Wow. Just wow. Such a powerful thread. Just spent a good hour going through it, and every post had its own wisdom, insight and honesty.
@SinkBackIntoTheOcean , thanks so much for that Joe Kort link. "Sexual disorientation" fits it to a T.
@ultraboy8888, I looked up your survivor's story and want to express my gratitude. It's done a lot to help me build up the courage to post mine, which is very different in a bunch of ways, but similar in how it involves shame at having experienced aspects of the abuse as intensely pleasurable.
@Hopein14 , thanks for the intense honesty of your "fuckedupitness" post. I don't know if you meant it to be poetic, but it is.
@NC-Survivor: "trauma-sexuals" is exactly right.
And, of course,
@kuurt, when you write:
the confusion comes from having weird feelings of arousal attached to certain sex acts that I experienced when I was a kid. And I sometimes fantasize about those acts, and watch porn that has some of those acts in it - and I feel like I want to do those things sometimes. But then I also feel very, very guilty about those thoughts and feelings, too.
This issue's pretty near the heart of it for me. I spent the years from ages 11 to 18 or so forming deep, hopeless crushes on boys. I say hopeless because I'd engage in surreptitious moves like, say, snuggling extra close to a boy at a slumber party after the lights were out, or "innocently" sitting with him thigh-to-thigh on the sofa, while simultaneously being terrified of ever making an explicit move, for fear that he'd reject me, I'd be exposed as gay and then become a pariah. Back then, the late 80s, homophobia was far worse than it is now. In the case of two of the three boys on whom I had the biggest crushes, this was all pretty deeply ironic: one was gay himself, the other bi, and I later found out that they were both attracted to me, too. Makes sense, given how neither of them ever avoided me, and often would surreptitiously snuggle up on their own initiative -- a signal I of course totally missed, because of my own self-loathing.
At the same time, though, beginning around age 14 I started developing strong attractions to girls. There, my tendency to set things up in ways that allowed me to get "hot and bothered" while avoiding true intimacy and connection took a different form. Since I didn't have to worry about being ashamed to overtly admit my attraction, I generally chose girls who were inaccessible for some reason (closeted lesbian gymnast, heroin user beholden to her dealer, science prodigy who was forbidden to date by her conservative immigrant parents, horsey girl who basically lived at the stables, etc.). If they actually showed an interest in me anyway, I would sabotage the whole thing by chickening out and failing to make the necessary move at the necessary moment. My specialty was the spectacular loss of nerve on the girl's doorstep at the end of the first date, as she's looking expectantly into my eyes awaiting a kiss. Unfailingly, I'd say goodbye with a handshake. The one girlfriend I had during that time in my life basically grabbed me by the collar and said: enough, you will date me. (How
that went is a story for a different thread).
I stopped crushing on boys when I was around 18, but the self-sabotage with women continued into my 20s. In fantasy acting-out land, my SSA went, um, bananas: gay porn, euphoric recall of things that "could have been" with my crushes back in the day, age-play in chats. That caused me so much shame and bewilderment. I knew I wasn't gay in the sense of actually wanting to have sex with a flesh-and-blood man, and yet I couldn't stop masturbating to this stuff, and on top of it felt compelled to pretend to be a kid enthusiastic about being used by chicken-hawks? What the hell?
It started getting clearer as I began dealing with my memories of abuse, putting them in order, facing things I'd stuffed away. The key thing, I now recognize, was what happened to me when I was 10. My abuser was an obviously very experienced pedophile (I'm not going to give him the satisfaction of calling him a "boy lover," which I have no doubt he'd have preferred). Sexually speaking he knew exactly what he was doing (my T's expression was "he played you like a violin"). It was only one encounter. There was a lot that was simply disgusting and terrifying about it. It was abuse. I hated it. I didn't want it. But there was also some extremely intense physical pleasure. More intense by a degree of magnitude than anything I'd ever before experienced, in fact, and far too intense for a boy of 10 to get anywhere near. Having dug into this pretty thoroughly with my T, I can now recognize it was that pleasure that threw things out of whack, giving me my sexual dis-orientation. I used to think I might be bisexual, heavily weighted towards being attracted to women; having the grip I have now, though, I'm more inclined to think that what's actually going on is that repetition compulsion so many of us struggle with. It explains so much, and my story seems to have so much in common with so many others on here.
For me, the physical pleasure aspect of the abuse is unfortunately the key. In general it seems as if CSA is an experience characterized above all by ambivalence: the simultaneous presence of very intense contradictory feelings. That's hard for anyone at any time, but especially difficult if the person having the experience is just a kid, and therefore in no way psychologically prepared. In a sense I feel like my sexuality got zapped at a dangerously transitional point (right before the onset of puberty) with "high-voltage ambivalence." The result's the mess I have now...which at least I can finally recognize for what it is, which helps.