cocsa?

[aaaaaw]

Hello, I have been dealing with a lot of guilt over what I did to my brother when I was a lot younger. I'm not sure how old I was exactly but I think I was around 10 years old, while my brother was 5 years younger than me. I saw a few other posts about people who were worried they committed cocsa and they've made me feel somewhat better, though I still don't know how to feel. I find it scary to even type something like this out and tell other people, but I feel like it's eating me up inside.

When we were young, my brother and I used to bathe together in the same bathtub. I don't really remember how I got exposed to sexual content but I think I must have found out about it from fanfic online. One time in the bath, I think I told my brother that I wanted to hug him and sort of pulled him on top of me. He wasn't resistant or anything but I know I did it because I wanted to have his private part touch mine. It lightly brushed against mine and then i pushed him back off me. I don't remember what I felt then. I think I might have known on some level that it wasn't right but I didn't really understand to what extent. I don't even know if my brother remembers it. But ever since I remembered that I did that i've been feeling terrible. I don't know what to do. I want to apologize to him but I don't know if he's even mature enough to realize what that was. Or if he even thinks about it at all. Maybe it was just nothing serious to him, because i myself am not even sure if it WAS something serious. I kind of hope that's the case, because I don't know how to live with myself if I caused some intense trauma in him.

I feel selfish for wanting him to just not remember. It makes me feel like I'm avoiding some sort of responsibility. I feel like I'm avoiding responsibility each and every day. Like I'm lying to my partner and my friends by not having told them about this yet. I'm scared they'll think I'm some kind of monster. I wonder a lot if I'm irredeemable and the guilt and confusion is just too much. I'm submitting this here because I think it would help to get someone's opinion on what I did. It would be helpful to first of all know if that even counts as cocsa. Thank you for any helpful reply you can offer.

[Heather]

Hey there. I'm glad that you found us.

So, nothing you have said here in this post suggests that you engaged in abuse here. What I hear you describing instead is sexual curiosity, and common childhood expressions of it. Given both how young your brother was, and how inconsequential this likely was to him -- especially lacking the ability to read minds -- I would be very surprised if this was something he did remember. After all, a sibling pulling your body to theirs is very common in a lot of contexts, and it's not going to be something that feels sexual to someone just because people were naked. Play in the bath -- and bathing together -- is very common with siblings.

I don't think you are avoiding anything here. If it does turn out to be something your brother remembers and ever asks you about, then you can talk about it. So long as you're open to that, I don't see any evasion in this picture. I also don't see any reason you would need to bring this up to partners: it's pretty unusual for people to catalog every expression of sexual curiosity they had as children to partners, including because we won't even remember most of them.

What do you think you need to let this go for yourself?