When I was around 7 years old, I experienced sexual abuse by another boy the same age as me. I pushed those feelings down for years and it mostly worked, but after my first breakup recently, everything came rushing back. Now I can't stop thinking about wanting someone to hurt me the same way, but worse. I even find myself thinking about how to get with an older person to make that happen. I know it doesn't make sense, but the wanting feels real and I don't know where it's coming from. I also feel this weird anxiety about getting older, like there is a window closing and I am running out of time to feel this way. I also feel like if I actually went through with it and got hurt, it would be my fault because I was the one looking for it. Am I a bad person for feeling this way?

Thank you for sharing this. You are not a bad person and what you are feeling has a real explanation. 

What you are describing sounds like something clinicians call trauma reenactment, and it is one of the most documented and least talked-about responses to early sexual trauma. When something overwhelming happens to a child before they have any framework for understanding their own body or what safety means, the brain can get stuck trying to finish what it never got to resolve. Think of it like a song that got cut off in the middle. The mind keeps reaching for the ending, even when the ending it is reaching for is painful. The wanting you feel is not a reflection of who you are. It is your nervous system still trying to make sense of something that happened when you were seven.

Your breakup almost certainly cracked something open. Loss and grief have a way of reaching down and pulling up older pain, especially pain around powerlessness or feeling like your body did not belong to you. The COCSA you experienced, child-on-child sexual abuse, was exactly that kind of wound. And now, hurting in a new way, your mind is reaching toward the pattern it already knows. Disorienting and frightening, yes. Gross or shameful, no.

The anxiety you named about time running out is worth paying attention to. What that feeling is telling you is that this urge feels urgent and time-limited, like there is a window closing. There is not. Urgency is part of how trauma patterns work, not a signal that you need to act before it is too late. There is no deadline on any of this.

On the question of fault...if an adult were to pursue you or agree to hurt you, the responsibility for that harm would belong entirely to them, regardless of what you wanted or asked for. Wanting something, even something that would hurt you, does not transfer blame onto you for what another person chooses to do.

What you actually need is not someone to hurt you. It is a safe place to work through the pain you are already carrying. A trauma-informed therapist who has experience with early childhood sexual abuse can help you untangle the reenactment pattern without requiring you to be hurt again to do it. If accessing a therapist feels out of reach right now, starting with a school counselor or a trusted adult is a real first step. You do not have to figure out the whole path, just the next door.

You reached out here instead of acting on this. That matters. Thank you for trusting us with this.