I'm a 25-year-old man, and I want to ask about something that happened in my childhood. Between the ages of 9 and 12, I was playing with a younger cousin who was 4 to 6 years younger than me. I don't remember exactly how it started, but since I was the older one, I assume I was the one who suggested we play a sexual game. We'd sit on each other without clothes, genitals touching. This was before puberty for both of us, and I didn't have any real understanding of sex beyond that. I remember I enjoyed the physical feeling. I don't think I forced or coerced him, but I honestly don't remember if I initiated it. This happened once. I didn't think about it again until my twenties, when I was at a seminar on child sexual abuse and a psychologist mentioned that children can abuse other children. Since then, for five years, I've been consumed by this. I carry deep guilt and shame, and it's contributed to depression. I don't know what counts as COCSA and what counts as normal childhood behavior, or if there's even a clear line between the two. I don't know how to let go of this guilt.

Thank you so much for trusting us with this. Five years is a long time to carry something like this by yourself and I'm glad you finally said it out loud.

There's no single clean line between normal childhood curiosity and something more serious. Age and developmental gap is one thing clinicians look at, since an older kid understands more and carries more influence in the moment, even without meaning to. Mutuality is another, meaning both kids curious, neither one pressured, neither showing distress. Some clinicians use the term COCSA, child-on-child sexual abuse, to describe situations with a real power imbalance, coercion, or one child not wanting it. Others use it much more broadly, for any real age gap regardless of what else was going on. You're the only one who can weigh what you actually remember, a single occurrence, no coercion, no memory of your cousin being upset, against what that term is meant to capture, and decide if it fits or if this reads more like the kind of undirected curiosity a lot of kids stumble into before they understand what sex even is.

That kid is not who you are now. You were nine to twelve years old, with zero real framework for what sexuality even was, running on the same undeveloped brain every kid that age has. You don't know for certain how your cousin experienced it, and that uncertainty is uncomfortable, but uncertainty is not the same as evidence that harm occurred.

Guilt isn't evidence either. It says something about your conscience, sure, but guilt that gets stuck and loops without ever landing anywhere stops doing its job and starts becoming its own injury. It seems like five years of this hasn't given you clarity or repair. Accountability means actually reckoning with something real. Self-punishment means staying in pain long after the pain stopped serving any purpose. What you're describing sounds a lot more like the second one.

The way this memory keeps circling, replaying the same details without ever reaching a conclusion, is exhausting in a specific way. Minds sometimes get caught fixating on the possibility of having caused harm, long past what the actual facts support, and the fixation itself becomes the thing that hurts, more than anything that actually happened. A therapist who works with intrusive, looping guilt can help you learn to tolerate the uncertainty here instead of needing to resolve it before you can rest. Stop It Now (1-888-PREVENT) is also there for exactly this kind of question. They've heard versions of this before and are prepared to support you if you have additional questions.

You've held this alone long enough. It's okay to put some of it down. Thank you for reaching out.