u/blankaudio

I wonder whether my childhood abuse was really abuse or if I wanted it. could it be why I cant physically enjoy sex? Or am I just trying to place blame somewhere for the things I feel are inadequate about me? I feel so much pressure to respond to sex in the way men want me to. I am going to a pelvic floor therapist to see if I have hypertonic pelvic floor; maybe that’s why my body doesn’t respond the way it ‘should’. I was touched and would do things to a boy that was around 10 or so when I was 4. I don’t remember it being especially traumatizing. I dealt with emotional abuse from my father and so I wanted the attention from the boy. I knew what was happening was not to be told and was to be hidden. I suppose there was shame too, but I don’t remember thinking “something bad is happening to me” I remember feeling “I want to be cared for”. It went on for a couple years; his family babysat me. A part of me feels I was always just an attention seeking whore. How can I feel that way about my 4 year old self? It happened again when I was 7 or so. A older cousin of mine one touch me when he was alone or touch me under covers when in rooms with other people. That’s been the story of my life in all relationships. You have sex with men so that they will be around you. I’ve slept with 40 or 50 men. Not because I wanted to but because I felt I had to. I mean I’d say no but they always keep trying until that no became a yes. That stopped happening as much when I got HSV2. Men don’t sleep with me now unless they care so perhaps it was a good thing that someone gave me herpes. I didn’t have enough self respect to stand by my no on my own.l so now it’s done for me.

I somewhat recently got out of a long term domestic abuse relationship. I’m trying to unlearn so much. I’m trying to learn how to have a healthy relationship and take up space but it’s so difficult. In my last relationship my needs were met with anger. I was called horrible names, spat on and threatened. This all became so normal to me. I questioned whether I was even abused or if I was so horrible to be around that that was just the natural progression of things. I spoke about what he did so matter of factly. I told someone about him driving erratically and threatening to drive us into a concrete wall to kill us both like I was sharing a story about us disagreeing about what show to watch. I said I punch my self to stop crying so that he wouldn’t kill us like it was just another day..

I am in a relationship with a man now who I think is kind. I don’t know how to express my needs. I make myself as small as possible so that he will want me around. Ask for nothing. Be as easy to be around as possible. They won’t leave me if I am small and give everything and ask for nothing. I want something real and loving but I don’t know how to have that. I am trying so hard to be a healthy partner but I don’t know what that is. I research when it’s okay to say certain things. I researched for hours whether I could tell my boyfriend I missed him after 5 months of dating. I want to tell him I love him but I don’t think he loves me so I think it’s best I wait for him to tell me. I don’t know if it’s even possible to love someone after 5 months so maybe I’m wrong and I am just infatuated. I’ve researched that as well; no amount of research can answer these types of questions though. No google search can tell me how my partner will react to keep me safe. I don’t know. I don’t want to be weird and love bomby so I just stay quiet and agreeable.

I just wish I wasnt the way I am. Im 31 years old yet feel like a child in the way I interact with men. I feel more sad out of the abusive relationship than I did in it because the emotional numbing is wearing off and the impact it had on me is becoming more and more apparent to me.

I don’t know how to add a flair after posting. Trigger warning.

I wonder whether my childhood abuse was really abuse or if I wanted it. could it be why I cant physically enjoy sex? Or am I just trying to place blame somewhere for the things I feel are inadequate about me? I feel so much pressure to respond to sex in the way men want me to. I am going to a pelvic floor therapist to see if I have hypertonic pelvic floor; maybe that’s why my body doesn’t respond the way it ‘should’. I was touched and would do things to a boy that was around 10 or so when I was 4. I don’t remember it being especially traumatizing. I dealt with emotional abuse from my father and so I wanted the attention from the boy. I knew what was happening was not to be told and was to be hidden. I suppose there was shame too, but I don’t remember thinking “something bad is happening to me” I remember feeling “I want to be cared for”. It went on for a couple years; his family babysat me. A part of me feels I was always just an attention seeking whore. How can I feel that way about my 4 year old self? That’s been the story of my life in all relationships. You have sex with men so that they will be around you. I’ve slept with 40 or 50 men. Not because I wanted to but because I felt I had to. I mean I’d say no but they always keep trying until that no became a yes. That stopped happening as much when I got HSV2. Men don’t sleep with me now unless they care so perhaps it was a good thing that someone gave me herpes. I didn’t have enough self respect to stand by my no on my own.l so now it’s done for me.

