new account because i don’t want this on my regular one

i’ve never heard of anyone having a similar experience and frankly i need to share and see if im crazy or blowing things out of proportion.

tldr: my dad and brother would regularly pin me down and tickle me throughout my childhood

for background: i was born female (im nonbinary now) and only got an autism diagnosis at 23. i experienced csa at the hands of a peer somewhere between 1-3rd grade (i told my dad around 7th grade). home life was fairly normal, never had money or food troubles, no outright abuse.

for my entire childhood up until around 15/16 (when my brother went to college) my dad and brother (mostly my brother) would restrain my hands and feet and tickle me. i hated it. i would scream and laugh and beg them to stop. in fact, “stop im serious” became such a catchphrase that my dad thought it’d be funny to mock me in a shrill voice about it as recently as 3 years ago.

they’d obviously seek out my most ticklish and sensitive areas, namely my neck, armpits, sides, feet, and inner thighs. sometimes they’d get the dog to join in — he’d pounce on me, bark, and put his mouth all over my face. this would happen at most twice a week.

eventually i developed the tactic of saying “stop im gonna pee” so he’d let go and i could run away. pretty sure at some point my brother followed me to the bathroom and realized i wasn’t actually peeing, because that method didn’t work for very long.

after that i started scratching and biting. i think my brother got annoyed and narced to our parents, leading to me getting mildly told off for hurting him. regardless the tickling basically stopped soon after that because that’s when he went to college.

now im very aware that this is far from the worst this subreddit has seen— some of the folks here have experienced real sexual assault from family members. i don’t want to make it seem like im putting this on par with anything like that. however this has weighed on me and affected me in ways similar to how csa did. this is some of what i’ve been feeling:

- my body, specifically the sensitive parts of it, were made fair game for the men in my family to grab, jab, and tickle whenever they wanted. in that sense i wasn’t allowed physical boundaries.

- all my cries for help went unanswered both by them and my mom and stepmom.

- my distress was their entertainment.

- if i remember correctly, my inner thighs only got sensitive during puberty. they soon became a common target.

- being restrained and tickled felt like electrocution to my nervous system.

and before anyone goes there, no, my dad and brother weren’t trying to be sexual with me. they saw it as regular play. i also believe that if every tickle ended with me sobbing and having a breakdown they would’ve stopped. but because the tickle response is laughter, and this behavior was normalized for me, the most id usually respond with is irritation. and i guess that didn’t matter.

what do you guys think? do any of you have similar experiences?

When I was 8F (20 now), a male cousin almost 4 years older than me started to molest me every chance he got. We lived in the same house periodically during that time or i was sent to stay there when my mom wanted me out of the house. It was almost every night. Whether he came in to my room while everyone was asleep, following me to the bathroom or kitchen, even when he had friends over at night, or when we were outside on the farm with all the other cousins. Some of them knew about it because we’d all play dirty truth or dare and they laughed as i was forced on the top bunk of the bunk beds with him. And all of them were 4+ years older than me. This went on for 4 years until I was told I was going to have to move in with him and his family again and I finally cracked and told a school counselor.

I can’t bring anything about it up with family or friends anymore because it upsets them and makes them uncomfortable. But therapy is expensive and I just want to be able to talk about what happened to me and tell my story. I’ve already written out how it started and some of the key moments i remember in a journal. Is staying silent about it now a normal part of growing up after trauma? Are there any online outlets that allow a victim to tell their full story and get insight? I don’t want sympathy anymore. I just want someone to hear me and see me and hope that maybe someday it well help someone else talk about what they went through.

Every time I open up to a friend about the reality of my past, they disappear. They feel too awkward to be around me. Suddenly they stop letting me watch their children. I’m a normal woman and mom myself. But it hurts so much. They trusted me before but suddenly what happened to me is a red flag?

I was 14 when this happened. I’ve never told anyone the full story, and I’m trying to find the courage to fully talk about it.I’ve made a small start, but I’m finding it much harder than I expected.

