Content Warning: The following article mentions the sexual abuse of a minor.

Christian Weissmann is best known to The Bold and the Beautiful fans as Remy Price, Electra Forrester’s ex-best friend and stalker, but the actor is also an accomplished writer and poet.

In a joint interview on the Soapy podcast with his co-star Lisa Yamada (Who teased her role in Elle.), Weissmann opened up about the evolution of his writing, including delving into the trauma he lives with due to being sexually assaulted at eight years old. He also read a poem from his book, Her, Him & I: Poems.

Key Takeaways

• How Christian Weissman became a published writer.
• What led the actor to share his story of his assault.
• Weissmann reads his poem, “7 pounds, eight ounces.”

READ: Lisa Yamada and Christian Weissmann want Luna and Remy to be B&B’s Bonnie and Clyde.

Writing Through The Pandemic

When he was asked about being abused as a child and the choice he made to write about that experience and its aftermath, Weissmann took Yamada and Soapy co-hosts Rebecca Budig (Taylor, B&B) and Greg Rikaart (Leo, DAYS; Kevin, Y&R) through his journey to his work being published. But his story didn’t start with the abuse or even his first feature in the Los Angeles Times, which was for the love and relationships column LA Affairs, not a personal essay about surviving assault.

No, the actor began with February 2020, the month before COVID triggered a nationwide shutdown, which also happened to be when he started coming out to his family and close friends as bisexual. Weissmann shared that while stuck at home, he wanted to be proactive and work on figuring out the person he wanted to be.

He credited Zoom therapy and his “lovely” therapist, Barbara, who guided him. It’s because of their sessions that the actor started journaling every day and not shying away from writing even the most ugly thoughts because no one would see it anyway, just him. It led Weissman to decide he wanted to go further than just journaling about his life.

It’s such a cathartic process to take all of these crazy thoughts in your head and all these feelings you’ve been bottling up for so many years and be like “Okay, I can look at it. It’s outside of me now, and I can deal with it.” With writing pieces, it started more as like ‘I want to come out, and I want to talk about my experience.’

The actor’s desire to bring people into the work of finding himself led to “How quarantine — and a bad breakup — healed me” being published, and from there, his writing took off.

Writing To Process Trauma

As for writing about the assault, Weissmann said that he always knew he wanted to “put it in some written form and talk about it,” but it was the hardest thing he had ever had to show the people in his life, some of whom didn’t know he’d been abused. He expressed that coming out played a significant role in his ability to be open about what happened.

I think once I came out, I was able to open the flood gates on everything that I experienced as a kid. And [the assault] was something that was always at the forefront that I was trying to run around and be like ‘Maybe I can deal with these things without dealing with that big, scary thing.’

I thought, once I came out as bi and queer, and I started to experience these romantic experiences with guys, I thought that big monster in my head from that experience would go away because I’d be like ‘Oh, I came to terms with who I am.’ But, no, I actually just opened the door. It’s still going to be there unless I really face it head on.

Once again, going to therapy really showed me that if I don’t write about it and process it, I’m not going to get to let it stop running my life. It’s still something that is a part of my life everyday but once I really talked about it and understood what happened, and let myself live free of that shame, the monster in my head got a lot smaller.

Three years after his first piece ran in the LA Times, Huff Post published Weissmann’s essay, “I’m A Man Who Was Sexually Assaulted At 8 Years Old. I Kept It Secret For Years — Until Now,” where the actor details the abuse, the trauma of burying the harm done to him, the hard work of healing, and the stigma around being a male survivor that keeps men silent.

Weissmann’s Poetry

While Weissmann was exploring his identity through writing personal essays, he was also using another medium to delve creatively into his feelings and experiences. Poetry. The art form provided him with an outlet that allowed his writing to be “a little bit more whimsical” and enabled him to escape his reality.

He said that he wrote for “years and years” and ended up with enough material for a book. After submitting to over 100 publishers, with almost every one telling him no, it was Central Avenue Publishing that took his collection of poems on. The actor called it a “gift of a lifetime.”

Her, Him & I: Poems is about love, romance, heartbreak, and healing, but it’s also described as a “love letter to queerness” where Weissmann examines the complexities of learning to love oneself.

When Budig asked him to read from his book, he picked “7 pounds, eight ounces,” a poem about the actor’s cynical view of his first moments of life. Watch him read his work below:

If you, or someone you know, needs help, visit RAINN’s National Sexual Assault Online Hotline or the National Sexual Violence Resource Center’s website.