Icon Nikon
Gold Member
Addy -
I don't have much to offer except my compassion and my own shame.
I grew up being sexual abused by my mother and later by my older brother, who used to throw parties and serve me up to his friends. Also a female teacher "cultivated" a lost and confused kid and then over a period of six years exploited me before discarding me in the most humiliating manner. Of course, all those were clearly not consensual, as I was a child and could not legally give consent.
However, after that it gets a little murkier for me, for some of the same things you all have identified, with the exception that I am a self-identIfied gender neutral (mainly because I for the most part rarely occupy my body) gay person (mainly because if I was ever lucky enough to walk through this world with the love of another, it would be with a female companion).
Anyhow, now that I was a consenting age and in college, I tried to abandon my gayness and my past, by going out with a Navy airman, who seemed nice enough. But after a few harmless outings and in the dead of winter, we went to his apartment to "study", or so I thought. I was still trying to find my voice after years of being silenced, so after my initial attempt to say no failed, he had sex with my empty body as I watched from "above" in horrid disbelief.
Shortly after graduating and trying to forget about that night, my work took me to Minnesota for six months of training. In those days women were just entering the male dominated engineering profession and I was "still eager to please and prove myself". So inspite of some internal alarms going off and what seemed like a casual dinner out with a colleague in a foreign city, I let myself be drawn into a compromising situation where I immediately froze and vanished in the only way I knew how - I dissociated and detached from my body and he had his way with my lifeless body. I believe that I asked him to take me home before freezing but every time I look back that aspect becomes less and less clear. I was 22 or 23 at the time.
And after a stressful time with many pretty terrifying flashbacks, I was desperate to find answers - to find the help I needed. So when I could afford my first therapist, male, at 26, I was literally willing to try anything to ease the pain I was in and the disgust I felt for myself, and yet no more capable of saying no if backed into a corner. For six months I willingly submitted to his homeopathic drugs (which I later came to discover were date rape type drugs - semi-unconscious paralytics ) that rendered me "literally unable to move and unable speak" while he doled out "his brand of therapy". His actions were obviously amoral, reprehensible, unethical, and of course criminal, but I kept coming back twice a week for the whole six months, even though I could, through tears and clouded eyes, see some of what be was doing to me. The sad thing is that I doubted my own eyes and "allowed" this psychopath to repeatedly violate me.
And finally in my first and last lesbian relationship at around that same time, whenever she wanted to have sex under the presumption of "making love" (which always stirred up those former images of being gang raped by my brother's posse), I would put up a "fight", if you can really call it that, but eventually surrender because of some perceived sense of "wifely duty" or obligation to the relationship. Then I would vacate as usual, even though she didn't seem to respect or care that I wasn't a "participating" partner. And the relationship continued like this for about three years with her leaving me, not the other way around.
Sorry for all the the above to make the following "simply" points. I still "feel" as if I consented to being abused/taken advantage of even though clearly that was not the case in many of the above examples, for I "couldn't" coming from a developmental standpoint or "shouldn't have been ever demanded to" by a then licensed psychiatrist and coming from a professional standpoint. As for the others, where I was of a consenting age, I still feel "ashamed with no right to feel as if I was violated" because in my head I was an adult then who should have been able to say NO loudly enough or strongly enough to walk away or even run away when something about the circumstances seemed "uneasy, amiss, or just not right". But the fact is I felt it was my fault and thus was the creator of my own living hell, and deserving so. However, and over a great many years, I learned that I was in no better psychological shape at 26 than I was at six, and thus in many significant ways "not my fault" because 1) I needed so desperately to be loved, 2) I had learned to come to accept and except to be treated this way, 3) I, in many ways, was still a kid in an adult body with no boundaries or ways to require others to respect them, and 4) I was coping as that trapped child with little to no options instead of an adult armed with many options and tools at my disposal.
Be it a weak or strong NO, it is still NO, which demands to be respected. I am sincerely sorry for the pain and the self-blame you are experience, and nothing I will say can take that away...I wish it could. And it seems cruel of me (and perhaps even dismissive) to suggest that you forgive yourself for this experience so you truly can grow from it. Please try to be kind to yourself and remember that you did the very best that you could with the tools you had at the time. Now it's time nurture yourself by 1) learning to set some new boundaries, for you genuinely deserve to be respected (by yourself and those you chose to be with), and 2) expanding your current set of available tools needed to maintain those personal boundaries, for you deserve to be safe and able to adequately protect all that is you and all that is only yours to give freely.
I hope that my honesty and my sincerity in relating my experiences (some of them for the first time, for which I thank you for giving me the courage to do) has been of some help - maybe not in the short-term pain you are feeling now, but in the long-term with the knowledge that you can engage with another without worrying about feeling unsafe and without losing any piece of you in the process.
And in the meantime, please be gentle with yourself. I hope you can find some relief - and remember you are amongst tender friends here who will surround you with loving understanding and caring support.
