Thank you both, JohnMarshall and raftcub for your support and kind words. To be honest I avoided looking back at the thread after I started it for fear of finding judging replies. I felt rather fragile emotionally this past week.
It sucks. I have worked through the "loudest", strongest parts of the experience, but there's just so much, a lot of it so insidious one would barely notice anything is wrong. Except for an absolute breach of boundaries, forcing intimacy, forcing lies - forcing to deny my own perception, my own discomfort and pain. Like a toy, a love and approval dispensing machine without it's own agency allowed. An extension of the self. A shield against intimacy with men. A substitute for a partner. A dump for every and any negative emotion felt. Nevermind.
Even the past week was plenty for several significant changes. A lot of it is pretty unbalanced, but I'm helpful. Main areas of change are my feelings about eating and surprisingly, about sex. There was a very significant change with an issue I've struggled for a long time (very violent sexual fantasies. Now I see how they are eerily close allegories to what I have experienced at home at an emotional level - It's really disturbing to look at them like that, but finally it makes sense. It's scary to admit that "this" is how I felt, but it's beyond denial now. The good thing is, the magnetic pull has disappeared and they don't "do" anything for me anymore). I also seem more and more comfortable saying that I've had enough. To eat, but also in other areas.
With regard to food I've always had a very unbalanced view, swinging between wild explosions of hedonism and strict controlled ascetism. It's funny how this whole epiphany was started when I asked my boyfriend for a rough sketch of the personification of these aspects. Here they are:
I love them. To me, they just ring so true. A virgin saint who sacrifices herself - more an object of her own story than the actor, but possessing a certain strength, a will, which is, however turned inward. She is self-denying and want's to distance herself from the world and it's ills as much as possible. Then there is a hedonistic goddess. She is loud and unapologetic, vindictive at times, never thinks beyond the moment. She seizes all the power, but has no direction. The world doesn't bother her because she isn't allowing herself a moment outside the roller-coaster of sensations to actually perceive it.
Looking at these, I had a distinct feeling something's missing. Not only that, but it's like these two are revolving around something
heavy. Dark, demanding, life-sucking. And that the "me" in there is pretty much overwhelmed by this interplay, spending all her energy on just staying afloat... and not "dancing" as she is meant to.
