When I was about 4 a 9-year old boy performed an oral sex act on me in the bathroom and I, ahem, reciprocated though I can't recall if that was my idea or a suggestion of his. I don't recall feeling threatened or afraid and at the time I liked it, but still felt an uneasy sense that I probably shouldn't be doing it. He was the son of a family friend and I think this only happened once, but can't be sure. I've struggled for years with feelings of worthlessness and unexplained anger. Could that be related to this event? I feel a wee bit sad about it as that lad likely was getting molested.

7538189
I would say even if some wouldn't categorize it as sexual abuse, it affected you in a negative way that would qualify it as such. I think it sounds like sexual abuse

Legally speaking you're out of any time limit were anything can be done.

But mentally? You can always work on making yourself better. What someone else did doesn't define you. You can be better than anyone, if you convince yourself. Dpnt make excuses for the other lad. If you get to a good mental place and want to offer him a hand up, good for you. But you come first

It's a sensitive subject and something that can take a long time to rise above but you deserve help. More importantly you deserve happiness.

7538189 If you solicited a 9-year-old child for a sex act, you're legally a pedophile. But since you weren't of accountable age yet, you're legally off the hook, so don't worry about it. Let's just hope you didn't cause any traumas to the child.

7538211
Did you miss the part where OP was FOUR YEARS OLD his own self?

7538211
Really insensitive given that OP likely has trauma from the incident.

7538189
I'm still working through my childhood sexual abuse issues but one thing I've noticed is that while the event(s) weren't necessarily super traumatic in the moment, a lot of the trauma and long lasting self-hatred and disgust came from the realization of what had happened to me and how my body was violated as I got older and began to learn more about sex, and what consent actually is. Whether or not you label the incident as sexual abuse is up to you imo. Labels don't always help things. Some people find it helps them find closure, but for some people it's better to focus on moving on rather than trying to label everything in the past.

And yeah, you are right that he was most likely being molested... Sometimes kids explore with other kids but from what I've researched after a certain age difference it's usually more than that. As a child I have admittedly done things with younger kids before I knew what I was doing and a lot of guilt comes from that. I don't know exactly what happened but there's a good deal of evidence from extensive psychological testing that I was heavily sexually abused at a very young age. People suck.

7538189

Could that be related to this event?

It could be. It's impossible for any of us to say if this incident is the sole reason for those feelings. An incident like this definitely won't help anyone's mental state, however. Have you discussed this anyone in real life?

He was the son of a family friend and I think this only happened once, but can't be sure.

Perhaps a controversial question to ask, but do you know why he did this?

I ask because he was only nine. At that young of an age, many kids don't have a sense of right vs wrong. Also, his actions may have been fueled by his own trauma.

I bring this up because I was sexually abused as a kid. The one who did it was an women in her early 20s who was also a family friend. Long story short, this woman had oppressive Punjabi parents who didn't allow her to have any romantic partners, or hang out with any friends ever. Since they were Sikh, they didn't allow her to shave any facial hair, so she was forced to have a partial mustache and beard, which caused her to get bullied a lot. And if she stood up against her parents, they'd stab a pen or pencil into her hands and forearms. Saying she was emotionally unstable would be an understatement.

What she did was obviously wrong, but knowing why she did it helped me overcome any sense of trauma.

7538211
Maybe one day you'll stop being a reddit debate lord and be able to properly read a post. Until then I hope you fall over and roll your ankle when you crawl out of bed at 3am hunting for shredded cheese and end up rolling on the ground in pain for an hour you gormless minger.

7538330 7538403 7538441 Often the trauma doesn't steam from the negativity of an event but from the perception of the event that gets created after.

So, if being a victim is the perception that causes trauma, why fuel it further? Wouldn't it be better to just cure the problem at its core which is the perception itself? And on that note, could you really still perceive yourself as a victim if you perceive yourself as the perpetrator instead?

7538456

Wouldn't it be better to just cure the problem at its core which is the perception itself? And on that note, could you really still perceive yourself as a victim if you perceive yourself as the perpetrator instead?

Solving the problem of perception by creating another problem of perception is not really solving anything, though. So, even if this worked as you propose, you'd cure nothing and might just as well worsen the situation, since being seen as the perpetrator is usually far worse than being a victim.

7538474 I don't see how solving the problem of perception by boosting said perception is a better alternative.

7538474
Look, I hate to be that guy, but why the fuck are we tolerating this sort of behavior in the first place? Even if this somehow doesn't violate any site nor any group rules, I certainly think it's a gross violation of the spirit of the rules, and should under no circumstances be tolerated.

This is anti-depression ponies, we can't have people talk about trauma if they'll be attacked over it, especially when, no matter how you look at it, they're the victim.

7538480
You're only boosing a different perception though, one that has so many negative connotations that pretty much anything is a better alternative. The reasonable solution here is the OP getting therapy or otherwise dealing with the troublesome feelings, regardless of whether they are an aftermath of this incident or not.

I've warned you about this before. Remember what group you're in and what kind of people you're dealing with. Distraught people come seeking help here, and while some humour, snark or tough love might be in place here and there if it fits, there's such a thing as reading the room and knowing when to keep your mouth shut. You don't want someone to hurt themselves because of your reckless comment, do you?

7538481
See my comment below yours. This is not the first time Bad Dragon has done this, and I'm slowly losing patience.

7538481 7538482 The way I see it, you guys are trying to hurt 7538189 by increasing the trauma. I'm trying to help by decreasing the trauma. The way you talk about my post is how I see your post.

