Were you Sexually Abused as a Child? How to Tell

I am more than sure I was sexually abused as a kid, not on many occasions, but I remember the two times, which I will write here, just because I want to write it somewhere where I won’t be recognized, since I come from a very small country. Writing on our country-forums seems too risky and I really need to leave it somewhere, even if no one ever reads it.

My family was very Christian, especially my mom, who did talk to me about sex, but in a very Christian way (it’s for moms and dads, it’s pleasant once it happens and it should happen in marriage and in marriage only). In comparison to other Christian kids, I was educated, but not as nearly as much as I should have been.

Aside from encountering porn magazines in parks, while hanging out with other kids, I remember being shamed for playing with other kids as well (kissing a boy in the kindergarten) and, which is what I want to write about, being exposed to a man masturbating while me and my friend were accidentally there and ended up watching. She was 4 years older and curious and insosted that we stay and watch, while I really just wanted to go home, since I got terribly scared.
When I finally came home, hours later, and told that to my mom, she was upset and I know she wanted to help somehow, but she didn’t. I was, more or less, “shushed”, get over it and not go to the same place again. Which I obeyed, never quite processed, tucked deep inside of my memory and went on with my life. I felt horrible for a couple of days (actively horroble, all the time for a couple of days, which I think is way too long for a 6 year-old child).

A year or some later, the same firend and I were on the beach, where we were jumping in the water and playing. A man (some other man) was standing on the shore, quite close to us, watching us all the time. At some point, he was swimming behind me and I felt my panties slipping down, him watching me directly into my eyes. I ran away and told my mom the same evening what’s happened, she talked to my dad (in front of me) and he pretended he didn’t hear her. Nothing was ever mentioned again. I spent my entire childhood, until puberty, thinking it was all an accident and I was overreacting, feeling incredibly dumb and needy for even mentioning it to my parents.
At the same time, a lot of attention was being paid, by my mother, to the never ending story of how “our society is sex-crazed”, how “young girls dress too provocatively”, how “it’s wrong to even French-kiss someone before marriage”, how “sex is overrated” etc., but really, not much was said about child abuse.
First I developed an enormous fear of sex, then porn addiction, then the need to please my partners more than myself…and it’s only now, in my 30s that I’m finally learning to surrender to my loving, sex-positive and respectful husband, who not only thinks sex is a beautiful and natural thing, but he is very attentive to both mine and his needs. First time in my life, I feel like I MIGHT ACTUALLY let go of shame, guilt and need to be sexually what others expect – be it my crazy parents, or my chauvinist, abusing former partners.

Recently I tried to talk to my mom, but she doesn’t really remember it all very well. Although I did feel the need to hurt her and my dad, badly, I decided it is better to forgive, for they themselves were very poorly educated about it all. Plus, at the time, we were war refugees, didn’t even live in our home town for five years and they were probably worried sick about everything and anything, besides me being abused, so the proper reaction was missinng due to that – not due to the lack of their love (they really loved me and they still do).

What I’m still battling with is Christianity which makes my relationship to my mom very hard to nurture, since I blame the dogma for my mom’s wrong behaviour. I battle every day and hope to find the forgiveness in my heart, because I myself am about to become a mom and I think the only honest love I can give to my child is the one where there is no trauma, resentment and holding grudges.

Hi there, recently I allowed myself to think about the possibility that I was abused in some way as a young child of maybe 6 or 7. The more I thought about it the more other things slipped into place. For e.g. I think it was a teenage boy and I’ve always been and I still am, afraid of teenage boys; I prefer to be by myself than with other people especially groups, but at the same time I crave company…I’m sort of afraid of it and I want it. I have certain memories of being in the top floor of our then very big house with this boy and something not nice happening and my sister leaving the room in distaste just before this thing happened, but she doesn’t recall this at all, although she didn’t discuss it with me when I saw her, even after I brought it up.
I recall sitting in our toilet shredding paper, for what felt like ages, while I wondered why no one came to find me, it was sunny. I think I remember showing this boy my dads porn collection, I suppose I wanted to impress him and it was the most grown up thing I had access to. I know that I actively avoided boys until I was a late teen
/early twenties and that I always thought people would find me disgusting if they really knew me. I remember a teacher at my secondary school worrying that all was not well with me aged 18 and me thinking, well it’s too effing late to worry about me now….without really knowing why it was too late.
I suppose my questions are related to whether it’s ok to say, ‘I’m pretty sure I was abused’, when I really have no clear memory? My partner was surprised when I told him I was wondering if the abuse had been physical and penetrative; he had assumed it was from the start, because of how I am…..which was curious to me. I am pretty much estranged from my immediate family, mother, father, sister, as I find I am treated like the crazy person who found our home life perverse, it was,while they were fine, they’re not. I don’t know where to turn for help. I have a lovely therapist who helps me to focus on me and feeling better rather than delving for what may or may not be in my mind but I feel like I need validation somehow for my feelings. Can you help at all do you think?

Reading this article and seeing symptoms of victims to child abuse made me want to share this with you…. I think I was sexually abused as a child but I have very little to no memory from ages 3-9 yrs old. I’m 27 now. A few years ago I was a little drunk, talking to one of my friends and I told her that I thought I’d been molested by my uncle in my grandmothers basement. I don’t know why I said that but I cried and started having visions of walking into the basement. Nothing else. I doubt myself because I was drunk and sometimes your mind can make things up (I’m also an artist with a vivid imagination)… My uncle is very caring and loving but he was also a drug addict and maybe did something when he wasn’t sober but I don’t want to blame anything on anyone because I don’t know for sure. I do have symptoms when having sex… I’ll do it not wanting to, or let someone do things and I’m thinking to say NO but it never comes out if they’ve already started to touch me. Also when I lost my virginity, my first told me that he didn’t think I was a virgin. I questioned him and he couldn’t explain why and I question that a lot as well…. that was 10 years ago…..Today I still think back to that day when I told my friend I thought I was molested but I honestly don’t have any memory, could I have been making it up?

This happen when 8 or 9 i dont know if i was sexaully abuse or not but i know i went to sleep at night with my covers were over my whole bodyand i woke up the next day with my covers to my stomach or my waist i cant remember i felt weird and i looked under my covers and my under wear also my pants were not on me they were on the ground i ended up telling my mom that day and she never said anything so i decieded to forget about it and its just coming back to me that this happened and really that night i was sleep i didnt feel anything that would wake me up and i never sleep walked or anything ever in my life to wake up without under wear and pants without remembering i also all ways wear pjs when im sleep can someone plz tell im not crazy???

Hi start from last I was raped 4 years ago which resulted in my son.
I was groomed and trafficked when 21.
My first proper bf at 21 raped me the day I came out of hospital after having abortion he told me to get. And then started the grooming.
Boys in high school would be doing things I always said no but they never listened.
When was 7 I walked into the bathroom when he was in the bath and told to do things I think was my dad but in doubting myself alot.
I do self harm and wanting to kill myself and I am on anti depressants but not taken for 2 or 3 weeks.

I am 16 and feel as if I was molested around age 7-10. I hardly remember anything from my childhood up until age 10, but I have this memory of my uncle playing with me and tickling my thighs. I don’t remember if he touched my crotch or not but I feel as if he did. Now, whenever anyone tries to tickle me or touch my legs I get extremely uncomfortable and angry. I remember him touching my butt and back of my thighs a few times. During the ages 7-10 I would grab/touch my crotch all the time and remember feeling uncomfortable around him all the time.Now, I get uncomfortable when around him and avoid being alone with him or being close to him as much as I can.I don’t know if i’m just making these memories up or if if this really happened??

I was watching a film where two boys were raped by the same man, one remembers but the other forgets. It was during that film I broke down in tears believing I was probably raped as a child but forgotten.
I have suffered from severe depression since I was six years old. A lot of it was because of my teacher, he was very emotionally abusive to me. That I remember. I seem to have a strange memory of him being with me in the girl’s toilet cubicle. Although, I’m unsure if this even happened.
During a therapy session I had last year I wanted to tell my counsellor what I believed could have happened. But I had a panic attack. I just couldn’t say anything. I was terrified of even saying it’s a possibility. I later ran to the toilet to vomit.
Now I’m 21 years old. I don’t trust men. I don’t understand why. I have never had a boyfriend. I’ve never had sex. I’m terrified of the thought of doing it and I wish I understood it. I’m 100% heterosexual and I’m attracted to men emotionally and sexually.
The way I feel is affecting my life in the most depressing ways. Not knowing what happened and the confusion of why I feel this way is destroying me.

Hello, I have very early childhood memories, however I loose the memories from 3 until about 10 . I have not idea what happen during that time. I have always since I can remember being extremely interested in sex I also knew how to satisfy myself early in life. I have always felt as if I was touched as a child. I once asked my mother if I was sexually abused she said no. I never felt comfortable around men when I was younger. I was sexually assaulted when I was 13 and did not even realize it was wrong until much later. I was very sexually active and very numb to the emotional connection. I thought I was crazy for feeling like something happened but my gut tells me otherwise. I am not sure how a 10 year know so much about sex without being told about it. I have anxiety and depression and have had it for 30 yrs however I self medicated with alcohol. Until I had a light bulb moment and decided to stop drinking and start medication and self evaluate.. I realized I am not crazy, I am not a victim I AM A SURVIVOR.

When I was little, maybe 6-7, my family would go camping with some family friends who had a son three years older than me. We would play ‘the game’ with my sister who was a year older also. The game was just him touching us or exposing himself to us but I was curious at that age and I feel like it’s not valid abuse because I didn’t say no. My sister could feel abused also, but I don’t feel comfortable talking to her about it because if she doesn’t remember I’ll feel even less valid. In another instance I was with a female friend and we watched a film with erotic scenes in it, and we were touching eachother under the covers. She also showed me her eczema cream which she put on her vulva, and told me she masturbated with a banana. I would have been 6-7, but I don’t remember protesting to this happening and feel invalid in the trauma. I still know and am close with both of these people today and I don’t know how to handle this.
I do have very poor memory in general especially my childhood and have self harmed aged 15(ish) for about a year after my auntie died. I’m 17 now, and I feel like I’m starting to get ‘bad’ again and my mum has asked me if I wanted to see a therapist (Ive been to one before but didn’t talk much so I stopped going) and I think I do this time but it’s hard to tell her, I feel like it would hurt her to understand what I did when I was younger, can I have a second opinion?

Hey I wanted to ask about a memory I have. The thing is I’m not even sure it is a memory, I was listening to dramatic music at the time (when I thought I saw this) and a sort of image appeared in front of me, I laughed it off initially but then I started to panic about wether it be real. As my mind began spiralling with fear a voice in the back of my head said, ‘this isn’t true’. I do suffer really badly from OCD and I’m known to overthink everything, so I’m not sure as to if this ever happened. All I can say is that it involved my father and it has been seriously bothering me. However my father has never showed any signs of being abusive, and I remember being bathed by him when I was young, and he never touched me sexually or in a threatening way. I used to go on walks with my dad and we’d go fishing, shooting in the forest, he’d build dams with me across rivers, and he’d make swings from trees for me. He has always been a kind and loving dad, and has never hurt me. This is why this violent image of a man I saw seems completely out of place on my timeline of childhood, i was never ill as a child, and I was happy for the most part. Also the place this ‘memory’ took place in is pretty public and there are CCTV cameras there so I really don’t understand how it could’ve happened. In the summer I gave my friend a blowjob and I didn’t get any kind of negative reaction to that, which people with childhood trauma talk about. I Also don’t struggle with kissing, and intimacy doesn’t weird me out .I did ask my parents about this image, just like I’ve asked them if I have cancer, illnesses, and various other things my OCD dwells on, and they were really concerned and just said it wasn’t true. My dad, (the supposed rapist) said that it wasn’t real and that I could get some medical and mental help if I wanted help dealing with thoughts like these. Surely a rapist wouldn’t want you to talk about it with people of power. I love my dad so much and he’s always been an amazing father, so to have to confront him about this has been horrible. The only reason I started panicking was when I turned to the internet and read about repressed memories. I understand that these are very real but I don’t have any of the symptoms of being abused. I became so paranoid that this was a flashback and in a way it was but I’m not sure it’s accurate. Besides it has been a year since I first started panicking about this and I haven’t experienced any other ‘flashbacks’. On the contrary I had a ‘positive flashback’, which sounds odd and hard to explain, but it was just a sense of happiness which came flooding back from my childhood. I feel deep down in my heart that this isn’t real, however I am very prone to panicking. what are your opinions on this situation?

HI I’m Carina and I was abused when I was a child the time past and I’m married with two kids. my husband is older than me. My concern is the fear that I have with my daughters when a men, another boy or their own father are too close to them, it’s so hard for me. I think too much about it.I’m scared that some will hurt them like someone did so many times with me and my mom don’t even notice.I don’t want that to happened to them and raised them so weak like my mom did with me .My first daughter is 8 and my second is 4 months.my husband and I let a 13 years old kid stay in our house .he is his bestfriend son I know that is just for a few months but I can even sleep thinking that he will come to my daughters’ room and hurt my babies.I used to take therapy but I missed one so I never call again.but it was a couple therapy.Honesly I don’t know how to protect or let raise my daughters knowing that I have a trauma.Do you think I can cure my self? for my babies I’ll do anything

I’m worried that I may have been abused by my dad. I have been experiencing most of the symptoms listed. I would always feel ashamed and afraid of sex and especially men. I feel so vulnerable and alone. Me and my dad aren’t close. I remember a possible memory of my mom telling me to show her how someone touched me using a big plushy dog as a demonstration. Recently, my mom told me how my dad was molested and how he tried to rape her twice. I am uncertain and I’m afraid of asking my mom about it. I don’t want to look like I’m accusing my dad.

Hi I was told as a teenager that when I was 3 almost 4 years old, my brother 3 years older than me came back home after a week end visit with out dad and we were both behaving off and out of character. I was going potty in underwear and crying a lot and just having issues and my brother was having angry outbursts and his teacher even noticed and has to call my mom about his behavior so she took us to a councelor and she showed me a book about places to not touch. I pointed to a page where the girl was covering her privates below and I said… dad was touching me there when I was trying 2 sleep! My mom showed me her notes she wrote down of our behavior back then and the hospital report cuz mom took me to hospital to have doc look at area to see if there was signs of being molested, but I would not allow anybody to get close to that area I wouldn’t let them take pants and underwear off and was crying so no exam done.

I have no memory of childhood. No memories til round 10 years old. My dad abused my mom all the time physically mentally and sexually in front of us. I have read police reports of him wrapping phone cord round mom’s neck and chasing her round with a bat round inside then outside of house. So a lot of trauma was witnessed as well as myself being sexually abused.

I have been diagnosed with bipolar1 depression and PTSD. Was in hospital last February for 2 weeks and the February before that for a month due to meds not working and needing a change quickly and with round the clock doc care.

I’m just really needing to know what actually happened and if I was molested more than 1 time or what was going on. Cuz I need to know if my dad actually did something to me. If I know what happened then I feel I can start to process it and work on the issue and begin to move on from it. I also just want my other memories of just being a kid and the relationship me and my brother had cuz we not really that close.

I am torn. I feel that I know a 3 year old doesn’t really say what I said unless it happened cuz it’s hard for a 3 year old to come up with something like that. And my brother obviously witnessed something or Idk cuz he was acting out also. So I know something terrible happened just don’t know what and it’s making life difficult not knowing. But I think cuz it’s my dad, I don’t want to truly believe my dad did anything to me. I just wanna remember being a kid but no memory.

Is there something I can do to help release these hidden memories? I really feel I’m not gonna be able to move on in life until I release memories and continue going to counceling and work out my issues. I need to know what happened. What can be done to help???

Oh and my mom is an alcoholic so was raised by an alcoholic mom and a woman beater dad who prob molested his own daughter. I just wonder if I really was sexually abused…if it happened multiple times over period of time which is why I don’t remember 1st 10 years of my life, or if that’s cuz there’s a mix of being molested and then witnessing the violence which made me loose those memories also for so long.

Plz help! If anything I can do at home or tell my councelor I Will do. Thank you for your time

I have a very foggy memory when i was younger of lying on a white sheet of paper or bed sheets in some place that looked like a doctors office. I remember specifically someone touching, and maybe cutting my clitoris and labia when i was a very young child. It was not a dream, i know that for certain, and i have no memories around that. I have all the symptoms of sexual abuse, including panic attacks, constant anxiety, depression, suicidal thoughts, low self esteem, intense mood swings and opinion changes, little sense of identity and HORRIBLE distrust of my parents, especially of my mother. I am not sure why and sex, though easy and comfortable for me, has now turned into something fear based and with low sex drive. I have an overly heightened sense of grossness, shame, and feelings of sexual dirtiness in my body almost all the time. I am 18 now and all the signs are now beginning to add up. What do you think?

