too much to ask? (possible triggers)

[bda]

Sometime between therapy and spiritual direction yesterday I had some really startling realizations and memories come together. I've been struggling around power and shame a lot lately (even more than normal). Anyway, I think the fuzzy and blocked out part of one of the incidents of my experiences with Coach (my primary perp) became clear today. The memory clips of this event have been the ones that really flip me out most and send me over the edge...or at least really near it. What's coming clear is that the assumptions I made about who was doing what to whom have been mixed up.

Coach asked me to penetrate him. He told me something about something that happened when he was 12 or 13, but I can't recall the details of that part...just that I knew we were acting out something he'd done when he was young. I tried to penetrate, but there was no lube or anything. I hurt him and he howled. He was bleeding after -- he went to bathroom and then came back and wanted to hold me. I just remember apologizing and him shushing me and telling me it was okay...it was all going to be okay.

In my head I know it's messed up thinking, but I guess I've always believed that he was this hurt child that was looking to me for redemption and all I could manage was to hurt him. I believed this at the time...I'm quite clear that I thought he was fragile and needed me to be strong for him. I was so scared of hurting him. Somehow I figured I was the abusive one...that's still pretty deep in me.

I haven't unpacked all the layers of this, other than the easiest connection that I have big fears of hurting and/or failing anyone who needs or loves me. I guess most people have those fears, but there's always been this gut-wrenching terror piece associated with it for me.

I'm still feeling a bit unsure of whether or not this event really happened, but that's a pretty common state for me. I can't imagine making this up...it's too vivid and too bizarre.

I've never hurt or been tempted to hurt a child. I only wish that I broke the cycle for Coach well enough that he was done. I'm quite sure there were others before me and others after, thought these recent memories seem to suggest that we went further into this game than he had previously. There's a part of me that has always wished I could have given him what he needed so he wouldn't have kept looking for it.

My repetition of the cycle seems to be much more tied to seducing older men, playing out whatever fantasies of theirs I could figure out, and longing for the holding that I hoped would follow. They're all wounded boys to me, and I have something they need, if I can just get it right without hurting them -- but I assume I'll end up hurting them in the end. I've never been quite able to put all of that together before, but that's a driving anxiety in my life.

I want to take responsibility for that behavior...to stop the seduction game and find some other way to honor the adult wounded boys I meet without dishonoring the adult wounded boy I am. I've spent the last 12 years in a relationship that started out with this game, but continues to insist on being more, and that's been and incredible life sustaining gift. I know that other men have held the formal authority and power in most of the sexual situations in my life. Almost always by age, and usually in several other ways. But I've made a life raft out of being the dirty little secret that cuts through the bullshit to the most vulnerable parts of men. I don't even know how I do it. It's like some weird mutant power that I never asked for, like those comic book heroes and villains who are forever transformed after the nuclear accident.

But a piece of me thinks that skill predated this stuff with Coach -- that I learned or figured out how to penetrate people to their cores somewhere very early on. Every tool is a weapon if you hold it right...but I guess that means every weapon can be a tool, too. I don't want that kind of power, but if I give it up I'm afraid I'll have no power at all. If I can't make you want me to make it all better, so much that you'd risk everything for it, then you've always got the power to hurt me first and deeper.

13 years of therapy, and all I've learned is how to name what's wrong with that thinking (yes, I know there's plenty in the ramblings above that is askew) -- but I still live out of it. Power is multidirectional. It may not have been for me when I was 12, but it is now. If I can't learn to risk being hurt, my only options are to isolate or continue to seek power over others. I'm tired of both of those strategies.

I just want to learn how to do friendship with men. Is that too much to ask?

 

[Leosha]

To answer the question of your subject title, I think there is really nothing to much to ask, just some things may need to be asked in different ways.

Now, to be honest, I read very little of your post. I am in a fairly 'good place' right now, and not to easily triggered by the sexual abuse things (mine right now are more emotional, needing, that kind of thing). But when I read you talking of your coach as the primary perp, I was able to read a few other sentences only, and that was all. Obviously something unsettled in me some, but there are very few people here that I have seen who were abused by a sport coach, and I guess just that triggered something off in me.

I am sorry of what happened, I know that whatever it was, was not your fault, just as none of it was for any of us.

Leosha

 

[ForeverFighting]

Thanks for posting that. True, that coach may have been needy--maybe we're all a little needy in some ways--but he had a responsibility to not hurt a child.

I know I lived, and still live, trying to give to these needy abusers. When I do the best and do the least acting out is when I let the blame lie right squarely where it belongs. It was my dad's fault, my uncle's fault. It was your coach's fault. We were kids. And if the older abusers were needy or needed therapy, it wasn't a young boy's responsibility to fix them. And I don't think a boy can cure his abuser by being raped. That is emotional stuff. And yeah, I think that triggered me. I can't believe how hard you're working on those tough memories.

We're here for you. It's an insidious training. Even if I'm in therapy forever, I will never understand how a big bad guy can convince us that everything they did was our fault. And we still believe it! How is that possible? I just try to remember how old I was. That it was personality shaping under the worst possible circumstances. Like some young trees in my backyard that were covered with deadwood years ago. I just cleaned out the deadwood. The trees have grown, but they're all gnarled and deformed because they had to grow around all that junk. Maybe that's a bad example, because I don't believe I'm deformed. I guess the advantage is that I can try to stand tall again where my trees will always be just a little crooked. Or maybe it is a good example. I don't know.

Hang in there. And don't let the deadwood win.

 

[bda]

Thanks, y'all.