The Friday Confessional : Baby Weight

TRIGGER WARNING : This post contains material that may be a potential trigger for some.  It’s contents include talk of eating disorders and self-injury.  If you are sensitive to this material, please use your discretion before reading.

I am by no means a thin woman.  As a matter of fact, according to my BMI, I am actually slightly in the overweight range.  It’s not really unusual for a person who lives in the good ol’ US-of-A.  Obesity is considered an epidemic in this region of the world.

I have bad body image.  This started as a very young child when the other kids would pick on me for being overweight.  At that point, it wasn’t my fault.  I wasn’t responsible for my diet, and my family had terrible eating habits.  In fact, as I started to notice while my parents were watching my child, they encouraged recreational eating for lack of other engaging activities.  As a result, I ended up a fat, miserable kid.

I remember I stopped eating my lunch at one point.  A lunch aid came over and asked what was wrong.  I recall telling her, “I’m on a diet.”  She looked shocked and appalled.  Now that I’m an adult, it’s completely understandable.  I was eight, and I was confessing that I was unhappy because of my weight.  To her credit, she attempted to explain to me that I had a lot of years to grow into the weight, and it was unhealthy to deprive myself of food.

Essentially, she was trying to talk me out of developing an eating disorder.  Unfortunately, talk is too cheap when you’re eight.

Eventually, people close to me stopped mentioning my weight.  And I continued to grow.  By the time I was in the fifth grade, I was obese.  I was eleven, 4’8”, and weighed approximately what a fourteen year-old 5’1” teenager should have weight in a healthy weight range.  My clothes continued to shrink rapidly, and the only excuse my mother could come up with was that I was just “having a growth spurt”.

It wasn’t lost on my peers or teachers, though.  While I had the brains, I didn’t have the body.  And the outside was all that mattered.  Summer break came, and I was about to enter middle school.  It was at that time that I decided that I would shed my “baby weight”, as people were so eager to call it, and become a slender woman.

That was the summer where it all began.

The real secret is something I’ve hinted at throughout the last year, but could never bring myself to actually come out and say.  Even now, I find myself typing and retyping the sentence that will start to change everything.  It will change how people think of me, and how people treat me.  It will have people worry and watch me like a hawk.  And those are all things that I’ve tried to avoid over the years.

I have undiagnosed disordered eating.

As a child, it developed from recreational eating into comfort eating.  I would gorge myself far beyond bursting, to the point of where it felt like the contents of my stomach were backing up into my throat.  The act of eating was comforting and satisfying.  The sensation of fullness seemed to fill this hole inside of me.  It took away the emptiness that I had tried so hard to fill with accomplishment.  Even for a moment, I was full.  I was whole.

That led to another problem.  Childhood obesity.  And the lack of friends I had resulting from my obesity and the intimidation of my perfectionism and accomplishment created an even bigger hole.  What started out as a small snag in the woven fabric of my life started to unravel into a gaping hole, threatening to tear seam to seam.  Comfort eating turned into binge eating and created a cycle that continually fed into itself.

The summer before middle school, I decided to start dieting.  How absurd – an eleven year old on a diet.  I restricted my food intake to half of what I was eating.  I refused to eat between meals.  I started both biking and running once a day for at least an hour.  When my clothes started to become loose, it only served to encourage all of these behaviors.

I was a child on a mission.  I started only eating half of what I was eating, leaving me eating meals off of saucers.  I added running stairs onto my exercise regimen.  I would spend a half an hour each day running the basement stairs, as to not bother my parents.  My clothes became so loose that I became reduced to wearing my 90lb mother’s clothes.

I had done it.  In fact, I had done so well that most of my peers didn’t recognize me anymore.  Many people started referring to me as “the new girl”, as I didn’t have any friends to correct them.  And much to my surprise, those shallow little girls I had come to despise welcomed me to their clicks with open arms.  I was no longer intimidating or disgusting.

Throughout the years, my weight bounced up and down.  I would binge and then go on an exercise craze.  In my mid-teens, I discovered those ephedra pills that could be found at any gas station.  Friends and I would take handfuls of them and stay up, bouncing off of the walls, for 72 hours at a time.  I remember lying in bed just vibrating, desperately mentally exhausted, but completely wired.

My relationship with my first love, my high school sweetheart, started going south around the time that I was seventeen.  And the binging started once again.  I hated myself for it, and I watched myself grow out of my clothes once again.  I knew he had to have found me repulsive, and I knew he was eyeing other women.  But, it only served to make it worse.

I will never forget this.  I had my eighteenth birthday at my boyfriend’s place.  I was surrounded by many of my friends, and we ordered several pizzas that I paid for.  I watched all of the girls daintily eat one or two slices of pizza, when I realized that I had gorged myself on four.  I looked at their slender bodies with envy.  What a disgusting pig I am!  I thought.  No wonder I’m so fat!

I went to the bathroom and locked the door.  I leaned over and stared into the bowl.  I was about to do something that we all had accused and ridiculed thin cheerleaders for.  It was this, or being doomed to a life of obesity and loneliness.  I extended my index finger and pressed down on the back of my tongue.

The vomit came pouring out like a fountain into the bowl.  The taste was awful, like orange juice mixed with something foul.  But, the sensation was incredible.  I could feel the load lightening, and my stomach shrinking.  I did it again, this time making myself gag harder, almost to the point where I made an audible noise.  It felt like all of the awful feelings were just pouring out from inside of me.  It was almost like cutting, but without any noticeable tell-tale scars.

I purged until there was nothing left but stomach acid.  I sat against the door, breathing heavily and relishing in the hollow feeling in my belly.  There was something so beautiful about feeling that emptiness.  It ached, along with my raw throat, and the bitter aftertaste of vomit in my mouth.

