Autoerotic - As a result of the physical violence experienced during a rape, the survivors experience many post rape autoerotic (sexual) dysfunctions and fears. Within these are arousal dysfunctions, Vaginismus, dyspareunia, primary, secondary, and situational non-orgasmic, sexual unresponsiveness and premature ejaculation, and less frequent or intense orgasms. Overall, the survivors experience a fear of sex through mental association with the rape.

But I’m just feeling very sensitive and vulnerable and on edge right now. Like so far I love my job and lately I haven’t really been feeling good about it. Like I’ve always been on edge and scared to be around men and at my other job it was mostly women and not that many men but here it’s the opposite. And I’m just so uncomfortable talking to men at all unless they’re my customers. Like some days I’m ok and the next day I’m not feeling good and when a man comes up and just starts a conversation I’m calm but inside I’m scared to death. I’m always waiting to be raped again.

It’s actually a sickening feeling at the bottom of my stomach. Last night I kept having nightmares of being raped again so I didn’t get much sleep at al. So this morning I was up and just not feeling like myself at all. The nightmares’ really freaked me out. I kept having flashbacks of having the rape kit done and I remembered exactly how it felt and how much it hurt me.

I didn’t want to talk a shower this morning. I had felt so dirty last night that i just wanted to soak in the hot tub. I felt so used and broke that the only thing I wanted to do was sit down and cry it all out. My vagina was hurting. It was hurting the same way it hurt every time I was raped and touched. The pain was still there and I couldn’t stop it. The ride to work was so much worse, every bump in the road only made the pain 100 times worse and all I could do was try to breathe through it.

That broke me and I don’t feel normal. I will never feel like a normal woman. I won’t have the option of saying no without being scared that I will be raped again.

We are calling it theft. As if he could pluck open your ribs like cello strings, Pocket your breasts, steal what makes your heart flutter and tack its wings to his wall. Some days you will feel dirty! Some weeks you’ll remember how hard it is to breathe in public, like your heart beat is climbing to the attic of your throat only to suicide itself on the pavement. But know this: the person who did this to you is broken, not you

I just feel really shaken up right now. I feel lonely and I feel like breaking down and crying again. Last night was horrible and I don’t really have a lot of days like that in a while. I had seen someone walk past my house last night and I had a panic attacks, so I hurried up to close my blinds and it hit me in the head and knocked a statue over. So I was on the floor crying trying to glue back the pieces and I had this horrible flashback of Banky raping me and I had broken down. At first I was angry and then I was sad. I got up and sat that the computer and cried. I cried so hard that after a while I got tired of crying because it hurt too much so I had to stop. I had another flashback but this one was about Frank and it felt like the 2 years that we were together had been crammed together and I had felt every single time he touched me and it was in such detail like I was watching a movie but I couldn’t stop the movie from playing. After I had caught my breath and stopped having the flashbacks it felt like my body was here but my head wasn’t. My body didn’t feel like it was mine. And all I wanted to do was get the pictures of them out of my head. The flashbacks became nightmares the whole night and I got no sleep.

I just feel so hurt right now. I woke up this morning and I feel like I have to throw up and my stomach is so upset right now. Like for the first time in months I’m actually scared to be in the house alone. Like I feel like I’m becoming paranoid again. Like I can feel them watching me. So when I woke up this morning I didn’t want to get out of bed because my vagina hurt so much. Like it felt like I was burning and I can still feel it. I’ve tried everything to get that feeling out of me but nothings worked so far. It felt like that after Banky had performed oral sex on me and before he raped me. It’s like that feeling just won’t go away and it just makes me sick to my stomach because I can smell him on me and no matter how hard I scrub I just can’t get it off of me.

 Someone to tell me it’s going to be ok, someone to hold me and just be there for me, I need to hear that it’s not my fault and that I’m still normal and beautiful and that I’m not damaged. I can’t do this part alone. I’ve tried so hard and I can’t so I’m reaching out to my support system. I’ve tried doing it alone and it doesn’t work, I only hurt myself and everyone else around me when I do it alone. I’m trying to convince myself that it’s ok to lean on other people when I need help. That I’m not weaker because I need help, that I deserve to be happy just like everyone else.

