How can I have trauma if I got of lucky
My step brother who was around my age kept trying to have sex with me when I was nine. Nothing happened but for some reason I still feel bothered by it. When I got my memory of it back I was crying in anger, when I met him again I had an anxiety attack. I cry sometimes when I think about it. I say I was sexually abused but is that wrong of me? Nothing actually happened. I feel like I'm over reacting. Its shouldn't bother me. I was lucky.
@OrangeFuzzyWorm Of course you can say that you were sexually abused, you are entitled to feel that way and no one should tell you otherwise. It is extrememly brave to face those feelings and feeling angry and anxious about it is a perfectly normal response. You aren't overreacting at all, and if you feel like you were lucky it didn't go any further and that helps then i understan but don't let people tell you "it wasn't that bad" because if it makes you feel that way then it was. He had no right and that is the main thing. I don't know you but I am proud of you for being strong enough to open up about how you feel, I know it can be hard to talk about these situations because they were so out of your control.
@straightforwardLemon1654 Thank you, yeah i suppose your right. I guess i just have a hard time sometimes legitamizing what i feel when in the end that is what's important. thank you. ive been open about my experience for a couple years now so i dont mind talking about it as much now as i used to.
@OrangeFuzzyWorm that's an amazing step forward. If you can talk about it and start to understand the way it makes you feel then it's a great start to healing and learning to live with it as a part of what makes you who you are. You are much stronger than you think and that strength will grow the more you work through the trauma. It's a long process but one worth going through to find peace with what happened. We can't change the past but we can use it to shape our future 
@OrangeFuzzyWorm I also got lucky and it was a close family friend who was way older and i was around the ages of 7 and 8. I only started having flashbacks last year which gave me a lot of anxiety and i was hospitalised. I pushed it back again and only started facing it recently. It is a very hard journey because you do not feel like your anger is validated because nothing happened, my advice is face it and talk to him about it. The anger will still be there but communicate your feelings and then cut him off. It's up to you if it's going to be temporary or permanent.
@OrangeFuzzyWorm
It can be attempted and still be traumatic. It sounds like the experience for you was scary. I am sorry to hear that this happened to you. *hugs*