This doesn’t happen regularly.  It only happens when I have a severely awful body image.  My clothes start to get tight, and automatically, my stomach starts to churn, as if it knows what’s about to come.  If I’ve eaten just before a fight with someone, I find myself getting queasy and running for a bathroom.  If I am rejected, I automatically assume it’s because I’m not attractive.  I find myself hell bent on getting back a body I once had.

But even worse is when I do it as a form of self-injury and control.  I binge, feeling the sensation of my belly swelling with all of the emotion I can’t experience.  The contents rise into my throat, without a place left to go.  I excuse myself and wrap myself in an awful embrace with that cold, unforgiving porcelain.  For a moment, just a brief shining moment, I stare into the bowl, trying to talk myself out of it.  There’s no other way.  I lean in, and the deed is done.

And each time, the whooshing of the flush brings shame to my already teary eyes.  I stare at the bloodshot eyes, ringed with raccoon eyes.  My face is red and looks exhausted.  All I can do is take to cleaning up the mess I created.

Ethereal Shadows

Anxiety runs rampantly, off of it’s leash, and unchecked.  It envelops me, trapping me in this fully contained, semi-translucent bubble.  The oxygen runs thin and the overabundance of carbon dioxide fogs my mind.  I am suffocating and immobilized, encased in thick, unyielding plastic.  I can see the world through clouded lenses all around me, but I am unable to touch it, to reach it.

The thoughts race faster than the stock cars in my mind, polluting my air within the dome.  “What if…?”  “How can I possibly…?”  “What can’t I…?”  My confidence dissolves in the thick, poisonous soup it creates.  I begin to disappear, becoming thinner within the wash.

And eventually, the cars come to a grinding halt, gears moaning and crunching at the sudden termination of everything and anything.  For a moment, the entire world, the whole existence goes blank, as plain as a clean sheet of paper.  Then, suddenly, I am propelled into pitch darkness, fumbling around for the scattered remnants that are not my own cognition.

In this blackness, there is a certain emptiness abound.  A void of mind and feeling transforms me into an ethereal creature containing the absence of any trace of matter.  I drift aimlessly upon streams of thin air, shivering as currents pass clean through me.

My soul liquifies and pours like a thick, black ribbon into a clear mason jar.  Now, it is preserved like blackberry jam, shifting and wiggling with its gelatinous quality.  My hands caress the glass longingly, for it has become as unreal as I have become.  I may look upon it, however, I may not touch.  It is now a forbidden fruit that will spoil long before I am prepared to reclaim it as my own.

Abysmal sheets of icy rain obscure my vision now.  A thick fog rolls in as dense, leaf bare woods encompass me.  Severed from me, my own emotions are carried back in with the fog, high above my head as it rolls on.  I reach, stretching my entire being high in the air above my head, attempting to get just a little bit closer toward them.  But they are not my own.

Are they?

Indistinguishable.  Everything becomes questionable in this parareality.  Wispy words come out in airless breaths within this vacuum of time and space.  Questions come rolling into reality with no discernable answer.  “Where am I?”  “Who am I?”  “What am I?”  All concepts float away, vibrating with each anxious blink.

Each push of the fog shoves me flat on my back against a frozen, unforgiving, unyielding earth.  Each successive tumble knocks even more wind from my lungs.  I squeeze my eyes shut and resign myself to this fate.  Paralyzed, I am defeated against this awesome force.

BPD and Me

A post by Angel, concerning Avoidant Personality Disorder, had me thinking again about the possibility of me having Borderline Personality Disorder.  This is a suspicion that has plagued me throughout the course of my treatment within the last year or so.  Instead of going straight to the Borderline Screenings, I went to a personality disorder screening to see the possibilities of what I may be dealing with.

Disorder	Rating
Paranoid Personality Disorder:	High
Schizoid Personality Disorder:	Low
Schizotypal Personality Disorder:	Moderate
Antisocial Personality Disorder:	Low
Borderline Personality Disorder:	Very High
Histrionic Personality Disorder:	High
Narcissistic Personality Disorder:	High
Avoidant Personality Disorder:	High
Dependent Personality Disorder:	High
Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder:	High
— Take the Personality Disorder Test — — Personality Disorder Info —

I really never imagined that I would be symptomatic of multiple disorders in Axis II.  Since BPD still remained the highest, I decided to take a specific screening.

Results of Your
Borderline Personality Test

You scored a total of 43.
Severe Borderline Personality Disorder Likely
You answered this self-report test in a way that’s consistent with people who have been diagnosed with severe Borderline Personality Disorder. This suggests that these concerns may be an issue for you as well, and something that you should seek out further assistance with this issue from a trained mental health professional immediately. Borderline Personality Disorder is characterized by a pattern of unstable and intense relationships, as well as frantic efforts to avoid abandonment — even if it’s not real.

I thought about the entire year and the instability of my own marriage – the most solid thing I can think of.  I had all of these paranoid delusions that my husband was cheating on me, although in the back of my mind, I knew it was not a possibility.  I sabotaged myself at work with the line of thinking that everyone was against me.  I started severing ties with coworkers and hiding in my classroom.  I had always thought that was characteristic of bipolar psychosis, but now, I’m not so sure.

