A friend emailed me the following when I brought up the subject I bought up in this post....

some thoughts and a little analysis of--perhaps anyway--behavioral constructs involving sexual expressions that would be deemed largely non-normative.

My sense of things is that there seems to be little empirical knowledge of how trauma and subsequent variant sexual expressions are "mind melded", if you will. Let me run by you what seems to me to be reasonable thinking on this.

Genetically we are, mostly, predisposed to develop healthily with natural, positive reactions to the touch and caregiving of our parents or other nurturing providers. There is speculation that psychopathy(essentially the absence of conscience, empathy, and remorse) may also be genetic and be a factor in the failure to bond to affection and love. But that is another post.

A child has, I suspect, a programmed, biological expectation of healthy,loving touching. Sexual molestation is not, of course, a healthy paradigm. It seeks not to give but to narcissistically take, disempower, and devalue....and to take in ways that cannot be stopped by its victim(s).

In my opinion, molestation somehow triggers an instinct in a child. Instinct being an uneasy, queasy, alarming feeling that is autonomic and brought to bear without any conscious summoning. This occurs even if the child is too young to intellectually understand what is happening.

There is this instinctive reaction somewhere within, maybe deep inside that what is happening/has happened is not "right". That we are being victimized. Used. Manipulated and devalued as a person. Harmed and threatened. That this touching carries with it a sense of foreboding that all is not well. Such terrorizing foreboding may not be able to be expressed....but it is there.

I believe that such sexual foreboding tends to reappear somewhere down the road--particularly with female victims(or transgendered males)--as sexual masochism.

How does this come about?

Any living creature will respond on a physical level to being touched. That touch, if not painful, is often autonomically "welcomed" even if, strangely, it is inappropriate or molesting in nature. It offers pleasure, summons it, and creates something even more important. Recognition that we exist. Now....this is NOT tied to any emotional or intellectual reasoning or reactivity. It is simply and purely a biological response.

The mental/emotional response is usually something far different, something directly at odds with the physical response to what is happening/has happened. This response, instinctive as well, carries with it things such as stress, fear, foreboding, uneasiness, worry, guilt, sense of being responsible, and so on.

We cannot physically escape. But we can, in effect, escape emotionally and mentally to an extent. We withdraw into fantasy. Into dissociation from that which is happening/has happened. And fantasy begins to "marry" trauma. (This is trauma splitting. In many such futures lie obsession-compulsion disorders often felt and expressed as things entitled to.)

Why? For safety and protection of our survival. You might well liken it to Stockholm Syndrome. Where those who have become captured--prisoners or hostages--will do anything to appease their captors in an attempt to survive. They "bond" to the wishes of their controllers. They will even defend them. Lie for them. Help them escape. There have been cases where they literally married them.

Once the mechanism of profound shock, fear, and terror has assaulted us and emotionally raped us we often cannot find the bonding switch to turn it back off even after the threat has been removed from our lives.

The molested child is, in my opinion, presenting the above devicing. What else might he/she do? What options exist when survival against someone who can literally kill you if you do not respond "appropriately for them" is at hand?

In such situations survival may well rest upon our ability to earn approval from our assailant. To please them in whatever way it takes. What happens is that we respond to traumatic touching with the mental/emotional reactivity of "feeling" excitement and pleasure. This later becomes--upon puberty if not before--sexual pleasure in being shamed, hurt, harmed, controlled, humiliated, and so on.

DSM-IV-TR refers to sexual masochism as a paraphilia....in plainer language: a sexual perversion. This then being stated as a disorder in and of itself. I would argue differently. That masochism--under this specific guise, at least--is not a mental disorder at all but rather reflective of mental/emotional overpowering stress, fear, and guilt "married"(as trauma bonding) to biological excitement through traumatic experience. That it is not, per se, a malignant thought-structuring but instead a psychiatric injury resulting from the unavoidable trauma of molestation.

That such experience was amongst others things sudden, shocking, sustained, repetitive, stalking in nature, and shaming/humiliating. We, under the ligatures of trauma deviance, will seek to please even going so far as to, in some cases, seek out the contact and initiate the molestation. Classic Stockholm syndrome presentation.

The continuance of this on into life seems to me to be referenced as PTSD. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. That the continuance is the result of early behavioral imprinting that is now running unabated and amok. A switch that seems nearly impossible to shut off since pleasure and excitement are now to be had from this. This is sometimes referred to as trauma pleasure or trauma arousal. It connects sex to fear, danger, violence, risk, and shame/humiliation.

A congruent thought processing of this is that we are "getting what we deserve"(a childhood belief that we are somehow responsible for what is happening/has happened to us. That we were/are "bad", not our molesters). Such "battery acid" leaks out in various ways....

Trauma shame: shame and humiliation become sexual exciters. We feel a strong sense, a need even to be unworthy. Expressed in ways such as self hatred, self-injury, cutting, association and submission to violence and sexual subjugation, estrangement, emotional truncation, sense of being immoral or sinful, and loss of faith in our future.

Trauma repetition: re-enactment living in an unremembered or traumatic past. Victimizing others as we were victimized. Self destructive behavior. Seeking of abusive relationships with sadistic partners to fuel our masochism, to re-enact what we always done to "survive" and "be okay". Repeating painful relationships.

Trauma abstinence/deprivation (sometimes as anorexia/bulimia nervosa): poverty obsession, commitment to going without, being devalued, being harmed. Driven by fear or terror and maintained by sexual masochism.

Trauma blocking: excessive drinking, taking depressants, compulsive sleeping, eating, binging, working, gambling, or exercise. Drug addiction. Abuse seeking.

High drama becomes a way to manage anxiety. Fear intensifies all human attachments. Control makes the fear. The fear deepens the bond. With abuse comes loyalty to the abuser. With loyalty comes secrecy and denial.
[Credit in great part to Patrick J. Carnes for his dissertations on trauma bonding...also, and perhaps more succinctly, referred to as trauma betrayal]

Suffering and submissiveness has become both our opiate and our Bible.

Just as way back when. We needed them to survive physically back then. And perhaps it can be said that we need them now mentally and emotionally to "feel alive.......still". To be "a good boy now", a "good little girl now".

How might we have become differently? ght up here. It explains alot.....