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March 6, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
39:54
670 Molestation

A truly tragic tale

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Time Text
Good morning, everybody.
Hope you're doing well. It's Steph. It is 8.13am, and it is March 6, 2007.
We're going to do a slight shift in protocol this morning.
Christina got an Ask a Therapist letter, and we talked about it last night for quite a while, and we've decided that I will do it, and she won't, and for a variety of reasons, which we don't have to get into now.
So, this is a letter from a gentleman who is going to be called Bob, and he likes the bah, Bob, and he says this.
Hi, you guys. See how I definitely dodged the who goes first problem.
Please keep my identity a super ultra secret.
My name is Bob, pronounced with the O sounding slightly like an A, bab.
I've listened to all your podcasts, and I'm a $17 a month subscriber, and I feel like giving more, but the life of the student forbids it.
I could never donate enough money to repay you for your gift to me in these podcasts, and that's all the buttering up I'm going to do, promise.
Okay, so things get a little serious here.
I am a 21-year-old.
Currently, when I was 15 or 16, I sexually molested my little sister three times over the course of two months.
After the third assault, I felt too guilty to continue.
I cannot remember the exact age at which I assaulted her.
She was 10 or 11 at the time.
I won't go into details, but it consisted of me touching her inappropriately.
While she was sitting on my lap, or if we were on the couch or a bed together.
It was not violent.
Well, the age different makes it innately violent, but I mean to say that I wasn't holding her down, nor was there any penetration.
My parents did not find out until I told them two years later.
They took it well, meaning they did not start screaming at me and beating me like I feared they would.
They've never beat me for doing wrong, and I thought this might just earn me a thumping, and advised me not to talk to her about it.
I'm starting to wonder if that's the right thing to do.
She's in therapy at the age of 16 and is on antidepressants.
She is an insomniac.
She was also raped when she was 14 while we were at a family vacation.
Her attacker was a friend of our cousin.
At times she talks like she's 10, not 16, using a baby voice.
And when she calls our father daddy, it makes me cringe.
These are, of course, my problems, and her doing these things undoubtedly reminds me of my assaults on her.
My assaults on her does not come to mind on a regular basis, but it's been coming to my mind once a week or so over the past few months.
Before I ramble too much I'm going to wrap it up. I don't even know if she remembers that I assaulted her, or even if she recognized it as assault at the time.
Would bringing up the issue be harmful as she tries to work through her depression, insomnia, and the after-effects of her rape, not to say that the three are not very interrelated?
Or would it provide for her a clearer understanding of her problems?
And I get the feeling that I haven't completely digested the assault myself.
Any advice you could offer on helping me do that would be greatly appreciated as well.
So much for wrapping up.
Thank you very much for all your work.
Well, that's a topic, without a doubt.
And I'll say a couple of things for the sake of clarity before we get into the sort of analysis of what's occurring.
Now, of course, I'm working on somewhat sketchy information, but I think that this is urgent enough that we should try and deal with it right away.
So I'll say a couple of things first, and then we can get to an analysis of what has occurred And some possible ways forward for yourself.
So, the first thing, of course, that I would say is that it was wrong.
I mean, there's no two ways about it, no ifs, ands, or buts, that it was completely wrong what you did.
I mean, this is, of course, no surprise.
But I would also say that there are likely to be some extenuating circumstances which don't make it any less wrong, but I think should give you some capacity to approach what you did with some kind of compassion for everyone involved except your parents.
That having been said, I mean, I'm going to sound a little bit more gentle than some people would like during this podcast, but for me, the age of 15 and 16 is one of those ages which is right in the middle of...
I hold parents responsible, who are usually in their 20s or 30s, and who have made the decision to have children.
A 15-year-old is still a boy, and I think that a 15-year-old is not necessarily biologically a boy, but we do have this horrifying mismatch between our biological natures and what is occurring in our ever-stunted The lives that we have being stuck in public school and infantilized well into our 20s, if you have any sort of intellect, which this guy obviously does.
So I think that right around the age of 15, there is a gray area around responsibility for these kinds of things.
So I would cut yourself a little bit of slack here, and I'll sort of go into why.
And this doesn't mean that the act itself was not destructive, and this doesn't mean that it was not bad, but it means that in terms of dealing with it, I mean, there are things to be commended, obviously.
