u/National-Event-1595

Be kind, please.

Just going to spill what’s in my brain:
I’m in my 30s. I have OCD. I’m the eldest of 4 brothers, two of whom identify as gay or queer.

When one of them came out when I was in my 20s, I started having muddy flashbacks of sexually assaulting him when I was maybe 13 or 14. The “memories” never occurred before then and he and I have a really strong relationship and he’s 10 years my junior. But then I have the other brother who is queer and I started thinking and wondering if I assaulted him. And in my “memories” it keeps changing which sibling and what occurred.

I think about it every day trying to make sense of if the memories are real or if I’m trying to blame myself for them being gay because I can’t fathom how two of my siblings could not be straight. I know how that sounds, but I don’t mean it negatively. I mostly mean it from a statistical standpoint. Our dad split when I was 13, the home we grew up in was angry and loud and a lot of fear was instilled in us with very few male role models and we were taught to stick together.

My OCD has me scouring the internet all the time trying to understand if people are born gay, turned gay, what it means if a 13-14 year old has sexual impulses that he acts on and later realizes was wrong, and I dig deep in my memories to try to find something clear to either condemn me or absolve me.

Their lives are challenging because the world is cruel and I don’t want to have contributed to that. I’m also a Christian so that both complicated and makes some parts of this easier. In my life, I also find more peace if I’m to blame for things going wrong, so much so that I’d always rather be the problem and idk if I’m applying that same behavior here.

Mom was very mean, I grew up throwing temper tantrums almost daily, I had unfettered access to porn, no one to talk to about sex in the home, hyperresponsibility and pressure and bullying, and not to mention having been forced by my 14 year old female cousin to make out with her sister my age (7-8) and take Polaroids of us doing it in the 90s as well and a male cousin my age fondling me in the closet around 11 years old.

I don’t know how any of this contributes to my brain and behaviors today but at the end of the day… I just hope I didn’t make my brothers gay and I hope I didn’t sexually assault them. I just want to remember if any of these thoughts are true and I feel like I want to preemptively apologize even though I’m not sure what happened. It’s all fucked up and sometimes I cry about it, have panic attacks, wanna 💀, and the thought of bringing up a convo with either of them about this stuff doesn’t feel productive. Getting on TikTok and Reddit doesn’t help either. People either want to make you feel absolutely terrible, misquote science, or use religion to prop themselves up. I’m just so confused, remorseful, struggling to remember and I just want to put it all to rest.