My father grew up in a military family, always moving from state to state, sometimes out of the country even, so he never got to call one place home or develop relationships with his peers and others. His mother was a very bitter woman who didn't show love very often - I can see signs of sexual abuse now that I think about her but will never know for certain because my family is such a mystery. One night, my dad's 16-year-old sister ran away with her boyfriend the night before they were going to move to a whole new state, which was clever, because all they could do was file a police report when they found out in the morning and start driving to their new post. They never found her and throughout the years she only contacted my grandmother to ask for money.
My dad met my mom in highschool and after the way he was raised, he became the highschool bad boy. He didn't finish highschool, he did all sorts of drugs, slept with dozens of women (even a married one), and led the typical hippy lifestyle that most led back in the 70's in Lake Isabella. My mother on the other hand grew up in a loving Christian home, so she was a good girl until she met my dad. They shacked up together, smoked weed, and eventually got married when they were 21 and 20 years old outside the court house. My mother eventually found her way back to her faith and just prayed for my dad for several years, he became a police officer, then he eventually became a Christian too. As a police officer, he said he saw horrible things on the street, like a man standing 6 feet in front of my dad going crazy until he picked up his shotgun, put it in his mouth, and blew his skull open all over the flowerbed while my dad saw it up close and in grotesque detail. Or the one time when they found a boy who had been kidnapped. They found him in an orchard lying face down because he had been sodomized. When my dad rolled him over, he said he will never forget the look of terror and agony on his face, or the dirt that was pressed into his eyeballs from being smothered in the dirt. I am convinced my father has PTSD due to his hyper-vigilance, outbursts, and distance he puts between himself and others. He doesn't have friends and it was usually hard for him to show us any love as children. My aunt told me one time that she walked into a room when he was feeding my older brother. My brother was full, so he turned his face away, so my father grabbed him by the face, yanked it back towards him while saying, "GET YOUR FACE BACK OVER HERE!" and forced him to eat while he was crying and scared. After his experiences on the street, he changed tremendously. His coworkers back in the day were terrified of him because he had no fear, he was 6'3", a power lifter, had a black belt in Goju Ryu, and he had taken down several guys high on PCP before. My father could be a monster.
One of the first memories I have with my father was when I was three. He asked me one time if I loved him, and kids are honest at that age so I told him, "NO." There wasn't much affection and I have always seen him as the ticking time bomb we had to tread softly around because he was usually grumpy and angry about something. He was hurt when I told him I didn't love him, but he never once stopped to ask himself if he had been doing something wrong or if he could change the way I felt about him somehow because he NEVER admitted when he was wrong or apologized for anything he did. Instead, he refused to speak to me or acknowledge my existence. He had my mother pass on the message that "you hurt your father when you said you didn't love him." Right then and there, I learned how to please God and my parents out of fear, not love. I told myself that if I didn't say I loved my father, then I wouldn't have a father, so I had to lie in order to have that sense of security. In short, my father was pissed off, had a short temper, he was distant and unloving, he dissociated a lot behind books and the television, and he never, ever, admitted when he was wrong about something because he always had to be in control. If there was a problem or if he did something wrong, he would turn it around on us and somehow manage to convince all three of us that it was our faults.
Maybe it was because my father was so tough on us and so in control of every aspect of his household that caused my brother to look for a way to gain control. I simply became very timid and submissive and I was very little when we started playing a game called Truth or Dare. I'm not sure when it first started, but I remember we started discovering our genitalia and he would touch me. It would escalate until he started licking my vagina. It's hard to remember specific events because it happened so often, I dissociated a lot, and forced myself to forget so much, but eventually when I was around 9, he had discovered his first hard on and he would rub it on my stomach or butt crack for a while until he ejaculated all over my body. It was disgusting. He had seen a few pornographic movies before and he learned about role play, so he would force me to act out things on him that usually included biting his neck and pretending to be a vampire and I don't remember if he had me stroke him or not, but he would usually conclude with rubbing and ejaculating on me. I hated this "game" of his and if I wasn't convincing enough in the role play, he would usually scream at me and hit me. I hated it when he would lick my vagina, and that is why loud chewing makes me go ballistic because the two sounds are so similar. He would also subtly taunt me by smacking his food because he knew it drove me crazy.
