TRIGGER TRIGGER TRIGGER!!!!

ABUSE. SEXUAL CONTENT.


And here I come slowly to a realization about what Stockholm syndrome really means. In an adult, who has been abused as a child. This is another stage in my long struggle that encompasses re-living the past. Not a willing one, necessarily, but one that comes with violent flashbacks, that I have no control over. What I dealt with first were flashbacks of pain, of abuse, of confusion, or terror, of me as a child, hiding or screaming under the bed, until I ran away out of my mind.
What is haunting me in the past several days, or weeks – I haven’t really seen it in time, I missed its clues, as I often do with things that I do not want to face, do not want to go through – is the pleasure part or the love or affection part.
I knew it may happen that I encounter it on my way through facing the trauma. I have conveniently forgotten how it goes, even if I have been there before.

The memory of it was triggered in me. It started with confusion and arousal. With wanting the touch, but feeling embarrassed about it. Soon the urge becomes stronger, and some kind of relief is what I look for. There is a vague sex talk, with someone I barely know, all wrapped up in jokes, so no line is crossed there. But in my mind, these few lines already force me to masturbate. More and more. I start looking porn. I start thinking about masturbation more and more often. And still I do not recognize where it comes from, and how familiar it is.
When I start feeling so turned on that I have to act out – which should not be anything perverse or bad in itself, and my husband could not be happier about my suddenly awoken sexual drive – I override the sense of a blockage that I feel in my own home, and do pleasurable things that we rarely do. But I do not really feel as myself. Or do I feel as myself more?
We have sex, but following my very strict rules and desires, me commanding every move, without penetration. With clothes on. And still I cannot recognize what it is all about.
And then, the next day, I can remember my childhood. His hands, his shirt, his scent. I can remember only split seconds of it, but I clearly remember my addiction to sexual contact, my addiction to being held. If it was abuse, how could I have become addicted to it?
Please understand that these thoughts are melting my brain. I can feel dissociation coming back, hovering like a terrifying storm cloud over me. I can feel how easily I can just slip back into deep depersonalization, and completely dissociate from myself and any form of identity/ies that I have.
And yet the only thing that I currently can see is this urge, as it is taking everything in, as if nothing else exists. This must be how a sexual addiction feels. And I should know, as I had a sexual compulsion when I was a child. An abused and hypersexualized child, who secretly looked at pornography, conveniently placed in the corner of the kitchen, with the stack of old paper. Women’s breasts, intimate parts, I was fascinated with it all. It was more than trying to understand what that sensation is. It was a porn addiction in a little child.
It is perhaps the first obsession that I had.
I know what comes after this, as well. I may or may not act further upon my urges. In any case, I will end up feeling terrible shame about it.
I just hope that there is something else I can do this time.
If only I could go through it recognizing what has been done to me.
If I could re-connect with my natural urges, and not a compulsion.
If I could take my healthy sexuality that I was supposed to have as a human being out of that box of abuse, that made everything so difficult to me.
If I could deal with the pain that is constantly reminding me of the abuse, punishing me for feeling pleasurable feelings while not in control, for being subdued to what was not my fault and my doing.
I wonder sometimes how can I sustain it. How I am still alive. It is an anomaly. How can I be alive? With this pain?
There are moments these days when I am at the edge of the blade, metaphorically. I am not a threat to my life, it is my mind that is in danger.