My Sister Masturbates In Our Shared Bed

[Brandon]

I feel like I should at least testify here to the potentiality for long-term trauma in a situation l...

Holy shit. You need to man the hell up. First thing you should have done is gotten some ear plugs when you were younger. Second there is more to it then having to have heard your parents having sex and you should have been able to cope with that long ago. Be a man and confront your actual issues and don't make excuses

 

[amosmorris]

Holy shit. You need to man the hell up...Be a man and confront your actual issues and don't make excuses

So--a couple things: This is an old thread but I responded to it because folks were being uncharacteristically critical of the original poster (OP), who was just a teen and who was actually very disturbed by what she was experiencing. I shared my own very explicit, long-term exposure experience (which took place throughout my teenage years) because one of the things I value so much about this board is that people usually DON'T rate or judge each other's the experience, and instead work towards acceptance and respect. There's not much value in a trauma competition, since in the end we're all just still hurt one way or the other. Many of us dismiss or undermine the things that deeply wounded us--and we never get anywhere this way--and I've found a lot of comfort here on this board because so often I find the community works to affirm and validate the stories that are shared, even while still sometimes being challenging or asking hard questions when necessary.

And so that brings me to another thing: I do wish I could say that my exposure experience was indeed no big deal and could have been easily solvable, as you suggest. It wasn't, but it also wasn't--and maybe this is what you mean by "actual issues"--the only deeply difficult thing I dealt with growing up. In fact there was more, and also worse, but I left that out of my reply to the OP in order to directly address and connect with an experience for which she was seeking some affirmation...and it was one I could relate to and so I did. I thought she deserved that, and she deserved it without any additional, unrelated stories about me that might threaten to undermine what she'd shared. Sometimes we just need to be heard and accepted--this is true for me and for you, I'm sure, too. So I hope you won't reply to another person on this board again in the same way you just interacted with me. It's outside of the best of this community.
Also: I'm a woman, not a man. Interesting that you read me in the way you did.