Soon after this terrible incident, Tori lost her virginity to a boy from school. “The next day, he called me a whore to his friends,” she confided. Tori vowed she would never let a guy have power over her again. She broke up with the boy and pretended not to be hurt. To cover the pain of her neglect and loneliness, Tori’s sexual behavior escalated. She began meeting and having sex with boys she didn’t know, and then not seeing them again. She didn’t have sex with boys she knew from school, believing she could somehow salvage her reputation as a good girl. Now, as a woman, she wonders, “Who was I kidding? I talked about sex all the time. My girlfriends knew there was something different about me.”
Tori always felt unique among her peers. She felt her interest in sex raised her to a higher, more sophisticated status. Yet underneath this feeling of superiority was a sad sense of shame. When Tori was fifteen, more chaos entered her family. Her sister and brother engaged in a court battle against one another. Her brother was accused of assaulting her sister. During this time, Tori’s life was spinning out of control. Her weight plummeted from 112 to 87 pounds, her mother lost the bridal shop, and her parents declared bankruptcy.
In an effort to escape the shame and pain of her situation, Tori’s sexual acting out intensified. At sixteen, Tori met a much older man at a nearby gym. She recalls an instant attraction. The man took her to his house that same day. Tori describes the following scene: “He penetrated me anally and it hurt so bad. He bit me during oral sex, and it was so painful that my legs were shaking. I was scared … I had never done this before. I just froze and left my body. I remember there was a woman in his house when I got there, but she left. She must have known what was going to happen. When I got home, I remember putting a temporary tattoo on my neck to hide his teeth marks. I remember feeling really dirty. I never went back to that gym. I thought it was my fault. It took me a long time to realize it was rape.”
As Tori tells her story, it comes out in pieces, almost like she’s choking. The trauma of the rape still echoes in her voice. Her body still carries fear and shame. After this horrifying experience, her behavior intensified:
“My life became more sexualized in college. I was constantly flirting, and working out and trying to look the best I could. No one’s boyfriend was safe around me. I slept with whomever I wanted to. I remember my mom telling me that since I wasn’t blond and blue-eyed, I’d never be beautiful, and I think I spent all my time trying to compensate for that. Everything in my world was about sex—the music I listened to and the clothes I put on. I lived to make men want me. I wanted to be the girl a guy was thinking about when he had sex with his girlfriend. I wanted to be his fantasy. If my father hadn’t been sending me plenty of money each week, I would have been a stripper or an escort.”
Tori learned from listening to guys talk that there was a right way and a wrong way to please a guy sexually, and she wanted to know the right way. When Tori met Todd, who was thirty and divorced, she was determined to “please” him the right way so she gave him oral sex. After he had an orgasm, he told her, “No woman has ever been able to make me orgasm like that!” Tori felt wonderful. Oral sex gave her an illusion of complete power. After about a year, however, Tori struggled with ever-present feelings of insecurity and fear of abandonment as her feelings for Todd increased. To compensate, she began having sex with other men besides Todd to boost her illusion of strength and independence. The relationship with Todd lasted three years, and Tori’s need for sex grew stronger as her feelings of insecurity grew more acute. Sex provided her a temporary escape from unbearable feelings, but created an insatiable, addictive need for sexual power and control.
Then Tori met Chad. She broke up with Todd one weekend and started dating Chad the next. Chad was Tori’s age, educated, and making plans to join the Navy. Tori wanted to be faithful to Chad. She wanted this relationship to be different from her others. She recalls that Chad masturbated every day and watched porn. He had a sister who was a porn star. His father had paid for a “boob job” for Chad’s sister when she entered the sex industry. None of these issues were red flags for Tori. She thought she was in love.
Like many sex and love addicts, Tori found a partner who came from a family just like hers. She and Chad both came from backgrounds where sex infused the family environment. Tori recalled that within the first ten days of knowing Chad, they had sex seventeen times. She thought that he must really love her to want her so much. At age twenty-two, she felt so powerful. Yet when Chad suddenly broke up with her, Tori was stunned and began to crumble. Something in her gave up on the idea of love. She decided to go back to using men for sex. Her decision illustrates the resignation that happens for women who become addicted to sex. When relationships are too painful to provide an illusion of love, sex becomes the substitute.
Barbara
Barbara came from an upper-middle-class family. Her father was a doctor, her mother a homemaker. Barbara recalled happy times with her father before she was four years old. She remembered him as warm and kind: “He held me and smiled at me.” Barbara doesn’t have pleasant memories of her mother though. She recalled her mother being unaffectionate and unloving while always ironing, gardening, or cleaning. She also remembered her mother having a vodka martini each night before dinner. Her mother threw lavish parties to entertain her husband’s colleagues. Barbara helped out with these events to earn her mother’s approval, but it never seemed to work. Barbara felt disconnected from her mother, which intensified her yearning for her father’s attention.
When Barbara turned four, there was a family incident that left her feeling afraid and confused. In Barbara’s words, “Standing at the top of the stairwell, and they were taking my dad away on a stretcher. They were taking him away and I didn’t know why, and I didn’t know if I’d ever see him again.” Barbara was left alone and has no memory of what happened the rest of that day. Where was her mother? Why didn’t she help Barbara make sense of what happened? Was her father physically ill or did he suffer some type of emotional breakdown?
When her father was taken from their home, Barbara thought he might be dying. She felt profoundly frightened and abandoned. Today, she still has trouble processing the memory of the event and cannot recall what the rest of her family did to cope, or even what exactly happened to her father. For these reasons, an event that could have been painful but not traumatic, became tragic. After her father’s episode, Barbara remembers her family as cold and distant. Her parents weren’t affectionate with each other and seemed to be emotionally shut down. Her father had unpredictable moods. On a good day, he could play with Barbara in the backyard or read her a bedtime story. But on a bad day, he had an explosive temper and became physically abusive. Since Barbara had bonded with her father early in her life, she was shocked by his new behavior and totally unprepared for it. Her father was once her refuge. Now he seemed lost to her. She couldn’t make sense of his abusive treatment, so she internalized that something must be wrong with her.
Barbara spent her energy trying to regain her father’s warm attention. She excelled in school to please him. She tried to adapt to his moods, spending hours with him watching baseball on TV. When he raged, she tried to soothe him. She studied him and tried to be like him. But eventually she became weary. To soothe herself, she turned to food. She craved ice cream, candy bars, and chocolate. The sugar helped her hide the emptiness she felt inside.
When a child works hard to earn a parent’s love and approval, she has no time to develop her own interests or desires. She lives to please someone else. Personality development is stunted, and the results are painful. Underneath the attempts to please a caregiver grows anger and sadness. Unconsciously, the child wonders, “Who is there for me? Why do I have to earn love?” When Barbara became a teenager, her attempts to connect with her father changed. She began provoking his anger, preferring the intensity of an argument to his painful dismissal. Their fighting resembled an unhappy married couple more than a father-daughter