Sexual Abuse Has Long Lasting Effects – But You Can Get Passed It – I did

The rate of child abuse in the world is truly frightening and the percentage of that which is sexual abuse is more frightening still. I discuss this during many of my presentations as a motivational speaker, not in a negative and depressing way but in a way of how you can triumph over having suffered through something like this in your life. I have always done this verbally, but I am going to give doing so in writing a try. Now, to understand the how and the why of it all I will share the entire story of how I was abducted and molested, then how I reacted initially to the entire ordeal, how my parents handled everything and the long-term effects this had on my emotional state and how I got to where I am today. This is not a sob story or anything like that, it is my reality, one of the worst events in my life and something that took me more than 25 years to overcome, but I did and I can only hope that this story helps others overcome the difficulties in their lives too.

At the age of 8 I was living in Al Khobar, Saudi Arabia with my family. Now, I am an American, a Texan to be exact and my father worked in the Oil & Gas industry which meant that my family moved internationally every 1.5 – 2 years. We lived on an American compound that had restricted access and was attached to the parking lot of my father’s office building. There were numerous locals that worked on the compound in the cafeteria, as grounds keepers and as bus drivers and nobody had heard anything about issues with them that were deeply frightening, though there were a few minor issues that had more to do with cultural differences than anything else.

I remember leaving our house one morning, our house was an old singlewide trailer, and walking towards my friend Phillip’s house. He was from London and one of about 3 kids in my age group. We played together a lot and we hid from his jerk of a big brother a lot too, ah the good old days. Anyway, I was walking to his house down the series of sidewalks inside the compound walls. It wasn’t more than a 2 minute walk as the compound was very small, too small for cars and just big enough to ride a bicycle around if you didn’t expect to get up any real speed. I had left the walkways between the trailers and was in the open area that served as a park for all the kids when I noticed a guy from the cafeteria that I recognized from every meal we had eaten there. He was one of the bussers who collected plates as people finished eating. He had never spoken to me or anyone that I knew of and I think we all assumed that he just didn’t speak English like many of the men and women who worked there. Boy was I wrong.

I didn’t think anything of him; he was dressed in his work uniform, a white shirt and black slacks and was walking towards the cafeteria. He barely even glanced in my direction as I neared him and being a kid I wasn’t exactly concerned for my safety. I wish I had been. He smiled a little as I got closer and raised a hand in a small wave, but as I began to pass him he threw his arm out and wrapped me up in an extremely tight head lock. He was squeezing so tight that I had a very hard time breathing and as scared as I was I recall thinking that he would be seen very soon and he would let me go. What I didn’t consider through my fear and pain was that it was summer time and the majority of the families that lived on the compound had returned to their home countries for vacation. That meant that there were less than 20 adults on the entire compound, not including the workers. He was never seen by anyone that mattered and could have stopped him.

Instead of being caught he drug me around in a head lock, pulling a nude photo of a woman from his pocket and holding it in front of my face for literally hours. My parents weren’t looking for me as they thought I was at Phillip’s and it was very common for us to be outside playing until the sun began to set. I was at the mercy of this creep and fate for lack of a better word. My best hope for salvation was supposed to be in the building he eventually began dragging me to, the cafeteria building. Inside that building was, obviously the cafeteria, but also a small weight room where I was supposed to be meeting one of the men my father worked with, a Saudi named Nassar. As this man pulled me between the buildings that surrounded the cafeteria he stopped and started talking to another man in a foreign language and it was not Arabic, I spoke a good bit of Arabic so I would have understood something. I began to struggle and tried to speak and in response he tightened his grip and snatched me around. That is when both men began laughing and my fear went up even higher.

He held that picture there for the entirety of the time he drug me around the compound and I was to learn later, after learning the time once I was safe, that he had drug me around for a few hours. He spoke to this other man for what felt like twenty minutes or so, then they actually shook hands and went separate ways. I was being drug by the neck again and I remember the bright sunlight dimming and pulsating as I struggled to breathe through his grip around my throat. I think I blacked out for a few seconds because I have no memory of going around the side of the cafeteria or entering the building, I don’t even remember being pulled down the hallway that led passed the weight room I was supposed to be meeting Nassar in or into the bathroom at the end of that hall, but I remember my head being slammed into the tile wall at the back of the bathroom and then hitting the floor. This is when light returned to the world and the onslaught began.

