Using old issues to mask others. Possible Triggers
I didn't intend for this to be this long when I sat down to write it, but I guess I had a lot to get off my chest as I type this back in some two hours later. Trigger warnings in advance - I do talk about how I was abused. No really explicit detail, but enough that I thought it'd be best to post a trigger warning.
When I first started posting here about ten years ago, I was just finally coming to terms that the sexual abuse I experienced from my cousin when I was a child wasn't "normal". I had finally decided to go to therapy for it because I wanted to move on in my life, feel "normal", have relationships, and was fixated over trying to prove 100% without a shadow of a doubt what my sexual orientation was.
About three years later, I was done with therapy. Many of the initial issues I went in for had resolved themselves. For a kid who had been so worried about my orientation, I had two women fighting over me less than a week after my last therapy session. Life felt awesome at that moment. But then, time went on. I still never dated or had much of an interest. I still occasionally found myself questioning my sexuality, and I still found myself on here posting my thoughts in a very cyclical fashion.
Now in 2018, I have realized an enormous amount of issues at hand that I didn't deal with or even realize, the sexual abuse being only part of it.
I did not have healthy role models when it came to relationships - my parents were not married happily, and my sister and I were subject to their fights regularly, as well as the fallout from it.
I was subject to constant emotional abuse by my sister as a child - my parents still to this day both minimize it as "just normal sibling stuff". The only times my sister was nice to me growing up was if she wanted something. She would tell me things like I was a failure at life, nobody ever really wanted to hang out with me, if I was ever married I'd be an abusive husband, I was a burden to the family and just made everyone in it upset, I should kill myself, etc.
If I was in my room listening to music, the music was too loud and she'd start a fight over it. If I was trying to play video games, she HAD to use whatever TV I was using, even though we had two other ones in the house. Playing guitar? Too noisey. Working out? I looked "fat" and "gross" and I'd never be a good athlete (I've been involved in kickboxing and judo now for 15 years - I may not be a stellar athlete, but I'm not exactly out of shape). I drove too slow. My breathing was too loud. My chewing was too noisey. You get the drift. My parents saw this happen every. single.fucking.day. I would say for 18 years, but we probably weren't having conversations at birth, so I'll say for 14 or 15 years. They did nothing. I have to assume they didn't know what to do about it, but again, they tell me to this day it was "just normal sibling stuff", so maybe they did truly believe that.
She would frequently kick me in the crotch when we were in middle school, knowing that if I hit her back I'd end up getting yelled at by our parents. She would get sent to her room and "spoken to", make a half hearted apology, and that would be the end of it. If I ever did anything to protect myself, I got berated, told I needed to go to therapy (ironically, the guy told my mom and sister they needed to get off my case - not surprisingly, they didn't) or go "talk to the priest", etc. My father actually threw me across a room once.
She'd try to either steal from me directly or con me into splitting birthday or christmas gifts for other relatives, and then not paying her fair share for them. She'd take the car we shared and use all the gas, then try to make me pay for it. That's hard for me to deal with now, as she's changed markedly for the better and sincerely apologized for what she put me through. We were just kids, but it was constant from elementary school all the way through high school. We even shared an apartment for a while in our mid twenties, and I was astounded by how little she had changed back then.
My mother was also fairly manipulative and emotionally explosive (I think probably owing to her unhappy marriage at the time). She would tell me how to talk if I was having an argument with somebody, and to remain calm, how to be diplomatic, etc. That actually worked fantastically - I am pretty good at it now. The only issue is that if I was arguing with her and tried to remain the same way, she would explode on me. Eventually, I'd end up yelling back. I tried to help her get the house ready for spring one year, and the deck broke. 20 minutes of being screamed at - not my fault at all, the wood was dried out and brittle, I was leaning on it to help me get a hold of a tiki torch, and it broke. She would tell me that she didn't know what to do with my sister, and I'd recommend that she try and do other things she did with me to keep me in line. Eventually she'd end up screaming at me. I lost my temper once with her after these exchanges and nearly tore the door off a dishwasher. She tried to grab me, and I took her arm off my shoulder and told her to keep her hands off me (she never hit me, ever, but at the time...). She immediately called my martial arts instructor to tell me I was attacking her. He sat me down to chew me out the next time I was in - I just told him what had happened and he understood, but she would pull that shit all the time. Tell me how to handle something, get mad when I did exactly what she had told me to do, and then attempt to take away the things I enjoyed or that acted as an escape for me.
