Skeletons

The author, Neil Strauss, wrote: “Every family has a skeleton in the closet. Some are more closely guarded. Hope you find yours, before it finds you.”

I had sex with my stepbrother.

This is my skeleton, Neil, or at least an arm or a leg bone — a family sexual secret (most of them are as you pointed out.)

Our parents met when I was 4 years old and married almost immediately. We became a blended family of 6 — my new stepmom, her daughter (age 3), her son (age 7), my dad, my brother (age 7), and me (age 5). A year later, my littlest sister was born to make 7 of us.

My stepbrother, Chris, was 2 years older than me. He was defiant from the moment I met him, always getting into trouble. At the age of 8, he set his bedroom curtains on fire. At 9, he moved the fire to the toilet paper in the school’s bathroom which resulted in suspension. At 11, our parents put him in a psychiatric hospital. He ran away a week later with a girl who had been admitted to the separate girls’ unit. They didn’t get far before they were returned to their respective units.

Before fires, suspensions, and psychiatric hospitals, he entertained himself by snooping in our parents’ bedroom, rifling through their drawers and closets. He liked to show me what he found on these excursions. On one such occasion, he showed me a red, rectangle tin canister, the kind you usually get at Christmas filled with cookies or nuts. There were no cookies or nuts in this tin. Instead it cradled a different kind of goody, one of an adult variety. He found our parents’ stash, and this was the moment I learned they smoked pot.

On another one of his expeditions, my stepbrother dragged me to our parents’ bedroom to divulge his latest find. He told me to sit next to him on the bed. He opened a book, and together we turned page after page of men and women depicting sexual positions with explicit instructions on how to carry each one out. He suggested we try some. We both undressed and simulated what we saw on the pages. At ages 5 and 7, it was childish curiosity, innocent exploration. Soon we grew bored and put our clothes back on. We never discussed it again.

Our parents worked shifts. Often one would be sleeping during the day to work all night. It was hard enough keeping a house with 5 kids quiet enough to sleep so we weren’t permitted to have friends over. We also weren’t allowed to go to friends’ houses because our parents weren’t awake to keep tabs on us. So we were left with each other, confined to our house and backyard. Many times we let the TV babysit our youngest sister, Kathy. Her favorite movies at age 3 were Little Mermaid and Dirty Dancing. To this day, I cannot watch Dirty Dancing without seeing my sister shaking her diapered, toddler booty to “I’ve Had the Time of My Life.” While she was busy shaking her booty, the four older kids would each take a corner of the living room and tag team wrestle, WWE-style. I always wrestled my stepsister which inevitably ending in her crying.

Another way we would entertain ourselves was by playing school or house. One day, Chris suggested house. He set the domestic scene: He and I were married and my stepsister, Barbara, was our daughter. He told Barbara it was a school day, and he would drive her to school. He dropped her off at school (my bedroom) and returned home (Barbara’s and Kathy’s bedroom which was right next to mine.)

When he returned “home” I asked “What are we going to do today?”

“We should catch up on our sleep,” he responded. (I guess even in a pretend marriage my husband could not be a responsible, working adult.) Barbara and Kathy slept in bunk beds. He pulled me onto the floor under the bottom bunk so we could pretend sleep. Soon he rolled over on top of me saying we should pretend having sex too. Awkwardly he moved his body, rocking on top of me. I felt his weight crushing me, and it made me uncomfortable. Not just physically but emotionally too. I didn’t say anything though. I just went along with it. As a result of other traumas, including physical and emotional abuse, my self-esteem had already been stripped away at 10 years old. (I am being generous by assuming my parents even built it up at one time.) By then I believed that my voice and feelings didn’t matter. Many times I felt that my vocal cords were constricted and of no use to me. My role in the family was to keep my mouth shut and never complain.

Not long after his boyish attempt of pretend sex, our play session ended to my relief. It was short-lived; however, as it resumed the following day. When Chris suggested house again, I showed reluctance. Chris was not only deviant, he was conniving and manipulating. He met my reluctance with an ultimatum: Either I play house or he would tell our parents what I had done. To this day, I don’t remember what I had done that he could use for blackmail. Back then, I was naïve and scared. I didn’t want to be punished for anything, especially after the beatings I had already been given for minor infractions. So I went along with it, thinking it was safer than facing the wrath of a parent.

