Hello. I am new here, but I thought I would share a a bit of my story. I came onto Reddit three months ago for the survivor subs. I have been in therapy five months, and it has helped a great deal. I never sought any help before, I had one bad experience with therapy a decade ago, and never went back, I didn't figure I was helpable. I am thirty seven, and have autism and PTSD, as well as the depression and anxiety, though those are getting better. When I was growing up, things were difficult. My father was a heroin addict and career criminal, and back then, my mother was the type of quiet girl who would not say shit. We moved thirty one times in my first eighteen years. When I was eight I was raped on five occasions by a man.

It was the point the bullying started to get really bad, they would punch, kick, throw stones, lock you inside things. I found a spot, a clearing in the woods, to hide. It was a tiny rural town, and I read detective stories, I figured out that the lack of detritus boys leave, little toys and whatnot, meant the other boys had not found this place. I went back to the spot maybe fifty or sixty times over that summer. He just showed up randomly five times, some farmer or something, I will never know. I would get so involved in my book, encyclopedia brown and Nancy Drew at that point, I did not notice him approaching until he was right there.

The first time, he only took off my clothes and fingered me. Afterword, he talked. About what a bitch his ex wife was, about some other boy he molested, about work. He made a very convincing case for why I should not tell, that my family would be broken up and us all placed in care, and this would happen more and be worse there. The second time he raped me orally. The third through fifth time were worse, he took me each way then, orally, from behind, on top like a girl, talking about his personal shit in between until he was ready again.

The fourth and fifth time he took pictures with an old polaroid camera. Get in this position and that, etc. I started acting out at home, though I never told anyone. I set a fire and I panicked, but I got it out. I broke some windows of a building, stole a pop from a store, and popped a blow up pool of a smaller girl. I still feel bad about that one, the way she cried. My parents knew the autism was a thing, though what it was, the name, they did not yet know. So they sent me to a live in hospital for six months. I was going to tell someone there, a kindly teacher figure, but the circumstances scared me. There were ten kids in our unit, and they treated most of us nice, but there was a girl, and they were not nice to her. Not unprofessional, just cold and robotic. She was bad, she would run away, grab the men sexually, she was eleven but it would take four grown men to restrain her safely. She used teeth and hands as claws.

She would tell trauma stories in hideous detail, laughing with a bitterness I have rarely heard in an adult. I was the only one she would talk to. I just got it, I mostly listened, I was still, and I never ever touched her. After six months, soon after I turned nine, they talked to me about going home. They left it up to me, but I was so excited, I did not think of her. When she heard, she locked herself in her room for a week. They needed all manner of threats to get her to come out and eat, at the end they simply refused to feed her if she did not come to the dining room.

So she did, and pushed a chair against a wall of the dining romm and stared at it, looking at nobody. I never saw her again. When I was eleven my uncle and cousin, who were thirty and nine, died in a housefire. Though our house was imperfect, the judge figured with a husband, wife and three kids, it was better for my surviving cousin, who was seven, to live with us rather than his mother, who was a kind lady, but a bad drunk. Dad treated him very badly, him and his brother had been very close, but he hated his wife, and they had rarely seen each other in the last five years. Dad seemed to take this out on the cousin.

He always treated him worse, assumed worse of him. He was a firm believer in spanking for me and my two younger sisters, but he rarely beat us. He beat him like a rag doll. This was made more so by the cousin being a fighter, a tough kid always getting into trouble. Later the year I was eleven, my father and an uncle burned our house down as an insurance scam. They got away with it, he sent us to stay the night at a friends house. Then called us out to see it, the whole family, to watch the fire trucks and the house burn.

The cousins hand in mine squeezing, his fear, is not something I can forget. After three years the cousin's mother got better, and he moved with her. Dad never let us see him again, and I only reconnected with him through facebook three years ago. My parents divorced at twelve, and my mother got with a prick who took emotional abuse to a new level. The bullying continued apace until fourteen, and the schools added zero tolerance policies. I was molested again when I was thirteen. We had a house on the beach, poor though we were, dad always seemed to be able to talk himself into good things, and I would walk up the beach miles, I liked long walks.

