Pandora’s Box
Today, I’m supposed to start going to a KAP run support group for women who survived childhood and teenage sexual abuse or assault who later survived adult sexual assault. This is Master’s idea. He says I’m ready to face my past and I’m entirely not so sure. I thought I had faced it, honestly, because I’m actually feeling pretty well about my life and I’m not depressed and my flash back episodes are minimal, but I still can’t go out alone. I still can’t function in stores without help. I still have anxiety attacks if I’m alone. I panic if the door is left the least bit open or if it’s ever unlocked for any reason. I don’t go outside if there are people in the yard. I’m afraid of all my neighbors. I don’t open the door if people knock and I wasn’t expecting anyone and I don’t ride the bus because I can’t see the bus stop from my house or the house from the bus stop. I haven’t worked outside of the home in nearly 6 years. My overwhelming fear of people, mainly men, is really stagnating my life as a human being and I’m so happy cradled in the comfort of Master’s protection that I don’t want to change anything.
I feel like we’re about to open Pandora’s Box.
The book that my new support group uses is nearly 700 pages long. It’s called The Courage To Heal and is actually a highly controversial book. I was told by the group leader that I should not really read the book very much at a time because it is so triggering and cuts right to the quick of so many issues. I’ve read the first 4 pages called “self assessment”. It’s the part of the book that asks me to look at my life and see where I am and accept where I am. I barely skimmed it and found myself unable to speak for several hours. I was just holding so much anger at how stagnant my life has become. I felt imprisoned by my past in that moment.
A little background: My Major abuser was a Baptist Minister on a mission from God. He had 14 daughters of his own, all abused from what I understand. It started almost immediately after we came to the United States. I was an easy target because I really didn’t speak English. I was all of 4 years old and I was being babysat by his wife. When I was 13, I was ready to tell, but my mother wasn’t ready to hear me. She cut me off before I could speak of it and said “If you are seducing this married man, God won’t forgive you and I will beat you” and that was enough to silence me and put me into this place of shame for 5 more years until I was 18 and able to tell my therapist without consequence. By that time though, I was pretty messed up as far as what I thought a woman’s relationship to men should be. On one hand, I had this incredibly warm, intelligent, and loving father who seemed to me exactly what a good woman deserved. On the other hand, I was dealing with this Baptist preacher who through my silence fooled my entire family into believing he was a saint and should be absolute trusted. On top of that, I was having my first consensual relationship with a male with my High School History teacher. It had been going on since I was 15. In all of that, the only man who could have protected me, my Father, I chose to keep in the dark. He never knew what happened to me. I never ever told him. My mother was told by my Therapist but she chose to stay in denial. I love her and forgive her, though. So that leads me to this…
Most psychiatrists say that we recreate the relationships we had as children when we become adults and if they are negative experiences, we still recreate them. I’ve often wondered about that. Is it that my first relationships with men were painful and sexual that I now desire relationships that are sexually painful? Am I trying to recreate my past negative sexual experiences that I could not control as positive current experiences that I do now control (somewhat). I don’t know. They also say that girls always want a man like their fathers, but my father never ever laid a hand on me. He spanked me once when I broke a window when I was 6 but after that, HE cried and couldn’t spank me again ever because he just loved me too much to ever cause me any pain at all. I was spoiled rotten by my father. He loved me to the day he died and sacrificed so much for me to have a good life. I often feel guilty for not having a better life than I do to repay him for the amazing life he gave me. See.. this is the stuff I struggle with.
WHY am I this way? I mean why did I gravitate so easily toward a form of loving that the rest of the world would consider oppressive and abusive? Why do I crave the same physical stimulation that tortured me when I was a child? Why do I feel a need to be beaten, mistreated, and raped? Why do I consent to it? Why do I love it even though the same treatment at the hands of an abuser RUINED MY ADULT LIFE? Is it because this is all I know? Is it because I don’t emotionally understand how to process love that is gentle? The kind of love my father had for my mother? Why did I slip so easily from actually being abused to living a life where these activities are the goal.