This play session started just like the last except Chris became bolder with our pretend sex. He pulled his pants down and said “suck my wiener.” I shook my head no. Again he used the ultimatum that I either do it or he would tell on me. In retrospect, it is easy to ask why I didn’t just tell my dad what he was making me do. Surely whatever he was using to blackmail me with wasn’t even a fraction as bad as what he was doing to me in that moment. My truth and reality then was one of fear and aloneness.

I feared our parents. I didn’t feel safe in my own home. I suffered emotional and physical abuse at their hands. Why would they protect me now? I was already developing my independence and learning that I could only rely on myself. And in that moment, I did just that. I relied on my own truth based on my experiences up to that point. I knew that if he snitched, I would be punished. If I sucked his wiener, I would only be uncomfortable. So I bent over and put his wiener in my mouth.

I held his wiener with my right hand and brought my mouth down to cover as little of the tip as possible so as to still count as “sucking his wiener.” Imagine sucking on a piss-flavored lollipop. That’s what it was like. It was soft, flaccid, smelly, and tasted like piss. I hated it. It filled me with shame, but I said nothing. I learned my lessons well. In our house, you didn’t complain. You just sucked it up, even when it’s a wiener, apparently.

After that, Chris had my number. He no longer used playing house to connive sexual acts from me. He would catch me alone and manipulate me into doing whatever he wanted. Sometimes he would pull my pants down, make me lie on my stomach, put his penis between my butt cheeks, and rock back and forth. Then he graduated to putting it into my vagina.

One day we were under the bunk beds when my oldest brother, Doug, walked into the room. He saw me bent over Chris with his pants down, my mouth around his penis. Shock flashed in Doug’s face as he quickly backed out of the room and closed the door. I shot to my feet and ran after him asking him “Are you going to tell on me?” and pleading, “Please don’t tell on me!” He said he wouldn’t. I was scared, embarrassed and full of shame.

A few weeks later my stepmom, Cindy, called (or more aptly yelled) at all of us to get in the living room. She was on another one of her war paths. We were all familiar with what was coming. She enjoyed ripping into us like a football coach in a locker room who is unhappy with his team’s performance. She would beret us, yell at us, and tell us how awful and worthless we were. Then dole out household chores so she could sit on the couch watching her soap operas. Her favorite was “Days of Our Lives.” I still cringe when I glimpse it on TV or social media today as she is so intertwined with the soap opera that it evokes negative, horrible feelings I felt back then.

That particular day included a twist. “It has come to my attention that some of you are having sex,” she said. My head dropped back and rested on the couch. My face burned red with shame and embarrassment. I wanted nothing more than to disappear into the couch. Vanish. Be gone from that very moment. She continued, “All I am going to say is that if your father finds out, he will kill someone.” Then she excused us so we could start our chores. That was it. Nothing else was ever said out loud and no one ever acknowledged the incestuous relationship again.

At the time, I felt relieved. I could run and hide from my shame and embarrassment. I could detach, act like it was no big deal. It wasn’t really sexual abuse. It was nothing.

But that was a lie. It was something. No one was there to protect that little girl, to protect me. In fact, just the opposite happened. A parental unit, someone who is supposed to protect me, blatantly left me to the wolf. I received a message that carried with me into adulthood: I am not worthy. I am useable, disposable. I don’t matter. Chris was also sending me his own message: I am a sexual object. I am only loveable and wanted as a sexual being.

Our sexual encounters lasted a year or two and never progressed beyond that. It ended when our parents divorced and Chris no longer had access to me. But the damage to my psyche was already engrained. My ideas on sex were skewed from age 10. Sex was never about two people expressing deep love. Sex was power, validation that I was worthy, that I mattered, that I was good enough, that I was desirable.

So I became a “slut” as I sought out sex for validation to feel good, worthy, desirable, loved, wanted.

As for my skeleton, it did eventually find me. I actively sought it for years before I had the courage to open the right door. When I did it took me on a roller coaster ride of highs and lows leading me closer to knowing my authentic self and loving that self.

Only recently have I realized the impact Chris had on me and how he helped set the platform of what my future relationships would be like. It has only been in the last two years that I have acknowledged that the abuse even happened. And only in recovery have I found the courage to talk about it. In many ways, I still have recovery work to do. I still cannot truly connect to my feelings. Growing up in that environment I shut down my feelings to protect myself. I especially detach from pain. The few times I have talked about this, I have no emotion. In fact, I believe I have blocked many of my interactions with Chris as I can remember very little details which is not like me. I usually surprise people by remembering the most mundane details that they had already forgotten.