Using the same site that Angel used, I discovered something kind of shocking:

You may be at risk for developing BPD if:

• you have a family member who has BPD
• you felt emotionally unstable or emotionally vulnerable as a child
• people in your household were impulsive when you were a child
• you were emotionally abused as a child

And all of those were true.  My mother does not have a confirmed case of Borderline Personality Disorder, but it seems she is symptomatic.  When she was a very young child, she was put into foster care.  She has absolutely no memory of this, and none of her family members will detail what happened.  My mother married her first husband on a whim, because his draft number came up to go to Vietnam.  She had an extremely turbulent relationships with him, and he mostly left her alone all of the time.  That’s how she met and fell in love with my father.

Their marriage isn’t much better.  In private, she has gone on and on about my father’s faults.  They have had a rocky relationships, where I recall them throwing around the word “divorce” probably far more often than they should have.  She binge drinks and sometimes takes too much medication.  Medication that isn’t even hers to begin with.  She is as impulsive as she can be in her restrictive environment and goes through so much emotional turbulence.  But, she will never leave my father, no matter what.

I was an emotionally unstable child, and I wasn’t the one to immediately notice.  My preschool teacher had mentioned to my mother that I needed to “toughen up”.  That one little phrase was enough to spark years of tough love and general emotional abuse and neglect.  It gave them a free pass to call it “good parenting”.  As a result, I developed this need for achievement as a means of recognition.  I was designed to people please.  Regardless, another comment came from a teacher stating, “Doesn’t take constructive criticism”.  And the idea that criticism was encouraged compounded what I was already going through.

Impulsiveness!  My father used to just go drive off in his car without telling my mother where he was going.  He’d be gone for hours, and she’d be a wreck.  One time, he went through the house waving a gun, terrorizing us with suicidal gestures.  Honestly, I can never get that scene out of my head as hard as I could ever try.  My parents have both run their credit into the dirt over impulsive shopping sprees.

Now, here’s where things get tricky.  Friends and family in the past have suggested that I may be suffering from Borderline Personality Disorder.  An ex used those weaknesses against me.  So the presentation is convoluted because my actions are purposefully deceiving.

frantic efforts to avoid real or perceived abandonment

I self-sabotage in this area.  When I perceive abandonment, I start to shut that person out of my life.  I have this funny idealization that person will perceive my own emotional abandonment and come running back.  It’s what my parents and my ex did to me, and I seemed to have picked it up.

I’ll also become more sexual and start having defensive sex or performing certain sexual acts to peak someone’s interest and entice them into staying with me.

I also have this habit of changing everything about myself to appease my partner.  This is an effort to avoid abandonment.  And it’s one that’s been preyed on before.

pattern of unstable and intense interpersonal relationships, characterized by alternating between idealization and devaluation (“love-hate” relationships)

People that are close to me are also subjected to this regularly.  Honestly, this is a major reason why I don’t let people get too close to me.  At first, I idealize someone and pick out the best of their characteristics.  Then, I start to idealize how the relationship with them will go.  Soon, I will become disillusioned at the first sign of trouble.  And it is at that point that I begin to demonize someone.  Everything about them is bad, and I have ever right to be suspicious at their deceptive behavior.  Except, it wasn’t deceptive.  I perceived them to be something that they weren’t and assigned them to the task of living up to my unrealistic expectations.

extreme, persistently unstable self-image and sense of self

I’d like to paraphrase the way I perceive myself.  I have lived a dozen lives, and each time, with every death, I’ve risen like the phoenix out of the ashes.  In my life, I have been a dozen different people and will be dozens more, each with their own birth, life, and death, only to start once more.

I take one aspect of my life and characterize myself through it.  I’ve been a baker, a mother, a wild child, a caretaker, a housewife, a teacher, a crazy woman, a bipolar woman, etc.  And for some reason, I can’t seem to integrate all of those periods of my life into the same entity.  They are just all separate from one another, as if I were living so many different characters in the same skin.

impulsive behavior in at least two areas (such as spending, sex, substance abuse, reckless driving, binge eating)

It is well known that I have a substance abuse problem with alcohol. But, here are a few facts that are the most difficult things for me to admit. I am guilty of day drinking every now and again. It is never when I’m alone with my child, for the record.  I am also guilty of taking too many benzodiazepines to escape reality from time to time.  Yes, I abuse my medication every now and again.  But, it’s not a dependence kind of thing.  I don’t find that it’s necessary, until I get into a frenzy of hysteria that produces so much distress that it’s unbearable.  The drugs quiet my mind.

And the other one is very difficult to admit as well, and I’m not sure if I can spell it out in detail.  I have a difficult relationship with food, dieting, and exercise.  I am guilty of binge eating.  I am also guilty of purging if I am distressed.  Especially if it’s about my weight.

And lastly, I recently made a confession of my sexual exploits in my youth in Promiscuously Yours, in the series The Friday Confessional.  I had multiple reasons for cheating on my ex, which is something I wouldn’t normally do.  I have a better moral compass than that.  Sometimes, I was so distressed that I just wanted to feel some kind of love.  Sometimes, I was trying to prove to myself that I was something special.  And other times, I did it out of spite.  Any which way you look at it, I did it in highly emotional moments.  And I always regretted it later.

recurrent suicidal behavior, gestures, or threats, or recurring acts of self-mutilation (such as cutting or burning oneself)

My cutting has been well documented in the past.  Unless I make a mindful effort not to self-harm, I will engage in the behavior.  I’ve written posts about the whys and wherefores in Why Self-Injurious Behavior?.  It’s complicated.

unstable mood caused by brief but intense episodes of depression, irritability, or anxiety

The mood episodes aren’t brief, so it leads me to believe that I may have a co-morbid diagnosis instead of a misdiagnosis.  However, I’ve always said this, and people have disagreed with me.  The only two constants for me and my disorder are reactivity and irritability.  I was under the impression that everyone with bipolar disorder is reactive and generally irritable most of the time.  Apparently, I was wrong.

