Mom touched me...Scarred since then

[blaskowitz02]

Looking for emotional support.....my mother touched me inappropriately on these occasions:

1) 11 years old.....walking past her and her hand intentionally brushed my penis.

2) In the kitchen, several times her hand would brush my buttocks

3)Once when I was sitting at the computer, she walked up to me, and blew a kiss to me after she put red lipstick on

4)Once asked me to take my shirt off

5)When I was 13..she tried on a dress and put one leg on the table, partially exposing her crotch to me

Is this covert incest or explicit. Looking for support and ways to handle the scarring this has created in me

[naomi]

Sometimes it's hard to say. Some of what you said seems more overt than covert to me! But analyzing my own childhood, the same applies to me. Mostly, I consider myself a victim of covert incest. I didn't go through an actual rape, and I recognize there are many people with more traumatic experiences than I had. Perhaps my self-identification as a covert incest survivor is one way of respecting this fact.

Anyway... The kiss-blowing, and any intentional touching, I would classify those as overt or explicit. Especially the areas you described touching. There were times my dad touched me on the leg, and those are harder for me to talk about because... Sometimes he would touch me on the leg and it seemed normal. Other times it made me feel funny. It was in the way he touched me, and how high up on the leg, that I knew something was just wrong about it. And things like this, they are more overtly incestuous than covertly. BUT...

In some ways the worst parts are the conversations he had with me about how much my mom betrayed him, how I was even prettier than she was, etc. These things are more covert, but I feel they were in a way more damaging than the touching. If a stranger had raped me, for example, I'm sure it would have been painful and felt very wrong. But I would have been less confused. When the touching and comments are more subtle and mixed with what feels like normal affection and love, the lines become blurred and sometimes confusion is worse than pain.

So I guess what I'm trying to say is, a lot of it, it matters more than anything else how you felt. So rather than thinking about, was this overt or covert, how bad was it, what kind of wrong was it, sometimes it's good to think, well what did I FEEL when it happened? If that makes sense.

[robert]

I agree with Naomi, it's how it felt to you. If you care, there were some lines crossed legally, but I don't think that's your goal. it's about helping you cope with what happened in your past.