I was lying crumpled on the floor and coughing as I tried to catch my breath. My throat hurt more than anything that I had experienced at that point in my life and I could not swallow without feeling like I had been kicked in the throat. This man stood there watching me for several moments, just standing over me watching me struggle to breath and I could not figure out what he was staring at me like that for. He did not have any anger in his eyes at all, that was something that I was well versed in from my father as he was an alcoholic and had a tendency to get enraged with me and I was always the target of that rage, but that is a tale for another time. Instead of anger I saw something even scarier. His eyes were so dark that they looked black, especially against his pale skin and under his jet black hair and in those black eyes I saw the most terrifying look a person can have. His eyes were empty. There was no anger, no concern, no caring, nothing. His eyes showed not a shred of human emotion. I was far from a student of human behavior at the tender age of 8, but I guess that there was something instinctual happening to me because I was filled with a feeling I had never felt before, but we will get to that in just a moment.

He finally tired of watching me or he was satisfied that I was not going to die, I don’t know, but whatever his reasoning, he reached down and lifted me off the floor by my upper arms and pulled me to my feet. He then knelt down in front of me and yanked my pants down, reaching out and grabbing my genitals as he did so. The grip there was just as bad as the one he had around my neck for the past few hours and I can remember wondering why everything hurt so bad. Why was I burning so badly and why hadn’t Nassar come to save me? I recognized the bathroom we were in, it was the men’s room at the back of the cafeteria and to get there I knew you had to pass the little weight room and there was no way anyone walked by there without being noticed by anyone inside, so where was Nassar? I learned the answer to that later and, spoiler alert, Nassar simply wasn’t there to see me be drug by.
So why was I burning so badly? The reason was that during the course of his yanking my pants down and grabbing me he tore the skin around the base of my penis and cut me with a fingernail just to the side of my testicles. Now, back to that feeling that was filling me. To understand the impact of this you need to understand something about me. I was a major pacifist. My father had always told me that if someone started a fight that I had better finish it but my mother always told me that if I got into a fight she would tear my butt up. Talk about being conflicted! Well, my father was at work all the time and when he wasn’t at work he was either getting drunk, punishing me for something or other, passed out or overseas working single status. That meant that the most influential person in my life was my mother and I became terrified to fight or even defend myself as was evidenced by the daily thrashings I got when back in Texas by my elementary school bully Randy.

Well there I was, trapped in a bathroom with a man I did not know, a man that had caused me serious pain and had me at his mercy for several hours. I had been abducted, drug around the compound, choked unconscious and now I was standing there with my pants around my ankles with a white hot burning pain in my groin and an indescribable pain that most guys who have ever been racked can imagine, but instead of being a single quick shot to the groin I found my nuts in a vise grip. This man pulled and twisted and stared at me with that empty look the entire time. Now, it felt like hours that this went on when in reality it was more like ten minutes. Finally he finished hurting me and he made a huge error. He planned on forcing me to satisfy his twisted sexual crap, but as he began unbuttoning his pants, and speaking English for the first time throughout all of this, he backed into the last stall in the bathroom. The English he spoke was short, strongly accented and as matter of fact and cold as the look in his eyes. I had reached down and begun pulling up my pants as he tried undoing his and he looked at me and said, “Now you do me.”

This is where that strange feeling in me took over. That feeling was the need to fight. I had been building up to it throughout this entire ordeal I guess and I remember knowing that I could not overpower this grown man, but now he had opened himself up and left an opening for me to escape. I had to walk passed the stall he had backed into in order to get to the door and the bathroom was narrow enough for him to reach out and grab me, which is exactly what he did as I tried to break for the door. As I broke into a run he reached out and caught me by the collar of my T-shirt, clotheslining me and causing the pain in my throat to return even more severely than it had already been. As my body spun around towards him I did the only thing I could do, I reached up and grabbed his forearm. The little strength I had combined with the inertia of my spinning body was luckily enough to slam his arm into the sharp metal edge of the stall and he lost his grip. I turned and bolted out of the bathroom and heard the best sound I had ever heard. I heard the sound of weight plates clinking together. Someone was in the weight room and I knew that it was someone who could help because employees of the compound were not permitted in there.

