My father beat me. My mother wouldn’t touch me—not a hug, not even a hand on the shoulder. The sexual abuse began when I was ten, at the hands of an adult who knew exactly what she was doing, and continued in various forms into my early teens.
What follows is one day. A Thursday in the early spring of my senior year of high school in Atlanta, when I was 17 and living alone in a rented house. I’ve reconstructed it as faithfully as I can from a memory that has never let go. The names are changed. Nothing else is.
It is not an unusual day. That’s the point. This was most of my Thursdays, as well as other days.
Running alongside that day is a second voice—the clinical literature on what was actually happening to me, which didn’t have a name in 1972 and has one now—the two alternate. I’ve done it that way because that’s how the understanding came 50-some years late.
I’m in my 7th decade. I’m writing this because one in six boys is sexually abused before he turns eighteen, and almost none of them will say so. The ones who go looking for their own story in print will not find it there. I spent five decades believing I was the only one. I’d rather not leave that tragedy intact for somebody else.
I didn’t know any of this between 15 and 20. I just believed there was something fundamentally, terribly wrong with me.
23 March 1972, 4.55 am
The glowing radium hands on my watch read 4.55 am, still dark outside, save for a street lamp flickering somewhere, wherever the hell I was. Not exactly sure, I reached out and my fingers found something familiar—a woman’s bra. Of course, a woman’s underwear didn’t offer any clues as to where, but maybe I should start with who. Rolling over slightly, I bumped into a body, the likely owner of the bra.
Light was coming in from something in front of me, and I realized I, uh…we were on the mattress in the back of my windowless Dodge van, one of several vehicles I owned. As the light through the van’s dirt-streaked windshield adjusted my eyes to the dark, I could see there was indeed a real woman right there next to me. Okay, but is she breathing? Checking for proof of life didn’t seem like an overreach. Drawing close, I detected muffled breathing, still face down; no way to know who this was yet. It’s not the first time I’ve been unsure of where or who, but I’d never get used to why I put myself in this situation.
I made my way to the front of the van, trying not to step on… what was it? A cocktail dress? I let myself out into a strip-mall parking lot. A quick look around confirmed I was at a bar I frequented, just off Clairmont, near Emory. Shirtless, barefoot, in nothing but my boxers, I felt suddenly and stupidly exposed—though there was nobody to see me. Just a yellow Camaro a few spaces down, which I figured belonged to my guest, who was likely a patron of the same bar. It was now a little after 5, and dawn was flirting with the horizon.
This was always my favorite time of day. As a kid, I learned to wake up before everyone else so I could grab the newspaper first. If my dad got to it before me, he’d take it to work, and that was that. He’d yell, “I messed the goddamn thing up,” and say I never put the sections back in order. But I always did. Sometimes I even rolled the paper up again, slapped the rubber band around it, and placed it exactly where the delivery person had left it on the sidewalk—to make it look untouched, like I’d never been there. Over time, after hearing countless times that I was stupid and never did anything right, “never been there at all” had become a common pursuit of mine.
The sky was doing its slow trick over the strip mall now, and I knew the spell would break soon. The bar’s neon was off. Someone would open the doughnut place at the end of the row before long, and a barefoot kid in his boxers leaning on an old van would be a story worth telling. I climbed back in.
She’d rolled over in the meantime, so now I had a face. It didn’t help. Pretty, older than me—but then most of them were older, sometimes a lot older—and no name to go with it. I want to say that bothered me. Truth was, it did, and it didn’t. I’d stopped collecting names a while back. Names were for people you intended to see twice, and I didn’t intend much past sunrise. A name was a thread, and a thread was something somebody could pull.
I found her dress and laid it over her, as if that were a kindness, which I’d somehow convinced myself it was. “Hey,” I half-whispered. “Sun’s coming up.” As openers go, it lacked poetry, but it was true and required nothing further from me.
She rose slowly, that half-second of not knowing where, the same fog I’d been in twenty minutes earlier. Except I was on the other side of it now, dressed, detached, and already gone in every way that counted. She asked my name. I gave my first, only, and not the one I went by. She asked whether she could call me sometime. I said I was so busy and hard to reach, which was the single most honest thing I’d say all day. I didn’t ask for hers. Finally understanding that was the whole transaction, she gathered herself with a dignity I didn’t deserve and slipped out the back to walk toward the yellow Camaro. It should have felt clean. Instead, it felt like leaving before anything could matter.
