#if my parents knew about cocsa. which they might not.

[error-core-animations]

I'm in a very interesting position of "got comprehensive and age appropriate sex ed at a young age" but I was also molested as a kid. I am walking evidence that seeing diagrams of penises and vaginas isn't harmful and the real thing that gets kids hurt and sexually abused is not knowing shit. Cuz like, I did get told what genitals were and how zygotes implant into the uterus walls and stuff, but nobody told me about sexual abuse and assault for a while.

This also illustrates something ✨extremely fun✨: CSA is treated like it is Too Yucky to tell kids about, even in technical terms, even if the kid is aware of what sex is, they simply cannot know that if their friend pressures them into touching their genitals, that's a bad thing and that friend is probably being hurt! It's so weird, there's literally a whole saying about how knowledge is power, but kids are intentionally denied knowledge that could save them so much pain.

[circulars-reasoning]

If I recall correctly, you said you had created alters, right? If so, I was wondering how it happened and how they're doing right now. I'm trying to do a bit of research on it to help out a specific alter in our system, but to no avail. We're trying to do this as safely as possible.

Right now, they’re doing well, but when they first formed, it was horrific for them and us. Trauma was… not great! I think it might be time to expand on their stories actually. Too many people in syscourse assume they know things about my alters, and the last time I opened up about them, folks came into my inbox to tell me I was wrong about my experiences.

Tw for suicidal ideation, harassment, depression, and alter death.

Debra:

She was our first created alter, and the one we actually consciously purposefully created. In terms of us having a created alter, she’s probably the one who counts — LED’s experience is closer to a regular traumatic split, but I’ll get to him later.

Context for this time of my life: We were in high school. We had never heard of DID, we were being actively abused on two fronts (parental abuse and COCSA), and the only people who we felt understood us were folks much older than me online who I talked to on a daily basis. I thought my alters were just imaginary friends to represent my emotions. The voices I heard were just my emotions and feelings, very loudly, and I was imagining those emotions as people — like Inside Out!! And this was normal, my peer abuser told me. Yay! (Oof.)

Wade was our main fronter at home. He held onto a lot of our depression and dealt with the brunt of the current abuse from our parents. He was also dealing with gender issues and just generally was struggling. We started getting more and more suicidal and depressed, and our systems only way of handling that emotion was repression (via Numb’s emotional blocking or Sierra’s toxic optimism).

Finally, one night, Wade got the closest he ever got to self harm. It was nothing, really - the mark of it was gone within an hour - but it panicked him, and he reached out to our friend at the time.

This friend comforted him and told him that he needed to manage his depression somehow. We knew we couldn’t get therapy, so he suggested something he’d heard of before, about parts therapy. AKA, IFS. “Your depression is a part of you. What you need to do is talk to it. Imagine a person; someone who is all of those depressing thoughts. And talk to that person; why do they treat you that way?”

Those aren’t direct quotes. In all actuality, all of this is so blurry. I was so fucked up and stressed, it’s not hard to know I split. But the thing is, Debra’s split was entirely different than any other split I’ve had. All of my other alters, it was… one second they’re not there, the next they are.

Debra didn’t do that. When Wade imagined someone to talk to, it wasn’t in our innerworld. It was in a different space, where we imagine our thoughts happening. Deb was entirely imaginary, and she seemed to say things as I thought them. Each negative thought I had was suddenly her saying them. (Sometimes, it seemed almost as if she would say the thought before I had it.) For every night for a week, they talked — though, it was more Debra talking and us listening and feeling worse about ourselves.

That first conversation, I remember Wade feeling better — empty, but not suicidal. After imagining Debra for that first time, Wade only felt non-suicidal if she was talking to him. Sometimes that didn’t even help, because really, she was just imagined — we were planning her thoughts. Until, suddenly, we weren’t anymore.

Side note: Deb is the first marked hallucination we have had. We were walking home from the bus stop, which was always inherently dissociative for us, and we looked over at our house. Out of the corner of our eyes, we saw Deb, floating around the cars parked on the road. We panicked at that, but a second later, she was gone. We believed magic was real for a solid day after that, and that our imagination was coming to real life.

