FANTASIES THAT INCLUDE ABUSE

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Before you read the following, I want to once again forewarn those who may find this particular post very triggering, besides being very explicit it deals with sadomasochists.

Typing this entry was difficult for me even though I read it ahead of time, but once it is put on "paper" there is more of a realization to it.

Please take gentle care:

“Many survivors can feel sexually aroused or have orgasms only if sex incorporates some aspect of the abuse they experienced as children. One woman could climax only if she imagined her father’s face. One could come only if she was stimulated the same way her mother had touched her clitoris when she was a child. Others have orgasms only if they imagine being bounded or raped or if they fantasize being the abuser themselves. One survivor described masturbating while reading incest literature: “For weeks on end I compulsively read about incest-If I Should Die Before I Wake in one hand and my vibrator in the other.”

Most women feel ashamed to admit they have such feelings or fantasies. A fifty-six-year-old psychotherapist, who was tortured with enemas when she was a child, explains:

I felt grossed out by my own sexuality. At times I’ve felt that my sexuality was grotesque and that it was sick and that it would land me in the hospital. When other people bring up the grosser details of their sexual abuse, I’m fascinated. Everything else just pales and I go right straight to it like a starving dog.

I have tremendous sadomasochistic fantasies which are just beginning to come out after seven and a half years of therapy. That’s because of the intense shame. I have hospital fantasies, concentration camp fantasies, slicing people’s bodies up fantasies. So naturally I had to keep my sexuality, my life energy, bottled up, because I felt so ashamed and terrified of where that stuff would take me.

When the fantasies first came up in therapy, I experienced a lot of destructive rage at myself. I wanted to kill myself. I was so horrified that those were the things that turned me on. I just wonder if that isn’t really the hard core, the pivot of this whole thing-the shame and horror and utter self -despair about being turned on by terribly abusive, sadistic situations.

If you share this woman’s experience, you are not to blame. You did not create these fantasies out of nothing. They were forced on you just as intrusively as those hands, penises, or leers were forced on you during the original abuse.

The context in which we first experience sex affects us deeply. Often there is a kind of imprinting in which all the things that are going on at the same time become woven together. So if you experienced violation, humiliation, and fear at the same time as you experienced arousal and pleasurable genital feelings, these elements twisted together, leaving you with emotional and physical legacies that link pleasure with pain, love with humiliation desire with an imbalance of power. Shame, secrecy, danger, and the forbidden feel thrilling.” (The Courage to Heal)

In the next entry, from the book, I will share the possibility of reversing these fantasies/acting out however difficult it may be.