I’m a man in my early 30s and I have never been in a serious relationship. I started seeing a therapist to get to the bottom of my relationship problems, and her opinion is that they may stem from an incident that happened years ago. I was raised by a single mom. When I was about 15 years old she went through a very bad breakup, and while I was comforting her we wound up having intercourse. I was a virgin. This only happened once, and we’ve never spoken of it.
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But I’m going to risk it: fuck your therapist, TGS. She’s not your parole officer–you don’t have to do what she says, and you’re free to go find another therapist if she’s pissing you off. If you don’t want to screw up your relationship with your mother and if you really feel that this one hugely fucked-up sexual encounter did not cause your current problems (plenty of men who’ve never fucked their mothers have relationship problems), then your therapist should stop hectoring you and start listening to you.
Oh sure, your therapist may have your best interests at heart. She may also be one of those conflict junkies who pass themselves off as therapists. Tell her for me that ripping open old wounds doesn’t always lead to scenes of weepy reconciliation and newfound emotional health. Sometimes it just makes a bloody mess of things.
You’re afraid of confronting your friend because it would make him uncomfortable. But he did something deeply creepy/relatively harmless that made you uncomfortable. So why not lob the discomfort back into his court? He may blame the booze, or insist that he doesn’t remember, or tell you that he sleepwanks, but he needs to know that he was spotted that night.