After that week, Debra was autonomous. She started to slip out of the void and into our innerworld. She started to harass Wade in a living hell 24/7, instead of from 11pm to whenever Wade finally passed out at night. And she hated a lot of us. She expressed that we should all kill ourselves so she could take over, because she was so much better than the rest of us. It was around this time that Wade made his trauma room in our innerworld and ceased fronting as often.

It only ended when Numb, fed up with her and panicked from even him feeling the suicidal ideation, killed her. Protector killing the persecutor, how classic. He crushed her to death innerworld.

Deb didn’t make a reappearance until college, when she emerged from dormancy. But in the meantime, there are two blank years of my life after we killed Debra. I have so few memories from those years, I could count them on my hands. Clearly, killing her destabilized us, but if we hadn’t, I have no doubt I wouldn’t be alive today. She was succeeding in her goals, and it sounded logical to us at the time. We’ve worked hard to make peace with what happened.

LED:

College. We’re now self dx’d as having DID. We’re no longer around our peer abuser, and in fact had ‘broken up’ with her after she ‘crossed a line’. I was now an hour away from my parents (though I had to call them each night and drive home each weekend). I was living with my then-roommate-now-fiancé and I was best friends with the only person in my life who knew I had DID, who lived in a different dorm. We were convinced Rice was a host by people online, and we were in pro-endo spaces (though had yet to strongly participate in syscoruse spaces).

Deb came back. At the time, I was in a nice Singlet Era Lite(tm) — aka, Rice fronted almost constantly, until she would collapse and meltdown and then we would rapid switch for the next few days, only for Rice to power back to front. It was unstable, unhealthy, and an incredible burden on Rice (one she is still recovering from to this day). Until, one night (at 3am), Rice was on the verge of a mental collapse again. She was down on herself, convinced she was a failure.

And then Deb was there, telling her she was, telling her how worthless she was, and altogether making everything harder.

That summer, Deb would take to harassing Rice, in particular. We had a flawed idea from the systems we spoke to that Rice was the “original core identity” and that the goal of DID healing was to integrate* those identities into one. She wanted Rice to feel out of control, so Deb could take over as host. If she could just become the original identity somehow, then we could fuse and just be perfect like her.

The best way she could think to make Rice no longer be in control? Make Rice split. Force a split, make Rice create someone, just like how we’d made Deb, and make Rice realize she was pathetic.

So, the nightly torture began. No sleep until 3am most nights, passive influence of suicidal ideation, near constant whispering about our mistakes. And, long story short, one night it worked.

Rice finally had enough, and completely went dormant in her room. And, in her place, was LED. Not visualized like Deb had been, but planned by Deb, and made specifically to counteract her. Debra is a being of darkness and shadow; LED’s name is literally Light Emitting Diode. Debra is an ageless demon; LED is a 10 year old ray of sunshine.

Only… Debra came for him, said hello, and. Well. LED took one look at her, screamed so loud I thought it happened in real life, and shattered. Broke apart into a million pieces and went immediately dormant.

This shocked Debra enough to actually break through to her at least. Damage was done, though. A new split and two dormancies in one night. Deb retreated from the front and left everyone else to clean up the mess while she watched. Rice remained dormant for a few months, and would only come back for, at most, a few hours at a time before having a breakdown and leaving for, usually, around a half a year. LED didn’t come back for almost a year after that. Debra had a “come to Jesus” talk with our friend who was in the know, and she started helping out some.

Now:

They get along really well! It’s been years and years since those incidents. Deb feels guilt for what she did back then, but everyone’s forgiven her — LED being one of the first. He actually apologized to her for being scared. Goddamn sweet guy.

Both of them have adapted to the system, but needed time to adjust. LED adjusted in dormancy, whereas Debra had to adjust after she returned from dormancy. It was… incredibly unstable for us after Debra’s creation. Our therapist cites that as part of the risk of IFS with DID systems, and how it can lead to increase dissociative barriers. It did for us.