Soon, something happened that was a huge turning point in this horrible nightmare. Matt developed a rash on his thighs from his pants or something, so he told me it was a disease that would only go away if he released certain hormones through ejaculation. That meant he couldn't stop the sex acts he performed on me no matter how much I begged him to, so he manipulated and threatened me into continuing them. I would sometimes threaten to tell our parents, but he would threaten me with something else and he managed to convince me that all of this was my fault, so it wouldn't matter if our parents knew because I would get in trouble for it. I was terrified every day. However, not only did he want me to perform oral sex on him and let him rub his penis all over me until he ejaculated, he also said that it would be much better if he could have sex with me. He wanted to rape me. I was merely a terrified child who knew nothing of anatomy or physiology, so I didn't know that the "disease" he talked about was a fake one, nor did I know that my parents would do their best to make it all stop if I had told them. It was good that my parents did not know because they were not good parents and it would have made it worse if they had known.
So because he wanted to have sex with me, he pushed and pushed until I was completed worn down and terrified of him. It was a hot summer day, we had put a sprinkler underneath the trampoline in the backyard and we were out there in our swim suits. He had sneaked a bottle of vaseline out there and I stood against the rail of the trampoline while he took a gob of vaseline and smeared it all over his thick penis. I watched as he came closer and told me to move my swim suit aside, my heart thumping in my chest out of fear, and the penis that normally would not have fit was suspended right by my vagina. Suddenly he thrust forward as hard and as fast as possible and I lurched forward in so much pain, my mouth wide open trying to scream but I couldn't - my voice was gone, it had left me. He thrust in and out a few times and asked if it hurt, I nodded "yes", so he withdrew and told me to go get cleaned up. I walked past both my parents in the house to the bathroom, locked the door, and tried to pee even though it burned horrendously. I wiped away the blood, vaseline, and sperm and felt a weight being placed on my shoulders and a stone-like sensation that grew in my stomach and stayed there for the next few years.
The next day or the day after was some sort of homeschool event and I remember trying to run and play with the other kids, but I couldn't because I had this terrible secret weighing me down and also it hurt to run because I had been raped for the first time less than 48 hours previously. I hadn't gone pee for hours because it burned, but eventually I couldn't hold it any longer so I locked myself in their bathroom, braced myself, held my breath, and let it all out while managing to suppress the tears from the pain and inner turmoil. I would hold all that back for many more years.
It would happen every day. My life consisted of this schedule: Wake up, watch dad drive away to work on his motorcycle, mom would climb in the shower for 30 minutes, I would get raped, we would start homeschool for the day, sometimes mom would run an errand in the afternoon and I would get raped again, then dad would come home and we would sit down to dinner like a normal family with church on Sundays.
One day my jeans caused the very same rash that my brother had on his thighs and he told me that I now had this disease, but he added a twist. Sometimes the rash would get bigger and there would be little red dots that got closer to my vagina, so he told me that if it spread to my vagina, it would go inside of my body and kill me. Now on top of being raped every day, I now believed that I had a terminal illness. I literally went through the stages that someone like a stage-4 cancer patient would. Books have told me that they include denial of the condition, anger at God and everyone around you along with plenty of blame perhaps even for yourself, bargaining with God to spare your life, and finally, acceptance that you are going to die, but I never came to this last stage of acceptance. Instead of playing with other kids, I would usually be running to the bathroom to make sure the rash wasn't spreading. I was angry all the time and soon I didn't have any friends because how would they understand something like this? I was always an outsider and treated like the weird, shy homeschool kid because no one had a clue what I was going through. Every morning I would wake up and wonder if I was going to die today or tomorrow, and then I would wonder how I was going to be raped today.