When I was VERY young, my parents would often scold me or punish me if I stood up for myself. I was patient in dealing with my sister (also my twin), but when I had enough I would get, as they termed it, "violent", meaning I would shove her away or try to restrain her. I was big for my age until high school as well, so whenever I interacted with other kids who treated me in the same way, I was always scolded harshly for reacting. This caused me to learn to not stand up for myself.
Taking my inability to stand up for myself a step further, I was the "weird" kid at school, and was bullied or excluded (and we all know the favorite nicknames for the excluded kids - more on that in a bit). Where some children who deal with this can escape, when I went home I was just picked on even more by my sister, who would actively seek me out to harass me, as I already said. I didn't make it easy on myself either - I was always trying to be the funny kid so I could gain acceptance from somebody, but instead I really think I just annoyed the shit out of my classmates and came off as really, really awkward, so I wasn't too popular. There were girls at school who would ask me if I wanted to go out on a date - they were upperclassmen girls who knew my sister, and I knew they were teasing me. Girls in my own grade wouldn't speak to me at all - in retrospect though, while that may have added on to already feeling like I was repellant to women, I am fully aware that the way I acted back then, cry for help that it may have been, was not helping me AT ALL. I see it in my own students now, but guidance and student support services are WAY more responsive now than they were back then, so...
my impression of women were that they only ever treated you kindly when they needed you to do something. Otherwise, they'd either go out of their way to nag you (though as an educator now, I kind of understand the nagging with some kids), try to purposely go out of their way to make you feel lower than dirt if they didn't need something from you, try to use you for money, or just try to purposely manipulate you into doing all kinds of crazy shit. Long story short, as much as I'd like to be in a relationship, I don't trust most women and can't find it in me to believe they'd actually see anything in me except as somebody to try and manipulate and control, and I'm terrified I'll end up stuck in a relationship I can't get out of that will totally rob me of any independence I have and will deprive me of anything that makes me happy or brings me enjoyment.
Take all that, then add in the abuse by my cousin. Again, he's only 3 years older than me. When it started, he couldn't have been older than 7 or 8. I know for a fact now that my mother's side of the family had a "weird" uncle, who was pretty much a child molester. I never asked, but my cousin now is pretty screwed up, and I remember him talking about how a lot of the stuff he would do with me was from a "friend of his with gray hair". I will never know for sure, but I suspect that's who he was talking about. Anyways, I always had a general feeling that what was going on between the two of us was something that wasn't supposed to be going on, but in contrast to how the rest of my family treated me, he was a close friend and an older brother of sorts. The abuse began with exposure and, for lack of a better word, "sword fighting" - nothing out of the ordinary for kids as young as we were, but it got to the point where he decided that that would be our "handshake", where every time we were together for family functions we'd go off and that'd be our official version of "Hey, how've you been"? From there it got progressively stranger - I had bunkbeds, but when he slept over he'd want to be in the same bed as me. He had me try oral on him - I didn't really want to, but I tried it out. Nothing happened when I tried it on him, I didn't see the point, and I kept telling him it didn't make any sense to me until he said I didn't have to keep going. Then he wanted to try it on me - again, didn't see the point, nothing happened, and I think he eventually realized I didn't particularly care for it or enjoy it, so he stopped. To me, at least in retrospect, that hits the extreme far end of "kids experimenting cause they're kids" and starts crossing the line into abuse. Things got weirder though.
As time went on, he began bringing anatomy books with him for "school", or had encyclopedias. Every time he was over, I ended up hanging out with him. He'd show me the diagrams of the male and female reproductive systems, diagrams of sex, talked about how people had sex, ejaculation, what puberty was and how it meant you were becoming a man and could have sex with women, etc. etc. etc. Never said anything about gay sex, and at that time, all I knew about gay people was that there were a few of them who went to church at my mom's church, and I thought it was kind of silly for two men to be married, because in my 8 or 9 year old mind, you were friends with boys and married girls. Even I had had a kindergarten and first grade girlfriend (we were of course supposed to be married, at least according to us, but her family moved).
