Re: Abuse or experimenting?

Hi, I am sorry that you are so very very fragile and shameful about this issue. I do feel with you because I feel ashamed about most anything still up to this day and I am now 52 years old. I also had a mother who did not love me and that puts you up to feel shame for your most basic intimate feelings. That you begged your brother is understandable in a way as there was at least some attention to you. You need to see that you were very very very deprived of the most basic support of love and attention. Now you still suffer from this and you have to learn to forgive yourself over and over and over again. It is important that one day you face this with somebody where you can share some bits and pieces and learn that you are not despised for it - but the opposite. Now you know how very tender all this is and you ought to be taking care of this wounded child in yourself and expose only as much as you can trust somebody. You had already the abuse following abuse.
It will not be easy. Give yourself time and learn about it and read and if you can, go into therapy. Even then it might come up in your life again in intimate relationships. It happened to me after many years of different therapies and one very wonderful tender loving therapist that I ended marrying an abusive husband. Life is not easy but whatever we can work through now we don't have to do in another lifetime. The harder it is now, the easier it is later. There are wonderful books and teachers out there and you ought to know that you are not alone with the most horrible story. There are worse things happening to people and they stay alive and work through and laugh and love again. People get tortured, imprisoned, killed, think about others and see it in relation. One day, you can use it to help others.
Look at the suffering in this world, child labor, child prostitution, forced prostitution, beatings, mutilations..... In opening up to the wider world we begin to see that our lot was not the worst of all. It was your brother, after all, he was intimate, he didn't beat you, force you to have sex with others. There was some affection for the person you had intimacy with.
Yes, it was not ideal, but FORGIVE yourself as you were a child and yearning for love and attention, desperate for something. Be loving toward yourself! I have feelings of shame very very frequently and deal with it by saying my favorite mantra of a special Buddha and do it till my shame goes away. If you are Christian or other religion, say your favorite prayer whenever you have shame and ask for God or the Holy Mother to take away your shame and guilt and say the prayers till they are answered. There is work to be done and you can do it. You need to know that you did what was the best you could do at the time when no love and no attention was around. That is what humans do: they take it from anyone they can get it. People take love from a dog, from a bird, from anything. We need love and we are vulnerable. That is the human condition. Do not beat yourself for it.
Pema Choedroen, a Buddhist nun has written wonderful books about how to stay with difficult feelings in awareness meditation. "When things fall apart" and other books of her help to go through difficult times.
Hope that helps. the Dalai Lama says: My religion is kindness. Be kind to yourself!!!

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