I somewhat recently got out of a long term domestic abuse relationship. I’m trying to unlearn so much. I’m trying to learn how to have a healthy relationship and take up space but it’s so difficult. In my last relationship my needs were met with anger. I was called horrible names, spat on and threatened. This all became so normal to me. I questioned whether I was even abused or if I was so horrible to be around that that was just the natural progression of things. I spoke about what he did so matter of factly. I told someone about him driving erratically and threatening to drive us into a concrete wall to kill us both like I was sharing a story about us disagreeing about what show to watch. I said I punch my self to stop crying so that he wouldn’t kill us like it was just another day..

I am in a relationship with a man now who I think is kind. I don’t know how to express my needs. I make myself as small as possible so that he will want me around. Ask for nothing. Be as easy to be around as possible. They won’t leave me if I am small and give everything and ask for nothing. I want something real and loving but I don’t know how to have that. I am trying so hard to be a healthy partner but I don’t know what that is. I research when it’s okay to say certain things. I researched for hours whether I could tell my boyfriend I missed him after 5 months of dating. I want to tell him I love him but I don’t think he loves me so I think it’s best I wait for him to tell me. I don’t know if it’s even possible to love someone after 5 months so maybe I’m wrong and I am just infatuated. I’ve researched that as well; no amount of research can answer these types of questions though. No google search can tell me how my partner will react to keep me safe. I don’t know. I don’t want to be weird and love bomby so I just stay quiet and agreeable.

I just wish I wasnt the way I am. Im 31 years old yet feel like a child in the way I interact with men. I feel more sad out of the abusive relationship than I did in it because the emotional numbing is wearing off and the impact it had on me is becoming more and more apparent to me.

I’m looking at buying a car. My car was totaled so I don’t have all of the time to search for the perfectly priced used car. I’m also not very knowledgeable about cars. In my line of work I put around 30k miles on my car a year and I drive them until they die. I ‘want’ to spend no more than about 30k on a new car. I personally hate the idea of spending this on a car but that is my budget. I feel like used cars don’t have much benefit these days. Not for someone like me who depends on mechanics and can’t work on them myself. I was looking at a Subaru crosstrek new vs a certified used one from Subaru and the price differences are pretty negligible. The Apr rate difference is 2.9% new vs 6% used. I’m also interested in a Prius but the interest rates aren’t as good and would put a strain on me monthly payment wise. Perhaps I could look at more used ones or consider a Corolla instead

Am I correct in feeling like I might as well just buy a new one or am I being dumb? What cars would you all recommend for someone who has to drive a fair bit like myself.

I can remember most of my life. I often feel like maybe I made the abuse up or exaggerated because I can’t remember the details of any of it. I am 31 now and my life is a blur. It’s not just the memories of my past though. I can’t remember shit. I can’t remember names or specifics about anything. I was talking to my boyfriend I began dating recently and he can teach me so much about so many different people that he’s met or read about - not that I remember after though. I can’t do that. I can’t tell you about anyone I’ve learned about in my past. I have no one I look up to. I love art but I can’t tell you anything about an artist. I can’t tell you a name of a person who made a piece of art I like. It’s not that I don’t personally have interests. Maybe I’ve just never cared enough to learn about people? I’ve cared to learn about the process of making art because that’s a part of my little world. I know how to do things but I can’t put words to the process. I feel so stupid and boring because I struggle so much to recall words, names, and specifics about EVERYTHING. My brain just burns and there’s a wall I can’t get past. I only remember names of people that I interact with everyday.

Does anyone else have issues with this? Is it my apathy from depression that’s caused me to just not care to retain the information? Is it that I’ve lived life in survival mode and didn’t retain that type of information? He acted so bewildered that I had no one I idolized or looked up to yesterday when it came to art.

I am 31 years old and am starting treatment for dissociation and Complex PTSD.