I always have this underlying anxiety.  It’s made worse by social interaction, certain phobias I’ve developed, and worst of all, having to make decisions on my own.  It’s difficult for me to take care of my personal affairs, because I am always waiting on another person’s approval.  I get anxious when I make a decision by myself, because I often second guess myself.  I am constantly seeking reassurance about my decisions and guidance from others.

chronic feelings of emptiness

This one is complicated.  I don’t often feel empty.  I often feel lonely or distant.  Sometimes, I feel invisible, rejected, or ignored.  Most of the time, I actually feel too full.  I’m too full of emotion, noise, and stimuli.  I often have several voices and personas that follow me and make commentary on my life.  It’s too much.  But when medicine gets rid of them, though I am relieved by the lack of conflict, I am lonelier.  It feels like a piece of me is absent.

inappropriate and intense anger, or difficulty controlling anger displayed through temper outbursts, physical fights, and/or sarcasm

I recently wrote a post called, “I Want My Yellow Dress” using the analogy of a little girl in a movie in the most epic temper tantrum ever known to describe my own inner child.  My anger is often out of proportion for a given situation.  I have a bad temper, and I know it.  It’s something I’ve tried to deny for a long time.

In Love the Way You Lie, I described a mutually abusive relationship.  It was the only time in my life I have ever lashed out physically, but the point is that I did.  Whether a person could classify that as self-defense is questionable.  There were times I did it because I wanted to inflict pain on him.  I felt like he needed to know my own pain.

stress-related paranoia that passes fairly quickly and/or severe dissociative symptoms— feeling disconnected from one’s self, as if one is an observer of one’s own actions

I’ve written scores of blog posts and theories about this.  I am prone to paranoia, and I experience it rather frequently.  With my recent medication change, I can say that I usually only go through it once weekly.  Prior to the medication change, it was much more frequent than that.

The dissociative symptoms have been documented in Conscious, Subconscious, and Extraconscious, where I described a theory of multiple personas rather than full blown personalities residing in a place between the conscious and subconscious mind.  It’s complicated to get into, but it’s worth a read honestly.  It would give you a better idea of what I’m talking about in terms of dissociative symptoms.

When I’m doing something out of character, I often feel like I’m not the one who is doing it.  I feel like I’m trapped inside myself, or even completely outside of my own body, as a helpless observer.  When everything is said and done, sometimes I don’t quite remember the details of what happened.

It’s something I’m going to have to talk to my doctor about, because as I get older, it seems to get worse, rather than better.  Sure, I am not self-injuring in the sense that I’m not cutting.  But, I am still engaging in impulsive behaviors, and I can’t tolerate distress or disappointment.  My anger is out of control most of the time.  And that’s not when I feel too doped up to do anything.  Sometimes, I have symptoms regardless of the medication.  When I relapse, it’s usually very bad, and feels like it’s worse than the one prior.  I don’t just have a blip of an episode, but a full blown, complicated one.

Vitamin L : Medication Adventures

Lamictal.  The one drug that I can say that we’ve all been on at one point or another in our adventures with medication.

Pardon me, my aphasia is showing with a little dash of emotional flattening.

I’m having difficultly remembering how to spell things.  You wouldn’t know it, because there is a such thing as spell check just for this purpose (but not solely).  My emotions are at such a level that I don’t actually feel.  It’s closer to a favorite pair of jeans where the dye has just completely washed out.  The jeans still look good, but they are faded and muted.  That’s me.  Faded and muted.

I can’t write intelligently like I did before.  Everything just comes pouring out like word vomit, because I can’t hang on to a thought for longer than a moment.  It’s a miracle that I can put anything coherent together.

The landscape of my technicolor world washed away into an old movie reel.  It’s so surreal.  Once, I was the flowing turquoise waters of the seas, ever changing, always in motion.  Now, I am the cracked earth, immobile and silent.  And ever so slowly, I am drying up and eroding, existing without life rooted in me.  Only the empty air whistles in my mind, catching a faint tune here and there, only to carry it away.

Moments come in flashes.  I am engrossed and deeply engaged for just a few seconds before I am distracted by something nonsensical.

Stop.  Sip of coffee.  What was I doing again?  I reread my last passage, and I am stumped, because it seems futile to even continue.  What is the point I am trying to convey with such vague and poorly worded imagery?

That was my world for the last month, prior to the last couple of weeks.  That is my life today, a translucent figure shrouded by shadows, discontent with such a shackled self.

That was not my life over the past couple of days.  That is how I narrowed down what medicine was doing this to me.  I was starting to run out of Lamictal, my Vitamin L as it’s commonly called in the mental health community (not to be confused with the Vitamin L of Lithium).  I lowered my dose from 300 mg to 200 mg in order to make it through successfully.

Except, there was no success to be had.  I went straight back into the same mixed episode I’ve been a slave to for more than nine months.  It was almost as bad as before, sans the psychosis.  I referred to it as Energetically Sad.  The story of my life.  I went into several crying fits a day, panicked and shouting the same phrase again and again,

“I can’t do this!!!  I can’t do this!!!”

Not again.  Not again.  Not again.

I can’t do this again.

Ultimately, I grabbed my precious medicine and dosed. The distress was immeasurable. I needed relief from that hell, the one I had endured for far too long.

But, I realized I’m not experiencing relief. I’m experiencing escape. My mind goes into a state of partial shutdown, leaving me no real clarity in any aspect. My consciousness is jagged, disjointed, and blurry, at best.

