It depends on several factors, which is why people experience it so differently over the course of their memories/lifetimes. For me the sexual abuse by two older cousins, from ages 5 to 15, is fragmented. I don’t have full memories until I was about 8–9 years old but before I have fragments. The fragmentation also includes the possibility of other family members. Bluntly, I’ve come to believe that a section of my family, there were 7 siblings plus cousins, all had some sort of sexual entanglement and I got drawn into it and then targeted by the two cousins.
I say targeted because then as I got older and they were babysitting me, one deliberately threw a rock at me while playing—-luckily it resulted in a small scar under my eye and not permanent damage. In retrospect, I can see in juvenile ways how “they had it out for me”.
In my late teens, my mother was in a car accident, that one of the abusing cousins witnessed and later for the civil suit settlement, she planned to give him tens of thousands for his testimony. I intervened, told her about the abuse,; she confronted both of their mothers and one cousin apologized to her. Their abject narcissism on both of their parts——that he apologized to her and she accepted—-while, I, the victim, wasn’t included in the apology about my rape.
Even farther years later, having messed up her money, she asked one of the abusers for money—-rocking off of his guilt at abusing me——the money from his mother’s death, though of course he had stolen savings bonds the week she died, went and got high on crack and missed the funeral. Everyone mistook me for him at the funeral. My mother was angry at me for not pressing him for money but amazingly her Pastor counseled me that it was fruit of a poisoned tree and that my parents financial woes were based upon their laziness and to walk away. I did. They lost everything even getting the money.
Yes, a messed up family.
What I did in response was learn how to work hard and smart, started several businesses and got out and away from them all at 21. I visited sporadically but even found short contact, even when my mother was terminal, was a mess stew of family dysfunction.
Luckily in my teens, as my parents divorced we did family therapy, before 21/college, which is what brought me to telling my mother about the abuse. I’d also been attending Incest Anonymous groups for 2 years prior (she thought I might be HIV+; I’m not), then in college I did a college incest therapy group and for a year each decade in my 20s and 30s, I’ve had a private therapist. The summation of that, plus for decades running workshops/groups myself on all manner of subject, specifically sexuality, sex, gender, race, etc. has liberated me in deep ways from the abuse.
We Cellularly Renew
I also contextualize biologically that every 7 years, we renew cellularly—-what science is trying to unravel is how to teach those renewing cells to not keep advancing in “age”. But to my point, I am Kyle # 6—-the abuse happened to Kyle # 1 & 2. It didn’t happen to me now—-which means I have the choice of what to “carry over”—-by that I mean not just emotionally but in memories and attachment to.
At 30 I got into an argument in an all White town with a neighbor, on his property, and had to go sit in the pokey—-for what I thought would be a day at most (I’m from NYC), it turned into weeks and during that time, to calm their psychotic population, they give out anti-psychotics to all the jailed folk. The kicker is that if you’re not psychotic, it drives you psychotic. I’d never done drugs or had alcohol to excess (partially because of a family history of addiction and accompanying my mother to AA and NA meetings for 4+ years as she turned around her life) so I thought I was getting Advil PM.
I went on the Express train to Funkytown.
But the zonkers experience, locked in a room/cell for hours on end with nothing to occupy myself with, forced me to meditate, do tai chi, qi gong, that I’d been studying for years. What I felt inside of me though, and had felt for years was—-a crack—-the best way to describe it was that as a vase, I had a crack in me. I believe it was the emotional wound of the abuse.
But to do deep psychic surgery on one’s self, what is required is the removal of the Ego—-which is what the anti-psychotic drugs did for me. I had enough awareness and self awareness to attack the crack to heal it.
I changed myself on a fundamental level.
What I believe occurred on multiple levels was I was in a place full of insane folk and it forced me to confront being deeply vulnerable. No one knew where I was, I was out of contact with family and friends and eventually I got it as a “spiritual message” to heal myself, to look for the reason why God would put me there—-that I had all the tools to help and protect myself, in the literal lions den.
I also believe that we, me, you, are our spiritual selves along a continuum. That our souls/spirits have no regard of time so Me Then was also being dealt with by Me Now and inversely, Me Then could help/heal Me Childhood/Past.
Kyle #5 had the maturity and time to sift through the memories normally blocked by the Ego to help heal Kyle # 1 & 2.
I don’t quite have words for it, but I had days to do it. I would also throw out that though I didn't know it then some of it that I ad hoc did involved breathwork (which I’d learned from Tony Robbins Personal Power) and eye tracking finger/object while re-experiencing the memories. Robbins also specifically teaches ways to dissolve/resolve painful memories that I use to this day.
