Dear Danielle:

You are welcome. Regarding your day with your stepdad: what happened is that your childhood experience following watching the movie, being interrogated by your mother, repeatedly, was triggered. It was triggered because you were supposed to keep a secret from your mother (the buying of the ring for her).

You have been avoiding this trigger by being the Confessor to her, as you shared with me before, telling her EVERYTHING: no secrets- no triggers.

So the very keeping of a secret yesterday triggered and brought to the surface the anxiety and distress of your trauma of childhood, the interrogations, her trying to uncover secrets that didn’t exist (sexual abuse that didn’t happen!)

Regarding the topic you shared on the other thread, which you mentioned here: I couldn’t have written there that a person is deplorable if they make a mistake more than once. If you’d like you can copy what I wrote there on this thread next, with a sentence or so before and after (for context), and I will clarify.

For the child that you were, and for a young person at the beginning of experiencing life, sexual sensations are very powerful and the person is very motivated to experience those sensations again and again. It is part of nature, the reason animals go through all the trouble, all the energy expenditure it takes to mate. That is their motivation- how good and exciting and powerful it feels.

There was nothing abnormal in your motivation to experience the stimulation you did. Naturally, you wanted to experience it again and again.

It makes me feel uncomfortable thinking of a dog being used that way, just like it makes you uncomfortable. This is one reason why I don’t feel comfortable with that thread. We both disapprove of that behavior. Thing is, that behavior of long ago does not indicate you being a bad or deplorable person. It indicates the powerful force of sex in nature. We are part of nature.

The fact that this behavior is in the past and has been in the past for a long, long time; that as an adult you didn’t repeat it, means you are okay with me, not deplorable.

Let me know your thoughts/ feelings about what I wrote here.

anita