Читать книгу I Am Nobody. Confronting the Sexually Abusive Coach Who Stole My Life онлайн

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I had previously always thought, never doubted, that I was heterosexual, and had never for a moment thought otherwise. I had never fantasized about anything other than girls and women and, while I was quite shy, I was very interested in girls. So it was confusing for me to find my body responding to him physically. I try to make it easier on myself now by noting that the average teenage male can have an erection simply because a breath of wind hits the right place. This protects me from facing a difficult reality that I continue to grapple with to this day, notwithstanding all of the therapy and the greater insight I now have into how the body operates. Whatever he was doing to me, I was responding to it physically.

Although I had always thought that I was heterosexual, evidence to the contrary was piling up. The result was a great deal of confusion and a huge impact on my personal development and self-image.

The easiest part of assessing the impact of sexual abuse is considering the actual physical actions themselves. Still, words like massaging, touching, fondling, groping, masturbating, oral sex, and ejaculating don’t come close to describing the horror of what was going on. And all victims, whatever they have experienced, live with that horror of the physical actions. There is no erasing the memories, and until they invent a pill that allows you to control your own dreams and nightmares, I will never know from night to night whether I will or won’t revisit those horrors in my sleep.