What The Abuse Felt Like
Often in how media shows abuse is as a horrible violation, and it is. But perpetrators prey upon quiet, smart, isolated children (I’m an only child and obviously even then smart/prodigious being ahead several grades) so we’re socially awkward or odd. Which means we don’t have lots of people to tell or compare experiences with. In childhood we’re also experimenting with sex and sexuality and gender so when predators seduce, and make no mistake they creep-seduce, it’s hard for a child to recognize the grooming period up to the actual sexual contact.
What I remember most was confusion because I was young and this “game” seemed intimate but then they eschewed me, would push me away out of their guilt and shame; that it was a secret. That was both physically hurtful and emotionally hurtful/confusing.
Compounded to that my whole family had some level of substance abuse issues and dysfunctional behavioral ways, until my mother broke the cycle in my mid teens—-so I was already in a dysfunctional Disneyland family system. It took years to pull my identity away from their madness to even understanding that I had a good memory because I was often undermined by my parents so they didn’t have to deal with the ramifications (guilt, shame) of their drug/alcohol addiction. (“No, it didn’t happen that way.”)
As a big secondary issue, to have same sex contact so young, plus also my experimentations with girls, friends in school, male and female, and then girlfriends, meant that my teens were a time where I really had to learn how to isolate what was me-choice, forced upon me and negative-bad.
I had to pointedly learn demarcation between sex and my own sexuality-choices/identity. Which I would say is what makes my identity so solid today—-I had to build it against something both familiar and wrong. Which meant that, from what I’ve seen of thousands of other LGBTSGL in workshops, I really dealt with the identity doubt and confusion to achieve sexuality clarity.
“Born this way” is far too simplistic and not something I find an interest or attachment to. I have chosen and designed my sexuality and I fully choose to enact it. And it’s also, beyond my professional work, no one’s business for me to seek tolerance nor acceptance about. It is. Trees are. You are. Just as what Is doesn’t ask for permission to exist and operate, as long as it’s not harming others—-I have little to no interest in anyone’s “thoughts” on my identity. (I personally think that’s a big capitulating error on the part of LGBTSGL folk—-allowing others in discussion to their identity/sexuality choices. Yes, I digress.)
I have always thought, even as a child ,before I completely understood it—-”I am sovereign unto myself.”
Perhaps it is something I time travelled back to myself during healing that crack at 30? Something so simple yet profound.
Another diddy: I’ve had since a child: “This is not the way the world is supposed to be.”
Just those two refrains, I’ve often wondered if we get to take a little something from past lives, from the cosmos, before we are born—-or perhaps when I daytripped back into myself, I left some seeds, seeds I planted in the Kyle-Earth I was churning through, cleansing to forward, aid in my eventual healing. Yes, a circuitous egg or chicken spiritual analogy. But again, I don’t believe in simplistic linear time for all of my Self.
Functional Changes
I was lucky that my mother shifted our lives dramatically with family counseling and AA/NA, and took me along, because it gave me a foundation, even just listening to people, to learn how to discern between what was done to me—-that may’ve created pleasure but was not with consent——and my own sexual awakenings, that involved consent.
That was a big thing for me—-consent vs. non-consent. I’m very big on it personally and later in my 20s/30s when I became a Youth Coordinator for LGBTSGL youth, teaching them that framework to discern by. I can honestly say I’ve had an active, fun, sex life that has always involved safe sex and it was only recently, 2019, on vacation, that I was ever intoxicated with a partner—-that’s 20+ years of being sexually active.
Kyle # 1 and 2, I have pictures of myself before the abuse, during and after, and I can tell the difference—-I shifted and became more withdrawn and frankly began ticking off the time of getting away from the entirety of my blood family.
And I did.
When I tried to “return” I was clearer, cleaner, an adult, and there was a lot of animosity, jealousy, vindictiveness, thieving—-because I had disconnected from the majority of them, I didn’t learn to absorb dysfunctional behavior as normal to that connection. I had also built friendships, mentors, lovers, godparents, a whole host of people who have “family-ed” me over the years. Those healthy associations, even during holidays away from NYC/my blood family , built within myself not simply a resilience but discernment about my family, my parents, my abusers.
