My story - sex

The last two posts I have written that dealt with childhood abuse and the rape have left me very raw and exposed. I knew that would happen when I started writing. At this point in my recovery process, I am opening doors and windows I have chosen to slam shut for years. No matter how much I may try to will it away, these things are a part of my history. And, unless I deal with them, I will never move on to the next phase of my life. That’s why I’m here writing about sex, an absolutely soul bearing prospect.

Being abused and raped left me a broken person and it has taken every ounce of courage I have in my body to get up and walk forward. Amazingly, God has given me the gift of forgiveness towards these two perpetrators. I do not sit here today feeling hatred for them and the actions they took toward me. I see them as sick individuals who, I pray, someday get the help they need. As a way of somehow protecting myself against future hurt, I have built carefully constructed walls to keep people away from me. I was never anti-social. I just didn’t allow people to get really close to me.

One of the areas that this is absolutely the case is with men. I love men, adore them. There is something that a man gives me that a woman never could (and, no, no the obvious). After the rape, I stayed as far away as I could from men emotionally and certainly physically. Granted, I was 13 years old at the time, so I hadn’t completely bloomed into a woman quite yet. However, I was interested in the opposite sex. As someone who was raped, though, I avoided them. I was just scared it would happen again. It was easy to avoid them … I just put on a lot of weight. That wasn’t my idea at the time, just something that I did to somehow take away the internal pain I was feeling. When friends started hanging out with guys, I didn’t. Not that I had a lot of offers anyway. Guys don’t typically go for the fat girl in the crowd as a teenager.

At school, I stopped hanging around with friends. When it was lunchtime, I went to the library everyday. I was very lonely and sad, but at least I could avoid the fact that guys weren’t attracted to me. I didn’t trust them anyway. I was sure someone else would hurt me in my life and I just didn’t think I could handle it. When I was 16, there was a neighbor guy who would give me rides to school everyday. We became friends and, later, he became attracted to me. I remember that he kissed me and it reminded me of the rapist. This had nothing to do with him. He was a perfectly lovely, decent person. I started to distance myself from him. He asked me to the prom and I told him thanks but no thanks. I know I hurt him, I know I did. I just wasn’t ready to deal with how I was feeling inside. What was going on inside of me was that I wanted to be with a guy, but I was too scared. Would he see me as damaged goods? Would he realize how ugly I thought myself to be and leave me? Was I no fun any longer?

I didn’t date. No one asked me on dates. I felt hideous, like this horrible beast walking the streets. The boys in the neighborhood paid attention to me once in a while because I had big breasts, but it was more of a Ripley’s Believe It or Not sort of thing. I was feeling very alone and kept on eating. Over time, some of my brother’s friends would hit on me but really it was the same old thing about them wanting to see what was under my clothes. Still, no one knew about the rape and I was starting to forget it, too. I mean, I never really forgot it but it was starting to consume my every waking thought less and less. I was feeling very rejected and I continued to eat. I'm not really sure that I actually was being rejected, but I lived in an all or nothing world after what happened.

I isolated in all areas of my life. I could always be the funny girl when I felt I needed to be, but mostly I was very sad. I realized at that time that a guy would only want to be with me if I was prettier, skinnier or if I would have sex with them. I so wanted to be in a relationship but I trusted no one. I always wanted to be the one to hurt them before they hurt me. And, frankly, the idea of sex scared me. Was what I had experienced at 13 what sex was all about? My parents never had the talk with me. I didn’t know what love was. I just saw the example I had in my life and it wasn’t good.

I came to the point in my life that I had come to accept the fact that I was going to be alone. No one wanted me, no one even paid any attention to me. I certainly didn’t help matters but being standoffish, defensive, distant and all the other things I chose to protect myself against hurt. So, I decided that I was going to give up trying and I would just be one of those sad few who would be alone. I spent my time working, living on my own so I could eat whatever I wanted. I had blown off what few friendships I had. Food was my constant companion.

Fast forward several years to 1997. I was 26. I came to OA for the second time (I had come before that but was not done doing research in my disease). I got a sponsor and started working my steps. I did the best I could do then, but I still wasn’t ready for recovery. By that point, I was still alone, had never been on one single date. I felt like a total loser. I was 385 pounds at my highest. The walls were still up and solid. I was losing weight in recovery, having lost about 100 pounds that first year. I still didn’t trust people, especially men. I got very close to my first sponsor, as well as her husband (DJ) and the child they had. He was the man that I would have sex with for the first time after the rape.

