Reflections on Rape

Reflections

The effects of rape were like a war of words within my head. My conscience versus reality versus an inner voice that told me terrible things. This inner voice was supposed to be my self-esteem; Stockholm Syndrome had replaced with an inner demon.

"You are not good enough."

"You are ugly."

"You are a second-class citizen."

"You are worthless as a woman."

"You should have a sense of shame."

Shame was the big one. All rape victims blame themselves. The incarceration of my rapist three months later had not brought about inner peace. I shifted from activity to activity, thought of moving, rode the bus for hours, walked for hours, sat bored in restaurants, watched television or slept in the afternoons, took only the work I had to.

I overate and then did not eat, fasting for a day or two. I avoided water until I was so dehydrated, I would have drunk a liter of coke just to alleviate the dryness. I ate foods with wheat I should not have been eating. One reactive episode involved choking on the coating of a chicken nugget I had grilled. And I thought of moving, of quitting my relationships, of leaving my family, of leaving. And then I stopped.

A few events happened. One was when I was walking with my mother, and she claimed that it was my fault that my delusional landlady was so crazy she flipped over my washing my own laundry and not using her linen. I never understood the sin of using my own linen.

I am tired of the crazy, narcissistic excuses some women have for insisting that everything in a household be done their way, as if they were morally superior and in charge. These types of women are verbally and emotionally abusive to their spouses and sons, which encourages the cycle of abuse to continue. Those people who experience abuse have a thirty percent chance of becoming abusers themselves.

Sadly, I have come across that in direct contrast to the heap loads of sexism that were out there. I was pleased by neither. Wanting a fair shot does not mean wanting to be the boss. It will start with the linen, and it will become a personality marker right through to the very nature of existence. Such is the nature of delusional narcissists.

What brought inner peace was the decision to take up Buddhism studies. Nothing else worked. I had spent the last thirty years subconsciously searching for a cure to this dreaded thing called Stockholm Syndrome without any lasting relief.

In a sense, I was as much trying to escape myself as I was the past. Stockholm Syndrome becomes internalized as much as self-doubt and the experience of rape. Call it PTSD or after-effects if you want. It is a very real experience. It is a psychosomatic experience that affects the mind, body, and soul. I know about those feelings.

I have been there. When Veterans claim they are suffering, they are telling the truth. And they often cannot find words for their experience. My own experience did not make me an expert, but it shone a light in my life onto the reality of that dark experience called Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

Over time, I realized the amount of desperate humiliation I had felt in response to the emotional and verbal cruelty inflicted upon me over the last thirty years. I had attracted sycophants: narcissists and Cluster B personality-disordered people. These types of personalities are dysfunctional and dramatic. Dramatic does not mean theatrical in this sense. Psychiatrically, they are conflict-oriented, attention-seeking, callous, abusive, and unstable.

A survivor of rape with Stockholm Syndrome meeting up with a seemingly normal-looking and normal-sounding sycophant leads to a lot of veiled hostility and pathological lying. It also leads to their egoism, abandonment, false accusations, cheating, manipulation, defamation of myself and others, and other forms of mistreatment. It was not just one person. It was a large set of people.

I have dated twenty men in my life. I have attracted countless others who were highly questionable, even borderline sociopathic at times. I am not attempting to blaspheme men as a group here, just to point out what happens in these types of relationships. It is a kind of setup, how the dysfunctional meet up with the dysfunctional. Stockholm Syndrome may have a dark side, but it is an internal experience. Post-Traumatic Stress Disordered-survivors do not aim themselves at others as a weapon against their own best interests.

Borderlines are the kind of people who paint everyone with the same brush. A person who asks to borrow $20.00 for a cab is a gold-digger manipulator. A person with a credit history of 600 and $20,000.00 in debt is the same as someone with $1,200,000.00 in debt and five maxed-out credit cards. There are no nuances in their thinking; people are good or bad, black or white.

Usually, in the eyes of a Cluster B personality, you are good if you can do something for them. You are bad if you do not. You are an unwilling participant in an evil game. You do not know the rules. They set the rules, always in favor of themselves. They see their lies as truth, and reality as an inconvenience, things to be fought against.

They can be so convincing that hordes of people will believe their lies without a shred of evidence. Some will continue to believe even if evidence is offered to the contradict their claims. It is like a bad soap opera cross between Dynasty and Forensic Files. It is a competition. You are being set up to fail. You do not realize it is a competition until the contest or race is over. I understood competition. I was a trained runner who grew up on the track field.

Cluster B personalities: histrionics, narcissists, psychopaths, sociopaths, borderlines. They are the kind of people who cannot be satisfied by ending a relationship. They are perhaps not feeling a real connection with someone. They may have dated out of desperation or for an ego boost. They may have liked sex and attention. There is nothing real about their connections with people. What they are searching for does not exist. They are scooping out their own versions of reality to fill an empty hole.

They are usually obsessed with finding the best partner. It is an image thing. They have to have the best partner for their needs; nobody can meet their endless needs or fill their empty, gaping holes. They will always have empty holes. They get to carry around their great big blue holes everywhere with them. What happens to people who fall in the Great Blue Hole.

There are two hundred dead divers' bodies on the bottom of Belize's infamous Great Blue Hole. If it looks dangerous, stay away from it. I had no ability to process dangers that were veiled and not obvious. There were red flags, but I could not see them. I am alive today somehow by virtue of my own strength. If you think leeches cannot suck your blood slowly, you are wrong. They love to do it when you are sleeping.

It seemed to me a lot of these attitudes were derived from insufficiently fair power structures in relationships. There were a lot of double standards. Men were allowed to express themselves and choose what they want.

By default, men were allowed to choose what they wanted and reject what they did not want. Women did not have the same right, and still do not. It has a lot to do with why people discuss rape culture, exploitation, objectification, and sexual misconduct these days.

Women have to be nice in order to water down their 'nos', and conceal their wants. They cannot express sexuality or spend their own money directly. There are a lot of double standards that fuel rape culture. It is a new term and an accurate one, though not obvious. There are many unwritten codes in society about male and female behavior that can create misunderstanding and hostility.