Pgh Lesbian Correspondents

CN: grooming, sexual violence, family secrets, cults, programmed,mental health, trauma

As a child, I was programmed (or groomed) by my paternal grandmonster. He was a serial predator whose violent behavior was protected by the family. It is a horrific multi-generational story, one I am determined to expose to the light of day in order to stop the effects from continuing for younger generations.

Someday they will Google and find these posts. My niece and nephew, my first cousins once removed, my second cousins once or twice removed. Perhaps their children. They will not Google my name because they probably don’t know about me. My defiance of the secret keeping has rendered my existence a secret, the aunt in the attic. But this aunt has a blog and an ISP.

It can be tough to talk about being groomed as a queer person. It triggers stereotypes that are particularly painful for survivors. I would be grateful if being turned into a lesbian by groomer is the worst thing that happened to me,

I prefer to describe my experience as programming akin to the way a cult works. In my case, my grandmonster was the cult leader and the adults in my family either were programmed themselves or turned away. I can count the people who resisted on one hand.

I don’t want to get into the story of my life just yet. Instead, I want to explain how programming has impacted me psychologically and emotionally. Here’s where I have to clarify that harboring a sexual predator in any family is not the same as belonging to a cult. It is a useful analogy, but not the same. May of us survivors find that attempts by other people to sow empathy by sharing your story do not go over well. There’s something about remaining in the isolation of our experience that feeds survival. Personally, I don’t mind when someone confides in me, but I need to compartmentalize my sharing from theirs.

From an early age, I was taught that I existed to meet the needs of other people. This was far more than sexual needs. I was stripped of my autonomy in order to protect the collective family. I was barely aware this was happening, but to be clear – I did know on some level that things were wrong. My memories are intact, I simply had very little in the way of context to understand them.

My core value, my essential goal in life is to be the adult I needed in my life when I was a child.

This type of thinking is par for course in Catholicism (“offer it up”) so the distorted and abusive threads were deeply entwined with the values of service and sacrifice. Beyond feeling the satisfaction of volunteering, for example, I feel a deep need to change the world. It isn’t simply resistance to the programming, it is the programming – an extension of denying myself was to always lift up others. You see the close line here.

I chose to pursue human services and social work because of what the programming instilled in me. It was also an act of resistance because I would choose how to direct those impulses toward the causes and people I valued. I would work to be a good person, not just on the surface, but in my soul. Rejecting the intent of the programming to isolate and restrict me, I spun it on its head to find connections and community.

When people ask why I go go go so much, the truth is that I simply cannot do nothing. I cannot endure gaps in systems and institutions, I cannot disconnect from my impulse to address them. Believe me, I’ve tried. I’ve pursued hobbies, thrown myself into books and streaming television, focused on my blogging for its own sake rather than as a means of storytelling.

My reality is always, always defined by projects. I find peace when I feel useful. It is fleeting peace because my brain has been altered forever by this childhood abuse. Through trauma therapy, I try to realign my neural pathways, but the damage is done. I can’t go back and undo everything. Rather, I can be aware of how any given interaction is shaped by the programming and adjust my response and choices.

When I was born, my mother suffered from postpartum depression and trauma from her own experiences with her monster-in-law. She was hospitalized. Someone needed to take care of me. I had five sets of aunts & uncles, nearly a dozen great-aunts and great-uncles, plus lots of adult cousins and first-removed cousins. I also had a maternal grandmother. Most of them knew what was eating my family alive. Still, they allowed me to be placed in the care of this grandmonster and my grandmother (a victim and enabler.) They failed me out of the gate.

Thus, the programming began almost from day one.

I do not know how long I was in their care – months? years? I do know my mother returned to the hospital when she was impregnated just eight ht months after giving birth to me. Obviously, I have no memory of that time period but I also have no stories or anecdotes. My first step? My first words? My first birthday party? There’s almost no one left to fill in those blanks and I don’t trust most of those still alive.