I watched her pull away. Then I was alone in the van, save for the scents of last night. I wish I could say I felt something. What I got was the quiet, and how fast the next thing rushed in—the low voice that asked, before she was even out of the lot, who’s next and when. That was the part nobody warned you about. Not the wanting. The way the need rushed back, before this was even a memory, and how little it cared what I’d just lost. That was my day: wanting, leaving, and wanting again.
It wasn’t quite six in the morning. I had a whole day. Surely, today, I can make it to Janice; I’m meeting her for dinner tonight. That should have felt like a plan. Instead, it felt like proof I’d be doing this again before nightfall.
There is now a name for it.
In the eleventh revision of the International Classification of Diseases, the World Health Organization formally recognized Compulsive Sexual Behavior Disorder as a diagnosis. The definition is deliberately clinical: a persistent pattern of failing to control intense, repetitive sexual impulses or urges, resulting in repetitive sexual behavior over at least six months that causes significant distress or impairs important areas of life, including family, relationships, work, education, or health. At its core, the diagnosis is simple: a loss of control that begins to damage a person’s life.
The American diagnostic manual, the DSM-5, chose not to include it. As a result, many US clinicians lack a formal DSM diagnosis to use when documenting or billing for treatment. For more than forty years, researchers and clinicians have debated whether the condition is best understood as an addiction, a compulsion, or an impulse-control disorder. That debate continues today. What is no longer seriously disputed is that the condition exists, that it can devastate lives, and that the real argument is over what to call it.
Notice what the diagnostic criteria don’t say. They never specify a number of partners, a frequency of behavior, or any numerical threshold. Frequency tells us almost nothing. One man may meet every diagnostic criterion despite relatively infrequent behavior, while another may engage in sexual activity far more often and not meet a single one. The diagnosis isn’t measuring quantity. It’s measuring a pattern: repetitive behavior that becomes increasingly difficult to control and increasingly destructive to the person’s life.
The criteria also make another important distinction. The ICD-11 states plainly that distress based solely on moral beliefs or disapproval of one’s own sexual behavior is not enough to justify the diagnosis. Guilt is not the disorder. Shame is not the disorder. The disorder is the inability to regain control. Clinicians are careful to distinguish those things. I wouldn’t understand that distinction for another fifty years, while the damage quietly continued to accumulate.
Four characteristics define the disorder. Repeated but unsuccessful attempts to stop or significantly reduce the behavior. Continuing despite harmful consequences. Allowing the behavior to become the central focus of life at the expense of health, relationships, responsibilities, or personal interests. And perhaps the most revealing characteristic of all: continuing the behavior even after it has stopped bringing much, if any, satisfaction.
That’s the point. Not appetite. Not pleasure. The behavior continues long after the pleasure has faded, while the consequences continue to grow.
Nor is the condition especially rare. In one nationally representative study of American adults, 8.6% reported clinically significant distress and impairment related to difficulty controlling sexual thoughts, urges, or behaviors. Among men, the figure was 10.3%. Another study found that nearly one in five sexually active men acknowledged significant sexual impulsivity. The studies used different methods, but they reached the same general conclusion: far more people struggle with this disorder than most of us realize.
Whatever kept asking, who’s next? before the Camaro had even left the parking lot now has a clinical name. It wasn’t desire. It was the relentless hunger that followed desire—and the damage it left behind.
23 March 1972, 6.20 am
I made it back to the little two-bedroom in east Decatur a little before six-thirty, which gave me time I didn’t need. I was, as far as I ever knew, the only kid at my high school who came home to his own house, maybe the only kid in Atlanta. Nobody’s porch light on, nobody up waiting, not one person in the world who’d have noticed if I hadn’t come back at all—which at 17 sounded like winning, and I’d have told you it was. No shower—Thursdays I went in early to work out.
Connie taught biology. Connie was also, in my personal denial language, much more, though I’d have been hard-pressed to say more what. We had a standing appointment I’d never once been asked to confirm. We met in the chem supply room because that was the only place Connie would meet me—not in a car, not anywhere with a sofa or bed—in that windowless closet that smelled of chemicals and contained the long black island every chem supply room on earth seems to be equipped with. She’d flip the lock, and it didn’t last much longer than it took to secure the door. I’d been “trained” by Karen to last as long as a woman wanted or needed, but Connie wanted it quick, and that suited the part of me that didn’t want to be seen wanting anything. I told myself quick was fine, quick was efficient; I just pretended I had somewhere to be.