Obviously, one of them is that you're experiencing remorse.
I mean, that's an enormously positive sign that you are thinking about it, that you are experiencing remorse, and you are trying to figure out how to fix it, right?
Evil people don't do that.
Bad people don't do that.
They experience fear of being caught, but they don't confess, and they don't worry about how to help the people that they have harmed.
So, from that standpoint, you are to be highly, highly commended.
I'm going to talk a little bit, and I'm going to conjecture a little bit, and please forgive me if I get things wrong, and please correct me if I get things wrong, but I'm just going to work on the evidence that's contained sort of in the request for feedback, and also some of my own knowledge about these kinds of things.
I was never assaulted, but certainly I had an older man grab my penis when I was sort of 13 or so, and my mother was highly sexually inappropriate, though never assaulted.
I never touch you or anything like that.
So, I mean, I have some sort of experience of this kind of stuff.
Some sort of knowledge at a personal level and also just for sort of my own research I've read up on it.
So, I mean, I have some sort of knowledge and then, you know, that sort of basic creative aspect of my brain that likes to formulate things chokes away on every problem known to man and some that have yet to be invented.
So, this is sort of where I'm coming from.
So, let me sketch out for you a possible scenario Which will help make your actions a little bit more comprehensible.
Now, I'm going to make some assumptions here.
I mean, I have to, obviously, because it took a lot of courage to write this letter.
And I'm going to assume a few things.
A, I'm going to assume that you're telling me the truth, right?
I'm going to assume that you're not leading me down the garden path because you can't change what you don't acknowledge, right?
And you can't deal with something if you're covering it up or minimizing it.
So, I'm going to assume... That there was inappropriate touching of breasts or vagina or something like that.
I'm going to assume that by no penetration you mean over the clothing.
And I'm going to assume that this is not something that is an ongoing problem for you but was an incident that occurred over the space of a few months, I think you mentioned, when you were 15 or 16, when your sister was 11.
So I'm going to assume that this is not a general predilection of yours and all of this of course It makes sort of what I'm going to say different than if this were not the case.
So if it is not the case, then this isn't going to help you that much.
And perhaps you can tell me more if you sort of realize that you haven't given me the full story and you really do want sort of help, then you can let me know.
But I'm going to go with the facts that's presented and I'm going to give you a kind of scenario under which it can be comprehensible.
And this doesn't mean, obviously, that it makes it okay to It just means that it makes it comprehensible, and of course that is the great challenge.
That is the great problem with these kinds of behaviors, right?
Obviously you don't want to do it.
Obviously you don't want to do it again.
Obviously you had horribly torn and mixed feelings about it at the time.
The pain and agony that it has caused you and the harm which it has done your sister was not worth what you did, right?
And the cost-benefit analysis of any of this kind of stuff, even if you don't sort of...
I'm not saying you don't, but I mean, even if one doesn't look at the ethics, the cost-benefits in terms of peace of mind and happiness are so outweighed.
Like, they're so off-kilter. I mean, the costs are just so horrendous and the benefits are just so transitory, even if there are, and I'm not saying there are, but that...
Mismatching between the costs and benefits of this kind of action render the behavior somewhat incomprehensible, right?
I mean, you can't really understand why you did it.
You can't really understand what was going on, why you would make that choice, and what was happening.
So, I'm going to put out some scenarios.
These are all completely theoretical, and this is all for you to digest, and none of this is proven.
None of this is syllogistic, let alone...
Anything to do with evidence or anything like that.
This is just a possible narrative that may explain what occurred for you or what you did.
Now, the sexualization of children is one of the great deep and dark secrets the world over, and this occurs in so many cultures.
The sexualization of children and the use of children as sexual objects is a great ripping, sucking, chest-wound agony of the planet.
And it is something that is far more common than any of us would really like to comprehend.
And so from that standpoint, I can tell you, at least in my opinion, and again, I'm not going to qualify everything, but please assume that everything here is highly qualified.
In my opinion, the sexualization of your sister occurred long before the incidents that you described.
Long before the incidents that you described.
A 15-year-old, and I'm just going to say 15 rather than 15 or 16...