My father was the perpetrator of the parental alienation. It began when they divorced when I was 3 or 4. He began telling me how my mother didn’t love me, just wanted to take me away from him to hurt him, and that every nice thing she did was a thing to trick me. He was the one that loved me. I didn’t everything he wanted and worshipped him so that he would love me. I became his spy. His tool to inflict pain on my mother. He’d dress me in slutty hooker clothes and send me to my mom so I could tell her that I wanted to grow up to be just like her. We played these games and he would laugh and be so happy when I’d do these things for him. He told me I had to be careful about what I say on phone calls because she was spying on me. He would have me lie and trick her.
When the custody battle began I was deeply brainwashed. When my mother took me to a child therapist I would draw my mother in all black with red eyes and blood dripping from her mouth and hands as she held my all black baby sister- my father demonized my baby sister as well so she was drawn as a monster too. My father told me not to speak to the therapist because my mother and her were conspiring to steal me away and so I refused. I would just mock the therapist or stay silent. My mother has cried to me recently about how the child therapist told her it was the worst case she had ever seen and didn’t know what was best. She didn’t know whether to get full custody or if that would deepen the hatred. They ended up with split custody which unfortunately wasn’t what was best. My mom feared what would happen if she got full custody and so she didn’t.
The games continued until I was a teenager. At that point my dad didn’t have to do anything. I was just extremely mean to my mother on my own. He stole a happy loving relationship that I could have had with her. We now talk everyday and are quite close but that took 25 years.

The impact:
I was sexually abused by older children as a child. The messed up part. I did it all willingly. It was my job to do what men or boys wanted. Plain and simple. I was sexually abused by a 12 or 13 year old boy several times when I was 5 and again by a cousin from ages 7-10. It was obviously abuse but it never registered as such. I grew up sexually promiscuous. There have only been maybe 3 men that I ever actually wanted to sleep with but I’ve had sex with at least 40. I would say no once but they kept trying so I did so they would like me. The number would probably be higher but I got an STD when I was 23 so people stopped wanting to sleep with me then. It has never been about whether I care for someone. It has always been about wanting them to care for me.

I have no sense of myself. I’m a chameleon. I adjust myself to who ever I am around. I don’t do well spending time with multiple people because I can’t be what everyone wants all at once.

I have been in abusive relationships as an adult and felt it was the best I could get so I stayed until they left me.

I disassociate. I don’t really feel sad. Mainly numb. Perhaps it is sadness and I just do not know happiness. I don’t have a lot of memories. I went back to abusers because I couldn’t remember the abuse. I thought I made it up. I still wonder if I did.

I fantasize about horrible things happening to me and then fantasize about the concern and support that would follow. I fantasize about being raped or almost murdered, being hit by a car, anything that leaves me almost dead so that people would help me. Yesterday I heard a loud bang walking into work and that prompted me to think “what if that was a gunshot and I was left bleeding on the sidewalk. Would people notice? Would they be concerned and help me? Would I finally receive the love and support I need?

I want so much to have a loving relationship where I feel seen and safe. I am dating someone who I think is kind now but I’m so scared of being myself. I don’t even know who that is. I am always scanning facial expressions and trying to analyze whether they are pleased with me or if they can see the unlovable part of me that I try to keep hidden.

I am entirely lonely and have no friends. I spend everyday alone. I wish my mother took me away from my dad instead of fearing that I’d hate her more if she did. Maybe then I could have been normal and happy.

I am hoping the specialized treatment will finally help me. I wish I started sooner. If anyone fears taking full custody like my mother did, don’t.

I know this is all pretty messed up so I apologize.

I play scenarios in my head about dying and then imagine people caring or something just overall awful happening that would prompt concern or care from others. When I’m walking down stairs I’ll imagine falling and thinking about the things that would follow. I was walking into work today and heard a loud bang. I started playing a scenario in my head about being shot and bleeding out on the ground; I imagined the concern and care that would follow suit. I do this with suicidal ideation, rape, being mugged, hit by a car and so on. They are not always about me getting hurt and people caring but mostly are.

I have a history of sexual abuse that was never discovered until I communicated it to my mom as an adult, severe parental alienation by my father so child abuse, and recently left an extremely emotionally abusive relationship that spanned 6 years. I have never been officially diagnosed with anything but I do relate to CPTSD and perhaps disassociating. I don’t remember a lot of the bad things that happen to me. I returned to my ex after a brief separation because I couldn’t recall the specific abuse and thought maybe I made it up or exaggerated it. I am very often lost in thought and never really present. I feel like an imposter and don’t feel a sense of self identity. I question whether I am a good person or just pretending to be.

I have been calling around to find a therapist today. I am waiting on a call back from a woman who specializes in CPTSD and DID.

