Atypical Transgender Late Bloomer

You have trauma, said the fortune cookie You may never get past it, especially at your age (62) I am fortunate to have good helpers. Each one a specialist, each working their zone. They treat the parts, not the whole Depression gets Cymbalta Anxiety gets Klonopin Mild Psychosis gets Keppra I locked up memories and buried them deep. Eventually they surfaced, like rocks in a farmer’s field, like ordinance in Germany. I could not allow myself to remember I’d been raped by the priest Nineteen times, my Stations of the Cross. Later, I could not allow myself to remember I sought out men when I was young. What a thing to lock away, to bury, to un-remember. I wish it had stayed buried. The therapists open the boxes in your head without knowing what’s in there; Pandora’s Box without hope. I’m not sure it’s ethical. Thirty-five years ago, blissfully compartmentalized, I married a girl. Three years ago, the memories burst out with explosive surprises. I don’t...

The number three honcho at the Vatican, Cardinal Pell, has been convicted of abusing two choir boys. The trial took place under a very effective news blackout and was dubbed "the cathedral trial" in the press because of the location of the abuse. No sentencing info is available. Cardinal George Pell 's official assignment is Vatican Prefect for the Secretariat of the Economy. He is the most senior catholic cleric to face criminal trial for sexual crimes. In another trial due in 2019, Pell will also be tried in Australia on charges that he abused two other boys at a swimming pool, in what is known as "the swimming trial". Editorial note: Eventually, the church is going to have to pay attention to this.

Trigger Warnings: priest, rape, catholic, altar boy       click here to go away . I was invited, along with three other altar boys in my grade, to a weekend in the country at a house that my priest had. I didn't want to go but my parents had accepted on my behalf; it was all set up. I was all set up. He had a big car, a Lincoln or a Cadillac. Priests took vows of poverty, but their families could supply them with cars and second homes. I now see it as: there were all sorts of workarounds for their inconvenient constraints. We departed Brooklyn NY with the priest and four altar boys in the car. It was my first time outside of the city, my first time on a trip without my parents, my first time Upstate in the country. Brooklyn was the kind of place where most things were paved. There were parks and highways that had green spaces and some trees, but no really wild nature areas. My mother was a big fan of the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens but I was indifferent to...

Trigger warnings: rape, beatings, jail, prisoner, Catholic, priest, family. Scroll down for content.        Or Click here to go away . The adjective catholic (with a lower-case c ) means: universal, comprehensive, widely shared. Something that's catholic is bigger than you might think. I need to set down my own catholic experience. You might not know anybody affected by the Catholic systemic child-rape scandal . Maybe you do know a victim and you aren't aware of it yet. I'm one of them. I was raped by Fr. Arnaud in Brooklyn's St. Theresa of Liseaux, on Avenue D and Troy Avenue. I volunteered to became an altar boy because on school-day funerals, you got out of class and sometimes you got $5. It seemed like a good deal. My dad recommended it. The old GI rubric holds true: Never Volunteer. From September 1965 to June 1968 - Fourth through Sixth grades - I was repeatedly raped by a parish priest. It happened in the rectory on Monday afternoons, an...

I have huge holes in my memory. There's lots of important things I don't remember, or I won't remember. I've been in therapy for four years with multiple focuses going on simultaneously: a gestalt practitioner, an EMDR practitioner, a family systems practitioner, etc. I've remembered more of my youth. I remember violent beatings from my father. I remember a priest raping me for three years. In Fourth, fifth, and six grade the parish priest was in my ass and in my mouth. I was 8, 9, 10 years old. I met a woman and we got married. We had kids. I had one recurring dream for decades about Dan which couldn't be true. But it was true. Now I remember Dan. Now I remember Allan in 7th grade and Ronald in 8th grade. Now I remember a man in Virgina, and a man in Spain. Now I remember David. At the time, I closed them each into an internal box and put them away; they were inconsistent with what I'd been told I should be. Otherwise: bad boy , and I couldn't...

NY Times : Brooklyn Diocese Identifies Eight More Abusing Priests. That's one of five dioceses. The story focuses on James Lara, who was a priest from 1973 to 1992, was de-priested, and then changed his name and pivoted to academia: Over the past 25 years, a university professor named Jaime Lara built an illustrious career in the academic world of sacred art history. He was a professor at Yale University for more than a decade, wrote five books and won more than a dozen prestigious awards and fellowships. Since 2013, he has been a professor of medieval and renaissance studies at Arizona State University. Mr. Lara did not respond to a request for comment. The other priests listed were Joseph P. Byrns, who served from 1969 to 2002; William E. Finger, who served from 1962 to 1980; Stephen Placa, who served from 1995 to 2002; Thomas O. Morrow, who served from 1971 until 1987; Romano J. Ferraro, who served from 1960 to 1988; Charles M. Mangini, who served from 1968 to 1993; and Chr...

This post is dated 2016 and written in 2022. I had a good life. A lucky child. I was a veteran. I married a pretty girl. We raised ideal children, both high school valedictorians. Now one's a PhD and the other's got her Master's. I had some modest financial success; I could pay my bills, we had health insurance, when my family needed something I could pay for it. When I was 58 years old in 2016, it all collapsed. It had started to collapse five years before, in 2011 when I was 53. My wife insisted on couple's counseling, and each of the several counselors we saw told me that I had too much going on myself yo be effective in couples counseling without first graplling with individial counseling. It turns out, from the age of 2.5 years I was beaten, viscously and regularly, but my father who would have been about 28 years told at the time. He was a timekeeper at Domino Sugar in Brooklyn when I was born (it's on my borth certificate) and got a job as a police offic...