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I'm sorry, I'm going to try very hard to censor this a bit but I need to post this somewhere. It's gross and super graphic so stop reading if you are a sensitive type. For the most part I can let this go and never think of it but when I was too young I saw this...too much. He would use knives to cut himself open. There was blood everywhere, knives sticking out of his abdomen. I don't understand how he would survive this. But he would do it and film this and he was naked and masterbating in the blood bath. I just remember the eye contact and the horror of it. I was way too young to handle this. What kind of pathology is this? I don't understand what makes someone do something like this. I don't really define this part of my experience as traumatic because I don't have PTSD symtoms from witnessing this. But this definitely messed with my head. I was too young. I was hardly ready for normal sex. I was shocked beyond belief.
Id say sexual sadist if it was knifes in others but knifes in himself? Hmmm, unsure.
I have researched sexual sadisim a ton as it makes up my trauma and i have heard of hurting oneself and sexual gradification but not to this magnitude. This magnitude is usually to others.
Personally I'm not sure.
ETA: Oh, to answer the title, any where you wish as this site doesn't censor graphic content nor are there trigger warnings. We all read at our own discretion.
You don't have to censor anything here. It's generous of you to let people know what might be coming (as you did), but it's not a requirement, and we don't use trigger warnings.
It would be a paraphilia. Paraphilias are behaviors associated with sexual arousal that are considered to be atypical.
I did look this one up. It's called auto-haemofetishism - which is about cutting yourself and having sex or masturbating.
I don't know anything about how they come into being. I am so sorry you carry that memory - of course it messed with your head. It sounds terrifying. Just beyond awful.
It's important to be able to say what you need to say - that's a big part of what this site is all about. Some people do it mostly in their trauma diaries, others start threads like you've done. I'm just so sorry that happened to you.
Thank you both for your replies. This experience was so bizarre and revolting that obviously this is something I have to be alone with. I appreciate that there is no requirement for trigger warnings here but interestingly on this site I don't read many details of traumas. Seemed like there was an unspoken rule about not writing graphic content. Really good to know this wasn't inappropriate to post.
I sometimes feel this urgency to get this awful information out of my head. So thank you for listening. Really interesting that there is a word for this, Joeylittle. I will look that up. I've just figured this is another absolutely non-human thing I have to sit with alone.
More than half of my trauma is like this, shock and horror and fear and threats but nothing happening to me...certainly I was hurt at times but so much is just what I thought was going to happen or what I had to see.
I don't think this is something you need to be alone with. That's not at all obvious to me. It seems like not being alone with it might make it easier to deal with. :hug:
I think you'll see quite a lot if you do a little reading in the member's trauma diary section - primarily because that area isn't accessed by search engines, so it feels just a little more private. But, no unspoken rule.
I'm glad knowing there's a word helped you - it helps me too. Lets there be some box I know how to put it in, with a label, instead of something just floating around in my head. I also know what you mean about it not so much a trauma, but instead being an indelible horror. I have a bunch of those. My therapist thinks that it's to do with a combination of: (1), being in a traumatic situation, a person can go in and out of shock, and that will change how things impact. (2) being exposed to multiple things at once, they do start to group into 'OK', 'bad', 'terrible' - even though, in a different context a single instance of the things that are 'OK', might be 'terrible' - and that creates a kind of cognitive dissonance that can be hard for people with sustained or multiple trauma to resolve.
I don't know if it bothers you a little that you don't react to the memory as a trauma - but I wanted to share that in case you did. It's not an unnatural thing at all, to sometimes have no reaction other than horror and shock.
That is actually very helpful to read. Yes, I definitely have a hard time accepting my response or lack of response to some things.
Why some people are so upset over things that hardly phased me makes me question my sanity. Why there were pretty awful moments where I felt we were just going through the motions like actors in a play and I didn't really care, I was just pretending to care, and he wasn't really a rapist, he was just pretending to do this because we were putting on a show for ourselves. I would hear myself screaming and think I seemed so dramatic. Why am I screaming so loud when this is just pretend? I think this is derealization, right? This dissociated experience definitely made me question everything and minimize it to almost complete amnesia. I pretty much could have passed a lie detector test stating none of this happened until just a while ago. I was so numb.
Yes, that's true- I can recall witnessing things and I'm just standing there, frozen. I cant tell if what i was feeling was shock or fear, probably both, but by the way the memories appear, I was definitely in a dissociative state at the time. I imagine part of the work is accessing the feelings I was able to "freeze".