I 30f have been dating this guy 34m for a couple of months now. When he talks about his interests I try to engage and ask him questions so he can tell me all about it because I know he is passionate about it. I don’t feel I get this is return though. I know he doesn’t find the substance of my art interesting. It’s anime based and he isn’t into that. That is fine. I am not really into what he is interested in but i am interested in him so i want to hear what he’s working on and encourage that. He sends me walls of texts about his interests; I don’t always know what to say because I’m not knowledgeable about it but I will spend time thinking about how to respond so that he feels good about sharing his passions. When I share things i am working on, he often only responds to parts of my messages that are unrelated or will ignore entirely and send me a message about his project with no acknowledgment of the message i sent. For example, earlier i sent a message asking how his day was going and then also sent a picture of a rough draft of my idea for an art project. He only responded to how his day was going. It makes me feel negatively about sharing my passions with him. It also don’t feel that he is interested in me as a person but just the company that I provide him.

I was previously in an abusive relationship so my ability to trust my feelings on matters are a bit impaired. I have anxiety around communicating my feelings or trusting whether they are warranted. Is this something that you would discuss with a partner or am I being too sensitive?

I have been dating someone for a little bit now. I told him on date 2 that I had hsv2. I go down on him and he uses his hands on me. I know that he would have had sex with me by now if it weren’t for my diagnosis. I ask because I feel it’s a bit one sided sexually at the moment. I feel he’s getting what he needs sexually but I am not.

Perhaps I should just talk to him about where he’s at 😅

I think I carry this persistent feeling that there’s something “off” or deficient about me. When I read about things like quiet borderline traits, it resonates with me, especially the tendency to internalize everything, overanalyze interactions, fear people pulling away, and assume rejection says something about my worth. I don’t feel I am suicidal but I do think of suicide when I am extremely distraught like when my abusive relationship ended. I would think about death to soothe myself; it was a way of telling myself I don’t have to feel this way if it gets to be too much. These thoughts are pretty rare though.

I don’t feel constantly sad. Most of the time my baseline feels more muted or emotionally flat. Maybe that’s normal and I just interpret the absence of strong emotion as numbness. But sometimes I feel this deep sense of emptiness or longing, like I’m searching for something more meaningful: deeper connection, more aliveness, more certainty that I matter to people. I don’t feel I remember much about my life when I try to look back at my experiences. I think that was a protective mechanism but also made me more forgiving because I struggle to remember the specifics when it comes to what people have done to me.

When I’m around others, especially when I’m connecting and talking, I genuinely feel happy and energized. The darker thoughts mostly appear when I’m alone with myself. That’s when I start replaying interactions, wondering if I said something wrong, if I was strange, if someone secretly dislikes me, or when they’ll eventually stop wanting me around. Sometimes I will have these feelings when I’m actively spending time with something if they say something or seem to act in a way that feels they are pulling away but for the most part I feel excited around others.

I don’t think I’m devastated by ordinary rejection. If a first date doesn’t work out, I can usually accept that. I have gotten used to early stage rejection due to my hsv2 diagnosis. But once I become emotionally hopeful about someone or something, rejection starts to feel deeply personal, like proof that I lacked something essential.

I think that mindset is part of why I stayed in an abusive relationship for so long. I kept believing maybe I was the problem, or that I should hold onto what I had because I might never find a genuinely loving relationship. I think I learned to distrust my own perception and to assume I was the one at fault.

All I want is to have people who care for me and to care for them. To go and do normal everyday activities. I want to have a life that I look back on fondly. I am starting therapy today.

I have been dating after leaving an emotionally abusive relationship. In my last relationship I always jumped up to handle or placate my partner whenever he came in to the room. I waited on him and never just sat and relaxed. I was always trying to do whatever to calm him. He was severely mentally ill and angry all of the time, everything I did was wrong. I was a stupid filthy aging whore that never did anything right. I couldn’t even smile correctly. He stomped, slammed and hit things. I was never relaxed. I was with him for six years so of course it changed me.

I have been spending the past two months with someone. I feel insecure about my tendencies. He jokingly told me that I was like a puppy because of how I jump up and move when he does. He got up and his dog followed and he was like “see!” And giggled. He didn’t say it to hurt me but it’s been running through my mind since. I feel embarrassed and somewhat pathetic. I don’t think he’s put two and two together about why I do it; I don’t think he’s aware it even bothered me, because I did my best to hide it. I’ve never really went into detail about my past relationship. I’m not sure if I’m supposed to talk to him about it or explain myself. Sorry if this seems small and stupid. It just really made me feel like I’m weird.

Am I even allowed to date until I ‘fix’ myself? Do I talk to people about why when they point out ‘weird’ things I do?