Eventually, I think when I was in either 3rd or 4th grade, a bunch of us cousins were sitting around, and he said, "So who wants to have sex?" I had spent all this time learning from him that sex was between men and women, but I didn't realize I had basically been groomed. I don't even know if HE consciously knew he was grooming me, but there ya have it. He tried to anally penetrate me, but I remember he didn't because I told him I thought it wasn't gonna work and didn't want to do it anymore. He had me try it on him, but I was an elementary school student and didn't get erections, so that wasn't going to work. That concluded that episode and we went about more normal family stuff.
There was one more time after that where he told me that he had finally figured out how to ejaculate and wanted to show me. At this point, I think we've already established that although child me knew there was something not quite right going on, I didn't bother arguing because I knew eventually he'd end up just convincing me, but I do seem to recall saying stuff like "yeah if you get caught we're both going to get in a lot of trouble and this doesn't seem worth it". Dude ended up masturbating in front of me to completion. Weirdly even with all the other shit he'd done, I think that was maybe the most traumatic moment of those 4-5 years of abuse. I was jealous that, at least according to him, he was a man and I wasn't. He could get an erection, I couldn't.
Today, I fill out tests for kids who show "overly sexualized behavior" if I have to make a DCF referral for work. In retrospect, I look at myself after that episode and think, "How the hell did people not notice anything?!" I became obsessed with sex. I wanted to be able to do what he had done, but thought he was kind of a perv, so I didn't want to exactly mimic what he had done. A few years later when I finally figured things out, I felt guilty because I thought what I was doing was weird, since he had done the same thing. Some people's first orgasms, they think about members of the same or opposite sexes. I just tired to mimic what my cousin had done down to the most exact detail I could. Tried to stand in the same spot in the room as he did, tried to use mirrors to re-create my perspective when it happened so I could make sure I was mimicing everything as exactly as possible...it always struck me as weird, but I figured it was just my thing. It wasn't until years later that I read a Joe Kort article about how many sexual abuse victims attempt to recreate their abuse to gain control over something they had no control over. Talk about an eye opener! That article is what finally convinced me to go to therapy and EMDR for my abuse, after which my sexual behavior had changed entirely. It was a profound lesson in how abuse can "hijack" our own sexual behaviors or preferences, and revealed to me that literally my entire sexuality had been based on compulsions from day one.
The porn I watched was either close up videos of heterosexual sex which recalled the magazines, encyclopedias, and diagrams he had shown me, or it was people masturbating, which is what I had watched him do. It wasn't until the end of high school that I actually got some attention from women and I realized, inhibited as I was, that I really liked that attention, but by then I was all sorts of mixed up.
Anyway, going back to the abuse and my childhood, the problem for me was that later on in school that year (this was 4th grade), they decided to teach us about HIV and AIDS in health class. They told us that you could get HIV/AIDS from sharing blood, needles, or that gay men got it. I remember telling my friend on the bus I didn't understand how that was possible, because sex was something that happened between men and women. My friend then told me that men could do it with each other too, and I promptly freaked right the fuck out, because that sounded exactly like what my cousin had been doing to me or trying to get me to do to him. I didn't realize how important that moment was - I was not a popular kid, and other kids at school, even that young, would say things like, "dude you're so gay" or "get out of the way faggot", etc. I didn't pay attention at first, because in my mind, it didn't make any sense to be called gay. After talking to my friend though, I became TERRIFIED that people would find out what happened, I'd end up being branded, and for whatever reason I'd be a social outcast blah blah blah.
At dinner that night, I wasn't eating, which was rare, because I was a chunky kid when I was young. Parents asked me if I was ok, and I burst into tears and told them everything. My dad was ready to kill my cousin. My mom was like, "I'm gonna have to make some phone calls". In the end, my Aunt was pretty much in denial and so my mom just said, "Just don't be alone with him, don't let him touch you anywhere inappropriate, etc". Of course, the next time the families were together I told him that I spilled the beans, and our relationship was markedly different after that.
The rest of the story is typical male survivor stuff - I was pretty confused about my sexual orientation for a while, but any time in life I've been in situations where I could be sexual with somebody, I've always went with women, and it's always made me feel 1000% times better about myself. Like a lot of male survivors though, questioning my identity led to me to looking at gay porn for a time, and then wondering constantly if maybe I was really gay. Close friends I grew up with who are gay and know my entire story don't see it. I've been to three different therapists for PTSD, relationship issues, and anxiety disorders. All three of them have counseled gay clients and don't see it either. The anxiety specialist did note that I am prone to a certain type of OCD called Purely Obsessional OCD, where I become obsessive over certain things and go through mental rituals.