We call both created, because there was purpose behind their splits. Debra was imagined consciously, purposefully, to hold trauma. LED was purposefully made (even if unplanned, visually and personality wise) to make Rice feel worthless (and instead made her feel stronger… after a year or so). We also distinctly call both of them created traumagenic alters.

Whew. That was a long one. I’m gonna to rest after that…

[devilboyblues]

tw for cocsa, bullying, violence

all of this happened within a few years. i’ve kinda underestimated how much this stuff could affect me. maybe i need to deal with it. been only focusing on what the adults did to me, not my peers

i went on some sort of retreat with people my age. it was a long hiking journey and supposed to be a coming of age thing. i was the youngest there. this girl was immediately friendly. i noticed that she and her friends (who i thought were my friends) kept doing this uh... sign on their forehead. i asked about it, was told it was nothing. the girl (C) said that this other girl uh M hated me. M was fat, and slow. we were both the slowest. she was a target of ridicule, and since i was told she hated me, i joined in. 

there was some other BS but C says she wants to do something for me. she tells me to close my eyes. i feel something weird.. .down there. had no idea what it was, but it was in front of the others and i felt humilated because i knew enough that it was bad. shortly after that she mocks M for eating ice cream and i defend her. it all clicks into place. i talk to M and yep, C was pitting us against each other. she had turned the others against me, and M was one of the few that supported me. the sign i had been noticing? was a special signal among her in group about how much of a loser i was. 

a bit of an upside? when this came together, me, M, and an older girl (the oldest one there, and the only other POC) banded together and called her out on this. C had been trying to pit me and the older girl against each other too. we joined together at the end as buddies. 

but still. once i got older and figured out what she did to me (that... thing) in front of others i’ve felt ashamed

~

i was being heavily bullied at a new school i went to. yeah i was weird and depressed and one of the few poc so i was an easy target. it was also like really obvious i was gay and trans or at least gnc. (i never was good at hiding that stuff, partially because i didnt know you were supposed to for a long time). there was a group of boys that would harass me every time i passed by. usually targetting my looks, my sexuality (learned some new terms for being gay), or my mixed race. i fuicking lost it one time they said disgusting things about my parents 

anyway this group was part of my gym class, and i beg to get out of it because it was constant humiliation. so! i get a job working in the school office instead. it was pretty great, taught me some skills that have helped me professionally. except one part. every day i would have to deliver the absent/tardy slips to classrooms. one of them was shop class and an older boy from there liked trapping me against the wall. talking about what he would do to me. it was a terrifying mix of sexual and violent. i cant remember specific words which might be a blessing. he would say he was joking. i never reported him because i was terrified of what he would do to me if he found out i told. one time he said he would r*pe me and i stress vomited and found a way to have someone else take the attendance slips 

a good conclusion? well i told on the group of boys that was bullying me, and i retaliated against the guys in one class who were being racist and didnt get in trouble. that one guy? well. i told JUST enough to have someone else take the slip but no more. kinda wish i said more now but im not sure it would have gone well. 

~

i was at a camp. character building! i, stupidly, had a crush on a guy and let people know. im not sure if i told people or if i was just really bad at hiding things. i am notoriously bad at being subtle. anyway! this cute guy has just one hiccup. his friend is creepy as hell. oh right and i am a laughinstock of the entire camp. but before i knew this i would do whatever the friend told me to, to have a better chance with my crush. he would pull me into secluded areas, including one time a place explicitly called the makeout shack. he wanted me to tell him in explicit detail how i would fck his friend. he fixated on parts of my body. had a ... weirdly clinical view of how this fucking was supposed to go down, which i was too young to understand at the time. he was seriously weird in talking about body parts. he talked like that “fava beans and a nice chianti” guy. so even if i was too young to get what he was going at i was seriously creeped out. 

