Starved for men's attention: Could this be an issue of past child abuse?

by p
(Iowa, USA)

My oldest sister has been very flirtatious her entire life. Once when we were in high school, she was standing in her bra (1970) in the dining room ironing her blouse when I came in with my male friends. We were 14 and she was 17. She didn't make an attempt to cover up, but she did look up to see if they had noticed her. Being the homecoming queen that year, she had a new boyfriend every week and never seemed to be part of the family, just all alone in her own world. Thirty-five years later she is still flirting.

One night, she was hugging all of the guys in the bar. Two of the guys asked her to leave with them. Her husband got into a fight with them. He was "defending 'er honor", so he felt.

Now I hear from her daughter that she was flirting with her son's friends at a family camp out. She apparently crawled into a tent with 2 or 3 of them. I don't know the rest of the story. She is 56. They are 28-30 years old. My other sisters have told me stories of her partying with guys, two at a time.

The police were at our house one night at 2 a.m. because I had called them to get her off my property. She paraded around in her white (t-shirt) nightie for nearly an hour, getting water and aspirins and making phone calls etc...them sitting in the chair talking until she finally decided to leave.

And if this isn't sick enough, one evening, after her bath, she hiked her towel up to her butt to put lotion on her leg and looked to me to see if I was watching. She had a very odd look on her face. Then she came into the room where I was and said, "Don't pinch my boob, I'm not wearing a bra."
What is up with all of this? I'm really creeped out by her behavior. I have banned her from my property and all types of communication, for the second time. This is it. I have told her give up drinking or give up me. She chose the booze. Go figure. I want to tell my siblings about it, but I can't find the nerve to get it all out.

Thanks for listening,
PB

Reply from Darlene: P, I'm not a psychologist, nor do I have a PhD in human behaviour, so my ability to answer your question is not rooted in formal education. I must be upfront about that.

As for the time it has taken me to put together an answer for you, it has been a week, P; not several weeks as your follow-up submission stated...not only have I been working on e-books and other site-related projects, I have been dealing with grievous family issues, therefore, my personal time has been extremely limited. And please understand that all I do on my site is of my own personal time. This is not a job I get paid to do; and there are times when I must scale back my time spent on the site (both in front of the scenes as well as behind them) in order to take care of myself and personal circumstances. If I am to continue operating the interactive nature of my site as I do, I need my visitors to be understanding when it takes a week or so to reply.

I've also had to find a "child abuse" element within your query. Please note, P, that this is not an advice column for personal relationships. The questions I answer here must have a child abuse connection. When I receive questions that do not have that connection, I'm forced to find a correlation, which results in a much longer response time.

Every day of the week, I receive dozens of requests for information, answers, etc. I am not in a position to be an ongoing support for my visitors. I trust you can appreciate the situation I am in.

The remainder of my reply to this Ask Darlene question "Starved for men's attention: Could this be an issue of past child abuse?" can be found at Comments below this submission. Depending on system activity, there are sometimes delays in comments going live on my site; but rest assured, they do eventually appear. So if you don't yet see them, I hope you will return later to read what I, and possibly others, have written. I thank you for your patience and understanding.

Email addresses, phone numbers, home addresses AND website/blog URLs in visitor comments are STRICTLY prohibited, and could result in being banned from making further comments on this site.