I did this with confusion about my sexual orientation, where I would watch gay porn and straight porn to see if I "reacted" the same. I'd go out and spend all my time thinking "did I find that girl attractive? What about that guy?" If anything slightly implicating that I wasn't absolutely 100% heterosexual happened to me, I would obsess over and try to prove definitively what my sexual orientation was for months, which only further fuels doubts, which makes the whole thing worse.
Somebody posted a cycle of addiction on here once and I was astounded with how similar it was to the routines I would go through. Basically, I realized it wasn't the abuse itself, but the irrational fear of being labeled as gay BECAUSE of the abuse that set so many of my behavioral patterns.
My cousin was once my closest friend, but without me being aware of it, our relationship was sexual. When I was younger, I assumed that's how most male friendships operated, and I assumed anybody who wanted to be friends with me wanted the same stuff to happen that my cousin did. I was lucky that I have extremely close friends who basically went "yeah, that's not really a thing you have to do/way you have to behave for your friends". Looking back now, I realize I was inappropriately socialized that way by my interaction with my cousin, and didn't get a chance to discover my innate desires on my own. A large part of that was what drove my questioning of my sexuality, until I realized I was simply doing what I was groomed to do.
Out of therapy, I have gotten closer to discovering my innate sexuality. I fell hard for one of my best friends sisters. She was home on break, and I had never noticed her before. After all, you get used to thinking "oh that's just so and so's younger sister". Suddenly, she grew up. Then she started flirting with me - I think just for fun on her end, but I was suckered in. We're still friends, but we both agreed the dynamic between my friend and my relationship with him and the rest of the family would tremendously complicate things. She lives several states away now, so that's a dead issue. There was another girl in grad school - this was the first time I recall feeling magnetically drawn to somebody. We flirted a lot, but she'd eventually keep distance. Three months later she was married - none of us even knew she was engaged at the time. Missed opportunities...anyways...
By losing my relationship with my cousin, anybody who wanted to be my friend pretty thoroughly astounded me - my opinion of myself was really that low. Once in 6th grade we were asked to write about our heroes for an assignment in english class. I chose my best friend of two year simply because he had approached me wanting to be friends and was still my friend two years later (still my best friend to this day).
So, the sexual abuse part was just the most obvious layer of the onion that is my state of mental health. It's really a giant knot of the sexual abuse, dysfunctional sexuality, emotional abuse, a TON of social rejection, and very low self esteem.
My mother still can't accept what happened - she, despite, knowing what happened, will say, "He's my nephew, what do you want me to say or do?" I don't know, stand up for and be supportive of your son? She even tried to talk me out of leaving my therapist to go to one she referred people to - I didn't though, and I'm glad. Same thing with the emotional abuse - both my parents will say, "That was just normal sibling stuff". I finally realized my parents have been minimizing these traumas, and turn leading me to minimize them, because they can't cope with the damage I've suffered from these things. That makes them feel like they're guilty, or did something wrong that they can't fix.
It took me 10 years to realize all this. 10 years to realize that my aversion to relationships is because I believe that I'm somehow broken, believe that I am inherently undesirable (even if people tell me I'm not), find myself uninteresting, can't fathom anybody staying with me voluntarily, feel that now I'm too old and awkward to date, don't like one night stands because it's difficult for me to have sex with somebody who I don't know or don't trust 100% (I wonder if they are using their feminine charms to manipulate me), and have NEVER approached women as I automatically assume I will be bothering them or coming off as "creepy". I gradually turned myself more or less emotionally numb and walled off between 7th and 10th grade, because there was nowhere I could vent and nothing I could do without catching shit for it from my sister or my family. Easier to be numb, then. Now that I'm older and wiser though, I can't figure out how to undo that.
The real bear here is that the sexual abuse and confusion over my orientation? I ALWAYS go back to it and analyze it and pick it apart for answer, because it distracts me from having to deal with these other difficult emotions and circumstances, and it's become familiar. When I finished EMDR all those years back, my therapist said, "I'd like to see you start to develop some positive relationships now". I also remember her saying that something what we come in the door for is only a step on a much longer path. That's where I'm at now, but when I finished therapy I remember thinking "I just want peace and to avoid having to suffer or be hurt". There's a part of me that doesn't want to go back and have to do all this over again, but if I don't, I'll stay where I'm at, and that's not really want to do either. If you've read all this, thank you for your time.
