Hello,
My experience is both quite different for gendered aspects of what I've gone through, but tonally not so different as you'll no doubt detect. Mine was an odd childhood dominated by an emotionally neglectful father who died early, whereas I was youngest of three children who invisibly came of age within female-dominated household. Undisclosed (here and now anyways) inappropriate moments with older sister and role-reversal experiences undesired in the company of my depressed and overwhelmed single mother seared into memory unscheduled dimensions of experience that otherwise, and in very different circumstance, may have equated to harmless exploration of identity. Materials I study now commonly employ the blanket term 'traumatic sexualization', and indeed such captures something I do suppose.
The interpersonal skills and heterosexual relation template afforded to me was far from best in class, given that men were demonized by my two older sisters in particular. Many of these men were in point of fact card-carrying goons, although to experience such one-sided and loudly articulated views strongly suggested that deep within I could scarcely be different. Among other things, I served as an unofficial personal assistant to block contact between them and many an undesired suitor, etc. The sum effect is that I felt like my siblings and my mothers best gay friend for I couldn't possibly have an interest in staking out an independent identity of my own. My sisters just never inquired about or verbally supported inclinations I might have harbored to find a girlfriend even if such was ultimately my business to take up. Gosh, I think about that time and I'm at pains to recall anything in the way of textured interest in my legitimate development of an identity.
It didn't help that I was so socially awkward that my only friends across my secondary schooling were in essence on the road to reasoned homosexual identification even if ultimately I was not. Add it all up, and I just couldn't push past the memories of mixed childhood sensations of inchoate desire, conceptions of sin, beliefs that I was fated to be harshly judged and rejected in the interpersonal realm, etc. Depression combined with some reflexive attempt at fitful identity assertion got me away from my teen homosexual friends during the early months of my sophmore year, but so traumatized by identity conflict, guilt, missed experiential markers, etc. I had no intimations then that from 17 to about 31 years of age that I'd have no friends to speak of. Whatever skill set required to initiate and sustain friendships atrophied to nothing, whereas simply 'switching' orientation even as my widely presumed high school experiences equated to nothing was ghastly territory to chart.
Rushing ahead and compressed for content and time constraints, it seems that close proximity presence of agreeable females is often far too much for me to endure, let alone process. I register attraction, PTSD trigger in relation to what is recalled in brief above, find I have no suitable 'heterosexual male protocol' to draw upon - and I flee in terror. I confuse good people - people that just might possibly be reasoned relationship prospects, while all I seem capable of is edging towards relationships I seemingly cannot have. Dozens of quite nice interactions and moments are cataloged in my memory, with names and place quite irritatingly summoned up absent respite - but very little interpersonal happiness for how to put a name on the totality of dysfunction manifest so?
Two heterosexual relations since 'had' (beginning only in my 39 year), although the second seemed to expand upon preexisting legagies of hurt for neglect of my reasoned need for attachment even as the physical aspect of the relation was too much. An unexpected open marriage liason if you will, with someone smart, like-oriented to the topics I care deeply about, and seemingly well-grounded. When matters 'went live' the soc. sci. exploration and topic content fell away as I became someone's erotic projection largely absent the emotional comfort and attention I now recognized I craved.
A tryst schedule one may adhere to, lurid telephone calls, and experiences one struggles to describe, let alone plainly speak of doesn't substitute for a core relationship that isn't there. Not being seen on the street in certain locales, strictly limited comfort in one's arms within environments one favors, but 'raw and now' behind closed doors even as I'm not Christian Bale in American Psycho. :stop: What for a few days seemed almost funny edged towards the scary as the outlines of her legacies of emotional neglect and a later physical assault was discerned even as she struggled to disguise such. 'I' was the one designated as "...impaired and mentally unwell" if not "sick". Such an imbalance of power, needs unmet, overscaled fantasy substituting for what interrelation(s) otherwise framed could have afforded. I was an innocent and deeply inexperienced nerd who had been 'shopped for', and my awakening to this reality leaves me so confused. Beware those who offload undealt-with trauma, presuming you'll pick up the tab regardless of where it leads...
Now 43 years of age, I carry about more edgy intimate memories than I really desire to claim, a massive backlog of interpersonal heterosexual flirtations that in truth may have gone nowhere at all, and a sensitivity that stops me dead in relation to the pursuit of what might help to effect some healing; i.e. a reasoned and balanced relation where the needs of each partner are expressed, responsed to, and I should hope - met. Young women pick up on the shyness, pick up on my poorly-disguised attraction, and yet personally registering such in total doesn't reliably equate to much more than an amplification of a certain sensitivity. Not really an answer or a way out, but a comparable experience shared then...
M.