Hi, I’m in my 50’s and recent events and revelations have made me question whether I may have been sexually abused when I was a child. I have a memory of my father saying inappropriate things to me aged around 12 but nothing else. However I have recently been made aware he has also done this to other female family members and was once questioned by the police about sexual abuse at a boys school he worked at. My question is… what , if any, are the physical (gynochological) signs that someone has been abused at a young age. I ask this due to having sexual problems throughout my life. Thank you

So the only reason why I think I was sexually abused when I was a kid is because I knew what a guy’s junk looks like before I watched porn for the first time. I didn’t think anything of it then but now I do. I’m afraid of my dad whenever he walks in the house it’s like a weight is on my shoulders and I get sad. I suspect my some of my uncles too for being apart of it. Also I read all of the symptoms and I have all of them… I don’t know what to do without my parents finding out.

im sorry i wasted your time .. i think my next idea will cure the pain heh i was probably being dramatic anyway or it was a dream… i dont know it doesnt matter its funny though the first time i tell someone no one cares.. oh well like i said its probably a dream

Hi, I’m a guy I’m 28 years old and I was abused 21 years ago when I was just 7 years old. I can still remember the acts I was forced to do, it was an older sibling who did this to me, and he was just 15 years old.
For a long time I thought I forgot what happened and that I succeeded dealing with all the negative feeling I passed through, but unfortunately, in the last 5 years I occasionally feel so depressed and so angry, I feel emptiness and guilt and start having flashback from that day. My life has not been so good on the social level and relationships with women, even thought at some point I had so many friends who loved me and looked up to me, but I have never been with a girl in bed, and sometimes I doubt people for no reason, even people that I supposably trust the most, and whenever I wanna discuss a sexual issue or topic with a friend I become so stressed and ashamed, like someone like me should not talk about sex or I don’t know. I simply wanna know why these feelings keep coming back after these years of neglecting them and after I thought I was stronger than falling into that trap.
I need help because suddenly I feel so lonesome and so vulnerable.

I think I’ve been abused, but I’m not sure. I’ve always been afraid of sex till I started having sex with a good partner. I’ve always hated sex, talking about it and such. I do remember fooling around with a friend of mine when we were young and kissing my sister. But I don’t think that’s what caused it. I do watch Law and Order: Special Victims Unit so maybe I’m making it up but I just don’t think so. My mom did tell me that I saw a man’s penis when I was a baby but I don’t know how that could have affected me. I just want some answers about how I feel.

I have a lot of memory loss, i cant remember much of my childhood apart from a few snapshots, ive always been really skiddish and anxious in almost any situation and whenever something comes up in media about sexual abuse i get really anxious and more uncomfortable than the other people around me. The more ive researched the more likely it seems i was abused in some way and its been really eating away at me. is there anyway i can get into this and try and figure out what happened? Or should i just try to ignore it and get passed it?

When i was no more than maybe 13, i told my sister that as a very young child, our family friend had abused me. She told my mum but not my dad and i’m pretty sure she spoke with the family friend and his wife. My memories of this are so foggy and I don’t remember the consequences or any action that followed. My mum is still friends with the couple and now, almost 16 years after initially telling my sister, i find myself wondering if i made it all up or if that really happened? I so want to ask my sister, but i’m very nervous to go digging in a place that i feel my brain is trying to help me forget. But as an adult, i can’t help but wonder what happened to make my ordinarily over protective mother, not take action? Was it that i was so young and unsure of what i was telling her or did she just not want to deal with that?
I really wish this wasn’t on my mind at the moment, but i don’t know how to make it go back to the bottom of my mind where it belongs.

This is hitting way too close to home! For a while I have assumed that I was molested or abused as an infant. I have no memories of abuse, but do know that I was very sexually aware from a young age. (Probably about 5yrs). I masturbated a lot from that age and always felt pent up sexual frustration. I was sexually active (touching/fondling /kissing) with our neighbours’ son from about 8. I have quite a few symptoms listed in this article, but as I never had any recollection of abuse, always thought I was a tad crazy.
I have this idea that I am adopted, which my whole family denies. I just don’t feel “part of the family” and have a very poor relationship with them. I am now 30 years old and would like to ascertain whether I was actually abused, so I can deal with the emotional fall out and heal. It feels like I can’t move on until I know for sure.

Hi, I’m 18 years old and recently I have been having suspicions of being molested as a child. I don’t remember much of my childhood, however I am experiencing a lot of the signs. I am dating a guy who is very narcissistic and my sexual drive is not normal. I panic whenever my boyfriend and i are getting intimate, especially when he fingers me. I hate being fingered but sex is fine, so this makes me think my molester fingered me. I usually never say no to my boyfriend when it comes to sex, even if i dont want to have it. I feel an obligation to please him. I have had OCD most of my life, and I have trichotillomania, which in some cases indicates abuse. Also, I began rubbing myself down there when I was in kindergarten. I don’t know how I began doing it but I do know that my girl cousin used to do it too at that age. We sometimes used to do it together. We were both really provocative at a young age, we would play games that had to do with having boyfriends and having sex with them. I asked her today if she remembers anything about her childhood and she suspects of being molested too. I don’t really know who could have raped me but i do remember a dream I had when I was 5 or 6. I dreamed that I was in bed and I couldn’t move. and I had a feeling my uncle was coming and there was nothing I could do. I don’t really know how i remember a dream from when i was 5, but it seemed to be significant. Also, the other thing that i clearly remember is i used to have a lot of urine infections as a child. I remember my vagina would burn whenever I got home from somewhere (I can’t remember where) and when my mom would check it, it would be red. I was a really quiet kid most of my life and I used to latch on to my mom a lot, I was very scared of people. In kindergarten through third grade, I remember having very violent thoughts towards other kids. I would imagine hurting them physically. I just want to know if these experiences indicate sexual abuse and if so, what can i do to be sure?

I seem to have most of the symptoms but I’m not really sure because I don’t remember anything. My mother was bipolar so I wasn’t raised in a nice environment and I might have PTSD due to this. My childhood memories are close to zero and they are all bad. But, although I don’t have any sexual abusing memories, I feel completely disconnected from my body, I don’t like sex, I hate talking sexually or hitting on a man, I’m disgusted by porn and always feel the need to be clean. I have one memory of an old person giving candies to other kids to bring me to his store. I also remember one kid from my neighborhood pretending he was having sex with me and I was trying to escape. But nothing more. Is it possible that I’ve been abused and not remember? How can I know for sure? I’m seeing a psychologist, but every time I try to mention anything, he says that simply not everyone has the same sex drive. He doesn’t even talk to me about PTSD. I live in a small society and can’t find another therapist. Is it possible that it’s just my PTSD causing this and not related to any sexual abuse?

Hey,

I feel crazy writing this, maybe it´s all in my head? I don´t know, but I need to get it out.
From a very young age, I´ve been interested in sex and known more than I should have. I used to make my toys perform inapropriate acts. I used to be addicted to satisfying myself, inserting things inside myself, when I really should not have had such knowledge.
As a preteen I was terrified of getting pregnant. I was physically, emotionally and verbally abused by my sperm donor, and have never expexted anything less of him but to have raped me.
I remember laying awake in my bed, stiff, terrified as he came to forcefully kiss me goodnight.
Being near him was repulsive. I feel physically ill just thinking about him or sex. Yet, I´m also very interested in it. I´m terrified or darkness, of men and letting people too close. I much prefer being by myself.
Anytime a man takes an interest in being with me, I´m flattered, but also scared stiff and want to run away and hide. When I go outside, I feel constantly as if I am going to be caught and raped- any passing vehicle, any look from a male.
Once, I recall, I was getting changed in my bedroom and my father tried to get in. I pleaded him not to, he knew what I was doing. He was laughing, trying to force the door open. He would barge into the bathroom as I was bathing, apparently to use the loo.
My uncle also lived with from the time he was a child, him being also bused by my father. I always felt uncomfortable arounbd him as well.
I have depression, dyslexia, PTSD and ADHD.

i am turning 13 and,i think i was abused i remember sleeping and waking up with no pants i would have had pants on because it was winter and my mom was always afraid of my uncle and he would give me things when we were together he would let me watch movies late at night and they weren’t kid friendly i was 7-9. i don’t know if i was i have anger issues and i think about ending it i have been having nightmares and they feel real.

my name is Dorcas i am 17 i was rape between 4-5 of age but the age is what is giving me problem. i was rape by a cousin of mine it was really painful and i was also rape at the age of 10 this time i was rape by an older man we had mutual relationship with my family. his is in his late 40s i couldnt walk after he rape me so i blame my mom for not taking notice of the way i work. i was also made to hold a penis i was also fingered twice at the age of 12 or 13 for this reason i sometime have hatred for my mom blaming her for her carelesnes i feel unwanted and rejected and i have low self esteem i dont mingle among with people for the fear of by laugh at for not being a virgin and lastly i dont like people talking about sex virginity near me or make metion of someone by raped i over react when my siblings do something wrong i think i over react pls help me and sacred that my future husband will dislike me for not being a virgin pls help i havent told anyone a thing about this

I am 65 years old, a mental health professional and had a wonderful 37 years with my beautiful husband until he passed away. I just want a name put to what I experienced from ages 9 to 14. My dad would get angry with my mom and would call me to get in the car and go with him. He never called my other three siblings – one older and two younger. I can remember leaving the house and returning to the house but nothing in between. There have been other minor indications that my dad could have molested me in some way. I know this is going to sound crazy, but I need a name for what I could do. During those years I developed the ability to completely turn our house and neighborhood around. Nothing inside the house or in the neighborhood changed, but it was as if my neighborhood, instead of running South to North was running from East to West. I could change it back and forth at whim. It just gave everything a different look. No one else could see it but me.

I faced mild molestations as a child which scared me to hell. I never spoke about them to anyone. I tried to persuade myself that they never happened and It’s all in my head. I used to get recurring dreams of a man chasing me and I lose my voice when I cry for help in those dreams. I thought I’ve moved on. I’m a young adult now. I’m getting those same dreams again and they still petrify me the same. How do I overcome this? I want those dreams to go away.

Wow, thank you all for all the comments and replies. I am in my thirties, married, mom to several children. I grew up very religious, completely segregated from boys. My husband was the first guy I ever touched and sex was gross and painful. I just always wanted to be held. After about two years of marriage and getting crazy anxiety, I got into therapy with a female therapist who took complete advantage of me by holding and hugging me for ages at a time, claiming she was “reparenting” me. Anyway, long story short, I’m at the other end of a huge recovery process. But now there is this niggling feeling that SOMETHING happened to me as a little girl. I don’t know what. My parents say they have no idea (and I trust them, no reason to think they’re lying to me). I’m about to get back with my husband after a long period of abstinence and I’m terrified of that forlorn and sad little girl emerging again, like she does when sex is involved. I’ve been through so much therapy and have learned to deal with my symptoms. Is it necessary for me to try to discover the source of my trauma? I feel like this is the only thing left that I can possibly do, because I’ve seriously tried everything therapy has to offer, but I’m so afraid of the process.

Shared from the United States. I am a 45 year male, dealing with vivid flashbacks of childhood sexual abuse at the hands of my slightly older brother. I only started remembering any of this 3 years ago when my twin children were born early by c-section in traumatic fashion almost killing my wife and them both. I held my wife’s hand while she was sliced open unaware of how close to death they all were, with the sight of her own lower half being blocked by a curtain; but I saw everything. After they were born and that day ended, I had my first adult panic attack and memories of abuse although sparse. Starting 6 months ago I have undergone EDMR therapy which unleashed a flood of memories and vivid flashbacks of years of abuse. Starting at 7-8 years up until 13 years old when I was strong enough to fight back. Somehow my mind completely blocked any of this out from that point on and allowed me to survive thinking I had a great childhood. Wrong! Although it does explain also why I have virtually no memory of any of my childhood except other traumatic events like…(someone killing a venomous snake in front of me, crashing my bicycle and getting hurt, or getting a horrible sunburn) but that was it. For whatever reasons I never questioned this lack of memory, other than assuming all kids must forget their childhood. Here is what I do remember happening by my brother:
Being… kicked, choked, punched, held down and spit on, attempted to set me on fire, pushed down staircases, pushed into trees and ditches, locked in basements and closets in dark, threatened constantly with death or harm if told, being sexually abused probably weekly for several years, being attacked in my sleep, being hunted down while hiding from him, being taunted in front of other kids by him and he encouraged them to put me down, being told I was worthless and nobody cared about me which is why abuse continued, beaten with sticks or rocks, feeling disconnected constantly as I still do, having my pets abused to prove he would kill them if I told, having live animals set on fire in front of me to keep me silent, and much more.
As an child and an adult I now realize I have acted in a disrespectful way repeatedly through my life not thinking anything was wrong with it, for this I am truly sorry to anyone involved. This included putting things in my butt as a 9 year old when no one was around, taking advantage of some women I dated when they were drunk/partying, always ending up in relationships with women who were sexually abused as children which they told me about privately after dating for considerable time, porn addiction, masturbating and more with other grown men as an adult but always hiding it from girlfriends.
This has destroyed my entire adult life in ways I did not even recognize and made my childhood a void which I now wish sometimes I did not know as much about. I cannot even remember any of the good moments. I am taking my children to a friends birthday party tomorrow and it made me realize I cannot remember any detail of even one childhood birthday party on mine.
I now suffer greatly from PTSD, anxiety, disassociation, flashbacks, and being a grumpy asshole to my family. My wife who is also pregnant with our third child is considering separating because of my inability to work through this deluge of shit. But I can only continue to recognize what happened and be a better version of me than I have been. I am not abusive to anyone but obviously I know that I am not a joy to be around, when anything can trigger my PTSD. Such as seeing my kids bicker and one get injured, or someone hit another person, or thoughts of keeping my family safe being difficult, or after a sudden flashback.
Either way I am happy to have sought help, EDMR therapy in particular, and to at least learn who I really am. Now I have to rebuild everything I know including ( self love, empathy toward others and myself, boundaries, what love is, who I might trust, and so much more).
I just wanted to write this anonymously and if I get a few responses that would be helpful, if not then I got to vent some frustrations without letting it slip out around my family who I love more than myself.
I truly feel for anyone who was abused. Do not doubt yourself. Memories can come back at anytime. Those gut feelings you have are likely for a great reason, they are a survival mechanism and trying to make you aware. I cannot pretend to know much about this, but in a short time of about a year have experienced a lot, and hope this can help anyone else; including myself.
Love to you all from me.
Keep your head up, shield up, nothing to be afraid of. A quote from the most positive musician in the world I know of Nahko and Medicine for the People, from the US also. Their music is the positive pulse that keeps me alive and moving forward.
Much Love and Thanks to You All for hearing me out.

Please help me to get answers. This happened about 40 years ago and I have been living with this since then. I was 6 at the time.. just started school. My father was a high school teacher and my parents were staying at a school hostel for boys. I was outside playing ball when this much older guy approached me. I think he was about final year of school – probably about 17years old. He started kicking the ball with me. He was asking a lot of questions and told me about all the places at the hostel he and the other guys used to hide from classes. He told me that he would show me. I went a long with him and didn’t feel scared at all. My parents knew him and his parents very well. We ended up in a small dark room… something like a basement room… just a door. He said I should look inside and as I walked in he was about to take off his pants. I wanted to walk away, but he called me and said he wanted to show me something. I went back. By that time he was already playing with himself and said I should not say anything to anyone. I just stood there…couldn’t move. He said I should close the door so that no one can see me and he pulled my pants… I said no, but he insisted that he had a cool game he wanted to show me. Well, he made me lie down next to him…I was shaking and didn’t want to make a sound. He then took my hand and placed it on his penis and said I should rub it. I didn’t want to. I said I don’t know how and I have never done it before – I was hoping that he would then leave me. He then touched me and said that he will show me. He said that this was a game I had to learn because we stayed in the hostel and all boys did that. I didn’t want to but he kept putting my hand on his penis and moved up and down. I felt exposed and he just kept on going … when all was done, he said I should not tell anyone and he left. I was sitting in the small dark room and waited until I could not hear him. I ran out and went to our apartment. I felt so guilty of what I did and could not tell anyone. I was too afraid. I avoided any possible situation like that and although it never happened again I could see that he had told all his friends – they would stare at me. I tried to forget that moment, but now, after so many years it is haunting me. My marriage of almost 25years is on the rocks, I feel I am sexually not enough and these memories are killing me. I have not since that day said anything to anyone…not even my wife. What now?

my name is Bree and I’m a 19 year old female and i feel as if i may have been sexually abused but have no memory of it. I first stumbled across the idea because i have deep fantasies of being abused and raped and have since before I could even be sexually arroused and I was joking with a friend that i must have some sort of repressed assault. but now it’s not so funny. Large parts of my childhood are unaccounted for. I have suffered from SEVERE anxiety for as long as i can remember. I’ve been hospitalized four times for suicidal attempts and self harm. I have bulimia nervosa. I have recently also been diagnosed with BPD. i am slightly overweight- which could be due to the the eating disorder granted. I get sick VERY often. i’ve been unable to mantain any relationships- ending them all as they just get serious. for that reason i haven’t had sex yet. it terrifies me! I thought these were all symptoms of my personality but now i feel as if there is more to uncover. I have intense fears of random people and places for reasons i don’t understand! I believe if i begin to record these boughts of intense fear i may be able to find a pattern and with that pattern i can start focusing on memories of my childhood. My childhood feels so far away, like another person lived it. I am only 19. I know I have mental illness and that treating it will happen with or without finding out if i was sexually assault as as a child. But now i feel as if i must know. is there a reason i am this way?

I forgot to mention that when I married i was married twice and bothe times they were much older men I am no sure if that is a symptom or not. I also to this day have no idea if the dream is of something that really happened to me but it sure feels real every time i dream it and it always happens the same way.

I’m starting to remember things that suggest sexual abuse, but it’s not enough to know 100% sure if it is or even a person. Do you think I should wait until more things come back? Small bits and pieces are slowly coming back. I can’t exactly look for memories, cuz then when something pops in my head it’s just imagining the worst possibility. But I can tell when it’s a real memory.