I learned to tell myself the truth about them, my family, as people, their individual characters and made effort to avoid them; perhaps the only punishment I could actively dole out was a lack of access to me. And yet with several other cousins and their children, I’ve gotten them full time teaching jobs/careers, college entrance, etc.. So I’ve been clear in my boundaries and favoritism and have no guilt about the ones I purposefully exclude. I have used my professional discernment to personally exclude. Maybe they don’t realize it, actually I know from scuttlebutt they do—-but with my resources, I have excluded them from financial gains/gifts, jobs, education that I can now provide others.
My abusers, both cousins, have assiduously become nothing.
One was invited to my mother’s last birthday party in a hospital along with a dozen other relatives. I’d travelled there for the party so I couldn’t avoid it (and as an aside, my stepfather trying to unhinge me and get more and more and more money out of me (yes, he too is a drug and alcohol addict) purposefully planned the abusing cousin being there and let it slip he would be there—-and “looked” for my reaction to it as we were prepping my mother. He thought I didn’t see him looking for my reaction. But I did. And I gave none. But I put a check next to his name in my had.)
That cousin, David is in his 50s and thrilled and proud to have gotten a job at Family Dollar and still talking about being in a band with his brothers 20 years prior, his life’s accomplishment that went nowhere.
The second cousin, Eric right after the rock incident went off to juvenile detention—-his mother having kept him in her bed (yes, some level of sexual abuse by her) for years into his teens, kicking him out in favor of a man she met and married, who then beat her for years. Eric went from Spofford to rehabs to prisons—-almost 30 years of his life wrecked, imprisoned, an addict.
Both tried to, at the party, and in text messages—-chat me up—-guilt creating false ebullience. Twenty years prior, memories of them, steeped in abuse. What could they possibly fathom I could gain from them?
They’ve accomplished nothing, nothing in a sane world that could aid me or my family. No schooling, no careers, no maturity. At their absolute best they stand as everything not to do and how to waste a life. Ironically they, abusers have often in brief contact tried to play upon some sort of family-sympathy, family simpatico—-what I will offer here is that abusers, predators and adducts tend to have a deep malignant level of narcissisms——evidenced in their pleasure and satiation being paramount to the feelings of others. So even in their contact, my cousins, rapists, can’t understand that it is abhorrent to be related to a rapist of children and revolting to have them approach you with some sort of misguided familial familiarity.
Perhaps they will die slow, lingering diseased deaths and then I can muse that God, neutral, can be vengeful. It sounds harsh but consider this—I am not their only victim. And criminals, before imprisoned, generally hurt, rob, burglar, deal drugs to a dozen victims before being caught. Now multiply that over the years, decades—-they have a slew of victims. Let us pray for a vengeful God upon them, they’ve earned such attention.
Yes, I Kyle # 5 looked for something—-rage, anger, pity, etc. at them, and, because it was post-vase crack healing, felt pity for them, not anger. They’ve amassed their whole lives to nothing.
At the birthday party, I was again the prodigious toast of the family, now an adult—-teaching at Columbia, author of a dozen books, host and owner of my own TV show, money in the bank, in a fine Emporio Armani suit—-all of it self-created.
I did connect to the animosity, the anger, the jealousy that they and others felt, I could now see it. See how it could drive them to try and harm a child as much as possible. I could see their failed parents, also extreme addicts, who never sought the rehabilitation my parents did, who had too many children—-so poor parenting skills left them to whatever came about by their immature devices.
No, I don’t attach my sexuality in anyway to them or their actions just as any other rape victim wouldn't be fucked into being whatever the perpetrator was or represented.
That’s not how rape works.
That’s not how identity, sex or sexuality works.
It’s sad and horrible misinformation when people think that about others or themselves. What I can offer that is that person purposefully carrying over the affects of whatever the rape was to their current Iterations—-which is how I believe some people don’t—-“get over” it—— but learn to put it into context. You can carry the ramifications of rape by choice.
My cousins, I’m sure they have continued to rape in the past 20+ years—-rape people, particularly children. I was not their only victim and I’m sure they raped others. Rapists who rape children, don’t stop at one.
Not every rapist criminal is brought to the legal system to face charges and punishment but both have extremely shitty lives in absolute poverty They will work shitty-nowhere drudgery jobs, not careers, haven’t gone to school, have to settle, are Black ghetto stereotypes and probably have prison in their futures, as well as the shame, humiliation and degradation that come from drug and alcohol addiction and the psychology that leads to and lends into addiction.
They are officially what is known as “a wrap”.
Yes, my mother and I considered pressing charges but the statute of limitations, jurisdictions and fragmented memories would have made it an arduous task. My aunts were also terrified that I would pursue it.