Talking about my sexual history is very difficult and all I can think about in this moment is that I really hope no one judges me too harshly. Of course, no one could think worse of me than I did at that time. My first sponsor was a wonderful person to me, became a friend and I ended up having a 5-year relationship with her husband. It didn’t start out that way. We were all friends. Then they moved away and he and I got closer over the Internet. I talked to him a lot, just as I did with her. But he and I would have late night conversations online and things went in the wrong direction over time. I take full responsibility – I was definitely an active participant just as he was. It's not as if one of us convinced the other that this is what we should do.

DJ and I had become friends before anything happened between us. He knew everything about me and I knew everything about him. I spent so much time talking to him and avoided “real” relationships. When it was time to talk to him, I would stop what I was doing and go home. I went to visit them for a couple of weeks and that was the first time we had sex. I felt like scum in one instance because of what I was doing with him and to her. On the other hand, I felt safe with him. While we were intimate, I never felt scared that he would rape me. We connected and I never thought about that awful night when I was 13. Here was a man who desired to be with me and I took that at face value. He knew my history and was very gentle with me at first. I can't begin to describe how special that was for me.

After I came back home from that trip, I learned that she found evidence of DJ and I together. I was prepared for her to be spitting angry with me, but she wasn’t. She ended our friendship, plain and simple. I understood and apologized to her. But how could a simple apology ever even make a dent towards healing based on what I did? I knew it couldn’t, but I had to own up to my part and apologize anyway. I felt like I never deserved her friendship in the first place. I didn’t talk to him for a while, but then the conversations started up again. There’s no way for me to properly convey how low I felt … I knew I should stay away from him but something also made it impossible for me to do so. He was having feelings for me and I was having them for him, too. Not only was I incredibly attracted to him, but I think I was in love with him. We saw each other on business trips, stayed together when we could. I always felt horrible towards myself, called myself every awful name ever invented. Yet, when I was with him, I felt beautiful, desired, loved. He looked into my eyes and I could see it in him. No one had ever made me feel like that. I felt peaceful with him and I can’t say I had ever felt peace in my life up to that point.

Over the years, we talked about being together, even talked about getting married and some day having children together. He was miserable in his marriage, reluctant to leave because of his daughter and I certainly was not forcing the issue. I didn’t want to be the one to force anyone to leave a marriage. Being with him was safe in the sense that I didn’t have to put myself out there in the world. I didn’t have to be vulnerable or even available. Besides, I loved him, so common sense went out the window. I didn’t want to let go of what he was giving me. He made me feel so many wonderful things and I just couldn’t bear the thought of letting that go. However, over time, the guilt, shame and remorse were getting to me. I knew what I was doing was wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. My father raised me better than this. I was turning into my mother, who had many affairs during the course of their marriage and then in subsequent marriages.

Finally, I talked with DJ and told him he was going to have to make a decision. He decided he wanted to be with me and started making plans on making that happen. Meanwhile, I was in quite a dilemma. I was a single girl with a sex drive that had finally kicked into high gear and I was dating a married man who was taking his sweet time with me. So I told him that I wanted to be with other men since he was married. He had no hold over me, I thought to myself. Maybe this will make him take action quicker. I loved him, but he wasn’t satisfying my needs. I needed to find someone who could.

So, that’s what I did. I set up a separate account online and put myself out there to men. It was amazingly easy to find men online since all I was interested in was sex. I'm not saying I'm so hot that I had no problem finding men ... just that it's easy online. That’s all I wanted from them. I didn’t want to make friends or date. Sex is a way of abusing myself further, just like the food managed to do. So I started to have sex with strangers that I desired. I’d have conversations with them online to get to know them a little better first, but then it was on. What was interesting to me was that I refused to be with any married men (as if I had moral standards or something). I figured one married man was enough for me.