 I’m trying so hard not to cry because my daughter is here and I don’t like crying in front of her because she picks up on emotions so easily.  My daughter has changed everything for me recently. I was so selfish the past couple of years, especially after I had her; I was selfish to my ex- husband and everyone else. But just being around her more and actually spending quality time with her and opening up has changed my life.  I want to be there for her when she’s 100 lol I know that it’s not going to happen but I want to make sure that I’m around for her. She’s my heart and if it wasn’t for her, I would still be drinking and trying to kill myself. I don’t want my daughter to grow up without a mother like I did. That is the 2nd worst thing that could happen to her and I would never want that for her. Every day I look at her and she gives me a hug or says I love you mama I think about why I’m fighting so hard. Why I keep fighting to survive, I’ve been raped and hit and abused (sexually and emotionally) enough times so that maybe one day she will never have to go through what I went through.

Each day is hard; it’s the hardest thing I will ever have to do. Some days I don’t want to get out of bed, some days I just want to fall asleep and never wake up again because on my bad days I feel like I would be so much better if he would have killed me and then I have days where breathing hurts so much that I’d rather hold my breath until I die. But then there are days where I have really bad panic attacks and I have control over them, and that makes me feel really good because I know that everything I’m doing is finally working. The emotions that I go through every day I can’t explain it. There are a lot of highs but so many lows to go along with it. It’s a draining and exhausting process that I’m scared that I’m going to have to live with for the rest of my life. I don’t know how long it’s going to take me to get better, to be normal again; I guess I just want to be a normal woman. Someone who has no problems with her sexuality. A woman who doesn’t have the flashbacks, panic attacks, triggers or the jumpiness when she’s touched by her partner. I want to feel like my body belongs to me again, that someone never touched me in the most intimate place every. I can’t get that back, none of it I can get back and I don’t want to say its ok because it’s not but I’m determined to heal from it.

Sometimes I think about if there’s actually healing from this. Is it something that you can actually be cured of or will it kill you slowly in the end? Do we actually heal from the flashbacks or do they eventually go away for a while and come back again when you’re not expecting it? When it does come back do you have to start all over again with therapy and healing? I wonder how many hours of my life I’ve lost to being raped and fighting this battle. Who would have ever thought that it would cause so many problems and so much heartbreak that a lot of people just don’t understand. I just want to know if I can actually get better from this or am I just holding on to false hope…..

She’s heard stories of Vietnam vets who can still feel the tingling of their amputated limbs She’s wondering how many women are walking around this world feeling the tingling of their amputated wings, remembering what it was to fly, to sing

I’m just really tired right now. This whole month has been so depressing and emotional and I don’t know why. I just feel like crying all the time. I sent off for my police report when I tried to press charges against Banky. Ugh just saying his name makes me sick to my stomach. It just seems like everything is falling apart. The more help I get the worse things become around me. I keep second guessing myself about what I’m doing. I don’t know if I’m doing the right thing. I feel like I have to do it I have to speak out about what’s happening. It still feels like I’m carrying around this deep dark secret and its tearing me apart inside. I’m scared about publicly speaking about what happened. I’m scared that people I called my friends won’t want nothing to do with me anymore. I’m scared that ill push everyone else away. I’m scared that I’ll never get over this.

Therapy isn’t going well at all. Every time I need someone to talk to everyone is busy so by the time that someone ask me what’s wrong or what’s bothering me I don’t really have anything to say because I don’t feel that same feeling anymore. I feel as though people just ignore my feelings, I feel like I’m sacrificing my soul. And right now I’m actually starting to think that something is seriously wrong with me mentally. I think it’s my hormones again. I’ve been keeping track of my emotions and something just seems so off with that and my eating habits.

This has just been such a bad year and I can’t stop thinking about my dad, I just wish this whole thing was over. He doesn’t want to live his life suffering, not knowing what’s going on around him. He has no function in his brain and yet my mother still won’t take the feeding tubes out. The doctors keep telling us that he’s not going to come out of the vegetative state. And it’s been 8 months and no one is listening to me and I can’t do anything about it. She didn’t care about him while he was around so why are you making everyone else (including your husband) suffer.

It’s just a lot of stress going on right now. My Grandfather (I’ve known him since I was 5 and he’s the closest thing I’ve had to a grandfather) died last night. Death always comes in 3’s. Its only October and the year isn’t even over. I’m tired of trying to hide my tears. I’m tired of crying in the bathroom. I’m tired of just letting go of one tear at a time and hiding the other tears. I’m just tired of having sad feelings.

As an adult woman can hunt for and find her own value. She can graduate herself into importance. But during the shaky span from childhood to woman hood, a girl needs help in determining her worth-and no one can anoint her like her mother.

