t remember much more, including how I felt about it, but we must have been in there for a while because my older brother came looking for us and knocked on the door. I could see she was panicking, and she called out to him in response but I can’t remember what she said—we’ll be right out, or I’m reading your brother a story maybe.
Another time, we were camping in a tent in the front yard of my childhood home. I remember her again showing me her breasts after fully disrobing and her guiding me by the wrist to cup them. And then she laid back and told me to put my penis in her vagina. I was completely flaccid, but I still tried. This last image is seared into my mind. I’m 39 now, and on occasion I’ll have sexual dysfunction. It started out as delayed ejaculation (taking forever to climax if at all), and more recently, plain old fashioned ED in spite of taking both Cialis regularly and Viagra beforehand. When that happens, I get flashbacks of that image.
It happened again last night. I was with a gorgeous man who has become a good friend (with benefits) over the past year. I made sure he got off, but when it was my turn, nothing. We even got out some porn and I just tried to bring myself to orgasm but it didn’t work. And I don’t have any trouble if I’m alone. Eventually I gave up and then I started crying, which became sobbing, almost hyperventilating, until bedtime. I’ve never cried after sex. Today I’m still kind of a mess.
I can’t remember what I felt back in that moment. Disappointment that I couldn’t do what she was asking me to do? I think so, because disappointment and shame and a feeling of not being good enough usually accompany the flashbacks when they intrude on my sexual encounters.
The last incident I remember is hazy. I had one of those bed tents from the 80’s—basically like camping in your own bed. The lights were turned off. My perspective is from outside the tent, but I know we were both in there. When I try to peer inside the bed tent, all my memory can recall is darkness, a great black haze. For a few years after I had recurring nightmares: I was in pitch black but I could barely make out the walls. I was in a big space, like a large cathedral, but it was growing. The walls retracted from me until I couldn’t see them anymore. The darkness was oppressive and never since have I felt so small. After that, I slept with a bright light on until I was about 12.
But my issues around sex and childhood trauma didn’t end there.
For as long as I can remember, my Mother was emotionally abusive to my Father and cast my brother as the black sheep while I was the golden child. Typical behavior for a Narcissist. It was unheard of the time, but she had two nose jobs, and my dad revealed recently that back in my youth she spent two weeks in a treatment center after shoplifting from designer stores. The thing is, we had money, but perhaps not enough. The arguing and the antics between my parents were so continuous, so loud, and so out of hand that I spent most of my childhood in my room or the woods, and as a teenager put myself in every sport and club I could just to stay out of the house. She would often call the cops on my father but never once did I ever see him lay a finger on her or get nasty the way she would. As an adult, I’m pretty sure she’s bipolar and certain that she has narcissistic personality disorder, with a complete inability to understand the consequences of her actions on other people’s emotions.
In fact, one time I had been having some age-appropriate consensual exploration with a rather aggressive girl my age (I was around 11) and we took one of my mom’s shoulder pads and put it in the front flap of my underwear. I wanted to see if the extra padding felt good. Well, I guess I forgot to take the shoulder pad out because one day while the family was sitting at the dining room, my mother produces the padded underwear for my Dad and brother to see. I can’t remember if it was my mom or my brother who asked: “You’re going to school stuffing your underwear like a girl stuffs her bra?” I was so ashamed. Mortified. To this day, I have trouble with nudity even though by all measures I’ve got a pretty good body (gym 3-4 times a week), and having been with enough guys I know I have well above average endowment. But it’s one thing to know these things intellectually and quite another to have them sink in emotionally and heal the lingering shame and feelings of inadequacy.
These days, my Dad tells me how horrible she is getting in their golden years, and for my Dad to actually say something to me means it’s really, really bad. She respects no boundaries—she used to get out of her bra without a shirt on at least once a week in front of me until I was 12. I beg him to leave, and I help him chart next steps, but he won’t take them. Seeing this relationship dynamic made it hard to exit relationships that weren’t good for me. Moreover, both of them neglected me in terms of emotions and time because they spent all of theirs working or fighting. They’d frequently forget to pick me up from school, or pick me up hours after the school had closed. I recognize my abandonment issues stemming from being left like that.