i asked the guy out, it went over like a fart. his “friend” keeps pushing me to do more. maybe demonstrate to him what i’d want to do to him. a actual friend stepped in and told him he was being massively creepy. he shut up, but it was the end anyway so? but thank you K, you are a real hero 

~ 

i had a best friend for years. this girl joins our school and decides im now her new best friend. not that unusual i guess except that she laid her claim to me by like hurting me and isolating me from my friends. wanted to do a blood ritual to bond us forever? shit was fucked. we also shared a racial heritage (not sure how to put) so i put up with this partially to have someone like me and she also said she would teach me about our culture. she forced me to do everything she asked like give her piggyback rides even tho i was much smaller. she degraded me in front of my friends. i am lucky i didnt lose my best friend. 

she invites me to her house. she keeps hounding me for a kiss. i have zero interest in this and keep dodging her. we are downstairs? and doing something with laundry idk and she slams me against the pool table. i remember my head cracking the pool table. i didnt think that could happen. she gets on top of me and ??? 

then later we are in her bedroom and i am rejecting her. she pulls out a knife and threatens to kill us both. i try to calm her down but tbh cuz of the stuff before i am seriously freaking out and i think i scream. something happens that her mom comes in the room and intervenes, calling my parents. i dont see her again after that

[a-trauma-fox]

i’m thinking about not knowing if i want stuff, specifically sexual stuff, or knowing too late. it’s really explicit under the cut so tw for cocsa, sexual abuse, emotional abuse, (falsely directed) misogyny and proceed with caution.

some time ago i thought about my first time again, with my then-bf. i think we had sex 2 times. i was 11 and he 12ish, maybe 13 actually, bc he was 1.5 yrs older than me and it was close to my 12th birthday.

he did push me into stuff. like kissing, with tongue, for hours when i didn’t like it (and i told him i didn’t like it, but he was like ‘come on, i like it so much’ and continued anyway. and i let him). i was hesitant before our first time, and it wasn’t my idea. he said a girl had let him do it before, that she’d been even younger than me (9) and it had been fine for her. it took a couple of weeks for him to convince me i think. i didn’t want to disappoint him. so finally we lay in bed naked, i was unsure. he showed me his penis, in a way too large condom, and said come onnn, he’s already waiting for you! and i was like i’m not sure this is a good idea but fine. and it was a mess, it hurt a lot.

once we had started the sex i continued - ‘for him’ because he wanted it so much and i wanted to feel wanted and i wanted to feel grown-up. we stopped after a while. i think it was pleasant for him, but he was too young to ejaculate or anything. it wasn’t pleasant for me. i thought it should have felt good though and that something probably was wrong with me. i felt used.

but i agreed again at least one time after that. i thought the second time probably wouldn’t hurt as bad bc i’d lost my virginity after all! and even by that age i was a sceptic but willing to give stuff second chances, and also an experience seeker, and thought maybe the second time could be overall more pleasurable for me. i don’t explicitly remember how hard he pushed for a second time, but i know he did push for it. and i still wanted to feel wanted and grown-up and thought i could handle it. and i didn’t want him to leave me because of this. not very surprisingly, the second time was disappointing again, i felt used again even though i had more part in it this time.

i don’t remember if there was a third time with him. he became really religious pretty soon after that and said jesus cured his adhd, so we couldn’t play gta on the computer anymore (which was actually my favorite thing to do with him). so i said alright, but you know then we can’t have sex as well because you know what jesus says about premarital sex. he was all ‘but but but’ and we were interrupted when my mom came to pick me up from his place. we broke up after that. i think he broke up bc of the sex thing, and i broke up because at the time i had this burning contempt for religion and especially religious hypocrisy. (i thought jesus didn’t give a shit about me grilling a bunch of pixel elvis impersonators with a pixel flamethrower. but i digress)