And I felt nothing. Again. That’s not me being hard on myself from a distance—I mean it the way you’d mean it about your hand falling asleep. Something was happening my mind knew shouldn’t, something it ought to protect me from, so a part of me had gone numb to it in real time. Connie didn’t have an intimate bone in her body, wouldn’t have recognized tenderness if I’d offered it, and I didn’t offer it. Afterward she’d plant one dry little “move along” kiss on my cheek. I’d go shower off two layers of sex and my workout, then walk to my 3rd-period class, telling myself the numbness was easier than wanting more.
Here’s the part I can almost laugh at, but not quite. That morning, I tried to skip Connie. I actually decided, somewhere on Columbia Drive with the radio blaring, that I’d work out, go to class, and leave Connie out of it, just this once, as if proving ‘I could’ might mean something. I got as far as the gym. I got as far as telling myself I’d made the choice.
Then second period came, and my feet took me up the stairs, down the hall the way they always did, and I understood—not in words, I didn’t have the words yet, I was 17—that I hadn’t overcome anything that morning. The decision had been made a long time ago by someone else, and I was just the one who kept showing up. She was already there. She locked the door. And the worst of it, the thing I couldn’t shake on the walk to 3rd period, was that some starved animal part of me had wanted even this—this cold, fast, loveless nothing in a supply closet—because it was the closest thing to being held I was going to get. I knew the difference—and I went anyway.
By the bell, I had it all neatly tucked away. That was the other thing I was good at, and I’d been good at it a lot longer than I’d been good at anything else. You take the thing you can’t look at, you fold it until it’s very small, then shove it deep in your pocket. You sit in third period and raise your hand and the teacher calls on you. I raised my hand. I got the answer right.
There is another problem as well: naming what happened.
Childhood sexual abuse is the most underreported form of child abuse, and boys are among the least likely to report it. Our culture teaches boys that they are supposed to want sex, while victimhood is often seen as something that happens only to girls. When the adult is a woman and the child is a 17-year-old boy, the verdict has often been written before anyone knows the facts. Lucky. Every boy’s dream. You should be proud. None of those are the right words. Every one of them pushes the victim further into silence.
The right word is abuse. A teacher who has sex with her student is not having an affair or a fling. She is not guilty of an indiscretion or a lapse in judgment. She is abusing a position of trust and authority over a child. The age of consent misses the point entirely. What makes the relationship abusive is the imbalance of power: the authority she held, the grade book she controlled, the classroom door she could lock, her full understanding of what she was doing, and the student’s inability to understand any of it.
Many states would not write that principle into law until years later. Georgia did not do so until 1983, when the law made it clear that a student’s consent could not be used as a legal defense for a teacher accused of sexual misconduct. But the law didn’t suddenly make the conduct wrong. It had always been wrong. It was wrong while it was happening, and the only person in that room who could not see it was the 17-year-old boy.
For years he believed he’d made a decision that morning on Columbia Drive and simply lacked the strength to carry it through. That’s how trauma often feels from the inside. It masquerades as weakness. It convinces its victims that what they lack is character, when what they are really confronting is a pattern laid down long before they understood what was happening to them.
It took me decades to reverse that sentence in my own mind. The pattern had been established years earlier, when I was 10. What happened that morning was not really a choice at all. It was an appointment someone else had made for me years before, and I kept showing up because the wiring had already been run. For most of my life, I mistook an injury for a weakness, when in fact it had been the predictable consequence of a childhood I never chose.
23 March 1972, 11.05 am
Walking to third period, I was already wondering about Teresa. Her mother worked days now, had since the divorce, which meant an empty house 11 minutes from school with a key under a flowerpot that fooled nobody. All I needed was Teresa.
She was standing at the lockers directly across from the doorway to my class. When she saw me, she started across the hall with that walk of hers—hips left, hips right, the whole thing cranked up about four notches past subtle, a girl doing an impression of a woman doing an impression of a vamp. Then the smile, the crooked, little wicked one she saved for exactly this, so slight you’d miss it at 10 feet.