This is hard to write, but I feel like writing putting it out there somewhere is the first step in coming to terms with the past. When I was around 7 or 8, my older male cousin started doing things to me. There are lot’s of blanks but I do remember being in bed naked with him and him being on top of me. He was around 13 or 14. I have other memories of him pushing his foot or hand into my crotch on other occasions. I grew up knowing this was wrong but feeling that it was my fault, that maybe he thought I wanted to do that. I felt like I was a terrible person and that I had caused what happened. When I was a teen (I’m in my 30’s now) my friends would talk about losing their virginity and I felt so ashamed because I didn’t know if I was so I slept with the first person I met at just 15, he was 18. This then continued a downward spiral of sex with strangers, feeling that if I said no I wouldn’t be liked or loved. I’ve definitely had an unhealthy relationship with sex. I have managed for the most part to shut the memories away because facing them means facing my feelings of shame. I’m tired of feeling unlovable. I guess I just need someone to tell me that it wasn’t my fault. Then maybe I can start to move forward.

Don’t know what to think anymore, it feels awful even typing this, It feels like I keep going back to the behaviours without knowing the cause, people say if you’ve been abused you at least have some sort of memory but looking back nothing is standing out and large portions of my childhood have been lost completely… My mum is an actual survivor of sexual abuse herself and she knows that it was always at the back of her mind and she never truly forgot it so it just feels like i’m pulling things out of thin air, but I always seem to gravitate towards “predators” and entertain them, my mum said I was groomed online multiple times, but these felt like normal behaviours, I really don’t know what to think, i’m just sick in the head.

i came online to search for signs your great grandfather stuck his penis into your mouth at an age too early to remember….i am thinking this must be a very common thing or at least in the old days before birth control…as the opening of a baby crying for its mom is exactly a warm inviting spot for an old man who had a very controlling wife and not allowed to have sex during his lifetime much on his own terms…i have only symptoms which i could lay out for you here but i dont want to waste the time I need to find information which talks about this…must be a very common thing that has happened to young toddlers when left alone at grandma or great grandma’s …am i right?

I can’t remember if it happened or not? When i search for the memories from this time it is very difficult to remember and almost painful or confusing. Im a boy and i was 3 years old or younger i don’t have many memories from this period anyway. I’m not sure if i don’t remember because i was abused or just because i was so young? I found out my cousin was abused by her stepfather and im curious if maybe my brain is just looking for something to blame my depression for, or could something have happened to me there as well? Maybe the pain i feel isn’t from my own abuse but witnessing what happened to my cousin?

I’m not in the UK, but – what do you do if therapy has consistently been harmful and retraumatizing? I’ve been to at this point 8 different therapists. I still have nightmares, not only about the abuse itself, but about my experiences in therapy. In my experience, because I was initially diagnosed with anxiety and paranoia issues (in part because I was making “crazy” accusations), my discussions of abuse have been downplayed or even dismissed as a result of my mental illness. Add to that that it was done by a female perpetrator (I am female-bodied as well, although I would consider myself nonbinary), I have found that therapy is a very unsafe experience for me. I firmly believe that my attempts to go to therapy have done significant further damage to me, by reinforcing the idea that I’m bad or crazy and I shouldn’t make up things like that. I am not willing to go back to a system that’s proven to consistently treat me like I’m lying or too damaged to be believed, as well as invalidating my own gender identity because of my past.

What’s left for me? I don’t want to just “keep trying” and hope that somehow another therapist might help when in my experience it’s been more likely to do harm than good.

The retraumatization I experienced was pretty much all from CBT. I honestly don’t understand how it’s supposed to help trauma. It was just echoing what the abusers and those who enable them by disbelief did – almost the same words sometimes. When I was a kid, the message was that I had good, loving, kind parents. It was my distorted thinking that made me so unhappy to live with my abuser and made me not love her. CBT (where I am the only option for trauma) echoed the same thing back to me, that my problems weren’t real but the result of my distorted thinking. That the primary problem wasn’t that I had been abused but that I wasn’t thinking clearly and was blowing things out of proportion. In fact my abuser has done it and loves it for precisely that reason, because it lets her explain how the problems her victims have are all really a result of their cognitive distortions!

Psychodynamic therapy might actually have helped. When I started recovering on my own, the first steps I had to take were trying to understand and label what happened and accept that it was actually that bad. But it wasn’t the recommendation for trauma. Instead I got endless attempts at CBT and confusion as to why I found it so difficult. I really think doing CBT so much set me back years in my recovery, because it hampered my ability to correctly identify, analyze, and handle bad situations and instead encouraged labeling my own ways of thinking about them as the problem. I was at the stage where I was just barely starting to recognize and accept the abuse, and CBT harmed that by encouraging me to second-guess myself and return to the old ways of thinking that relied on the baseline idea that I was being too negative.

Unfortunately I really don’t know what to do. I can sort of manage life, but the effect of therapy (this was across at least a half-dozen therapists) is that at this point I start having unmanageable symptoms simply from attending therapy. It doesn’t matter what the therapist does, they start after the first or second session even if we talking about nothing more interesting than the weather. Therapy is so strongly tied into re-experiencing the trauma and the denial of it that merely engaging in the process is too traumatic. I’ve also by and large found that there’s no treatments offered for trauma other than CBT and I won’t be offered any sort of care, even medications, unless I agree to go through a course of CBT first.

I need help, but I lost years of my life to therapy and I don’t know how to avoid that happening again. CBT took me from having symptoms but functioning to having to spend 2 years not being able to even hold down a job. And the whole time I was told I was uncooperative and I needed to try harder. Again, this was across 6+ therapists, all of whom said they worked with childhood trauma. The only cure offered for my distress was more CBT (and DBT, which has the same fundamental problems for me). I was also encouraged in therapy to maintain and try to repair my relationship with my abuser, since my “cognitive distortions” were seen as the primary cause of my stress in that relationship.

I don’t know what to do. I’ve found therapy to be a so horrifically unsafe experience that I’m afraid going back will cause me to completely fall apart again. I think the fact that I experienced covert abuse by a female/same-sex abuser plays a large part. Often CBT techniques were used to downplay abuse, encouraging me to reframe instances of abuse as normal caring behavior and to maintain a relationship with my abuser. I might be open to a different treatment, but every time I’ve tried I’ve been told CBT/DBT are the only treatments available to me and that if I don’t want to do CBT then I don’t really want help at all.

The question remains – what do you do when you’re too traumatized to be able to handle therapy? The memories resurface instantly and strongly and I feel immediately so panicked I can’t think straight just by being in the context of a therapy appointment. This can all happen as soon as the first appointment and without any discussion of trauma at all. And it will get to the point where I have to quit therapy so I can keep it together enough to basically manage my life before it gets to the point of actually calming down. I feel like I’m at the point where I’m not able to get any help until I figure out a way past my issues all on my own.

I don’t think I was ever diagnosed as having childhood trauma. I had a brief abusive relationship as a young adult, but was at the time unaware that my childhood experiences were abnormal. When I started to bring it up in therapy, it was seen as another manifestation of my mental illness. So I was treated as though I was having irrational anxiety about my relationship with my mother as a result of the anxiety disorder I was diagnosed with. The same thing happened when I tried to express concerns about treatment; I was assured that therapy could be difficult but I needed to work through it to get better. At no point was the idea that I was expressing genuine problems rather than distorted negative thoughts considered. If anything, I was severely minimizing what had actually happened, but it was treated as though I was exaggerating due to my anxiety issues.

Im 14 and I think I was molested when I was little. I have a child molester in my family, that I have had multiple encounters with, and once spent the night with. My parents didn’t know he was a child molester, because my grandparents kept it a secret from them. I sometimes remember a hand holding my head against his crotch. This might have happened to my little sister too, because she suggested we play a game where we poked each other’s crotches, but that might have just been normal curiosity. I’ve been diagnosed with anxiety and serious depression. I self harm, and every time I do so I feel like I’m leaving my body. I have a lot of memories where I’m out of Body. I just wish I had clarity on the situation

I don’t think the problem is that I’m “too flawed to ever change.” I think the problem is getting past the therapist’s biases. The damage done by bad therapy can’t be compared to a bad date at all – it’s an experience of finding even the professionals won’t believe that you or treat you like you’re just crazy for trying to talk about what’s actually happened. And I’ve found that in general therapists don’t want to really talk about fear of therapy unless you agree up front that it’s primarily your problem and you haven’t actually had genuine trauma caused or reinforced by therapists.

If I could get someone who was willing to be neutral and open about how systemic bias in therapy could lead to further harm to people like me, I would be willing to consider it. But so far I haven’t found anyone like that. If you have any advice that’s not just to keep trying at random and hope this one will help instead of recreating the trauma of disbelief again, I’m happy to hear it. But I don’t want to keep trying when my experience tells me that I’m more likely to be actively hurt than helped by professionals.

Have a lot of the symptoms listed above, but I have many unrelated issues that they could easily be attributed to. My main concern is that I have this horrible feeling that comes up when I am exposed to imagery of genitalia, especially in a medical context. I’m worried that this could be some sort of sexual abuse thing, but I’m not sure. My mother said/complained that she put me through around 20 daycares when I was very young because I kept getting kicked out. I remember about 5-6 of them. So there is easily space for missing time there. I have a lot of other space for missing time that something could have happened.

When in a sex ed type thing, we were shown these pictures of STDs, etc and I got this horrible feeling like I was going to pass out and I started panicking for seemingly no reason. i had to leave the room. Things like that episode of True Blood where Jason Stackhouse gets a priapism from ODing on vampire blood, give me a similar feeling (but not even close to as strongly because it’s not shown on screen). I got a mild urinary tract infection, and I couldn’t stand to look at websites with info about it. That same giddy/anxious/horrible feeling again. I don’t like porn with penises (or genitals in general) in them, etc.

I don’t understand where this aversion comes from. I just don’t know. Mostly don’t want to know, honestly…

Hi. How can I tell the difference between sexual abuse and sexual games between siblings and or cousins?

I don’t know if I was molested, I also can only remember one thing.
A family member and I were watching a video on his phone alone on the couch. He then placed my hand on his crotch and when I removed it quickly he took my hand again and placed it there once more. That’s all I remember and the thing I found weird is that I think it’s all in my head but every time he comes over to my house or if I see him at a party I avoid him and feel a bit anxious or weary. On the other hand, he just looks/talks to me awkwardly. its been 11 years and only about four years ago I remembered this memory but I never did before so I’m not sure if its all in my head or if this is real. I want to ask him but I don’t want to accuse him of something he might have never done.
I don’t know what to do, what would you recommend?
Is this possible?

Hi, i remember being 11 years old when this happened but before i remember that my mother and him had an argument in which he yelled at me that i wasnt his daughter.. like he didnt care how i felt about it a couple months after my mother was at work n my brothers were in their room playing a video game n he was watching a action movie a Jean Claude Van Damme one . I was in my brothers n my bedroom i was listening to music really
Low because i wasnt allowed to listen to music only Christian type and i was sewing my pillow . He could see me from the living room . I guess the movie was over n he started walking towards the room so i turned the radio off n he was like what are you doing? N closed the door n sat on the bed n asked me to sit beside him so i did he rubbed my leg with his hand up and down up and down i was scared i dont know why . I remember asking myself is this normal ? . Then he asked me to sit on his lap so i did i had shorts on n he kept touching my legs i remember him saying something but i dont remember what . I got up to open the door n he grabbed me from behind n he hugged me i covered my breastn he forces his hands on my breast n said in my ear they are growing i was speechless i was scared i wanted to cry but all that was going through my head was wishing someone would help me the windows closed the door closed then i just threw his arms off me looked at him n opened the door n went with my brothers . My mom came home from work n i remember running towards her n telling her i needed to talk to her i was scared . We went in the bathroom n locked the door i was telling her what happened in a whisper n he kept yelling to open the door n what we were talking about n why were we both inside n taking so long . She said she would talk to him i guess she did n she came to my bed i was awake waiting she hugged me and told me it was a misunderstanding i cried myself to sleep repeating in my head a misunderstanding..i dont like no one to see my body i hate the light on … my first relationship i had a daughter and i was abused verbally n physically my second relationship i had a son i was not treated like i was enough i felt like i was invisable he is a good father but i was not in the picture .. i feel like i loose it sometimes and i need to see what to do because i have two kids .. n i have this other thing that i keep wanting to get pregnant like a desire but i know i shouldnt but i ask myself why i feel the desire too be pregnant ?

What if u think u might have been molested but u don’t remember everything and sometimes u forget prices until something makes u remember and the person who did it was always drunk so u don’t know if they remember and there sober now and each totally different around u,because I remember he used to touch my thies and he used to tickle me under my skirt or dress but he’d put his hand a little too high up and it felt like he was rubing my vagina and he always offered me a drink so I soon became his drinking buddy and There was this one time I was in the dinning room looking out the window and I was only wearing a shirt and underwear and I felt something a little wet and warm touch my back and when I turned back around he was fixing his underwear so I don’t really know what happened there and I was looking at the symptoms that are listed and I have almost all of them and I can only masturbate to forced to fuck porn and daddy forces daughter porn and every time I watch it I start to cry unconciusly like there’s a tear but I’m not aware of it until it starts streaming down my face and I feel really bad after I’m done watching my porn and through out most of my memories about stuff like that I start to lose memory or the memory gets blury

Hi, I’m a seventeen-year-old girl who has suffered many mental illnesses. I’m about to start my life to find myself unprepared and unable to even do daily activities. A year ago I was diagnosed with DID (Dissociative Identity Disorder). I have had physical trauma from my family members along with lots of mental and emotional trauma from manipulation and punishments, along with sexual abuse from my fellow classmates before I could even understand what it was. I currently have seven other alters who all have different symptoms and fear when it comes to sexual activities. Including OCD, PTSD, Depression, and so much more, but what I found strange, was my extreme disgust of the thought of sex. From a young age, I have a fear of large crowds, a group of guys anywhere around me, and older men with facial hair. I never in a million years would have thought about getting raped… But I had a dream…and I can’t get this extreme fear and anxiety and somewhat of a face out of my head. I have always been getting sick with common colds, stomach viruses, and just about everything else that exists, my life has honestly not been the best. Getting raped, I cannot admit to myself that this is a possibility, but…if this is really what happened, and it’s haunting me without any memory of it, I think I just need an experts opinion, I’m at my last breath here. If you have any advice or any thoughts that I might have been raped please respond back.

Hello.
I am a 16 year old girl and there’s something that have bothered me for quite a while now. I have always had this memory of my dad ”sexually abusing” me. Or at least that is what I would call it if I remember it correctly. I knew it was wrong but since I still live with him I just never thought much of it.
Sometimes something would remind me of it but I’d just push it away again I think. But then not a long time ago I got mad at my dad for some reason. And it went on for a long time. In that time I started to think more and more of that memory from when I was younger. So here I am. Still wondering if it actually happened or not. I also remember thinking more of sexual things than I should in such a young age so that might’ve been connected to that. I am also a very anxious person who isn’t very keen of socializing too much. I also remember having a low self esteem for a really long time. I specifically remember comparing my legs to someone I saw on the tv multiple times when I was quite young. So I have always been conscious of my appeareance.
But I am just not sure of whether it actually happened. Because he is my dad and he lives here and we seem to have a normal relationship now. So I am just confused… I don’t know what answer I am looking for exactly but I just wanted to write it somewhere. Even though it is quite scary for me.

Hi,
Recently an event happened that triggered a lot of flashbacks to happen to me… these flashbacks were of various traumatic events that have happened throughout my life, but I’ve also been getting a lot of flashbacks to being raped and sexually assaulted… the thing is, I don’t have any memory of anything like this having happened to me. I keep thinking I’m going crazy, but when I thought about it a little it actually made a lot of sense… for example, I’ve been very scared of men I don’t know, to the point that if I was out in public (bear in mind this is in a busy public place, in daylight and the men I have been afraid of were not acting at all suspiciously), I would cross the road or change the route I was walking completely to avoid this man as in my mind the first thought I always have is that they are going to rape me.
Also, sexual assault, rape etc. has been a subject that has made me very distressed and in the past I would have what I now realise to be low key flashbacks to being raped or sexually assaulted. My psychiatrist has also asked me before if I had been abused when I was younger as he feels that psychiatrically, my presentation is very common in people who have experienced abuse when they were young. I’m also very scared of doing anything sexual, despite wanting to be in a relationship, even the thought of it makes me quite frightened.
Most of the things I have written thus far I can find alternative reasons as to why it could be an issue in my life, but there’s one thing I’m finding hard to explain in another way. When I was young, about 5, I used to have these nightmares in which I would be sexually abused and hurt if I didn’t do what the person wanted me to do. I’m struggling to understand where a five year old would have gotten any sort of understanding of these kinds of things. My parents were very careful of what they exposed us to when we were young. I did think about the possibility of overhearing someone talk about this or maybe accidentally seeing something in the media when I was young, but I feel that these nightmares were far to graphic for me to have gotten from something someone said. Even TV shows I may watch now… rarely actually show any sexual abuse, rather imply it and the audience understands what is going on, so where a five year old would have seen this kind of things, I don’t know. I also have a lot of gaps in my childhood and remember little to nothing of some parts.
I’m understand that you are unable to tell me whether or not I was sexually abused or not, but I’m just unsure off what to do… I guess I just wanted to know if this all sounds really crazy or if it’s something that could be worth bringing up with my therapist.
Thanks for reading.

