Dear Dad,
I should have told you what I am about to tell you when I was twelve, fourteen, or even sixteen years old. I guess it was my fault that I didn’t do that, but I was always afraid that you would only see the evil in me and punish me further for what happened. I was already being punished by a man I thought was my friend and, in my mind, by a God I thought was everybody’s friend except mine.
It might surprise you to know that some of my antisocial behavior that you did not understand came out of my futile attempts to avoid continually hurting the people I loved. Dropping out of university rather than continuing and disappointing everyone when I failed to succeed. Avoiding conversations rather than becoming argumentative and aggressive. Choosing to avoid family occasions rather than disrupting them by my objectionable and sometimes drunken behavior. Spending time alone, drinking or playing games online, to avoid what I felt was your judgmental attitude toward my behavior. All these decisions did not seem like choices to me. These, and many others like them, seemed to be my only options.
You often wondered aloud why I did not ever speak to someone about “what was bothering me.” I was never sure what you meant when you said that. I did not feel that I was being bothered by anything, or at least anything that I could talk to anybody about. I just felt worried, angry, tired, and sad. What I knew that no one else could know was that I was different from everybody else. I saw people who were obviously happy, when I knew happiness was an impossible dream for me. I saw people who believed they had an exciting future, while I lived with a painful past. I saw people secure in their relationships, while for me, the idea of being in a relationship filled me with crippling fear. I saw people happily recalling memories, while I was tormented night after night by unspeakably horrific nightmares.
The painful past I have lived with revolves around events that occurred when a man I trusted sexually molested me. He was a friend of yours and was always in our home. He was a friend of God’s because he was our parish priest, and therefore he was my friend too. He was the friend of the other boys my age as well. He took us on camping trips, he coached us at basketball, and he led us through our confirmation classes. He invited us to visit him in his house, where we played video games, listened to music, and ate takeaway. He was knowledgeable, kind, fun loving, and generous. When he first touched me in what I now know as an inappropriate way, I accepted it as an expression of affection. But when one night in a tent, in a riverside camping ground, he raped me, I was frightened and confused. I was frightened because of the degree of force that he used and confused because when he finished, he became angry, telling me that God would punish me if I ever told anyone about what happened. So began a life of excruciating secrecy.
This secret world in which I now lived was made all the darker and foreboding by several perceptions that I had about myself. I was aware that I was a child and he was an adult with position and power. This perception led me to the unshakeable belief that I had committed a dreadful sin not only against God but against this “good man,” and this clearly meant that I was evil. I also perceived that if anyone were to discover what I had done, I would be punished and rejected not only by my abuser and God but by everyone else. The third perception was perhaps the most painful. It was that at no time is it safe to trust myself or another person because relationships are dangerous, and friendships will always have a painful end.