Introduction
I want to talk about the sexual abuse I suffered as a young boy. There’s a lot to say, so this might end up being longer than I initially planned. It’s difficult for me to discuss, but I believe it’s important to talk about for many reasons. Most importantly, we don’t talk enough about sexual abuse happening to boys.
The fact that we keep it secret allows it to continue. We have this stereotypical image of a victim of sexual abuse – maybe a teenage girl with a stepfather. But the reality is that young boys get sexually abused by both men and women. The last statistic I checked was around one in six boys in America suffer this kind of abuse. I was one of them.
What I Remember
I know I was sexually abused. The abuse was severe and occurred over a long period of time with multiple instances. I’m fairly certain it involved actual intercourse of some type, and either physical torture or the threat of it. I believe it actually involved some physical torture, though I don’t fully understand why my abuser thought that was necessary – whether keeping me terrified was part of how they kept it secret, or if it was some deviant form of sexual gratification.
I know it happened when I was very young, likely between the ages of four and eight. I don’t think it continued much past that – I don’t remember anything happening when I was a teenager, so I think it was all pre-teen years. I know my abuser was a woman, and I know she wasn’t a member of my immediate family.
That’s about all I know. I don’t know her name. I can’t picture her face. I just know she really hurt me – physically and emotionally. She hurt me a lot, over and over again. But I don’t know who she is.
Repressed Memories
Let me explain what repressed memories are. A repressed memory is something that happened to you, typically in childhood, that your conscious mind buries in your subconscious. You’re not aware that it happened.
I don’t know if this is true for everyone with repressed memories, but I remember almost nothing of my childhood before my teen years. I can count on one hand, maybe half a dozen very short memories from when I was a child. Everything that happened to me before I was a teenager is basically blank. Based on research I’ve done, I believe this blank slate is part of the repressed memories – my conscious brain erased a huge part of my life.
I don’t remember the details of my abuse. Most of what I remember is emotion. I remember severe physical pain and severe emotional pain. More than anything, I remember absolute terror of that person and what she did to me. It’s a kind of fear I cannot describe in words – debilitating, heart-stopping terror.
Emotional Flashbacks
I experience what I call emotional flashbacks. I have triggers – a smell, a sound, a place, or seeing another woman’s hairstyle, type of shoes, body language, or gestures. When triggered, I basically go back to being a small boy. I experience the intense emotions of a four or five or six-year-old. I don’t become completely detached from the current moment, but reality becomes shrouded in a dense fog.
These flashbacks vary in intensity. The milder ones, I can get through them. The longer ones can be intense. During a bad flashback, I experience seizures – psychosomatic seizures I can’t control. I get nauseous, experience pain and cramping in my legs, and curl up into a ball. While experiencing these physical symptoms, I’m also feeling those intense emotions – pain, emotional pain, physical pain, and terror. Often, I’ll be begging her to stop touching me, to stop hurting me.
I try not to let other people see this, not even my wife, though she handles it well.
Coming to Terms
I had my first flashback in my early thirties. For the first 30 years of my life, I didn’t understand that I had been sexually abused. I had no clue. When the flashbacks started, I didn’t even understand what they were. As they continued, I began to understand more.
I was in denial at first – I think that’s probably normal, if any part of this is normal. My wife helped me through it, telling me, “Somebody hurt you. Somebody hurt you really bad.” I think that helped me come to grips with understanding it.
I don’t have flashbacks as much as I did in the beginning. I’m a little better at controlling them now, to the extent they can be controlled. There are still a couple of places I can no longer go – I suspect I saw my abuser in those places, or they remind me of places where I saw her.
For a long time, I thought I was crazy. I thought nothing happened to me, that my brain was making it up. I know now that’s not true, but for a while, I thought I was just losing my mind.
The Challenges of Not Remembering
Not remembering everything makes me angry. I feel like my abuser got away with it. Maybe she hurt other people after me, and I wish I could have remembered who she was because I could have stopped her.
I used to get really angry. I’ve come to peace with it more now. I understand that burying the memories was just a survival mechanism, based on some research I’ve done. But I wish I remembered who she was because I want to confront her and stop her. I don’t get to do that because my own mind has hidden her identity.
Not remembering means I don’t get to ask her the questions I want answers to. If I had a chance to talk to her, I think the most important thing I’d want to know is why she chose me. Why didn’t she choose some other boy? Was it because I was shy and quiet? Because she thought I would keep it a secret? Because she thought she could scare me?
