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How likely is it that you were abused as a baby if you were already masturbating at 3 yrs old and while doing so, had a vision of an unfamiliar woman angrily forbidding you to think about girls and telling me to think about boys instead? I ended up straight and disregarded her command, but the vibes felt like some kind of feministic progressive trying to make me gay as a 3 year old?
I also had some UTIs at the time and a fear of bathrooms. I had some nightmares about this woman as well until I was 5-6 or so, not sexual in nature however. My parents do not recall any such person that matched my description of that woman in our lives. Although I feel like if it were anyone, it would have maybe been a preschool substitute teacher? Given that I inexplicably could not use the bathroom at my preschool and had to be held back because of it. How does one explain such a memory then? I've read that early masturbation doesn't necessarily mean abuse, and I didn't seem to have actual knowledge of how sex worked until a normal age. But this memory I have doesn't seem exactly normal either, you know? And I acquired a lot of issues as I grew up, not sexual but physical and mental and am trying to figure out why I am so objectively weird and have so many problems.
Reposting the bulk of my reply to this thread.
WRT masturbation specifically, from a therapeutic standpoint my understanding is that children can and do sometimes discover it at an early, pre-sexual age absent any sort of sexual abuse. There is even some debate about whether some observed fetal behavior/movement in the womb is actually masturbation! For whatever it's worth, while my earliest concrete memories date back to 4-5 years old, some of those memories are of masturbating. I don't remember discovering it, mind, but I do remember it as being this strange sort of urge that would come over me from time to time. Puberty/sexual awakening also happened for me at a normal age, and it was at some point during that time of my life that I connected the dots and came to understand that what I had been doing was masturbating. I've also never had a single nocturnal emission in my entire life, but then, I don't think I had any periods of complete sexual abstinence greater than six weeks or so before my mid-thirties.
From what you're saying, I'm not seeing a concrete explanation for your memory of the unfamiliar woman either. Irrespective of the wider question of sexual abuse, it certainly seems like something that a three year old would imagine all on their own.
Interesting, it is good to have someone else say that it seems like something a 3 year old could imagine on their own. I was probably just searching too hard for a cause for my issues, when I just need to make a series of good choices and such, maybe will not get any hard closure on why my issues happened, no magic bullet of knowledge/memory that will suddenly make it all make sense.
I agree that ruminating on a cause or closure might not be terribly helpful. In a larger sense, just about everyone I know well has had some straight up weird shit happen to them in life. My uncle told me stories of seeing a smiling face named Subsunk on the wall when he was a kid. He seemed to think of Subsunk as mostly an imaginary friend but he was clear that he really, physically saw Subsunk on his wall and not just in his mind's eye. For another example, my wife was all alone one day (after waking up from a nap, I think) when she heard a voice tell her out of the blue that she would be pregnant, which according to an earlier doctor, wasn't supposed to be possible for her, and she did in fact become pregnant later in life. I always personally thought that there was no such thing as "normal", but then again, being autistic I would think that, wouldn't I?
Man that's some weird stuff. Weird world I guess, maybe you are right there is no normal just a weird world. Edit: maybe the people who say they haven't seen or heard anyone see anything weird are the true weird ones?
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