Childhood My father frequently showed me pornography as a child, and i don't know what to think about it.

[Sweetleaf]

even though they broke up with me like a spineless coward would.

I want to elaborate on this because it ties into my trauma.

They broke up with me like this:
By vanishing.

So as you can imagine, that really f*cked with my head, and my heart. It also f*cked with my head that, they came back a week later. I had heard nothing. We had sex. THEN afterwards (!) I find out that they have considered themselves broken up with me for the whole time they have been gone, and it just made me collapse to the floor crying, bawling. I never would have had sex that day if I knew that. I felt like I had been used for a quick cheap thrill by them. It really hurt. I felt used. They left. Never returned. They acted like they didn't get why I was so upset. My heart felt ripped out.

It was not very long after that, that I began communicating with my abuser, and met him IRL, and started hanging out with him, and then got into a relationship with him. I feel like I was plugging that hole in my heart, when I got with him. It really did feel like that, emotionally. It masked my sorrows, at how I had been so hurt, by the last person I was with. What I didn't know, was that I would get hurt so much more by the next person.

I know you said it's embarrssing, but it's not you who should be embarrssed about it.

I know but, it's so hard to make myself feel that way, it's so hard to make myself feel like I don't bear some sort of responsibility for it, it's so hard to not feel embarrassed that that stuff went on. I don't even know if I will be able to get the words out to her. Last time, it was on my mind, and I was about to, I was wanting to, I had a nice long pause, and I was working up the courage to say something about it. But, I couldn't, and just let her start talking about stuff, and talked about other things with her, which of course was still helpful because it was about other stuff that was bothering me a lot, but, still. I couldn't bring myself to do it, and part of that was because it started making me feel a lump in my throat.

I understand what you are going through.

Thanks for saying that.

 

[Daydreamer]

I don't even know if I will be able to get the words out to her.

You are the boss of your healing and you know the best when it's time to bring things up. You're not ready now but it doesn't mean you never will be. I'm sure you'll get there.
You said you're totally lost about that part of your past, you can't make any sense of it, but you know what. I think you are doing it. You are making sense of it now.
When I wrote my introduction thread you responded and you were very supportive, and you mentioned what your father did. It hit me when I read about it, I remember my reaction, I thought about how wrong it was. You wrote you don't even know what it was about, you never thought about it and you're only starting now. That was less than a month ago. And now you are here, facing it, talking about it, getting into the middle of it. You are not stuck, you're moving forward.And you are gonna figure it out.
I know you have distanced yourself from your father, but from your posts I think you might be holding to a lot of anger towards him - which is completely justified. You are working to make sense of your relationship and him showing you pornography is a big part of that relationship.

I hope this post was not too condescending, I just wanted to show an outsiders perspective.
Good luck and lots of strength to you.

 

[Sweetleaf]

I hope this post was not too condescending, I just wanted to show an outsiders perspective.

Oh it didn't come across like that at all! It came across as nothing but supportive and helpful. Also, you have made me aware of some things. Thank you for posting that.

I know you have distanced yourself from your father, but from your posts I think you might be holding to a lot of anger towards him - which is completely justified

The thing is, I can't even tell where all the anger is coming from, as in, which precise aspects are the main contributors, because there are just -so- many reasons why I hate him. I outright freely admit I am extremely angry and disappointed feeling about him. I also am very callous towards him. He was somewhat recently in a very bad car wreck, and even broke his neck (for the second time, no less), and all I had to say to my mom when she told me was "jesus christ what is he a f*cking terminator or something?! he just won't f*cking die!!" rather than -any- sort of compassion or "oh no" sort of words or feelings, I just thought "why does he keep getting to just survive this shit?" He has a large history of accidents, vehicular and just outright accidents, like falling 3 stories. This recent one, happened because he was driving drunk, and sideswiped another car on the highway. Other people were injured because of it, not just him. Last I heard, he was facing several felonies because of it.

Kind of strange to think that maybe there's someone out there who got in a car wreck because of it.

OOOOOH shit. Memory time. Haven't thought of this since he finally left our lives for good, not that he wanted to. Tough shit, his fault for being a failure.