I experience slow motion waves of hollow, but shallow depression. Futility is found at every turn. The shadows seem deeper and more defined, like menacing sillouttes in the distance. I can’t shake them, but they can’t seem to touch me. They nip at my heels, and send ripples of darkness through me, infecting every molecule. And in a few moments, it passes, the poison having been purged.

At first, I thought it was just me. It felt like a new state altogether, like anxiety masked by a tight cloth, rustling, deperately seeking an outlet. It had the face of depression, leaving me dispondent and uninspired. But no true symptoms existed. Not in the desperate, deep dark places I’ve been. I stood in a parellel existence unlike anything I’ve ever known.

And then I thought, “Is this what it’s like to be better?” Dullness and mild discontent.

It’s not.

It’s the medication.

So, that leaves me with two very undesirable states. Perpetual distress or muted depression and anxiety. One zaps my everything, making me too medicated to function. The other disrupts my life with meltdowns, only making me partially functional.

One little pill is what makes the world of difference. My vitamin L.

Everything is (not) Wonderful Now

“I just don’t understand how you can smile with all those tears in your eyes and tell me everything is wonderful now.” – Everclear – Wonderful

I feel as if I have been robbed of something.  Most of the time, I’m blank with these vague floating emotions.  Sometimes, I can tap into them, but it is more akin to breaking open the Pandora’s box.  These emotions suddenly intensify and flood over me, consuming me like a tsunami.  A thief crept in the window to my mind and stole my translator for emotion to cognition.

I am inclined to speculate as to whether this is just a side effect of losing those internal monologues / dialogues.  On occasion, I catch myself attempting to recreate them, especially in the moments of severe, agonizing distress.  However, there seems to have been some kind of role reversal.  Instead of my dominant persona being confused by multiple personas in my head, those lesser personas being the ones who generated the intrusive thoughts and discord in the chambers of my mind, there remains one persona.  This persona is new.  She’s the therapist.  What do people call it?  Maybe the voice of reason?

Blank slate.  I am seemingly an empty canvas.  I never cared much for empty things, because they require filling.  There are always these second thoughts and doubts; Am I doing it right?  What if I mess up?  It highlights the cracks.  I float around in my life without immediate purpose, without the constant noise that colored my life.

One would think the riddance of such garbage background noise and a wide spectrum of ever fluctuating emotions would be a positive improvement.  There remains this empty container where thoughts and emotion would overflow out of, the tap of which being always open.  The source has dried up, and it seems an IOU is tightly fastened to the bottom without a named perpetrator.

One would suspect that another would be at peace without such distressful experiences such as psychosis.  Instead, I find that I cannot seem to associate myself with this state.  I don’t belong here.  This doesn’t feel right. Something is wrong.  It’s all wrong.

One would think that all of this freedom would be so wonderful.

Everything is not wonderful now.  The tears of mourning still come to my eyes as if I were somehow missing a piece.  Colors seem to be dimmer and the whole world feels washed out.  It is distressing in itself.  The absence of myself.  The crazy, emotional, outrageous, always interesting, talkative woman has become muted, grasping at straws for conversation and content.

Is this what it feels like to be normal?

Capricorn

My MO.

Little Shades of Grey – Domestic Sexual Assault

Trigger Warning:  This post may contain triggers that would be hazardous for readers who have a history with sexual assault and crimes of that nature.  It is strongly advised that children under the age of 13 and those that may suffer adverse affects from this post take care and use caution while reading,.  Reader discretion is advised.

In the previous post, Little Shades of Grey – Sexual Assault by a Lover, there was a representation of statistics and a personal account concerning sexual assault and rape.  Unfortunately, that incident was not a sole occurrence.  In fact, it was just the first.

Some women are still stuck in the old mentality that there are just some things you have to do to please and keep your man.  I grew up with the idea that sometimes, I would have to perform sexual acts I did not want to participate in, or I’d have to engage in intercourse when the mood and / or time was not right for me.  It was the nature of being a woman.

Dozens of grey rapes, my mind came to put a term to it, so I wouldn’t actually have to relive it. It was the attempt to free myself from the haunting memories. But, it wasn’t enough. Dozens of times I said no. Many times he reminded me that if he wasn’t “gettin’ it from you, then I’ll get it somewhere else”. Bullied into it, by a man who preyed on my deepest vulnerabilities.

How many times had I thought we had a fantastic night only to wake up to a surly, dismissive, apathetic day?

I started to realize that there were no fantastic nights. There was cheap booze, little white lies, and completely carnal fucking.

The first instance with Avi was not even a full year after the incident with Beck.  It didn’t register, because it was just so subtle.  He lovingly and eagerly asked.  I was too ashamed to tell him the truth about what happened.  I was anxious at the idea of disappointing him, and I went along with it.  It was just that one time, right?  I could satisfy him and then say no.

Then, there is the mentality that no doesn’t really mean no.  For many women, myself included, there is a disconnect between mind and body.  While my mind may be shouting, “NO!”, my body may not be complying.  It’s confusing for a woman, and encouraging for a man.  Men, but societal rules, are accustomed to the chase.  Often times, men get the wrong signals.  And for a predator, that is a perfect excuse for inexcusable, despicable behavior.

To some men, no doesn’t mean no.  No means, coerce me.  No means, harass me.  And that’s exactly what I experienced.  There was no changing my mind, or else I was a tease of a girlfriend who deprived my boyfriend of sexual gratification for my own kicks.  There was no saying no, or my will would be broken down in one way or another.  Finally, not complying with his wishes was grounds for threats and dismissal.

“If you don’t do it by choice, then I’ll just have to take it by force.  But you’d like that, wouldn’t you?”  I shiver and tremble at that phrase.  In my mind, there was nothing worse than losing control of my situation.  What I didn’t realize was that sex and sexual acts were no longer my own choice.  I was, for all intensive purposes, a victim of continual sexual assault and grey rape.

