I Was a Cub Scout Once: A Memoir of Healing and Hope

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.