[Trigger Warning] Was I molested?

[Milarepa]

**This whole post promises to be potentially triggery for CSA survivors, particularly those who don't have any specific memories of the events.**

I'm super preoccupied with some of this stuff today and trying to make sense of it.

When I was two years old, I started bleeding rectally for no discernable reason. My parents took me to doctors who (for a lot of complicated reasons I won't go into here) I now feel were incompetent and may have missed signs of CSA. They diagnosed it as a milk allergy.

I also have a lot of memories of weird, creepy, invasive behaviors from my father. He used to grab me and kiss on me, even when I didn't want it and actively squirmed away. I still feel nauseated when I remember wiping his disgusting spit off of my face; an act that he took with great offense.

I remember looking at his spit on the lip of his beer bottle and feeling similar revulsion. To this day, the sight of a bottle with just a little bit of water left in it, or obvious spittle on the rim makes me feel triggered.

He also felt perfectly entitled to barge into my room without knocking, even if I was changing, masturbating (I did / do a lot of that, and it didn't stop between childhood and adolescence), or sleeping.

Furthermore, I remember feeling that it was my responsibility to give my dad some kinds of physical pleasure. I used to play with his hair while we watched television in a way that now (as an adult) I recognize is the way that lovers play with one another's hair. It was all very weird. 

There were also clear emotionally incesctuous boundary violations too numerous and complex to detail.

I am frequently triggered during sex with my husband (less so with my boyfriend*). My husband has just a touch of Asperger's and sometimes does things that are insensitive when we're in bed together without thinking and it really makes me feel objectified and triggered. My boyfriend is also kind of Aspie (I like nerds), but he's been married for a long time and has a young daughter, so I think he's done a lot more emotional work on himself and is more attuned to me.

Still, I have a hard time believing that my father is a child molester. My much younger half-sister (in her teens) shows absolutely no evidence of having been sexually traumatized in any way. Neither does my half-brother (also a teen).

I just don't know what to make of all of the confusing memories and bits of feeling. My therapist thinks that I, in my abused child's attunement to his moods, probably picked up on his unconscious sexual desires for me, and that nothing physical happened, but that leaves me with a quandary about what it means in terms of his accountability vs. what he didn't do out of some decency.

Sorry this post is so rambly, I don't have a lot of clarity around this stuff. 

* We're poly. All of the non-monogamy is consensual, on the up-and-up, and approved by all parties involved.

[Rain]

I do not know.  Another T may know.   I would think it would be well worth looking into further as you can.

Have you read about "emotional incest"?    Think "sexual abuse without the sex"  ...and you may have blocked memories.

I'm sad with what you have, and are going through.   

[Milarepa]

Have you read about "emotional incest"?    Think "sexual abuse without the sex"  ...and you may have blocked memories.

I'm sad with what you have, and are going through.   

Thanks! I have read about it and I definitely think that my family was enmeshed and emotionally incestuous at the very least.

Whether we remember, in detail, or just the overall emotional 'coloring' of it all, the effect is still the same. Incest is a hard and mostly taboo topic for a lot of people. Nothing that is really willingly talked about unless under duress. To reconcile incestuous behavior with supposedly close and loving family members is one of the toughest roads out there.

My own experience was filled with incest and as a result of how harmful it was and the long term consequences of believing and trusting my own perceptions, I would probably feel uncomfortable with a therapist who was not totally validating my feelings and experience. But that's just me.

I hear the hurt and I hope that someone, somewhere is able to help. 

I kind of want to * slap your parents right now. I'm so sorry that you went through this and now you're left cleaning up the mess.

I hear what you say about reconciling (potential) incest with supposedly close & loving family members. It's so hard for me to imagine my dad being a child molester; and yet all the feelings are there. 

As for my therapist, she first asked me what my instincts were telling me, and I told her just that: it's really hard to imagine my dad as a child molester. That's when she came up with what I call her "Mila, you're psychic" theory of my reading his mind. I think that if I went to her and said, "I rescind my previous statement," she'd believe me in a heartbeat. She's just following my lead.

I went through emotional incest and that is a hard enough road.   Not the even harder road that you and Milarepa went through.

Let's not do the abuse Olympics. Remember what Saint Pete Walker of the Best. CPTSD Book. Ever. says: emotional abuse and abandonment is at the core of what we *all* went through. Your emotional incest is just as bad as my whatever the * it was and BeHea1thy's specific incest experiences. At the core is that our parents were incapable of giving us healthy, nurturing love.