A 15-year-old boy in the throes of the mad sexual hormone rush is not going to be innately or naturally attracted to an 11-year-old girl, right?
That's just not how biology works, right?
Because biology is basically going to point you towards somebody who fulfills two conditions at the very minimum.
A is fertile, in other words, has finished puberty and so on, and is probably at least 14 or 15.
Not that I'm suggesting that's okay.
I'm just talking about rank-based biology.
And, secondly, of course, there is, in every culture, a taboo on incest which is going to seek sexual satisfaction outside of the family structure.
Because, of course, as we all know, the biology of reproducing within the family is bad.
I mean, there's too many similar DNA strands that can pair up and cause defects and problems with babies.
So, There is something that pushed you to surmount a barrier that is twofold.
A lack of sexual interest in children, which would be innate and biological and natural, A. And B, the overcoming of the incest barrier.
From that standpoint, those are sort of the barriers on that side.
In order for you to enact this behavior with your sister, These are the barriers that would be overcome, and these are not barriers that are overcome on your own, right?
These are not barriers that you just sort of wake up on one day and say, hey, the incest taboo and the lack of sexual development of my sister mean nothing to me, right?
I mean, that's not how biology works.
So there's something other, some other psychological energy or some other phenomenon or dynamic that's at work here to grease this slope, let's say.
There's a couple that sort of pop into my mind.
I'm going to put them out there, and of course you can let me know what you think of all of this.
The first is that the sexual exploration of...
Relatives, when you're very young, is not uncommon.
I actually, to be perfectly frank, I had a cousin.
We were both little boys, and about the age of five or six, we explored each other's bodies, as I put it in The God of Atheists.
We explored each other's bodies with a frankness that would give a proctologist pause.
And I don't feel bad about that.
That's just sort of a natural human curiosity.
There was nothing sexual about it.
I just couldn't see parts of my own body, and so we explored each other's.
And I don't consider that to be bad or wrong, and there was nothing creepy or weird about it.
It was just curiosity. And so there is a phenomenon around exploring the body which can occur within the family, which is not specifically sexual.
Now in this case it was, which again puts it not squarely in that category, but it is definitely that sort of exploration is a symptom of an earlier stage of psychological development, which means that there was stunted development within your family for you, right? For you. And there was unpleasantly accelerated psychosexual development for your sister.
For your sister.
Around the age of 8 or 9, in general, right, in general, around the age of 8 or 9, little girls stop climbing on their daddy's laps.
They stop cuddling with their brothers.
I mean, not because they're hitting puberty, but just because they're getting too old for it.
And that sort of elemental growth occurs pretty organically in healthy families, or at least families that are more healthy than yours.
And it's a gradual process of weaning the girl off of physical displays of affection, because if a girl is raised to be indiscriminately physically affectionate and then hits puberty, then she is going to be ripe for this kind of exploitation.
And a healthy family, and this is a little bit more the job of the father, I think, than the mother, although the mother can certainly do it.
In a healthy family, the girl is weaned off that kind of physical affection.
And, you know, hugs and kisses still, that's great, right?
But sort of the very intimate, on-the-lap kind of stuff that occurs when a girl is very little.
Generally, a girl is weaned off of that starting around the age of eight or nine.
And that gives her a sense of physical space.
And, you know, you don't have to say to the girl that you shouldn't do this because of X, Y, and Z, because you'll be inappropriately setting yourself up for problems.
It's just something that occurs naturally.
So that didn't occur for your sister.
She was not given the basic elements of self-ownership, self-protection.
And self-protection is a dramatic way of putting it, because when you have this kind of development, you don't need self-protection.
Because this stuff just doesn't occur.
This stuff just doesn't occur.
So this was not something that your sister was given, which means that there was a lack of boundaries around physicality within your family to begin with, that this just didn't sort of naturally grow, that people didn't sort of recognize that this is naturally how children get weaned off compromising situations and taught that they have to have their own space, their own privacy, and that hugs and kisses are great.
But, you know, when you're 11, you don't lie in a bed with your brother, you don't climb on his lap.
I mean, this is just something that would never occur in a healthy family.
Okay.
So if you're looking at understanding some of the dynamics that are at work that ended up with you acting out this behavior, which of course is bad and so on, but the important thing to focus on is to understand it first and foremost.
