Читать книгу Ready to Heal: Breaking Free of Addictive Relationships - Sarah Elisabeth Boggs - Страница 14

Tori is the third child born to parents who thought they were finished having children. They already had a son, eight, and a daughter, seven. Tori’s father was an anesthesiologist while her mother stayed home to raise the children. Their relationship was chaotic and intense. Tori’s father was not sexually faithful to her mother, and Tori’s mother exhibited signs of being desperately addicted to her husband. As a result, Tori grew up in a household suffused with sexual energy and violence. She can’t remember a time when sex was not on her mind and when she wasn’t also feeling fear. From as early as she can remember, she knew her father wasn’t faithful to her mother. Her earliest memory took place when she was five years old and she walked into her mother’s room to find her swallowing pills. Her mother was crying. She yelled at Tori, “Get out of here.” Tori recalls being frightened and confused. Later, Tori realized that this was her mother’s first suicide attempt after she had just learned of her husband’s first affair.

Tori witnessed a great deal of violence by her older brother. She recalls, “What I remember most about growing up is the physical violence between my brother and sister. My brother was mean, and from him I learned that men are violent. He was also using drugs. I just thought he was scary.”

Tori’s brother had a lot of power in the house. When a teenage boy sets the tone for a home, the younger children aren’t safe. Since Tori’s father was unavailable and her mother was struggling to survive, Tori was left to fend for herself. She learned she couldn’t rely on anyone to keep her safe, much less comfort her.

Tori learned to masturbate at an early age. She doesn’t recall how or when she learned, but just that it was always her companion. She stated, “It was like breathing. I just always did it and didn’t think anything of it.” Tori’s story is similar to Maria’s and Heather’s in this way. All three learned as young girls how to self-soothe through masturbation.

When young girls are masturbating, it can be a sign of early childhood sexual abuse. However, in each case, none of the women remember being sexually abused. What is clear is that each girl lacked a safe, nurturing parental attachment. As a result, we can assume that all three girls were under intense stress and fear. Without proper bonding and attachment, the girls found a way to comfort themselves and ease the high levels of stress hormones generated by excessive fear and loneliness. Masturbation became the substitute for human connection.

Tori’s sister left home at age fifteen when Tori was only eight. She remembers being thrilled to have her mother all to herself. Her hope was to finally receive attention and care from her mother. When Tori’s siblings left, however, her mother became obsessed with opening up her own bridal shop. Tori was left to get herself ready for school each morning, and she came home in the afternoon to an empty house. At this point, she discovered new ways to soothe her loneliness. She began reading erotica and watching “real sex” on TV. “Thank God there was no Internet in our home at that time,” she exclaims in therapy. As a woman in recovery, she now understands that her sexual and fantasy addiction would have been much more extreme with the avenues available online today.

At age fourteen, Tori’s life began to spin out of control. Her mother learned of another one of her husband’s affairs when she found a sex toy in his suitcase and a receipt with a young woman’s name on it. Tori’s mother flew into a rage and rallied her daughters to accompany her to the woman’s home. Tori remembers driving to the stranger’s home with her mother and sister, but her mother refused to get out of the car, forcing Tori and her sister to confront the woman on their own. The police were called and a confrontation led to a terrible fracture in the family. Tori remembers feeling afraid, angry, and humiliated during this episode. At this point she knew, deep down, that she couldn’t respect or trust her mother. When her parents separated after this event, she moved in with her father.

Soon after this terrible incident, Tori lost her virginity to a boy from school. “The next day, he called me a whore to his friends,” she confided. Tori vowed she would never let a guy have power over her again. She broke up with the boy and pretended not to be hurt. To cover the pain of her neglect and loneliness, Tori’s sexual behavior escalated. She began meeting and having sex with boys she didn’t know, and then not seeing them again. She didn’t have sex with boys she knew from school, believing she could somehow salvage her reputation as a good girl. Now, as a woman, she wonders, “Who was I kidding? I talked about sex all the time. My girlfriends knew there was something different about me.”

Tori always felt unique among her peers. She felt her interest in sex raised her to a higher, more sophisticated status. Yet underneath this feeling of superiority was a sad sense of shame. When Tori was fifteen, more chaos entered her family. Her sister and brother engaged in a court battle against one another. Her brother was accused of assaulting her sister. During this time, Tori’s life was spinning out of control. Her weight plummeted from 112 to 87 pounds, her mother lost the bridal shop, and her parents declared bankruptcy.

In an effort to escape the shame and pain of her situation, Tori’s sexual acting out intensified. At sixteen, Tori met a much older man at a nearby gym. She recalls an instant attraction. The man took her to his house that same day. Tori describes the following scene: “He penetrated me anally and it hurt so bad. He bit me during oral sex, and it was so painful that my legs were shaking. I was scared … I had never done this before. I just froze and left my body. I remember there was a woman in his house when I got there, but she left. She must have known what was going to happen. When I got home, I remember putting a temporary tattoo on my neck to hide his teeth marks. I remember feeling really dirty. I never went back to that gym. I thought it was my fault. It took me a long time to realize it was rape.”

As Tori tells her story, it comes out in pieces, almost like she’s choking. The trauma of the rape still echoes in her voice. Her body still carries fear and shame. After this horrifying experience, her behavior intensified:

“My life became more sexualized in college. I was constantly flirting, and working out and trying to look the best I could. No one’s boyfriend was safe around me. I slept with whomever I wanted to. I remember my mom telling me that since I wasn’t blond and blue-eyed, I’d never be beautiful, and I think I spent all my time trying to compensate for that. Everything in my world was about sex—the music I listened to and the clothes I put on. I lived to make men want me. I wanted to be the girl a guy was thinking about when he had sex with his girlfriend. I wanted to be his fantasy. If my father hadn’t been sending me plenty of money each week, I would have been a stripper or an escort.”

Tori learned from listening to guys talk that there was a right way and a wrong way to please a guy sexually, and she wanted to know the right way. When Tori met Todd, who was thirty and divorced, she was determined to “please” him the right way so she gave him oral sex. After he had an orgasm, he told her, “No woman has ever been able to make me orgasm like that!” Tori felt wonderful. Oral sex gave her an illusion of complete power. After about a year, however, Tori struggled with ever-present feelings of insecurity and fear of abandonment as her feelings for Todd increased. To compensate, she began having sex with other men besides Todd to boost her illusion of strength and independence. The relationship with Todd lasted three years, and Tori’s need for sex grew stronger as her feelings of insecurity grew more acute. Sex provided her a temporary escape from unbearable feelings, but created an insatiable, addictive need for sexual power and control.

Then Tori met Chad. She broke up with Todd one weekend and started dating Chad the next. Chad was Tori’s age, educated, and making plans to join the Navy. Tori wanted to be faithful to Chad. She wanted this relationship to be different from her others. She recalls that Chad masturbated every day and watched porn. He had a sister who was a porn star. His father had paid for a “boob job” for Chad’s sister when she entered the sex industry. None of these issues were red flags for Tori. She thought she was in love.

Like many sex and love addicts, Tori found a partner who came from a family just like hers. She and Chad both came from backgrounds where sex infused the family environment. Tori recalled that within the first ten days of knowing Chad, they had sex seventeen times. She thought that he must really love her to want her so much. At age twenty-two, she felt so powerful. Yet when Chad suddenly broke up with her, Tori was stunned and began to crumble. Something in her gave up on the idea of love. She decided to go back to using men for sex. Her decision illustrates the resignation that happens for women who become addicted to sex. When relationships are too painful to provide an illusion of love, sex becomes the substitute.