When I first started posting here about ten years ago, I was just finally coming to terms that the sexual abuse I experienced from my cousin when I was a child wasn't "normal". I had finally decided to go to therapy for it because I wanted to move on in my life, feel "normal", have relationships, and was fixated over trying to prove 100% without a shadow of a doubt what my sexual orientation was.
About three years later, I was done with therapy. Many of the initial issues I went in for had resolved themselves. For a kid who had been so worried about my orientation, I had two women fighting over me less than a week after my last therapy session. Life felt awesome at that moment. But then, time went on. I still never dated or had much of an interest. I still occasionally found myself questioning my sexuality, and I still found myself on here posting my thoughts in a very cyclical fashion.
Now in 2018, I have realized an enormous amount of issues at hand that I didn't deal with or even realize, the sexual abuse being only part of it.
I did not have healthy role models when it came to relationships - my parents were not married happily, and my sister and I were subject to their fights regularly, as well as the fallout from it.
I was subject to constant emotional abuse by my sister as a child - my parents still to this day both minimize it as "just normal sibling stuff". The only times my sister was nice to me growing up was if she wanted something. She would tell me things like I was a failure at life, nobody ever really wanted to hang out with me, if I was ever married I'd be an abusive husband, I was a burden to the family and just made everyone in it upset, I should kill myself, etc.
If I was in my room listening to music, the music was too loud and she'd start a fight over it. If I was trying to play video games, she HAD to use whatever TV I was using, even though we had two other ones in the house. Playing guitar? Too noisey. Working out? I looked "fat" and "gross" and I'd never be a good athlete (I've been involved in kickboxing and judo now for 15 years - I may not be a stellar athlete, but I'm not exactly out of shape). I drove too slow. My breathing was too loud. My chewing was too noisey. You get the drift. My parents saw this happen every. single.fucking.day. I would say for 18 years, but we probably weren't having conversations at birth, so I'll say for 14 or 15 years. They did nothing. I have to assume they didn't know what to do about it, but again, they tell me to this day it was "just normal sibling stuff", so maybe they did truly believe that.
She would frequently kick me in the crotch when we were in middle school, knowing that if I hit her back I'd end up getting yelled at by our parents. She would get sent to her room and "spoken to", make a half hearted apology, and that would be the end of it. If I ever did anything to protect myself, I got berated, told I needed to go to therapy (ironically, the guy told my mom and sister they needed to get off my case - not surprisingly, they didn't) or go "talk to the priest", etc. My father actually threw me across a room once.
She'd try to either steal from me directly or con me into splitting birthday or christmas gifts for other relatives, and then not paying her fair share for them. She'd take the car we shared and use all the gas, then try to make me pay for it. That's hard for me to deal with now, as she's changed markedly for the better and sincerely apologized for what she put me through. We were just kids, but it was constant from elementary school all the way through high school. We even shared an apartment for a while in our mid twenties, and I was astounded by how little she had changed back then.
My mother was also fairly manipulative and emotionally explosive (I think probably owing to her unhappy marriage at the time). She would tell me how to talk if I was having an argument with somebody, and to remain calm, how to be diplomatic, etc. That actually worked fantastically - I am pretty good at it now. The only issue is that if I was arguing with her and tried to remain the same way, she would explode on me. Eventually, I'd end up yelling back. I tried to help her get the house ready for spring one year, and the deck broke. 20 minutes of being screamed at - not my fault at all, the wood was dried out and brittle, I was leaning on it to help me get a hold of a tiki torch, and it broke. She would tell me that she didn't know what to do with my sister, and I'd recommend that she try and do other things she did with me to keep me in line. Eventually she'd end up screaming at me. I lost my temper once with her after these exchanges and nearly tore the door off a dishwasher. She tried to grab me, and I took her arm off my shoulder and told her to keep her hands off me (she never hit me, ever, but at the time...). She immediately called my martial arts instructor to tell me I was attacking her. He sat me down to chew me out the next time I was in - I just told him what had happened and he understood, but she would pull that shit all the time. Tell me how to handle something, get mad when I did exactly what she had told me to do, and then attempt to take away the things I enjoyed or that acted as an escape for me.