Hi, I’ve just been reading some of the comments and I feel I share some common feelings amongst others. I want to keep my name and identity private but would like a little bit of advice… I’ve been seeing a counselor lately and I opened up to her about something I have never told another soul before. I’m 27 years old now and when I was around 6 or 7 I french kissed my brother… I had completely forgotten that it had happened only to have the memory flood back to my mind again when I was around 20. It was like a huge sting of shame that swept over me from it and I have probably thought about it almost every day since. It makes me feel sick to my stomach… Why had I done it? What had I put my brother through? Has it affected him going forward in his life? He’s a very anxious person and was growing up to the point he used to throw up on regular occasions from being anxious… I remember him saying to stop at the time and I think I asked him whether we could do it once a year at Christmas for some reason and call it “the thing” to which I think he said yes out of fear. I don’t ever remember it happening again and I also don’t remember how I felt at the time. Whether I did it out of curiosity or what I don’t know. I remember that my friend, who was a couple of years older than me at the time, maybe 8, had done the same to me in my bed a while before this had happened with my brother and I remember feeling really confused so maybe I tried it out on my brother after wards? Who knows… However, after reading all of the indicators of sexual abuse above I pretty much tick all of the boxes and have had this concerning thought clouding my mind for a while now as to whether I was infact sexually abused as a child? The couselor I spoke to about this said it would have just been out of curiosity but this doesn’t explain my behaviours over the years especially towards men. How would I find out whether I had been abused? What if I find out it was with someone I love dearly like a family member? I’d really appreciate any kind of help. Thanks

Hey, I’m 29 years old now. The older I get the more I’m concerned about weather or not I was sexually abused. When I was really very young before I was even in double digits in age I use to draw terrible pictures that depicted obvious sexual abuse it would normally be a picture of a child with clothes cut open or completely naked tied down or chained up with an equally exposed other person normally a taller person the child would normally be crying or begging them to stop. My parents sent me to therapy after finding my drawings and when either the therepists or my parents asked me why I drew these things I would reply I Don’t know and really didn’t know why my mind was a complete blank and I still to this day have no earthly idea of why I drew those things when I honestly had no knowledge of anything dipicted in those drawings

I thought something was odd about the things I get sexually stimulated over until I was 50 and I began having night tremors and would wake up with vivid memories of being sexually abused as a child.

I am 14 years old and I am very confused hahah. I am pretty aware of what is considered sexual assault and how it applies to me but at the same time I feel like I am just over exaggerating it to give myself some sort of sympathy. When I was 7 or 8 or maybe younger I’m not sure, my older sisters friend who is a very close family friend and I were down on the trampoline at the back of our house alone. It was just us two which was unusual because we normally weren’t that close as he was three years older and my sisters best friend. Anyway he started saying we should play a game. I can’t remember what it was called but I know it was something to do with him telling me to do stuff and then I do it and visa Versa it was like dares but different. We started off with simple stuff and then he said let’s go into the cubby house, he found paddle pop sticks and told me to put it up my bum. I didn’t want to and said it was silly, he told me that if I didn’t he wouldn’t let my sister shoot his knew gun which I knew she really wanted to and he said that she would never forgive me. I was scared so I went with him,I didn’t want my parents to come down and see us because I knew something wasn’t right. He did it to himself and then told me to turn around and forced it up my bum, he kept going further and further trying to see how far, until I kind made a noise and he stopped I’m not sure how or what I did but he could tell I was scared and upset. He then told me not to tell anyone or else my sister wouldn’t get to use the gun and kept going on about how mad she would be at me. Anyway both of our parents came down and I immediately started crying. My dad was concerned and asked me what had happened so I told him a tiny bit of what had happened and didn’t go in to much detail he got very mad and yelled at the boy so him and his mum left. I blocked it out of my memory for so long because I was embarrass and only really remembered it at the start of this year. Although I don’t blame him or think he did it on purpose i just think he was a stupid boy. After writing this it sounds like abuse but I still feel like it’s not that big of a deal and I should just forget about it.

I am an adult female who was molested by my mother, and I am trying to find literature about this gender specific. Any references would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.
Please keep my name confidential.

I am almost certain that I was sexually abused as a child. I cannot remember anything but my body does. By that I mean I have known From a very young age (5 years old) about sex in great detail. I acted out sexually from that age on. I make impulsive sexual decisions that I regret immediately. I have nightmares of me being raped or having to watch a loved one being raped. I can remember my earliest nightmare was around 12. I feel the grime from the nightmares crawl down my spine for days after and they always feel very real. I was also born in Africa Sierra Leone during the blood diamond war where rape by far was one of the most utilitized weapon. I still wonder if I’m exaggerating. because I have no recollection of something actually happening I don’t know how to talk about what I am feeling or who to tell. I am especially concerned about accidentally implicating did not happen. I do not want to invalidate other peoples experience by turning out to be wrong or having made it up.

My mother would come into my bed at night, when I was little and touch me all over. I didnt know why that I felt like that was okay with my friends; when I was young. That continued for years. My mother would say things that i need to be stimulated. My body has been unproportional and im handicapped. She never bought medicine or got me real help. Whenever I told I didnt feel right she said thats fine. Then years after couldnt help always needing to have orgasms or do something. The doctors and therapists told me to shut up all the time so I never went back. I did poorly in school. In high school years my friends were never friendly and I didn’t know why. Now my mother wont stop harassing me, im 38. She follows me all over the states and wont stop mind controlling me. Telling me i need sex and she will satify me. Is it right to get restraining order?
How do you stop feeling like you need it to relax?

I know I was sexually abused by a family friend and later my best friends dad. I am in no doubt whilst I don’t have complete memories (remember the beginning of each incident the first touch but don’t remember it stopping them leaving). I’ve been in therapy and it helped about 15 years ago I had a bad time couldn’t stop thinking about certain memories felt experiences in my body which caused me a lot of distress but I have no visual memory just things like being on a water bed – some one on top of me or behind me touching me. I felt it was my dad and was and still am desperately wanting that to be not true. I took part in the Truth Project project 2 yrs ago and the terrible feelings/ thoughts came back I was terrified they’d ask about my dad that I would say something. They are getting stronger but still no actual evidence or memory. I struggle as I don’t understand why I can remember bits clearly about the other two men – yet these feeling/thoughts terrify me it’s so intense I feel so bad, I’m terrified I’ve made it up, lying. I can’t actual say out loud what my fear is it’s hard to write. I don’t know if this is normal. My parents aren’t even alive anymore yet I feel if I try to talk I’ll be punished.

Thank you for the reply. I’ve been in therapy on/ off over 18 years (maybe 18mth break – not always weekly) recently just done 20 weeks trauma therapy with Manchester Rape – it seems a lot to me. The main bulk off therapy was with a Transactional Analysis Therapist – took me a long time to open up – have dealt with family friend and my best friend dad. It’s just these body sensations, feeling ill a lot more and these dreadful body memories. Have had 4 therapists. Trauma therapy made me realise its highly likely my dad abused me or at least another person. I feel like I’m giving the past life oxygen to breathe grow bigger part of me wants to box it away forever but that seems to be getting harder. I’m scared i will lose myself – won’t be able to or want to function.

Hi, I’m 13 and reading other people’s experiences made me remember something that happened to me not too long ago. I was in 6th grade, and there was this boy, who liked me. We were good friends, and when he said he had a crush on me, at first I felt kind of flattered. But then he started making comments about my body, and staring at me awkwardly. One day at school, as we were walking, the boy, who I’ll call A., tried to put his hand up my shirt. I was so startled that I almost fell down the stairs. This one teacher, who was super smart and I really admired, saw the whole thing. She asked me during class if there was anything I wanted to talk to her about. I said no because I knew what she was referring to and I was embarrassed. A. and I would walk around the school holding hands, and he would kiss me in public. I was upset that my first kiss was with someone who made me uncomfortable. My friends made fun of me, but they weren’t being mean, and they wouldn’t have done it if they knew what was actually happening. They thought I actually liked him. Meanwhile A. began telling everyone that I was his girlfriend, and rumors began circulating that I was a slut.

Then one day during lunch, A. said he had a “surprise” for me. He led me to the bathroom, where he groped me and shoved his “thing” in my mouth. Afterwards, I threw up, trying to get rid of the awful taste. Both the English teacher I admired and the Science teacher I kind of had a bit of a crush on saw A. come out of the boys’ bathroom, followed by me, crying. The science teacher asked why I was in the boys’ restroom and whether I had a “good time” in there. He then winked at me, and the English teacher just about exploded. She said that she knew I was a victim of sexual abuse, and how the science teacher was acting was inapropriate. I can’t remember what happened next, but I think she sent A. to the office or something and they were going to call my parents. I freaked out and somehow convinced them not to and nothing was happening. My english teacher kept trying to “reach out.” I moved away and whenever anyone talks about sex, I feel REALLY uncomfortable. I made a good friend in my new town and I told her everything. She said that even though when he asked me if I wanted to do stuff with him I said no, because I didn’t tell him to stop while it was happening, it wasn’t sexual abuse. I have nightmares about him in that bathroom, and I’m afraid of going to the restroom at school. This isn’t about memory, since I remember everything very clearly, but is what my friend said true?

When I was 5 i had a boyfriend who would make me do things with him all the time, and recently i cant figure out if it was sexual abuse or not. The guy was the same age as us, and he would make me do these things through the entire time we were together. (5 years)

What can I do? I won’t get help from anywhere. Nobody seems to know how to help me. My life is very awful. Everywhere is said, get help from this and that, but I’ve been running in for 10 years now, even more, and nobody helps with my deep issues. No-one seems to have the professionalism and needed actions I would need. (I’m not from Uk.) And really I do not want this txt to be published, I would just be glad to receive professional really smart help.

Hi. I don’t know whether I may have been abused as a young girl or not. But I do however remember being told by my stepdad that he use to put me in the “naughty chair” when I wasn’t behaving. What is a naughty chair can someone tell me please? I also remember sitting on his lap when I was younger and telling him that I wished he was my real dad .

If someone could explain to me what a naughty chair is because recently in the last few months I don’t know why but when I see chairs I just end up asking if it’s my naughty chair and it upsets me. I also have a dislike to my stepdad and felt uncomfortable around him on a few occasions.. I do also have the illness called paranoia schizophrenia. The thing is my memory is actually quite good but whether I could of been molested I can’t say ?as sometimes people suppress or block out certain things that happen in their life.

Many thanks,
Terri

Hi, I remember nothing about my childhood. Everyone talks about primary school and all the memories they have of their time then but I dont remember anything except the building and one memory of my friend and I running inside. My mum has expressed a worry about sexual abuse once but that’s it. She said she has been worried about if I was abused when I was little because I was always really shy and I was especially scared when it came to older men. I’ve gotten a little bit better now but I’m still awkward with my dad but I think that’s just cause we dont talk much. I’m mostly afraid of my dads friend and coworker who hes been friends with since they came to this town before I was born. Hes my friends dad and I’ve always felt terrible and shy near him. I also am pretty sure I’m asexual and I feel physically sick when I think about having sex with someone else but I am able to masturbate. Theres no real therapist in my town as far as I know except all the outreach centers but I know everyone working there and dont feel safe going there. Theres a counselor at school but they have to notify my parents if they think something’s really wrong and i dont feel comfortable with them knowing really

i dreamt for around 10 years about a wolve or creature who tickles me, that the feeling was painfull and terrible. i became a teenager and that dreamt was gone, replaced by somebody always chaising me, trying to hurt me, cut me, kill me, voices. I have had nightmare my entire life, i have been several times in therapy, i just can not remember mostly nothing from my child hood. After the last therapy under hypnsosis, tickle dreams came back and i am always at my uncles house or he is very often in my dreams. Does this mean something? all the tests psychologist have made doesnt shown or suggest sexual abuse, but i am starting to panicking i need to know what this tickles mean. can you give an opinion

I have memories of my older sister (she’s four years older than me) having me touch her vagina. We were in the garage and were kind of hiding behind a standing tool box. I remember asking her “why she had hair on hers” and her telling me to “just touch it”. On another occasion we were in bed, and she kept rubbing her hand over my crotch. I have always been very sexually aware, and began masturbating at a very young age. In my family, and I have always felt fortunate for my upbringing, we do NOT talk about sex, I don’t know if my catholic upbringing has anything to do with that. Even when I began menstruating and tried to talk to my mother about it, she didn’t believe me, wouldn’t discuss it, and I just had to learn to use what we had for supplies on my own.
I have had experiences with cousins touching each other, showing each other our intimate body parts, watching porn and not always understanding what was happening in it. These instances began when we were still in elementary school. As a teenager there was only one guy – he was 20, I was 16 – that I got close to. On two different occasions we were kissing, he laid me down and got on top of me, stroking me, and I would panic or just freeze. After he realized I wasn’t going to sleep with him, he had sex with my best friend. I am in my 30’s now, I am overweight, and struggle with self-esteem and trust issues. I have never had a steady relationship with a guy even though I am attracted to men. When I crush, I crush hard, but that’s as far as it goes. I’m just not comfortable enough to truly get to know them. Hugging and certain touching makes me very uncomfortable – even with family – and I am still a virgin – I have shocked a number of doctors with that fact. I unfortunately spend a lot of time feeling inadequate, not good enough, like I’m a loser. I know I’m not alone in these feelings, but being a 34 year old virgin these days makes me feel like a freak. Also, being touched by another girl, let alone a sister?… I’ve never talked to anyone about this.

I’m about to turn 14 and I been having a lot of issues with mental health but no one noticed and I think it started growing when I was younger but I’m sure but remember just crying a lot feeling worthless. And my dad had left when I younger. Even before 6 grade and 7grade when I was diagnosed with clinical depression and social anxiety. This year my anxiety has been getting out I having panic attacks and keeps getting worst. And find out I’ve found out that I have a sign of having PTSD and I’m sure what to do. When I smell perfume or really close with people around me even just 1 person. And touch in certain place my anxiety just starts flaring up. What I’ve been reading I had all the signs of sexual abuse as a child. My family would bring me to their friends and family places. And my aunt and uncle coming over that one time. I don’t really remember much to 5-10.

I’m in a complicated moment in my life and I’m unsure if I was abused at around the age of 5/6 would I remember all I know is that recently I have looked at Illicit pictures and videos of children under the age of 18 and I know I hate myself for it, the police recently arrested me for links to it and I can safely say it is the horror of my life to be associated with it, I don’t find children attractive on the day to day, but occasionally when I’m trying to crush my depression in the fog of alcohol I have looked and downloaded and felt sick after watching it, I know something happened sexually early on in life for me at around 5/6 years old is it possible that these early experiences have fractured my mind into a vulgar way of thinking, I won’t survive prison if that is what it comes to, I’m barely handling the shame and self hatred I already feel, I don’t want to be this dark person I feel alcohol makes me I want to be normal and live a fulfilling life, But I feel that quickly becoming an impossibility.

Thank you for replying, but I know what I have to do to protect my families name.

I dont really know how to go about talking about this, but I recently have been getting angry at my sister for various reasons. I was talking to my dad about it and as I was talking about what she had been doing, I referenced that she had done it ever since i was born. I was thinking about the legitimacy of what I was saying since im rather forgetful sometimes and i started to think about what me and my sister had done as when i was around 5 or 6. I started to remember a game we used to play called rag doll, and without getting too graphic, she would touch me and i would try not to move. forgot to mention that your completely naked. this happened twice to what ive remembered.
Ive been wondering about this since ive had multiple of the “symptoms” that are listed above. Another thing ive since realized is I have a legitament fear of people touching my stomach. ive never figured it out and its not even as much of a fear but more of a reflex. whenever someone even lays their hand or even their head on my stomach i tense up and my muscles start moving sort of like im trembling or something, i cannot even do it myself without getting the willies. im wondering if this is some sort of reaction to past events?
Ide like to move foward in life and I feel this is going to hold me down substantially unless i can tell someone about it but it seems very embarassing to tell anyone about. Ever since I’ve felt good around my sister and we’ve grown closer then when I was a bit younger. Im worried about the situation it would bring to my family overall and im wondering if its even worth it to tell anybody.

Hi. This is kinda strange but I have no one else to talk to about this so….. here goes. I think I was sexually abused when I was younger, but I have no memory of it at all. Although it would make sense because my older sister was abused by my father and other men my mom had dated, but I can’t remember if I was. I feel like I was abused by my dad or one of my mom’s boyfriends; I don’t remember my dad because my mom left him when I was like 1 or 2 but from what I’ve heard he was a really bad man. I just am not sure if I got abused by my dad that young would it have an effect on me now at 13. Ever since I could remember, like before I even started kindergarten I would rub myself on furniture but mostly chairs. I remember when me, my mom, and my sister were in the car and I was in the backseat in one of those large car seats ( that are only for like 3 to 4 years old) and I was rubbing my self on the seat belt in front of my legs, then my mom looked back and told my to stop and never do it again. This happened a lot because when I got in to school, I was sitting in a chair all day pretty much and I would do it all the time and my teachers and my classmates would look at me so weird. One time my teacher told me to stop but I couldn’t and so when the teacher parent conference came around she told my mom what I was doing. Later at home my mom told me that I had to stop and that someone could call the police on her. I didn’t understand but it was so addicting I couldn’t and til this day I can’t stop. It also sucks cus I have the worst relationship with my mom so I can’t talk to her about it. What’s confusing and the reason I think I was abused is because how did I learn or teach myself to do that at the age of like 3 or 4 it doesn’t make sense. A lot of what you wrote I related to as well. For example, I think I might be addicted to porn but after I watch it I feel so guilty and gross, but while I watch it I have this mindset of it’s happening to me, and I deserve it and I need to please them, that I should do everything to please a man. I also have sex fantasies of being raped and in them I like it, which is scary. I’m also dealing with depression and I am trying to figure out who I am. Anther thing that I saw that I relate to is feeling disconnected from my body, I want to be loved so bad, and I feel like i’m dirty down there all the time. I also have a really hard time sleeping and if I hear the littlest noise I get so freaked out. The other thing is that I get aroused way too easily, like if i just think about sex I feel that way or if i’m in the car and I feel a little vibration it happens. I don’t know what to do or who to tell, and I don’t feel comfortable telling my family. Do you think I was abused? And what should I do?