Sex is often a mechanism for control.  And seeing as how I was also both a victim and abuser in other ways, it was the perfect arena for him to gain back control.  Though I would disagree, and I would put up a fight, he would always eventually win.  Nothing scared me more than another full on assault.  Maybe I thought I had the control by consenting.  It’s tricky to know.  I described a bit of it in Decent into Hell.

Just say yes, you little masochist.  

Addictions leave you little choice.

Help me tighten these chains.  Is that my voice?  My mind screamed to be released, for me to take the free ticket to ride and go.  But my heart without it’s limbs could not be freed from it’s vice.

The pleasant memories melted into the form of nightmares.  There was a double edged sword, turning the pleasurable jabs into horrific stabs.  My monologue’s narrator was raspy and exhausted.  Playful smiles turned to sinister grins just as loving chuckles morphed into maniacal laughter.  The blaze pushed forward, engulfing everything in sight.  It seared my flesh, leaving nothing but brittle bone.

In a domestic relationship, it becomes harder to define rape. It becomes even harder to convince others that the sexual contact was not consensual. Worse, is the probability that one will have to face their assailant in the wreckage of the aftermath of reporting.  And that’s possibly why so many sexual assaults and rapes go unreported in those situations.

There are deviant sexual acts I was forced to participate in that I am still ashamed of.  I recall my first threesome.  I consented to it under the pretense of defensive sex.

For those of you that are unfamiliar with defensive sex, it is a sexual response to an emotional manipulation playing on the insecurities of sexual performance and satisfaction.  It is an attempt to avoid abandonment and ease fears for some.  I recognize the manipulation in my own mind now.  And I realize that I had engaged in this behavior and played into his own hand.

The focus of the threesome shifted to a twosome, only involving me as a third party observer.  And I recall watching, thinking I had been tricked into watching my ex sexually gratify himself as a show of force.  As if he was proving to me that other women wanted him, and I was apt to lose him at any time.  I was ashamed at the manipulation.  Later, when my friend and I lost touch over it, I realized it was also an isolation mechanism, enabling all forms of abuse by removing me from third outsiders.

I could have never seen it coming.  Like other forms of abuse, it creeps up and becomes the new “norm”.  Also, it has devastating effects on emotional, sexual, and romantic dynamics in future relationships, again, like other forms of abuse.  This is just as real and horrifying as any other form of abuse, though it is far less recognized.  However, it should be recognized for what it is, and women should be educated and informed about the possibility of this type of hidden abuse.

Little Shades of Grey – Sexual Assault by a Lover

Trigger Warning:  This post has graphic contents in subjects surrounding sexual assault.  Consider the nature of this post before continuing reading.  It is advised that those under the age of 13 and those who suffer past trauma with sexual assault may want to refrain from reading.  Reader discretion is advised.

This is the world in which a Canadian policeman recently advised a group of students during a health and safety talk that “women should avoid dressing like sluts in order not to be victimized.”

– A Crime Upon A Crime, Rape, Victim Blaming and Stigma by Laura Bates.

Yes, in cold places like Canada and Pittsburgh, it’s so very easy to dress like a slut with mountains of snow and bone chilling wind.  My friends and I make a joke of it now, but another friend of mine was dating this guy who once cautioned her, “You can’t take the bus in that tube top to Downtown!  You’re going to get raped!”

Rape is very real.  RAINN shows a statistic that one reported sexual assault happens every 2 minutes in the United States.  Statistics can only reflect the cases that are reported.  RAINN also reports that an estimated 97% of people who have committed sexual assault with not serve time for their crime.  54% of rapes still go unreported, standing as the silently suffering majority.

Why do these cases go unreported?  There are many reasons, first being that victims are taught to be ashamed of being violated.  Second, they are lead to the victim mentality that the rape / sexual assault was in some way their own fault.  All because, “Society teaches don’t get raped, rather than don’t rape.”  It asserts that sexual assault with always be a given, and it is our responsibility as women to don our habits and buckle up that Elizabethan collar, in order not to send the wrong message.

Another reason the majority of victims remain silent is because the crime was perpetrated by someone the victim knew.  RAINN states that an estimated 2/3rds or 66.6% of rapes are committed by someone known to the victim.  An even greater 73% of sexual assaults are perpetrated by someone familiar.  And this is not exclusive to acquaintances and / or friends.  28% of reported cases are intimate.

Imagine the cases that go unreported between two people who were already intimate.  There’s a joke that circulates among teenagers.  Or at least it did when I was young.  It was, “You can’t rape the willing.”  As it turns out, you can.  It can happen to anyone, anywhere, at anytime.  I would say especially if two people are intimate.  Because that is a place where grey rape exists the most.

Little shades of grey is what I call it.  The greyscale of a nontraditional rape are all of the shades in between a sexual act that someone begrudgingly performed to violently screaming no, and everything in between.

Grey rape impacts me deeply, as I have mentioned in other posts.  It took me a long time to realize that the sexual deviancy I had loathed myself for participating in for so many years wasn’t exactly that at all.  It was in the broader scope of victimization under abuse.  Sexual abuse is not just perpetrated by parental pedophiles with children as their victims.  Sexual abuse can occur in any form of partnership, just as any other kind of abuse.

I have never had the courage to tell the full story to anyone in great detail, but today, I will speak out against rape and the people who commit grey rape regularly.  It started with one incident. I was at a Valentine’s Day party, in the middle of a harsh Pittsburgh winter, and I was drunk.  My on-again, off-again boyfriend, Beck led me to his room, a room with a bed we often shared on weekends.  This was our second go at a relationship; the first being a four year relationship where I truly thought I’d marry this man.  He was the first man I had ever slept with.  And I would have trusted him with my life.