So I met men, mostly in my home. I also met them at hotels and occasionally at their homes. I have to say that I am damn lucky nothing ever happened to me. I didn't go on dates with them. There were some that would come over and we'd watch TV shows or movies together, but the purpose of getting together was always about sex. I had oral sex, full intercourse, even group sex. I had several partners that were with me on a regular basis and some that I met just once. I had sex every day of the week if I could. Often times, it was with a different man each day. When I was with these men, I made it a point to choose men that I was physically attracted to only. I didn’t want an emotional attachment whatsoever. They were guys my age or younger, athletic types. My inhibitions were out the window and I did what I wanted to do with them. My sexual appetite was never, ever satisfied. I always wanted more. I never let them sleep the night with me. There was one that I did that with mistakenly and I couldn’t sleep the entire night. I just wanted him out of the house.

With these men, I had fun in the moment. Just like with the food, it still tasted good in the beginning of my binges. However, the more times I was with men, the more I needed it. I felt incredible emptiness and aloneness when they were gone and I needed to go out and score more. I told DJ everything that was going on. I think I was trying to hurt him with what I was doing. He told me he understood I had needs he could not fulfill in the moment. I can’t even begin to imagine the number of men I was with, easily 30. Probably more, but that’s at least a good beginning guess. This behavior went on for at least a year, maybe even two, possibly three. That part is a blur to me and the semantics don't even really matter. I didn’t tell anyone, I didn’t dare tell anyone. Meanwhile, my married man was still not with me.

I was starting to tire of this double life I was leading. Professional by day, sexpot at night. One day, a guy I was talking to online wanted to be with me. I was not really feeling like I wanted to be with anyone. Then he told me he would pay me. That part wasn’t as offensive as the thought in my head that I actually considered it. I knew I was done. I knew my life was spiraling down, completely out of control. I told one of my friends, who personally knew who DJ was, what was going on. She didn’t know about the sex with all the other guys, but she finally knew the identity of the mystery man in my life. She felt completely betrayed, which she was. I lied to her, just like I lied to everyone else in my life. It created a horrible strain on our friendship.

So, after many more months of being strung along with excuse after excuse of why DJ and I weren’t together, I hit my bottom. My food was completely out of control and my life of deception with men was completely out of control, too. I asked God to come back into my life and help me. That night, I got abstinent, January 7, 2005. Shortly thereafter, I ended my relationship with DJ as well as stopped seeing all the men for sex.

Since that time, I have been doing a lot of work to recover. I told my sponsor absolutely everything without going into graphic details of my sex life. I was sure I would go to my grave with the truth of my sex life buried deep inside of me. I confessed everything to God and asked that Jesus come into my life and forgive me. It took at long time for me to get over DJ. My heart was absolutely broken and I cried a lot. I cried because I loved him so very much and I didn't know how to be in this world without him. I cried because I acted out with a married man and many other men. I cried because I wondered if I would ever feel the love in my heart again like I felt when I was with DJ. There was a period of time that DJ and I spoke again for a couple of months to talk about what happened. I changed, though, and he did not. I was no longer willing to be the other woman. I knew God had different plans for me.

I have not dated since that time. Part of that has been on purpose and part of it is because I know there's work to do with me before I can even begin to be in a healthy relationship with a man. Some of the walls that have surrounded me are starting to come down, but it’s a painfully slow process. I feel like I'm taking a bendable chisel to Mt. Everest. I understand that all of the hurt in my life, either created by other people towards me or hurt I created towards myself and others takes time to heal. I get to do things differently and in a healthy way. There is a man at work right now that is attracted to me and I am attracted to him, but he is married. The attraction is very intense, but I do not want to go there again, so I am doing things to take care of myself. Part of that is being honest with my sponsor and following the direction she gives me.

I am a precious child of God and I know that today. However, I am scared of taking risks and of being vulnerable. When someone tells me they think I’m pretty, I choose to practice acceptance by saying thank you. Do you know how incredibly difficult that is? So much of my life, I have felt very ugly. But, the truth is that I am not an ugly person. I am a flawed human being who is working very hard at overcoming the past. Yes, I was abused. Yes, I was raped. Yes, I have acted out very inappropriately. Now, I get to heal. I trust that God will put a very special person in my life one day. I do not want to be as sick as my secrets. That is why I have chosen to blog and to be honest when I do so. I am not the same person any longer. In the same vain, I will not be the same person I am today even six months from now. I have learned a lot from the past. This is not just about the food. I see now it never has been.