I am a male, as a child i would poo in my pants occasionally until I was about 8 or 9. No idea why. My sister, a year older than me was very promiscuous and had sexy lady undergarments by age 11 that i can be certain of. The both of us, my sister and I have suffered greatly with mental and emotional wellness issues into our adult lives. I myself battled addictions to substances for years. I am now and have been sober for 5 years. Our mother was committed to institutions with our fathers blessing many times when we were young. Subjected to electro shock torture, the works. Large periods of my childhood are missing, i just don’t remember, blank. Always centered around times mom “was sick”. My sister and my father always had a weird relationship and I was, still am it seems always in the way. I remember for certain my father having incest themed open mags. This was in the 1980’s, pre interwebs. My father, to this day goes on trips to Disneyland once every two years or more with an old buddy of his. Just the two old men, no family, no children just them two 60+ year old men now. It always raised creeper flags to me but I never really thought to hard about it.
Flash forward to now. I have been stuck in a deep depression for about a month or so and looking into myself for answers All the little bits and pieces that i have shared with you here started surfacing. Nothing ever made sense, still doesnt. With everything i have shared here The only thing i can figure is bad things happened to me. I dnot know anything for certain and feel as though i may be grasping at straws, creating a narrative that makes sense. Believe me, i really don’t want this to be true but I do feel like i have finally put the puzzle together, does that make sense? I don’t know what to do about any of it. This was all 30 years ago. Do i put it out of my mind and move on? How do I know for certain, there is only fragmented circumstantial evidence at best. Do I confront my father with questions?

(I realize that this reply is really long so I don’t really expect a response, I’ve never told anyone about this so it’s been nice to vent I guess.) I’ve recently turned 17 and have suddenly remembered some stuff that happened in my childhood that disturbs me a bit. I know all these things happened but I’m uncertain whether they would be classified as sexual assault or if I’m overreacting so if you’re reading this I would really appreciate it if you could give me some help. Here’s the gist: when I was a preteen (I’d say from 9 to 12 when I was still… underdeveloped) I had a male friend from my school who was around 3 years older than me. His twin brother was my older brother’s best friend and our mothers were very close so naturally I was around at their house a lot.
We both enjoyed video games so I would go up to his room and we would play them together. It all got slightly uncomfortable for me when he downloaded some mods for some games we would play lots, like the sims 4 and skyrim. I don’t really want to get into detail but the stuff I saw would definitely be classed as pornographic. I was uncomfortable but I wanted him to think I was cool so I went along with it.
We were very close so I would often lie in his bed and didn’t think much of it (I was used to having girl friends rather than guy friends) and I remember he would lie next to me and would sometimes roll over so he was on top of me. I remember my heart thumping really loudly and telling him to get off me and he eventually would. I didn’t tell any adults about anything that happened because: I was embarrassed (I’ve never been good at talking about sex with my parents), I kind of felt like I had consented (even though I didn’t know what consent was) and I had already got in trouble for coming across some nsfw stuff on the internet accidentally so I thought I would be told off. Also I truly believed that we were best friends and didn’t want him to get in trouble.
Other memories are quite blurry and I don’t feel comfortable saying stuff that I’m not sure happened so I’ll leave it at that, however I am pretty sure that more things happened. I have almost no memories from that period of my life but my memories start up again right after our friendship ended… bit suspicious.
This ‘tumultuous’ relationship ended abruptly when on a dog walk with him he confessed his feelings for me and I didn’t say anything, I don’t think I said anything until we got back to his house.
But I remember, at 12 years old, being petrified that he would rape me, while not even really understanding what rape meant.
I effectively ghosted him from then on, I remember ‘joking’ with my friends about how it was a bit weird but they were just jealous that an older guy was interested in me. (I often bragged about how much I knew about sex which, with the context of how I knew all this stuff, is a bit fucked up.)
A couple weeks ago my mother mentioned meeting up with him and I almost had a panic attack and cried until she said I didn’t have to go. Today his twin brother came to our house and I didn’t leave my room for the entire day because I knew he would smell like him (I know it’s a bit weird…)
I now struggle with self harm, suicidal thoughts, alcohol abuse (I’m quite drunk while writing this, that’s probably why I’m writing this in the first place) and hypersexuality. I have fantasies about being controlled, abused and raped by a person I trust and have frequent dreams where I’m fully raped, however they don’t turn me on at all. Also really intense attention seeking behaviour which has ended many a friendship. However, I have ADHD and am being assessed for ASD, both of which have symptoms that could cause some of the shit I’m going through.
Something else that in hindsight is odd, I have quite disordered eating where I often starve myself with the wish to look like a child, I literally want to look like a twelve year old.
If anyone has any advice, or if someone can tell me if this WAS weird and I’m not just overthinking that would be great 👍.

hi it’s really hard for me to write this since it’s my first time where I actually put this in words. but it’s been quite a while since I’ve realized I was sexually abused as a child and I’ve come to this site cause I’ve been overthinking again and it’s 2 am right now. I’m a 16 years old girl and I’ve found my self in more than one point above, and I’ve always been insecure about me being sexually abused because at the time I was 7 yo and I don’t really remember how old he was or how old he is now since I don’t see him anymore but he should have been around the age of 11 or up. Now the question that keeps bugging me is, is it still considered sexual abuse even though we were just kids? I don’t remember the details either but I think there wasn’t a sexual penetration. He did force me to kiss him though and it really made me uncomfortable. I also had forgot about it until half a year ago. When I finally remembered, everything felt kinda weird and I think I wasn’t the same anymore. I was already a very anxious person and the extreme overthinking led me to experience nightmares which I still have. I did also self harm cause the thoughts were being too much. but this also got me questioning “AmI overreacting?”. I really hope someone would answer this question. I’m sorry if this might seem confusing or stupid but English it’s not my first language. I don’t even know if I’ll ever receive an answer but It doesn’t really matter. Thanks to anyone who got to read this.

I’m sixteen and while I can’t bring up any memories of sexual assault happening to me, there are some people in my life that I used to meet more frequently when I was younger (practically not at all now, as we moved to another country) who have given me an uncomfortable feeling whenever I was near them. I think I opened my mind to the possibility of sexual abuse having been happened to me when my mother made a comment in passing (which I was disgusted by) that when I was a toddler, my grandfather would ‘pat,’ my diaper. I felt horrible after I started thinking about it. Then I started thinking of the men my grandfather lived with (my uncles) and they were weird too, like always felt like they watched me and one, would take picture of me because he was an aspiring photographer back then. They would also make innuendos as I grew older. In general, they were horrible people. I have also read that having a high sex drive could be related to past abuse. And as I acknowledge that I definately have one – I’m wondering whether I started being like this because a sexual assault event i can’t remember triggered it. I was also very young when I started masturbating, also I discovered porn at a young age and constantly feel guilty. Not just after a session, but in general, feelings of guilt surge when I see someone I deem to be more needy than me.

Hi,
As a child I had a babysitter that had me play games and then try things that could feel good or exciting. The things we did started out not sexual, but then turned into touching of skin then tracing his fingers on my stomach and slowly into my underwear, not knowing any better it was neat and exciting, then that turned into touching my penis and then him performing oral. Later I was told I had to do the same as that was what you have to do and be polite. Then it became the normal thing that he would do. I was told it was just a thing between him and I a special bond and no one should know because it wouldn’t be so special anymore. This went on for over a year. Later the neighbor boy who was about 2 years older was showing me his movies that make him feel good, then he said that he would tell my mom that we watched these movies unless I did what they were doing in the movie. It was mostly hetro porn with oral. Fast forward 30 years later. I’m straight male, and have always suppressed the memories of what I did to the babysitter and the neighbor and felt disgusted with myself. I have been with my wife now 10 years, before her I was in many many many sexual relationships all straight never had any thoughts of being with men, but 2 times now I’ve had men hit on me and touch me not sexually but wanting to, saying things like wanting to see me naked and complements, I had to pretend I got sick once and another pretend I was sleeping so they would leave. I found it hard to say no and I was disgusted of the thought of even doing anything, at the same time felt like I had to. Background on me I’m a 6 foot tall man 240 lbs and a violent fighter, so not like I am a sub or was scared. I’ve unfortunately hurt people for less reasons but had no tendency to hurt these people. I’ve also had a very hard fight with depression and substance abuse. I fight my demons and thoughts because I have 4 children with my wife. They fight is getting harder. I also feel I have to please everyone all the time and wa t acceptance.

After reading it all I think I was sexually abused as a child I don’t know what to do its seems real and explains why I react and behave the way I do. But I’m still not sure if its true. I don’t know if I should tell my best friend all this for some advice I more it feels true the more it hurts and I don’t know how to react but I also want to know the truth but I’m scared to know it. For I’m not sure what I would find.

When I was 9 I discovered masturbation (I felt bad like I was too young to do that and there was something wrong in me) My half sister was 14 at the time and I can’t remember why but I ended up talking to her about it and then the confusion starts. At first I didn’t think there was anything wrong with it because we were kids but pretty quickly I started feeling bad and sick about it I remember crying thinking I wasn’t daddy’s little girl anymore. I hid from my half sister for a while, scared to be alone with her. The last thing that happened was me jumping on her bed, trying to wake her up. She grabbed me and started humping me through the quilt. I really didn’t like it and got away. I tried to tell my parents but I didn’t use the right words and was too scared to come right out with it because I participated willingly in the beginning. I can’t remember why but it stopped after that I felt really bad everytime I thought about it, it made me feel wrong and sick so I stopped thinking about it and I hardly think about it unless it accidently pops into my head and I get the same bad feeling still. A few years ago I decided nothing bad happened and that we were just kids messing around because she never really forced me into anything but I shouldn’t still feel sick about it if it was nothing right? I’ve found out that my half sister was BADLY sexually abused as a young child before we came into her life and my dad (my sister step father) was always scared she would molest me and my sister because thats what these kids can end up doing. I don’t know how to feel, I want to believe that it was nothing but I can’t lie to myself anymore.

Thank you, this article helped a lot. Most of my childhood Is kinda of a blur but I remember being sexually abuse by my own cousin as a child and most of the time I though it was a game I guess I didn’t know any better. One day my mom knew there was something wrong going on and that day she took me home and asked me if my cousin had done something to me and I said no various times but I didn’t want to tell my mother the truth I was so small and then after moving to the U.S my moms husband touch me inappropriately more than once and I think I came to the country when I was maybe 8 or 9. They are still together and have been married for maybe 5 years now and I was planning to tell my mom on my 17th birthday which is only 2 months away. I was planning to write a card and I don’t know if that a good idea pls I need to know if I should do it that way because I just don’t think I could ever tell her face to face. Everyone around me thinks am a happy person and I try to be, I sometimes forget all that these horrible things have happen to me and I can’t believe that even after moving to another country I had to go through the same thing. Sometimes I think out of every man In this country I can’t believe my mom pick him. He hasn’t touched me inappropriately in years now but I know my mom should now this because they have a son together my baby brother he is now 5 years old and really think he has also touched him inappropriately and I have such anger in my heart it hurts so much but seen all these strong women charging their story encourage to share mines because even though it hurts I know I could get through it with Gods help.

When I was young between 4 and 6 two of my cousins who were also children and girls but older than me would make their dog hump me. They would tell me he was just hugging me and make me stay there. They would also tell me to go hump family members, family friends, and stuffed animals. Then when I was 10 I asked my other cousin who is a boy and was 13 if I could play his games said only if I touched his privates, and he unzipped his pants and showed me privates while fondling himself. I told him no and he insisted but I just walked out of the room. Him and his brother would dry hump me and I thought it was normal. They also showed me porn. And another time my best friends brother would always show me his penis and tell me to lick it. My friend would laugh, so I would too, but I always felt uncomfortable about it. I haven’t told anyone about these encounters. But I’ve never had close relationships that lasted long, and sex is very uncomfortable to me. I only aim to please the person. I don’t know what to do. We’re all grown up now and my cousins are really nice, but I still feel like what happened wasn’t right. I need help/advice.

Hey the fact that i am here says a lot. I have no recollection of any kind of any sexual abuse as a kid. I was however highly emotionally and verbally abused
(around the age of 6-10) and had repressed memories of those events that resurfaced almost a year ago (aged 17). I was also suffering from severe depression when those memories resurfaced. I have huge memory gaps of my childhood. I remember only a few things even if i think hard about, these gaps go up to the age of 12. I have a high sex drive. i make a lot of sexual or double meaning jokes. I was sexually harassed when i was 16 too but i am very aware of that and have made my peace with it. I have been watching a lot of troubling porn including rape and abuse and even tho i hate these with everything i have and recognize as a feminist i still seem to enjoy these videos. I have a memory of playing a very disgusting game of acting with my cousin sister at a very young age. It included being abducted and forced sexually. Now thinking about it that is very troubling coming from a child that young (i was younger than 10). But i have no recollection or memory of having been sexually abused as a kid. All these factors put together now are worrying me a lot. I m obsessing over the fact that something terrible might have happened to me that i am not even aware of. I NEED TO KNOW HOW TO FIND OUT IF I WAS SEXUALLY ABUSED OR NOT. I cannot talk to my family about this. I need help in figuring this out please reply.

Hi. I have a vivid memory of hugging a man in my church whom I saw as a grandad type figure but as I hugged him, he began touching and squeezing me and kissing and licking my neck.

I felt gross and my body felt strange. I froze. I knew it wasn’t OK but I didn’t know what to do so I did nothing.
The strange part is, I have no memory of how old I was? I could have been a child or 18 or even 22?
Is it odd that I so vividly remember what happened but not the age that I was?

When I was 7 I started second grade and in my class there was this girl in 5th grade who immediately wanted to be my friend. One day when we were alone in the locker room she asked me if i wanted to be in a relationship with her. By this time I was 8 years old but I felt pressured to say yes and like I couldn’t say no ,so I said yes. The longer this went on she started telling me to do things that I don’t think were right of her to ask. We were both young ( I was 8 and she was 11) but I feel like she had to know that what she was doing was wrong. She would have us go to the restroom and get in the same bathroom stall together when no one else was in there. When we were in there she would have me take my pants and shirt off and push my naked body against hers while we would kiss. This happened many times. She would watch me change my clothes by ducking under to look into my stall. She would have me put my hand in her pants and touch her bottom. Does what she did count as sexual abuse? Or was she too young to know it was abuse?

How do I know if I was sexually abused as a child? I was in a physically and emotionally abusive relationship for six years. In august he went to jail on other chargers and was able to move out to a safe place. I don’t know how long he’ll be in jail, but for now I am free. I have been talking to a therapist and seeing a doctor to try and get a handle on my panic attacks and anxiety. My memories as a child are very limited. I have nightmares but cant remember them once I wake. I feel dirty and sick to my stomach after sex, as if I did something wrong. I believe my grandparents (yes both of them), along with my cousin who was around the same age as me, sexually abused me as a child. I only remember a few “good” memories. The rest goes black. My grandparents would make me bathe with my cousin (male) while watching us. Then they would make me sleep in only a baggy t shirt with no underwear on. Every single time I stayed at their house. They made me sleep this way because I’d always complain of hurting or feeling weird in my private area. So my grandma or grandpa would have me sit in the chair with them legs spread to “air out”. Before bed they’d make my cousin and I have a “midnight snack” even if it wasnt midnight. it was usually ice cream melted or a shake. Then they’d make us sleep in their bed. Thats where everything goes black, but not the normal falling asleep black. I am starting to have flashbacks or memories of things they did to me, but it’s fuzzy and comes in pieces. My panic attacks are extremely worse and I don’t know how to get the answers I need/want. I remember my grandparents moving me around, positioning me with my legs spread while I was out of it. I cant remember all the details, but I feel like I was drugged with the midnight snack. I have always felt different because I never had a sex talk with an adult, but I knew what to expect when it came to it. There is a lot more but it’s too much to type. I don’t know what to think..

Hello, i dont know if i have been sexually abused as a child but i have always known that something has been wrong. I barerly remember anything from my childhood, only very short and foggy memories. I do remember very strongly seing my dad watch porn. Many times. And waking up having “dreams” of him coming in my room touching me. I dont know if they were dreams or not. I checked almost all of the boxes around diffrent symptoms and experiences i read here except seeking abusive relationsships. I have always been atttacted to calm nerdy guys. I dont know if i want to know the answere of why i am and feel this way. Because my family is pretty close. We dont talk about any of the hard times we have. I dont know what to do and i dont know how to tell my boyfriend that i have faked everything in our sexlife.