One weekend in January orFebruary, I was home alone with my father. I was in my bedroom listening to music and playing a game when he suddenly came in, furious. He grabbed me by the throat and squeezed hard, dragged me by my hair into the hallway, and continued hurting and insulting me. He eventually pulled my trousers off and raped me. I remember staring at the window, watching dust particles floating in the light. Afterwards, he thanked me for calming him down, told me to clean up, and left. I felt numb and lost, but eventually went back to playing my game as if nothing had happened.

Later, I realised I was pregnant. I had been feeling nauseous and my breasts were sore, but I didn’t know how to deal with the possibility at first. Even though I knew I was pregnant, I was drinking heavily to cope with everything that had happened. In March, my father found out about the pregnancy. He punched me hard in the abdomen and pushed me down the stairs. Shortly afterwards, I had a miscarriage. I lost a lot of blood and was alone in the shower, feeling completely abandoned, even though my mother was home. I don’t know what caused the miscarriage, but the timing has stayed with me.

What makes this so difficult is the guilt I still carry. I already knew my father was dangerous. He had hurt me before, including using violence to force sex and maintain control over me. I was living with my mother, so I didn’t have to keep seeing him, but I went back anyway. I never expected him to find out about the pregnancy or hurt me the way he did, but I keep thinking that I should have known better. I blame myself for going back

I also knew the sex was unprotected and that pregnancy was possible. Looking back, I feel like I should have recognised the signs and protected myself and the pregnancy. I was drinking heavily, and although I don’t know what caused the miscarriage, I can’t stop wondering whether my choices contributed to it. I think of the pregnancy as a life that was already there, even if it was still developing, and I feel like I failed to protect it. Sometimes I’m afraid that if people knew everything, they would think I had killed my own child. I feel guilty and ashamed, and sometimes I worry that these choices make me a bad person.

I’m 29 now, and this still affects my life in ways I find difficult to explain. I would love to have children, but the thought of it also scares me. The guilt surrounding the pregnancy and miscarriage is something I still struggle with, and it’s one of the reasons I’m still in therapy. I’ve started to talk about what happened, but sharing the full story feels overwhelming. I only told my therapist the first part of the story.

I think I’m mostly looking for empathy and understanding from people who might relate to these feelings. If you’ve ever struggled to talk about something traumatic or carried guilt over something from your past, I’d really appreciate hearing from you. I think I just need to feel a little less alone with this.

How to cope with the awful humiliation of being a victim. I’ve been a puppet and a toy for so many people. I’ve let them do such demeaning things to me. My body violated over and over and over. How do I escape the humiliation of it all. I want to crawl out of my skin. I want to die just to escape the constant embarrassment.

Between the ages of three and four, while I was in kindergarten, I was s*xually abused by my father.

He would also come home drunk (even on my 4th birthday) and beat or strangle me.

My mother struggled with severe anger issues and often took her frustrations out on us, though she was consistently kinder to me than to my sister.

She was more likely to consider my feelings or listen to my perspective. To this day, she blames my father for what happened and has a deep hatred for him.

Because of this, she treated me better than she did my sister throughout my life.

Even years after I recovered from an eating disorder that began when I was twelve, she says that my mental health struggles were a direct result of my father's actions. She never actually did anything about it when it was happening though.

For most of my life, she hasn't even shared a bed with him. I often find myself wondering: would she have treated me just as harshly as she treated my sister if it weren't for the trauma my father caused?

TW: covert incest, SA, misogyny

Until I had some time to heal, I hadn't had the chance to really process all of the madness I have endured over the years because it was all normal to me.

My father was in a covert incestial relationship with me. He loved making me feel violated with his suggestive touching, flirty remarks, and made demeaning sexual comments toward me from as young as elementary school age. It was normalized. He told me if I didn't let him touch me or voiced objections, I was the one in the wrong and he'd get aggressive, usually just grabbing by force.

I just had to accept I was a thing who wasn't allowed to have any boundaries or feelings. What I feel doesn't matter.

Fast forward, I met a guy and started dating when I was 17.

This guy did not care about boundaries. He would tickle me despite me saying no. I then later tried to have a serious conversation, telling him that it isn't a joke and it need to stop, he completely brushes me off and then later does it again. This was ugly foreshadowing for how he would treat me later on.