When I was VERY young, my parents would often scold me or punish me if I stood up for myself. I was patient in dealing with my sister (also my twin), but when I had enough I would get, as they termed it, "violent", meaning I would shove her away or try to restrain her. I was big for my age until high school as well, so whenever I interacted with other kids who treated me in the same way, I was always scolded harshly for reacting. This caused me to learn to not stand up for myself.
Taking my inability to stand up for myself a step further, I was the "weird" kid at school, and was bullied or excluded (and we all know the favorite nicknames for the excluded kids - more on that in a bit). Where some children who deal with this can escape, when I went home I was just picked on even more by my sister, who would actively seek me out to harass me, as I already said. I didn't make it easy on myself either - I was always trying to be the funny kid so I could gain acceptance from somebody, but instead I really think I just annoyed the shit out of my classmates and came off as really, really awkward, so I wasn't too popular. There were girls at school who would ask me if I wanted to go out on a date - they were upperclassmen girls who knew my sister, and I knew they were teasing me. Girls in my own grade wouldn't speak to me at all - in retrospect though, while that may have added on to already feeling like I was repellant to women, I am fully aware that the way I acted back then, cry for help that it may have been, was not helping me AT ALL. I see it in my own students now, but guidance and student support services are WAY more responsive now than they were back then, so...
my impression of women were that they only ever treated you kindly when they needed you to do something. Otherwise, they'd either go out of their way to nag you (though as an educator now, I kind of understand the nagging with some kids), try to purposely go out of their way to make you feel lower than dirt if they didn't need something from you, try to use you for money, or just try to purposely manipulate you into doing all kinds of crazy shit. Long story short, as much as I'd like to be in a relationship, I don't trust most women and can't find it in me to believe they'd actually see anything in me except as somebody to try and manipulate and control, and I'm terrified I'll end up stuck in a relationship I can't get out of that will totally rob me of any independence I have and will deprive me of anything that makes me happy or brings me enjoyment.
Take all that, then add in the abuse by my cousin. Again, he's only 3 years older than me. When it started, he couldn't have been older than 7 or 8. I know for a fact now that my mother's side of the family had a "weird" uncle, who was pretty much a child molester. I never asked, but my cousin now is pretty screwed up, and I remember him talking about how a lot of the stuff he would do with me was from a "friend of his with gray hair". I will never know for sure, but I suspect that's who he was talking about. Anyways, I always had a general feeling that what was going on between the two of us was something that wasn't supposed to be going on, but in contrast to how the rest of my family treated me, he was a close friend and an older brother of sorts. The abuse began with exposure and, for lack of a better word, "sword fighting" - nothing out of the ordinary for kids as young as we were, but it got to the point where he decided that that would be our "handshake", where every time we were together for family functions we'd go off and that'd be our official version of "Hey, how've you been"? From there it got progressively stranger - I had bunkbeds, but when he slept over he'd want to be in the same bed as me. He had me try oral on him - I didn't really want to, but I tried it out. Nothing happened when I tried it on him, I didn't see the point, and I kept telling him it didn't make any sense to me until he said I didn't have to keep going. Then he wanted to try it on me - again, didn't see the point, nothing happened, and I think he eventually realized I didn't particularly care for it or enjoy it, so he stopped. To me, at least in retrospect, that hits the extreme far end of "kids experimenting cause they're kids" and starts crossing the line into abuse. Things got weirder though.
As time went on, he began bringing anatomy books with him for "school", or had encyclopedias. Every time he was over, I ended up hanging out with him. He'd show me the diagrams of the male and female reproductive systems, diagrams of sex, talked about how people had sex, ejaculation, what puberty was and how it meant you were becoming a man and could have sex with women, etc. etc. etc. Never said anything about gay sex, and at that time, all I knew about gay people was that there were a few of them who went to church at my mom's church, and I thought it was kind of silly for two men to be married, because in my 8 or 9 year old mind, you were friends with boys and married girls. Even I had had a kindergarten and first grade girlfriend (we were of course supposed to be married, at least according to us, but her family moved).
Eventually, I think when I was in either 3rd or 4th grade, a bunch of us cousins were sitting around, and he said, "So who wants to have sex?" I had spent all this time learning from him that sex was between men and women, but I didn't realize I had basically been groomed. I don't even know if HE consciously knew he was grooming me, but there ya have it. He tried to anally penetrate me, but I remember he didn't because I told him I thought it wasn't gonna work and didn't want to do it anymore. He had me try it on him, but I was an elementary school student and didn't get erections, so that wasn't going to work. That concluded that episode and we went about more normal family stuff.
