AS SICK AS MY SECRETS

The shameful secret of childhood incest fueled her sex obsession
and drove her compulsive search for relief in empty relationships.

I would like to share with you the journey of my sexuality that began with an experience of incest. The thoughts and feelings that accompanied the incestuous relationship I had at a very young age affected my development, perspectives, and choices throughout my life, until I was able to make sense of them and come to a place of healing, acceptance and forgiveness, all of which I found through the support and guidance of the Be Totally Free! process. Thanks to such healing, I no longer perceive myself to be a victim. I am totally free of the anger, hurt, and shame that once plagued me. I know today that the negative experiences I had growing up have been teachers for me, opportunities for healing, and have ultimately provided me with the compassion and understanding which, when I share them with others, can potentially save another soul from having to live as a victim of the same emotional isolation, shame, and resentment which I almost allowed to ruin my life. I hope that as you read this you may be able to relate to the thoughts and feelings of my experience (even though the actual details vary) and can come to know that you, too, deserve to be totally free !

I was a happy, carefree child with the typical innocence one would expect from a child. But when I was 5 years old this innocence was interrupted when my oldest sister began to use me sexually. I was in no way emotionally prepared to be sexual at the early age of five and it showed; I immediately lost that sweetness I had exuded up until that point. There was an openness, trust, and loving abandon which died in me when I took part in what I perceived to be a deviant sexual life; it was a secret I believed I would need to keep buried in me, at all cost, for many years to come. I turned to food and excess body fat to help me bury this secret, and along with it, all of the ensuing feelings of resentment, shame, guilt and powerlessness.

Today I do not blame my sister for using me for her own sexual and emotional needs. She was a child herself (age 10, and five years older than me). She experienced sexual abuse by a family friend at a very young age, and the only thing she knew, harboring the pain she felt from the innocence she lost, was to take her anger and aggression out on someone weaker than her. I was the youngest, the weakest, and the most convenient. The experience was not violent or severe; she taught me to bring her sexual pleasure, which many times included in her doing the same for me. But I was only five. This clandestine relationship took place when my parents were out of the house or sometimes just in another part of the house, and when my other sister was not around. It continued for five years. When I was 10 and my sister was 15, she confessed her wrongdoing to my parents and they told her to stop. They did not realize, out of their own fear and denial, the significance of what my sister was actually confessing to, nor what kind of impact it had had on me. My sister did stop, very abruptly, without any forewarning; it had finished just as it had begun for me, without any knowledge of why, and without any say in the matter. I had become accustomed to the special attention from my sister and the sexual stimulation I derived from our secret meetings. I felt betrayed when she stopped, (and even more so when five years later I learned that the pact of secrecy I had sworn to had been broken by her, to the very ones I worked so hard to hide it from…my parents.) I was left with a jumble of feelings of guilt and shame for having partaken in it at all, and humiliation for actually craving the physical and emotional pleasure I was missing. The worst was no longer having an outlet for such cravings. I felt rejected, and ashamed that I was at all disappointed when it ended. I felt dirtier than ever and was convinced I was a pervert.

Needless to say, having had sexual feelings turned on in me at such an inappropriate age, without any emotional development or support with which to handle them, I became out of control sexually. I compulsively masturbated from age 5 on (I had learned how from my sister). At the onset of any kind of difficulty or challenge in my life I would use masturbation as an escape. This only contributed to the sense of shame and humiliation I felt for being dirty and out of control in the first place. I overate from a very young age to keep this truth about me hidden, and to punish myself for it at the same time. I overate constantly and was always relatively overweight. I became a “yo-yo dieter,” never able to keep the weight off for good. What I did not realize is that I used the weight as a protective shield to protect me from the feelings inside I could not bear to face, and to protect me from any closeness—and the risk of possible harm—with others. I had felt so vulnerable to my sister’s desires and control that I was filled with resentment, thinking that an angry hard shell would protect me from ever feeling hurt again. I was sure that I needed to be protected from being hurt by others. But what I did not recognize was the need I felt to protect myself from me—from the insatiable sexual appetite I could sense was laying dormant under my rolls of fat and my combative attitude. I would fantasize about being thin, dressing in sexy clothes and having the power to seduce men to want to have sex with me. I even envied the life of prostitutes, because I perceived that their occupations gave them the permission to be sexually active without any inhibition—a “luxury” I craved for myself.