Now, I read something a while back by ClanBear’s becca in which she states that she’s not submissive because she was abused but was abused because at 3 years old she was already a flirty coy submissive with the ability to seek out and illicit D/s behavior from adult males. She, in a sense, blames herself, saying that she was a pretty child and being a pretty child got her into trouble. Now I cannot go this road. I know that as a child, I was not at fault in the least. Even as a teenager, I was not at fault. I don’t blame myself. I never have and I never will. He was the adult and he’s a pedophile. He has a sickness or a compulsion and I was his prey. But other than that, I haven’t come across a lot of information written by submissives or slaves who have been abused. I know for a fact that a large large number of women were abused sexually or otherwise and now are in the BDSM community and find it a healing place, as do I. But what I haven’t figured out is WHY.
Maybe like me, those women are also a little bit or a lot afraid to delve into the meat of the issue and find the connection. For me, finding a connection between being hurt then and not being able to stop it and being hurt now and not *wanting* to be able to stop it means that my whole life and lifestyle is a reaction and I’m still being driven by this abuse that shaped my life. I don’t want that to be at the bottom of this Pandora’s box. It means that I have to reassess everything, look at everything and see it through a different reality. I guess I’m a bit old school. I want to know the root of the issue, the whole pathology of the thing so that I can fix it. I’m to interested in homeostasis that doesn’t include it. I’m not sure why I can’t just “be here now” and accept that I like being beaten. I can’t accept that there’s no REASON that I like it. There has to be. But I’m also afraid that I don’t want to know what it is if knowing will change anything about my life, and I’m sure it will.
The other part of this is Master. Master wants to know if there’s a connection. He wants to know if whether I like it or not, our D/s relationship is keeping me rooted in my past. He wants to know why being beaten, feeling pain, and being forced to have sex is in the plus column when it comes to me. See, he did not come into this relationship with the idea that he was a Dominant. It sort of happened. We had vanilla sex at first. I explained to him that I was kinky. We had rough sex a few times and he liked it, then he started exploring his Dominance and lo and behold, A Master was born and a slave was collared and we became W/we. So now he has questions about whether or not it’s healthy for my healing as a woman. These questions are no doubt fueled by my inability to function in a world of men due to my crippling fear of them. So we’re opening Pandora’s box. Master believes it’s time. I’m not sure, but I know that neither of us will be satisfied that our D/s relationship is based on something healthy, and not just a latent reaction to emotional and physical and sexual abuse until we open the box.
With any luck, Hope will be at the bottom of our Pandora’s box, too, and we’ll be able to let it out.
Expressions, Sacred & Divine |6 Responses to “Pandora’s Box”
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My wife was abused severely by her brother, and she did a fair amount of counseling a few years back. I agree there are a lot of childhood abuse survivors in the lifestyle, and the pros will say almost universally that those who are are modeling behaviour that they learned in the abuse. Your being in a D/s relationship is a symptom of your childhood.
Don’t buy that line without questioning it. My wife needs the D/s for reasons I don’t completely understand, but i do know that she “processes” the original abuse by way of our D/s. When I tie her up and use her…and have her used by other men…part of her does go back to being a little girl when her brother was doing what I am doing. I have been told that I am a secondary abuser taking advantage or her, which is BS. She uses kinky sex to heal from the abuse, and she needs a strong man to keep her in line or else so goes to some bad emotional places. I dare say you will not find anyone to give you an explanation for how D/s works to make a childhood abuse survivor whole again, the subject has been outlawed by the PC (politically correct) police, and the “experts” take all such talk as proof that the speaker is not well.
I hope that you have a better experience with counseling, for us she does not go anymore and we ignore what they said. We know each other well enough to know that for us acting out out our kink is good all the way around, even if we don’t completely understand it, and even if it is very tied to the abuse. If you are ever in doubt over what to believe, your experience or the experts, do yourself a favor and chose your experience.
Hello, Hawkeye
Thank you for your comment. I’ve been in therapy for nearly 12 years with the same therapist. He has been very supportive of my lifestyle but agrees that I need to figure out how much of it is modeling so that I can make sure that I’m not hurting myself with it.
I think my situation is different. I use the love of my Master and his care for me to absolutely shelter myself from the world. I don’t leave home, I don’t work, I don’t live my life because I fear men so much. The only men I don’t fear are the ones who are D/s related. I’m 31 years old. I still have a lot of life ahead of me and I need to get to the bottom of all of this so that I can live my life, pop out some babies, and be a whole human being.
My D/s has not made me whole. I’m actually *more* fractured than I was before it started. (I used to work, I used to have a life, I used to get out more and ride the bus) Since my 24/7 relationship started, I have withdrawn fully from the world with the idea and excuse that only my concern is my slavery and the outside world isn’t important. The truth of that is that I’m very afraid of everything outside my front door and I know that fear stems from my years of abuse.