Sex with him made me feel like a dirty used sock. He'd get off and throw me away. If I said no to sex, he'd get mad and go cheat on me with other people. Multiple times he made me bleed. I'd tell him I'm hurting and to stop, he'd completely ignore me. Afterwards, I'd just want to get in the shower and scrub my skin with sandpaper until I start to bleed because I'd feel so disgusted.

My father did not like that I had a boyfriend. Not because of overprotective reasons. He was jealous.

He tried to split us up by doing asinine things, like making up stores that I was pregnant. He was obsessed with my body, constantly telling him every health problem I ever have was because I was having sex. He kept talking about my uterus to the whole family, alerting everyone in the family I was sexually active and shit talking me. He kept asking me how many babies I was going to have with him with a disgusted tone.

Afterward I cut ties to everyone involved after two decades of suffering, I couldn't fathom having sex again. I didn't date. After all, sex is my only use and if I can't give sex, then I'm useless. Getting a partner who doesn't give you sex is like buying a washing machine that doesn't work, right? I'm not a person, I'm an object and if an object doesn't serve a purpose to another person, then it's useless. Worthless. Should be thrown out and replaced.

Luckily I did finally date again and I met someone I feel safe with. I've made a lot of progress and mostly gotten over my hang ups over sex. My main struggle now is working through the fact that I have internalized the fact I am not a person and it's hard for me to comprehend the idea that I have value outside of what I can do for other people.

I (31F) had an abusive father and then several experiences with men that were traumatic, culminating in a pretty brutal assault by an ex boyfriend in my 20s.

I’m in my 30s now and I don’t experience spontaneous attraction to anyone to the point that I don’t even know my sexuality anymore—like if I’m straight, lesbian, bi, asexual, etc. I had some crushes on women in my teenage years but I’m not sure if they were actual crushes or just because I felt safer with them. I feel like after the last assault I completely shut down physically and romantically and even if I would like a partner and maybe even to have a family someday I don’t actually know who I’m interested in dating or how to start.

Has anyone else not known what their sexuality was because of too much trauma/sexual abuse in your life? Is there anything you did that helped you figure it out?

TW for csa:

My mom who is now divorced to my step dad told me that he admitted to her what he had done to me when i was a kid. She told me that she had never actually believed me until he said that he'd done it. This stuff all came out when I was around 16 or so and the assault ended when I was around 11, I'm 24 now.

I'm upset that she never believed me until he confirmed it. But also idk why but I thought that him admitting it would free me in some way, like give credibility to what I was saying and stuff. Now I feel like I never really needed the credibility because him confirming it and making it believable just makes me angry that she didn't think I was believable enough. Either way, I just don't feel good about it at all. I feel terrible. My deceased brothers birthday is coming up in about a week and that might be part of why i feel so terrible.

My memories from when I was a kid are all fragmented and foggy. Which is bad because sometimes I'll suddenly remember something really bad. But it can be nice because it makes it so sometimes I can almost forget it happened. But him admitting it somehow just made it all feel very real. I really do not feel good about it at all. Has anyone else ever experienced something like this? What can I do, i feel more sick to my stomach thinking about my csa now than i normally do.

I just keep wishing he killed me like he threatened to. If I were gone I wouldn’t have to think about it. I’m trying not to be that way, but it’s really difficult. I won’t hurt myself because I don’t want to hurt my partner. I’m just incredibly depressed about how my mind doesn’t feel like my own. I’m constantly fluctuating between believing my trauma and thinking my mind has always been fractured. That I’m just a horrible sick person because of my memories or thoughts.

I’m trying to not affect others around me with my thoughts but I feel so isolated. I sometimes wish I hadn’t looked into my past and tired to figure it out. It feels like I took everything out and now I can’t put it back away. Like what’s the point? Who cares if it happened or not. It’s doesn’t even feel like me, it feels like a fake person or someone I don’t like. My mind keeps telling me it’s just something that happen to a body in the past so it shouldn’t matter, but I still feel tormented.

So far i have seen my therapist for 5 years. On and off met about once every 3-4 weeks. I mostly share about anxiety, school, work, family.

At the end of our 5 years mark, I brought up about past CSA as part of our conversation which I also shared that it doesnt affect me now. I was 9 years old then and I didnt know better about what happened - an uncle who molested me (only touch, not intrusive and no penetration) multiple times but stopped after my mum found out.