after that i decided that sex categorically wasn’t for me. that something must be wrong with me for not getting pleasure out of it. i somehow couldn’t bring myself to touch a penis until ten years later in my early twenties. before, at 15, i had a sort-of relationship with a girl 4 years older than me who kept touching me even though i didn’t want it and i lay there dissociated. i told her it was fine and i was sorry i didn’t feel the same way about her. at 16 i got really drunk with a boy around 18 and we started making out, then i burst into tears and told him i was broken and didn’t really want this, and we stopped. he sent me a patronising letter telling me i didn’t know what i wanted. then at 16-17 i had a boyfriend who was 22-23 and we were both unintersted in sex so that aspect was chill. at the time i was in a psych ward for the first time, and one of the therapists somewhere down the line asked me if i was sure i’d never been raped or something like it. i said yeah no, my first time was pretty early but just disappointing (’most first times suck don’t they? lol’) and then i decided sex wasn’t for me, but i was okay with that and everything was totally chill. i don’t know if she actually bought that, but she dropped the subject. would have been helpful if she’d told me what makes a sexual encounter nonconsensual. at 18 i had a bf who was 32 and with him i actually had the first orgasm with another person, though he emotionally manipulated me into having sex.

i ‘confessed’ that i had sex with him one night, maybe one or two years later at most, to my mother. i remember feeling a deep shame and i couldn’t stop crying. i think she stayed and tried to calm me down, but she didn’t really say anything that made me feel better. i expected her to be shocked or to say she was sorry that happened and she didn’t notice or something. but she sort of just... noted it? i had the feeling she didn’t really want to stay, she actually would rather go to bed than comfort me, but leaving would be too much of an asshole move so she stuck it out.

i actually don’t know why my parents never said anything to me and my first bf when i was 11. they must have known that we were lying in bed, kissing, for hours, sometimes only in our underwear. but they only gave us space to do whatever. i don’t remember them asking questions about what my boyfriend and i were doing. if i had an 11 year old child i definitely would ask that stuff to make sure they were okay? to make sure they knew it’s okay to say no if you feel uncomfortable for any reason at all? to make sure they didn’t do anything that’s really inappropriate for their stage of development, physically and psychologically? isn’t that what a parent should do?

i don’t know if my first time was cocsa. i don’t know if it was that bad. it certainly had some pretty unhealthy elements. it’s even harder to decide now in hindsight, because it happened during a time where i was deeply unhappy. i was bullied at school, which definitely was traumatic, robbed me fo sleep for years afterwards and screwed me up even more. i was really numb most of the time back then, and i suspect it’s the time i started dissociating (idk maybe i learned it earlier but i definitely knew how to do it when i was 11). i thought i was broken and a profoundly bad person, but at least had the decency to feel bad about it in contrast to the other children who i thought were even worse than me. i was really lonely and that boyfriend at least gave me closeness and attention, even if it was mainly to get in my pants. at the same time i was so numb that i didn’t care about a lot of things, and it took strong stimuli like video games to make me feel excited. i had a lot of anger inside me and got a punching bag because i thought i might lose it in school and kill another kid. at the same time i thought i was really grown up and could/had to handle everything on my own. i had mainly contempt for feelings and vulnerability, especially my own, so that didn’t help with learning self care.

anyway, back to that first time - i don’t remember if i just didn’t know what i wanted and went one step further, or if i wanted it to work and went one step further. i feel like if i wanted it to work, that makes it not sexual abuse, because i consented right? also if it really was so bad, why would i try it a second time? i know i wasn’t as opposed to the second time because i didn’t want to judge sex in general based only on the first time, and then there was the boyfriend who kept going on about it.

it’s actually a bit similar to my most recent affair that went really bad. it definitely involved some emotional abuse from him, and then we also had sex once. this time we’re both adults at least. i was falling for him hard and wanted it to work, but then he seriously crossed a line during sex and i couldn’t say no, i sort of froze and stuck it out. he definitely should have asked before what was okay and what was not, but he didn’t. and i chose to see where it would go, i even initiated the sex. my therapist asked me if it felt fitting to say “i felt raped by him”, and i didn’t know. that would depend on if it actually was rape, i thought. he didn’t even know what he did until i told him that part wasn’t consensual, that it hurt and gave me flashbacks and new triggers. i still don’t know what to call it, but am starting to make my peace with it anyway.

but i still wonder if that first time was sexual abuse or just poor boundaries on my part...

if you’ve made it this far, i’m sorry. since this is my place to dump stuff anonymously, please give me your two cents on that last question if you want. i tend to go around in circles in my mind with this stuff and could really use some input.