I do know by age four, I was living with my parents and younger brother. We had lots and lots of contact with my grandmonster. He tactics to isolate me were so transparent even I knew something wasn’t right. He was indifferent to my brother and rarely included him in activities, something I knew wasn’t fair but was slowly trained to ignore.

Our dependence on him was absolute.

Being raised by wolves just reinforces you are a sheep. I never stood a chance. Except … I did have this little spark inside of me that knew all of this was wrong – the programming, the dependency, the alcoholism, the domestic violence, the wall between me and my brother. I tried to get help, but I wasn’t heard.

The spark in me defied the programming. I kept picking myself up and trying. I just didn’t know what I was trying to do.

That spark eventually led me to therapy. Therapy helped me peel the layers of my mental health – a mood disorder, an anxiety disorder, and eventually a diagnosis of complex trauma.

I want to be healthier, but the truth is that I want to do my work better, too. I want to be useful because I cannot imagine any reality where I have value just for existing, just the way I am as Mr. Rogers would say. Maybe that will change as I continue my work in therapy. I doubt it. I think the programming is just something I have to live with.

It is deeply difficult to discuss this with anyone. They are horrified, I often end up taking care of them. We don’t have enough of these conversations – even after two thousands years of the Catholic Church, after Penn State, USA Gymnastics, Bill Cosby, countless cult documentaries, Jeffrey Epstein – we still can’t or won’t talk about this.

What I really want is to be comforted. I lost all of those years when I should have been safe and nurtured, loved and cherished. The threads of the programming rendered most of us incapable of offering comfort or finding it for ourselves. All of the relationships were damaged. It was a horrible family dynamic stretching across generations. Offering real comfort was impossible because the secrets had to be protected at all cost.

How do you learn to accept comfort as an adult? That’s tricky.

The last time I saw my grandmonster was in 1998 when an ambulance dropped his sick, broken body in my grandmother’s apartment, immobilized by dementia. I knew she couldn’t care for him, so for her – I stepped in and got him placed in a nursing home with the level of care he needed. I looked down at him as another ambulance driver carried him out of the house. He was weak and pathetic and I knew he would never hurt anyone again. It was cathartic. I never went to the nursing home. I didn’t care that he died a few years later. I was done, or so I thought.

It is ironic how our final interaction involved me choosing to support him. I turned being programmed by him on his head because I knew I had agency. I decided to do these things, I was in control. I could have walked out of the apartment and left the problem solving to others. However, I will never allow him or anyone to change my priorities, my values.

My core value, my essential goal in life is to be the adult I needed in my life when I was a child. Whether that’s aunt, partner, friend, neighbor, sibling, etc – that’s my mission statement. My raison d’être. I am not interested in parenting my inner child or other woo woo psychobabble. I’m doing the work to meet this goal and I hope I never stop. Being programmed didn’t destroy me.

Events of the past 16 months have challenged my control over my own life. But this time, people offered comfort. And it has made a difference. People helped me because they knew what I experienced was wrong, wrong for me and wrong for anyone to endure. They valued my blog enough to help me avoid selling it. The blog is not fully about being useful so that’s a slight shift in how I move through the world.

Being gas lit, violated, manipulated, and tossed away like a piece of trash is not something I expected in my adult life. It triggered all of the programming, of course it did. I was meant to be unsteady on my feet, to be isolated, and to be broken down.

And of course no one from my family showed up. Ever. Even when my father died, I was completely disregarded by many of the same people who abandoned me 54 years ago. I guess some people never change.

But I am home, I am addressing gaps in these new systems, I am steadfast.

I guess the little spark is still with me.

If you or someone you love is a victim of sexual violence or being groomed, please reach out to RAINN for support. This is a widespread problem that our society does not want to address. Reports have found that 93% of groomers know the victim and 34% of known groomers are family members. You are not alone. You deserve someone to protect you, no matter how long ago or recent your experiences.