When I was 7 to 9 years old, my brother’s friend, who was around 11 to 13, sexually assaulted me. I remember him coming over after school, and I can’t remember if my brother was home or not, but he told me to pull my pants down and lie on my stomach. I didn’t understand what was happening, but I knew no one could find out because I was afraid of getting in trouble, and I just wanted to feel cool. Almost right after, I developed a masturbation addiction at a really young age. I’m 22 now and only just realizing it was COCSA. How was I so blind to this, and how did I not see all the trauma it has caused in my life? I feel so confused, almost like it wasn’t my life.

Thank you for trusting us with this, and I am so sorry you had to experience something so painful. Coming to understand something like this at 22 can feel like the ground shifting. It makes so much sense why you are feeling so confused. 

You weren't blind. At 7 or 8, you had no framework for what he was asking you to do. Children that age don't have the language or the understanding of sexuality they'd need to recognize sexual harm while it's happening. So the memory gets stored as something strange, secret, and hard to place. What you did understand was the emotional part. You knew it had to stay hidden, you were scared of getting in trouble, and you wanted this older kid to think you were cool. Notice that what scared you was getting in trouble, not him. Kids often absorb the secrecy around something long before they understand the act itself. Children can't consent to sexual contact, and going along or staying quiet is not agreement. Many survivors only start putting words to childhood experiences in their late teens or twenties, once they have the knowledge and the distance to look back. Delayed understanding like yours is one of the most common patterns among adults who were harmed as kids.

Child-on-child sexual abuse, often shortened to COCSA, is a term some people use for sexual contact between children where there is a gap in age, power, or understanding. At 11 to 13, he was also a kid, and he may have been repeating something he had seen or experienced himself. You might feel anger toward him, compassion for whatever he may have been carrying, both, or neither, and none of those is the wrong response. The harm to you was still real, and a four-year gap at those ages is significant. Only you get to decide what language fits your story.

Clinicians often see what you describe as a masturbation addiction starting almost right away in children who were exposed to sexual contact before they could understand it. When a child's body is awakened to sexual feelings too early, those sensations can become a way to self-soothe or cope with feelings they can't name. It doesn't mean something was wrong with you. Your body was responding to something it never should have been introduced to.

The feeling that it wasn't your life is worth paying attention to as well. When something is overwhelming or doesn't fit the story we have about ourselves, the mind can create distance from it. Clinicians call that process dissociation, which simply means a protective kind of disconnection. Feeling like you're looking at someone else's past is one way that distance can show up. Seeing something clearly for the first time can even feel worse than not knowing, at least at first, and that usually softens as you let yourself look at it more directly.

You don't need a complete memory to begin healing from this. Memory gaps are normal for experiences from that age. One thing that may help right now is writing with no goal of making it make sense. Start with "What I know now that I didn't know then" and let whatever comes land on the page. If you want company while you sort through it, a trauma-informed therapist can do that with you. You're allowed to understand your own life at whatever pace it comes to you. Thank you for trusting us with this. You are not alone.