He used to drive me around in his car with him, when I was a kid, even a LITTLE kid, while he was drunk. There were times that me and my sister (especially her, she's like, 5 years older than me) were terrified at how he was driving. He would speed on the ice and do all sorts of wild maneuvers because he thought they are fun - those are f*ckin' scary enough when a -sober- and competent person is doing them. I myself like to do drift-style ice slides from time to time, like, you know, when it's safer to do, or it just happens on accident (inevitable occurrence from time to time). But he would do that shit all the time, drunk, driving, with his kids in the car. Very often with me in the car - as I said, I was stuck with him and my sister got to hang out with my mom all the time. One kid per parent would be good, if both parents were good parents... she knew he was a drunk and always complained about his horrible parenting. Yet still stuck me with him anyway? Ugh.

It's only thinking back though, as an adult, at those memories, that I realized he was driving drunk, and I was in the car with him, and he did that for years, until my parents divorced.

Ugh. More memories, just of his shittiness. He was getting really belligerent (i love that word for some reason, just the roots of it make me kinda laugh at it being applied to someone who is acting like a manchild) and just drinking a lot, more than he had been.

My mom is actually pretty tough, in that she doesn't take shit. She once got whacked over the nose with a phone in the 70's, at work, because her coworker was tired of her talking on it, and angry at her using it so long, and so he just grabbed it and slammed her over the face with it. So, old school phone, yeah, pretty bad to whack someone with, it broke her nose. She immediately slapped him, lol. That's her reaction to getting hit. She hits back. Not my reaction, though. (btw the guy who did that had the book thrown at him, a judge that hated when women got beat by men got chosen, lol)

So, as you can imagine, when my dad got belligerent, and did shit like try to chase her around intimidatingly and hit her, she would do shit like throw down chairs and furniture and make him trip over it because he was too drunk to dodge or stop moving. She never even got hit by him, she was too aggressive and crafty. Why can't I be like that?

Anyway, this one time he was doing shit like that and I got too pissed off by it and stood between him and her and just was like "dude calm the f*ck down, seriously, just chill" and he grabbed my arm and started twisting it, but he was really drunk, and I just kinda automatically gripped his arm and started twisting with his twisting and made him fall over into the table. Don't even know how I did that. I am pretty tall, and at the time I was very fit, I did sports, I worked out, I ran a lot. My sister called the cops after that and he went and ran off into the woods for a while. The cops kept trying to get my mom to get a restraining order against him and do all this other shit. She wouldn't. They were all like "we'll drive you down to the court house right now, we got time still, they're still open" and everything. But she refused. The cops thought it was cool that I swung him into the table.

There are just, countless, countless reasons for me to be angry at him. I've been angry at him for years, for all sorts of things, which have nothing to do with the pornography exposure. There's plenty to be mad about. At the end I made my anger at him extremely visible, outright just told him I hated him, didn't give a f*cking shit about him, so on and so forth. He f*cked up in so many ways I haven't even touched on here.

It's hard to tell if any comes from the pornography exposure. I have too many other emotions tied up with that right now. But I feel like, now that you point out my general anger at him, I can feel it from that too.

When I wrote my introduction thread you responded and you were very supportive, and you mentioned what your father did. It hit me when I read about it, I remember my reaction, I thought about how wrong it was. You wrote you don't even know what it was about, you never thought about it and you're only starting now. That was less than a month ago. And now you are here, facing it, talking about it, getting into the middle of it. You are not stuck, you're moving forward.And you are gonna figure it out.

Wow, I remember that. I just went back and read it. The crazy thing is, when I wrote that, I had not yet realized it was abuse - that only happened in this thread. I am glad that you found it supportive, that I wrote all that. I have long since come to terms with cutting all contact with a parent, and I feel like I have progressed very far down that road in regards to being okay with it, and having moved on.

What about driving drunk with a kid in the car? Is that abuse? That's something that -really- makes me angry, that it happened to me. Thankfully he only tended to get in accidents while drunk, if he was on his motorcycle. Nobody would get hurt but him, then, yet miraculously the worst he had was missing patches of skin, cuts to the bone, road rash, etc. Nothing like, horrible, not even broken bones, aside from when he broke a bunch of ribs snowmachining drunk. (I think you all call them snowmobiles? hahaha) It landed on top of him I think? I forget. He f*cked up, basically. People really underestimate the danger of those things. A relative of one of my friends, wound up decapitating himself on his four wheeler, just riding through the woods. Really sad. He had a lot of life ahead of him. But it just shows that those sorts of activities can be very dangerous.

