Ok this is still bugging me about how something we say can have such a HUGE impact on the course of a child's life .... so I am coming back to add something more personal to help others understand why I am so passionate about the great power that we wield with children and how we need to make sure we are CAREFUL in what we say to them and what messages we send and that we are not passing on our own 'baggage' about sexuality to them!

There is much of my childhood I have 'blacked out' because it was not good but there are some thing that are just stuck there as nightmares no matter how hard I tried to block them out .... like when I was about 5 I remember being at the babysitters after school and her son who was about 7 was there and remember we were playing in the basement 'unsupervised' and well we were at that curious age and Michael had started a conversation with a sort of 'dare' to it about 'if you show me yours I will show you mine' ... and I remember his mother coming downstairs just as we were each pulling down our pants and just LOOSING it on us .... she spanked us both hard on our little naked bums for being dirty naughty disgusting children (she said a whole bunch of other stuff in her shock and anger but those were the words that I remembered) and she went on about that is not something good children do, we had to stand in the corner for what felt like ever afterward while the other kids in the house walked by and she would tell them 'they are dirty naughty children' and than she told my dad when he came to pick me up that I was a dirty little girl and he better 'fix me' because if I was going to do stuff like that I would not be able to come to her house after school and so he took me home and 'fixed me' by spanking me with a belt until my bum bled for having shown my private area to a boy and being a dirty girl ... I can still almost 40 years later remember the SHAME that I felt in those moment about being 'curious' about body parts and how they were 'different' ~ a very NATURAL thing for children to notice and do just like they compare who has blue eyes or brown and so forth!

The shame ran so deep that I would not even look at myself 'naked' after that let alone let anyone see me naked I wore underwear into the bathtub 'just in case' someone came into the bathroom ... and 6 years later when I was molested by an extended family member all those messages came back and I felt it was my 'dirty naughty fault' again that there must be something 'wrong' with me and I did not tell a soul at the time .... when I was raped and sodomized by a friends father at 14 when I was over for a sleepover ~ I did not tell a soul because it built on all those other messages starting with that ONE message ~ I was a dirty naughty girl and deserved these things to happen to me and instead of telling someone what had happened I first turned to drugs and alcohol to try to 'forget it' and than when that did not work run away from home so I did not have to deal with my dad finding out and blaming me again or having to risk having it happen to me again if I had to stay at that friends house again!

All of these things starting with that ONE curious moment shaped my sexuality as I grew into an adult, it planted seeds of thinking of sex as something dirty and horrible and that 'good people' do not do ... and from the age of 18 ~ 25 I spent years in therapy learning to come to terms with all those messages and how deeply they affected me ~ to the point that when at 18 I found out I had stage 4 endometiousis already I felt I deserved it that this was my 'punishment' because I was a 'dirty girl' and even my hostile womb knew it ~ no child would ever grow in there because of the 'naughty things' I had done to it! It took me years of extensive therapy to come to terms with my sexuality in a healthy manner and learn to trust men again and learn how to have a healthy sexual relationship with anyone including learning to 'love' myself!

Now I have no way of knowing if the first incident had been 'handled better' by the adults in my life if it would have changed the course of my life ... cause who knows maybe if I was more confident and informed about 'sexuality' I would not have been easy prey for my family member who molested me because I would have been empowered to say 'no that is not a healthy touch' or maybe I would not have been prey to a drunk man at a sleepover .... but I do know that the way it was handled and the message it sent certainly did not HELP to provide me the skills and resources I needed to cope with my sexuality and natural curiosity moving forward in life that's for sure!

What I also know is that as 'uncomfortable' as it makes me feel to see or hear a child doing this ... specially with my own childhood baggage about 'dirtiness' still engrained in me .... I make sure that the only message I send them is 'if you want/need to do that you have to make sure your hands are washed and that you choose a private place to do it' ... and trust me I have a child who went through chronic masturbation starting at around 2 in my program who went through a phase where whenever she got 'bored' this was her go to thing to do no matter WHERE she was and her parents I had to work hard to try to help her understand there was a 'time and a place' for this sort of thing ... she still does it during 'quiet time' to help herself fall asleep.