I am one of them,
Alex
I don't have much to offer except my compassion and my own shame.
I grew up being sexual abused by my mother and later by my older brother, who used to throw parties and serve me up to his friends. Also a female teacher "cultivated" a lost and confused kid and then over a period of six years exploited me before discarding me in the most humiliating manner. Of course, all those were clearly not consensual, as I was a child and could not legally give consent.
However, after that it gets a little murkier for me, for some of the same things you all have identified, with the exception that I am a self-identIfied gender neutral (mainly because I for the most part rarely occupy my body) gay person (mainly because if I was ever lucky enough to walk through this world with the love of another, it would be with a female companion).
Anyhow, now that I was a consenting age and in college, I tried to abandon my gayness and my past, by going out with a Navy airman, who seemed nice enough. But after a few harmless outings and in the dead of winter, we went to his apartment to "study", or so I thought. I was still trying to find my voice after years of being silenced, so after my initial attempt to say no failed, he had sex with my empty body as I watched from "above" in horrid disbelief.
Shortly after graduating and trying to forget about that night, my work took me to Minnesota for six months of training. In those days women were just entering the male dominated engineering profession and I was "still eager to please and prove myself". So inspite of some internal alarms going off and what seemed like a casual dinner out with a colleague in a foreign city, I let myself be drawn into a compromising situation where I immediately froze and vanished in the only way I knew how - I dissociated and detached from my body and he had his way with my lifeless body. I believe that I asked him to take me home before freezing but every time I look back that aspect becomes less and less clear. I was 22 or 23 at the time.
And after a stressful time with many pretty terrifying flashbacks, I was desperate to find answers - to find the help I needed. So when I could afford my first therapist, male, at 26, I was literally willing to try anything to ease the pain I was in and the disgust I felt for myself, and yet no more capable of saying no if backed into a corner. For six months I willingly submitted to his homeopathic drugs (which I later came to discover were date rape type drugs - semi-unconscious paralytics ) that rendered me "literally unable to move and unable speak" while he doled out "his brand of therapy". His actions were obviously amoral, reprehensible, unethical, and of course criminal, but I kept coming back twice a week for the whole six months, even though I could, through tears and clouded eyes, see some of what be was doing to me. The sad thing is that I doubted my own eyes and "allowed" this psychopath to repeatedly violate me.
And finally in my first and last lesbian relationship at around that same time, whenever she wanted to have sex under the presumption of "making love" (which always stirred up those former images of being gang raped by my brother's posse), I would put up a "fight", if you can really call it that, but eventually surrender because of some perceived sense of "wifely duty" or obligation to the relationship. Then I would vacate as usual, even though she didn't seem to respect or care that I wasn't a "participating" partner. And the relationship continued like this for about three years with her leaving me, not the other way around.
Sorry for all the the above to make the following "simply" points. I still "feel" as if I consented to being abused/taken advantage of even though clearly that was not the case in many of the above examples, for I "couldn't" coming from a developmental standpoint or "shouldn't have been ever demanded to" by a then licensed psychiatrist and coming from a professional standpoint. As for the others, where I was of a consenting age, I still feel "ashamed with no right to feel as if I was violated" because in my head I was an adult then who should have been able to say NO loudly enough or strongly enough to walk away or even run away when something about the circumstances seemed "uneasy, amiss, or just not right". But the fact is I felt it was my fault and thus was the creator of my own living hell, and deserving so. However, and over a great many years, I learned that I was in no better psychological shape at 26 than I was at six, and thus in many significant ways "not my fault" because 1) I needed so desperately to be loved, 2) I had learned to come to accept and except to be treated this way, 3) I, in many ways, was still a kid in an adult body with no boundaries or ways to require others to respect them, and 4) I was coping as that trapped child with little to no options instead of an adult armed with many options and tools at my disposal.
Be it a weak or strong NO, it is still NO, which demands to be respected. I am sincerely sorry for the pain and the self-blame you are experience, and nothing I will say can take that away...I wish it could. And it seems cruel of me (and perhaps even dismissive) to suggest that you forgive yourself for this experience so you truly can grow from it. Please try to be kind to yourself and remember that you did the very best that you could with the tools you had at the time. Now it's time nurture yourself by 1) learning to set some new boundaries, for you genuinely deserve to be respected (by yourself and those you chose to be with), and 2) expanding your current set of available tools needed to maintain those personal boundaries, for you deserve to be safe and able to adequately protect all that is you and all that is only yours to give freely.
I hope that my honesty and my sincerity in relating my experiences (some of them for the first time, for which I thank you for giving me the courage to do) has been of some help - maybe not in the short-term pain you are feeling now, but in the long-term with the knowledge that you can engage with another without worrying about feeling unsafe and without losing any piece of you in the process.
And in the meantime, please be gentle with yourself. I hope you can find some relief - and remember you are amongst tender friends here who will surround you with loving understanding and caring support.
I am one of them,
Alex
