I was casually reading about the horrors of the Duggars when I suddenly remembered being molested by my cousin at 7 as the adults were in the next room. I’m afraid counseling won’t work for me. In the past I’ve always sabotaged it because I won’t tell the truth if I think it means the counselor won’t like me. Fucked up? You bet, but that’s me. I guess I don’t want advice. I don’t know what I want. I’m just so fucked up I needed to say something. Shit.
I’m sorry that happened to you. That sucks.
FWIW, if you think that counseling might help you with this or any other aspect of your life, try again. It sounds like you have not found the right person yet. A big part of finding the right person is being comfortable enough to be honest. Not every counselor you talk to will feel “right”. In a weird way, it’s like dating. Sometimes you have to talk to a few before you find the right one.
Good luck.
You just suddenly remembered it now?
I agree that it sounds like you should give counseling another try. The only thing I can suggest is that you tell the counselor what you said here – that you won’t tell the truth if you think it means the counselor won’t like you. Starting with at least that level of honesty would help you to open up, and the counselor would be able to assist you in overcoming your need to please him or her.
Good therapists really are a safe place for you to unburden yourself. If you don’t feel comfortable enough to do that, then you’re not working with the right therapist for you. I can’t tell you how many therapy sessions I’ve started with the words, “O.K., here’s the thing that I’ve been most afraid to talk to you about this week…”
Late one night listening to a radio talk show about incest and abuse, they stated that often, hearing someone else’s story will trigger the memory. I guess you found your trigger. (That show was mine. 
)
As far as sabotaging your counseling…I agree with ddsun that you may have to shop around a bit to find a counselor you “click” with. I also believe you ought to give counseling another try.
(Even if you are not looking for advice -) The counselor is not your friend, they are a professional that you are paying to help you. (IOW, I don’t care if my plumber likes me, as long as he can fix the toilet!)
Ultimately it doesn’t matter if they like you, it’s not like you’re going to be meeting up with them for lunch. They’re not allowed to go gossip about you to their friends. If they have much experience in their field, chances are they’ve heard worse. And if they just happen to not like you, they’d damn well better be professional enough to never let that show. So, what have you got to lose? 
Good luck, and I’m sorry for what happened to you. It sucks, I know.
Thanks, everybody. You’re right, I’ve got my work set out for me. It was just such a shock to have all that suddenly flood in to my brain. Who knew the movies got it so right?
If this happened to me - the sudden realization after all these years - I have to believe I would have some level of doubt as to whether there is some possibility that it did not, in fact, happen. You don’t seem to have this.
Why is that?
mmm
I think, in a lot of ways, how much you are willing to doubt your own memory depends on how well educated you are about how memory works and whether you have had opportunities to see it fail. I know enough to be sure that no-one can be 100% certain about any distant memory.
I once gave a statement to police, about an accident that I witnessed, that I later realized was wrong. I, like the OP, had a childhood incident just pop into my head for no particular reason forty odd years later. I had not recalled it even on the day it happened. And only weeks ago I listened to someone recounting, to a large group, a lengthy story about an incident they had been involved in years before. The story was 100% accurate except for the fact that I was the person involved in the incident, not the storyteller.
don’t ask, this is so much like what I was going to say. I was in my 30s when I realized I’d been sexually abused as a child. Several times by different people.
I’d always known it. It was a part of my past and I could describe the episodes so it didn’t come out of the blue. But I’d never owned it. For several months I’d think “I act like somebody who’s been sexually abused,” like when something on Oprah would come up or whatever. But it wasn’t until a counseling session while I was relating an example of something and the therapist said "Becky, that was you that I guess I started accepting it. (At first I was dumbstruck and didn’t know what to say.) But he convinced me when he recalled the same “confession” from months before.
Mentally, I’d always known it. Emotionally I could only relate it as something that had happened…at sometime…
No grand breakthrough. Floods of nothing else occurred. lol It didn’t really change anything and nothing was resolved, but it made me start looking at other things from my childhood in a different way, because maybe I’d been safely distancing myself from that stuff, too.
Ongoing, and I’m learning. But I don’t cry about it or get mad. (I don’t think.)
See, for me, it was always how I’d framed it. Up until I was in my mid-twenties and begun having these horrible night terrors about some man being in the bedroom with me, I considered what went on between me and my step-brother as innocent childhood play. “Show me what you got and I’ll show you mine.” It wasn’t until I began therapy to try and cope with those stupid, ever-present dream that I told the counselor about the stuff that I’d experienced as a kid.
I’d never talked about it much after I dismissed it, even letting go of all the other issues that had accompanied it at the time: more nightmares, bed wetting, being terrified of sleeping alone, need extra ‘protection’ to do ordinary tasks due to my extreme fear of I didn’t know what. And while detailing and truly thinking about what I thought was no big deal, for the first time since I was an adult, it dawned on me that all of it was so much more than just childish play. I’d been molested and internalized the severity of it.
So, I completely understand how this could happen and I sympathize for anyone going through it later in life. It feels like the rug has been pulled out from under you, contradicting what you wanted to believe versus reality. I’m so very sorry, but you definitely can find healing.
But how can you be sure it really happened if a therapist had to convince you it occurred?
Memories can fade over time.
Memories can be altered by time.
Memories can be modified by other memories and merged with stories from other sources, even news articles.
When memories are altered, they feel just as real as the originals, no matter how impossible, unlikely or false they may be.
So I doubt you were molested by your cousin.
It was your priest.
Musicat, memories can and do alter over time, so I’m with you there. I gotta say, though, that your last 2 sentences really caused me to go “WTF?”, especially in the context of this thread.
What is that swishing sound I hear?
I think Jimbuff is saying that your joke is a little out of place in a thread like this.
You need to talk to a professional because people here just want to make jokes or tell you to doubt your own memory.
I had a similar experience, but it was minor. I don’t remember what triggered it but I suddenly remembered that while in high school that the history teacher kissed me on the cheek during class. Maybe I had always remembered it on some level but I didn’t realize the level of inappropriateness of his actions until then.
Have you remembered it before, but never labeled it as ‘abuse?’ Maybe just ‘my cousin did some jerky things?’
Both sides in this thread are correct. It is very easy to invent memories. It’s also very easy to not recognize something as abuse when it happened to you, especially as a kid.
I sincerely wish you the best of luck.
It’s happened to my wife; she was triggered when my sister revealed she’d been molested (not repressed memory for sister; it was by a “pillar of the church” and she didn’t think she’d be believed). I saw things my wife had written way before we met where she thought something had happened, but she wasn’t sure what.
In joke or not, this isn’t really the place for it, so don’t do things like this in topics where they’re inappropriate.