Flashback Friday - Full House and I Lose

A word of explanation and warning. Since I first disclosed my status as a survivor of childhood sexual abuse at the end of March of this year, I have spent many sleepless nights and many waking hours consumed by a tsunami of flashbacks to specific incidents of the abuse that have left me feeling like I was drowning. With each successive flashback they feel as if they have been piling up in my mind, heart, and soul in a way that is threatening to consume me. When the flashbacks hit it is not me remembering the abuse, it is me reliving the abuse. All of my senses are transported back to that time. I am not a thirty-seven year old man; I am a three year old toddler, a six year old little boy, or whatever age I was from the ages of three to twelve during which the abuse occurred. I need to get these flashbacks out in order to be able to detach and see these events through my adult eyes so that I can begin to heal. The only way I know how to do that is to tell the stories. If you are a fellow survivor, these Flashback Friday posts are likely to be triggers. If you are a supporter, please know that what you read on Fridays will likely be extremely disturbing. If for either reason you choose not to continue reading, I understand. If you choose to continue reading beyond the image below, thank you for validating my experience by listening to my truth.

I know it's been a while since my last Flashback Friday post and the reason is that this is far and away the worst flashback I've had and the one that keeps coming up the most. I've had a really hard time finding the strength and the words to get this one out of my head and onto the page. Thank you for your patience.

As near as I can tell, this incident of my childhood sexual abuse happened when I was seven or eight years old as we were still living in Metro Detroit and hadn't moved up north yet. I have no idea where my mother or my little brother were. For some reason I was home alone with my stepfather one night when five of his buddies came over to play poker and get drunk. While the other guys seemed to be pacing themselves, my stepfather had a much larger collection of empty beer cans in front of him than anyone. He started getting angry and losing hand after hand as he was so drunk he couldn't concentrate on the cards in his hand. Throughout the night my stepfather's buddies kept making comments about what a cute boy I was. It made me feel good that they all seemed really nice and that they liked me. I wasn't scared that my mother wasn't around because these men made me feel safe. What a naive child I was...

After countless hands of poker and a lot of beer, the night seemed to be coming to a close as one of my stepfather's buddies, a really tall guy with light curly hair, looked at my stepfather and said "You lose Chuck! Time to pay up." My stepfather pulled out his wallet from his pocket and opened it up to show the other men that it was empty and then he started laughing. I knew that laugh and it made me really, really scared. He looked sideways at me and then said to the five men sitting at the poker table, "No worries, right guys? You didn't come here for money. You came here for the tightest ass you've ever fucked!" And with that my stepfather stood up, picked me kicking and screaming under his arm and carried me over to the living room couch. He threw me down on my stomach over the arm of the couch, knocking the wind out of me, and pulled my pajama pants down, spit on his dick, and rammed it up my seven or eight year old anus as hard as he could while his poker buddies cheered.

For what felt like hours I blacked in and out of consciousness as my stepfather and his poker buddies took turns raping me over and over as I lay across the arm of the living room couch with tears streaming down my face. The pain never stopped and I was in agony as each man raped me each more than once. Eventually they all zipped their pants back up and left one by one until I was alone again with the monster my mother called her husband. As I shakily tried to stand to my feet, I could feel something running down the insides of my legs and I thought it was the stuff my stepfather put inside me all the times he raped me before. When I looked down though, there was blood running down my legs from the savage multiple rapings I had just endured.

I have a vague memory of a period of about a week where I kept putting a wad of toilet paper in my underwear to keep from getting blood on my underwear and pants. In light of reliving this event through multiple flashbacks I'm pretty sure that was right after my stepfather's poker night. To this day, I can't watch poker on television and I've lost count of the number of excuses I've made over the years to not have to learn or play the game. Even looking at a deck of cards can trigger a flashback to that night. I know enough about the game to know that a full house is supposed to be almost a sure win in a game of poker. In my case, it was a full house but I lost more that even I might ever know.

Real Men Feel: Surviving Childhood Sexual Abuse

Not Mine To Carry

This week the universe decided to teach me a lesson through the actions of a man that I sit in a men's group with and thought was a friend. For whatever reason, something about me triggered this man and he decided the way to deal with that was to dump his issues on me, to make me the bad guy, and to accuse me of something that was proven to be untrue but yet he refused to acknowledge his error. I carried the weight of this for most of this week. I wondered what I did wrong, what I could have done differently. I felt guilty and ashamed. Sound familiar?

I realized after a few days that whatever the cause of the rift between my friend and I, it wasn't my fault. He has his own issues to work through and tried to make them mine. But his issues aren't mine to carry. The confusion, fear, guilt, and shame I carried are his and so I gave them back to him and set myself free from the burden. It seemed like such an obvious and simple response in this situation. Why then is it so hard to apply to the past?

As a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, I have carried the secrets, guilt, and shame of the abuse for over thirty years. On one level I know that these are not my burdens to carry either. They belong to my stepfather and his friends who sexually assaulted me for years and ripped away my innocence. None of that can be laid at my feet so why am I the one left feeling guilt and shame? Why is it so easy to let go of what is not mine to carry in one instance and nearly impossible when it matters most?

All I can think of is that because I have carried the guilt and shame of my abuse for so long that they are familiar and feel like they're mine, but they aren't. From the day this past March that I finally broke my silence and revealed all of the dirty little secrets that I have been keeping for him, I have been on a journey toward letting go of the guilt and shame, of returning to his ghost what is not and was never mine to carry...