by Leah Davidson

Created on: July 06, 2009   Last Updated: July 08, 2009

I thought I was estranged from my siblings, until 1993, my brother, Paul, had been abandoned by his wife and he was not told why, within a 24 hour period she was gone and he was stunned. He had no idea why she decided to leave him, in fact he thought things were going well for them. He found that she had left him because she thought she was in love with a woman at her place of work. This news absolutely crushed him because he loved his wife very much. He called me one day, I was living in another city, and asked if I would come to Austin where he lived so that I could attend a session with him and his psychologist, a woman.

During this session it was revealed that when I was six years old and he was 13, he had sexually abused me. Now I had grown up with this knowledge and because the abuse was very benign, meaning there was no physical contact of any kind, I felt that this had not in any way disrupted my maturation, instead I blamed all my emotional problems, deservedly, upon my very dysfunctional mother and father. This abuse of all their children is what probably led to my brother's natural curiosity, as abstracted as it was, of sexuality. My father routinely got drunk and had violent sex with my mother, this disturbed my brother quite a bit. But his abuse of me was as I said benign and in point of fact I had no reaction to it at all, rather I thought of it as a game between the two of us.

I became afraid and disturbed only after my brother came to me very shaken one day and made me promise never to allow him to convince me to play the game again, he transferred his fears and guilt to me. So I told my mother, the result was a horrible thing for my brother. My parents sent him to the parish priest who guilted him, a psychologist who guilted him and a result of all this led to a very abnormal adult sexual behavior, that is until he married. His wife was and was until his dying day his soul mate and the love of his life. I expect that he now has a new love in his spiritual life and that would be God.

I am a solitary person, I have never made friends easily and when I do I tend to keep the relationships emotionally distant, I grew up to be a manipulator, and in the family dynamic I was the scapegoat, a very hurtful position. Anyway, in 1993 I left my husband and moved to Austin to try and help my brother who by then was suicidal over the loss of his wife, little did I know I would never return to my husband and I lived in Austin for 17 years. The first three

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