I’m looking forward to getting back into my life and honestly, If I have to give up D/s for a while (since it seems to be such a crutch for me) to have a real life again, a life outside of the walls of our home and a life without fear of every shadow, then I’m willing to do that, and so is my husband.
I’m not going into counseling this time with the idea that everything I’m doing is healthy and that if they say it isn’t then I need a new therapist. I’m going to a Kink Aware Professional, a psychiatrist who deals primarily with people IN the lifestyle and who is in the lifestyle himself as a Dominant/top so hopefully, the answers I get from him will be honest ones that don’t look at my lifestyle as a sickness, but may find them as a reaction and then help me deal with that.
Good luck to you and your wife and thank you for your honest response and your concern.
Kitten~
Kitten,
I’m glad that you are looking at the relationship, your past and your self. There is healing yet to do, and growth in your life. Your own fear suggests that. Master is right in that you need to find the answers, but you may also find strength. I look forward to a lot of writing as you go through some of this.
Which came first, the chicken or the egg?
Are we submissive because we were abused or would we have been submissive anyway? We’ll never know for sure, because we can’t go back and erase that abusive past.
I think I understand the point that becca is making. I don’t think I was a coy and flirty 5 year old, but I do think I possessed inheritantly submissive traits that made me an easy victim. That doesn’t make me responsible for my own abuse any more than if my abuser chose me because I was a brunette and that was his fetish. I think he chose me because I was quiet, timid, shy and *easily* controlled. Just maybe I have always had a submissive personality and it fell into the wrong hands at first.
So now what?
I used to hate that my submission was ‘tainted’ with the abuse. That there were all of these stigmas attached to it. I wanted that pure submission. I wanted to be able to confidently say that I am a submissive *because* of a,b, and c. But I can’t do that because perhaps I am a submissive because I find comfort in the familiarity of past relationships.
Is it a continuation of abuse? Am I causing further harm to my psyche? If I am suddenly “healed” will I no longer want this? Is Master taking advantage of my “broken spirit”?
No. No. No. And no. I can confidently say that now. I believe it now.
There are two glaringly obvious differences between my past and my present situation. One is choice. I did not have the option of choosing to be abused in the past. Nobody asked me if I wanted it. It was *taken*. The second is outcome. The past abuse left me as an empty shell. I was full of shame and fear and regret and pain. I was withdrawn, unsure, questioned my own sanity. I considered suicide, I hated myself, the world. I found no comfort in anything.
The present? Entirely different. I did choose this. I continue to choose it, actively, on a daily basis. I choose it today and know that if I change my mind tomorrow, I will not be forced to do it anyway (at least not without serious discussion where my feelings are taken into consideration). And the outcome is also vasty different. I don’t come out of this broken or ashamed. I’m cared for and I’m loved and I’m energetic and excited and full of life. I see the world in color and I see beauty and I’m probably too confident for my own britches now.
I get that because I took what was once a harmful situation and, through negotiation and self-awareness, made it into a healing situation. What I couldn’t control, what happened to me as a kid, I can control now and brings me joy. Once I stopped questioning whether that joy and pleasure was really real and not some false sense of recovery from abuse, I found even more joy in it.
It may seem like a lot of submissives are abuse survivors, but I don’t think that is the case. I think a lot of people in all walks of life are abuse survivors. I think the open nature of this sort of lifestyle draws us to talk about it more though. When you share so many other intimate details, it seems natural to also share this. But obviously, not all survivors are submissive and not all submissives are survivors, so one cannot accurately conclude that past abuse leads to BDSM. It’s simply not true.
And the fact that there are vast numbers of submissives who far surpass myself in depravity who ARE NOT abuse victims allows me to believe that I was born a submissive and a masochist. Why not? If they were born that way, why can’t I have been too? And why not you too?
Even if we are this way entirely because of our past, if what we get out of it are pleasurable results, why not take it for what it is? You said yourself that you wouldn’t want “recovery” to change your outlook on D/s. I really don’t think it will. I don’t think there is a reason, not one that you will ever discover with any certainty. Because trying to find that reason is as impossible as trying to explain why someone is vanilla. Or why they are gay. Or why one likes chocolate ice cream and not rocky road. Some things about ourselves we can answer with certainty. I know why I have brown hair and freckles. I know why I’m only 5′4″. The rest is so much… stuff.