I honestly dont feel it affected me per say (im sorry if I offend anyone but im only speaking from subjective experience)

At the end of the session, my therapist looked at me as though I am so broken. She also asked why didnt she know about this earlier. To which I responded that I didnt know it was important because it didnt affect me?

I had experienced sexual abuse when I was 6 years old by a stranger and teenager by my dad at home. There had been other incidents that added up growing up and in adulthood.

I get flashback on the street when there is a man walking towards my direction, even though they are just passing by, I get hyper-vigilant and paranoid when there's a man standing behind me in the line or waiting for train etc. It's so tiring.

I get really overwhelmed by just monitoring and paying attention around me. I sometimes get random rage inside me but most of time I just get in freeze mode while there is a storm happening inside me.

Externally, I think I'm at good place. I have a partner, get to get things done, I get to talk or socialize but the storm inside me seems it never go away. I have so much anger and hates time to time. I tried EMDR therapy and it was too overwhelming and had to take a break.

Does it every go away and can I ever be okay? What can help me? I sometime feel so helpless and hopeless. I just wanna live without having to be alarmed and suspicious everything around me. I wanna enjoy living.

I’ve really been struggling with an overwhelming sense of helplessness in intimate situations due to my childhood assault. I feel like I have no power and I have trouble speaking up if I get triggered and want to stop.

I decided to sign up for a RAD class, hoping it will help me not freeze up so much. Today was the first day, no practical skills yet just talking. Honestly I just felt worse as we talked about running and fighting and yelling. Because it just felt pointless to me. I don’t believe I can fight.

One woman said her young daughter took RAD Kids and she was so proud of her for practicing yelling at the instructors because now she has the tools to keep herself safe. All I could think was that I tried running, I tried resisting, I tried screaming. It didn’t matter. I still got raped.

WTF is a child supposed to do against a grown adult? WTF am I supposed to do even now against a man who will likely have a size and strength advantage? God forbid he also has a skill advantage.

It just feels pointless. I hope the class gets better but right now it just feels like false hope of escape.

TW: CSA descriptions.
I (20F) am currently in EMDR for C-PTSD and have had a lot of memories come up over the past month. In the past two weeks, though, I’ve realized more about what my abuse entailed. I think I’m looking for support because I’m in immense emotional turmoil and feel constantly invalidated by forces in my life. This might be a little long because of my confusion.

For context, my adoptive mom, adoptive brother, and adoptive dad all were inappropriate with me (I was adopted at birth and just refer to them as my family). There was one instance when I was 5 where it was contact sexual abuse from my dad and brother at the same time. After that, it was just my mom and brother who non-contact abused me when I was 8-12 in exclusively four ways: my mother exposed me to porn, was indecent in front of me, and forced me to be naked and shower in front of her despite my extreme distress. My brother (3 years older than me) exposed me to porn, was indecent in front of me, and told me how to masturbate and did that in front of me too.

I realized these things about my mom literally this week. I always knew these events happened, but never really processed them as abuse. I brought them up to my therapist and she said that there’s no way to know if this was sexual abuse because she “doesn’t know my mom and doesn’t know her intention.” It makes me feel really upset to hear that because what my mom did fundamentally impacted me because she committed sexually inappropriate actions, especially because exposing me to porn is objectively illegal. My mom also allowed us to be around our adoptive dad even though she knew he was sexually abusive. I just feel like my trauma is a question that other people evaluate in their minds.

I posted about what my brother did to me in r/siblingsexualabuse and someone commented “…” beneath my post. My therapist said that what my brother did to me was a “bad day that happened to me” even though it was from when I was 8-12. He only stopped when he left to live with our grandma. I didn’t know what normal male anatomy looked like for so long because he was always hard around me.

Is it less bad because my brother was a kid too? Is it less bad because my mom’s a woman? Frankly, they were both sexually abused but my mom is dead now and my brother lives across the nation. We are estranged and I’m focused on MY experiences. My mom’s family is extremely emotionally abusive and manipulative and I am only coming to terms with these events now, and still, I feel like I can’t comfortably talk about what I went through as CSA. It’s important to me to label my experiences because I feel like if I don’t even know what they are and what happened, I can’t effectively reprocess them. My family absolutely hates women and I was a glass child and scapegoat. I told my uncle about my brother being sexually inappropriate and he said, “So he crossed boundaries? I think he’s just trying to do better now.”

