My father was killed in a wreck when i was 3. My mother moved us to live with my aunt (dead father’s sister). Therapists have helped me work through the f’d up trauma bond we all suffered from for nearly 30 years. My mother and aunt were extremely possessive and intentionally raised me to believe that no other woman would love me like they did. They took their grief and loss and over compensated by smothering me as the only piece of my dead father they had left. I lived at home through college and became quite successful in my job, but the trauma bond kept me living with them anyway. Call it grooming or Stockholm syndrome or whatever you wish but i get that the reality is that they were very effective with the brainwashing As if my emotional immaturity wasn’t enough to hold me back from being drawn to girls and women as i grew, i learned after their deaths how they had worked together behind the scenes to prevent or sabotage any budding relationship i might have ever had. Both of tbem died from cancer. I am still working with a therapist to try to gain basic social skills and emotional maturity but it is a very real struggle. Thanks to their grooming i dont make the effort to date often, because i am trapped in the headspace of a woman i am drawn to may leave or abandon me or wont love me enough or i will disappoint her. And my self sabotage works both ways. I convince myself i will disappoint them. The part that both the therapist and i recognize is the worst part of all is how impossible it feels to overcome the s e x u a l detachment and desensitization. From the day my mother and i moved in with my aunt, the grief and loneliness and depression they were goimg through (i was only 3 remember) meant that ae all slept together. And since they were master manipulators, no surprise, when my body went through puberty they made sure i had that helpless attachment. They had not educated me about any of that arena, but since they kmew it was coming, they got me hooked on intimate touch (their touch on me only, i was told d not to touch them) and all three of our bare bodies every night in the shared bed. Therapit and i are discussing various things, even hypnosis, to see if there are rrepressed memories of pre puberty s** ( not that i want to know or recover such memories). It did not to my memory become s***** untl my first w********. It freaked me the f out but they “nurtured” me throigh that total ignorsncr and freak out but the dynamic shifted after that. They would touch me and teach me to touch them how they wanted. It was all touch only but they obvoously used every night of laying bare together night after night to keep me helplessly addicted to their touch and keep me hooked on o r g a s m by their hands night after night. Evemtually they taught me to pleasure them without penetration so i becsme a very capable lover to them both iremained a virgin. That changed a few days after my mother passed. In bed with my aunt that night she took my virginity. Of course it was brief but over the coming days i learned how to become a true lover to my aunt. It was addicitve and obsessive to us both. I managed to summon the courage to ask her, if this could have been happening all along, why hadnt it? She said it was the one rule my mother had i nsisted on. But with her gone, she no longer felt it was a voe she had to maintain any longer and that she deserved it even more tjsn i did. For the next 4 years my aunt and i were a couple in every way. Date nights, trips, entire weekends barely leaving the bed. One night while we were going at it very intensely she cried out my dead fsther,s name and did mot realize it. I eventually brought it up and she was horrified and i insisted on the truth. My father had been grooming my sister her entire life and even after marrying my mother he had brought his sister into his marital bed. I was told things i would never havr wanted to hear. I was confused and angry and packed and left for over a week. I came back after convincing myself that it had always been about my father, never about me at all. You would think that that ws more than enough to make me break away, but i was emotionally and s******* addicted to my aunt, amd i was terrified of being alone just ss she was. I was with her until she died and the void of that final loss drove me to therapy. The worst part? Lying awake at night longing for both of thrir hands on my body.