I now own his motorcycle, actually. My mom got it in the divorce and gave it to me, '77 honda scrambler. The tailpipe is broken, but it's been stored in a shed ever since his last accident, which is why the tailpipe is even broken, along with various little but annoying things, which would need to be replaced before it was good to ride. It's still in good condition otherwise. It's been very protected from the elements, and was even driven home after the wreck (he got back on, skin missing, cuts to the bone, hands just a bloody mess, etc. and rode home reeking of scotch) so I know that at least when it was stored, it was in operational condition, just with some shit on it broken.

 

[Sweetleaf]

Kind of strange to think that maybe there's someone out there who got in a car wreck because of it.

Lmao, reading this I go "well no shit"

I meant to expand on that. Maybe there's someone out there who got in a car wreck, and is still suffering from the consequences of what he did. Oops.

 

[Swift]

@Sweetleaf all I meant was you would tell me the way I reacted was okay and it was wrong to show me porn as a kid in the first place.
Also, there's this thing called "the theory of inverse proportionality" that doctors have because they have a very black sense of humour. The amount you're injured is inversely proportional to how absolutely f*cking stupid you're being. Ie, the stupider you're being, the less likely you are to sustain serious injury. If you're actually being fairly sensible, that's when you get fkd up. Neat little Murphy's Law joke.


I dunno how the laws work, but it would definitely be child endangerment at the very least to drive around drunk with you in the car.

 

[Sweetleaf]

but it would definitely be child endangerment at the very least to drive around drunk with you in the car.

I guess that's more what I meant. It being something illegal he did that risked my life, though I didn't know at the time.

there's this thing called "the theory of inverse proportionality" that doctors have because they have a very black sense of humour. The amount you're injured is inversely proportional to how absolutely f*cking stupid you're being. Ie, the stupider you're being, the less likely you are to sustain serious injury. If you're actually being fairly sensible, that's when you get fkd up.

I've heard of this before, lol. Definitely seems to apply to him.

 

[Sweetleaf]

all I meant was you would tell me the way I reacted was okay and it was wrong to show me porn as a kid in the first place.

I want to say something about this too.
Yeah. You are right. It is just so hard to feel that way about myself, but you telling me about your experiences does help me see it in another light. Thanks.

 

[Swift]

This is one of the many things that makes this all so hard to grasp and so hard to deal with, the tho...

Hey hey.
I really wanted to reply to this yesterday but didn't have the emotional wherewithal to do it.

So much of your story resonates with me.

I want to elaborate on this because it ties into my trauma.

They broke up with me like this:
By vani...

And this, too.

Crass descriptors, sexual trauma, mentions of self-harm, and poor decisions ahoy!

There's a patch in my life I refer to as my slut phase. I'm okay with the word slut for myself, because I rationalize that I'm making some kind of feminist reclamation of the word, which is intellectualizing BS.
The real reason is that I call it my slut phase as a bit of a joke so I don't have to deal with the rest.

Now, me being the absolutely brilliant emotional thinker I am, at 16-17 (after my abuser left me and disappeared, yes you read that right), I wasn't calling it abuse yet. I also decided that I didn't want to develop a block about sex, or be gay.
Two solutions rolled into one, and I went off in search of the magical dick that would turn me straight! Sheer brilliance, I know. Obvs worked really well. (For those that don't know, I am approximately fifty shades of gay).

Then my best friend and the only one who knew about the abuse died, and I lost what little grip I might have had on the rails.
So for about 3 years, I slept around. Strangers. Threesomes. Guys. Coupla girls. Guys. And a couple more guys. Usually older. Risky sex. Kinky sex. Drunk sex. Sex I didn't particularly want to have, but did with the attitude of taking some very unpleasant medicine. Dissociated sex. Stoned sex.
I felt like I was reclaiming power and agency and washing the taste of her and them out of my mouth. So many people had already f*cked me and passed me around like a f*cking toy to be shared, what did a few more matter? I was doing it on my terms. I was (in my mind) an adult. I was searching out people to have sex with on my own terms, because I'm a badarse bitch from hell and NOTHING can hurt me. You want to throw that shit at me, life? Guess what, I can do it better!

