My Story - Short Form

Hi there. I am a 60 year old male from a family with multi generational sexual abuse, to the best of my knowledge all male on male.

My first knowledge this was a problem was the day 21 years ago when the police came to my door and arrested me for aggravated sexual assault of a minor, namely my 12 year old stepson. I was flabbergasted - I'd done nothing to him to hurt him, injure him, or anything that hadn't been done to me by my dad - and I turned out fine - why was this??

Over the course of nearly 10 years in treatment following this day, involving resolving both my abuse of my stepson and my being a victim at the same time, a whole lot of information, revelations (many very painful), family history (most of it not pretty) and a lot of soul digging - not searching, real digging - took place.

The basic story is pretty simple, and all too unfortunately as I heard in my treatment groups, very common.

I was the next to last generation in our family to be abused by my male parent. To my great regret and sadness, I passed it along to my stepson just as it had been passed to me - and to my father from his, and so on and so on how far back I cannot know.

What my father did to me I never considered abusive or wrong. Quite the contrary. He was a traveling salesman, and whenever he came home, he always would spend 'special' time with me - when I was little, it was bringing me new underwear, then having me try them on, and him 'checking the fit' - we also took baths and showers together, slept together, and all the time he was telling me this was 'just for us' - our 'man time' - and what we did was 'man secrets'. That was fine - what he was doing (I won't go into great detail, it's probably not needed) all felt really good, and we were together - just the two of us.

In reality, I was being fondled, ***********, having oral sex performed on me, and fondling and ************ him, from as far back as I can remember (which was about age 4) until I got into early high school, was pretty well through puberty, and started wanting to 'take care of those things myself' without his doing it for me.

I began to fully realize what really took place when during group discussions I'd be talking about times when I felt safe and like he was going to leave me alone - and realized that every time we visited his parents home, my grandparents, I slept in his old room - and he would not go into that room for any reason whatsoever - I felt as safe as if I was in a bank vault.

I began to fully realize what dad may have gone through when, one night at the family cabin on vacation, I awoke to find my grandfather standing by my bed, I was rolled face down sound asleep, and what awoke me was his hand rubbing my butt through my underwear. As soon as I awoke and turned over to ask 'grandpa, what are you doing?' he just said 'making sure you're sleeping OK - the windows are open, and it's getting cool - I'll close them - then quickly leaving back to his room.

I began to fully realize what small, little things had taken place that desensitized me to appropriate and proper human boundaries when I realized that I never had any bathroom privacy - whenever I was in the bathroom, whether brushing my teeth, taking a bath, or using the toilet, dad would just walk in - if it was to use the toilet, he'd just do it right there in front of me - and the same was true at grandpa's house, and when we were at the cabin, it was like an all male frat house - everyone, including dad, uncle, cousins, wandering around in either briefs or nothing, the bathroom door never was closed - and I never developed boundaries whatsoever in that area.

While I had to work on my personal recovery from what occurred to me, when the true nature of what took place really settled in, the much much bigger burden was - I did this to another human being - one that trusted me completely, believed me without question, and did just as I had done 30+ years earlier - willingly did what his father asked of him.

My progress to recovery has been a very long one. I have come to grips with the fact that my overwhelming preference is gay. I have had the great fortune of finding a partner I have been with now over 15 years. I have come to grips with the fact that what was done to me was just one facet of the relationship I had with my dad - that there is also a large volume of good that I learned from him, and that good needs to be nurtured and kept alive while the bad is left behind.

I feel that the most fortunate thing in all this was that I was caught, we were able to get my stepson into proper treatment and care, and make sure that whatever he needed, he had to put what I did t him behind him. I get great feelings of hope when I see him with his wife and his sons - and know that they are (as of right now) not the next generation of victims. His wife knows everything about what occurred - so she can be properly vigilant.

I feel very fortunate that our natural son was too young at the time I was caught to be victimized. He escaped the family curse, and for that I will be forever grateful.

My heaviest regrets are that I cannot even begin to give back to my stepson the childhood I took from him. Nothing - nothing - can give back the childhood he should have had. Mine is now 50 years in the past, and I have made peace with that. Equally heavy regret and remorse are for my former wife, and my natural son. To my former wife, I totally betrayed and shattered the trust and faith she put in me to be a good father and husband. She does not trust as much now any person, and the wounds I have left may be healed over, but no such would this deep goes away. For my natural son, while I am so glad he escaped being directly abused, he did not escape the consequences of my actions - he grew up without the father he deserved.

Molestation is an evil, creeping, insidious thing - by the very way it is perpetrated most times, the actor is someone the child trusts, loves, and obeys without question. If the molestor - like my father and I - do not perform acts that are injurious or cause hurt, and instead do things that generate sexual responses that feel good, then there is a double betrayal. The act of molestation is in and of itself the first. The second is the molestor is using the child's body reflexes and responses to his advantage and against the child - using some new sensation that feels really really good to keep the child available, and in many cases actually learning quickly to want and seek out that sexual contact to get those sensations going again.

I was an excellent victim - because dad was away a lot, when he came home I had been planning for days our 'special' time together - what I wanted him to do, when and where I wanted to do it - and there was no problem with him 'following along'.

You are undoubtedly asking where Mom was in all this - she and Dad regularly argued, and many times she'd leave with my sister to go to her mothers house for some times days at a time while Dad was at home - so we were alone.

I was an excellent understudy - and used the precise same techniques so closely to how they were used on me you could hold them up side by aide and have difficulty finding any difference other than the years in which things were committed.

So - here I am - a grateful recovering victim, become victimizer, and glad that it stopped with me.