There was a story I read just a bit ago, an analogy about BDSM and abuse using an illness as an example. I’ll cut and paste it here because I think it’s relative to this.
“While it is true that sick people take medication, that doesn’t make medication a symptom or perpetuation of illness!
I think possibly the best example might be diabetes. A diabetes sufferer, as well as needing to inject with insulin periodically, also needs to have a stash of high-sugar foods just in case the blood sugar levels start to plummet.
To someone unaware that the person has diabetes, this process of injecting and/or taking “secret snacks” might appear to be self-harming.
Furthermore, one way that a person can get diabetes is from having been an overeater - so it might appear that the “secret snacks” especially, were somehow perpetuating the earlier harmful behaviours.
But whether the diabetes is caused by earlier problems, or whether the previously undiagnosed diabetes had led to bad eating habits before it was diagnosed, the current situation is most definitely not harmful - rather, it is the very best way to control and manage the conditions.
None of the above should be read as implying that a submissive’s nature (nor, indeed, a dominant’s) should be regarded as an illness. But both are conditions that can, in the wrong circumstances, lead to harm. The difference between BDSM orientation and disease is that disease rarely has extremely positive outcomes; whereas BDSM is a true source of joy.”
So maybe that helps and maybe not. Self-examination is never bad, until it begins to undo the current good in your life, that is.
Good luck.
ps. I left a comment on the other post but I think maybe it got ate or something.
I agree with most everything you said here, kaya and I thank you for saying it.
I know that I may never know entirely if there is a clear connection. I am pretty sure that I made an easy target. I spoke almost no English and was so frightened that I didn’t really speak very much at all. Since he abused his 14 daughters as well and I don’t know whether the are into BDSM or not, but I do know that 8 of them are lesbians, 3 of them are still living at home, 1 of them is seemingly normal and 2 of them killed themselves. I am in no way saying that every abuse survivor who’s in BDSM entered the lifestyle because of their abuse. I’m saying that there’s a possible connection for some people. For me, when I started D/s I was almost straight out of my abusive situation because it didn’t stop until I was 18 and I took my first collar right before I turned 20 and I know that I sought it out partially because it was so close to the only type of intimacy I understood. Also, I figured there were only 2 kinds of men. The kind who would hurt me on my terms and the kind that would hurt me on their terms and that’s really sort of how I got involved in BDSM. Also, At some point, I think probably after my mother abandoned me in the abuse I started dissociating, just actively floating up out of my body to the point that I was numb and feeling nothing at all and remembering nothing at all and responding to nothing at all. I did it all through my first D/s relationship and intermittently throughout all my D/s relationships except this one.
The reason that all of this is coming up is because I have started dissociating when Master and I have sex, when he disciplines me, and when we scene. I don’t feel anything, remember anything, or respond to anything a large majority of the time which as brought our sex life to a screeching halt. I have started to hear my abuser’s voice, smell his cologne and this fear that he is around me has driven me into my house to the point of near agoraphobia. This has led Master to his decision that is is time for me to deal with this and it’s also led him to the belief that I’ve in my mind somewhere connected the past and the present together and I’ve started processing Abuse and D/s with the same set of criteria or something and he might be right.
I feel like I have to figure something out whether it means delving into the past, dealing with the present or both because I’m unable to intimately connect to Master and I know that “Why am I this way” is going to be a big question until I can get my own closure on it.
Thank you so much your comment. It put a lot of things in perspective for me. Thank you Thank you.
Kitten
Ahh. I see now. I hadn’t realized things were coming up like that. I understand better now.
I wonder if the reason things like that are surfacing now is because you feel safe enough to let it happen? I once had a psychiatrist tell me that I would never feel or express anger until I found someone who I thought was strong enough to take it. (anger was one of the emotions that I absolutely buried through the abuse and therapy). And he was right. Poor Master. For a while, I was like an active volcano, spewing anger *everywhere*. True to form, though it got to him now and then, he was strong enough. I still struggle with anger, but it’s more about how to express it in the context of D/s than in not expressing it at all. Poor man. I don’t know how he puts up with me sometimes.
I do understand. My abuse went on until I well into my teens too, and it certainly colored a series of relationships for me as well. But there is light at the end of the tunnel, I think. I also think you and your Master are doing exactly the right things. Kudos for standing up and taking the bull by the horns. I wish you the best of luck on this part of the path. Both of you.