Posted by Wittgensteinz on December 5, 2008, at 16:03:36
This is probably going to be a confused post but I feel confused at the moment...
I saw my pdoc a couple of weeks ago. He asked me some direct questions about my sex life - he wanted to know whether the change in meds had had any effect on that aspect of me. I felt terribly embarrassed - it's such a non-topic for me, and every answer I gave he would respond with another question :(. I just wished he would leave it alone.
While I was at university (as a late teen) I had a relationship with a boy and it turned very unpleasant. I've told my T about it. I spoke intensively about it for about 3 sessions, half a year ago or so, then wanted to close the door on it and never return - and that's pretty much what I've done. At the time, T used words like 'rape', 'brutality', and 'sex abuse' but they fell somewhat on deaf ears - I see myself as culpable for what happened. I was an adult not a child. I let it happen to myself, through lack of assertiveness (and common sense perhaps) and it was within my power to have stopped it from happening. Anyway, since then I just don't seem capable of having a sexual relationship, and for the most part somehow that works (and who knows how my partner puts up with me). I have the feeling that I could be perfectly happy never having anything to do with physical intimacy ever again.
Well, the questions from the pdoc stirred things up again. When I was hesistant and didn't give clear answers, he said I was avoiding this area and should talk about it (to be honest his questions had no simple answers and I didn't really want to talk in depth with him about it) - I don't think he believed that I'd ever talked with my T about this - personally I found it a bit much he brought this up on the 5th visit. One question in particular that triggered/irritated me was that he said "or would you find it easier to talk about this with a woman than a man?" - at that point I just looked at my toes and then abruptly changed the subject. He had a point though (not about it being easier to talk with a woman than a man - that was a bit clueless) but that I avoid this topic.
So I bought a book - the 'Sexually healing journey' (my partner teased me about it somewhat). I'm reading the book and it's making me think - these problems intensified since the relationship with that boy at university but they didn't start there. And I'm thinking back about the abuse as I was growing up. I want to explain it away with the physical and emotional stuff that happened (and that's easy to remember as it went on until I left home and really was just something 'normal' everyday, if that makes sense). The problem is it doesn't all fit together and there are some memories, and only very fragmented things, with my mother when I was tiny - up to 3 or 4 years - they involve me being alone with her and being naked. I don't know, maybe it's nothing but already at such a young age I was utterly ashamed with myself and my body. I was terrified of her seeing me naked, for example. At nursery I was the child who refused to have her face painted because she didn't want someone touching her - I also remember being too embarrassed to remove my shoes and socks to make footprints in paint. I know she did strange things to my brother and I - she used to joke about how she taped my brothers legs and arms together when he was a toddler because he wouldn't stay in his cot at night - this obviously was a solution she found acceptable and even funny. Even from early memories, I have a strong feeling there was something sadistic and forceful in the way she handled me - she liked to do it, to watch me squirm. I've never ever felt this way toward my father.
As a young child I had a lot of problems with my eyes. I had to be held down each day to have contact lenses put in (I have no natural lenses in my eyes). My father put the lenses in and as far as I recall, my mother did the holding down part - she was insistent that I wear these wretched lenses - I wore them until 20 but always had problems from them because of the underlying medical condition. Finally a few Christmases ago I had ulcerated eyes from the lenses. One eye was swollen shut and that was the last of it - so now I wear the thick 'ugly' glasses that she would never let me wear. I always put my self-consciousness down to this - that I didn't understand what they were doing and it was traumatic - but the thing that doesn't make sense is that I've never found it difficult to trust my father - and I never held anything against him, despite his role in this process. Plus these other memories - dad worked, and when I was little I would go to nursery in the morning but the afternoons I was at home alone with my mother. I know I used to dread those afternoons. I'd scream when she came to collect me and I always loved Thursdays because then I got to stay the whole day at nursery.
Ok, I'm not quite sure why I'm posting this. I feel ashamed - it's dangerous to point fingers at people without being sure - I'm not sure I really want to know anyway, after all whatever did or didn't happen, I am now as I am, and the underlying causes are perhaps not so important. All I know is how scared I am of that woman, and how I never want her to touch me ever again.
Witti
poster:Wittgensteinz
thread:866883
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20081205/msgs/866883.html