[traumabrained]

(1) TW COCSA? im pretty sure i ever initiated sexual stuff with my sibling when we were children and i have always been pushing the issue far back into my brain but seeing your blog made me realize maybe i deserve the chance to come to terms with the past. i never knew it was something common enough to be a named issue that brings related google results when you search it up. it pains me to read any article. its hard to even write this to you. i dont want to carry this burden forever.

(2) i feel guilty and embarrassed to the extreme, i think. i never took the time to try to understand how it made me truly feel. i don't know what to do. google only brought up advice for victims but what if you are the perpetrator??? how do i deal w this? what am i supposed to do? i don’t remember how / when it stopped. did my parents find out and made me stop? i don’t know but i’m terrified. there are so many things i don’t remember from that time.

(3) i wish things had gone differently. i don’t think i meant to hurt anyone. i wish someone had taken the time to speak to me and explain how things work but maybe someone did and i just repressed it? which was my goal? what do people remember? just how embarrassed do i need to feel? how can i be forgived w/o speaking about it with everyone involved, without asking a single question? how do i... i need to move out

i am really not the person to ask. you definitely do need to move out. i don’t think you can be forgiven without speaking about it--you need to talk to your siblings, because this might have (as in, there’s a high chance) traumatized them. but if you try to bring it up and they dont want to talk about, then leave it alone.

no idea how to make this better, but i advise that you see a therapist, who should be able to help you. just remember that you cant make amends just by feeling guilty, it comes from fixing things.

[traumasurvivorshelpingsurvivors]

TW: COCSA, incest

Looking for reassurance/validation?

I'm in a similar situation as the other COCSA anon. When I was 6 or 7, I'd play "doctor" with my cousin who was 5 or 6 at the time. We would both take turns being the doctor and their mother even caught us once and didn't say anything.

I never thought of it as sexual and genuinely thought it was normal. I was also being sexually abused by a parent at the time so that might be a reason why I thought it was normal. I'd never force them to do it and we would stop the moment one of us wanted to from what I remember.

We both are very close and we've spoken about it and I've apologised multiple times and they said they still love me and that we both thought it was a game but I don't deserve their love. I was older. I should have known better and I did all this to them.

Sometimes I feel like it was just exploring our bodies but other times I feel like it traumatised me too which isn't fair. I'm the abuser. Just because we both did it to each other doesn't mean I can be traumatised by it. I should have known better.

Hey anon,

I'm sorry you're feeling this way. Please don't be so hard on yourself. You were a child. Give yourself the same empathy you would another child.

From what you've written here, I don't think you abused your cousin, nor were you in any way the perpetrator. A 6 or 7 year old is not very different from a 5 or 6 year old. You were both children. You were both the same. You did not have power over your cousin. You did not force your cousin to do anything. I know all of this is hard to believe sometimes, but please repeat this to yourself and remind yourself of it all. You were playing a game and that's okay.

It's great that you were able to talk to your cousin about this. It sounds like that went well and that your cousin does not consider this to be a cocsa situation.

It's a complicated situation. If you feel that this traumatized you, that's valid. If your negative feelings about it are based on shame and guilt, please try to talk to a mental health professional about this. You have no reason to feel shame or guilt. You're being incredibly hard on yourself. It is possible to think about this experience differently and see it more clearly. Let yourself think and feel without judging yourself.

You literally, and I mean literally, could not have known better than you did. You were doing the best you could with what you knew.

Here are some links about what is healthy between children, and what is cocsa: One and two.

Instead of punishing yourself in any way, try giving yourself love and care. I know it isn't easy and it will take time, but remember that you are not a bad person. Remind yourself of that.

- Mod Misa