Am I crazy? Did I experience sexual abuse? Did my mom and brother just cross my boundaries? I would love to hear any insight. I am really struggling right now with feeling valid in what is majority non-contact abuse, because I feel like because I wasn’t raped, my complex trauma and trauma symptoms aren’t justified. What I went through wasn’t bad enough. It wasn’t abuse at all.

I recently had a session with my therpaist we were discussing why I have such a fear of men although I had sexual relationships etc my answer was I’m afraid to be alone with one because what if they will rape me or abuse me. Which to me was crazy that I answered that way. So if anyone here can tell me if it’s completely normal to not remember being physically abused please feel free to comment. My sexual life has always been very chaotic and self destructive and I have also dealt with extreme pelvic and stomach pain my entire life . But again I still don’t think I was abused that way because I’m 90% sure I would remember right?

I hate hate hate when my mom just stares at me. It’s like all she does now since we’ve moved and I’ve taken over caring for her full time. I’m getting very self conscious around her, making sure im properly covered.

I don’t know if she victimized me but at the very least she was negligent to it happening by my father and other family members. It’s so hard not to be bitter and angry at her.

When I (F23) was 4 (maybe younger I can’t remember) until about 10 years old my oldest brother (M33) who would’ve been 14 until he was 19/20 was molesting me. Making me kiss him, touch him, and perform oral on him and would do the same to me. I never told anyone and I never brought it up with him. He acts like everything is normal and I somewhat do too, but I am extremely traumatized from it. Whenever I’m around him I feel the need to hide myself and I’m super stiff and uncomfortable but I just deal with it.

I have another brother (M31) that I am super close with who is also super close with him, but I never told him what happened. I told him I was molested when I was 20, but never told him who. I’ve had like 6 different therapists since 2024 who always told me I should tell someone, but I never thought I’d be able to for fear of ruining my family and the turmoil it would cause. Almost like I was protecting my oldest brother is how it would seem but I was honestly just trying to protect my family from having to find out what he did.

Well anyway I told my M31 brother yesterday after a vulnerable therapy session. I couldn’t say it out my mouth. I made him guess it. He’d asked who it was in the past but I’d always say I wasn’t comfortable. I told him yesterday and I feel like I’ve ruined his life. He cried in front of me. He’s never cried in front of me as an adult, I barely remember it as a child. I feel like I’ve ruined his life and I’m ruining our families life. I genuinely spiraled after. I can’t believe what I’ve done and I’m having such a hard time processing this. I told my therapist it would not make me feel better telling anyone they all told me it would. I feel so awful that I have turned my brothers life upside down now. I’m so sick to my stomach.

In a moment of vulnerability right after I told him I told my friends that I told him who it was (my friends don’t know who it was but also know something happened to me). My friends are telling me this is a breakthrough but it does not feel like it. This is all over the place sorry.

TLDR; I told my closest brother that our oldest brother molested me and now I feel like I ruined his life