So, there's a lot of dynamics that are at work here.
The first, of course, being lack of physical boundaries and a susceptibility to exploitative situations within your sister's behavior.
That comes directly from the parents, right?
The parents were not teaching her this, and so on.
So, from that standpoint, this is one of the ways in which this became even a possibility, right?
Even a possibility. I mean, I totally get that you're not lurking around schoolyards or anything like that, again, unless you haven't told me the whole truth, in which case, please feel free to correct me and we'll go further.
So I totally get that, that there's a series of situations that have presented themselves that have...
A result that resulted in you as more of a boy, far more of a boy than a man, acting out this kind of behavior.
And if we can understand these drivers, then we can understand what happened and how best to help yourself and how best to protect your own conscience and, of course, in time, your own children, right?
I mean, this is, and I hate to sound harsh, but this is something that...
You need to be aware of.
You need to be careful of. It's not because you're a bad guy.
You made a bad decision definitely when you were younger, but there were reasons for it.
If it's completely incomprehensible, then you can't alter the behavior.
You can't watch out for any danger signs.
So I'm just trying to give you some of the tools to understand the dynamics that were likely at work within your family so that you can make sure that you can be the kind of Father in time that you want to be and stop this cycle because it is a cycle.
This is not something that originated with you.
It is not something that originated with your sister.
So the sexualization that occurred for your sister was, on the one hand, not teaching her any sense of physical boundaries, self-protection, discretion, appropriate behavior, and so on.
Now, the second was that you don't end up as a 15-year-old boy being sexually attracted to your 11-year-old sister.
And again, I'm not saying that it was sexual attraction that drew you to this behavior.
I don't know. But to even think of a sister in these kinds of terms requires that she has been sexualized.
And what I mean by that is that she's not being allowed to grow into her own sexuality, but rather that At the very most benign way of putting it, premature sexual behavior has been inflicted upon her prior to the age of 11.
You just don't grow up as a girl submitting to these kinds of interactions with you or with others, and you don't end up being raped at the age of 14.
This doesn't just happen, right?
There's an etymology to this.
There's an evolution to this kind of stuff.
This doesn't just pop out of nowhere.
So, something occurred, and I'm absolutely sure, though of course I can't prove it and you can let me know, but something occurred, for which I am certain, occurred repetitively that was pretty horrific.
Very horrific. Just horrific.
To your sister long before the age of 11.
Long before the age of 11.
This doesn't forgive anything that you're doing, but it's just putting it in context, right?
It's just so you can understand the psychological forces and interactions and dynamics that were at work here so that your behavior becomes somewhat comprehensible so that you can process it, right?
Because, of course, you can't process it.
I mean, there's so much complicated stuff that's going on here that results in this kind of behavior that it would be impossible to process it from the inside.
So, it is my strong opinion that your sister was attacked or assaulted, and in ways that make yours look completely benign, relatively benign, long before the age of 11.
Long before the age of 11.
And I say that sort of based on a couple of indicators that you talk about.
The first, of course, is that you felt that you could touch her in this way and get away with it, that she wasn't going to say anything, right?
So you totally got that she had no boundaries, that she would submit to it, and that she wouldn't tell.
And that's sort of the primo thing that occurs when this sort of behavior is considered, right?
Basically, is she going to tell?
And you knew that she wasn't going to tell because it was you who ended up telling your parents two years later.
So she had already been trained to be silent about these behaviors.
And not by you.
Not by you.
You mentioned nothing about the man or boy who raped her going to jail.
So she had already been sort of trained to silence in terms of sexual violations.
Not by you. So there's another dynamic that's at work here.
That you need to understand that your behavior is an aspect of a more core dynamic that did not originate with you.
That did not originate with you.
The second is the insomnia, and victims of childhood sexual assault develop insomnia in general.
And again, this is all generalizations, but victims of childhood sexual assault in general will develop insomnia when they are repetitively molested at night.
They're afraid to fall asleep.
This is all very simple, right?
Because they're afraid of someone coming into their room, waking them up and assaulting them.
And they just simply lose the ability.
Their whole circadian rhythm gets screwed up.
And they lose the ability to sleep because they live in terror every night.
The therapy and so on.
I mean, this is a seriously messed up girl.