Lots of other risky behaviours. My first shrink called it 'russian roulette.'
Just this utter ambivalence to whether I lived or died. Rolling the dice.
The French call it "l'appel du vide."
I stood at the edge of the cliff, and I laughed like a madman, daring the world to kill me if it thought it could manage.
There's also repetition compulsion there. The idea that we have a horror so utterly incomprehensible to our minds that we re-enact it, compulsively, until we understand it.

Then I was dragged back to my home town and fighting with my difficult mother. In Aus we call it 'rooting for a roof' - when you pick up a random to sleep with for a roof over your head for the night.

Also, like, sex was all anyone wanted from me in that way. I didn't have to make myself vulnerable, and it gave me control. Like, "you only want this, anyway, so what the hell is the point of pretending otherwise?"

Sex was the currency in which I earned affection. Like, my abuser was pretty much a substitute mother for me. She said nice things to me. She didn't think I was a bad person, or tell me so on a daily basis. She said she loved me, she listened to my problems, she held me, she fed me, she remembered my birthday, she spent time with me, she cared about me. she told me I was beautiful and talented and worth knowing and a good human being and many more wonderful, pretty lies I wasn't hearing anywhere else. And when it came time to pay the price, I did, right? She told me it's what people who loved each other did to show their love. And then things got even more f*cked up.

Sure, it hurt like nobody's business physically, but I was f*cking good at it. Get the guy to nut it and shut it, get the girl off, rinse and repeat, leave.

If you have sex willingly, then no one can rape you, right? So obvs the best anti-sexual assault self-protection is to have sex with everyone who wants to have sex with you! Dunno why they don't teach that in schools (heavy sarcasm.)

So yeah. Trauma can f*ck your headspace right up. Reactivity is a bitch. Affection is a drive more powerful than any I've ever known, including self-preservation.

And f*ck the motherf*cking dickheads in our lives that made things so difficult. May they burn in hell.

 

[mumstheword]

B

Hey hey.
I really wanted to reply to this yesterday but didn't have the emotional wherewithal to do it....

I really relate to a lot of your story @Swift, minus the gay part. I went through slut phases between my first relationship and my second (first I was still embroiled with the mother-abuser, but the relationship wasn't abusive) .
Second relationship? Very abusive, long term and destructive, except for the childbearing and art forms I developed in it).

Slut phases were similar to yours, especially my one as a teen, not so many girls though, and rapes still happened, but only when.I was exceedingly out of it.

After I got out of the long term abuse relationship I was in love with someone, but he was terrified and I was exceedingly unwell and shattered, so I had a bit of a pity-party -random -pick-up-sex-binge, not so self abusive but still not well adjusted, after all I was in my late 30's by then. I ended up with the man I love though. So happy ending.

 

[Sweetleaf]

@Swift

It was difficult for me to read that and take it in, but thank you for writing it. Thank you for expanding my view on some subjects.

Sure, it hurt like nobody's business physically, but I was f*cking good at it.

This line hurt to read, it reminds me of what I went through. I -had- to be both very good at it, and I had to do everything I could to hide my discomfort and all the other horrible things I was feeling, which was impossible at times. Me looking like I was suffering was a turnoff, so it was bad for me to let it show, and if I did, and he noticed it - best case scenario it means I have to suffer longer. His "needs" were also insane. Limitless stamina, and he basically was ready to go again the moment he was finished. That was one of the worst things about it all, one of the most exhausting and painful aspects of it all - so often, it just would not f*cking end. I'd finish him off. Then I'd have to do it again, minutes later, and again. Then again. It just went on and on some times. Back to back. Why did I endure all that? Why did I not run away sooner? Why did I let him use me like that, and suffer so much, and not put an end to it sooner? I felt so trapped. But that was so much to endure. It is a true wonder I did not kill myself during all that. Near the end I really wanted to. I came so close to trying.

I'm so sorry that you had to go through all that you did. It really hurts my heart, what has been done to so many people on this site, including you. I can't believe people exist, that do all this f*cked up shit to other humans. Yet I have experienced a lot of f*cked up shit first had. Even with my own experiences, it's hard to know that what happened to me is just one of many, many horror stories.

I really wanted to reply to this yesterday but didn't have the emotional wherewithal to do it.

That's okay, I have times like that myself.