And then there’s my older brother. Like my mother, he had no boundaries. When I was a teenager and exploring my body in a locked bathroom, he would routinely use a pin to unlock the door from the outside and barge in to see and then tease me. Violence and the threat of violence were constants with him. He threw me through a glass table once, the whole thing shattered. And he regularly waved knives and guns in front of me and even some of my friends’ faces. He’s a woman beater, has committed arson, assaulted who knows how many, 3 DUIs, and is now an alcoholic slowly dying in some hovel of an apartment. We’ve been estranged for many years, so I have to arrange alternate days for all of the major holidays with the rest of the family. Most of my rage is directed toward that sociopath. Almost ten years ago he was diagnosed with MS and there is a very angry part of me that is glad for it.
In spite of that, I still prefer men over women. Sexually they seem safer. But like most survivors, there are questions around sexuality in my head. When I was in the fourth grade, my best friend at the time, Jason, got together with this guy who had a reputation as a hoodlum. They prank called Jason’s father, and pretended to be me by imitating my voice. They told him, “I think I’m gay”. And then Jason’s dad calls my dad. I was asleep at the time and my dad rushed into the room and woke me up in a fit to ask me if I had called Jason’s father. I said no, I’ve been sleeping. Then he asked if I had told Jason’s dad I was gay. Before I really knew what gay meant. He looked relieved when I confirmed I hadn’t. I eventually found out the rest of the details after Jason fessed up to it. On the bus Jason and I shared to go to school every morning, I imagined myself a robot because robots don’t feel. For many years I wondered if I was really gay or if the molestation and betrayal had led me down this path by force.
Still, I did date and sleep with women in high school and college. My first time with a girl, I completely dissociated, and it was as if I was watching the whole scene from an upper corner of the bedroom. Dissociation and getting in my head has been pretty steady since I started having sex, even with men. My Mom was pretty horrible to me when I came out. I told them over the phone while I was studying abroad. She was never religious—in fact, when I was in high school, I went through a phase for a year or two where I was super involved in the church, probably in some misguided notion that I could pray the gay away. While I wrestled with my sexuality then, I don’t think my parents ever attended a sermon. But when I came out, suddenly my Mom decided she wanted to be a devout Baptist, and it wasn’t long before I was getting calls telling me I’m an abomination, that I’ll go to hell, that I’ll contract AIDS. That continued every other day for about a year until I said to her one day, if you want to have any further relationship with me, you’re just going to have to drop it.
Owing to these incidents and others, most of the time when I’m intimate with others, I alternate between dissociation and feeling like a spotlight is on me.
Though it’s not all bad. I had a couple things going for me. I had smarts, good looks, and got out of there with a scholarship to a top school. And when I came back, I met my husband within a week. It’s probably due to the aforementioned abandonment issues that I clung to him so quickly—within two weeks, I moved into his condo, and within two months we bought a house together. Luckily, he turned out to be a great man, and helped me work through a lot of my trauma. We separated amicably after 17 years back in February. But for the last two years together, we didn’t have sex, and his job didn’t leave anything left for me. After this period is when I started having problems with delayed ejaculation. Coincidentally, I also started having sexual fantasies about women and I started to masturbate to straight porn around this same time, which leaves me with lingering questions about my sexuality. Anyway, I was really looking forward to living alone for the first time in my life. I knew it would be hard but I never suspected I’d be doing it in relative isolation on account of the pandemic. The pandemic has also seen me put down my cat, and help my best friend through stage 3 breast cancer. It’s been a really difficult time.
But I’m reminded of my strength. I’ve been working with a therapist for the past three years, and last week I joined an online support group for male survivors of sexual abuse & assault. It gave me the courage to share my story here. I’m learning about complex PTSD (CPTSD), and after I read about it, everything started to make sense: the dissociation, the flashbacks, the trouble I have with emotional regulation, startle response, passivity, and negative self-perception. I experienced a trifecta of sexual, emotional and physical abuse in childhood that robbed me of normalcy and joy. I’m 39 now, and sometimes the prospect of starting over and defining what normalcy and joy will look like for me is daunting, terrifying even. But I don’t want to center my identity around trauma. There’s so much more to me. Playing piano and singing take me out of my head the most, but I enjoy writing, gaming, meeting new people, and hanging with friends too. I think that maybe these are good places to start shaping the role joy will play in my life and to help me finally reach that state of mind that acknowledges I am, in fact, deserving of love.