I was caught between being a depraved little girl on the inside, and needing to maintain an image of wholesomeness and purity on the outside. I was terrified of my parents seeing through my façade and rejecting me as a result of what they saw. The idea that “if they only knew me, they wouldn’t love me” dominated my subconscious thoughts and motivations every day of my childhood; it became the primary motivation for becoming an “over-achiever”…. I had to make up for my deficiency. I did well in school, was very active in lots of activities like acting and singing and sports, and I stuck close to my parents, trying to please them with my accomplishments and attentiveness, hoping to convince them that I was good, despite my knowledge to the contrary. Despite all of this effort, I lived in constant fear of their ever “finding out” the truth about me—that I was not really the sweet, innocent, diligent, moral person I portrayed myself to be.

In my teenage years this double life grew more dichotomous; instead of just fantasizing about boys and sex, I began to actually experiment sexually with boys. The problem was that I carried around so much guilt for my secrets that any kind of sexual contact, even the appropriate adolescent contact between a boyfriend and girlfriend, brought me unbearable anxiety, shame, and guilt. In my way of thinking, to be sexual in any way was to be a “bad girl,” (Sex=bad). For this reason, I could only be comfortable being sexual when I was drunk. Under the influence of alcohol I could sate my sexual appetite without the mental torture of self-condemnation and irrational fear of losing my parents’ and God’s approval. The drawback to this was that when drunk I was not only sexually active, I was out of control. Alcoholic “black-outs” enabled me to be as forthright as I wanted with guys, sometimes people I barely even knew, and still somewhat deny the truth of this monstrous sexual hunger that lived inside of me. Everything I did perpetuated this fear that I was dirty and bad: I wound up with people I barely even knew, humiliated myself chasing guys who had no interest in me at all, and resorted to being with people who, when sober, I would not have been “caught dead with!” In the end, I felt so bad about myself that I did not even need to be drunk to justify humiliating myself with poor choices. I willingly sold out for only the best I thought I could get—which, despite my feeble attempts to make it seem otherwise, was not at all what I really wanted. And being as obsessed with sex and men as I was, I lived in constant stress and worry that I would ultimately contract AIDS.

It was obvious that without extreme conscious control on my part, I would always inevitably resort to compromising myself again. In an attempt at self-control, I would flip from being promiscuous to being completely asexual or prudish about sex of any kind—but of course this was never a solution; I still had not made peace with my sexuality and therefore continued to live in fear of when it would next rear its ugly head. I was at war with myself and with this powerful sexuality I could neither understand nor properly control; it was a constant, never-ending, and ultimately hopeless struggle.

It is important to note, too, that, for the most part, I did not even consciously see myself as a sexually out of control person. I was not consciously aware that I was driven by my sexual desires because I hid such desires and the need for others to accept me sexually under the guise of the pursuit of a “meaningful relationship.” I was only looking for “Mr. Right,” not catering to the whims of my voracious sexual appetite! I was plagued by such inner turmoil that from a very young age I used the escape of fantasizing about being swept off my feet by a “knight in shining armor” to comfort and distract me. But whenever I did find my knight I was disappointed to realize that he couldn’t take me far enough away from me as I needed. And besides, it wasn’t long before I discovered that “Mr. Right” had too much wrong with him to meet my very high standards. This constant pursuit of the “right relationship” kept me distracted from the pain inside of me for years. It was an all-consuming obsession that included many stages: the development of a crush, the fantasy of the “match made in heaven,” the coy game-playing to capture his attention and affection, the sexual tension throughout this process, and the initial ego satisfaction I got from finally getting him and having him dote on me—how I loved to be adored! This process of obsession was so intoxicating that finally settling down in a steady relationship paled in comparison; it always seemed so anti-climatic! After becoming disillusioned with the situation I’d worked so hard to create, I would begin “scoping” for prospects and stirring up the excitement of the next chase.

The madness of this self-serving and compromising sexual behavior finally drove me to seek shelter from the storm in the peaceful calm of Be Totally Free! Although I had attempted release through years of therapy, it was only through the insight and unconditionally loving support of Roy and the Metasteps process that I was finally freed from the emotional labyrinth of guilt, resentment, and perpetual shame, both from my childhood and as an adult. I am no longer driven by compulsion, either for food, sex, or a relationship, and I have made peace with myself, especially with my sexuality. I have lost the cynical, hard edge that, instead of protecting me, kept me a prisoner of my pain for so many years. I now have sanity and balance in my life, which has enabled me to be more genuinely considerate of others and far more useful than I had ever been while I was chasing my insatiable desires. I now thank God every day that through Be Totally Free! I was saved from a life of self-loathing and self-degradation.