So yeah. Trauma can f*ck your headspace right up. Reactivity is a bitch. Affection is a drive more powerful than any I've ever known, including self-preservation.

All of my relationships have been chained back to back, with almost no space inbetween them. One would end, I'd start the next in no time. I couldn't handle not being with someone. I could not handle the lack of affection.

What sucks is I have that feeling returning, the not being with someone feeling, that craving for affection, and it sucks, but I also CANT do anything about it. I just can't. I'm too afraid of it, and I'm too afraid of myself, and the way I react in relationships, and just the way I have been throughout my life, and I worry that I'll do something stupid and get with an abuser again. Not to mention, it would all be so triggering and I know it. Funny that my body wants it anyway. Lol.

I feel like a weirdo because this has been something I've talked with my therapist a lot, and she's been giving me all these ways to perform checks to help me be less likely to wind up with an abuser. So, effectively, instead of just doing it naturally like a normal person, I have to go through checklists and use other people to not wind up with a wacko on accident.

I've been in denial about me having problems with that sort of stuff, despite getting this help from my therapist. I keep wanting to tell myself "no, you just randomly wound up with a really abusive person" when really I missed a bunch of red flags - in fact, I almost feel like I steamrolled over a bunch of red flags in my desire to fill the hole in my heart that was my desire for affection, intimacy, closeness, etc. There were so many things at play. I was in sad shape when that horrible relationship began, but now I look at my deep past and more things make sense, sadly. It is very sad that those things happened to you, and it's sad that that stuff happened to me.

It's much easier, or rather, more obvious, for me to realize that my adult trauma is trauma, and has strongly affected me. The whole ending was basically escalation, and escalation, and increase of everything bad, he got crazier and crazier. This was a months-long process, really a years long process, but those end months were particularly bad. The very ending of it was basically (and I force myself to use these terms) torture, that kept me from sleeping, which lead to psychosis, and it made me so insane that I was crazy enough to free myself I guess.

That's a f*cked up part for me - that psychosis, that insanity, was intensely terrifying, a completely excruciating and horrible experience, these words do not do the terror of it justice. Yet, I can't help but think that it was what enabled me to free myself, which is SUCH a f*cked up thought for me. I can't describe why. I was very lucid on the very day that I freed myself, though fully feeling the emotional amplification provided by psychosis, along with a handful of minor, light delusions that I was dismissing. The psychotic "fear = utter mortal terror the likes of which you have never felt before" stuff, that really got me to get myself the f*ck away from him. My head felt like it was on fire, just from the psychosis. Throwing more trauma on top of that, it was too much for my psychotic brain to handle. It freed me, but it also -really- f*cked me up. It felt traumatizing all on its own.

It was a very intense ending - and that makes it very easy for me to point my finger at what caused it and go "THAT - that right there, that was some f*cked up shit, that person that did that to me is f*cking evil and crazy" and it's easy to have an event, even if it lasted for years, an event with a very definite and nightmarish ending, one you can go "this thing has affected my life and how my mind works majorly" at.

It's hard to have something like your father showing you pornography over the course of years, frequently, and then having a rather anti-climactic ending of just leaving when it would happen, and him leaving it at that, aside from laughing at me and such things. There was no "i'mma sit you down here and force you to watch this like that scene in a clockwork orange, because you won't sit here on your own" lol. There was no extreme, life shaking, reality shaking, mind bending ending. It ramped in. It fizzled out. I shoved it deep into the memory banks. It messed with me, but not in a way that was glaringly obvious, like my adult trauma. With the adult trauma I get to go "THAT right there caused this shit" but with my childhood being-shown-porn stuff, it's a much trickier thing to connect the dots on.

There's a patch in my life I refer to as my slut phase. I'm okay with the word slut for myself, because I rationalize that I'm making some kind of feminist reclamation of the word, which is intellectualizing BS.
The real reason is that I call it my slut phase as a bit of a joke so I don't have to deal with the rest.

For me, a huge element of this is "I wish I never had sex"
That is part of what drives my feelings that I was/am a slut. I also compare myself with my sister and my friends, so on and so forth, and it makes me feel like a slut. Even my abuser called me a slut, over my past sexual activity, when I told him about it. He called me a slut many, many times after. Degenerate slut.

I just wish I could take it all back and start over again.

Might have more to say later.