I don't know why but talking about this almost causes me more shame then the "real" stuff that was going on. Anyways it won't go away so maybe I need to sort it out finally. Here goes........


MTMTMTMTMTMTMTMTMTMTMT





I was being abused most nights and wkends by someone from the age of 6-12. This person was a teenager and I badly wanted him to be my friend. My adoptive parents were very emotionally distant and I wanted to be loved.

I was never dragged into what happened between me and "him" infact sometimes I looked forward to it. I got excited at the thought of being special.

The only times I remember feeling really bad about what was happening was when "he" would do "dirty" things. Would put things inside me that were dirty. I didnt like that but just didn't protest against it at all.

When I was at sch during play times I always wanted to play a game where I was kidnapped and tied up and stripped naked and the kidnappers would want to "do" things to me. I got excited over playing this game. I would be afraid that my playmates would see that I was enjoying it to much.

It was important in my mind that it always looked as if I was against what was happening to me, but infact I wanted it.

I still, some 30plus yrs later feel shame and confusion over this game. I spend more time feeling shame over that than the "real" stuff that was going on outside of sch.

Does this make sense to anyone??

[Evangelista]

{{{{{Mouse}}}}}}

I know an abused child will use coping mechanisms which adults would find hard to understand, does it make the child any less deserving of the compassionate attunement to the cry, not in my book...be gentle with yourself Mouse..the burden of shame is not yours to carry, someone placed that burden upon you..your working hard to come to terms with the abuse..I hope the best for you Mouse..



Evangelista

[mrb020377]

mouse_
it makes sense... you are not alone!

pm me if you need to talk

[katheryn]

(((((((((((((mouse)))))))))))
i understand what you are saying

[froggie2]

(((((mouse)))))) Its not your fault. When we are denied love and affectin of course we try to get it somewhere else. Even when someone takes advantage of us. Years ago I saw somethng that said what our needs are as human beings. Love is one of them. Its mental cruelty to deny that.I know all about that. Hang in there.

[Maven]

You're not the only one with this fantasy. They're known as "force fantasies." I think it's often (but not necessarily always) victims of sexual abuse who have this fantasy.

Thanks for the replys. I guess this needs to be looked at more closely in T as Its going round and round in my mind at the moment and won't be put away!.

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.....

[Evangelista]

! Very good post !....Mouse...

I hope it helps to understand...I figure shame..in what ever form it takes..can transform once it is shared, and shown the light of reason in a compassionate way..you cant heal shame with shame..

It's like feeding baby chicks spoon fulls of dirt just because you see them pecking at the ground..

I know as a Survivor of childhood sexual abuse, I have had to learn that in my Therapy..but it is so very hard to do..I keep feeling a need to feed the most vulnerable parts of me spoonfulls of shame in the form of self judgemental thinking....not understanding in the end I am suffocating myself in the process.....

Thank you for sharing Mouse..

[AlteredState01]

</font><blockquote><div id="quote"><font class="small">Quote:</font>
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".


</div></font></blockquote><font class="post">

A large quote, yes, sorry about that, but very insigtful.

I can relate.

[biiv]

feic feic feic feic feic feic feic feic!!!!!!!!!!!
wish i could read your whole post mouse without spacing out. wish i could think about and talk about it. stuffing stuffing stuffing stuffing.
denial.
nope. not denial. nothing to deny.