Eventually the rash was gone, but I was still being raped every single day. Matt exposed me to this porn video where the girl shoved a dildo up her ass, so he got the idea about anal sex. He asked his friend Paul a lot of sex questions because he was a little older and sexually active, so Paul told him that anal sex felt better because it was tighter than the vagina but that a condom needed to be worn to avoid infection. My brother came home with this news to experiment. He grabbed a rubber glove that was in my parents' room, smeared on more gobs of vaseline, and just stood over me while I lay on my stomach in his bedroom by his closet. I don't know why he just stood there, but I was forcing my mind to go elsewhere while I waited for the inevitable. Soon he was on top of me, put his penis right by the opening, and he once again thrust forward and pushed his penis into my anus. This time, my screams of agony found a voice. I have never felt anything more excruciating in my life than this torment - cracking three ribs didn't even come close to it. I don't remember the rest of what happened because I was traumatized and have successfully blocked it from my memory, but I think I spent the rest of the day hiding in my tree house. I pooped blood for about a week and had to try very hard to walk and sit without anyone noticing that something was wrong.
Sometimes my brother was afraid I would get pregnant, so he would subject me to cruel things to avoid it. He took a water bottle of some sort and forcefully and painfully tried to flush me out. Or one time he forced me to drink a glass of tequila even though it burned and I wanted to puke.
I remember one time he wanted me to sit on top of him and do the work, but his penis was still large and I had difficulty fitting it in and it was painful, so he would scream at me and threaten me until he pushed me down, got on top of me, and finished himself. Or another time we were in the hallway when my dad was at work and my mother was at the grocery store. He had on a thin condom and was trying to rape me when it snapped somehow like a rubber band and I screamed in pain, so he slapped me across the face and told me to shut up because our neighbor was outside playing basketball and he didn't want him to hear us. These are some of the memories that will always be with me and I wonder at how I am not able to remember the other hundreds of times it happened.
The abuse stopped when I was nearly 14, and I thank God that I started my period later in life. I hid my pain, dissociated, minimized a lot and convinced myself that it wasn't that bad. Because of how I coped as a victim, it affected how I functioned in society. I felt dead, lifeless, like a visible ghost who dissociated even during a regular conversation. People thought I was just a really weird kid who wasn't very friendly, perhaps just painfully shy, but they had no clue and of course no one gives another person the benefit of the doubt. I didn't even know I was depressed because I had forgotten what feelings were long ago. The dissociation combined with my father treating us like our feelings were disrespectful made a huge mess.
A year later, my brother came home upset about something and he wanted me to kill him by taking off my pants and sitting on his face while he performed oral sex on me until he suffocated. He threatened me multiple times and became so irate that I thought he would hurt me, so I did what he told me to do and took off my pants. He hadn’t seen me naked for a little over a year and by this time I had developed hair, and I remember he commented how different I looked while he said, “Wow” and I watched his penis enlarge. I sat on his face and did as he asked until he stopped licking me and just lay there without moving or breathing. I got so afraid that he was actually dead so I climbed off and he wasn’t moving. I freaked out so I slapped him across the face and he started breathing again. That was all I remember from that incident.
Eventually I tried dating because it's what normal girls do, and one of the first guys I was talking to told me that I wasn't skinny enough and that I should start running. Because of my Scottish/German heritage, I have curves and my father told the guy this, and that he should basically fuck off because he was an twerp. I was mad at the guy for telling me this, so I took up kickboxing while thinking "fuck this guy, I'm gonna make my legs bigger and start kickboxing!" I was getting really good at kickboxing and getting ready to have my first match against some other girl. I really liked it so one night I was training at my coach's house after class at the gym. We started watching some kickboxing video on the TV in his bedroom when he started making advances towards me. I was uncomfortable, yet I didn't feel as though I had the right to walk away from him and once again, my voice was gone. He managed to get my pants off while he was kissing me, he put on a condom, and he put his penis against my vagina. I told him I didn't want to have sex with him, but he shushed me and kissed me. He put his penis next to my vagina again, I moved my hips again, he moved it back, I moved, and this kept going on while I told him 2-3 times that I didn't want to have sex with him. I was on my period at the time and wearing a tampon when he decided to push forward anyway. He drove the tampon deep inside and the string cut me, but I had learned to minimize pain over the years despite the damage being done. He finished himself off 3 times, replacing the condom each time. When he was done, I stumbled to the bathroom and spent 20 minutes fishing out the shredded pieces of tampon that had painfully been shoved back. Because of my abuse as a child, I thought that I had just had sex with a man for the first time, so I continued kickboxing, yet something just didn't seem right so I merely pushed those thoughts in the back of my mind, telling myself that everything was okay. After some sex abuse counseling sessions, I realize now that he raped me because I told him I didn't want to do it and he did it anyway.