Things got heavy, and he asked me if I wanted to try something new.  I was a rather adventurous girl so I asked, “What did you have in mind?”

He told me that he wanted to try anal.  I was uncomfortable with the idea, because it sounded painful.  He assured me it wouldn’t be if we took it slow.  Hesitantly, I bent over, my rear in the air and my face to a cool pillow.  He grabbed my hips and started gently.  I gritted my teeth and told him it hurt.  He assured me that it wouldn’t soon, that he just needed to get worked in.  I asked him to stop, because the pain was increasing.  “It hurts.  Stop.  Please stop now.  Stop!”

He gripped my hips and started thrusting wildly at me.  I started to screaming, “No, stop!” and he put one arm around my pelvis and another forcing my head, smothering my screams into a pillow.  I violently screamed at the top of my lungs, hoping he would stop.  Hoping that maybe someone would hear me.  A part of me had hoped maybe he hadn’t heard me.  Maybe this was a mistake.

Finally, it was over.  I gasped for air as I lifted my head from the tear soaked pillow.  I rolled onto my side, backside in excruciating pain, and cried, “Why didn’t you stop?!”

He was sitting there, lighting a cigarette and pulling his pants back on.  He smiled and only said, “Oh shut up, you liked it.”

I didn’t tell a soul until my husband and I became more than friends three years later.  The pain and anguish on his face was enough.  “I wish you had told me.  I was there.”

“I wish I had told you too.  But who would you have believed?”

 

I wish I could say that was the first and only time that situation had ever happened to me.

To be continued . . .

Related articles

• The Truth Behind Elder Rape (thedailybeast.com)
• Toronto women Take Back the Night in march against sexual violence (metronews.ca)
• Toronto women Take Back the Night in march against sexual violence (thestar.com)

The Seeds of Doubt

Amnesiac.

That might be a painfully accurate depiction of a large part of me. My memories prior to eleven are largely fragmented, save for a few vague impressions, recurring themes, and a traumatic experience that has recently resurfaced to rear it’s ugly head at me. Regardless of how often I attempted recalls, those calls went unanswered. A flicker, like a spark, would come alive, but leave existence as quickly as it came.

I often find myself in a unfocused world of disjointed memories and alternate realities. The vast fields of fog are sewn with seeds of doubt, spouting fears and obsessions. In those fields and shadows, monsters have plentiful cover to prowl for their prey – me.

They often say that when a lie is repeated so many times, it starts to embed itself as a portion of factual memory. Basically, if a person believes in something strongly enough, it becomes real. It becomes enough to rewrite someone’s entire history. The lines between reality and fantasy start to blur in a place where fiction and fact can coexist, even potentially peacefully.

Unfortunately, I have not once before been a person who can successfully smudge the details of my own personal past. Not to myself, anyway. I can report being guilty of deception by omission. But, something distressful stirs and blinks with any instance I even remotely consider telling a blatant lie.

This is not say I am immune to deception and coercion into accepting an outright lie. My psyche is malleable in the way where I am susceptible to manipulation. Why? Because it’s been the very basis of which I have been raised.  My father once told me, “Believe none of what you hear, and only half of what you see.”  Then, was it his intent to distort my world in such a way that I will one day have difficulty trusting myself?

There are so many clinical words for this.  Dissociation.  Depersonalization.  Derealization.  Psychosis.  Delusion.  Hallucination.  Dissociative Fugue.  Splitting.  Repression.  Coping.  So many clinical terms that overlap in their definitions, and yet, not one quite captures the true essence of being within it’s grip.

For me, my repression has a proximity sensor.  Clinically, it’s called Dissociative Amnesia or Dissociative Fugue.  In the past, I have always called it throwing a block or throwing up a wall.  I am figuratively walking along in my own mind, through wild, overgrown fields and forests of my own memories to suddenly smash into a concrete wall.  Suddenly, the whole landscape shifts, and I am boxed in this nondescript, blank white room.  White walls, white floors, no windows.  It is me and a dining room chair.  This is my mental waiting room, where I am being isolated until the memory of the memory passes.

I call it, “The Eraser”.  When it’s all said and done, I come back to consciousness in my own familiar surroundings, in my own waking life.  But, is it?

This is the direct result of the seeds of doubt being sewn into a person so carelessly in the impressionable youthful brain.  The concept of an active consciousness is disturbed, and the development is stunted and contorted.  It must be so easy to manipulate someone with such a frail sense of reality, a blank canvas of self, and stunted emotional maturity.  And that’s why abusers do it.

I slip in and out of streams of consciousness, alternate, yet simultaneous realities, and find skips and pauses that disarrange an incomplete chronology of life.  I start to get the belief that I am, in fact, a time traveler, as my external self as my own ship, however I have no use of my own controls.  Somehow, somewhere along the way, I have been damaged.  It mimics human ailments.

But I know none of that is true.  I am just as human as the next person, with cognitive dysfunctions resulting from mental illness and latent trauma.

Or faulty wiring.

I doubt everything.  My experiences often seem surreal.  My memories, unless attached to a particularly powerful moment, are vague.  My short term memory is shot, so it becomes unreliable.  I doubt everything I feel, all of the conclusions that I come to, and some of what is right in front of my face.  I doubt right down to self.  Is this me?  Am I me?  Am I here?
How did I get to such a place where I have to question everything?

