Thank you for writing me, Helcat. I feel like on some level punishing myself is what I deserve. I label myself as a sexual abuser, a rapist, someone who sexually assaulted another human being. The people in my life tell me it is not so but in my mind, that is how I feel about myself. Being in the skin of someone such as that is utterly repulsive to me. There is some part of me that wishes me to suffer. I think this part of me wishes this because it is so very disappointed in me and wants to keep me from ever making the same mistakes again.

I know for a fact this would never happen again as I have trained myself to take rejection less personally and to surround myself with people who are generally emotionally aware and communicative. I try to create a safe space for the people around me in my own way and I take care in making sure people understand they are not responsible for my emotions nor do they need to fix me. I try to communicate what I need and want. Rather than assuming what people want, I ask them beforehand and make sure they’re absolutely comfortable. I watch for their facial expressions just to make sure they’re okay with me reaching out to them.

This relationship has scared me off of being in a relationship with someone again. I do not feel comfortable being a sexual being. I feel unclean. I am deathly afraid of hurting someone, not that I think I would intentionally do so, just that the potential is inherent.

I would most likely not condemn my friend. I would feel compassion for them and try to be there for them. I’d probably think the fact that they care so much is indicative of a good heart, not that of one who abuses others.

When I condemn myself, I’m thinking about the people in the world who would condemn me and label me as a sexual assaulter, an abuser, a rapist. I punish myself before those who do not understand my story do.

I agree with you in that I tend to blame and criticize myself heavily when things go wrong. I do want to overcome my self-criticism and learn to see the situation with more grace for myself. Much as I feel like a villain and as though everything was my fault, the relationship was not good for either of us. Abusing myself is painful. In the past few days, I have even felt close to death from the shame I’m carrying.

Before this relationship, I often felt a sense of defectiveness about my insides. I believed I was unlovable. I would criticize myself for making the tiniest mistake or for not living up to my standards of performance. I also criticized myself for having feelings, wants, and needs in the first place. I thought that they didn’t matter and that by expressing them, I ran the risk of being abandoned. To this day, I internalize what others say of me and struggle to be on my own side. I have a difficult time believing I have ‘goodness’ in me. Part of why I attached so much to this first relationship was because I thought this would be my only chance, that no-one else would want to be with me, and that my ex was the only person who saw any good in me.

I wasn’t taught about consent, no. I don’t think either of us were. One class in middle-school or high-school is not enough to cover the nuance of a relationship. That one class doesn’t talk about boundaries and healthy relationships, it doesn’t make it real. We both walked into the scenario blind and without experience and healthy modeling. I was raised with the stereotype that ‘all men want sex 24/7’. I now know this is false and that rejection isn’t always personal. And if it is, so what? There are many people in the world to have relationships with anyways.

In my home-life, I wasn’t encouraged to have boundaries and was often denied them in the first place, particularly if I was expressing a negative emotion about it.

The thing is, when I would initiate, they seemed more than happy to receive what I gave. I couldn’t tell by their facial expressions that they were feeling pressured. And they did not express a desire to stop. Now I know to ask beforehand in all things to ensure everything is okay.

I have been with a partner I wasn’t feeling great about being with. The pressure I felt I likely put on myself but when it came to having these conversations about how to rebuild intimacy and make us both feel comfortable between my ex and I, I perceived myself to be doing a bulk of the work with less attention centered on myself and my needs. I tried to make them feel comfortable saying no but I did not yet feel comfortable saying no. I hadn’t said no ever and also needed reassurance. Once we had the talk about how they were feeling, I pushed my needs and wants entirely to the side. By this point, intimacy was beginning to feel disgusting to me. I felt sick with their overtures in some part although I did consent to it. I didn’t communicate this yet again for fear expressing myself would make them upset or that they’d leave me/our relationship would fail entirely. I’m sure they wouldn’t have minded had I said no. I wanted to make them feel nice and this was one of the remaining ways I had to feel close to them so I did it anyways.

Thank you Roberta,

I don’t think my partner was intentionally hurtful. They were similarly inexperienced and did not have healthy models of relationships either. There are times now that I question if I was treated badly because many of our miscommunications turned into me having misunderstood something and it being a problem of my issues with anxiety. I would talk about something that hurt me and my ex-partner would want me to repeat what was said word-for-word and have the exact date of it being said. This caused anxiety in me and I’d often come to the conclusion that I was making a big deal out of nothing and misunderstanding them. This happened often enough it became more difficult to speak up. They explained themselves well enough I couldn’t stand my ground. They expressed irritation with me for needing constant reassurance saying, ‘Why do I need to keep reassuring you?’

I did try to express how I was feeling about our sex-life outside of sexual encounters and now I simply think we were incompatible with one another. They told me they didn’t initiate because I initiated so much that they ‘were all full’ (on physical touch) but I mainly initiated as much as I did because 1) it was reassured me they wanted to be with me and 2) our sex-life was unsatisfying for me as intimacy was usually done when they were ‘finished’.