There was one more time after that where he told me that he had finally figured out how to ejaculate and wanted to show me. At this point, I think we've already established that although child me knew there was something not quite right going on, I didn't bother arguing because I knew eventually he'd end up just convincing me, but I do seem to recall saying stuff like "yeah if you get caught we're both going to get in a lot of trouble and this doesn't seem worth it". Dude ended up masturbating in front of me to completion. Weirdly even with all the other shit he'd done, I think that was maybe the most traumatic moment of those 4-5 years of abuse. I was jealous that, at least according to him, he was a man and I wasn't. He could get an erection, I couldn't.
Today, I fill out tests for kids who show "overly sexualized behavior" if I have to make a DCF referral for work. In retrospect, I look at myself after that episode and think, "How the hell did people not notice anything?!" I became obsessed with sex. I wanted to be able to do what he had done, but thought he was kind of a perv, so I didn't want to exactly mimic what he had done. A few years later when I finally figured things out, I felt guilty because I thought what I was doing was weird, since he had done the same thing. Some people's first orgasms, they think about members of the same or opposite sexes. I just tired to mimic what my cousin had done down to the most exact detail I could. Tried to stand in the same spot in the room as he did, tried to use mirrors to re-create my perspective when it happened so I could make sure I was mimicing everything as exactly as possible...it always struck me as weird, but I figured it was just my thing. It wasn't until years later that I read a Joe Kort article about how many sexual abuse victims attempt to recreate their abuse to gain control over something they had no control over. Talk about an eye opener! That article is what finally convinced me to go to therapy and EMDR for my abuse, after which my sexual behavior had changed entirely. It was a profound lesson in how abuse can "hijack" our own sexual behaviors or preferences, and revealed to me that literally my entire sexuality had been based on compulsions from day one.
The porn I watched was either close up videos of heterosexual sex which recalled the magazines, encyclopedias, and diagrams he had shown me, or it was people masturbating, which is what I had watched him do. It wasn't until the end of high school that I actually got some attention from women and I realized, inhibited as I was, that I really liked that attention, but by then I was all sorts of mixed up.
Anyway, going back to the abuse and my childhood, the problem for me was that later on in school that year (this was 4th grade), they decided to teach us about HIV and AIDS in health class. They told us that you could get HIV/AIDS from sharing blood, needles, or that gay men got it. I remember telling my friend on the bus I didn't understand how that was possible, because sex was something that happened between men and women. My friend then told me that men could do it with each other too, and I promptly freaked right the fuck out, because that sounded exactly like what my cousin had been doing to me or trying to get me to do to him. I didn't realize how important that moment was - I was not a popular kid, and other kids at school, even that young, would say things like, "dude you're so gay" or "get out of the way faggot", etc. I didn't pay attention at first, because in my mind, it didn't make any sense to be called gay. After talking to my friend though, I became TERRIFIED that people would find out what happened, I'd end up being branded, and for whatever reason I'd be a social outcast blah blah blah.
At dinner that night, I wasn't eating, which was rare, because I was a chunky kid when I was young. Parents asked me if I was ok, and I burst into tears and told them everything. My dad was ready to kill my cousin. My mom was like, "I'm gonna have to make some phone calls". In the end, my Aunt was pretty much in denial and so my mom just said, "Just don't be alone with him, don't let him touch you anywhere inappropriate, etc". Of course, the next time the families were together I told him that I spilled the beans, and our relationship was markedly different after that.
The rest of the story is typical male survivor stuff - I was pretty confused about my sexual orientation for a while, but any time in life I've been in situations where I could be sexual with somebody, I've always went with women, and it's always made me feel 1000% times better about myself. Like a lot of male survivors though, questioning my identity led to me to looking at gay porn for a time, and then wondering constantly if maybe I was really gay. Close friends I grew up with who are gay and know my entire story don't see it. I've been to three different therapists for PTSD, relationship issues, and anxiety disorders. All three of them have counseled gay clients and don't see it either. The anxiety specialist did note that I am prone to a certain type of OCD called Purely Obsessional OCD, where I become obsessive over certain things and go through mental rituals.