And you're aware of that, of course, right?
And you did not help, but you did not cause.
I mean, you hurt her, but you did not create the environment that allowed you to do what you did.
So that's another thing to understand.
That it is my belief that your sister had been violated repeatedly and probably, or very likely nocturnally, for years before You did what you did.
Just to put it in context.
This doesn't make it okay or anything like that.
Just to put it in context so that you can have some understanding of what was occurring.
Now, children who are sexually violated from an early age often become hyper-sexualized.
If there's inappropriate comments or the kind of touching that you talk about, what happens is the children tend to shut down sexually and they tend to become bookish and they tend to become asexual.
They'll wear the thick sweaters.
They won't put makeup on.
They'll become the sort of dry librarian type.
They will become asexual.
Where there is penetration, a violation of this kind, it is more often than not that they will become hypersexualized.
And we don't have to get into all of that as to why.
You can read up on this kind of stuff.
But the trauma and the destruction of the soul that occurs with this kind of predation on children is so staggering and so beyond the pale that what it does to the personality is the splitting that is required into good and bad and the power that the children then Achieve over the parents through the keeping of secret.
I mean, it just completely distorts, reverses, and smashes up the entire personality and trust structure and so on.
And often the children become seductive in a way, right?
And again, this has nothing to do with making anything okay.
I'm just sort of talking about what happens.
And... The question is, and we never like to go here, right?
We never like to go here, but what is it that occurred that had you shift your object of sexual desire or curiosity towards your sister?
Well, it's because you were to some degree infantilized, and we'll get to that in a few minutes, and to some degree your sister was hyper-accelerated and mutated sexually through prior sexual molestation of, I would say, significant and repetitive degree.
If there is unacknowledged sexual abuse within your family, it's going to play out in every dimension of your family interaction in one form or another.
If there is unacknowledged sexual abuse within your family, it's going to play out in every interaction in one form or another.
So, what happened for you...
Let's talk a little bit more about what happened for you.
Another thing that is very true, I do believe, of a young boy or sort of a boy in his sort of early to mid-teens who is sexually curious towards a child, one of the things that is occurring is cripplingly low self-esteem, crushingly low self-esteem.
And you're not to be blamed for that.
You're not to be blamed for that because this is the result of how you're treated by your family, in particular your parents.
So if you were in the sort of massive throes of hormonal, sexual, mental and physical activity and you found yourself with your sister, clearly it's not a high self-esteem thing Than going on a date and trying to caress a girl who is 15 or 16.
Not that I'm recommending it.
I'm just talking about the biology and the psychology of it.
So, the low self-esteem that means that your sexual curiosity cannot be, or you don't feel confident enough to express your sexual curiosity with somebody your own age or older, that is a sign of low self-esteem, right?
A very low self-esteem. And again, that's something that was inflicted on you through repetitive negative behavior through your parents and your parents' interaction with you.
You weren't brought up to be confident.
You weren't brought up to be secure.
You weren't brought up to express your preferences and to take on the great leap into manhood that occurs when you have to start asking girls out and put your sexual attractiveness on the line and get rejected and learn how to handle it and all of that stuff that's part of growing into a man.
This was blocked because of your very low self-esteem and so your sexual curiosity found other channels.
So, as far as your parents go, right, I mean, even if we take the most conservative way of looking at it, your parents did a wretchedly bad job of bringing you guys up.
And the...
Let's get to that in a minute or two.
So, you told your parents then when you were 17 and your sister was 13.
What did they say? They said, don't tell.
Don't tell anyone. Now, I don't know when your sister went into therapy, but I think you said it was after her rape.
So, here's a situation.
Let's just say that your parents were replaced with decent or even averagely reasonable human beings.
Let's just say it was me. Let's just say your parents get killed and somehow I end up with custody of you when you're 17 and your sister is 13 or whatever, and you tell me about this.
Well, let me tell you what I would do in that situation and then maybe you can compare it to what your parents did so that you can understand it.
Well, the first thing that I would do is I would keep questioning you and try to understand what was going on.
The second thing that I would do I would absolutely say that these demons need to come to light, that this behavior that has occurred, that you're confessing to, is a symptom of a much darker and blacker and more corrupt and exploitive past that your sister has experienced and perhaps you have as well.
