Therapy backfired and now I sexualize my trauma even more
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My earliest memories I was sexually abused and betrayed by my mother and her boyfriend on a daily basis, and it went on for my entire early childhood. Just an ignored object until they were bored and horny, and the things that were done were especially brutal. It fucked me up quick and I started sort of reenacting things that had been done to me on my innocent peers in school and in the neighborhood, and I proud of how good I was at getting away with it. I also was continually seeking sexual abuse from others, especially people older than me. It's the only way I knew to feel validated and normal. I had basically no friends growing up that I didn't sexually abuse or didn't abuse me, until high school. I had decided to try to be better, and besides letting a couple teachers fondle me so I never had to do homework, I was very good. I didn't pursue anyone.
I had become really good friends with this popular and kind girl I was able to have a perfectly normal friendship with. I like how normal she made me feel. By our sophomore year I started sleeping over at her house a lot, and got to know her family. They were so insanely wholesome and genuinely emotionally healthy that it broke my brain. They were so kind and considerate, and affectionate in a not creepy way! All things I was completely unaccustomed to and didn't realize could be real.
It actually bothered me at first, it felt fake. Then it angered me, but I didn't know why. At one point I decided to do what I promised I wouldn't do and try to get one of them to sexually abuse me. I got drunk with her older brother after she went to bed, and he was just a perfect gentleman the whole time, no matter what I did, he wouldn't take the bait. Not even when I pretended to pass out, loose shorts on, legs open, no panties. The dude got me a glass of water and a blanket and tucked me in without laying a finger on me. I even tried a one with her little sister, but she was oblivious or pretended to be. As soon as I could have the house alone with her dad, I tried to bait him, too. That was even more embarrassing because he clearly recognized what I was doing and just asked if I was okay at home, in like the most compassionate, heart melting way possible. It made me break down in tears and realize how fucked up I was for trying to ruin this family just so I could make it something I understood.
So I confessed some of what had gone on in my home. Not much of it, because I was still well-trained to protect my abusers from consequences. I didn't tell her dad anything that could get my mom in any legal trouble. But that night they invited me to live with them and I accepted. I lived there until I was 18 and seriously turned over a new leaf.
It was the best thing that had ever happened to me at that point. I learned a lot from their family I would never have learned from my own, and I feel so lucky to have had an opportunity to understand before I went out on my own. I completely stopped abusing others and putting myself in a position to be abused. I moved forward in life with hope and confidence for the first time. I walled up my past and decided not to let it define me.
Years later, I'd been dating someone for a couple of years that I could see myself with long term. We start talking about kids and marriage. Once we got to that point, I started to feel very guilty for hiding so much of my childhood. It had already gotten awkward quite a few times in the past, just dodging the subject. I had explained that I had an abusive childhood, but that's all I ever told anyone. My fiance was the first person I ever completely opened up to. He was shocked, which honestly I was kind of relieved to see. Part of me had feared that he would sexualize it, and I couldn't bear the thought of that. And though we didn't really talk much about it after that, it didn't seem to bother him. But for me, being that vulnerable for the first time, bringing it all back up, it changed me in a way I wasn't expecting, and did not understand for a long time.
What I thought was a deep depression and anxiety over took me. I tried to ignore it, but after over a year it caused me to be very distracted at my dream job and they fired me. About 4 months later, my fiance broke up with me as I lay paralyzed with inexplicable terror in bed, like I had the last few months since being fired. Just frozen in an overwhelming fear that made it impossible to think about anything else, heart beating over 130 for months. But I was just left to lay there. He never asked me what was wrong. And I didn't know, tbh. There would be times that it would be difficult for me to even respond to anyone trying to talk to me. It was during one of these times that my childhood trauma I had confessed only to him was thrown back in my face by my now ex fiance, claiming my stories of absurdly dramatic childhood abuse stories were all manipulative lies to gain sympathy, but also (somehow) the reason I am too fucked up to be in a relationship with anyone.
After having already moved into the guest room, finally I was cruelly harassed enough, by someone who had called me family not less than 4 months prior, I agreed to move out. I had nowhere to go but my mom's and I was in a full blown mental health crisis that I knew at least in the back of my mind was connected to her. I chose to live out of my car.
