HOW BEING SEXUALLY ABUSED AS A CHILD AFFECTS OUR RELATIONSHIPS AS ADULTS.
Srishti Shankar, INN/Delhi, @shankar_srishti
While the incident which feud angst among st all of us i.e when ‘Bois Locker room’ conundrum broke out. Our social media feed has been constantly trying to remind us to be aware of such issues, and how to be more alert since then.
Almost all the posts and stories which are being shared online specifically on Instagram and Twitter has a certain type of “trigger warning” attested to it. Still, you might run into some random posts which are as subjective and there are no disclaimers or warnings attached to them.
In order to understand the adversity which a victim or anybody who has been through the same might not be just as ‘clear’ to most of us, as in- how they react, how they get more prone to having panic attacks e.t.c.
We try to answer such questions after having read and came across a lot of real-life experiences of women across India where they share their stories- on how these trigger warnings play a huge role and how their relationships with men have been left affected since the childhood- when they were being subjected to their first sexual abuse.
Sexual abuse not only leaves a huge imprint into the lives of women but it affects them in thousands of other ways which might continually cause them discomfort at every stage of their lives. One of the pivotal areas being their ‘romantic-relationship’ with their partners.
One of the women, who agreed upon sharing her story with us-tells; how all her troubled relationships caused her to put efforts which lead to nothing, her memory goes back to the first sexual experience she had with her boyfriend when she had just turned 19, and she still gets uncomfortable while she thinks about it.
We are not sure whether each one of you reading this article at the very moment can deduce what might be going inside the brain of women like these. But we can solely bring you the experiences of such brave women as well who continue to fight the battle against feeling oppressed, left out and those who are still carrying the burden of not having been able to confront their victims openly yet.
On one side where the world continues to talk about rape-culture, and traumas of rape victim very openly, there are still a lot of women who are not able to come out of their shell and not yet comfortable in sharing their own stories, there are often scenarios where women are made to feel inferior about the whole situation and they continue to blame themselves for whatever happened to them. Adding up to that, their situation and romantic involvement with their partners makes them more prone to having doubts, insecurities about their body, especially when their partners are unable to understand the situation and the depth of the scenario which they have been a part of, during their childhood.
Hence, whenever a girl who still hasn’t recovered fully; comes across a post which does not offer any type of ‘trigger warning’ can cause a lot of harm at that very moment.
Coming back to the main topic on how their relationships get affected due to the childhood sexual-trauma, well; the imprint is one of the main things which they carry within them for a long time, and adding up to that- it is their inability to understand the “hidden motives” behind men approaching them, which continue to halt them every time they try to get close, and involve in having a deeper level-connection, let alone having thoughts to experience pleasure, which according to most of them cause a huge array of discomfort and raise questions regarding their ‘safety’ and ‘comfort-level’.