is this sexual assault? what should i do? *potential trigger*

I am now a female in my late teens. I live in a very mental health positive and open household but there is one thing i have not told anyone in my family or group of friends. When I was somewhere between the age of four and eight  i used to play with a boy who was almost two years older than me. our families were close and he was my best friend at the time. We used to build pillow forts and pretend i was a wild cat and he was a human who was living in the wilderness. 

during these games he would sometimes bring me under the pillow fort or somewhere secluded where there was closed doors and touch me beneath my clothing under the pretence that he was examining me for wounds (we were still pretending to be out in the wild, he usually recused me from something and i would pretend to be injured) He would focus around my genitals but i cannot remember if there was any insertion. It always felt weird to me because he would immediately stop if he heard someone coming. after this happening a few times i told him that when i was a cat my cloths were my fur and it never happened again. i was never scared as such when this was happening but it always felt wrong in some sense. nothing as extreme as this happened after, the only two relevant things i can remember is that he would occasionally force me into being given a massage underneath my cloths but this never went below the waist. and another time where we were tickling each other and kept tickling my genitals with his foot even after i told him to stop.

i never told my parents because he was my friend and i did still like spending time with him, i was also being badly bullied in my school and i had few friends, he stood up for me and was in general really kind. but i was always slightly scared of him. we began play fighting as we got older and i was afraid of him hurting me even though he never did and in reality i hurt him much more then he ever hurt me. i would never let him help me up if i fell, i would constantly say that i didn't trust him as well as other fearful actions along those lines. i would also often try to keep my distance physically. 

he moved away when i was about nine or ten and we have remained friends to this day. i am not  scared of him and our families are still close. i honestly don't think he remembers any of it. i see him about two to four times a year and i never really thought about this until recently, now i cant get it out of my head. i cant mention it to my therapist because i am underaged and she would tell my parents. i am worried to tell my parents not because they wouldn't believe me or anything like that, i'm just afraid of the drama it would cause and his parents are such lovely people, i don't want their family to fall apart because of me.

i have been thinking about the ways this might have effected me and there are a few weird ways i do/have behaved. when a boy liked me and acted as such i would get extremely freaked out. i would be perfectly fine during the interaction and afterwards but once i began to think about it i would get so scared that i would feel the need to hide from this person. this has happened with close friends, people i had romantic feelings for in the past and people i barely knew. i am bisexual but genuinely i am more attracted to guys, but i have told everyone i know that i am a lesbian just to avoid being sexually involved with males. i also used to get very panicked if i was too intimate with a platonic male friend, even if it was just a hug or wearing his jacket. this is a problem as i have a lot of male friends. i have since mostly gotten over this. 

i have a bad history of mental health problems such as self harm, suicidal thoughts, anxiety, depression, trust issues, commitment issues and the list goes on. i don't have reasons for many of these and i am not looking for something to blame these on, i am just trying to figure out how this has effected me and what i am supposed to do. do i tell my parents or councillor? if so how should i go about it? does this even count as sexual assault? someone, please help. i'm lost and i don't know what to do.

5 likes, 3 replies