7538189
Well, it's a thing with some murky areas you have. Let's try going over it.

First, I think we might have to touch upon the subject of responsibility. Was either one responsible for what happened? It's the first murk we have to trudge through. You don't remember whose idea it was. You both were extremely young kids. Sure, he was older, but at nine years old? I gotta be honest, I think at nine years I was more of an automaton than a living person. Zero thought. Not everyone is like this though, so... but again, could that kid grasp the nuances of what you were doing? Almost certainly not, just as you could not. I think it would be foolish to look for a 'perpetrator' in this case. I'd mostly consider it as having two victims at best, though victims in the sense of youth and inexperience exploring and trying stuff they don't understand.

I think Bad Dragon might have grazed the core of the issue, and Sleepy Panda grasped much more solidly. Perception. Can you tell if the sense of unease was because you felt the act was wrong or was it just a sense of 'being naked is naughty?' as it tends to be given to kids? Again, I don't think that at that age you would have been able to grasp that the act was something you shouldn't be doing because of all the reasons that we, as functional adults, can understand. I don't believe so. A general sense of 'I might be in trouble' maybe, at that age.

But you grew up. You remembered this as you grew. You remember it now. And as you grew, you perceived it otherwise, seen through the lens of new understanding. But lenses do have a tendency to somehow distort the view if not applied properly. If the feelings of worthlessness and anger stem from it, what if their origin is how you subconsciously viewed it after the fact? That you (pure speculation here) receive the feeling of worthlessness by viewing what you easily did as a 4 year old, or got convinced to do, as though it happened to one with later mental development and should have had better understanding? That the anger might come from viewing it later and placing it—mistakenly—in a more current age context subconsciously? That you feel as this because it's how you perceive you would have felt if it happened, say, now and project?

What happened might not be sexual abuse. Even if the 9 year old had issues and... replicated traumas, I don't think we can call him anything but a victim. If a truck hits a car and that car hits a pedestrian, the car is not at fault for hitting the pedestrian. But we also don't have the full picture. You don't have the full picture.

I think you should let this go as far as an experience that reflects on you and how it affects you goes. Don't let it define any part of you. Should you feel worthless for this? No. You were a kid, and all kids are dumb and do stupid crap. Should you feel angry you did or got into doing that? No. You were a kid, and kids do stupid crap, either you or the other.

But who you are now knows better, and what happened then is not a reflection of who you are. What happened then doesn't fly forward through time to set upon you as if it happened now. Not unless you let it to.

Obviously, if you feel very conflicted or this weighs on you, you should talk it over with a good therapist. If nothing else, you could identify those feelings you described and address them, because they are here now and they are what matter.

7538488
I know you could have made your point in a better way. I know you're a smart guy, so I don't quite see how you thought that a thread where the words 'sexually abused,' 'sex act,' '4 years old,' and 'worthlessness,' is a thread where tact is completely unnecessary. I had quite the respect for you but you made it quite diminish here. You could have done this a lot better, dude, and you shouldn't have needed me or others to tell you "sensitive topic, don't be a fucking asshole!"

This fuckery stops right here and right now. I do NOT want this to devolve any further.

Like Everfree said, learn to tell what is needed and when it is needed.

7538488

I'm trying to help by decreasing the trauma.

Look, I don't think that stating "Yes, you're the victim!" helps anybody. I never said that it does. I don't think that it'd inevitably increase the trauma, but it doesn't really help matters either. It's really hard to say anything about what happened, given that the OP himself barely remembers it. As I've said before, the only reasonable thing here is dealing with the present issues, regardless of what's their source.

If you really think that your approach of "Oh, don't worry, you're not a victim, you're the culprit!" helps decrease the trauma, then... I don't know. We probably live in a different universe or something. It might seem funny to you, or maybe you think that if you were in the OP's place, hearing such a thing would help you. I don't know, I cannot see into your mind. Still, you can clearly see that what you did apparently upset a lot of people, to the point of some (such as 7538481) perceiving it as a personal attack. I know how you act, and I don't think you meant it as an attack--Then again, what do I know?--but it still means that your behaviour may not only negatively affect the OP, but also discourage others from posting here when they have some sort of issue because they'll be afraid of you popping up with a similar comment.

7538501 Yes, it's true that I don't subscribe to the circle-jerk woke tactics and don't dance around the subject trying to be politically correct.

A was labeled as bad, and B was to the opposite of A, so I promoted B in order to fix A. In my mind, this is as clear as 1 + 1 = 2 and the first go-to solution a brain should have thought of.

But you're right. Clearly, we don't understand each other and we probably never will, so it's better to just stop. I'll refrain from commenting anymore on this thread unless somepony specifically calls me out to do so.

7538493
This is very helpful advice. As you said, I think it has a lot more to do with me placing it in an "adult" context, when at the time, it was likely two kids exploring something that the older child likely had an experience with he shouldn't have had.

7538408
Thank you for sharing your experience and advice.

7538403
Unfortunately, people do indeed suck. Thank you for sharing your thoughts.

7538488
You're the only motherfucker dense enough in this site that I've seen openly advocate for Eugenics. I legit cannot tell your mouth apart from your ass with how much shit and bile you spew wherever you fucking go. I suggest you shove your hands up your ass, hook your legs under your arms and promptly roll the fuck out of this site like a sonic character.

7538693
I understand why you're upset, but the disagreement was more or less already dealt with. There's no need to fuel this thread further by resorting to personal attacks.

7538538

No problem

7538189
Child-on-child sexual abuse is a real phenomenon and problem. You were younger and more vulnerable than the other child and had no knowledge about what was happening or the appropriate reactions or ways to get help. No children should be having that kind of contact with one another; it isn’t healthy for them. You should contact a therapist or mental health resources in your area and see how they can help explain the issues with this and how to process it.