I think I was about 7-9 when this happened to me but it gets really fuzzy whenever I try to forcefully remember what happened.
Basically I think I was sexually abused/molested by my cousin (my cousin molested me older brother) and I’m not sure how to explain it really but I’ve always felt guilty about it because I think I might have wanted it, my sister told me that I would sit on his lap and stuff and lately I’ve been having dreams about him making me suck him off…But now that I’m 15 I feel like it might’ve been partially my fault for not removing myself from that situation and ever since that happened to me I guess you could say I’ve become more sexually and going as far as to even getting aroused at being raped and other things.
I’m not sure what to do I feel as if every I might just take my anger out on the people I love and end up pushing them away…There’s a lot more to this of course but this is what I can type down. (My whole family has a history of being touched by family members so…)

hi, im 19 years old and im starting to suspect that i might have been sexually abused by my father. i want to leave my story here so someone can tell me if i was or if im overreacting. long story short my parents are divorced and i used to have a phone so i could talk to my mom when i was up at my dads. one night my father came into my room, he laid in bed with me and gave me a small plastic heart and told me “whenever you look at this heart remember that i love you”. i cant remember anything after that. ive tried for the past ten years to remember what happened but its like i blacked out or something, the last thing i remember was him leaving and realizing that my phone was gone. i remember that after he left i felt so angry that i threw the heart. even to this day i try so hard to remember anything cuz i feel so gross when i think of that night, but the most i can remember is him scratching my back then it all goes black. please if anyone can help i would be so grateful. also im sorry i know that this is all over the place but that how the night feels to me, i feel like im putting together a puzzle when i dont have all the pieces.

i have absolutely no memory of ever being molested or anything, but im starting to have my doubts. i love my mom, but when i was younger she put me and my siblings in some unsafe situations. before she got addicted to drugs, she had a lot of boyfriends. most of them were physically abusive and obsessed with my mother. especially one i hated the most. around this time i started getting extreme “bladder infections”, and gaining weight. after that i became self conscious, and devoleped anorexia. also, i dont know what it is, but i have an extreme fear of touch. i hate when people touch me. just any form of physical contact, at all. but especially sexually. and touching my own body, especially my… chest… makes me physically sick. like in my stomach. ive never told anyone, because probably theyd think im crazy. i also have rape fantasies, which scares me so much, because if i was molested thatd basically mean that i enjoyed it? i dont know. because ive had these fantasies and others since an extremely young age. like 10 or 11. i also have, like what was listed on here, weird moments where im suddenly uncomfortable, just little things like certain actions or certain touches or certain phrases that put me on edge. i dunno, maybe im just being paranoid but something about it is just off i think.

Reading this blog made me think of a few things that had confused me from my childhood. I dont have clear memory of anything. It’s all bits and pieces.

I remember when I was around 4-5, I was putting things into my underwear and rubbing against it to make me feel good. I don’t know where I got the idea to do that. I did not even know about the female anatomy until I started my period at 12 and realizing I have a vagina. There was another memory of where I was staring at the ceiling while an older male cousin was doing something “down there”. I don’t have memory of what he was doing exactly but I’m guessing it probably wasn’t good. I remember feeling intense pain and crying so I’m guessing it was penetrative. Another thing that made me think it might’ve been penetrative was that when I got older and had “sex for the first time”, I still felt pain but I never bled. I remember growing up, whenever I was told to give an adult a hug, whether it was male or female, I felt intense anxiety; like I had a pit in my stomach. This feeling was most intense with my dad. I don’t know if my dad ever did anything to me but I do remember that whenever us kids wanted a favor, he told us we have to return a favor. He would take another cousin that’s the same age as me into a room and made everyone leave. He called it “squish penis” in our language. My aunts and uncles know what he was doing but none of them thought anything of it. They thought it was normal. So me, my same age cousin, and other kids also thought it was normal since none of the other adults said or did anything. They even teased my same age cousin that he got his penis “squished”. I don’t know if my dad ever did anything to me because from the age of 6 and older, I had formed some really solid memories and I never remember him doing anything to me. I don’t have good memories from before age 6. The memory from that point felt so hazy that I’m doubting if it’s even real memories. I don’t know if my mind made it up to make sense of my intense hug anxiety and not bleeding for first time sex. All of these “memories” are really confusing because I don’t remember it well and I had a relatively normal childhood.

Although I don’t have all the signs and symptoms from this blog, I do have a few. I started liking boys at a really young age. I did not know what sex was but I had often have the arouse feeling and was interested in sexual things throughout my childhood. I have rape fantasies and still have it to this day. I like rape pornography and enjoy acting out my fantasy with boyfriends. A few other pornography categories I like, that I’m not proud of and is extremely ashamed of, are incest, older male-younger female, and voyeur porn. I am not listing these categories to be disgusting but simply to list a few things that I think are symptoms. I also no longer believe this but when I was younger, I used to think I “have to” have sex with a boyfriend. I also enjoy pain. I do have depression, anxiety, social anxiety, low self-esteem, and suicidal thoughts.

Anon is not my name because I would like to remain anonymous. I feel extremely disgusted by writing this but I wanted to share this somewhere. I have not told anyone and do not feel safe writing it down onto paper for fear someone will read it. I want it to be known but not by anyone I know. It’s weird but I feel relief from writing this down and having someone read it. So if you are reading this, I appreciate it and apologize if it is disgusting or disturbing.

I’m really confused. Even saying this online is making me nervous.When I was younger about 7 there was a female (I’m also female too) who was a similar age as me. She would start off with things like kissing eventually by the time I was 8 she would tell me to do things like oral sex on her,sucking on her breasts,kiss her all over etc this went on till I was about 14 years old. I went ahead and did it because I had no clue of what any of this was so I would just go ahead with it. There were so many times where I didn’t want to do it but I didn’t understand what was going on and I didn’t want to “ruin the game” so I would carry on. She would disguise it as a game we would play like princesses etc She would also go and do similar things to me. I remember after every time it happened I would feel disgusting the next day. Honestly I feel absolutely disgusted by the whole thing idk why I didn’t say anything during those years I knew it was wrong but I couldn’t understand why I guess i just didn’t have the right language to be able to say what it was. I blocked all this out till now. I’m 19 I would say I’ve surpressed the memories rather than them being repressive I really don’t know. I knew it was always there in the back of my head but I would ignore it because well I don’t know why. I think it’s maybe to do with a friend that was raped a year and a bit before hand whilst we were both on campus. She was a closed friend of mine I know it wasn’t my fault but I feel like considering I was literally on campus I could’ve done something. I also think it’s because I haven’t seen the female that was doing those sexual things to me between the ages of around 7-14 in months and I guess my brain has now decided it’s okay to suddenly have the memories resurface.Now I can’t stop thinking about it. I don’t know why the memories have suddenly resurfaced after some years down the line. I also remember times where when I was around 7-8 years old toys would be put in my underwear-it was never shoved up but it always felt uncomfortable. I actually also had some infections down there when I was younger too. I don’t believe it was directly related to these incidents since they weren’t STIs but I know other infections can be influenced by things like oral sex which thinking about it makes me feel even more disgusting. I was rather shy and quiet when I was younger I guess that made me an easy target.I remember there was time a family member almost caught us I was absolutely terrified I was going to get into trouble despite never initiating any of it. Is this classed as COCSA? I’m really confused because she wasn’t older than me we were around the same age and we’re both female I don’t know if that means it’s not part of the category I don’t know.

Hi.

I’m 25 years old and I recently started to reflect a lot on how I was as a child. I remember being about 5 or 6 years old and having a high sex drive without even knowing what it meant. I would crave for men to touch me even though I was scared. I also remember being curious of boy private parts and would constantly try to touch them or hit them. I would play rough with the boys in my class in hopes that they would touch me so I could feel satisfied. One day I was walking to my house from school and a boy ran passed me and touched my breast, I acted like I was mad but inside of me I felt special, and it was the weirdest roller coaster of emotions to go through. I was watching porn by 7 years old and was addicted to it too. I masturbated a lot as a child and as a teen. I was in a a long term relationship (my first and only relationship so far) and everything that could go wrong with me went wrong. I had a hard time accepting his love, I was insecure and very codependent. I was never sure he liked me and thought that the only way I could show him that I loved him was through sex, even when I did not want to. I had a hard time saying “no” or “stop” when it didn’t feel good and put myself through the pain. I only remember being “in the moment” while having sex with my ex boyfriend a hand full of times because I would constantly zone out. He did everything in his power to show me his love but I would always push him away, I felt like i did not deserve for someone to love me because I couldn’t perform sexually or emotionally.

At what age does memories of sexual abuse come back?

Hi, I’ve been pretty concerned that I was abused (sexually or otherwise) when I was younger. There’s some things I remember but I don’t recall them being very traumatic. I remember being exposed to porn by age 6 and being sent a gorey sexual video when I was 11 but that’s the worst I can remember. Other than that, I really don’t remember much of any years before, really. I’m a teenager now and I find myself being overly interested in sex (which I know could be a response to trauma), but feel ashamed whenever people talk to me about it. I’m a teenage boy, and so are a lot of my friends, so I guess being asked wether or not/how I touch myself should be expected to some degree, but I feel like I can never talk about these things as openly as them. I always feel guilty, ashamed, or flustered when I get asked this sort of thing. It’s not really like I’m uncomfortable with the subject though, I’m always one of the first to start joking about it, only when it’s someone asking about me. I was sent to a mental hospital a couple of years ago, which the government can do with or without my or my parents’ consent, and I know that a lot of sexual abuse happens there, especially in the minor’s section. I’m worried something may have happened there as well. Other than that, I have multiple other symptoms like the ones listed above but I’m not sure whether or not that means I’ve been abused or if something else is going on.

Hi, I am mostly writing this as I have nowhere else to say this and really want to talk about it, I know you don’t have the clear answer. I’m 23 now and I have very very few memories of my childhood and anything below the age of 12. I have this reoccurring thought that I have been sexually abused as a child and somehow there is no doubt in my mind that that is true even though I do not have any memory of anything suspicious happening ever. I have had a really high sex drive since i was about 13, I have depression, anxiety disorder and suicidal ideations, and i am recovering from an eating disorder. Although I can contribute those issues to other factors, the things that seem to me like the biggest evidence are other things – I am absolutely terrified of having anyone apart from a partner looking at my genitals (doctors, aestheticians etc) to the point where I cry and have a panic attack even just thinking about it happening. Additionally, if when being intimate I lay down and put my knees to my chest I start uncontrollably crying without a reason even if I was in that position just for a second. I have no explanation for those things especially the latter and it makes me think something has happened to me that I do not remember. Do you think that’s possible? Thank you.

I’m 16, I vividly remember masturbation, fingering my anal cavity, taking my clothes off at night, passionately kissing my pillow, a fascination with rape, and sexual fantasies with both myself and barbies from around the age of 3. I always knew it was wrong and was always disgusted with myself. Some days vaginal cramping and breast pain gets really bad and I’m not on my menstrual cycle, it just really hurts down there. I’ve had that ever since i could remember. I’m a virgin as far as I know, and I have a red rash that runs from my pelvic area all the way down my legs. I scratch pimples on my face, shoulders and back all the time, I can’t seem to stop, it’s just something I do. My parents get really condescending when ever they see how deep the gouges get sometimes. I always have a few bruises I have no clue where they came from. I always feel so alone, I’m a very manipulatible person, I always feel like no one ever loves me. I figured out sex before my mom gave me the sex talk when I was 8. I don’t know who would/could have hurt me, but the more I think about this, the more I really start to worry and remember.

To be sexually abused, molested as a child has been a huge possibility. Though I block out certain memories some as extreme as they are very vivid. I can remember aspects of being a toddler. 4,5,6, so on so forth just aspects. There’s definite huge gaps and blackouts. I started masterbation without realizing what it was besides feeling good as a toddler..my family members used to call it a leg thing. I would do that everywhere I wanted, could in front of everyone. Then 5, 6, 7.. I somehow started drawing porn before I even found or knew what porn was
Did alot of sexual things with friends my age girls, one boy. In elementary.. teen years. 14, I was pressured by my 18/19 year old boyfriend to have sex.. 15, was pressured to have sex with a boy in the woods with his friends watching… 15, got high for the first time and with no consent, or knowledge a boy proceeded to have sex with me outside at a campground… 16/17… I had a family member try to have me touch them and make out with me and touch me. That’s the moment I knew this might have happened before. I was sexually active with a boyfriend but, was used, both abusive… and raped by his friend who denied it.. with me expressing the truth, him, my mom, and friends around never believed me. I was asked from my mom “well why don’t you just call the cops then” Which she having pot in our house and her smoking with me, supplying alchohol and cigarettes to a minor not in school.. along with being scared and bleeding from a cut on my hand made accidentally by my then boyfriend in front of her.. I was not able to discuss it. And was named a cheater. I’ve had moments where I choose not to remember things.
I’ve been sexually harassed, assaulted, raped, verbally, mentally, physically, emotionally used and abused. I have abandonment issues, trust issues, co dependency issues, depressed, suicidal thoughts since 12.. had tried to commit suicide, self harm, abusing drugs, alcohol, and have toxicity traits and tendencies. I pretty much unfortunately can relate to most if not all symptoms/signs listed above. My adult life is effected severely
I am unable to comfortably have sex.
My relationships are effected.
My friendships are effected.
I am unable to have stable relationships…
My friendships come fast and end on bad notes and they just come and go.
I can’t go see a therapist.. I do not have money I do not have insurance and, I do not know how to be self sufficient enough to begin the process of getting to the right direction findin help.
That’s a short version of my story. I’m sorry everyone here has been through horrible things I hope all of us are able to find peace and happiness in life and are able to work through it all.

Hi. Reading all your comments has given me the strength to tell mine and convinced me more than ever that I was sexually abused as a small child.
I’ve had problems with drugs, promiscuity and depression all my life and I never knew why. I feel like I’m forgetting something important and often feel dirty or incredibly low , recently I’m starting to believe I was sexually abused. As a small child I spent alot of time with my older brother and his friend and I have memories of massaging them or sitting on their crutch areas. They were 10 years older than me. I was very sexually and masturbated in public frequently and performed sexual acts with classmates every other day (between 4-7 years old) I also remember a private joke between my brother and I in which he would trace a line above my pubic area with his finger but thought was innocent until now and I have no other memories. How can I start to remember?

So it’s really weird that I am writing this. I am a 49 year old male. I clearly remember exchanging oral sex with a boy a couple of years older then me when I was between 5 and 9 years old. I remember mostly doing the “performing” and recall sometimes not wanting to continue. Although I have identified myself as heterosexual all my life I have had homosexual fantasies since a teen ager. I have has sexual excitations since I can remember. I can<t say if what I did was coeerced or forced or consensual. Today I'm kind of messed up. I like pretty weird stuf sexually and porn wise. Today I believe I am bisexual but I can't imagine being in a loving relationship with a man. I am turned on by femdom scenarios and forced homosexuality and cuckolding. Does any of what happened to me as a child have anf effect on my fantasies and desires? Is it normal to masturbate a minimum of twice a day? Sorry if this is extreme and it is really strange for me to read, I ahve even thought of looking up the guy (I still remember his name) butt am totally afrais of what might come of it.

I don’t have any memories of sexual abuse but I feel that thats what happened to me. But at the same time I dont want to say thats what it was because i dont know for sure. Im 25 and I am unable to have sex with my partner. We have tried countless times over our 3 years together, but every time we try i have an extreme panic attack and I cant do it. Hes been very patient but it has caused a lot of trust issues in me and I have never been able to understand why. I know something had happened to my sister when she was younger and it was from my cousin. And i remember this dream I had multiple times where it was just him staring at me from just outside my bedroom door and each dream he would get closer and closer. And i only remembered it when she told me about what happened between them. I dont want to accuse him of anything because i dont even know the truth. But there is no explanation to why i have so much problems with sex. I just want to know why and its killing me. Sex has always been a rough topic for me i remember when my close friend told me she had lost her virginity i had a mental breakdown and started bawling my eyes out. That isnt normal.

I’ve been asked by a close family friend of my deceased mother if I had been sexually abused a child. She stated our neighbors had expressed concern at one point… I told her no. I would remember it, but I really don’t have a lot of childhood memories.

I do remember being very hyper sensitive to clitoral stimulation. I may have been 5 and would try to find things to put on my criteria ( didn’t know what it was at the time) to make it burn/sting/tingle.

I’m very sexual and really enjoy sex if it is taboo either the acts or the people. I need to be under the influence of alcohol for regular sex with my partner.

I’ve been very sexual though since as long as I can remember but as far back as that memory goes, I don’t remember anyone doing anything to me.

I feel like I’m messed up but was born this way. What makes some people sexually aware so young? I feel like a misfit half the time because when I talk about how I felt as a child people don’t relate and look at me like there’s something wrong with me.

I feel like I’m going crazy. I’ve had panic attacks over whether or not I’ve been sexually abused at some point in my life. I’m a very sexual person, I’ve masturbated daily since I was like 11 or 12. I’m terrified at the idea of actual intercorse though. The idea of being sexualized makes me sick. I’ve been diagnosed with Generalized Anxiety Disorder and ADHD, I might also have depression. I self-harm pretty regularly, sometimes it’s done with the intent of making me unlovable and ugly so no one will touch me. I have had multiple dreams of being taken advantage of sexually. I have had panic attacks over someone touching my neck. I’m terrified of men, I try to make myself as small as possible around them. I don’t remember much of when I was little. I feel disgusting and I think the only thing I’m good for is to be used by others. My mom gets mad at me because I feel uncomfortable changing in front of her. I don’t remember ever being touched sexually though? Have I just convinced myself that something happened? I have a therapist but I don’t know how to bring this up to her, I think she’ll think I’m looking for attention. I feel like I’m just being stupid.

Hi everyone.
My name is Mattie, and I’m 13 soon to be 14. About a month ago, I was at my grandma’s house, and my grandma, my mom, and I were all talking about a woman and her husband who used to babysit me when I was about 4 years old. They weren’t the most professional people, and they didn’t exactly treat the kids very well. My mom was talking about the story of why I stopped going there, and she said something that just didn’t make me feel right. She said, “While we were waiting for Aunt Kathy (my aunt) at the store, you said ‘It’s touchy-feely time.’ I asked you where you heard that and you said, ‘Paulie.’ (the man who I think may have molested me.)” I feel like in my past I’ve heard this story before, but this time I think it really sank in, and I realized what could’ve actually happened to me. Ever since then, I’ve been more on edge about relationships and fooling around with guys, (ex. kissing, grouping, and sex.) along with having fantasies about being molested and raped with the guys I was beginning to be involved with. A lot of the symptoms listed above make me think the suspicions are true, and that I was in fact molested. I’ve been having flashbacks of being at their house, and remembering some stuff that was kind of odd, but it was so long ago that I’m not even sure if they were real or fake memories. Now looking back on it, from an older mindset, he was kind of creepy. I just need someone’s opinion on what I should do, and if they think the behavior I’m currently exhibiting means that it’s definitely possible this happened to me.

