For those who've been here for awhile and have read any of my story, you know that between the first time I shared and the last time I posted it, things had changed as I remembered more or remembered "correctly".

So.... now I gotta refigure all over again...

So, I thought.... we had moved when I was 5 and sometime after Kindergarten I had met those that began the abuse....

So tonight I was going through a whole crapload and pics and things that my mother gave me the last time we visited them back last November....

Once thing was a baby book.

So I started reading....

Turns out.... we moved a month before my 4th birthday...!!!

If that wasn't enough.... my mom has a page dedicated to my 5th birthday.... and their names are all there under the list of people that were there........ WTF!!??!!

So now I'm all baffled and confused and wondering when it all started, did it start BEFORE I made it into kindergarten?????

Man I hate this crap.

Hi Scott,

It can be a real kick in the head when we come to these kind of realizations about timelines and such. I had a similar realization last year -- I had thought up to that point that the last perp was when I was 14. But then last year I remembered that he had just gotten the Fleetwood Mac Rumours album which came out in 1977, so that meant I was 16, not 14. For some reason, that seemed like a remarkably significant difference to me, even though he was in his 30s.

I hate this crap, too, particularly when moments like this come up. But the upside of this is that you're seeing it all with more clarity now than before, so that can help you make better sense of things and move forward with processing it.

Eddie

P.S. I watched your 4 part video testimony this evening, and it was incredibly inspiring. I hope you realize how much inner strength you possess as a man.

Scott,

For me the exact dates,ages I was when my abuse happened are really not that important to me as addressing the fact that it happened to me. For so many years I choose not to deal with it in so many ways that it is very difficult to remember what happened when. but as I work thru it new memiors return that pinpoint some it closer to or futher from what first remembered.
But again exact dates are not what is important to my recovery.

Mike

I tend to agree with Mike, here. For me timelines aren't nearly so important as impact. Whether I was four or I was five (I was four) the fact still remains that I willingly followed him into the bushes and happily let him do things to me that no four year old boy should experience. I've lived with the fall out of that all of my life.

I live with those things too Joel. Only the last fellow when I was 13/14 used pressure and manipulation and what not. I think that for me is one of the reasons it took me so long to really see and understand what happened to me as abuse.

Probably one of the reason I really haven't felt any anger with those first individuals.

Was jut a shock to realize that my understanding was off yet again.

Hi Scott,

I think the important thing for me in what Mike and Joël are saying about the timelines is that getting something "wrong" in the timeline doesn't mean the need to refigure. To me the real thing that needs figuring is my response today to what happened then, and the dates, times and people involved don't matter all that much.

There's no way to know why or how or any of that, so the timing is just part of the disconnection. Trauma screws memory pretty bad. That's just a side effect. The real issue is today's action or mindset (to me).

Danny