That’s a yes, in case you were wondering. I’d found my lunch “date”.
Teresa and I had been at this since we were fifteen, which by the standards of the times made us practically institutional. There was no romance in it, and no pretending there was, which I knew at the time to be the healthiest arrangement I had. Nobody was lying. Nobody was married to a pilot. Nobody had children old as me. Nobody locked a door.
I had one class after lunch and then, most days, work. Janice had gotten me the job—write that down, it’ll matter later—keeping books at a big independent garage over in Kirkwood. I’d taken it because my other revenue streams, while considerably better paying, sat far enough on the wrong side of the law to put my freedom in play. I’d done the math on that one afternoon and decided I’d rather have a paycheck, albeit smaller. The garage owner, Albert, promoted me from gofer after he watched me run a finger down a vendor’s parts bill and stop cold on a $130 error. He wanted to know how I did that. I didn’t have an answer then and don’t now. Numbers jump out at me, and they can’t lie to me. That parts house near the Chevrolet dealer made errors all the time, and I want to be fair to them here—I’m sure it was sloppiness and not larceny—but in four years, I never once found a mistake that didn’t go their way. So Albert had his new bookkeeper at minimum wage, and I had the only thing in my whole life somebody wanted me for that had nothing to do with my body.
Not that day, though. Sharon was finishing up—she was the bookkeeper, and about eight days from having her baby—and Albert wanted the afternoon alone with her and the ledgers. No work today, he’d said. Come Monday.
So there it was, an afternoon with nothing in it. I’ve thought about that a lot since. That job was the only boundary left standing anywhere in the last twenty-four hours. It came down for the most ordinary reason in the world, and the space behind it filled up as if on cue. Teresa cut her last two classes; didn’t have to talk her into anything. That was the arrangement, and it showed me how little the rest had really mattered.
I’ll skip the salacious details, which were pretty much the same as every afternoon, and go to the part I struggled to understand. Nobody made me go to that house. Teresa wasn’t 29, and she wasn’t grading my work, and there was no lock on any door. She liked me, plain and simple, without complication. In the way a 17-year-old girl is supposed to like a 17-year-old boy. Every single thing that was wrong with the rest of that day was absent from this. It was the almost normal one. It was the one I emotionally allowed, the one I didn’t beat myself up over.
Yet I felt nothing. The same nothing as the van, the same nothing as the supply closet. Nothing.
That was the first moment all day I felt fear, and I have to be careful about how I say this, because I didn’t have the words then and I’ve had fifty-five years to find them. I’d been telling myself a story where the problem was the circumstances—the wrong women, the wrong rooms, the wrong hours. Fix those, and you’d fix the boy. But here were the right circumstances—the only right ones I’d get—and the boy came back empty from those, too. That was the real blow. It meant it wasn’t the rooms, it wasn’t the women. Something in me had been shut off a long time ago by somebody else’s hand, and it was not going to come back on because a really sweet girl in Decatur cut class for me. That was the truth of it.
Teresa and I put her mother’s house back exactly how we found it. Pillows straightened, glasses washed and put away, key under the flowerpot. Nobody would ever know we’d been there.
I was very, very good at that part.
The boy in that house asked the right question. He simply had no way to answer it.
At first glance, the research on childhood sexual abuse seems contradictory. Survivors are more likely than the general population to experience hypersexuality. They are also more likely to report diminished sexual desire, difficulty becoming aroused, and dissociation during sex. The same person can move between those extremes over the course of a lifetime, or even over the course of a single afternoon. They are not opposite conditions. They are different expressions of the same injury.
Once you understand what dissociation is for, the contradiction disappears.
Dissociation is a survival mechanism. It develops in children who cannot escape what is happening to them, so the mind learns to escape instead. It is remarkably effective, which is why the brain keeps using it long after the danger has passed. The nervous system doesn’t stop to ask whether this room is different from the last one, or whether this touch is welcome. It responds to familiar cues the way it was taught years before. It is doing exactly what it learned to do.
That’s the answer to the question the 17-year-old could not ask.
