As I sit in my therapist’s office contemplating why I’ve been way more anxious than normal about him, she asks me to think about the date. March. Four years have passed. I was a sophomore in high school, he was a senior. When we met in September he was charming and funny and made me feel special. When February came to a close and things got bad I clung on to this version of him desperately convincing myself that that part of him made him worth it.
It would be over a year after it ended, the summer before senior year of High School, when I finally was given consent education through participating in an advocacy group addressing sexual violence. Specifically, I learned the word coercion and came to define it as the foundation of our relationship. After months of being together, I wanted to have sex - I really did. And at first it was great and exciting and consensual. But then it wasn’t. The pressure ensued to do things I didn’t want to do. My “Nos” were met with a steady repetition of “please”, “why?”, “let’s just try it.” His favorite tactics were victimization and humiliation. Why wouldn’t I let him do this and that- all his friends’ girlfriends were letting them- I was emasculating him and embarrassing him in front of his friends- I was being unfair and a bad girlfriend. He picked apart my body under the guise of jokes and playfulness to aggravate my insecurities and wear me down. He was mean and moody and I never knew which version of him I was going to get. And finally he got what he wanted. Weakened and worn down, I whispered ok. The most reluctant, doubting, unenthusiastic, and scared ok. And that forced permission was all it took. His happiness depended on my willingness to please him regardless of my discomfort. Though I still didn’t have the vocabulary to label this as abuse I knew my discomfort wasn’t ok and eventually told him we couldn’t continue like this. I thought everything would get better but things didn’t really change. Sometimes he listened and it was consensual but sometimes it continued as before. My body continued to be a means to an end. He chose to ignore the boundaries I had set. He chose to violate me. How many times did I have to say no for him to understand. It felt useless to say it again. Shocked, trapped, and powerless, I’d close my eyes waiting for it to be over. Leaving my body.
Senior year of high school I took psychology and I learned about fight-flight-freeze. As soon as you recognize a threat in your environment, your nervous system immediately shifts into one of the three stress responses. I had heard of fight or flight but freeze made everything make sense. When you feel neither running nor fighting is the best choice, you can feel frozen instead. Everything shuts down. When you freeze you get used to the stress. And I was left to swallow my discomfort to appease him and convince myself that this stress was normal.
We broke up when he graduated. The break up was a twisted mix of sadness and relief that I couldn’t quite understand until I gained the vocabulary and education to label my experience as sexual and emotional abuse.
And that quite frankly is the shittiest part. The fact that I didn’t realize that I was experiencing abuse because I had never been taught what a healthy teenage relationship should look like. I thought we were in love and I believed that in love you make sacrifices for the other person’s happiness- even sacrificing your own safety and bodily autonomy. The fact that no one had given me the tools nor education to understand consensual sex and healthy relationships by age 16 is not only absurd but unacceptable. It begs the question of not only why wasn’t I educated, but also why was the responsibility fully on me to educate myself. How can it be that trauma is the teacher that saves me from a next time.
I texted him two years ago outlining what he did to me and how I hope he never does that to anyone again. He was shocked he said. He was sorry he said. For once he didn’t know what else to say. Though the abuse I experienced did not happen here, its effects continue here. I don’t hate him but I hate that I have to deal with the unwelcome, lurking trauma that he forced upon me. I hate how my relationships are affected by it. I hate how my feelings of self worth are affected by it. But that’s on him. Not me. I’m learning to accept that and allowing myself to heal. There is an unfortunate narrative that suggests that after you’ve experienced sexual violence you become in some way damaged goods. I want to be clear that while this was a defining and transformative time in my life that will be something I always carry, it did not in any way define me. I am not broken.
For the past four years I’ve learned to claim survivorship as my own through retrospect. It has taken countless hours of reflection, therapy, and support from those close to me to accept that I am a survivor of intimate partner violence. I am doing my best to push away those doubting thoughts that I am exaggerating the pain I went through. I am learning how to love and trust again- both myself and partners. I am reclaiming my boundaries and my conception of healthy sex and relationships. And it feels great.
I can count on one hand the number of people from home who know the truth about him. I don’t know if others at home would believe me. But I’m lucky and grateful that at Tufts I have been believed. Right now telling my story is cathartic and right for me in my healing process but I can’t stress enough that your story is always valid whether or not you speak out about your experience and trauma.
I’ve deleted him from all forms of social media but sometimes he’ll be tagged in a Facebook friend’s post and I can’t help but see what he’s doing. He has a girlfriend now and I hope she’s okay.