I did this with confusion about my sexual orientation, where I would watch gay porn and straight porn to see if I "reacted" the same. I'd go out and spend all my time thinking "did I find that girl attractive? What about that guy?" If anything slightly implicating that I wasn't absolutely 100% heterosexual happened to me, I would obsess over and try to prove definitively what my sexual orientation was for months, which only further fuels doubts, which makes the whole thing worse.
Somebody posted a cycle of addiction on here once and I was astounded with how similar it was to the routines I would go through. Basically, I realized it wasn't the abuse itself, but the irrational fear of being labeled as gay BECAUSE of the abuse that set so many of my behavioral patterns.
My cousin was once my closest friend, but without me being aware of it, our relationship was sexual. When I was younger, I assumed that's how most male friendships operated, and I assumed anybody who wanted to be friends with me wanted the same stuff to happen that my cousin did. I was lucky that I have extremely close friends who basically went "yeah, that's not really a thing you have to do/way you have to behave for your friends". Looking back now, I realize I was inappropriately socialized that way by my interaction with my cousin, and didn't get a chance to discover my innate desires on my own. A large part of that was what drove my questioning of my sexuality, until I realized I was simply doing what I was groomed to do.
Out of therapy, I have gotten closer to discovering my innate sexuality. I fell hard for one of my best friends sisters. She was home on break, and I had never noticed her before. After all, you get used to thinking "oh that's just so and so's younger sister". Suddenly, she grew up. Then she started flirting with me - I think just for fun on her end, but I was suckered in. We're still friends, but we both agreed the dynamic between my friend and my relationship with him and the rest of the family would tremendously complicate things. She lives several states away now, so that's a dead issue. There was another girl in grad school - this was the first time I recall feeling magnetically drawn to somebody. We flirted a lot, but she'd eventually keep distance. Three months later she was married - none of us even knew she was engaged at the time. Missed opportunities...anyways...
By losing my relationship with my cousin, anybody who wanted to be my friend pretty thoroughly astounded me - my opinion of myself was really that low. Once in 6th grade we were asked to write about our heroes for an assignment in english class. I chose my best friend of two year simply because he had approached me wanting to be friends and was still my friend two years later (still my best friend to this day).
So, the sexual abuse part was just the most obvious layer of the onion that is my state of mental health. It's really a giant knot of the sexual abuse, dysfunctional sexuality, emotional abuse, a TON of social rejection, and very low self esteem.
My mother still can't accept what happened - she, despite, knowing what happened, will say, "He's my nephew, what do you want me to say or do?" I don't know, stand up for and be supportive of your son? She even tried to talk me out of leaving my therapist to go to one she referred people to - I didn't though, and I'm glad. Same thing with the emotional abuse - both my parents will say, "That was just normal sibling stuff". I finally realized my parents have been minimizing these traumas, and turn leading me to minimize them, because they can't cope with the damage I've suffered from these things. That makes them feel like they're guilty, or did something wrong that they can't fix.
It took me 10 years to realize all this. 10 years to realize that my aversion to relationships is because I believe that I'm somehow broken, believe that I am inherently undesirable (even if people tell me I'm not), find myself uninteresting, can't fathom anybody staying with me voluntarily, feel that now I'm too old and awkward to date, don't like one night stands because it's difficult for me to have sex with somebody who I don't know or don't trust 100% (I wonder if they are using their feminine charms to manipulate me), and have NEVER approached women as I automatically assume I will be bothering them or coming off as "creepy". I gradually turned myself more or less emotionally numb and walled off between 7th and 10th grade, because there was nowhere I could vent and nothing I could do without catching shit for it from my sister or my family. Easier to be numb, then. Now that I'm older and wiser though, I can't figure out how to undo that.
The real bear here is that the sexual abuse and confusion over my orientation? I ALWAYS go back to it and analyze it and pick it apart for answer, because it distracts me from having to deal with these other difficult emotions and circumstances, and it's become familiar. When I finished EMDR all those years back, my therapist said, "I'd like to see you start to develop some positive relationships now". I also remember her saying that something what we come in the door for is only a step on a much longer path. That's where I'm at now, but when I finished therapy I remember thinking "I just want peace and to avoid having to suffer or be hurt". There's a part of me that doesn't want to go back and have to do all this over again, but if I don't, I'll stay where I'm at, and that's not really want to do either. If you've read all this, thank you for your time.
