Note: This is not a threat, read on. 🙂 Warnings for the usual: suicide, r*pe, etc….
My doctor won’t let me go on birth control pills because she’s afraid the hormonal fluctuations will cause me to commit hari kari. Or however you spell that.
The Dude would chase me around until he caught me, or trap me, and he really hurt me…but. But then he’d keep holding me down and work at it until my body reacted. I went into shock for weeks, just dead lying there, if I wasn’t fighting him, while it went: Fear, Panic, Pain, Helplessness, Zoning Out, Less Pain, Comfort.
He would pet my head and tell me how much he wanted it to be good for me. He would hold me after until I stopped the uncontrollable shaking. He only forced me when I fought back. So I stopped fighting. And when I was at home, I saw blood everywhere, and your sense of time changes and I was caught in an eternal NOW of reliving it. So I went to him. For some reason (I have since learned why.) being with him helped kill the panic. Talk about cutting off your nose to spite your face. But I would go over and he would hold me, and when I tried to leave, he wouldn’t let me go. Until. And he told me that was what I came over for, and I said no, and he said, well, what did you expect?
Well, what did I expect? The only answer I ever had for him was not this.
Honestly, I just wanted IT to go away, but after putting my foot on his ribs and pulling, and leaning off the bed to get away, and pleading that I had to go to the bathroom…. all of which he didn’t even open his eyes for… I stopped, stuck, and thought, well, what DID I expect? It’s already happened, it can’t cause any more damage. Sigh. And I sat back down, his hand still clenched on my wrist, his eyes still closed.
He liked to hurt me, I guess me fighting back was more erotic than me lying there dead. And eventually I stopped fighting, and once the shock wore off (I don’t really think it did for years, but enough that I could move my body by volition) he encouraged me. There was one place, I think where the worst tearing was, and it felt so much better when he went THAT way. It made the pain stop. I would stop fighting. He would say, see? You like that.
I guess……yeah? It made the pain stop. It felt better. Does that mean I like it, if I like it? How do I untangle the fact that the reason it feels better is the reason it was hurt in the first place? Where does the line of responsibility (guilt) lie?
And as I recover enough to not always want to kill myself after sex, I am blocking off the pain. I can’t stop myself from the pain or the self-injury or the suicidal thoughts. It’s like the wish to kill myself that I had in the middle of it has stayed imprinted even though he himself is no longer a part of my life. But everyone else is. The ones who told me I wasn’t raped, I was seduced; that if I really didn’t want it, I would have known better and he wouldn’t have been able to take advantage of me; the ones that told me that if I really wanted to, I could leave; the ones who told me that I didn’t know what it was like to want to be loved, obviously, and that I wasn’t a real woman, and that I was too self-righteous, being stuck in my no-sex-before marriage mindset, because OBVIOUSLY this thing I’ve been taught my whole life is only… an abstract; the ones who told me I should have had more sex if I wanted children in my life, that they didn’t want to spend time on the phone with me, because I was just being negative, and if I wanted to do something there was always the shelter.
If you haven’t been through it, that probably sounds reasonable. If you’ve been through it, you can see how ridiculous it is.
So I want to kill myself. I hate my life. I hate the fact that I’m nearly 40 and I look around and I look inside and i look back, and this sucks. And I feel so confused and helpless and full of despair and I have worked it out so I get up every day and try to work through my life and whatever the heck it brings. I know that there have been some good times since then, and maybe there will be more. I trust that I will be better someday and someday, impossible to imagine now, I will be better. Because at the counseling center there have been women who went through this and I believe them. Because I realize that when these feelings are the worst, is when I am working through some part of the sorrow. Some impossible cognitive dissonance. So. I have an extensive anti-suicide plan. And recognizing that feeling, sitting on the side of my brain sticking its foot in the middle of my workings, is the first step. I have 24-hr numbers to call if I get too bad, to help me through. I have the local walk-in center (regularly scheduled sessions tend to push me into panic attacks for days before in anticipation, and my counselor quit because he had cancer, and there’s a year waiting list to get another, and…) where I can go and talk it through when the noise in my head gets too much. And I have a close friend or two that I can send up smoke signals to (sometimes the safety of acknowledgement helps a lot, after FIVE FRIKKIN YEARS of being told I was just making to big a deal of it [that by the local church’s Celebrate Recovery leader]). . . I NEED to see someone every day, I need to eat (I’ve spent years not wanting to eat anything, and I tend to bribe myself to eat regularly), I go walk the dog, I keep a regular schedule, so I can keep walking when my steps are unsteady.
Please, god, i don’t believe, i can’t believe after this, but please please please let me find a better incarnation after this. amen.
I can’t stop being a sexual being, and my mind and body are constantly warring between wanting to go back, to not think, to surrender, to have the safety of closing my windows and doors, and push through the pain until I start taking control………………
and wanting to just MAKE IT STOP.
I feel like my whole life has been raped. Not just my body. My life.
Your Celebrate Recovery leader doesn’t know what they are talking about. It’s all a big deal Aubrey. All of it. Has that leader been raped? People who say those kind of things have nothing to offer you and being told that over and over again is abusive.
What you said here: “I feel like my whole life has been raped. Not just my body. My life.”
At a visceral level, I understand this. Though not “raped” as you were, my spiritual abuse left me with the feeling of my whole life being raped. Though it was back in the early ’90’s, I still live with affects of it in many ways. Mostly in the inner sanctum of my mind/body connections.
I so relate to the “noise in my head” scenerio and also to just wanting it to stop.
As you may have noticed, I’ve closed my ACS blog but I’ve moved the contents to a new URL. I’m not sure what the future of blogging holds for me but I noticed while checking in to my old ACS blog that someone had clicked there from here, and that’s how I came to your blog today.
You’ve been through so much. I hope you can find a new counsellor. It really does help to talk and if it helps, keep writing.
I remember telling my psychiatrist that I thought I hated myself. He didn’t think so. He thought it probably felt that way but it was more likely that I hated what happened to me and what it did to me, than actually self-hatred. It took me a long time to start to care about myself. I still struggle but every day I too look for a new incarnation. A way of being alive and coping with internal sadness.
I hope this comment hasn’t triggered you in any way. Just want you to know I care.
… Zoe ~
Oh, how awesome. I haven’t posted for such a long time, and I clicked on your link just today too. I am glad to hear from you.
I saw your last post said you’d moved.
The Celebrate Recovery counselor had actually been through a lot herself, and her comment was one reason I thought god meant for me to be with him…. I find that people who have been through this or that, often are so strong on the taking-charge angle that there is no mercy. I find that as I wear off the edges, so to speak, I forget the feeling of being a victim. Which is kind of the point, I guess, to create a new persona….but…. I find myself totally not understanding the old me. I know I had reasons, but my mind is so focused on creating a new, workable worldview, and blocking the panic attacks that the memories cause, that….. I am turning into something, and hope it’s something good.
Thank you for writing. It means a lot to me. And funny again, because you mention incarnations. I’ve often said that every time my life undergoes a fundamental change, I feel like I’m in a new incarnation. 🙂
Thanks again. I hope to see you around the netz. 🙂
Me