I ran down the hallway towards the weight room and burst through the door. There he was, Nassar, and I burst into tears. He dropped the barbell he had in his hands and dropped down to my level asking what was wrong. I couldn’t say much but I said this, “A man grabbed me and hurt me in the bathroom.”

I later learned that he initially didn’t believe me because in Saudi Arabia a crime like that is punishable by death by beheading after months of hard jail time and weekly lashes. That is a huge deterrent, but then the man who had done all of this too me went rushing by the weight room. This is the only part of the entire day that plays like slow motion in my mind. As he appeared through the doorway he looked inside and saw me and Nassar and his already pale skin drained of what little color he had. Nassar’s reaction was perfect. He looked at me very seriously and with a large amount of shame and pain in his eyes and said run home to your mom and dad, and with that he bolted out of the weight room. I did not see Nassar again until that evening.

I was terrified to do what Nassar told me. I had obviously done something wrong; otherwise this would not have happened to me. I chose to hide, though not well. I left the cafeteria building as fast as I could and that is when I was overcome by a pain and a weakness unlike anything I had felt before. I began crying even harder and was having trouble seeing through the tears, my groin was on fire and screamed with pain and my throat seemed to be getting tighter, forcing me to spit the saliva build up out because swallowing hurt too much. I couldn’t walk very well so I went over to a large row of flowered bushes that lined many of the trailers and hid behind them. I unbuttoned my pants and began to pull them and my underwear away from my groin in an attempt to relieve the pain, but instead the sight made it worse. I was bleeding enough to have coated the inside of my underwear with a layer of smeared blood and the heat of the summer weather had caused me to sweat into the open wounds which only added insult to injury.

I hid in those bushes for a few hours and cried until I couldn’t cry anymore. Finally I saw a few kids that I knew walk by on their way to the playground and I felt a little bit of relief. I watched them and waited for them to pass by, and then I adjusted my pants, wiped my face off with my shirt and slipped unnoticed from my hiding place behind the bushes. I walked very gently down the sidewalk, trying to keep from aggravating the pain I was already in and also trying to look normal to the other kids. It had been only a few hours since this all ended and I was already trying to hide it. I found myself constantly looking over my shoulder expecting the man to reappear and grab me all over again, but that never happened. In fact, I never saw him again and I would learn the reason why later on that evening.

Remember, I had been told to run home but I chose to hide out of fear of being punished for doing something wrong by my mom and dad. I guess it was around dinner time when I saw Nassar come around a corner towards the playground. He saw me and came over to ask why I had not gone home. I just looked at him and started to tear up all over again and again he reacted perfectly. He placed a hand on my shoulder and said, “Come on. It’s going to be okay.” To this day I tear up when I think about those words. It was the first “comfort” I had felt since having my entire world shattered by my molester.

Nassar positioned himself between me and the other kids so that they could not see me start to cry and he led me towards my house. He had gone to my house to check on me and learned that my parents had not heard from me. That scared him to death and he told them to stay put in case I came home while he went looking for me and they did as he instructed. I remember being escorted through the front door and seeing my parents standing in our tiny, poorly lit living room. This is where the anger towards my parents began. My mother did not try and hold or comfort me and neither did my father. Nassar had removed his hand from my shoulder and had taken a seat in one of the living room chairs against the wall on my left. It was time for the interrogation by my parents. What exactly happened? How did it happen? What exactly was done? Why didn’t you come home like you were told? Finally I got the ultimate message that I was in serious trouble and that all of this was my fault. I was told to go to my room and go to bed. I was not hugged, I was not comforted in any way, I was not told that I was not at fault and I received no empathy or reassurance that everything would be alright from the two people I needed it from the most. Instead I got pointed questions and my father yelled at me for failing to come home as I was told. He yelled at me several times when he did not like an answer and threatened to “beat my ass” several times too. Needless to say my bad day just got worse.

I went to bed as I was told and I cried myself to sleep after spending hours trying to find a position that didn’t hurt my groin and my throat. That was the last that this was ever discussed with me too. The following morning it was if nothing had happened, at least as far as my parent’s behavior went. I told my mom that it hurt to pee and my dad overheard, to which he told me to stop whining and my mom told me that she couldn’t do anything about it, just wait and it will get better. That was the first time I felt a burning ember of anger deep inside towards my parents but it would be years before I was able to quantify that anger, to understand it and it would take decades before I was able to face it and end it.