My mom died that year of a heart attack. That sent the mental health crisis I was going through into overdrive for some reason and all the memories I had walled up started flooding back, every hour of every day, no matter what I did. I finally fully understood where the terror was coming from. I was having flashbacks to when I was frozen in fear as a child, just letting things happen to me. It became a lot more clear that I was having a delayed PTSD response from all the childhood abuse. I took the small inheritance I got from my mother's death and spent all of it on therapy.
Something happened in therapy. I got worse. Telling my therapist about what has happened to me has me constantly aroused by rape again, extremely strongly. I found myself wanting to talk about nothing else, like it's a drug. I basically forced the topic onto my therapist every session and forced her to hear every detail. I could tell she didn't like it and parts of it have made her physically ill. I've seen her go pale and need to leave the room.
So therapy didn't help. I'm never got functional enough to work a regular job, which was the goal. Still living out of my car. I can hardly remember what I'm doing long enough to operate an oven safely, flashbacks just come out of nowhere and can last for hours, sometimes even days non-stop. I lose track of time and reality, often just frozen in fear but still touching myself to fucked up porn to feel normal, like it's medicine. It's impossible to heal when you have nowhere safe to be.
I've had a three people invite me to live with them so that I can heal and get back on my feet. The first time I found out they were abusing their kids and when I confronted them about it they kicked me out. The other two times they ended up making it clear that if I wanted to stay I had to fuck them. And so that's what I did. And I hate it. But I'm so mentally unwell the only thing I know how to do to survive in my current mental state is to fall back on my childhood training.
I'm currently escaping my latest live in rapist. He swore that he would never sexually pressure me because he knew how traumatized and vulnerable I was. In the first week he started waiting until he thought I was asleep and got into bed with me and fondled me. All I could do was lay there and think about the consequences if I stopped him. I would be back out on the streets. So I laid there and hoped that he would stop. Trying to get him to stop, I quit showering for weeks and eventually months. That didn't slow him down.
It only took a couple months before he started masturbating in the living room in front of me and acting like it was rude of me to interrupt him. As just his guest, he said I shouldn't expect him to change his routines. When he worked up to asking me to help him get off, I confessed to him that I had stopped showering to try and keep him away from me and I knew that he had been fondling me at night this whole time. He said he knew that's why I stopped showering, and it had turned him on more. The whole reason he helped me, he said, was because he thought it'd make me sexually attracted to him. It was like he forgot about everything he had said before. That's when I gave up, again. It was be homeless or be a sex toy. And so I got on my knees without saying another word, and every day after that, I just obeyed without saying anything.
That was over a year and a half ago and I've been his daily brainless cum dump since. I have been completely alone that whole time, talking to basically no one, and almost never leaving the apartment. I drink myself to sleep. It's the only luxury he bought me, besides the orange juice and two small meals a day I was allowed. I figured out fast that if I ate too much then he just wouldn't buy me anymore, and I'd have to go hungry until shopping day. So I learned to ration. I've gotten really skinny and can't sit up in bed without getting dizzy. During the day I mostly cry or sit in a vacant stupor dissociating from reality. I have been dependent on him for literally everything and he's made sure to keep it that way.
I told him no plenty and it just ended up with him either yelling at me that I'm worthless, or him crying that I'm so ungrateful and he always goes out of his way to help others and no one ever does the same for him, and I'm costing him so much money every month and he deserves something in return.
Finally, a couple months ago I told him no and I told him that I called the cops and reported him for sexual coercion. I didn't have the balls to actually do that. But he took the bluff and disappeared for a month. Most peaceful month I had in over a year, despite the constant anxiety that he was going to come back at any moment. But then he and his friends came back and got all of his things all in one day and left and I haven't seen or heard from him since.
It's been another month since then and now his lease is about to be up. I've started to feel more stable and be able think slightly more clearly. I'm thinking of trying to squat the apartment and see if they'll do month to month and charge it to him. But I doubt that will work out in my favor for long at all so I'm trying to find places I can store my stuff and it looks like I'll be living in my car again in the next few days.
That's the most G-rated version of my story I think I know how to tell.