It’s hard to tell what parts were my anxiety and what parts were reasonable. It’s hard for me to trust my own perceptions already. Even as I write these words, there’s a feeling in me saying ‘You’re just trying to make yourself out to be a victim.’

After our relationship, I was left with the feeling that ‘everything was my fault’. I said this to them once and they said, ‘I wouldn’t use those words.’ I feel like it implies they thought so too, though. Unfortunately I cannot remember all of the details nor everything that was said and done. I suspect it’s because of an issue with my brain that I struggle to remember things.

My ex and I still communicate to this day but I am constantly afraid they’re going to change their mind about me. In our communications, I feel afraid and as though continuing to speak to them will ensure that they don’t think of me as a bad person. I worry if I say something wrong in my interactions with them, they’ll be upset with me and decide I’m not a good person after all.

Hi Anita, thank you for writing. I’ve lurked on this site for awhile and have consistently seen your name in the comments. I think it’s good of you to spend your time helping people.

But say that person 1 goes quiet, moody, and even grows sad when person 2 doesn’t want the sandwich, person 2 would of course feel pressure to eat the sandwich in the future because they don’t want to make person 1 upset. Person 2 probably has trouble saying they don’t want to eat the sandwich as they care about hurting people’s feelings but person 1 doesn’t know their reactions are causing person 2 to feel bad as they usually end up talking the situation out after awhile of silence.

Not only did I not initiate anything, I made sure to reaffirm to them that they needed to say no to me and that I didn’t want to be with anyone who didn’t consensually want to be with me. We had sex 1-2 times after that initial conversation and it was only initiated by him. We scheduled intimate time and stopped once that time was up regardless of whether or not anyone was finished. They said the aim of sex shouldn’t be orgasm so we focused more on the intimacy of the acts. Eventually though, as our relationship withered, sex and intimacy fell away too.

They broke up with me a week or two after we had a fight on our last day of school. They were very anxious about us spending too much time together as before we had the big talk, they told me us spending as much time together as we had was unsustainable for their mental health. They even said their mental health was getting worse because of me.

They at first spent more time with me because I behaved similarly dejected when they refused or had plans that didn’t involve me. We both agreed we needed to have our own lives outside of one another. I was trying but still struggled with my anxiety and feeling emotionally disconnected from them.

They agreed to drive me home from college and we spent the night in the same room. The next morning I had to try and pack my things into their car and not everything would fit. There was a checkout time with a fine included if I didn’t clear my room in time so I started to shut down from the anxiety. I went into ‘fix-it’ mode and I think this made them feel anxious as it reminded them of times when I’d shut down in the past. I wanted to focus on taking care of my room situation and my ex wanted me to talk it out with them. I couldn’t do both. I went back to my room and had to throw so many things out, including stuff other people had bought me as gifts.

My ex followed me around and burst out crying saying that they were afraid things were going back to the way they were and that I was mad at them and that I was going to break up with them. I stopped what I was doing to reassure them and bring them down from their panic.

I finished throwing my things out and we had a meal together in silence. I got upset with the silence and asked them to just say something. In the car, I told them I ‘could’ve used more support’ and they snapped at me that they could’ve too. We rode back in silence for the most part. We tried to talk it out but at that point, our relationship was too strained.

I felt them pulling away and a week or two later, they broke up with me over the phone. They told me they couldn’t focus on their mental health and fix this relationship. Even talking things out was too much of a strain for them.

Later on, right before I went no contact to focus on my own healing, we had a phone-call in which they described me as ‘manipulative’, ‘toxic’, and ‘smothering’. I reflected on my behavior and apologized.

I had many moments like those with A where something hurtful was said and I convinced myself/or was otherwise convinced I was seeing the situation distortedly. Maybe I was seeing the situation wrong. There’s part of me that feels anger when I consider that maybe I had reasonable feelings that were invalidated. And there’s a part of me that cannot trust my own perceptions, that feels guilty for not taking all of the blame and saying things that make A seem.. not so great.

I felt hurt by what A said, yeah. I felt like I gave something precious away to them and they didn’t care. I felt like they didn’t care about whether or not I was satisfied or if I felt listened to.

I felt resentful of them for talking at me and rarely asking me any questions about myself and for staying with me despite feeling bad being with me (they said ‘*everything* felt bad for them, not just intimacy, but they stayed with me cause they thought I was a great person) and for not seeming to care about whether or not I felt satisfied in our sex-life too.

I remember crying to myself while they were sleeping peacefully on the other side of the bed. And I remember them telling me ‘no’ when I asked if I could take care of myself while they cleaned up in the shower. And even now, I think to myself, maybe I’m just misunderstanding!

I guess I do feel angrier about things than I thought. I don’t feel right feeling angry about things they said and did because I was not a good partner either and again, the way they explained themselves, none of it was intentional.

But maybe it’s important that I do tap into those feelings. There’s a sort of fog around our relationship I keep trying to push through. I know I was very messed up for a long time after the breakup.

The image of all those people including me, condemning me, is a really sad one. I will try to take your advice.