Don't know how to deal with memory

Hi,

I am a 23 years old male living in Australia. Before moving here I lived in New Zealand, where I spent my years in intermediate school and high school. I have a certain memory of my father (my own one, not step-father) which really haunts me and sometimes make me feel like giving everything up and die. (if the writing seems too long to read please skip the next paragraph)

During my junior years in high school I was a pretty motivated student. I studied pretty diligently and got good marks, which put me in one of the classes that smart kids were put into. My father was always a good student himself and had graduated from a reputable university, and my good marks pleased him, and I became the favoured child between myself and my older brother. However, as I got into my senior years I started to go through puberty and started losing interest in study, which caused my marks to slip. This made me lose confidence and I started holing myself up in my room. This got worse when I was put into an expensive private high school, which didn't have any sports field and only made students study from 8am to 5pm straight save for lunch. Every minute during those days made me feel like a loser and I had lost my previously bubbly personality, and this consequently led me to have no friends at all where in the previous schools I had plenty. My parents were both worried and disappointed at me for becoming this way which I could definitely sense. My older brother also started looking down at me for falling so far down.

One day sometime during the end of my first year in the private school I was sleeping on my bed in my room. I heard the door open and heard my dad coming in. I was still lying on the bed face in pillow but with no blanket and in my undies. My dad approached and reached for the blind on my window right beside my bed and proceeded to open it. During this process I felt that part of his body touch me on my thigh, which I think he began to rub slightly as he continued to open the blinds. I was startled and froze in confusion as to whether he was doing it on purpose. I think it took almost 5 seconds before he stopped and left my room.
After he had gone I lied in bed for almost an hour trying to make sense of what he had done. For some reason I became definitely sure that he had done it on purpose. On top of the depression I was going through at that time I felt very humiliated that someone in my family had decided to take advantage of my weak state. I tried to pass it off as nothing but the next morning he came in again and proceeded to approach the blinds beside my bed. I awoke immideately and before he could do anything pushed him away and jumped out of the room. The push was pretty hard and normally he would have said something about why I pushed him that way. The fact that he didn't say anything about that made me even surer that he was trying to do something guilty.

After this he stopped coming into my room and he did nothing that seemed like sexually abusing. That was ten years ago and I have worked and studied hard and overcame some of my problems such as social anxiety and depression. However, in everthing I do with my dad, even though I did not find him do anything that was sexually harassing to me after this incident, some kind of fear of sexua| assault from family members have grown in me. At one stage I even became suspicious of my mother that she was trying to seduce me, and this made me very aggressive to anything she tried to do to me. I even refused to eat or drink anything I've seen her eat or drink. I love my mother and am sad that I may have hurt her because of this.

I know that there are tones of people who went through so much worse things than me in terms of sexua| abuse and in comparison this seems something trivial. But no matter how hard I tried to forget this or deem as something very insignificant this memory seems to have a very powerful hold over me. Some people or most are going to say I'm being reasonable when I say I've suffered for 10 years because of a slight rubbing on the thigh. I used to be very close to my father but nowadays I cannot even manage a hug without shudders. I know this seems stupid and if I was a different person I probably would have told me to stop being so sensitive and forget it, but I can't. If it was some other stranger outside my family, I probably would have forgot about it but this is my dad, one I have to see almost everyday and cannot easily severe ties with. Almost everytime I interact with him I am reminded of that incident and feel the humiliation and frustration welling up. Of course he himself won't know why I'm acting that way towards him and often gets angry with me for doing so. Every time I am reminded of that day and I feel powerlessness which I feel cannot possibly be made up by any other means. I even developed a habit where I intentionally make ugly or angry faces whenever I am around my parents as a way to avoid being their target of any future abuse. I am sorry about the very long length of my writing, but this is affecting me greatly. I just feel helpless that this is something not everyone can relate easily to.

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