A few weeks later Nassar came back to our house for dinner. He made it a point to come back to my room when I was alone and talk to me. He was the only one to ask how I was doing and to reassure me that everything would be okay, but I didn’t answer him honestly when asked how I was doing because I didn’t want to get in trouble. I wasn’t certain that I would but I certainly had reason to be afraid of it. Later that evening, after dinner, I overheard the conversation of a lifetime between Nassar and my mother. For the first time in my memory my father was completely silent, come to think of it, it was the last time he was silent too. Nassar told my parents that the man who did this to me had been released from the hospital and that the police were not going to pursue charges against Nassar for having beat him into the hospital. My mind went reeling as I realized that Nassar had beaten this man severely for what he did and I felt a love for him in that moment that I didn’t really understand. I heard him ask my mother what she wanted to see happen to this man. She had the choice because we were not Saudi citizens and neither was the man who had abducted and molested me. He was Pakistani and my family had the choice of having him executed or deported. I wanted him to be executed. Even at the young age of 8 I remember wanting him dead for what he had done and even being afraid that if he was simply sent back home that he would hurt another kid. My mother didn’t share those feelings because I heard something that took that hot ember of anger I had towards her and my father and turned it into a flame that would eventually turn into a raging forest fire. She said she wanted him deported because she refused to have anyone’s blood on her hands.

That was it, he would spend less than a week in a Saudi prison which meant no lashes and he would be sent back to Pakistan where he could carry on doing what he did to me. Granted, Nassar had beaten him severely, bad enough that the Saudi police would have pressed charges had he been anyone else. I was also to learn that Nassar was one of the Saudi Princes, there are tons of them, but because of that he was considered immune from punishment for this particular act. About six months later we finally returned to Houston and life continued on as normal for everyone but me. I was never the same after Saudi Arabia. This was the worst event from there or any point in my youth, but it was not the only one from Saudi. I was caned by a teacher while attending a foreign school that I was mistakenly enrolled in. I was removed after less than a month and sent to the American School that my middle sister attended, but there I was kicked through three rows of desks by a teacher who had a reputation for hitting his students or throwing things at them. He was fired after assaulting me though and then sent home. This was the absolute worst year and a half of my life and it scared me emotionally and physically.

Over the next 8 or 9 ears that tiny flame of anger grew and grew until simply looking at my parents filled me with a deep loathing for them. I watched my mother dote on my sisters, buying them fancy gowns for pageants and going to every little thing that they were involved in and grew even angrier because I played football starting in 7th grade and my mother came to a single game and never returned. My father never attended a game. I felt like an outsider in my own family and that gap between us only grew as time passed. I went on to drop out of high school and earn my GED. I fought until I earned enough college credits to be able to enlist in the Navy where I excelled, but that ended after fracturing my neck. During my time in the hospital my family never once came to visit me or so much as call to check on me, I was alone. That flame grew more and more until I had finally had enough of it.

I became a father and as I explain in my “Veteran’s Perspective” post, that changed me inside. I refused to raise my son in a world where I was always angry and somewhere in there I began looking at the events in my life differently. The following is how I looked at the events after my abduction and molestation.

As I said, I was angry beyond words with my parents. They handled everything wrong and even made me feel responsible for what had happened. So why is it that they would do this? I know them both well enough to know that they abhor this sort of act against anyone, especially a child, so why did they act as they did when I was the victim? I put myself in my father’s shoes first. As a father now I felt I could relate a little better to him. It turns out that I was right. I thought about my role as a father, especially as a single full-time father without the presence of a mother at all for my son. I am the protector, to protect and provide for my son is my number one priority and I guess that is hardwired into our DNA because it is not a choice that I made, I just have to do it. If something like this ever happened to my son I would lose my mind because I was not there to protect him from something so terrible and I do not know how I would be able to live with myself. My father is different than me in many ways. He is a Vietnam veteran who suffered from undiagnosed PTSD up until about two years ago and he self-medicated with alcohol and anger. I also now suffer from service related PTSD which gave me a new understanding of him. I have also studied psychology extensively in college over the years and grew to understand his actions the night after my molestation even more. I do not in any way agree with how he or my mother reacted, but I do understand how it could rather easily happen.