It was a public bathroom, it was very early morning, and there was nobody around. He simply shoved me in a stall, shoved his hands down my pants, and fiddled around. He told me that I was lucky I didn't get hard or he would have raped me, and left. When I was fifteen, dad got bad. He had bought us kids fine bedroom sets, fine beds, dressers, a television set, a super nintendo etc. One day we got home and everything was gone, replaced by the cheapest charity versions of what we had had.

He got worse, became suicidal. and sent us to live with an aunt, he went across the country to get clean. He didn't, and the aunt grew tired of us kids, getting rid of the one sister after two months, the other after four, and me after six. When I got to the big city my father and two sisters were living in, it was a gang riddled slum. He had had many people living in the house, my sisters will not talk about anything that happened in those months. There was nothing in the apartment, a mattress the girls shared, some clothes, a couch and coffee table, nothing else. My mother had moved to that side of the country since, and I phoned everybody.

About a month after I got there, she kidnapped us technically to regain custody. We were living in that part of the country when I turned sixteen. That was the last time I was molested. I walked four miles to a mall, and was tired walking back and took a ride. The guy fiddled around, same as before, and called it fare for the ride. During those years there was constant partying, wild drug parties, in the house. There were other fires, suicides, and OD's. When I was eighteen, living back in the town I am in now, me and my father got an apartment together as adult roommates.

During that my favorite uncle died in a drunken car crash, and a sweet old man I knew well, I sat in his house dozens of times to buy dope for dad, got stabbed to death over an attempt to steal twelve beers. That lasted four and a half years, but dad was a heroin addict, and one day I got up and he was stone dead. I was twenty two. I moved a hundred miles north six months later, to a town I had lived in and had a friend. I was OK for quite a few years, moved a lot, and poor, but I made friends, mostly by dealing grass, but still. At twenty eight I got a place with a friend. We lived together five years.

The first two were good, but the third got hard, and the last two were bad. He had schizophrenia, and I have autism. We started being gay, kinda. Spooning, kissing, hugging. But I could not be gay for him. I loved him, I tried to dredge up gay feelings sexually, looked at gay porn, but I just could not be that for him. The last two years it was awful. Hiding in rooms, banging on doors, constant yelling and sniping. threatening suicide, potential suicide pacts. In the last six months it got worse. The med changes stopped working, he started thinking people were coming into the apartment, watching in cars outside, hearing things.

It was when he started seeing UFO's I realized this was hurting him. I gave him two months notice, but he was so mad. He would not discuss me helping him get a place, just blew up. At the last two weeks he gpt scared of homelessness and begged me to find him a place. I did not know what to do. I have so little, with a bit more time it would have been easier, I found him a cottage in the nest town over where I would be living, but he did not want to leave the town because of his mother.

So all I could find him was a room in a boarding house. It was an awful place. We kept talking for a month, but at that point, he was at his mothers when I visited, I visited every day, taking the link bus between towns. He told me never to contact him again, not to cry in front of his mother, it was over. When someone says that, decent society says to obey that, so I did not contact him. A month after that, he had pushed a dresser in front of the door of his room in the boarding house, and was on his meds, and set himself on fire sleeping.

He lived, but him and another man were badly burned.After a month he was released from the hospital, and I did visit his mothers once more. She said she had always liked me, took my contact info, but said he would never contact me. She was right, he never did. After that, I began drinking quite heavily. I do not know if the drinking caused the memories from childhood that I thought I had dealt with or what. Over the next four years of everyday drunkenness I fucked up everything. Lost most of my friendships, became a sad whining idiot.

At that point, a year ago I jumped off a bridge. That was the point I decided to get help. Things are getting better, addiction counseling for ten months, therapy for five. I am two credits from finishing highschool, getting my drivers license, got my first part time job. Three weeks ago I was layed off from my job until September, and my therapist is taking literally nothing until then, with both of us simply assuming and hoping I do in fact get my job back. Anyway, this is long, but I wanted to tell the basic core of my story. Thank you so very much to anybody who reads this.