Dear Kayla:

Both your mother and your father knew that your paternal grandfather sexually abused you and eight years later, your younger sister.

Your mother contacted some authority and got him on a child molester database. Your father’s response to his own father sexually abusing his daughter was: “your grandpa made a mistake and you have to forgive him”.

Your sexually abusive grandfather bought you a car (“my grandparents bought me a car”), and your mother was financially dependent on your father (“after they divorced he had some monetary control over her”), so both your father and mother chose money/ the providers of money over their daughters’ mental health.  Your father, with your mother’s consent,  “continued to bring my grandpa around my sister and I and we just all pretended nothing happened” because of the monetary advantage.

“When I think about the gay issue, I think you are right that my anxiety is living in that issue.. I want a man to want me sexually and having my ex be interested in men was a huge blow to my esteem.. I love this new guy but my body goes into severe fight or flight and I come up with reasons he could be gay”-

It may be that you wouldn’t have been so intensely alarmed if you found a straight dating site on your ex’s phone, and if you imagined your new boyfriend looking at a woman’s behind. It is possible that the reason you were so alarmed about the gay part is that homosexuality is still considered by some to be a sexual aberration, similar to the aberration of incest, of a grandfather sexually abusing his granddaughters.

The gay issue therefore, may have triggered your sexual abuse expeirence (the abuse by your grandfather + your parents’ betrayal of you following that abuse), causing in you that “severe fight or flight” that you experience when you imagine your new boyfriend being gay.

anita

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