Wow, i think he abused me. I cant believe im just falling. Ive been doing trauma therapy for a while and we discussed abuse, violence, but it didn’t feel real. It felt like i was robbing the words “sexual abuse” and put it on my story while i still felt the line between what happened to me was very thin or invisible between “normal” and “abuse”.
I think im just realizing this because, i couldnt understand how my perpetrator could find any sexual pleasure on careesing my body, specifically because i didnt feel any pain and the confusion carried till today because i couldn’t distinguish if it was normal or wrong. Specially because i didnt see him aroused, he didn’t have a boner, he was just touching me while asking me questions and that distracted me from what was happening (multiple times). I knew touching a private area was wrong, but it was so casual, caressing, that it didn’t feel abusive.
But, now im thinking it this way, what if he didn’t feel sexually attracted to me or my body, but instead to the powerness and control he had over me as a kid? Its an horrible mindset but im trying to understand, i dont think i ever will understand thought. But i find some kind of peace if i can finally put a name to what was done to me and believe it, and not feel like im robbing it from someone else.
This kind of situations were done to me not only by him but by my mom too, and its so confusing. Because i am not sure if any of them felt any sexual gratification of what they done to me, but they ignored my pain, my pudor as a child, they ignored when i cried and scream, they put pain on my body, they humiliated me, they sexualized me when i didn’t wanted to and when i couldn’t consent to it, i couldn’t scape, i couldn’t say no. They hurt me and my sexuality was involved. I think that’s sexual abuse, it is not clear and i cant fully understand it and i still doubt, but i wish someday i can be sure and believe myself instead of doubting myself and what was done to me. I’ve had tons of consequences that multiple professionals told me were normal in child sexual abuse cases, i couldn’t understand why i didn’t remember, i think i do remember, i just still cant understand it. Its still hard.
Ive read a hundred times online and on therapy that a big part of child sexual abuse is confusion, and that survivors can take years to realize what happened to them was abuse. I thought that because i am already definitely old enough to know what sex is; then i would have already noticed that that one touch was wrong, if it EVEN was wrong.
But it’s much more complex than that. Its confusing because the situation was dressed as something else, he was supposedly healing me when i was sick, as my doctor (and my step-parent), he was asking me questions about my health while he put his hands under my clothes. Thats what made it confusing, because it was care and it was normal, and my mom let him, and at the time it didn’t feel wrong, but then, as i got a lot more older and started healing other things on therapy, i feel touching someone else’s private area is not okay or normal, but again, because there was no pain or hurt, and he didn’t look aroused, it didn’t feel bad enough to call it abuse. At the very least i could call it weird, or something i wouldn’t ever do personally.
I don’t think any conscuences of sexual abuse came out of this situation, at least i guess i was desensitized to the fact adults could ignore my consent about my body. But there were other situations were pain was involved, pain in my private areas, and it was again dressed as “care” or higiene if so. I feel those situations had more last and effect on the trauma, because my pain didn’t matter and my consent was clearly not respected. I am just falling now that voyeur of my body to other adults is also child sexual abuse, because i didn’t want to be seen that way, i explicitly told it and expressed it, and they didn’t care. I feel those situations were more emotionally traumatic than the “caresses”, but im not fully sure.
I know i have trauma from many sources in my life, but im trying to figure out where the sexual part comes from, i am sure i wasn’t ever violently assaulted, but theres a lot of situations during my childhood and teens that felt between the limit of sexual abuse and normal and i still cant understand if thats what affected me so much or if theres something else im not remembering.
To all this i wanna add, am i overreacting? Is this really abuse or am i being influenced by social media? Why do i feel so hurt?