northernlights19 :
- First, I am SO SORRY! There is nothing that makes what happened to you better of okay. YOU WILL GET BETTER, but nothing makes what he did alright.
Two pieces of advice. Get off this board with your story. Take it down if you can. I can talk from personal experience, people who have never gone through this don’t understand. Reading these hurtful comments can trigger you even more. Please, talk about this with a counselor who specializes in PTSD.
Second piece of advice, one you have a counselor, (and please, please, please get a counselor). Remove yourself from this abusive relationship.
If you are feeling drained and only have enough time to read the first what I wrote above, that is okay! If you have it in you, go ahead and keep reading.
Like I said above, I am writing from personal experience. I cannot begin to tell you how hard it is to even admit to yourself, to even write out for the first time, that you were raped. I couldn’t even use the word for months after it happened. I couldn’t accept that it had happened to me.
This doesn’t make what happened any less real!
This is NOT something that is “normal” for a marriage. It is rape.
I highly encourage you to Google, “Symptoms of Rape” and “Symptoms of PTSD.” There was something very powerful for me in reading the symptoms that I was going through written down. It helped me to come to terms that what I was going through was real.
One of the symptoms of rape is that the survivors often times blame themselves at first. Saying things like, “We have both made mistakes.” Nothing justifies what he did. Nothing makes it okay. You are not required to stay in this relationship because you have both “made mistakes.” They are two separate events.
I could go on and on about this. Let me end with, it took over a year of counseling for PTSD to get to a place where I am functioning again (and I still have bad days / weeks sometimes) but IT DOES GET BETTER. I didn’t believe it would at first. I wanted to die so many times. It can be a living hell. These is a song that goes, “Cannot run from myself. There’s nowhere to hide.” Really got to me. There isn’t anywhere that feels safe. After I was assaulted for the first time, I kept being hurt again and again for over a year by different men. I was terrified to be alone. As in crying on the floor in a ball contemplating cutting off my lady parts “so no one could ever hurt me again.” Being with someone, even someone I didn’t know, felt safer than being alone.
I am not your councilor. You would NEED to talk to one about it. But from someone who has been through it – my opinion of your affair is that it could have been your survival mechanism. You needed help. That was where you found it. It is SO SO SO hard for someone who has never been through it to understand, but when one of the guys who offered to help me made a sexual advance, (when he knew that I was crying and throwing up from not wanting that), giving him what he wanted felt like a test. My mind would circle, “I know what you are. Here. Take it. I know that is all you want. Prove me wrong. Prove to me you are only here to help me.” Like I said, I could go on and on. It plays horrible mind games with you.
Bottom line, please, go see a counselor. It’s the path to you getting better.
Member
