I’m new to this forum and I’ve written this exact same story three times because I was logged out or accidentally refreshed the page it away. So here is the final, polished draft of my story.
I’m posting it here because I feel the need to talk about something I can’t seem to talk about with people I know in real life. I recently started to suspect I’ve endured sexual abuse as a child.
It started a about a month ago. I had broken up with my ex-boyfriend for about a year, and noticed I missed being close and intimate to someone, so I decided to start dating. I met up with a guy I met on Tinder and we had a chat and some tea. Even though I was feeling very anxious, I decided to push myself because I had already missed out on many potentially pleasant experiences because of this anxiety. We started kissing and eventually moved on to his bed, but the anxiety became so much I moved into a dissociative state. I said it happened to me more often, and that it had nothing to do with him. He was very considerate and nice about it, but sadly still felt like it was his fault.
I thought I had moved on from this response to sex, I had been together with my ex-boyfriend for 4 years and I had slowly grown comfortable with being intimate with him. The first times we shared a bed I slept, stuck to the wall, with all my clothes on, so I thought that because we were eventually able to have sex, I had grown out of this fear of intimacy. However, my experience with the guy from Tinder (who I really like) showed me otherwise. I started doing research to the causes of anxiety and dissociation during sex and intimacy and I encountered many websites that associated this with childhood sexual abuse. This initially made me angry, because I couldn’t remember any such things and didn’t want them to plant a seed in my head. But they did, and I started to make connections.
First of all I have very few memories of my childhood. What I do remember was always feeling sick, sad and a bit disconnected from other children. I remember having a nightmare of fighting off, and *mod edit*. Other than that I had recurrent nightmares of being swallowed by monsters and machines while unable to run, unable to fight and unable to scream. Another thing was that my brother (C), four years older than me, used to beat me up for things I didn’t do. I vaguely remember a very unpleasant night in which I had to share a bed with him because my parents had a bad fight and my father wanted to sleep in my bed. Yet I don’t remember any specificities of it. When I see C I still feel very uncomfortable, angry and sexual repulsion. He blames me for being mean to him but I just can not help it. Last year I had a nightmare in which he raped me and last summer my oldest brother told me that C used to frequently hold me down and tickle my private parts. I do not remember this.
I also want to mention that three years ago, C told us that he suspected he had been abused by our grandfather.
I don’t know if I should, and dare to ask my oldest brother for more details about these events. Is it useful to have this information, or will it just make me feel worse? I’m scared to talk about this with my therapist (even though he is a certified sex therapist) because I don’t want to seem like I’m making up trauma to justify my suffering of today, and it already makes me extremely uncomfortable even thinking about it.
I would like to hear some advice on what to do next, or if any of you have experienced something similar. I really hope I can one day engage in intimacy without first having to tear down the enormous wall my guard has built around me.