Child sexual abuse, in my view, likely only happens in already dysfunctional systems. The protective barriers and safeguards are malfunctioning. First, the parents may be the abusers themselves. They may do it together, or more commonly, a father does it, and the mother suspects or knows, but does little or nothing. Neither parent, in such a situation, can have been nurturing to that infant, to the extent needed to meet the “good enough” standard.
And of course pedophiles nearly always prey on the vulnerable, those who have no one they can trust, those whose bond, particularly, with the mother is absent or weak, because she is absent or weak, emotional, physically, or both. They become both the trusted person–this is especially true, I think, of man on boy abuse–and the abuser. This is a mind fuck on several levels, because love and abuse cannot be separated easily; one’s usefulness as a sex object and as a human being are intertwined. All the feelings are comingled.
I was talking once with a male survivor who was abused by a church elder of some sort, and he commented that it was not all bad. It felt good to him, but in the abstract he had to call it abuse. This guy was seriously fucked up, and has since done a number of nasty things to people who trusted him. He will likely never heal, since he has rationalized his anger at the world. As I think about it, he is likely at not inconsiderable risk of becoming a pedophile himself, although as far as I know he has nothing to do with children. I have not seen him in a year or more.
It is, I read, a reasonably well established fact that the rates of rape among sexual trauma survivors is a multiple that of those who grow up in happy homes. It is not hard to see why. They lack boundaries of the acceptable. They feel shame in their very existence. People willing to treat them as victims find them ready prey. One trauma leads to another, in one of these sick cycles that cause some of us to feel the need to get drunk when we contemplate them too much.
So I would suggest that when you see someone assert that sexual abuse is their primary problem, I would hazard a guess that the MAIN emotional wound, the one that set the foundation for those following, happened before age 3. Everything else compounded on an existing superstructure.
You can, as one example, be in a car accident and be lacerated in multiple places. All those cuts can be sutured and treated, and you can still die from internal bleeding.
When you throw a rock in water, it sinks to the bottom. The bottom is where the work needs to be done. Everything else rests on it. It is dark and difficult there, but it is not impossible.
Guru, I will note in this context, literally means “heavy”.