I’ve recently started questioning a lot of things. I have a uncle who was acting really odd at thanksgiving this year. i never see him but i know when i was a baby he used to baby sit me before my parents put me in daycare. he greeted my mom and my boyfriend, i sat between them both, he even shook their hands, but not one for me, he didn’t talk to me much either but he was acting so weird the whole time. i have only one memory of him when i was little, he was bouncing me on his leg (playful) and i had a space themed sippy cup. it’s always been a clear little memory of mine. now here is why i have my suspensions. i’ve been googling about side affects and behavior a toddler shows when being abused. I used to have night terrors really bad growing up, i’m not close to my dad much at all but i asked him when they started, he said 2. i saw somewhere in 0-3 year olds that’s common with night terrors. i frequently wet the bed and hid my sheets in the closet, i would self sooth myself as long as i can remember i would just call it the “leg thing” i would grab my privates really hard and stiffen up and i really liked how it felt and it was extremely difficult to grow out of. i knew what i was doing was bad though somehow and i knew it was dirty and wrong. i liked sticking things in my pants as well to give me the sensation i had male parts. i feel like as a kid my sex drive was way more active than it is now. which is really gross honestly. i have one memory of being little in the bathtub and i was looking at my privates and there was a black spot on it, i remember it going away over time. i have so many odd gaps in my early childhood. i know sucking my thumb was a huge issue for me and fidgetting my hair while i did it. i seen from other posts that later signs are eating disorders and what not. i’ve had bulimia for 4 years about and it’s been hard getting over it i just can’t get myself to. my dad wasn’t emotionally present other than abusive growing up. but i have an amazing mom and i love her so much. i talked to my boyfriend about my connections i made today with everything. he thinks i’m over reacting.

Hi… I’m 33 years old, and for many years I never thought about my experience with my stepfather, I was so little, but every now and then I would remember one specific occasion, but would just ignore it and think “it’s in the past, I’m a grown-up and it was nothing, I turned out fine”… But for the past two years I’ve started remembering more things… And started to actually cry and accept that it wasn’t ok. No matter how much of a “good father” he was to me, helping my mom to give me the best education and everything I needed , I finally understood I was and, worst of all, I FELT ABUSED back then. When I started to think about it, my first memory was when I was around 4 years old and he used to have me on his lap or close to him watching TV and he would put his genitals out and touch it. I don’t remember if he touched me or how he held me, but the genitals part is very vivid and felt ashamed that I was seeing his “pipi” but didn’t say anything to him. Later I recalled it happened more than once and one day I told my mom that I saw his “pipi” and he gave her a lame excuse but he stopped or at least I think.
My other memory is when I was older, around 9 or 10, back then i shared the same room as my mom and him, who I always called my dad. And when at night he would watch porn on the TV while we were asleep and masturbate because I could hear it. My mom took pills because she always struggled with insomnia, so he was always a heavy sleeper, but I would hear everything.. he would not even turn the volume off and I felt so bad that I didn’t even remember to breathe properly because I felt like I wasn’t supposed to be “hearing that”… It happened almost every night until I was 12 and got my own room. I always gave him excuses like “oh we shared a room and he was a man,man do that” but now that I think about it, I feel angry because we had a TV in the living room, HE COULD WATCH HIS PORN AND MASTURBATE THERE, or he could at least turn down the volume… But no, it’s like he didn’t mind about my well-beingor he wanted me to listen….
I was exposed to porn at such young age, that I was so prematurely promiscuous… I don’t know if that’s the reason but obviously hearing that porn triggered my curiosity and when I got my own room I started watching it too. I was curious to see what I had only heard or only saw glimpses of.
I struggled so much with the things you mention during my teenage and young adult life,
I turned out ok, because I learned that I had to be better…. but I was a very disturbed adolescent. And now I remember how I FELT, I felt abused. And when they got divorced 13 years ago I was sort of relieved. And I don’t really care about being in his life TBH, even though I feel guilty about it sometimes because like I said he was the father I didn’t have. We had lovely moments as a family. But I also resent him.
Sometimes I wonder if it was abuse or it’s just in my head. Sometimes I wonder if I should tell my mom, but I fear she’ll feel too guilty that she didn’t notice or do anything, and I don’t want to hurt her
Sometimes I wonder if I should block and forget he ever existed or even confront him. Or if I should just forgive and forget.
I can’t even talk to him nowadays because the memories are way too strong now to play nice…. I just ignore his messages.

The list is mostly “me”, with some exceptions of course, and additions, i.e. I wet the bed until I was about 10 years old. Things in my life finally coalesced once I asked God to show me who (if anyone, I can’t remember any details except as an infant being in their living room) abused me. He showed me it was my parents’ “friend”, who lived 2 doors away from us. They babysat me a few times. Not to go into the details, but once he (my “uncle”) propositioned me when I was in my parents garage (my father had died and I was cleaning up the house getting it ready to be sold). Once that happened, everything “clicked”. He always showed me a lot of attention, but was so so very careful. He always makes lewd and suggestive remarks, always talks dirty. He’s still alive and so is his wife (my “aunt”- my deceased mom’s friend from school). I know for a fact his one son was sexually abused, my mom caught him (at age 3) doing things to my younger sister that no child would ever know about unless they were abused. My mom got really mad and told his mother (her friend). She just laughed! Getting back to what happened, one doctor of my mother’s had asked her if I was abused that way. She asked me, but I said “no” because I couldn’t remember anything (I was about 10 years old and had tried to run away from home, it was because I was going into another school and it was a really bad one and I was afraid to go, as I hated school- I was always very quiet and shy).
Now I finally told my husband what happened. The problem is the few people I know, none of them (Thankfully) have never been abused that way. At least I now know why I had such inner rage as a child, the cutting events of my teenage years, the depression, suicidal thoughts, feeling dirty, hating anything to do with sex (I’d never ever wear low cut shirts, even swimming, I’d always have a shirt on), until my first boyfriend guilted me into sex. He did not believe I was a virgin, even though I had never done it with anyone that I knew of. I used to write depressing poetry as a young adult and he got ahold of it and read it, though I tried to take it away. He asked me if I had been abused, but I told him I couldn’t remember, which I still can’t. Any time I see any sort of ‘rape scene’ on television I get so enraged and upset and cry- I’m usually one to hold my feelings in very tight and never ever want to cry when others see. After being guilted into sex, I became the opposite of my formerly chaste self, I felt like I had to ‘give it’ to any guy who wanted it, not quite a nymphomaniac, but close.
I don’t know what to do about this person who did this to me. I know it was him. I don’t know what to say(I have never been back to see them since!). They are both in their early 80’s and in poor health. I forgive him for what he did, but I am still so shocked, even though this happened in 2020. He ruined the last few times I was in the house of my childhood. Part of me wants to rip him to shreds, part of me is sad for him, maybe he was abused too. But I do not know what to say, if anything. I wrote an anonymous letter last year and sent it to him with certain bible verses regarding his sinful nature. I do not know how many others he has abused. He is very careful about it, he only did it because his wife was sick and it was one of the last times I was going to be over there. I pray he repents of his evil ways, but I don’t know what if anything to say. This still makes me so sad, and there is nobody around here I can talk to about it. I have a degree in psychology (I got it to figure out why I was so screwed up, ha ha!), but that doesn’t do much. Anyway, if you’ve read this far, thank you for at least reading this. I just feel so alone, plus the “not knowing” is still messing with me on some level. I always was a ‘need to know’ type of person. I hate being in the dark about this.

Hello, I’m currently 17 years old and I am thinking that I may have sexually abused when I was younger. When I was around maybe 7-9 I would usually go over to my great aunt and uncles house after school due to my parents working. My younger cousin would also come from time to time to be watched. From some bits and pieces that I can barely remember I think everything was fine, despite a few weird stares from my great uncle. A few years passed and my younger cousin went to court to testify against my uncle for molesting her. When the news came out I was so shocked and disgusted. My parents asked near frequently when ever he was brought up if I had also been molested, but I couldn’t really remember at all so I would always say no- but I’m not entirely sure. My greta uncle was found guilty and currently resides in prison. I’m not sure when his release is. But whenever I hear family members talk about him it always fills me with this sort of dread or anxiety. I’m not sure who to reach out to to figure out if I had actually been molested or not. Does anyone know where I could reach out or how?

I’m going to be really honest here even though I know it probably makes me sound terrible. I’ve had sexual fantasies since I was about 8 that I’m being raped, hit, whipped. One sexual fantasy I had a lot when I was about 12 was being a sex slave pimped out by my mother. As an adult I’m into BDSM as a submissive. My mum is a very strange woman, she was verbally and physically abusive toward me my whole life. She barely looked after me and I was always babysat by various people like neighbours and family members, whoever would take me. I’ve always wondered if I was molested and I have most of the signs above. I was highly promiscuous as a 16-18 year old. I slept with everyone including men I wasn’t attracted to and any man who put pressure on me even when I didn’t want to. I was forcibly raped at 14 when I tried to turn a man down. I know I need therapy of course and don’t know why I’m sharing this really.

What does it feel like to feel safe? Unfortunately, I have never felt physically safe with a man other than my first boyfriend. Ever since I was a little girl, I did not like to be touched. I experienced anxiety and a sense of fear whenever anyone would come close to me. My brain registered me being sexually assaulted with I was 13 year old. I am 25 now and to this day I remember exactly how I froze and could not move an inch when I was being violated by a man. But I did not like being touched even before that. I wondered why cannot I even hug someone or shake hands or just feel safe anywhere. despite coming from a emotionally and physically abusive household I did not think I was that way because of my father who would physically abuse my mother, me and my siblings. It was until when I had my first depressive episode at 18 when it started coming back to me. it started in bits and pieces as if my subconscious had buried these memories so deep that only intense sadness and self harm could bring them to light. I remembered I was 8 years old and would visit my grandparents house. There in the afternoon, I would be part of a game where I would be the wife and someone else the husband. I do not remember the face but I remember he would ask me to comply with acts that husbands and wives do after the man comes home from work. Taking off of clothes and touching, exposure of my whole body. I started getting nightmares that someone was always watching me and trying to be near me. Soon I became suicidal and intensely depressed. I still would not feel safe anywhere and also could not understand why this was happening, if my memories were real. I was 20 when I first hugged someone. 21 when I first hugged a boy, he was my first boyfriend. He was the only to ever make me feel truly safe, always respectful and patient and understanding of my trauma. We were together for more than 3 years (2018 to 2022) but since 2016 I had been getting depressive episodes. no amount of medication or therapy made my episodes stop. After our break up, I fell into depression again and would constantly wonder if I can ever feel safe with anyone else. Then, I pushed myself to get out of this trauma. I went on a date with guy, he seemed nice but on second movie date he ended up taking advantage of me and even after said no, he insisted and I just couldn’t be bold enough to push him. my body froze, all over all. Months passed and I thought maybe I should try again, with someone who would understand. I met another guy through a mutual friend and we dated for 3 months before my depression hit again. 2 months even after depression I stayed with him but never felt safe. During this time, he was financially abusing me and sexually as well. Multiple instances of forcing me to have unprotected sex, other degrading methods that I was not comfortable with, he always needed sex whenever we were together. it would not matter to him if I had fever or periods or I had been indulging in self harm. he would say he understands but ended up forcing me have to sex anyway. I said no, I tried, many times but I gave up, or maybe I was not strong enough to disappoint him. I told myself I have to get over it or else I won’t feel safe with anyone. It has been a week after I broke up with him, my friends were incredibly supportive as he started behaving erratically and would not leave me, forced me to meet in a hotel but my friends helped me. I had to change my number because he still does not stop calling. on the other hand I got to know, he’s been asking about dating other people. Since the last one week, I cannot help but feel disgusted and hating myself for letting someone do this to me. I feel stupid and weak for being so submissive that anyone can just come up and force me to do things. On the other hand, I fail to believe that I will ever feel safe with anyone other than my first boyfriend and I am too scared to even give anyone another chance now. I am 25 now and don’t know how to get myself to feel safe anywhere. I have been dealing with depression and anxiety since 2016 and still harm myself, I cannot seem to get better even after trying therapy, medication, exercise and every possible thing, I am scared that I will never be able to feel the feeling of home. Have I actually been sexually abused or am I just making it up? I do not know and I cannot trust myself around anyone anymore. I cannot walk the streets without feeling anxious, be around loud noises, be in crowded spaces.

Sooooooooo, I see we are implanting false memories in people are we ‘Now’? (Excuse me: ‘Again’ is more correct, i thought we were over that. Like Years and decades and Years and YEARS ago…..AFTER it was repeatedly proven that any time a therapist, psychologist, and/or psychiatrist gets involved the eventual “recovered” memories Almost Always contain Major deviations from what factually happened in the past instances [the ones that turn out not to be Complete fabrications, i mean], like Major Deviations such as who did the abusing, and what the abuse entailed) Interesting ….in a Really bad and Dangerous way that ruins people’s lives, including the victims’…..but not the lives of those therapists, who are making that money 💵 money money money

This is so mind boggling! Even more all the reactions and replies. Amazing article.

when i was around 6-7 yrs old i had a glimpse of memory of a relatice taking out his genitals and started rubbing it in front trying to insert in me then i ran out and forgot all the details, when i was primary student from my neighbourhood boys ask me to go to there house to play and they let me lie in bed and they would roll over me, and one of them when we’re playing he invited me into their restroom and told me to touch his genitals (they were all my relatives), when i was younger i was really exposed to this immoral caught my gparents doing it, my aunt making me watch anime sex videos, then after the things happening to me i began craving for it as far as i remember as a child like searching it on website when i was a child, touching my own parts, and even touching someone younger than me his parts or much immoral from what i had remember, this memory really haunts me from time to time as an adult, and feel like i don’t deserve to be here and i really feel the worst shame and guilt possible when that person remember and tainted immoral doings in his memory as a child. I feel like this grievous sin to my grave

Is it sexual abuse if a person sits against someone who is sexually aroused but they don’t know they are aroused? Or does it depend on who the two different parties are in relationship status to each other?

I am a 54 year old woman who realized two years ago that I was sexually abused by my father, brothers, grandfather, and brother-in-law when I was younger. I was reading a book two years ago, and all of a sudden the memories came back. I remember when I was younger, and I would sleep with my hands over my private parts, and my mother would come in and yell at me to get my hands out of my panties. I remember my brothers coming into the room I shared with my tow other sisters and at night having flashlights and molesting me under my covers. One of my brothers would violently thrust my head into his private area and make me perform oral sex on him. This is why I have trichotillomania. My mother knew all about this and did nothing. My sisters were violated to, but they will not talk to me about it. I confronted one of my brothers about this recently, and he never responded back to me. Before these memories, I loved my parents, but since they are both deceased, I hate them. I cannot be in a room with my brothers, as they sexually abused me. When I was talking to them, I now see why they kept asking me if I remember anything from my childhood. More memories came forward recently with one of my sister’s being pregnant with either my father or brother-in-laws baby, and my mother having an affair with the same brother-in-law. I talked to my niece, and she remembers my mother and her father in bed together. She was also sexually abused by a cousin. My whole family life as I believed to be is one built on lies, and I am hurt, disgusted and angry because no one was there to protect me. My own mother knew what was going on and did nothing. My family is so messed up, but with each memory, the pieces of the puzzle are being built to make a picture of this evil and horrendous family that I wish I was never part of.

