Resurrection After Rape Community Group
Discussion, question-and-answer, general social support, and journal processing for progress-oriented rape survivors. No crisis, no damaging or triggering conflicts--this is for individuals who want to contribute to collective, cooperative action toward the goal of making actual PROGRESS through rape trauma. Much of this work is based on the book "Resurrection After...
I hope this won't bring up bad memories for anyone but after i read through what I wrote I realized that it could be distressing depending on your own experiences.
I decided to finally stop avoiding the journaling exercises and realized after doing some of them that I'm still sitting with feeling responsible. My initial thought was to come here and say how can this not be my fault? I had this analogy of the kid who is told not to touch the hot stove but they are curious and then guess what they touch it and get burned. The stove never said you better do this or else, the kid just did something they shouldn't have done in the first place and paid for it.
As I sat with that analogy I realized it didn't really fit because the stove couldn't do anything on its own to begin with. By itself it didn't have the power to create a dangerous situation. A stove isn't hot as a matter of course.
Anyway I modified the scenario a bit and it turned into this: The kid reaches for the stove trying to understand what all the fuss is about wondering why they need to stay away from it , then when they start to realize that maybe this really isn't the best idea and they go to move their hand away and as they do someone else comes over to them and says don't move your hand away and then keeps the kid's hand down on that burner until they decide their done doing so.
So there's still the pain of the burn and the feelings that you shouldn't have stuck your hand near the stove to begin with but there but also the realization that maybe even if you did something you shouldn't have done that it didn't make it okay for someone to not let you move your hand when you realized you wanted to.
I don't know that I'll ever get a place where I feel completely blameless but I can at least start trying to share some of the blame.
I decided to finally stop avoiding the journaling exercises and realized after doing some of them that I'm still sitting with feeling responsible. My initial thought was to come here and say how can this not be my fault? I had this analogy of the kid who is told not to touch the hot stove but they are curious and then guess what they touch it and get burned. The stove never said you better do this or else, the kid just did something they shouldn't have done in the first place and paid for it.
As I sat with that analogy I realized it didn't really fit because the stove couldn't do anything on its own to begin with. By itself it didn't have the power to create a dangerous situation. A stove isn't hot as a matter of course.
Anyway I modified the scenario a bit and it turned into this: The kid reaches for the stove trying to understand what all the fuss is about wondering why they need to stay away from it , then when they start to realize that maybe this really isn't the best idea and they go to move their hand away and as they do someone else comes over to them and says don't move your hand away and then keeps the kid's hand down on that burner until they decide their done doing so.
So there's still the pain of the burn and the feelings that you shouldn't have stuck your hand near the stove to begin with but there but also the realization that maybe even if you did something you shouldn't have done that it didn't make it okay for someone to not let you move your hand when you realized you wanted to.
I don't know that I'll ever get a place where I feel completely blameless but I can at least start trying to share some of the blame.
As I see it you had three pretty lousy choices ahead of you:
a) recognize that control was taken from you and that you weren't to blame. But then the full emotional force and pain of violation would have to be eventually recognized. I personally think this is the healthiest choice, but it really hurts at least in the first stages.
b) blame yourself and ditch the guy. That would have maybe kept you safe from further harm, but the cost to you in terms of your self-concept would be huge. His refusal to hear your request to stop meant that the bond between sex and committment was broken against your will. He didn't just violate your body. He violated your understanding of yourself. If you are to blame for what happened, then you are also to blame for the broken relationship between sex and committment. You clearly found the idea of being "that sort of girl" very painful, hence ditching him didn't even seem an option to you.
c) Blame yourself and stay with the guy. The up side of this option is that you can "repair" the broken bond between sex and committment after the fact. This preserves your self-concept but then leaves you vulnerable to further harm from him. Furthermore, it leaves you vulnerable to despair. it is kind of like trying to stop a pipe from leaking by taping over a place without out a hole and ignoring the crack further down. You can't repair what you didn't break. His choices and warped view of things was what broke the bond of sex and commitment in the first place, so your attempts at repair were ultimately doomed to failure. However, if you don't believe it is his fault, then it is totally reasonable to imagine that you can repair the damage.
As Heptet said, experimenting is just a normal part of finding out what you like and don't like. In normal healthy sex both parties are focused on giving the other person pleasure not just getting something out of it for themselves. So if one partner isn't happy, the other stops. He wasn't out of control - he managed to be clear thinking enough to talk to you and try to persuade you to continue. That means his reason and judgement was functioning well enough to do the opposite as well: stop until you are ready.
You chose to stay with him, i suspect because all of your options looked pretty yucky. The first option, voluntarily embracing the pain and loss is really I think the hardest of them If you don't have past life experiences or supportive people/books giving you a strong message that there is healing on the other end of such pain, it is very easy to question what good could possibly come from it.
The second, ditching him, was an emotional impossibility to you. The third, staying with him, looked like it gave you the option of undoing the damage. Why grieve about what looks fixable? It is entirely understandable to me why you made that choice, even if you ultimately decided that staying with him wasn't a good idea after all.
Your response make a lot of sense and I understand now what you mean about the stove vs. fan.
So was my first time less than ideal. Should have it happened like the time I held back and should I have waited? I guess what I am saying is that I can under stand your concept of an experiment how ever I also agree that true sexuality is not detatched. In fact this second boyfriend every thing we did before was not detacted and very connected to the universe and my heart. But that weekend he said something off putting and offensive to me and then when we did what we had been doing (ie he went down on me) there was something a little off there was a slight disconnect on my part and I wasn't as happy with it. And it was the next morning that we had intercourse for the first time.
For me, integration was in part a learned thing. Sometimes my emotions lead. Sometimes my body does. And when its really great they move together. These three different ways of relating to sexuality have happened even in situations where I have felt completely respected. In most situations, how integrated I am has more to do with where I am at the moment, rather than my partner. I tend to sometimes live in my head and sometimes someone turns me on regardless of who he is.
I find that there are many possible sources for lack of integration: my own psychology, not being real with myself about how much I like a guy, self-preservation in the face of force or fear, uncertainty about what one really likes. It isn't always so easy to tell right away which is which when things are actually happening. For that reason alone, I think the ability to stop and re-evaluate is essential to the notion of healthy sex. Both parties need the emotional and physical space to decide how they feel each step of the way and also to change the course of events if they are uncomfortable.
When someone refuses to pay heed to their partner's request to stop or even their freezing and saying nothing, they are preventing healthy sex and have done something wrong. In my book "you started it, so you have to see it through" just does not apply to sex.
Also the notion that sex "ends" in intercourse is fundamentally suspect in my book. Who says that that is the ultimate goal or end of sex? Is sex even really a goal oriented activity? If there is a goal, isn't the ultimate goal supposed to be mutual pleasure and connection? The acts are merely an expression of the goal. There are quite a number of different acts that can lead to that place of mutual pleasure and connection. The one act that absolutely, certainly does not achieve that goal is forced penetration, so I can't see how rape in any way, shape, or form could be the natural progression of experimentation.