So, what I would then do is I would recognize that we have a 13-year-old girl Who is not only not aware of any self-protection that needs to occur as far as sexuality goes, but also could be engaging in repetitive self-destructive and seductive behavior with others.
Right? That's a ticking bomb.
That is a ticking bomb.
Like, I would not let the sun go down before dealing with that.
Which would be to get your sister and you into therapy and to go to family therapy and to get you to talk about everything that happened and to begin the process of dragging these bodies out into the light of exhuming them and talking about them and to recognize that a potentially enormously risky landmine was ahead for you and much more importantly so for your sister.
Because I would recognize that a symptomology of being molested by a brother was something that indicated a much deeper problem in terms of family history, in terms of potential seductiveness, in terms...
And this is not to blame the child, of course, at all.
I mean, this is just a scarred and brutalized child.
And inappropriateness.
And that if it was not brought to light what happened, and if it was not dealt with positively and proactively...
And through some significant interventionist counseling, then what was going to happen was exactly did happen, right?
If you don't bring this stuff to light, if you don't deal with it positively and proactively, then what inevitably happens, well, almost inevitably, is what exactly did happen, which is your sister ended up getting raped.
The symptom was very clear.
The symptom was very clear.
And I'm not going to try and sugar up the meal, but...
It is possible that you told your parents with the hopes that they would help your sister.
And you. But they didn't.
But they didn't. Because I can virtually guarantee you that if your sister had gone to a competent counselor, and if your family had gone to competent and proactive and interventionist therapy, and if you had gone through that, then the odds of your sister getting raped would be almost nil.
Would be almost nil.
You are, again, to be commended because you at least confessed to your parents and told the truth.
And what does this tell you about your parents?
That even though they know that the sister is at risk, I mean, deep down everybody knows, right?
A child that gets molested is deeply at risk for getting raped.
Even though your parents know this, they do nothing.
They tell, oh, don't say anything. Don't say anything.
Let's keep it quiet. Let's go on a family vacation and let's lose track of our daughter around more teenage boys.
You've already confessed.
You've already told them that she submits to this, that she says nothing, that she is inappropriately sexualized at the age of 11.
All of the warning signs are there.
And what do your parents do?
They say, oh, let's go on vacation.
Let's not keep track of our daughter.
Let's not say anything about it.
And let's let her hang out with teenage boys.
Well, what do they think is going to happen?
Well, they know exactly what's going to happen.
So there's a pattern. And if I can just say that there are two things here.
I mean, that's enough of a pattern for me, given the etymology or the likely etymology of what happened in your family.
That there are now two people who have enacted out sexual violence or sexual molestation, right?
That the rape is violent, you say that yours was not, and of course I have no reason to disbelieve you.
We now have two people who have acted out this aggression against your sister.
Right, so what's really going on here?
What's really going on here?
Let's just talk about daddy, shall we?
Let's just talk about daddy.
And this is, of course, why Christina doesn't want to do this one.
I mean, she does, but she's got professional conduct.
And I don't, right?
I mean, so I'm going to go further than Christina would, and fools rush in where angels fear to tread, right?
So let's talk about this.
There's a reason, my friend, that you feel creepy when your sister uses the word daddy.
And you need to explore that feeling.
I'm not going to tell you where it leads, because I think you know, given everything that I've said so far.
You need to explore that feeling.
You need to explore what's going on there for you.
We all basically know everything that happened and happens and is happening and is going to happen within our families.
We know all this stuff. The horror of facing it is unbelievably hard.
But we know.
We know everything that's gone on in our family.
The symptoms that seem so scattered and disconnected in our behavior that seem so incomprehensible to us is not.
It's not. We just don't like putting the pieces together because the picture that jumps out of us is hell, usually.
So, you know what's been going on.
Any parent who fails to adequately protect children...
In terms of sexual molestation, in terms of inappropriate and risky behavior, it's doing so for a reason.
And that parent's sexuality is itself disturbed.
How far that goes, only your memories can tell you.
But there is a truth that is in your family that needs to come out.
There is a truth within your family that needs to come out and the symptoms are everywhere and the road they lead to me is clear, but I'm not going to talk about it because this is something that you need to explore within your own heart.