I wish I had the opportunity to confront Chris, ask him what he was going through. Our home was obviously chaotic and dysfunctional. I see him as a victim too. I believe he was crying out for attention with all his deviant behavior, including his sexual abuse towards me. Unfortunately I will never know. He committed suicide at 26 years old. He was found dead of a drug overdose in a hotel room, his body on the floor between the toilet and the tub with Vaseline on his penis and a belt around his neck.

Much later I felt shame around the sexual promiscuity in my teenage and young adult years as I sought to reenact my childhood trauma. Sex was the only way I felt needed, wanted, loved, and validated. And with my low self-esteem, I needed a lot of validation.

During recovery, I was consumed and almost swallowed whole with self-hatred as I became aware of my unhealthy relationship to men and sex. I felt jealous, sad, unworthy, rejected, unwanted, and used. All of these emotions overwhelmed me as I was accustomed to blocking them and feeling numb instead. They jumbled and mixed together to create rage directed towards myself. It was poisonous. I hated everything around me.

I was jealous of all the women who were able to maintain platonic friendships with these same men that I acted out with. It was incredulous to me that they could be friends with a man without it leading to sex or at least having sexual tension. I believed I would always be a whore in these men’s eyes, an easy lay. Every other great quality about me was just inconsequential background noise, meaningless, overshadowed. Once I crossed that sexual boundary with them there was no going back. My sexual promiscuity trumped everything else about me. It superseded everything. What I once sought to feel validated now made me feel INvalidated. I hated myself for this.

I blamed myself. I projected this sexual energy and men responded. I created this situation by my own actions. I burned the friendship bridge for my own selfish needs of feeling good, worthy, desirable, loved, wanted. The harsh truth is that the burned bridge was likely permanent and those feelings of validation only lasted temporarily. I hated myself because the opportunity to know a genuine friendship with some of these otherwise seemly good men was gone due to my own lack of self-respect.

One of the things I learned in recovery is that loss is part of the process. The only way I could work past the self-hatred was through acceptance. Accepting myself and accepting the loss that I had created. If the loss of friendship was meaningful, then I had to grieve it. It was the only way through. I cried for the pain I self-created. I cried for projecting this false image of myself that inevitably pushed men away from me in the end. I cried for my self-alienation that kept me from knowing closeness and unconditional love of another human being. There is also the loss of the childhood that I should have had but I am still not in touch with those feelings enough to properly grieve it yet.

My childhood was far from ideal. It is easy to reflect back and become angry at the injustice; however, anger is of no use. It doesn’t change the fact that it happened. Instead I look at the positive things this journey brought me. I am a firm believer that nothing is inherently good or inherently bad. One exists because the other also exists. It exists because we made it so. We cannot know good without knowing bad, but good and bad just IS. Naming something good or bad only denotes a certain feeling because we pass judgment on it. It has no power until we declare it good or bad. I can’t change the past. It just IS. If I choose to accept it this way without judging it as good or bad, then I am more open to seeing the positive things that came out of my childhood. I am more open to seeing how my childhood developed character strengths that have helped me excel in adulthood. With this perspective I can live in the present without the past encroaching on me, engulfing my current light with past darkness.

When people describe me the first two adjectives used is invariably strong and independent. Those characteristics developed from the chaotic, unstable childhood I lived. I’ve had to rely on myself for so long at such a young age that I developed this faith in myself that I can do anything. Consequently, I take risks where others fear. I also developed skills to better handle a crisis. A crisis is easier when you have the tools to shut down emotions long enough to take necessary action to move through it. The trick is knowing when to turn my emotions back on to properly process it so it doesn’t fester into something much bigger.

Above all this journey taught me about self-love. Loving one’s self is paramount to loving another and knowing true intimacy and connection. For me this is vital to living a fulfilled life, one of a more efficacious, mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual self. One of my favorite quotes that adequately reflects my journey is from the movie, Silver Linings Playbook, when Tiffany says, “I was a big slut, but I’m not anymore. There will always be a part of me that is sloppy and dirty, but I like that, just like all the other parts of myself.”

*Names have been changed to protect the innocent. If your name wasn’t changed, you’re not that innocent.