Hey guys. I'd really love to hear from some other survivors about this because I feel conflicted. I have heard a lot of discourse lately because of the Cornell case, and a lot of people encourage reporting past sexual abuse just to make sure there is a paper trail for other survivors of the same perpetrator so they might have an easier time getting justice. My particular situation feels impossible to navigate for me. It's just so confusing because we were both young (they were 15-17 and I was 16-18) and they apologized and appear remorseful. At the same time, there are things that complicate the situation. Such as the severity of what they did. A majority of the abuse (which, I'll admit, was extensive) was they coercing me into sexual acts, letting them take and keep nude photos I didn't not want them to have, and groping and downright assaulting me because they assumed me not physically pulling away was the same as consent. At one point they did digitally rape me (tried to vaginally fist me while I was unconscious, though I did consent to two fingers beforehand, I now understand the severity of waking up in pain like that and that it was a severe violation for them to do that without my consent.) I stayed with them for a year after that and it took a year after the breakup to call it sexual assault and three years to regard that specific incident as a form of rape. They also digitally penetrated me two other times where I did not consent at all, I just didn't pull away or shut it down because I was conditioned to believe saying no was futile because they would make me feel bad for it or I didn't feel safe enough to resist. They texted me last year apologizing for "being too pushy" in our relationship. I feel as though they purely wanted to absolve their own guilt. I have CPTSD and dream about being raped every night and they seem to have no understanding of what they did because they didn't mention any of the assault in their apology, just them forcing me to take off my shirt all the time and let them keep nudes I wanted to delete. I responded that what they did was actually assault and their immediate response was "you're right, I'm sorry." I listed out in graphic detail every instance of SA I could remember (which is less than I remember now tbh) and they were silent and respectful. Then they apologized again and when I told them not to reach out again because it was retraumatizing, they listened. I haven't heard from them since. To be honest, I do genuinely believe they feel bad and I know they didn't have a good understanding of consent because their sexual education was severely lacking (they were terrified of STDs despite us both being virgins). However, I know for a fact they noticed my discomfort physically and they very intentionally steamrolled my objections when it came to me telling them not to grope me, that I didn't want to take my shirt off all the time and let them stimulate my chest outside of sex, and them keeping nudes I wanted to delete. They KNEW they were coercing me and they prioritized their sexual gratification over my consent. I don't trust them not to do it to someone else. But they were so young and I don't know if it is fair for that to be on their record. I just don't know. What do you think?

Hi everyone it’s my first time posting so I’m super sorry if this isn’t the appropriate subreddit, I (25F) was just looking for others opinions on some childhood memories that are bringing me a lot of confusion.

When I was really young (I don’t remember my exact age) both my mom and I were naked and she was rubbing her breasts on my chest. It makes me sick to think back on but she was laughing so I can’t help but assume she thought we were engaging in fun, harmless play.

When I was older (around 10-13) she would perform “body checks” on me and tell me to take off all my clothes so she could inspect my body to make sure it was growing properly. When I would tell her how uncomfortable I was and how much I didn’t like it she would get really offended and say that “she owned me.”

These are just two memories that I wanted some outsider perspective on, I’ve also been realizing that besides this she has also emotionally manipulated and financially taken advantage of me but those are a lot easier to recognize in my mind as abusive. Thanks in advance

This is my story. Putting it out there in case anyone can relate and I hope that it helps me somehow to share. I have a lot of memories of abuse and have come to understand a lot of the ways it set the trajectory of my life and cause me a great deal of loss having spent so much time playing out patterns, mostly to protect myself out if fear. Anyway, I’d like to share the memories because the lack of a full memory of sexual abuse still causes me to question myself.

As a 3-5 yo I remember my father asking me to sit in a special seat in the car so I could be closer to him and be his girlfriend. He’d then put his arm around me. I remember him showing me a building near our house and explaining that if I ever did anything bad I’d have to go live there and never see my family again. I remember later when my father had my sister sit next to him in the front of the car (there used to be a middle seat) he got angry at me for exclaiming that it was her turn to be his girlfriend now. I remember him asking me to go skinny dipping in our pool at night when I was around 9 and I declined.

My father sexually assaulted a stranger once and there rumors of him being inappropriate with a pet. He did things to terrorize us as children such as hiding in the house and cutting the power. He was an abusive to my mother. I also have memories of special attention from him like him helping with school projects and Halloween costumes. This makes things extra confusing as part of me wants to think he was just damaged and truly loved me and I know it could even be both. I don’t remember being afraid of him other than when he was drunk and angry for obvious reasons. I remember him then treating my younger sister as special and buying her treats and things. He was physically abusive and mean to my brother always. He had many other morally messed up tendencies like trying to teach me to steal as a child. My mother took me to the dr at around age 7 because of pain I was experiencing and it was determined that my hymen was broken. I know I spent time alone in the car with my father and remember songs or phrases and that’s it. The confusion I experienced presented many problems for me such as the feeling of needing to hide anything bad from young age. As such I experience some identity confusion. The rest of my family doesn’t believe there was any sexual abuse and honestly , I don’t know how given the way that he was. However it still leaves me questioning myself. I know I don’t need it, but it sure feels like it would help to have solid proof in order to stop second guessing myself. What do you guys think?