My father was furious at the man who did this to his son. To make matters worse, he was furious with himself for not having been there to protect me. The fact that he was at work and was unable to foresee something like this or do anymore to prevent it than I could have was irrelevant. Anger and guilt are not logical and therefore are not governed by the typical rules of thought and reasoning. I would have the exact same feelings as he did, I would just handle them differently now. Now, that is more than likely because I am the victim of abduction and molestation and I felt the burn of a rage that nobody should ever suffer. I spent years punishing myself for this happening to me and being angry at my parents for their roles in all of it, though I never blamed them for the actual event, which I took onto myself. The deeper I dove into the “what would I have felt” scenarios in comparison to what I could see that they felt the less angry I became. It is said that with understanding comes clarity and this is absolutely true. The more I understood about their emotional states the more I was able to let go of the anger that came from my reaction and perception of their attitudes and reactions to what had happened.

You see, I was not the only one who was changed that day. My parents were too. They learned the hard way that they could not protect us kids from the world all the time. They learned what it was like to be powerless and helpless and after numerous discussions about all of this with them in my late 30’s they came to understand, accept and even apologize for the way that they handled everything. Their apologies did not help me to heal though. I felt vindicated when I saw their guilt. I felt justified in being angry for all those years, though it was actually a very bad thing it was not unfounded as one of the counselors that they hired for me as a teenager claimed regularly. I had every right to be angry with them because they had handled everything terribly and instead of seeking to comfort me and to help me to understand what had happened, to help me understand that it was not my fault and that I was not a bad person for having suffered this in my life they made me feel responsible for it and then they left me to deal with it all on my own while they buried it beneath years of experience and denial that I could not have at such a young age.

But as I said, the more I understood about them and their feelings as they would have related to me given the same situation the less angry I became. I will be honest, I have not forgiven my parents for their roles in the years I felt abandoned and betrayed, especially over the events of that terrible day, but I am no longer angry with them. They messed up in a monumental way and unfortunately there is absolutely nothing that they or I can do about that. The finally came to realize that they were wrong, but no matter what they realized, time only moves in one direction and once damage is done, it is done and there is no going back to correct it or erase it. I learned to stop dwelling on all of the negative in my life as I came to understand the events and the reactions of my parents and within myself revolving around the events of that day and more important than anything else, I learned to look at all events in my life in a different light. I learned that the initial emotions that we feel during or after an event are not necessarily the best or even the correct ones. They are more like a reflex and while they are largely uncontrollable in the moment you can adjust your perspective in the end. You always have a choice of whether you want to spend your life filled with anger, fear, jealousy, happiness, joy or any other of the countless emotions that come with being human.

On the day I finally realized all of this I began focusing on that instead of the anger and the blame, instead of the fear and the disgust. I let go of all of that and while I will never forget what happened or what my parents did any more than I will forget the pockmarked landscape of my molester’s pasty face or the way he reeked of body odor and rotting meat, I also am no longer ruled by the heavy negative emotions that filled me for so many wasted years. I have found myself happier than I have ever been before and in a place where I can help others to let go of their anger and to better understand the reactions and actions of others and hopefully to let go of the anger, hurt, fear, etc. and move on with their lives with a sense of power and freedom that only comes after surviving an epic struggle.

I will close with this thought. We are truly in control of our own lives. It is true that there are things that we will see, have done to us and experience that we cannot foresee or prevent, but how we feel daily is really up to us. If you find yourself truly angry or truly scared and you are unable to let go I would suggest seeking to better understand the source of those feelings, be it a person or an event or a series of events and as you build some level of understanding you focus on putting yourself in those shoes. By doing this and by being truly tired of feeling as you do you will find your mind is supremely strong and resilient and if you want it bad enough and honestly enough that you will be able to release the burden of those negative feelings and emotions and find happiness and some level of peace while remaining wiser and stronger for having survived.

No matter what you are suffering through or struggling with, you have the strength to change your life through the power of your own mind. I hope you are able to tap into that inner strength and find that peace in your life, even if you have had an amazingly happy life. Know that you are never alone in your struggles as there are thousands of people out there struggling through something every day. Thank you for reading this far, I know that it is a lot.