After spending about an hour here, I guess it’s my turn to write… I don’t know where to start. I feel as though I’ve only been alive for the last five years now, and even those years have not been a life because I have been stuck in bed with such severe chronic pain, I scream my lungs out every day from how badly it hurts. I have mostly the same symptoms as a condition called PGAD (Persistent Genital Arousal Disorder), however my symptoms do not stem from nerve damage, meds, or anything else that is known to cause PGAD. My symptoms are even exactly the same as PGAD.. for the last five years now, I’ve been suffering from this pain— it feels as though an invisible man is poking my cl!t 24/7. If it weren’t for God, I don’t think I’d still be here today. I often scream and cry, begging Him to take me home, but the truth is I am scared and I don’t want to die yet. I want to live. I mentioned I feel like I’ve only been alive for the last five years. Here’s why.. I am 18 now. Everything before the age 14 is either dark, blurry, and in third person, or completely blank and non existent. Everything before the age 11 is even more blank. I have just a couple memories from early childhood, but those are so dark, blurry and in third person. Any other pieces of my childhood that I have now, I’ve gotten from either pictures or working through therapy and also working on getting my memories back myself. Growing up, my father has 50/50 custody of me. He was emotionally and mentally abusive (extreme paranoid narcissist). I grew up feeling like I wasn’t just his daughter, I also had to play the role of best friend, therapist, and wife. I watched many women come and go from his life, but I was his one supply source he’d never lose. When I’d go to my mom’s on her custody days, I’d panic and cry because “daddy can’t be lonely, he’ll be sad! He needs me!” That was my childhood and really all I really associate childhood with. When I was 12 or 13, my father ended up moving out of the state, breaking the 50/50 custody agreement. He still begged me to fly out and visit him regularly though and I never wanted to. I always made excuses as to why. “I don’t want to fly alone on a plane.” So he’d fly to me and then fly back with me. “I don’t like flying.” So one time, he drove all the way across states to pick me up. “It just makes me really anxious.” He’s emotionally manipulate me and gaslight me until I gave in and visited him. I ran out of excuses. I’d go when he’d tell me. Then finally… A couple months before I turned 14, I flew out to visit him. A couple days after I got there, we drove from there out a couple states to visit my grandparents on his side. I hadn’t been there in maybe 4 years prior?.. I was very happy to see my family there as it had been so long. But then the second night of us staying at my grandparents, I had a nightmare that I was r*ped. It wasn’t even a graphic a dream and from an outside perspective, it probably wouldn’t even look like r*pe. But somehow, even having little to no understanding of sex or r*pe and no interest in the thought of sex prior to this nightmare, I woke up and just knew “I was r*ped in that dream.” Again, I didn’t even understand that concept prior to that dream. And somehow after having that dream, I completely understood what r*pe was, what it looked like, what it felt like, what grooming and molestation looked like— everything. There was this voice within me SCREAMING “this happened to me in real life” and I could not ignore it. For the next year, I became completely obsessed with the idea of— not sex— but r*pe. Nightmares of r*pe became regular. Extremely intense daydreams of r*pe took over my life. I LIVED in my head. On top of all this, my PGAD symptoms appeared around puberty and this trip I had with my father and grandparents was within the same half a year as my first menstrual cycle. As months went on, my physical pain symptoms worsened. I went on to have exams upon exams, MRIs, an x-ray, a sonogram— the doctors could find nothing. But I had and still have all these signs and symptoms of sexual abuse. Again, I hardly have any memory of anything up until the age 14– really up until that trip and I had that nightmare. Like I said, I feel like I’ve only been alive since then. Like that nightmare and that trip “put away” past me and “woke up” the me that has been alive since! I feel like a version of me lived and died at the age 6, then a new me from then lived and died at maybe 11. Then a new me lived from 11 to right before I turned 14 and she died with that trip and nightmare. I’ve been here ever since, and I know that I know I was sexually abused at some point, I just don’t have the memory. I have been working so hard on trying to reconnect with these “versions of me” that have “died off” so that I can work my way to remembering my life, or at least what happened. I cut off my relationship with my father back in January by the way.. whether he sexually abused me or not, he was still emotionally and mentally abusive. I have so many random “puzzle pieces” that once correctly sorted can tell me exactly what happened, but there are a few problems… One, I have no idea where these pieces belong. Some of them don’t even look or feel like they belong in the same puzzle! What if there are multiple puzzles (multiple sexual abuse events)?? How do I know?? Because some pieces start to click together and tell me it happened with my father… Then some pieces tell me it happened with an adult male friend of his he invited over a couple times that I have zero memory of… Then some other pieces tell me it was BOTH of them… And then some other pieces tell me the county fair is involved.. some tell me there were multiple YOUNG men… and then finally, there’s this handful of pieces that I cannot allow myself to believe are real, because when pieces together, they create this picture that I was a victim in child sex trafficking, alongside at least one another kid, and I can’t believe for a SECOND that that is even possible!!! My parents had 50/50 custody, plus, I went to elementary school up until 4th grade. SOMEONE had to have seen SOMETHING. And I know without a doubt my mom and family would have spoken up if they noticed anything off. They were always aware of the emotional/mental aspect, and did what they could for me through that. But if these scattered puzzle pieces I have put together this incredibly insane scenario… how would no one have noticed?? The second side to this all is that growing up, my father gaslit me insanely. That’s my father’s first language. And now.. I gaslight myself. I really, really can’t trust myself. I’m so very visually creative; what if my nightmares mean nothing? Sure, I had no idea of sex or r*pe, but I’m creative! My mind could’ve made it up! Or… what if I just LIKE the idea of being a victim? What if I was just born with a wicked and disgusting desire to be victimized and dominated? I felt these feelings literally all my life— I have one memory from when I was only 4 and in preschool. It was Halloween and I was dressed as a kitten. The other kids and I were playing a game where they tried to catch me to make me into their “stew.” I remember this from third person.. I wanted to just go limp and let them grab me and drag me away like a ragdoll; like I was just a lifeless object. I wanted them to drag me and control me and scare me and hurt me. What kind of 4 year old thinks or feels that way???? Was I just born a total psychopath?? Or was I just born a sl*t??? I’ve never been sexually active. I believe sex should be saved for marriage. But if it weren’t for my family (moms side) and God being so faithful in my life, I fear I would’ve put myself in a dangerous and vulnerable situation a long time ago now.. Because I often feel like I’m only good for sex. I feel like a stray dog without its master, and now I’m worthless and I’m nothing. I’m nothing without my master. The painful PGAD-type symptoms I experience chronically feel like they were created in me intentionally. It feels like at some point in a life I don’t remember, a man groomed and molested me in such a way that my little body would be stimulated in ways it was too early for, and then he’d touch me to relieve the painful sensations he intentionally stimulated, but then he’d pull back, leaving my little body feeling this pain that was awoken and then never fully relieved. And then he’d do it again, but then provide a little less relief each time before pulling away. Until finally, he’s created this torment with my body— this addiction. He made it so that my body would NEED him to touch it in order to be relieved of the pain he first created. I don’t know why I think I know that. That didn’t come from any outside source. I never read anything like that, I never heard of anything like that— That all came from this voice inside me that just knows. I know that I know, yet I still don’t trust myself or fully believe myself. Anyway.. I think that whenever I repressed the memory of the abuse or trauma (If this abuse really DID occur), the monster of symptoms or “addiction” he created in my body must’ve gotten repressed too. And I think that once I hit puberty, those symptoms “unpaused” and started up again. Only now, whoever initially did it to me is no longer here to relive the pain or feed the monster he created. The pain gets so bad, I hate it but this part of me inside cries and begs that sexual abuse will happen “again” (if it ever happened at all) so that I’ll be relieved of this. No doctor or therapist has been able to reverse yet, and I think progress isn’t being made because I still can’t trust or believe myself that any sexual abuse happened to begin with. Now I’m stuck with this pain literally 24/67, at all times it feels like I’m being poked in the cl!t and I scream and I cry and I’m just so scared that I’ll never get to live again. I’m so scared that I’ll be stuck like this for the rest of my life. I had dreams and desires. I wanted to get married and have a godly marriage and be a wife, homemaker, and mother. But I’m terrified!! I can’t even look men in the eyes. Even the guy I loved and wanted to have a future with. I was petrified in his presence and fear that men who show any interest in me only see me as an object, toy, or plaything. I beat myself up because I live in my head replaying these scenarios of “what if this happened and I was r*ped” or “imagine one day I get kidnapped and trafficked.” I beat myself up and say “you’re sick and disgusting and wicked!! You weren’t sexually abused, you just wish you were because you have r*pe fantasies!!” But on the other hand, I KNOW that’s not true because I am frankly TERRIFIED at the idea of men even having any interest in me. They’re not r*pe fantasies— that is the LAST thing I want!! I’m so afraid! I can’t even look men in the eyes!! But then how come I can’t stop imagining being r*ped over and over and over as though I like it and want it to happen? And why when I was 4 did I like it when the other preschool kids dragged me in that game and I went limp like a ragdoll? And why did I used to vividly imagine wolves grabbing my limbs, ripping them off my body, and eating me alive until it made my privates physically hurt when I was little? Why why why am I dealing with any of this?? And the biggest why— WHY can’t I just REMEMBER whatever maybe happened if I WANT to remember? I’ve been trying so hard to remember… I mean, again… after pushing and working so hard, I have these scattered pieces, but they’re either too blurry or too out of the realm of possibilities. There’s no way I was trafficked! There’s no way there was more than one man! There’s no way there was another little kid that suffered alongside me at one point! There’s no way that little boy also died during that time! There is just NO WAY. I’m losing my mind!! And I hate myself. I hate myself that I’m so blind and I hate myself for not believing myself and I hate myself for the “r*pe fantasies” and I hate myself for being afraid of men, especially those who care about me, and I hate myself for ever opening this can of worms to begin with. When I woke up from that nightmare 5 years ago, I should’ve repressed that too….. Wow. I must be really messed up.. how can I say I should’ve “repressed that too” when I’ve declared a million times in the last year alone that “all I want is to remember/know what happened to me.” I’m shattered and scattered; divided even within my own self. I’ve been to 6 therapists (including trauma therapists) in these last 5 years and they all end up saying “you need more help then what I can provide” and then pass me around like it’s a game of hot potato and I am the potato. I don’t know where to go from here, honestly. I’ve spent these last few years so determined to figure out the truth and never give up… but I’ve now reached the point that I wish I could go back and somehow either not have had that nightmare, not have gone on that trip, or just forgotten that nightmare… but something tells me that it would’ve come out one way or another. If not that trip; if not that nightmare, it still would’ve reached me somehow. Not to mention, the PGAD-type symptoms. I guess this was bound to happen. I was bound to end up here, stuck in bed screaming in pain, my desires for my future crushed. If what happened, happened.. and he did it.. whoever “he is,” whether it was my father, his friend, a group of teens, or all of them separate or combined… He broke me. They all broke me. They ripped me open and gutted me and tore me apart. Then I put on some nice clothes and a mask and I covered it all up. It worked for a few years. I survived. And then suddenly, that cover up started to fall apart. Not enough though. I don’t know how, but somehow I’ve managed to cling on to whatever is left of my mask and cover up claiming “I want the truth out!!” but still withholding it somehow. I don’t know how. I really do want to remember. Why can’t I? What am I doing wrong, what’s stopping me from remembering? Is it because I won’t believe or trust myself? How can I believe something that has no proof or that I have no memory of? What if my signs and symptoms are just symptoms of my OCD or Autism or what if I really was just born a sick little sl*t with a wicked and sick love for r*pe fantasies? (I wrote a part 2)

So when I was 8..my parents found that my backpack was filthy. I was in the shower at the time. When i stepped out they got super angry and started slapping me. I didn’t have anything on. They yelled that i didn’t need clothes to go outside and pushed me outside naked. My mom kept slapping my ass and telling me she’d “beat the hell out of me” and while i don’t think anyone saw me I felt sexualized.

Afterwards my mental health significantly declined for a child. I began doing “suicide experiments”, seeing how i could kill myself.

Another time when i was around 7, my babysitter took nudes of me and my 5 year old sister, saying we looked cute. It seemed suspicious that she thought we looked cute only when we had absolutely nothing on but i thought she knew best. She also brought in another woman with her and they both kept staring at our bodies and laughing.

I’m not sure if this even counts as SA. It feels totally invalid.

I’m 15 now and while i have gotten slightly better there have been some times when i have sudden nightmares and flashbacks to it. It makes me want to cry.

Does this even count as SA?

I struggle with knowing if some experiences are abuse or not. I had a very sexual behavior when i was a child and got very promiscuous as a teenager. Now, I dissociate when having sex with my husband.

The experiences that I remember the most while growing up have to do with my mother. She use to talk a lot about sex with us. We were six years old and she thought it was a good idea to give us a sexual education talk. After she finished reading the “kids book” she began telling us the nasty details she did with our dad. How “delicious” it was to have vago al contractions (she used that phrase). When I grew up a bit more, I was maybe 8, I started exploring my body, one day she caught me in the act and smelled my hands asking me if I was touching myself. I told her no, and she insisted I was because my hands smelled as vagina. I asked how she knew and then answered something like: believe me, I do. Years later, I was 12 maybe, we were watching tv and she told me she wanted to watch a sex movie, I asked her why? And she made this cheeky face and answered: idk. At that same age she let me read her romantic novels full of soft p*rn. She even let me read a story regarding pedophile. She used to make this super super loud noises when she had sex with my dad. She knew those would wake us up, even my dad told her to shut up and she wouldn’t. I saw them having sex a couple of time when I was 9.
Are those experiences sexual abuse or am I exaggerating?

Alot of this seems very accurate to my life, I think I have trust and intimacy issues as I have purposely sabotaged a lot of relationships before they became serious, and yet I hate myself for it. I wasn’t necessarily abused as a child but I did have a very early sexual encounter with someone my age at the time – around 8 or 9 years old. I was staying over a friend’s house for a sleepover where we watched a softcore porn film, I got up to go to the toilet and when I came back he was lying on his bed naked waiting for me. I freaked out and ran away to hide in the bathroom. I demanded for his parents to call mine to come and take me home. Me and him never spoke about this again, and he has since come out as gay and is dating a much older man. I’m not gay, but possibly bisexual – which may be a product of this? Could this count as sexual abuse or be a traumatic experience in some way? I recently met a girl and gave cut it off when becoming serious, I don’t know why.

I’m 29. I read a story about sexual abuse recently (which is something I’ve read before, so I don’t understand why this time’s different…) and it affected me in a strange way. I’m beginning to comprehend that there might have been more to something that my mother said (in passing) happened to me when I was under 1 years old, than I initially thought… It would explain a lot, but I was so young that I don’t remember anything. I can’t stop thinking about it now. I’m also worried that I’m convincing myself that something happened when it didn’t. I will mention it to my psychiatrist, but what if she agrees with that idea? I don’t want to talk to my family about this. How do I deal with this question without an answer?

Ok my niece she was 12 years old and she told me that one night her stepdad layed in the sam bed with her because her mom was in jail and she had on shorts and he started pulling them to the side and pulled out his penis and started humping her between her but cheeks he didn’t penetrate her and that he had well you know cam all over her she was scared so she didnt know what to do we told her mom but she didnt listen idk what to do

I lived with my grandparents as I was growing up and various aunties / uncles, one uncle alaways lived at home. I was abused by this uncle from 8 to about 14 / 15. full sex penatration, oral, mental abuse threatening. He had also abused my mother years before. I had to witness my step father forcing my mother to show me and my cousin how she gave him oral sex. This stepfather also also attempted sex with me several times. My grandfather showed me his penis once but didnt do anything else. My nan used to drop me off at a mans house, I have a memory of abuse from him, but its vauge. I can remember being promiscious and had boys gather around when I was very young and I lifted my dress etc to show my vagina and later I would show my boobs.
I have been physically, mentally abused by boyfriends and physically, mentally, sexually abused by my ex husband.
5 yrs ago my son died by suicide and the night before he told me about being abused by his biological father, there were signs before, I went to the police in 1998 but nothing was done, then when my son died I was told things should have been done in 98 when I gave them documents, but said we couldnt do anything now as my son died.

I cant afford any therapy and I hurt like hell.

I was sexually abused at the age of ten. I have healed. I just recently remarried and my wife’s 16 year old daughter was sexually abused and molested in two different occasions. The most recent was about a year ago. I have a good relationship with my stepdaughter and have been there for her during this traumatic time. Her predator was a family friend and has been sentenced to 15 years. Since then her behavior towards me is on the borderline of inappropriate and her other family members noticed odd behavior. We will set boundaries and she is seeing a therapist. We will speak to her therapist but I wanted to know if this is normal behavior, because it’s as if she has replaced her predator with me. It’s just a very uncomfortable position to be in. Thank you in advance.
Walter

I was sexually abused when i was 13 and it was on my First Holy Communion day! I was in the middle of my puberty and bedwetting because of it and wore cloth diapers and plastic pants to bed every night.For our First Holy Communion,all of us girls had to wear a poofy,knee length,short sleeve communion dress and veil with the lace anklets and white maryjane shoes and under our dresses a white tee shirt with a cloth diaper and plastic pants.Mom put my bedwetting diapers and a pair of my white plastic pants on me with the tee shirt as my top.After my party was over that sunday after noon,my parents took my relatives to catch their flight back home,so i was home alone.A male cousin stopped by to give me a card and saw me in my outfit and got aroused!He hugged me,then put his hand up under my dress and felt my diapers and plastic pants and got even more aroused! The next thing i knew i was on my knees giving him oral sex! He told me it is what girls are supposed to do to make men happy! I was so ashamed of my self and never told my parents about it!

I have recently started to feel like i have to remember something I forgot from when i was a child. When i was younger (between the age of 3 to the age of 10) i used to act really “sensual”, have fantasies about older kids/men having sex with me (most of the time with violence) and when i was 3/4 i used to pee on a mattress while thinking somebody wanted me to do it because it was “enjoyable” to them. As a child, i was always angry with my father and after he died (while deleting his texts) i saw he texted me “Wanna bath together?”. It was through telegram, so maybe he didn’t know it was me and i don’t think it was my father the one who did it, but we didn’t get along and he was pretty abusive, so I’m not sure.
I never thought this was weird until a few months ago where i started to have the feeling that i was r4ped as a child. I don’t know if my mind it’s deceiving me or if it’s there really a possibility that i was sexually abused as a child. I don’t have the courage to share this with my therapist because maybe i wasn’t really abused…

I wasn’t spanked much as a child, but I’m a spankophile. I have recurring images of me as a 2-3 year old being whipped by a babysitter. She’d strip me naked, tie me down with my legs spread apart, then get the whip. I vividly remember her whipping my bare penis. The pain was horrible, and she’d tell me not to tell anyone. Could this be a false memory, or could it be true?

My entire life I had this distant memory of me being touched in a way no child should be touched.Ive convinced myself that im just making it up but why would a child make up stories of how she was SA?.There were things I knew when I was 6 , 7 that I shouldn’t have known which makes me question if what I’m remembering was true.Its strange because when I was a kid I used to think that I was the bad person and I SA someone idk why I used to think that I was to young ig it was a way of coping.im 17 now and still confused on if I was SA or not I get pretty uncomfortable around guys alone especially when I was kid.Like when my mom was sleeping and my brother was the only one awake I would be very scared.