Good for you, CO. That took guts.
Stay well.
If that's what you want to call it. For me, there wasn't much of a choice; it was fix it, or fail at life and die. The key was the gagging reflex. Once I realized what was going on and how the associations worked, it took about a month of searching, every night or two, wandering through my history tracing that sensation, gagging the whole way. One gets to feel pretty stupid for quite a while. There wasn't anybody in my life with whom to share what was going on either. It got pretty lonely and I had to be patient about it.
You can't imagine the relief when I found the recollection and "replayed" the scene: At last, I knew who did it and how. I knew that there wasn't anything inherently flawed about me. It wasn't my own doing. I was just being a friendly little kid. I can only imagine what that person had gone through as a child himself. I do know that some of the other kids in my immediate neighborhood circle at that time are VERY messed up to this day, and for no good reason in terms of their parents.
This guy was a monster. I've tried to find out what happened to him to no avail, thinking that it might help somebody else. Yet as I've matured, (this was all almost thirty years ago) I've realized that this is an individual battle, and the injection of that information could do considerable damage on its own. This is where Christ's teachings are so terribly important: We don't forgive for others' sake, but for ours.