Unraveling the Unconscious Curses of Surviving Sexual Assault

When I was 17, my mom’s boyfriend’s 15 year old son climbed on top of me one night and started kissing me. His actions would launch a short affair that was, for the most part, my sex education - the ground for which I learned things about sex I hadn’t known before. We didn’t have intercourse that night but soon would. He was the first person to go down on me, the first penis I’d see ejaculate. He may have been the first person I orgasmed with besides myself but I don’t remember that precisely. When he told his dad we both got in trouble. I couldn’t cognize the experience as assault until decades later. 

I’d had p-to-v sex for the first and only time on my 17th birthday, on a hide-a-bed sofa in my friend’s rec room. A couple months later, it was summer, and my mom took her four kids to her boyfriend Dave’s cabin in a Pacific Northwest hamlet of mountains, large trees, and a fast river known as Index Washington. 

The cabin was tiny so a large tent was pitched outside for the kids. The night was darker than dark and I was still afraid of it. I had the annoying habit throughout my childhood of desperately needing not to be the last one awake but too afraid to fall asleep quickly. I laid there in the tent like I did most nights, eyes shut tight, criticizing myself for being such a chicken, willing myself not be tormented or eaten by the things that lurk in the night. My siblings were asleep and I assumed Nick was too. 

Then his hand was over my mouth. My eyes shot open. Fright crackled through my body. 

“Shh,” he shushed me and crawled on top of me. But I wouldn’t have been able to make sound. I laid there frozen. The suddenness and unexpectedness of his actions shocked me into a decades-long silence. My worst fear had come true about the darkness and nighttime, except it wasn’t a ghost or ghoul attacking me, but an entitled teenage boy. 

It was 1995 and Monica Lewinsky was still an unknown intern at the White House. I was assaulted before her nationwide shaming so it’s entirely possible that even if I had recognized what happened as assault and said something, I would’ve been blamed for it. 

I was two years older than Nick but he was already six feet tall and muscular, so aside from casting him off with a spell, which I didn’t know how to do, there was no chance of me being able to physically resist. So I didn’t. Some wise and determined creature within me made a snap decision of surrendering to what was so. I couldn’t see his face in the darkness as he kissed me and I kissed him back. 

I didn’t know how to flirt yet and, thinking of him as a brother, he hadn’t registered as attractive to me, though I suppose he was. I told myself his actions were a compliment and for years I wore being wanted by him as a signal of my attractiveness. And anyway, wasn’t being wanted what I wanted? 

I want to say our affair lasted a couple months. I found out it was over one day, as my mom and I were driving somewhere just the two of us in her red Astro van, and she asked me if Nick and I had been messing around.

That tattle tale little shit, I thought. 

Then I was shamed for my behavior. 

“You shouldn’t have done that, Forest. It was inappropriate and you should’ve known better.” 

After that, our parents made sure Nick and I weren’t alone together. 

I don’t remember my exact punishment but I was probably grounded. I do remember looking out the passenger window as a schism settled into my body. Dissonance and confusion that took me decades to unpack and that I’m still unpacking. I hadn’t acted on my own desire but merely survived and then shapeshifted the experience into an education for myself. This is another topic but my own desires were still developing and this set of experiences greatly affected them. I never got a chance to explore my budding sexual self without also surviving the violence of the assault and then being treated by my main parent as if I’d been the one behaving badly. 

I answered my mom’s questions with single word responses as I got scolded, shamed, blamed, and judged. Gazing out the van window, I honed my teenage eyeroll, which was more energetic than physical because my mom could hit peak volatility instantly if something set her off.

We are groomed to be sexual assault survivors while too young to discerningly ask, “Wait, what societal expectations am I agreeing to?” and “Who gets to do whatever they want with my body?” and have enough agency to decline. This sour legacy of Brokenhearted Culture is taught by those who were also groomed, steeped in their own dissonance and unreconciled experiences. At least that’s been my observation. 

Telling our stories with discernment and alignment begins unraveling the unconscious curses of grooming that are so much larger than any one warlock, wizard, or curse worker. Those of relating to ourselves as objects (outside ourselves) instead of subjects (inside ourselves), and the work of uncovering what we had to bury so deep in order to make it through. As we weave our own stories and tell them, may the shrapnel shards the curses lodged within us - the scapegoating, learned helplessness, the self-hatred, and self-gaslighting - shake loose. 

From my vantage point now, as the adult my 17 year old self needed but didn’t have, I’m holding these experiences with them. I have the wisdom not to pass on what actually needs to die. And I can hold and grieve with what wants to live but needs to be slowly and softly opened first.

To my fierce young warrior self, I see you. I see that you needed the comfort and protection of a parent. Every single one of your actions was justified. I see how frightened you were and how it robbed you of your softness and curiosity. You who crumbled, hardened, and hid are not alone anymore. I’m just sorry it took me so long to arrive here with you. I’m here now though, to hold you in all your truths and complexities. I have created the spaciousness for all of your intensity and rawness and will hold all of it with you. I understand that your ferocity didn’t arise out of nowhere or because you’re defective, but because your childhood took place in the trainwreck of rape culture, your coming of age forged on the tracks amid the wreckage. I’ve got you. I will not gaslight you or lie to you. You are like a soldier returning from war. And soldiers need their stories told in order to fully come back home. I reflect back to you your innocence, bravery, and warriorship. You walked a long road to accuracy and I’m sorry that you had to bend and contort around the violation, shame, and aloneness. I’m so sorry that at no point was there an adult there with you, to look into your young face and help you or comfort you. That wasn’t right. It shouldn’t have been like that. 

Of course you didn’t fight him back, he could’ve easily dislocated your shoulders or worse. I see and commend you for keeping your eyes open and making the snap decisions that you did. And I respect that you chose to learn and live. I commend you for being able to hold so many truths at once. 

Your story may have started by surviving both the assault and punishment for surviving and learning, but it doesn’t end there. We shall write the next part together, for we are still becoming, and aligning with our desires, attuning to our many truths. As long as we’re still breathing, we have the power to change. And I’m here to breathe and change with you. 

May our storytelling disentangle us and others from these unwieldy disgusting curses. May we put our stories to page and plot, to naming and claiming. And together may we write a new story by continuing to become the true discerning adults our descendants need us to be.