The numbness wasn’t a verdict on Teresa. It wasn’t evidence that something was wrong with her or with the relationship. It was the oldest survival reflex I had, still doing the job it had learned years earlier. What frightened me wasn’t simply the numbness itself. It was the realization that I could no longer trust my own reactions. If I couldn’t feel what I thought I should feel in the safest room I’d ever been in, what else inside me had already been taken away?
Everything else follows from understanding what the behavior was actually accomplishing.
Clinicians who specialize in compulsive sexual behavior often describe sex not primarily as the pursuit of pleasure, but as a way of changing how a person feels. It becomes a ritual, repeated whenever emotions become too difficult to regulate any other way. That understanding explains the interchangeability I have been describing throughout this episode. If the purpose is emotional regulation, then who is in the room matters far less than most people assume. The growing number of encounters is not evidence of greater desire. It is evidence that the smaller, older dose no longer works.
That helps explain another feature of the disorder. Over time, the behavior often produces less and less satisfaction, yet it continues anyway. The ICD-11 recognizes this pattern as one of the defining characteristics of Compulsive Sexual Behavior Disorder: repetitive sexual behavior that persists despite harmful consequences and despite providing little or no real satisfaction. The pursuit continues, not because the pleasure has increased, but because stopping no longer feels like an available option.
When I walked out of Teresa’s house at 17, I wasn’t experiencing adolescent melodrama. I had just conducted the only controlled experiment my life allowed. The girl was right. The relationship was right. There was no coercion, no manipulation, no locked door, and yet the result was painfully familiar. The problem had traveled with me.
That realization changed how I understood myself. I became convinced that no different relationship, no different woman, and no different room would ever solve it because the problem wasn’t waiting outside me. It had already been wired inside me years before.
What I did not know then—and would not learn for decades—is that the ways we learn to survive are not permanent. They can loosen their grip. People recover. Not quickly, and rarely in a straight line, but they do recover. The nervous system that learned fear can also learn safety, one experience at a time.
I was right about one thing that day. The problem really had traveled with me. What I was wrong about was believing it would travel with me forever.
23 March 1972, 6.15 pm
Thursdays, Jim flew to Los Angeles and didn’t come back until late Friday. I could have told you the flight number, the tail number, and the age of the plane.
I can’t make any of this funny; believe me, I’ve tried. Janice cooked. She’d have something going when I got there, and the windows would be steamed a little, and she’d ask how my day went as though it was a day you could answer that question about. I’d say fine. She’d hand me a plate. We’d eat at her table, in her kitchen, in the house she shared with a man who was somewhere over New Mexico by then, and for an hour I’d get the thing I’d been out combing the entire county for since a quarter to five that morning.
That’s what I want to say clearly, because the rest of this day makes no sense without it: the food was the point. The table was the point. Somebody asking about my day and waiting for the answer was the point. I’d have gone through the entire day all over again for a single evening of that, and in a manner of speaking, I had. It wasn’t just hunger. It was wanting to be wanted long enough to feel real.
Afterward—and I’ll leave the afterward where it belongs, since by now you know what it was and you know I felt about as much as I’d felt in that supply closet—we’d lie there and talk like people who’d been married 20 years, what so-and-so said in the teachers’ lounge. Should I take the harder math. Some administrator she couldn’t stand. It was ordinary, almost normal. God, it was so ordinary, and I was so starved for it that it felt like slipping into a warm bath.
Then she’d get to the other thing, the way she always eventually did, how she wanted out, how it had been over with Jim for a long time, whether he knew it or not, how things might look someday, meaning us, meaning a life, meaning a house like this one with a different man in it. She said it softly, and she said it like a plan, and she wasn’t joking. She would go on to do exactly what she said—she’d divorce him by my sophomore year at Tech, and stand there fully expecting the marriage I’d never once promised, but never once refused until I did.
I was 17 years old, lying in another man’s bed, being told about my future by a woman 11 years older who was in love with me, and the only honest thing in me was this: I didn’t love her. Not once, not for a minute. I was attached to how it felt to be cared for, which isn’t the same thing and isn’t even close, and I took it every Thursday anyway with both hands, the way a starving man would scratch and claw for any morsel of food. That was the part that frightened me. I knew it then, and stayed anyway.
So here’s where the day ends. It ends with me getting exactly what I’d been hunting since before dawn—warmth, attention, kindness, a person who wanted me around afterward—and it ends with me being unable to feel one honest thing about it. Everyone I’d touched that day I could file under something. A habit. A closet. Even nothing.
