Hey Jeff,
I really agree with what you have been posting. As I said, nothing ever happens in isolation, and that goes for CSA. The circumstances can be due to something specific like living with a perpetrator, or the path to CSA can be made up of a lot many elements that create a scenario in which a child might become the target of a pedophile.
I know in my case, I lived with my first perpetrator who was my biological father, so there really wasnt any escape. I was in the immediate environment, and he took advantage of that.
When I was abused by my coach, there were a lot of internal and external elements that came into play. I had already been abused, so it created a lot of internal dynamics that would determine my interactions with men and what I would perceive as normal would be already skewed. After my biological father abused me, he terminated parental rights and left the picture. My mother remarried, but my stepfather was not the sort to play a lot with kids. He was a provider and very generous, but not the type to spend a lot of time with a young boy or nurture him in any way. So, even though I had a stepfather, I was in many ways still searching for a father figure that might spend time with me or do things with me. My coach sensed that and moved into that role in order to take advantage of me.
Another thing that really played a large part in my abuse was where we lived. After my biological father left and my mother remarried my stepfather, we moved out of the country. In many ways it was a clean break, a reboot of sorts. Things werent perfect, but I was able to leave the monster that was my father behind. In a new country, in a new world, I really flourished. I made easy friends, did well in school, and had a great life in many ways. I still had my issues due to the abuse of my father, but I was able to move forward and put a lot of my problems on the shelf.
After a few years, my family moved back to the US. I was excited, but it was not a good homecoming. I had developed an accent from the move and my young age. At the school I went to, it was not an asset. I was isolated, made fun of, and tormented because of it. I had absolutely no friends in school, and was really lonely and dejected. I also had a teacher that had an attitude about my education. I was a bit ahead of the other students because I had learned a lot of what she was teaching in the other countrys school system. It was just a fact. But, she treated me like I thought I was special because of it, like it was a personal insult to her. I was just a kid, but she made it seem like I was implying that she was a bad teacher. She put me at a table in the back of the room, isolating me from my peers and making fun of me if I ever got an answer wrong.
At home, I was quiet and reserved and did not mention the stuff with my friends or my teacher. It really impacts you when a parent leaves you, even if that parent is a monster like my biological father was. You start to get the idea that if you cant make a person as bad as your abusive father love you or want you around, then surely nobody else could. So, I didnt make any waves. I never argued, never talked back. I was a model kid for a long time. I didnt want my mother to leave me. This was a very deeply rooted fear for me at this point. My mother didnt know what was going on. They both worked and life was busy. Plus it was 70s and people let their kids go in ways they dont these days. There wasnt a national dialogue forming around abuse at all.
So, it was with this combination of issues, and others, that I first entered the gymnasium. I made no effort to make friends, because I was conditioned at that point to think no one would like me because of school. I laid low and did my routines and exercises. I am sure to an adult, it was easy to see that I had problems. But, I didnt know that. I just kept focused and had started a journey to a very internalized world. So, I probably was very visible to a perpetrator that I didnt have a lot of fatherly attention, no connections with any peers or friends, had no self-esteem, and was begging for adult attention.
Once the abuse started, I went deeper and deeper into myself, and have not fully emerged yet, after all of these years. It was like I was one of those people buried by the dust of the eruption of Vesuvius in Pompeii. The me that was was buried under years and years of dust and sediment from a blast that completely destroyed my world.
After my abuse by coach, we again moved rather quickly to a new state. That move I still count as a blessing. Again, like when we left the country years before, I was presented with a new life, a new world. Another chance to reboot. I was still a mess. I left the town of my abuse with a shattered psyche, demolished self-esteem and sense of trust, and a chronic bedwetter. But, my mind was able to put it on the shelf again. Life returned to as much a sense of normalcy as it could. I still lived under the rubble caused by the abuse, but the ash had stopped falling. I think that is what allowed me to bury it deep down inside, not to surface again until decades later.
So, I agree with you Jeff, there is so much more to grooming than some of the things we encountered from our perpetrator. There are so many factors that go into setting the stage for this to happen. They were all out of my control. Asking it to be any different is like asking that kid I was to stop the volcano from erupting. Quite an impossible task. As I have said before, some things just cannot be stopped. Be they natural disasters, illness and disease, or things that other people do to us that we are powerless to stop.
I have stopped blaming myself because if I really think about it, there is no way I could have stopped it. I was just up against something way bigger than myself. And I can take some of these rocks and rubble off my back as I work through that.