I would ask her if she understood, when she was hurting me, what it was going to do to me for the rest of my life. Part of me wants to ask that question because I feel like there’s no way she could have known – because if she had known, she would have stopped. Was that few hours or days total time she got to exercise power over me and have that sexual gratification worth the damage she did to me?
Forgiveness Without a Face
Perhaps the hardest part is that not remembering who this woman was has denied me the ability to fully forgive her. I think I have forgiven her to the extent that I can, and that took a long time. I don’t want revenge. I don’t want her to hurt or suffer.
Part of that is because I understand she was probably also a victim of sexual abuse at some time, because that’s the pattern. In a strange way, it allows me to empathize with her. I also think being able to forgive her is a beautiful way to reflect God’s love and mercy, and that’s something I want to be able to do.
To the extent that I’m able, I hope that I’ve forgiven her. I hope that if I remember who she is and get to talk to her, I’m able to tell her that I understand she was also hurting, and I forgive her for what she did.
But part of not remembering means I don’t get to fully forgive her. How do you fully forgive a ghost? She’s a ghost that hurt me a huge amount, but she’s still a ghost. Not being able to remember has denied me the opportunity to fully forgive, and I would pay a high price to remember.
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve tried to tell myself that remembering her doesn’t matter and isn’t important, but deep inside, a part of me just wants to know who she is. I might never know, and I have to come to peace with that. But it’s hard.
The Impact on My Life
It’s sometimes hard for me to separate my depression from the consequences of my sexual abuse. My wires got crossed up, without a doubt. I deal with some demons – deeply entrenched demons – that I think are rooted in the sexual abuse I suffered. Fighting with those demons takes a toll on me. It makes me tired.
Thankfully, I’ve had a pretty normal, healthy relationship with my wife, which I’m grateful for. Some of that is because I didn’t remember a lot during the first 10 years we were married. It hasn’t done a huge amount of damage to my marriage, though my wife has seen some things I wish she wouldn’t have seen.
The abuse makes me question my fitness as a man, though I know it shouldn’t. I know I was only a boy, but part of me wonders why I didn’t stop it, why I wasn’t strong enough. Part of me wishes she could see me now as a grown man. I have a feeling I wouldn’t be as easy to scare or physically dominate.
I wonder what she did that made me so terrified, so afraid. It makes me feel like a coward sometimes. I deal with that guilt – guilt for not stopping it, and guilt for being a coward.
I think she probably changed my relationship with women forever. I was ready for an adult relationship with a woman way too young, and I’m sure that had a lot to do with being sexually abused by a woman who was much older than me. It led to some early heartache for me because I was trying to find adult relationships when I was too young, and when the girls my age were too young.
Breaking the Cycle
I’m so happy that my marriage has turned out as well as it has, despite the abuse I suffered. I’m thankful that I broke the cycle – I haven’t abused anybody, and I tell myself I would take my own life before I allowed myself to do to another person what was done to me. I’m very proud of breaking that cycle. It’s a hard cycle to break, which is why it continues, but I’ve been able to do it.
I try to deal with my abuse in a healthy way, even though there’s a lot of emotional damage and I don’t remember everything. I think I’ve coped fairly well.
What I Want You to Remember
If you’re reading this, what do I want you to remember? If there’s one thing you take away, I hope you remember that you have to protect your little boys. The little boys that you love need to be protected. There are women predators out there who will do horrible things to your little boy, and I don’t think we always realize that. There are women just as evil as the men who sexually abuse children. They’re selfish and cruel.
You have to guard your boys and keep them safe from people like that. Part of me wonders why I wasn’t worth enough to keep safe. I don’t understand why there wasn’t anybody in my life who loved me enough to keep me safe from her. I just don’t understand why they let her hurt me so badly for so long.
So if you remember one thing from my story, remember that you have to protect the boys that you love and keep them safe. Whoever abused me had the complete trust of my parents. It was someone they trusted. So you have to be careful who you trust as a parent.
I think there were some obvious signs that I’d been abused that my family ignored. So don’t do that. If you have a boy or young man that you love who’s been abused, you need to help him understand what happened and start the healing process so he can get through it.
Don’t forget. One in six. A boy that has been abused – one in six. Don’t ever forget that. I was one in six.
This article is part of a series on my struggle with depression as a man in America. You can find the other articles on the series home page for “One Mountain Man’s Struggle With Depression”. This article is also available as an audio recording on YouTube.
Photo Credit: Ravi Pinisettie On Unsplash