How Do You Know If You Can’t Remember?
I would like to start this by clarifying that I was assigned female at birth and am a trans man. I transitioned around 13 so I experienced my childhood as a girl.
I never remember being sexualIy violated, but I do remember first discreetly pleasuring myself very young (probably 3-6 years old) and continuing throughout my childhood because it ‘felt good’. I knew it was inappropriate and I shouldn’t do it but I did anyway.
I was first exposed to ‘adult material’ at age ~7 by googling ‘n*ked woman’. I felt super embarrassed and also being aroused by it, which is so icky to think about because I was a little kid!
I also started having this fear of men, like I specifically remember this one high schooler working at my after school program (in elementary school) made me super uncomfortable, he was nice and I could never tell why I didn’t want to go near him, I just had this icky feeling inside of me. This happened with several men throughout my life and I can’t pinpoint any similarity because it’s not every man, but there’s probably something, because they were never creepy or weird.
In elementary school, I would also have these dreams of being topless and being watched (inappropriately) by different men and boys in my life, while being laughed at by everyone else, and no one would ever come help me. I had so many dreams of being nvde that I feared falling asleep some nights, because I was going to be watched and embarrassed and uncomfortable. These dreams were so distressing they would follow me into the next few days if I had a particularly distressing one, and it would affect how I viewed the people in my dream (like a friend and family members). I also had dreams in my early teen years about S/A-ing people, which were also distressing. I even had dreams about doing it to family members. I would like to emphasize that I would never touch anyone without their consent, not even a hug, but for some reason the situations were coming into my mind.
In middle school I became hypers-xual and started consuming p*rn, first in 6th grade. I got addicted to it and touching myself and at times it was better and worse throughout middle and high school. I can’t say I’m doing all that much better now.
At the same time as being hypers-xual I greatly feared ever having any intimate relationship that I become completely unattracted to real people, only the ones in adult entertainment.
Probably TMI but I also have some issues with lack of feeling and pain in my swimsuit area (to put it politely).
I also have C-PTSD, I’m not 100% sure what happened to me because a lot of my childhood is blocked out, but I know for a fact I was at a minimum, emotionally neglected.
So, my question is, how do you know you’ve been abused if you don’t remember? I have so many symptoms but I don’t want to put that label on it if I really am just overthinking it, because there are real survivors that have flashbacks and much worse symptoms, I just want to know if I’m crazy or these things could be something?