 

The Friday Confessional : Promiscuously Yours

This would be installment number two in The Friday Confessional Series.  For those of you that are new to The Friday Confessional, thanks to LaLa, writer at Seasons Change and So Have I, I have taken on the idea of the Friday Confessional.  There’s something so cleansing about it.  I am not Catholic, nor have I ever been.  But, I can see why confessional is an important part of their Christian denomination.  I believe that it’s important to mental health and spiritual health to come forward with any deep dark secrets that may be bothering me, consciously and unconsciously.

This is where I start working toward my clean slate.

Dear Avi,

I have written several articles about our tortured relationship, some of which are entitled, “Love the Way You Lie”, and “Decent into Hell”.  Facts are facts.  You abused me in every imaginable way.  You degraded me and manipulated me into sexual acts I am still ashamed that I performed.  Those are my own burdens now.  Karma has come full circle and dealt with you in the best possible way, although I am still unsure as to whether losing your entire military career taught you the lesson, “What goes around comes around.”  Maybe being divorced after six months of marriage in your twenties was bad enough.  Somehow, I doubt those things.

Karma has dealt with me.

For what?  Am I referring to the mutual abuse I helped to perpetuate?  Not exactly.

Sadly, the real breaking point in our relationship didn’t occur until you had made the open admission that you cheated on me.  It’s not that you cheated on me, it’s more about the lie.  I caught you doing it a year and a half prior, and you convinced me that I was paranoid and delusional.  It was damaging to my mental health, and truthfully, I never truly believed it.  Especially after her boyfriend clearly called you and threatened you right in front of me.

I was willing to let it go, because I thought I loved you.

The truth is, I never did.

I had no right to be upset with you about cheating.  Because honestly, I cheated on you probably more times and in more hurtful ways than you ever cheated on me.

I started my indiscretions at the very beginning of our relationship.  Remember when I told you I was going to be in Ohio visiting relatives?  Did it ever click later on that the only relative I have in that state is in Columbus?  Instead of visiting family, I was visiting a truly gorgeous young man who had a serious attraction to me.  We had been fooling around even before you and I were together.  I won’t attempt a justification, because if I had determined it was appropriate, I would have made the admission up front.

And we had crazy kinky sex all weekend.  It never occurred to you that those bruises were no accident.  That same lame accident I blurted out when I brushed the subject off the very next weekend.

Honestly, I had no love for Jamie, either.  But, he was a complete manwhore, mostly sexually indiscriminate between man, woman, young, or old.  Jamie was an incredibly attractive boy with incredible sexual skill and anatomy.    However, if had Jamie lived closer or attended the same school as we did, it would have been more likely for me to have chosen Jamie over you.  I may have come to have feelings for him, however unlikely. It was just a huge self-esteem booster to be the object of such a man’s desire.

Then, there was Jeff.  Jeff was actually an ongoing infidelity from the relationship prior to ours.  All of those whispered late-night calls were made from his bathroom after a booty call.  Sure, that’s all I was to him.  I was his secret sex, because basically, I just was not attractive enough for him to parade me around his shallow friends.  But, I never wanted to be his girlfriend or even his arm candy.  Why?  I failed to fall in love with him as well.  Instead, I fell in love with the thrill of his pathetic, shallow, sex-driven psyche.  I adored his compliments, sweet talk, and the ambition – all completely directed toward screwing me.  It was fantastic.

All of the unfaithfulness occurred within the first two months of our relationship.  That is the reason why I never reciprocated any loving gestures or words.  I collected them, just as I collected all of the affections from other men, however superficial.  I eventually settled for you because being promiscuous was getting exhausting.  Besides, you seemed like a guy I could probably stay with.

I was wrong.  I thought I loved you.  I fell into a hole I couldn’t dig myself out of.  And you trapped me, leaving me pacing the cage.

I cheated again with Jeff.  It was once, six months into our relationship, when he failed to sleep with Adrianne at a party that you weren’t invited to.

I cheated with Beck.  I went as far as to give Beck a third shot at dating and mating, even after everything that happened, because I loathed you so much.

I found myself seeking repeated emotional affairs.  In college, Q and I were fantastic friends.  One day, when you refused to at least walk me to a doctor’s appointment down the street, I stormed off.  Q came after me, and finally walked beside me on the street.  He grabbed my hand, and we talked.  I choked back tears as I recounted the argument.  Finally, Q stopped me in the middle of the busy city sidewalk, and embraced me.  I did attempt to pull back, but not for your sake.  For my own.  And he said, “I’m not letting you go until you’re okay.”

That was only the beginning of Q and me.  We went on “adventures” around the city together.  He’d grab my hand, and we’d skip class.  We went everywhere.  He bought me some odd Asian ice cream in the Strip District.  He taught me how to play DDR in Station Square.  He took me with a group of friends to a sushi restaurant in Oakland.  We walked through Schenley Park in Squirrel Hill.

Then, I went and ruined it by coming out with it.  “Do you ever think we could be together?”

“Not like that.  Probably not ever.”

And Simon.  Simon, a great friend for three whole years.  Simon, who I spent most of the summer with, drinking and talking on his back porch.  I had been more emotionally intimate with Simon than anyone in a long time.  But, you knew that.  That’s why we had a threesome with Simon on the anniversary of Simon’s and my first kiss.  And, Simon became weird about it, and I lost a friend.  You did it to try to prove to me that no man could ever love me, except for you who barely tolerated me.

Finally, there is you.  In reality, you were an affair from the relationship prior to ours as well.

For the record, I did not cheat with Xan.  I had an accidental romance with him over five years.  Over Beck, over all of those men, over Simon, and over you.  And in the end, Xan and I ended up where we belonged, proving you wrong.  A man can love me.

Most sincerely,