Caro
much of what Sammy says makes sense to me as well.
I don't like to talk to my wife about my abuse in our house, it's the simple thing of not letting my abusers foul up this home of ours that we built from a ruin and love so much.
Other peoples abuse we can deal with here, but not mine, I will not describe any of what happened to me out loud in this house, although I do talk about the effects and my healing now.
Again like Sammy, when discussing sex between us I use clinical terms, but I can cuss nearly as good as Sammy
and often do, I also tell my wife very crude jokes sometimes. So I find that a bit strange, why can't I use some of the less offensive terms like 'cock' instead of penis when we're talking about our failing sex life ?
If I instigate sex I wonder if I'm acting like an abuser, and she has the same problem as well.
I never talk while having sex, I don't ask her to do something I like, or ask if she likes what I'm doing.
I know where that comes from, one of my regualar abusers, many times a week for 4 years, encouraged me to talk, and I did. I would suggest things, tell him how 'good it was' - 'how much I was enjoying it', and the dirtier the talk the better he enjoyed it.
Sadly I can't get that out of my head.
And neither can I competely shift the images and flashbacks that invariably happen during sex, or the dissociation and fantasy.
Then there's the failures that inevitably come with those things, which only go to reinforce the feelings of being useless, or at their worst actually making me wonder if the only sex I'm capable of is the sort I had when acting-out; horrible, brief encounters with strange men in toilets.
I know none of this right or true, but once the thought has entered my head it has to be processed and dealt with which even if it only takes 10 seconds is a big enough distraction from the main event.
Naturally my wife sympathetic and does what she can, says all the right things, and eventually makes me feel better about it. Sometimes I can even carry on again, but imagine how difficult that can be when I'm so uptight about talking about sex with her in any kind of open and easy manner ?
Some of this might be a generational thing that could be common to people of our age, I'm 52.
We spent our teenage years in the "swinging 60's" - a time of free love and pre AIDS, and I had my fair share of the free love as well, but I, and maybe others, are still very influenced by our earlier upbringing that gave us our parents influences. My dad turned the TV off at the very mention of sex.
And that prudish embarrasment that surrounded sex still lives on, and is the hardest thing to change I have ever known.
I have sat with my wife in a club in Amsterdam and watched a live sex show, we've sat and watched porn videos, but if wake up with an erection as most men do, I make great efforts to hide it when I head for the bathroom.
There's a big part of me that is liberated, although I feel as though I can think liberated but not act liberated.
I think that I would have become fully liberated without two things.
My abuse and the strict Methodist church moralising of my childhood.
As my abuse began I renounced all religion, and still do, but the two are so closely linked in my head that I can't seperate them.
The moralising of that religious upbringing, and my parents reinforcing of that, gave me the certain feeling that sex would send me to hell, the abuse made sure of that when I was 11yo.
Logically I can see my way through and past that moralising, and I can see the benefits ( to me ) of the liberal views I hold, but something inside my head clings to the wreckage of 11yo David's thoughts and emotions and wont let go.
Time for a few sessions with my therapist I think !
Dave
