At the time, I would clutch them to my chest and feed off the energy of the love he sent me.
But now, looking at him from across the kitchen table, I had no idea what I was doing. I didn’t love him; I barely knew him. For that matter, I barely knew or loved myself.
Counselors in rehab and anyone else who has more than a year of solid recovery will tell you to avoid getting into a relationship within the first year of recovery, because it only serves to distract you and in many ways replaces the alcohol and drugs. At the time it didn’t make sense to me, because the sensation of someone paying me attention outweighed any new information or personal growth I had experienced in rehab. He was good-looking and kind, and my self-esteem was, as usual, in the toilet and solely reliant upon the attention of others. So dating someone in rehab made sense and was a good idea in my problematic way of thinking.
As the cobwebs slowly began to clear in my brain, the idea of a year’s abstinence was starting to make a little sense to me. It is easy to hide behind something else, even when you are not using. It is easy to get lost in a relationship, or the idea of one at least, which keeps the mind in denial of all the reasons why it is not a good idea to be in one. As an addict, I looked for anything and everything outside of myself to fill that void I had inside. Men had always been one of those things I had turned to in order to avoid dealing with myself. But the longer I worked a program of recovery and began to explore my past in therapy sessions and group sessions, the more it was starting to make sense to me that I had never really known love, and in many ways love and sex were just vices I used to escape, like alcohol and drugs.
I was beginning to understand that my views on sex and love were just as skewed as all my other views. I was beginning to understand that anyone who would run to a guy in rehab whom she didn’t know just because he told her she was pretty was messed up. I sneaked around at night against the rules in rehab to steal quick kisses with some guy I had just met, all because he paid me attention. And that attention was another drug for me—one that I was just learning could be as destructive as using, if I let it. It was becoming clear to me that I had never had a healthy intimate relationship in my life, and my obsession and feelings for Matt were just emotional baggage that I hadn’t yet checked in recovery.
We tried to have sex a couple of times, but sex without being drunk or high was incredibly awkward for me. In fact, sex at all was like a foreign concept. I had no idea what real intimacy was because I had never really had sex without being high, and most of my sexual endeavors just left me feeling dirty, used, and empty. After all, my first sexual experience was a rape—a drunken rape. It was no wonder I was a mess in this area.
This only fueled the extreme confusion I already felt regarding sex and my sexuality. From a very early age, kindergarten in fact, I can tell you whom my first crushes were on—girls. I had always had feelings toward girls and never knew it wasn’t okay until people in positions of authority so studiously began pointing it out to me when I would express my innocent crushes. I was teased in school as a young girl for making it known that I had feelings toward another girl. I didn’t like the taunting. I didn’t want to be labeled a freak or abnormal, so I began to fake it.
I had fleeting moments of intimacy that were blurred by total drunkenness, so I was really lost. To avoid dealing with all the uncomfortable feelings that came along with it, I found myself emotionally detaching during sex. I would lay there while he was inside me, moaning on cue, trying to do and say all the things that I thought should be said during sex: “Oh yeah, come on, baby.” But I was as flat as an iron. If he tried to look into my eyes, all he would see was a distant, empty void where I imagined true emotions and intimacy should be. Instead of being present, I was off in my safe place of detachment. I would just mentally float away and create visual places where I was free or safe. Sometimes I would be swimming in the ocean and feeling the sunshine on my face. Other times I would be flying high above the clouds and feeling light as a feather, where no one could hurt me. There I didn’t have to deal with the fact that someone was invading me and that I didn’t enjoy it the way I was told I was supposed to.
Instead, I floated while Matt fucked, as I had always done during sex.
I learned later in therapy that this is a common phenomenon for women who have been sexually assaulted. With my introduction to sex coming in the form of an assault, everything afterward was a mess. How can anyone really expect a person not to be confused? Love and sex got all intermingled and twisted in my head and intrinsically became one for me. I thought sex was supposed to be this uncomfortable obligation I had to offer up to men to gain acceptance and love. I was extremely promiscuous growing up—not because I liked sex, or guys for that matter, but because I thought that was how one obtained love and acceptance. That was what I knew. That was what I had learned. No one taught me differently.
This is where many people get confused about young girls and their behaviors. Often folks just shake their judgmental heads briskly back and forth in disgust at the displays of many misguided young females. What people don’t understand or realize is that the majority of the times you see a young girl acting in the manners I did—dressing provocatively, flirting like crazy with any boy that moves—these are clear warning signs or indicators that she was probably at some point sexually abused. She isn’t a slut or a whore or another label society would immediately assign out of assumption. She is most likely scared, confused, hurting, and deeply, deeply violated in some way, and she is acting out in the only way she knows how. Young people do not usually verbalize their feelings. I never had the ability to articulate my feelings, but boy, if people had just paid close enough attention to my actions long enough, they would have seen I was really screaming out for help.
I was so screwed up in my head that I used sex as a way to gain attention. The terrible thing was that I never wanted to actually engage in sexual activity. I just wanted someone to pay attention to me, to hold me, to tell me I was pretty and worthy, even to just see me. Sex came as part of this deal with most men, because, let’s face it, if they think they can get it, they will try. Sex was uncomfortable for me, and most times I hated every second of it, but during those moments at least I wasn’t alone. Someone was paying attention to me, and in my mind, I guess, loving me. My idea of love was royally screwed up also.
The love I got from my parents had been dysfunctional. My mother would say she loved me while telling me what a bad person I was. And my father, well, he always told me he loved me, but he was rarely around when I needed him. The love I sought from men was unhealthy and was not love at all, but abuse, lust, sex, and pain. I wouldn’t have known what true, unconditional love was if it had come up and slapped me in the face, so how exactly was I supposed to love Matthew? How was I supposed to give him something I didn’t possess myself? How was I supposed to love him unconditionally when all the love I had ever received or given was filled with expectations and conditions, whether they were spelled out or in my head?
I didn’t know how to tell him I just wanted to be his friend. I couldn’t find the words to tell him that, while this was a nice distraction for a while, I was just not into it. I was barely in touch with my own feelings, so how was I to try and explain to him what they were? I never had the ability to communicate my true feelings to people, especially if they were going to be potentially hurt or would hold me accountable in some way. I was incredibly codependent in this way. I would set my feelings or my needs aside, always for the sake of another. I did this even when I wasn’t getting anything positive out of a relationship. I didn’t know how to break this cycle just yet.
But I knew enough to recognize that this relationship with Matt was potentially as damaging as my substance abuse. I just wasn’t quite sure yet how to open my mouth up and allow truth to flow out of it without fearing the outcomes, the rejection, the pain, the guilt. I still wasn’t sure how to put myself and my needs first. So I just sipped my coffee as he swooped down and gave me a quick peck on the cheek before he and his father went off to work. I stiffened, and he left the house with no clue that I was sickened to my core.
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