Dear Vaishh:

You shared that your father “is physically, mentally and verbally abusive”, that your parents often hit you, “for the tiniest mistake”, that they restrict you a lot and didn’t allow you any privacy when you lived with them. Currently, you are 19 and they (still) do not agree that you date anyone.

In the last 2 years of high school a “friend” sexually  harassed you for a few months, and one of your schoolmates raped you “almost every 2 days for nearly a year”. You got pregnant, told him about it, he hit you brutally, causing you to miscarry, and he threatened and blackmailed you.

For college, you moved to a new city, “to start afresh”. In college you met a senior, he listened to you “rant for weeks”, called you cute and said that he likes you. With him, you had “consensual sex for the first time” in your life. During that experience you felt disassociated from your body: “I felt disassociated from my body… fear that my body doesn’t belong to me.. like I’m a nobody.. like I don’t belong anywhere… like I don’t belong to my body and I have no right or control over my body”.

Even though you fear being touched, you got comfortable and feel safe being touched by him. You “love him now”, and sometimes you tell him that you love him, and he tells you that he loves you. Because of Covid-19,  the two of you live a distance from each other, your relationship with him is a secret because of your parents’ disapproval, so you don’t have as much sex with him as he wants to have with you. Therefore, he told you that he wants to have sex with other women.

As a response to him wanting to have sex with other women, you feel jealous, lonely, unloved, and “like something is wrong about” you. You don’t want to tell him how you feel so to not be annoying, and to not burden him. Those “sudden strike of fear and bodily disassociation still” hit you hard, and you “cry helplessly, wanting to be protected, wanting to feel safe”.

You asked: “What do I need to do to feel less away from my body?… what am I?”

My thoughts/ my feelings: a little girl is born to belong, born to be loved, born to be respected. The girl needs gentle hands to feed her, to clothe her, to brush her hair, to touch her forehead gently, to touch her gently with the unspoken-but-felt message: you are precious, we respect you, we know that you are important, and we value you; we are here to love you, you are safe with us.

What happens when the girl is touched instead harshly, with hands inflicting pain, with hands delivering a different message: we don’t like you, we don’t want you, we hate you, you are of no  value to  us.

What happens is that the little girl believes the message delivered by the harsh hands. She then looks at her beaten body and says to herself: I don’t like me either, I don’t like this body. I don’t want this body. I hate this body, it is of no value.

Next, this girl grows up and she notices that boys are interested in her body, they want her body. She wants to be liked, so she lets them use her body. She found out that to the boys/ men, her body has value: it gets them excited, their excitement builds up, they then get a relief and they feel so much better. So she lets them. She gets a little bit of what feels like a much needed loving attention (she feels their touch and it doesn’t hurt, different from her parents’ touch).

Her parents are strict, they don’t want her to date.. if they only knew that she was having sex, what would they say, what would they do.. she feels shame and fear. She doesn’t understand. She feels like a freak, like something is so very wrong with her.

How strong is the will to live, that a girl hated by the people she needed to love her.. her body being hurt by hands supposed to love her.. her body being used by men who need to be sexually served… this girl, as separated from her body as can be, still wants to live, and to love. She still wants a piece of a good life.

And she can have a piece of a good life, love and safety. She already had moments of it, she can grow those moments to months and years, but it will take time and work. Life is incredible this way, how a girl born into misery can survive and with ongoing healing, she can thrive.

* The current man in your life, he is not the one for you. He is better than others you had in your life, but he is not good enough for you.

If you want to, let me know what you think of my response, and we can communicate further.

anita