I Was a Cub Scout Once

For over fifty years, David Jensen had no memory of what happened to him as a Cub Scout. He remembered building a pinewood derby car. He remembered pack meetings in his family's basement. He remembered a neighborhood friend who came to one meeting and never returned. The rest was a blank space - and blank spaces, he would learn, are never empty. I Was a Cub Scout Once is a memoir of childhood sexual abuse, dissociation, and the long, nonlinear road to healing. Between the ages of nine and ten, David was sexually abused repeatedly by a scoutmaster in Colorado and a volunteer at a camp in New Mexico - acts of brutality committed in a church basement while other scouts and adults gathered upstairs, and in a tent beside a lake far from home. These were not isolated incidents. They were part of a larger pattern of abuse that also included members of his own family. But David's body kept the score long before his mind could. Chronic headaches, stomach pain, dissociation, a freeze response that left him unable to fight back in schoolyard confrontations - his childhood was a map of symptoms no one thought to read. He stuffed candy to numb what churned beneath the surface. He stole to feel powerful. He bullied others to belong. He stood frozen while life happened around him, protected by a nervous system working overtime to keep him alive. The first sexual abuse memory surfaced when David was twenty-seven, triggered by a moment of crisis at a twelve-step meeting. This one involved his father. What followed was decades of therapy, body work, and slow, painful remembering - memory by memory, fragment by fragment. The Boy Scouts of America bankruptcy and settlement process became an unexpected catalyst, unlocking scouting abuse memories that were darker and more devastating than anything he had imagined. Through it all, David discovered something the abuse could never destroy: what he calls the Spark - an inextinguishable point of strength deep inside, the part of him that refused to die on the worst days of his childhood and refuses to stop healing now. This memoir does not sanitize. It does not rush toward resolution. With raw honesty and hard-won compassion, David writes about dissociation and what it steals, about a body that grew around trauma in the shape of protection, about the heroes - a swim coach, an aunt and uncle in Kansas, a beloved dog named Dandy - who unknowingly kept a wounded boy alive. He writes about learning to parent himself, about holding a stuffed child named Little David and saying the words he never heard: You are safe. I believe you. None of this was your fault. I Was a Cub Scout Once is for anyone who has carried secrets that were never theirs to keep. It is for survivors still wondering if their memories are real. It is for the therapists, loved ones, and advocates walking beside them. And it is for a society that continues to look away. David Jensen is no longer a victim. He is no longer merely a survivor. He is a thriver - and this book is his truth, finally spoken aloud.