I spent long hours in my bedroom dissociating behind books and would try to fill some sort of void that way. My relationship with my parents was strained because my dad was just an ass who was impossible to communicate with and I had no clue how to let anyone close to me. I still have a difficult time letting anyone close to me, but am still afraid of being alone at the same time. I long for someone to show me affection without trying to spread my legs.
Soon after my 21st birthday, I was sleeping in my car a lot because I didn't want to be at home often, or stayed at my friend Celine's house. One night our friends were at a bar and asked me to pick them up, but when I got there, they realized they hadn't gotten me a drink for my 21st. I hadn't eaten all day because I had to weigh in that night, I was at the height of kickboxing physical fitness, I hardly ever drank, and I was an extreme lightweight. That night they bought me 3 Adios Motherfucker's and I drained all of them in the span of an hour. They had to carry me out, sling me over their shoulder and drag me upstairs to Celine's room where I puked my guts out for a while. My last memory is being dragged across the floor from the toilet to the mattress where I blacked out. One year later, Celine told me that her boyfriend took advantage of me while I was passed out and she didn't stop him because they were "in an open relationship." I told her to go fuck herself and drag her boyfriend down to hell with her.
Eventually my dad screamed at me to get out of his house because he couldn't stand to see the stranger I had become anymore, so I drove over to San Luis Obispo, slept on a bench, walked around... But I felt like a ghost. My dad called a few days later to tell me to come home, but I said no. Hell no. I moved into a classmate's house off Hailey and Bernard where I slept on a cot (an upgrade from a raunchy mattress) in the corner of their living room, or in my car when people were over getting high on whatever drug they brought, usually just weed, sometimes heavy drugs. There were cockroaches on the floor and I would sit on their kitchen counter chugging a bottle of wine at six in the morning because I had just got home from screwing some guy all night and that was how I tried to sleep and fill some sort of void. Sometimes I would combine wine with vikodin that I had gotten from cracking my humerus while sparring, but my roommate stole my pills before I got addicted thankfully.
My roommates had a band, and in that band was a cute Mexican drummer. He had cute, curly hair with golden brown eyes and I was struck by him because when he looked at me, there was something different in his eyes that I hadn't seen before. We struck up a conversation one day when I asked him a question in passing, but he gave me a detailed, thoughtful, intelligent answer and from then on I made a point to spend time with him whenever possible. One night we were together the whole night, just talking and it was wonderful. The next three days and three nights, we didn't leave his bedroom and I broke it off with the guy I'd had the extended one night stand with so I could be with Julian. Even though he was very kind to me, I still didn’t know what love was at that point so yet again I was making another vain attempt to fill up some sort of void.
I was going to go into the military but my aunt called out of the blue and told me to move down south to live with her in Thousand Oaks. I did move down there and I saw Julian on weekends until he moved just 30 minutes away to Ventura.
At my aunt's, the big house creeped me out at night. I dispersed weapons throughout my bedroom, visualizing attacks and trying to make sure there was a weapon in all locations for anything that could happen. When I managed to fall asleep, I had nightmares and sometimes woke up screaming. My aunt didn't understand why, but I moved in with Julian and I finally felt safe when he held me at night. I finally slept through the night. I felt secure sleeping next to someone who treated me better than anyone else had at that point and there were times that it was difficult for me during sex so he would make us stop and he just held me. He taught me that my emotions were more important than the fear of disappointment and rejection and it was hard to believe that someone wasn’t treating me like a human blow-up doll. Even though Julian wasn’t good for me in some ways, it was because of him that my healing journey began, otherwise I would still be getting drunk almost every night and slipping further and further away.