I’d wondered, all day, at every stop, what was wrong with me. In the dark, in that house, in another man’s bed, with the dishes still in the sink and a good woman asleep against my shoulder, I finally had it. The wanting had never been for any of them. It had been for this—for somebody’s kitchen, somebody’s table, somebody asking about my day—and I’d run through a whole county’s worth of bodies for several years, and I was never going to fill the hole in my soul. Not this way, anyway. That was the part I couldn’t forgive myself for because I knew the shape of the want, and I still kept chasing it.
I understood something that night that many 17-year-olds never would have seen. I knew none of those women had ever been what I was really looking for. What I couldn’t see—not then—was why. I mistook the wound for the weakness, and because of that, I walked out of that house believing tomorrow would be no different from yesterday.
So I lay there, and what came with the knowing wasn’t relief. It was simply math. Because if the wanting had never been for any of them, then none of them had ever been the answer, and there was no reason on earth to think tomorrow’s bodies would be either. Friday would come. Then another Thursday. Then a hundred more days, running out ahead of me in the dark like a hallway with the lights going off one at a time behind me. For the life of me, I could not see where it ended, or how, or what would be left of me by then. I wasn’t afraid of being alone so much as I was afraid of never stopping.
I was 17 years old and so tired, in a way that sleeping didn’t begin to touch.
But I slept anyway, because Thursday was over and Friday was coming, and Friday would want feeding, too.
The Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) framework identifies eight categories of childhood adversity. Among American adults surveyed between 2011 and 2020, nearly two-thirds reported experiencing at least one, and just over 17 percent reported four or more. Emotional abuse was the most commonly reported category, followed by physical abuse and sexual abuse. Even those numbers are almost certainly low because they depend on people being willing to tell the truth about the hardest parts of their childhood.
The important finding isn’t any single category of adversity. It’s the accumulation. Study after study has shown that the number of different adversities a child experiences predicts later difficulties more accurately than any one of them alone. Violence, fear, neglect, and the absence of protection don’t simply add together. They compound one another.
The last of those is often the easiest to overlook because it consists of things that never happened. A child who is never comforted, never held, never made to feel safe carries those absences into adulthood just as surely as he carries the injuries that were inflicted on him. Research has shown that emotional neglect disrupts the development of healthy attachment, while childhood sexual abuse is strongly associated with anxious and avoidant attachment later in life. What a child is denied can leave marks every bit as lasting as what was done to him.
It took me most of a lifetime to understand that my craving was never really for sex.
A child terrorized by one parent and left emotionally untouched by the other grows into an adult still searching for safety, regulation, and simple human reassurance. He reaches through the only door he was ever shown. There is nothing perverse about that reaching. It is an attempt to find something that should have been there from the beginning.
The tragedy is that it cannot succeed. No sexual relationship, however loving, can satisfy a child’s unmet need for comfort and protection. An adult relationship cannot feed a childhood hunger. The hunger doesn’t know that. It simply keeps sending you back through the same door, hoping that this time the answer will be different.
That is how the cycle closes. The behavior produces shame, and shame becomes its own source of pain. Depression often follows, and research suggests that, in men, it helps explain part of the pathway from childhood sexual abuse to compulsive sexual behavior. Depression is not merely another consequence of the cycle. It becomes one of the forces that keeps the cycle alive, increasing the need to escape, to find relief, or simply to feel nothing at all.
I was 17 years old, lying in another man’s bed beside a beautiful young woman who loved me, and I had just worked out the arithmetic in the dark. Three years later I would arrive at the answer that arithmetic had been pointing toward. Looking back now, I realize I had correctly identified the pattern long before I understood its cause.
The 17-year-old boy was right about one thing. No room he could walk into was going to heal what had happened to him, because the wound always arrived before he did.
What he couldn’t possibly know was that wounds are not the same thing as life sentences.
Fifty-five years later, sitting in a therapist’s office, I finally began to understand the difference.
© 2024-2026 Keith Bumgarner. All rights reserved. No part of this essay may be reproduced or republished without the author’s prior written permission, except for brief quotations permitted under US copyright law.
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Thank you for another brilliant piece about childhood trauma, abuse and healing.
Another gripping piece of autobiography by Keith.