I had fleeting moments of intimacy that were blurred by total drunkenness, so I was really lost. To avoid dealing with all the uncomfortable feelings that came along with it, I found myself emotionally detaching during sex. I would lay there while he was inside me, moaning on cue, trying to do and say all the things that I thought should be said during sex: “Oh yeah, come on, baby.” But I was as flat as an iron. If he tried to look into my eyes, all he would see was a distant, empty void where I imagined true emotions and intimacy should be. Instead of being present, I was off in my safe place of detachment. I would just mentally float away and create visual places where I was free or safe. Sometimes I would be swimming in the ocean and feeling the sunshine on my face. Other times I would be flying high above the clouds and feeling light as a feather, where no one could hurt me. There I didn’t have to deal with the fact that someone was invading me and that I didn’t enjoy it the way I was told I was supposed to.
Instead, I floated while Matt fucked, as I had always done during sex.
I learned later in therapy that this is a common phenomenon for women who have been sexually assaulted. With my introduction to sex coming in the form of an assault, everything afterward was a mess. How can anyone really expect a person not to be confused? Love and sex got all intermingled and twisted in my head and intrinsically became one for me. I thought sex was supposed to be this uncomfortable obligation I had to offer up to men to gain acceptance and love. I was extremely promiscuous growing up—not because I liked sex, or guys for that matter, but because I thought that was how one obtained love and acceptance. That was what I knew. That was what I had learned. No one taught me differently.
This is where many people get confused about young girls and their behaviors. Often folks just shake their judgmental heads briskly back and forth in disgust at the displays of many misguided young females. What people don’t understand or realize is that the majority of the times you see a young girl acting in the manners I did—dressing provocatively, flirting like crazy with any boy that moves—these are clear warning signs or indicators that she was probably at some point sexually abused. She isn’t a slut or a whore or another label society would immediately assign out of assumption. She is most likely scared, confused, hurting, and deeply, deeply violated in some way, and she is acting out in the only way she knows how. Young people do not usually verbalize their feelings. I never had the ability to articulate my feelings, but boy, if people had just paid close enough attention to my actions long enough, they would have seen I was really screaming out for help.
I was so screwed up in my head that I used sex as a way to gain attention. The terrible thing was that I never wanted to actually engage in sexual activity. I just wanted someone to pay attention to me, to hold me, to tell me I was pretty and worthy, even to just see me. Sex came as part of this deal with most men, because, let’s face it, if they think they can get it, they will try. Sex was uncomfortable for me, and most times I hated every second of it, but during those moments at least I wasn’t alone. Someone was paying attention to me, and in my mind, I guess, loving me. My idea of love was royally screwed up also.
The love I got from my parents had been dysfunctional. My mother would say she loved me while telling me what a bad person I was. And my father, well, he always told me he loved me, but he was rarely around when I needed him. The love I sought from men was unhealthy and was not love at all, but abuse, lust, sex, and pain. I wouldn’t have known what true, unconditional love was if it had come up and slapped me in the face, so how exactly was I supposed to love Matthew? How was I supposed to give him something I didn’t possess myself? How was I supposed to love him unconditionally when all the love I had ever received or given was filled with expectations and conditions, whether they were spelled out or in my head?
I didn’t know how to tell him I just wanted to be his friend. I couldn’t find the words to tell him that, while this was a nice distraction for a while, I was just not into it. I was barely in touch with my own feelings, so how was I to try and explain to him what they were? I never had the ability to communicate my true feelings to people, especially if they were going to be potentially hurt or would hold me accountable in some way. I was incredibly codependent in this way. I would set my feelings or my needs aside, always for the sake of another. I did this even when I wasn’t getting anything positive out of a relationship. I didn’t know how to break this cycle just yet.
But I knew enough to recognize that this relationship with Matt was potentially as damaging as my substance abuse. I just wasn’t quite sure yet how to open my mouth up and allow truth to flow out of it without fearing the outcomes, the rejection, the pain, the guilt. I still wasn’t sure how to put myself and my needs first. So I just sipped my coffee as he swooped down and gave me a quick peck on the cheek before he and his father went off to work. I stiffened, and he left the house with no clue that I was sickened to my core.
Whenever he would try to talk to me about “us,” I would just smile and say everything was okay. Matt and I would often go to meetings together, and I could tell from the vibe we got from many people in the rooms that our relationship wasn’t looked upon fondly. After all, we were each supposed to be focused on ourselves, but it was apparent that we were only focusing on each other.
My father and stepmother weren’t thrilled that I was living with a guy at that time either, but they managed to be okay with it because I was sleeping in a separate room. I think in many ways they were just so happy I was not home while trying to learn to maintain my recovery. We all knew my chances for recovery would have been slim at home. They encouraged me every day to find an apartment or place of my own. I needed to do the next right thing and take care of myself. It was becoming clearer that I was going to have to step up to the plate and take a swing—one that would unfortunately hit right in Matt’s heart.
NAVIGATING THIS NEW STATE OF RECOVERY WAS SCARY and I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with my life, so I hung on tightly to a famous slogan in twelve-step fellowships: “Take it one day at a time.” Twelve-step slogans are the best because they just bring things home in a simple way, like “Keep it simple, stupid,” or “Progress, not perfection.” Some of them saved my life and sanity in the first couple of years I was in recovery.
I didn’t have a job at first; I thought it would be best to just take it easy for a while. Everything was so strange for me. The world around me felt very large, so I kept my reality based in the rooms of recovery. I worked the Twelve Steps daily by writing, going to meetings, praying at night, and doing a daily inventory of my actions. Each night I would sit down and assess my day and ask myself certain questions: Did I harm anyone today? Was I honest in my encounters with others? Was I true to myself? Were there any verbal amends I needed to make to anyone? This assessment was a great tool we used in rehab to help keep ourselves accountable in our recovery. After all, I am human and this was a whole new way of life, so making mistakes was common, but it was what I did with those errors in judgment that mattered. Did I learn from the mistake? Did I try to make things right? These were the thoughts that flooded my mind at night before I said my prayers and went to sleep. It certainly made hitting the pillow and drifting off to sleep much easier to do.
I made sure I hit a meeting every day. It was my only connection to people, because usually I stayed in the house watching Oprah, smoking cigarettes, and eating everything I could get my hands on. Matt’s father was very much a meat-and-potatoes kind of guy, and we lived in a rural area that was not conducive to my vegetarian lifestyle. So I found myself eating junk food—chips, cookies, macaroni and cheese from the box—all food with little nutritional value. Mostly I was eating out of boredom and