“Young Children believe that Mother is the true source and has all the answers. If a mother dislikes her child, or thinks she’s not good enough, the child believes she’s unlikeable and inadequate. If someone does not challenge this distortion and show the child that she is worthy and precious, she will internalize these negative beliefs and eventually decides that she cannot be different.”

I’ve been thinking for a while, about how I’m doing in therapy and my progress. So I’ve have homework and everything and one of the things I’ve done was a billboard of positive things and things that I like that make me happy. I do have pictures of myself on the top of the billboard with encouraging words and I have post it’s on it with positive things about myself and my body. I also have a book of positive affirmations that I carry with me all the time that I created myself. That got me to thinking of why I even have to do either one of these things just to make myself feel better. I sat down and thought for a little bit about what caused all of this and how it started. I thought about how I felt about myself when I looked into the mirror how I felt about my body and my feelings towards me. After thinking and crying I realized that I don’t have self-esteem or confidence.

I don’t know what confidence feels like. I don’t know how to think about my body but the only thing I do think about is having thunder thighs and my mother always getting on me about becoming a roly-poly and losing my baby weight. I felt the same thing about my hair and my complexion. Shed called me nappy hair because I have kinky hair so she put a perm in my hair when I was 12. After I had the perm in my hair for a while, it started to break off my hair and I started wearing hair weaves because I wanted long hair. All the boys and men around her like black women with long hair so that’s what I wore. I had curly weaves, crinkly, curly, multi colored weaves, I’ve even wore a wig before. I was ashamed of my hair. I was ashamed of the length when she made me take my senior pictures with my own hair. I hated the length I felt ugly. I hated that I had to put a perm in my hair to make it straight and that I had to put hair weave in it to make it longer and I still didn’t feel pretty. The only thing I kept thinking of was I was ugly. There were days when I had the weave in she would comment about how bad my hair looked, her and my dad would always say why you keep that crap in your hair. I was a teenager at the time and I remember thinking because I’m ugly. I’m not pretty and no one is telling me I’m pretty and no one is giving me that attention that I need. It got to the point my mother wanted a weave in her hair and she went out and brought the same weave I was wearing but in a different color. The thing that I had to myself I no longer had. I went natural in 07 and every comment out her mouth was when are you going to do something with that nappy head of yours. She tore down every positive thing about my hair that I had and I didn’t have the confidence to even get it back until now. I have dreadlocks and I wouldn’t change it for the word. It’s me, I love the way it makes me look, I love my hair, even the kinky part of my hair I love. I would never put another perm in my hair again.

I don’t have self-confidence; I didn’t have it when I was growing up. I wasn’t given those resources and when my mother did give them to me it was only a little bit at a time but she would come back and break me down again. My weight is something that I’m still a little bit insecure about. I’m still a little insecure about the way my body looks. Over and over it was drilled into my head that I have thunder thighs and a big stomach. When I was little, as soon as I hit puberty in the 5th grade I put on weight in my thighs, hips and my breasts. I’m short so of course it went to those places. I’m not fat, just thick and I love it now and I understand it now but then I thought I was fat. I never weighed over 150lbs in school but when I was in middle school my mother put me on a diet to make me lose weight. Then I was 85lbs in the 8th grade. I could run a mile in 8 minutes but she still thought I was fat and made me very aware of it.

She would tell me how I needed to lose weight because I was getting big. She would tell me that if I didn’t lose the weight I would look like a roly-poly, those toys that waddle but they don’t fall down because their bottoms are big. Then I would have to ride the exercise bike for an hour crying. She made me run up and down the steps for 30 minutes while she sat up stairs watching TV and eating. This one time she made me get on the exercise bike and when my sister came in the room to try to cheer me up she yelled at her to get out of the room. In elementary school I used to eat everything like all the time. She put me on a diet then and limited my portion size so after everyone else went to sleep I would sneak out the bed room and eat because I was still hungry. She preached and preached about control my portion sizes and how I’m eating too much. I have such big anxieties about eating now. Like I only eat once a day because I don’t want to get fat, I don’t want to gain any more weight. I still feel like I’m 10 being told I’m fat and I need to lose weight, that voice is still in my head and I’m fighting every day to try and get it out.