So, here I am, having made some things out of life—-still more creative projects, career goals, educational goals in process. I have a helluva resume and have had lots of wonderful and edifying experiences. I think that’s important to point out. I don’t think I’ve done nearly as much as I could or want to but I’ve done more than my abusers ever will and more importantly, I’ve done more than the abuse promised I could’ve.
That’s what you have to do—therapy, group therapy, Incest Anonymous groups, even those years of AA and NA with my mother as moral support—-and then I’ve written about it in books, articles, interviews—-I’ve come to understand it from all dimensions, yes, even including the perpetrators perspective.
Also help others—-it sounds hokey—-helping others heals—-but it does. I help others. I had to learn the balance for myself personally of too little and too much, but I have positively affected people with my knowledge, the empathy being abused can press one to create and seeing people clearly.
I’m not a pie in the sky, lovey dovey person, I am pleased to see the shit storm, the going nowhere burger of my cousins lives. They dharmicly (it’s not karma, it’s dharma—-people confuse the concepts) are reaping what they have sown.)
Do I believe that’s like a God/Universe thing?
I believe it’s multiple things—-I believe that people can do shitty things, things they recognize as shitty and destructive to other human beings, even if they’re just teens and that participation—-like all of our lives—-is like fertilizer to the garden of our entire lives. Corrupt fertilizer generates corrupt blossoms, dead saplings, etc.. I think for what they have done, they have semi-purposefully punished/destroyed themselves.
I believe God/the Universe is neutral and both good and evil, which is how so much can happen. It is us, man, womankind, who attach good and evil to actions, people, the world, God.
Do I forgive them?
Forgiveness is release. Forgiveness is release with the understanding that the past/the transgression could've been any different than it was. Forgiveness is giving up it should’ve been B instead of A. It is not acceptance or even desire to communicate with the offender, it is simply release from an incorrect, delusional belief about something that happened.
I would want Kyle # 1 & # 2 to have not been raped.
That’s not what happened.
What did happen though is that Kyle, by Iteration 5 had studied enough, listened to enough wise and counseling folk, practiced having a good internal self, spirituality and sense of self, that when given a chance, to time travel, within his own existence, was able to use an opportunity, that felt like descending into madness, to heal himself, to travel within himself, astrally, spiritually and fix “something”.
The crack is gone. I look for it sometimes. Like a store or landmark that used to be in your neighborhood but was torn down. You catch yourself thinking or saying something in reference to it and then turn and look and it’s not there—-you remember a gone-memory. That landmark of pain, that crack contained rage and suicidal ideation and fear and for years I used to rock myself to sleep with “I don’t want to die” as a chant.
I think the first few times of being raped were so traumatic, that I, Kyle Soul, took those memories away, crumpled them up so that I could become a Kyle. There are shreds, fragments from prior to 7 years old, just enough for me to know to time travel into myself to heal.
The rest?
Landmarks that no longer exist, that I travelled back with balms and salves and medicines to alleviate, to cure.
The crack is gone. I don’t know how else to explain it. Even when sad or despairing or when my mother died—-not there.
“No crack here, sir. You are healed.”
What I do now and perhaps it’s replanting onto that plot, repurposing that psychic space is I buy myself toys, coloring books, dolls, I do fun silly, completely non-adult things. I play. I do these things for Kyle # 1 and 2 because there were a few days, and it was only a few days where they were hurt.
But now I can send back through this special conduit within me——love and joy and play and fun and use the abuse—-to write novels and non-fiction books and articles and TV shows—-and yes, make a little profit to buy candy from those products—-but to most importantly reflect back through and forward and then outward, that I don’t know about yours but my rapists lost, to me, they’re less than dead.
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Kyle Phoenix is a teacher, certified adult educator, sexologist, sex coach and sexuality educator with over two decades of intensive experience. He studied at the University at Buffalo, SUNY, New York University, and Columbia University. He has worked, consulted and taught individuals and focused professional developments for the CDC, Department of Education, Gay Men's Health Crisis, New York City Department of Health, non-profits, Fortune 500 companies and unions. He began his career facilitating on-campus workshops addressing a wide range of sexuality and sexual health issues and then moved on to teaching at universities, non-profits, private groups and clients, hosting The Kyle Phoenix Show on television and multiple online webinars, including YouTube and Sclipo and writing extensively through his blog, Special Reports, articles and other print and E books in the Kyle Phoenix Series on relationships, finance, education, spirituality and culture. He lives in New York with his family.
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