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Falling in love and having a sexual relationship with one’s father may seem out of the realm of possibility for most, but that’s exactly what happened to writer Natasha Rose Chenier, who detailed her experience in an essay for the website Jezebel on Tuesday. The essay, which has quickly made the Internet rounds, has been described on social media as both “weird” and “beautiful.”

“I have been totally overwhelmed with loving and supportive messages from around the globe — Turkey, Iceland, India, Brazil, England, and beyond,” Chenier, 27, of Vancouver, Canada, tells Yahoo Parenting. “It has been a deeply heartening experience.”

In her essay, “On Falling In and Out of Love With My Dad,” Chenier recounted how she met her biological father when she was 19. Because her father was absent for most of her life (he lived in Jamaica) and her mother was in an abusive relationship, Chenier craved paternal affection — which turned sexual when she finally met her father. “When I first met him in person I noticed that we even had the same posture, the same way of carrying ourselves in the world,” she wrote. “I was intoxicated by our likeness, which I never shared with my mother, or with any siblings (I am an only child). All of a sudden I had company. It was that simple. I had a dream parent, and I was over the moon.”

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What both Chenier and her father were experiencing is a disorder called Genetic Sexual Attraction (GSA), which is sexual and romantic attraction that can occur between two relatives (father-daughter, brother-sister, mother-son) who did not grow up together due to adoption or abandonment. “When GSA occurs, it’s usually because the two people involved have not experienced that initial bonding from birth,” Susan Branco Alvarado, a licensed professional counselor in Falls Church, Virginia who specializes in adoption issues, tells Yahoo Parenting. “We know so little about GSA because the disorder is stigmatized, however, it’s possible that the two people spend so much time fantasizing about the other, that when they finally meet, the connection is so powerful that it somehow turns sexual.” GSA differs from incest in that the latter involves relatives who grew up together.

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Illustration by Val McBain. Provided by Natasha Rose Chenier.

“On my second trip to Jamaica, I started sleeping in my dad’s bed,” wrote Chenier. “It was, in retrospect, yet another thing that might seem inappropriate to other kids. But I came from a kiss-on-the-lips relationship with both my mother and grandmother, and growing up, it was normal for us to cuddle and be affectionate together. I enjoyed it. I also had no idea what was normal in a father-daughter relationship. We held each other and I felt safe. When I started feeling sexually attracted to him — as well as shocked and horrified to realize it— I spoke of it to no one, least of all him. I hoped I would go home and the feeling would go away. But it didn’t. Instead, it grew.”

Chenier described her inability to resist the sexual relationship as a “dark spell.” She wrote, “We had oral sex a few times, almost always followed by my descending into a whirlwind of self-hate and disgust and dry heaving over the toilet in the bathroom attached to his room. He lay on his bed looking aloof during these episodes, spouting empty reassurances like ‘You’ll be fine.’ I was on an island far from home, and had no one to turn to, nowhere to escape. I did not want to fly home early because I knew my mother would have questions, so I stayed in Jamaica for the remaining few days of my scheduled visit, the darkest of my life. I felt so powerless that I begged him to stop me from initiating, and for him to stop initiating too. He agreed, did neither, and I remained horrifically and self-destructively unable to resist.”

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Such feelings echo what Branco Alvarado has seen in her practice. “My clients report feeling incapable of not going through with [the relationship] and overwhelming feelings of attraction,” she says.



The relationship between Chenier and her father continued until she was 21. “One day I acknowledged that the panic attacks I was having were because of him,” Chenier says. “The crisis I was going through was because of him. My efforts to idealize him were no match for the horror I felt in that moment, and so I stopped answering his calls and emails. He got the message pretty quickly and stopped trying to contact me.” Chenier has also been in therapy and adds that she has not been in contact with her father since 2009 and that her mother has been greatly supportive.

“These relationships are most often initiated by men and ended by women, so there is a very gendered component to them that warrants further research,” Chenier says. “I hope people learn from my story to be mindful of the fact that they’re more common than anyone thinks, and to be empathetic towards victims. And for victims to know that if they speak up, they are going to receive love and support.”

Branco Alvarado concurs. “In regards to adoption, a situation that can evoke GSA, if more birth parents had (or were permitted to have) regular access to their children, it would eliminate some of the issues surrounding the disorder. And research shows that when adoptive children are given healthy access to their biological parents, they develop healthier identities about their adoption status.”

Now, engaged to a man she met three years ago and with plans to have her own children, Chenier says she couldn’t be happier. “The way my fiancé has taken care of me through some of the toughest times,” she says, “is what has made me know, without a doubt, that I want to spend the rest of my life with him.”