Self-Rape of a Youth
I spent years raping myself. I spent years violating my heart and soul by separating them from my body that I would leave behind for someone else’s pleasure.
I was young. I was wounded by a life event and I didn’t have the coping mechanisms to recover in a healthy way so I did the best I could with the limited tool set I had at the time. I survived in the short-term, but the lasting effects would reverberate throughout my life well into adulthood.
I am a recovering people pleaser. I spent so much of my youth trying to make everyone happy. One day my best friend, who had been my family since I was two was suddenly taken away from me. One day she was at school with me the next I was told she had been moved to a different school under the dark cloak of night. Apparently, I had displeased her mother, I was thirteen at the time. Her absence was a devastating death, one that was made very clear by her mother to be my fault. As a people pleaser the lesson was clear: if you displease someone you love you will lose them. This untruth has led to a lot of decisions made for the wrong reasons and a fuck ton of self-inflicted trauma.
So, as you can imagine at the age of thirteen when boys and girls just start to discover each other, and the wild world of teen dating starts I had this traumatic event that left me with a completely misguided idea of love and abandonment.
What followed was years of me being the “good girl” I was expected to be throughout my search for love. I would take my heart and soul and put them in a box and shove them onto a shelf in the closet and leave my body in another room to be used. I raped myself. I was a willing participant. I authorized every touch, I consented but believe me it was a violation. And I had no one to blame but myself.
This destructive self-rape went on for years. And in the moments I would return to the box that stored my heart and soul I would feel shame. I felt unworthy, no I felt worthless. The guilt and shame caused me to start to build a wall around myself steadily putting bricks between myself and my closet friends. Because I felt so ashamed of who I was I didn’t want my girlfriends to see me. Eventually the wall I built did it’s intended job and ended those friendships and further cemented me into my prison.
I spent years living a body separated from her heart and soul. Sex was just an obligatory act that needed to be completed as requested. My body was not mine to have ownership over. I became so disconnected from my body still to this day being nearly naked does not phase me in the slightest. It is just my body.
When I married my first husband this morphed somehow into, I can have ownership of my body to the extent that my body now belonged to my husband I didn’t have to allow anyone else to have it. I was subletting my body from my husband temporarily throughout the day while we were apart. But still my body belonged to him and not me. And bless his heart he was so delicate with my body, but still it was supposed to be mine and not his.
When I divorced my ex-husband, this is when something miraculously and blessedly shifted in my life. Not immediately but eventually. I was for the first time ever in my life an adult and single. An actual real adult with children, bills and a minivan. And I had no one I was obligated to please. This bears repeating, I DID NOT HAVE ANYONE I WAS RESPONSIBLE TO PLEASE. It was the most liberating moment of my life and set off an explosion of growth. Growth towards self-love, boundaries and a remodeling of what love and abandonment mean to me.
Now I am conscious to make sure my heart, soul and body are aligned, and I am the person in charge of my body. I know now I do not have to give my body away to please someone else, nor do I have to give my body away to be worthy of love from my partner. And if I decide for whatever reason in a specific moment, I am not comfortable sharing my body my partner will not abandon me.
I think more women struggle with this then they openly talk about it. And I think it is something we should be talking about, supporting each other’s healing and letting the next generation know they need to give themselves the freedom to take ownership of their bodies.
I have forgiven myself for my past over and over again. And somedays I have to forgive myself again. It is a constant revolving door of furiously forgiving myself and loving myself unabashedly. Because I am worthy. Because I did the best I could then and I do better now.