When I was pregnant with my daughter I only gained about 30lbs and that was just in my stomach. A couple of months later my mother asked me when I was going to lose the rest of my baby weight. (my mother is twice my size, she smokes, does drugs and works 3 hours a day, when she gets home she sits in the kitchen, in front of the TV and eat until it’s time for her to go to bed. She still has her baby weight). When I started to lose the weight and started wearing tight jeans shed always have something to say about why I’m wearing tight low cut jeans. My shirt was long enough so you didn’t see anything even when I sat down. I ignored her. So you don’t want me to be fat but you don’t want me looking nice either? In all of my school pictures I was not allowed to wear skirts or dresses. Especially in elementary school. She would put me in old jeans, boots and a sweater when every other girl in the class had on a dress for picture day. So when I would come home and tell her they were teasing me she didn’t care, her response was tell them if you don’t like my clothes go buy me some. That was her answer to everything, feelings didn’t and still don’t matter. We had dresses and nice clothes in our closet but she wouldn’t let us wear them, she would make us wear things she wore as a child.



 I wore make up in high school my freshman year. She hated it, I liked the glitter and the eye shadow and doing my eye brows but she hated it. She hated everything about it because she didn’t wear it growing up. She told me in front of my friends and her coworkers that I looked like a clown with all that junk on my face. I remember walking away holding back the tears because I was still around my friends and I didn’t want them to see me cry. I thought I looked pretty but to her I felt like I looked ugly. I was always insecure about my completion. To this day I still think I’d rather be a dark complexion than the caramel complexion I have now.

I feel like I’m not light enough to be pretty and I’m not dark enough to be pretty either. I feel like I’m in the middle and I feel lost. I got tired of hearing her talk about how light my complexion was, how I didn’t look like anyone else on her side of the family and how I was the odd one out at every one of her family events. Her brothers would make fun of me because I was so light and because I “talked like a white girl” (proper English). She never stopped them she would join in and comment about how she told me to lose weight, how I would be prettier if I lost the weight. And that’s what keeps playing in my head. Where I live, men like light skinned women (red bones) or you have to be loud and ghetto. And I’m not close to either one. I’m still unsure of myself when it comes to my husband. I don’t think he thinks I’m pretty enough because I know he likes light skinned girls with red hair and I’m not that. And I guess it just makes me think of how I wasn’t good enough growing up because of the complexion of my skin and because my hair wasn’t long enough or curly enough or even straight enough. This one girl in my neighborhood would make fun of my complexion all the time all the way up until high school. My first boyfriend broke up with me to be with her because I was too dark skinned and that hurt it still there in my heart.


Growing up I wasn’t called pretty, I wasn’t called beautiful, my mother never told me any of this; my father never told me any of this. The closest thing I was told was that I looked nicer in my clothes after losing all my weight. That’s not a compliment, that’s an insult. I wanted to feel pretty, I wanted to feel beautiful, and no one told me any of those things so I went looking for them. The boys my age didn’t find me pretty either so I went to older men and that’s when I met my ex, which was the worst thing that happened to me in my life. A lot of things I didn’t have growing up that I should have had but I never got. And I dint think that it would affect me as an adult but it does. I don’t have as much confidence in myself as I should. I don’t believe in myself as much as I should and I’m trying to learn it for the first time. I do feel empty, I feel broken, and I feel like not myself. How can I be confident when I don’t know what it is? How can I be sure of myself when I don’t even know who I am? I know what I like, I know what I don’t like, I know who I love and I know who loves me but I don’t know me. I don’t know myself. I feel like I’ve been beaten so many times that I’m struggling trying to get up again. I feel pretty now, I just don’t feel whole. While I’m going through therapy I feel my inner child talking to me and I talk back to her. And I can feel her crying and it’s so loud and that pain I had from being a child is starting to come out.


 Right now I’m scared of changing but I’m excited at the same time. It’s so scary for me because I haven’t felt like this before. I wasn’t allowed to think for myself and now that I had the freedom to say what I want and how I want it I guess I’m careful on how I do it. For so long I’ve carried this around with me because I was taking the blame for when my parents failed, especially my mother. She was the one who was supposed to be there and guide me growing up and she didn’t. That’s not my fault. I was under 18 and a child, I’m not responsible for her actions and I never will be. I’m responsible for what I do after I turned 18 and what I chose to do now. I used to think that because my mother had a bad childhood that was she did to me was excusable and that she didn’t know any better but she does. I see now that she knew exactly what she was doing, that it wasn’t an accident or something that she can blame her childhood on. That was her conscience decision and I’m not taking the fall for it anymore.