Sunday 28 June 2015

Exploring traumas: sexuality

The most interesting yet also the most dangerous property of traumas is how hard they can be to detect and narrow down. Often it's just an oddity in one's behaviour, or strange thoughts. It's generally not until the right trigger is encountered that the trauma fully comes to the foreground. It's also only through such triggers that one can begin to piece together the full extent of a trauma. One of the most severe types of traumas are probably those related to sexuality.

For myself it's in hindsight not hard to see how such a trauma managed to dig its roots deep into my mind. From the circumstantial evidence that I was sexually abused as a young child, to the degrading relationship between my parents until my father finally ran off with the woman he had been cheating on my mother with, to the advantage guys have taken of my fragile emotional state during the first years after discovering the truth about my intersex condition.

Earlier today I had a sudden emotional breakdown which surprised me. All of it centred around the question 'why did they do that to me?'. I never wanted to be sexually abused. I never wanted to be raped. I never wanted to say 'yes' to those guys doing... things to my body. I never felt I had the right to say 'no'. Yet with every event I could feel another part of myself, of my sense of self-worth, be cut away and discarded. Yet I didn't feel like I had the right to stop it.

I never wanted to say 'yes' to those girls, either. I never really knew why it all happened. Maybe I just went along with it all just to fill this gaping hole where my emotional side was supposed to go. Maybe I was afraid of what would happen if I said 'no'. Maybe I was just lonely.

Today's breakthrough seems to be that I felt simply angry at all of them. At all of those who neglected my feelings and just used me. It's much like when I was finally able to stop blaming myself for having been raped and allowed myself to simply be angry at the pile of excrement which felt that he had the right to use and command me in such a manner.

Maybe even more importantly is that it showed me a glimpse of the complex and intricate wiring underlying my hatred for anything related to sexuality not to mention also anything male. It's a complex mesh of betrayal, trust, loneliness, deception, longing, fear, pain and many more contradicting emotions. Even if I receive that reconstructive surgery this year, I'm not sure how long it'll take me to explore this trauma's web fully and begin to disassemble it.

The betrayal, deception and harm inflicted upon me by physicians merely adds to this existing trauma. It meshes the traumas related to sexuality with those related to my body as a whole into a new... meta-trauma in which my body itself and anything related to it is the trauma, the trigger and the key to destroying the trauma.

At any rate what I'm learning is just how far down the rabbit hole goes. I hope that at least this way I can learn to better understand my own behaviour and urges, to ensure that at the very least I won't be making the same mistakes again, and allow myself to have just that little bit more self-esteem that I seem to need to actually clearly state my feelings to others and to not simply give into the yearning for companionship that loneliness evokes in a social creature.

It's okay to be alone and lonely. It's okay to go a life without feeling loved by another. As long as you can love and respect yourself.


Maya

2 comments:

pincerfae said...

as someone who's also intersexed, I can relate to how you feel.
The same thing's happening here in the United States with the American Medical Association and its guidelines on intersex genetalia, as well as WPATH.
There's a lot of very negative history with those organizations, as well as their European counterparts.

Maya Posch said...

@pincerfae: yup, their policies have been 'eradicate intersex and don't tell anybody about it' for the longest time. Still are, even if they're claiming it's changing.

Those born with an intersex body are apparently also born without any human rights, basically free to be hunted down by any physician who it bloody well pleases to practice some medical genocide =/

Doesn't really contribute to the 'feeling good about one's body' part of being alive, when the overall impression is that you're just sub-human scum...