And this gets us to the most important part of what it is that I'm talking about here.
First of all, going to talk to your sister at the moment is not in my mind a good idea.
It's not in my mind a good idea.
Yes, she is in agony.
Yes, she has been brutalized.
Yes, she may never be whole again.
But until you have a clearer understanding of the dynamics within your family, I would suggest that going to talk to your sister is not a good idea.
You're not ready.
You're not sorted out yourself yet.
And there's no reason why you would be.
God, you're 21.
But, my friend, you must get to counseling.
You must get to therapy. You must, you must, you must, you must get to therapy.
I mean, this is like bleeding stump go to emergency room scenario.
You must listen to the podcast to the end and you must pick up the phone and you must make, you must make the call.
You must make the call.
And you must go and you must confess everything and you must talk about everything.
Once you have established that the therapist is somebody you feel comfortable with who's giving you good advice, I'm not saying go spew everything first day, but you must make the commitment to find out the truth about your family.
What we reject, we repeat what we remain ignorant of.
Those who fail to learn from their history fail to understand the history are doomed to repeat it.
You do not want to repeat any of this.
And it is to your credit that you are doing what you are doing.
I survived getting my penis grabbed.
I survived my mother's sexual inappropriateness, nakedness, her porn magazines.
I survived all of that.
And I'm very sensitive, right?
So I survived all of that.
So I don't believe that what you did is the cause of your sister's dysfunction.
I believe that you are acting out a family practice.
I believe that you are acting out a family practice.
Somebody who molests children It's one of the reasons that they turn their children into seductors, right?
Because they want to normalize it.
They want to say everyone does it.
And that's why other people do it who themselves have been raised badly or in situations or in families where the sexualization of children, the sexual assault of children is present.
There is a massive normalization process or goal that occurs within those who molest children.
You're not doing that. You're not doing that.
And that is to your credit.
But you don't have enough to bring to your sister that's going to help her as yet.
Bringing a confession and an apology is good.
Don't get me wrong. It's good.
But you need to understand why you did what you did or you won't know what is yours and what is not.
And that may further confuse her.
And that may further stunt her growth and progress.
You need to know what was going on in your family.
What was going on for you?
What is the etymology of your behavior?
Why did you do what you did?
What was going on in the family dynamic?
Because you need, in this conversation that you need to have with your sister at some point, at some point, you need to bring some understanding that is greater than, I did you wrong.
And you did her wrong. Don't get me wrong.
You did her wrong. No question.
But you need to bring an understanding that is greater than that.
You need to return as a warrior with the treasures of truth rather than just with apologies and shame.
She can't. She can't do it.
If what I think is true is true, she can't do it.
And she's in no state at the moment to do it.
At first, she can't even sleep, right?
And please don't tell me that you can't afford therapy.
You can't not afford therapy.
You can't not afford therapy.
If you can afford to go to school, you need to even drop out for a semester or even two semesters.
You need to pursue this because you will not be at peace and you are still at risk of hurting others if you don't deal with this and you don't want to do that.
You don't want to do that.
We lay in money for our education because we wish to reap satisfying jobs and financial rewards.
Sure! But this is virtue and peace of mind, right?
This you can't get any other way.
You can't find any other way to achieve this.
And you won't achieve it without the truth.
And the truth isn't going to come from here.
The truth is going to come. So, I mean, do all the things, right?
Do all the things. Start keeping a journal.
Read books about this kind of situation.
Read books about molestation.
Read to understand the family dynamics that end up producing this kind of stuff.
Yes, of course you need to apologize, but you need to understand what was going on first.
Otherwise, the apology is going to do more harm than good.
Because your sister's agony at its root is that she doesn't know, fundamentally, or at least very likely, why this stuff keeps happening to her.
It's part of the shame and horror that is inflicted upon children who are assaulted in this manner.
Is that they are often turned into seductors so that the stuff keeps happening to them which continues to smash and destroy their self-esteem and makes them feel like such crap that they can't assert their basic right to physical independence and physical security.
So I hope that this has been helpful.
I know it's been difficult, and it is a very, very difficult subject.
And again, I do commend you for writing in.
I do commend you for what it is that you did.
I commend you for confessing, but there's something that you need to learn about your family that I can't teach you.
And you need to go to counseling.
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