i guess i am a freak. There is something wrong with me. i never had sexual play that i know of.

pink.. if it felt "icky" then it stuck in your memory as bad, worng or icky... and really, i don't think you will truly ever know... you know how unreliable recovered memory can be. i think you just have to work with what you do have. Sometimes it doesn't take anything even as much as this to provoke a feeling of shame in a child. That was what you ended up with from it, a feeling of shame. In the end, it's that powerful feeling of shame which leads to potential issues in life later.

it can be a tricky minefield, that's for sure.

i know, from experience, that feelings of shame have a strong attachment to events, place, people, things... they surface with a vengence when triggered. Shame is such a strong and unpleasant emotion, it overwhelms us, we so badly want to get away from it.

this incident could easily be provoked and attached to a lot.. and yeah, adult sexual experience can get filtered through those early feelings of shame. Hell.. it's hard enough to transition into feeling sex is healthy considering how conservative society is about the body, nudity, sex.. pretty much everything. We teach kids to cover, to know modesty, to refrain from sex (pointless, but we try anyway)... growing into it all being ok is a big jump.... add in feelings of shame for some external event, and well, you'll get something painful

you will have to explore what this means to you, what it meant to you, whether or not it shaped your development... you already know this

whether you want to call it abuse or not is really a personal choice that no one really has any right to take from, or give to, you. It's a personal decision really...

ask yourself... does it matter to you to label it? or are you seeking external validation? why? does that make it better? worse? justify or deny your experience somehow?

i asked myself all of this and more in regards to my own experiences... and honestly, no amount of external validation "proved" it to me. i still struggle with it sometimes.

having said all of that... external validation is sometimes all we got until we get stronger inside. It doesn't heal but it soothes. Having someone else speak the word abuse for me until i could say it myself (literally) was what i needed.

so.. in that light... anything that produces an overwhelming feeling of shame has potential to be abuse. There really isn't any good reason to produce that feeling in a child. Personally, i think it was, because this boy was old enough to know this wasn't play.. and to "play" this "game" with a much younger child, well... that tells me that he knew it was not something a child his own age would have "played" with him, he was dominating you (IMO). It's disturbing at the very least. A boy of 13 can be sexually active in the full adult sense of the word. He knew a lot that you did not. Had he been your own age, it could be viewed differently i think.... my T says that the difference in many cases is intent. What could really be the intent in this situation? It doesn't sound like a curiosity about the differences in anatomy... it sounds like "hey.. i wonder..." that got translated into you being an experiment... and that is domination, manipulation adn in my opinion, abuse.

but it doesn't matter what i think babe.. or any of us or anyone... it matters what YOU think....

and who ever taught you that it's ok to have bad things happen to you? why is it ok? what is ok if it was someone else? why don't those rights and rules apply to you?

i love you girl... take care and be well