It was because of this relationship that I started to realize just how much the abuse had carried into my everyday life. We would get into arguments and I would not be able to remember what I had said or would forget what we had been talking about because I had dissociated a little due to feeling threatened. Julian started helping me get my memory back and would also remind me that yes, we are arguing, but that he wasn't my overbearing father or abusive brother so I should calm down and have a rational discussion with him. He also showed me how to defend myself and be independent by sitting me down one day and yelling at me until I managed to yell "FUCK YOU!!!" to someone who had done something wrong to me. It was a little unorthodox, but it worked because from then on, I didn't let people walk all over me. However, because of his past and his upbringing, he had a tendency to be extremely paranoid and he would read things into situations that simply were not true. There were times that he had me convinced that I wanted to cheat on him because I had apparently looked at a guy the wrong way (not true). Looking back with hindsight 20/20, I hate that because it’s almost exactly like what my dad used to do: convince me I was at fault when I wasn’t. I got to the point where I couldn’t even look at a guy and I always felt wrong for even talking to one no matter who it was and it’s something I still work on.
Eventually I started talking to my dad through email. I thought it would help our relationship if I told him I was raped, not to mention that I wanted my father's compassion and affection. I told him I had been raped but that I would not tell him who had done it, so he said I had to tell him who it was so that legal action could be taken in order to protect other women. I emailed back a response, saying it had been my brother. Before they had a chance to read it, my brother called me at work and asked if he could delete my email and just tell them himself. I said no - he should tell them and they should read my email too. He sighed and said, "This is going to ruin my engineering career," to which I told him where he could shove his career.
My dad was sympathetic at first, but he still lets my brother live with them, never turned him into the police, and did not make sure he regularly counseled with their pastor for very long. Soon, it got worse. He sent a venomous email saying that I needed to "repent in sackcloth and ashes" because I had lied to him all those years. Because I did not tell him what was happening while I was a helpless, confused, overwhelmed child, he believed that I was an accomplice in my rape. His words: "Therefore, you are just as much at fault as your brother." I was completely crushed by the fact that my own father turned on the victim and put blame on my shoulders. As a police officer, he should know better. He arrested plenty of rapists in his day I'm sure. I'm also sure he never put the victim in the back seat of the squad car along with her rapist simply because the poor child didn't call him to arrest her father/uncle/whatever rapist.
Doing the math, I have been molested, raped, sodomized, perhaps more, somewhere between 900 and 1200 times throughout my life. I do not speak to my "family" at all and no longer consider them to be my family. I have a hard time letting people close and if I didn't have such a strong desire to be loved by someone, I would just become a recluse and tell anyone who approached me to simply fuck off. I want to do that all the time, but I know that this journey is one that will be better for me in future, so I try to resist the urge to tell people to fuck off most of the time. I attend church and try to allow them to take me in; I even went on a date fairly recently. I look at a man and think that I should stay away from him not just because he's probably an asshole, but also because what if he's nice? If he was sane, he would stay far away from me because I feel like I'm dripping in filth and NOT worth anyone's time because it would take a little effort to gain my trust and to break down this Great Wall of China I've assembled over the years. Yet occasionally I'll see a good-looking guy and wish I could find someone to love me, even all the broken pieces, and to see past them to see a survivor - someone who is strong with a great personality that shines through when I let it out. But whatever happens, no one has the right to minimize my feelings as I go through this long journey. This is MY healing process and I won't let anyone get in the way or tell me to just forget about it and move on because I will battle with depression, rage, anger, anxiety, confusion, memory loss, fear, hatred, and a host of other issues no matter what happens until I am whole someday. I'm not going to give up so that one day, I can go out and fight against the evil that has happened to me and continues to happen to other men and women. Sex has been used for evil against me and many others, but these experiences I’ve had will allow me to take them and use them for good. That is why I am here - to help myself first and then help others when I am able. If Christ hadn't yanked me back by the hair recently, I would be off popping pills in a drunken haze, probably whoring around trying to fill that void. Without Christ, I wouldn't have the strength to get up and seek healing. Christ has become the strength I didn't have, and he has become the father I don't have. Throughout everything, I can say with confidence that GOD is greater than ALL of our trials. "My grace is sufficient for you, for My power is made perfect in weakness." Story of my life.
