True Stories :: Fifty Years of Suffering

I was nine when I became a Boy Scout. Looking back, the very name, Boy Scout, seems wrong. Doesn’t Boy Scout mean someone looking for boys? I know that’s not what it’s supposed to mean, but it is what it came to mean for me.

It was the beginning of summer. Mid-summer my family sent me to Boy Scout Camp. Like everyone else, I was lonely and had nothing to do to pass the time but work toward Merit Badges. The pivotal one was canoeing.

I was small back then in both height and weight, so dealing with a swamped canoe was difficult for me. Day after day, after everyone else had left, I continued to work at it. After a few days of that, the instructor asked me if I would like his help. I didn’t know that the help he offered had nothing to do with canoeing, but after a while, he suggested that we go back to his cabin to work though my technique. Unfortunately, the technique he had in mind had nothing to do with canoeing and everything to do with perverted sex.

I can’t recall what I thought at the time. As a child, I had played "I’ll show you mine if you show me yours" with my peers. It’s ironic that a short time into the new school year, someone told their parents about what had happened. At that point, I was told both that it was "wrong" and that it was "normal" for children to make comparisons … a huge dichotomy for a young child to deal with.

If the "normal" that I did was "wrong", what was what had been done to me? The guilt and confusion and shame over-powered me. I didn’t know that any of it was "abuse." I didn’t know what abuse was. I do know that it killed me inside.

Even having been found out, I couldn’t tell what had been done to me. For if what I had done was "wrong", how "wrong" had I been in trusting someone older? I was already "damaged goods", what would happen to me if I confessed to even more damage?

I aged that way. Scared of what would happen to me if I did something wrong, I went the other way. I wouldn’t even kiss a girl. I wouldn’t do anything to anyone that seemed "wrong". I couldn’t take that chance. After all, how could anyone "like me" when I had learned not to like myself. Another mistake and then what? From that question, a perfectionist was born.

It wasn’t until much later that I understood the concept of trying to fulfill an internal emptiness with external "things", but that is what I did when I finally met a girl that actually seemed to like me. I married her expecting her to fill the unhappiness within me, but she couldn’t. No one could, but I didn’t know that. All I knew at the time was that she wasn’t helping my pain, and with that recognition, my unhappiness grew larger, my self-doubt grew larger, everything negative grew larger.

Striving to be a perfectionist wasn’t helping. Perfectionism is a doom-loop. With each failure, I punished myself, hated myself more, tried harder, put in more hours, failed again, and the loop continued, until I crashed.

I yearned to feel better, to feel as if I mattered, to feel loved. And when my wife couldn’t help, I searched for it with every woman that would talk with me.

Recognizing that I had become a sex addict, I entered therapy. I knew what I was doing was wrong, but I simply couldn’t find my way back to anything that seemed normal. For twenty-five years, I worked through my problems without ever dealing with the cause, then at the age of fifty, I finally told my therapist what had happened and what I had done. With his help, I came to recognize the shame that had ultimately defined my life, to place the blame where it belonged and to resolve my self-doubts. In short, I finally came to recognize who I was and was not.

Now, I’m in my sixties, yet with all the knowledge I have acquired, it is still hard for me to grasp how something that happened in less than an hour has affected my entire life and led to countless years of suffering for me, my former wife and others. For my perpetrator, it was probably over when he finished, but for me, it will never be over.

Abuse doesn’t go away. I know that because neither the abuse done to me nor the hopefully "normal" things I did to others has ever gone away. Therapy has eased the pain and allowed me to work within our world, but the internal pain is there forever. The person who victimized me as a young boy is probably long dead, but his legacy lives on.

The cycle of abuse lasts forever. The only way to stop it is to never let it happen. Please teach your children about what is and is not acceptable, and that regardless of what happens, they need to tell. Only then can they get the help they need so that they do not perpetrate this evil. Even if parents can’t prevent the abuse, they can stop it from moving forward. They can end the cycle.

Please help stop abuse. Don’t let another boy learn the wrong lessons about what is acceptable. In those few minutes of teaching, you may save your child and others fifty years of suffering.

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