When the cause of pain is a sex crime, victims are frequently invalidated by people they count on for support! Reaching out for help can make the victim feel like they’re choking on the turmoil they lived through! Having to justify painful feelings while being discredited heaps pain on top of pain and can cause deep depression! When the weapon that undermined their sexual consent was fraud, invalidation by family and friends is all too typical and common.
A woman I’ll call Laurie contacted me recently for help. She’d been violated by a sexual sadist who got off on hurting her during sex. He’d built up her image of a lasting, loving relationship over a few months. True to her level of oxytocin and other attachment brain chemistry, when he became rough during sex, and she clearly said “stop,” she didn’t immediately grasp that he was assaulting her.
Forgiveness and caring, the emotions of a neuro-typical person, often prevents them from recognizing the truth. The delay in recognition is looked at by others, who are not aware of the impacts of brain chemistry, as giving license to the behavior.
While her conscious mind told her to accept his horrific behavior, the horrid sensation of being abused haunted her. She tried to discuss it with him in the hopes he’d understand and treat her romantically. Instead, she was told that he simply was using her as a sex toy, and he disappeared.
Laurie contacted me for help
We spent some time talking about the connections our minds make that are driven by the infrastructure of our brains. She could more clearly see what had caused her to try to hold onto the relationship rather than simply walking away. That insight has enabled her to forgive herself even if the people around her have difficulty understanding. Today, I received this message:
I’m reading “Combating Romance Scams” to my mom and dad now – It’s such a help to us. I was having a problem letting them know exactly what had happened to me and your book is helping me do that with less shame.
Combating invalidation when you’ve been scammed
Sometimes, you can talk ’til you’re blue in the face, with the utmost clarity and knowledge, but people simply don’t “get it!” If it happens to you…. which is likely if you were sexually defiled in a romance scam, “Combating Romance Scams” can help! If you can’t afford it, let me know. I’ll send it your way!
Something like this happened to me in 2016. I am pursuing legal action.
That’s a brave undertaking! I’m sure everyone who reads this, and suffered a similar crime, will be rooting for you!
Oh Joyce do I know this feeling all too well. As a victim of sexual assault I feel for her. The pain is terrible and the perpetrators just walk away like nothing happened.
Especially sexual sociopaths whose aim is to cause you harm! At first the victim is in denial, excusing and tolerating harmful behavior. Once the victims gets wise to them, they’re out the door preying on someone new and unaware.
This breaks my heart. It is not just chemicals that do this, it is the brainwashing and mind fucking they do to us. Years of being good at how they can con people. Giving us all this love and attention, then they flip a switch and act like we are nothing to them. So then we fight to prove our love and devotion to them. To get them back, into seeing how special we are to them. We are really just a tool for them to use and get off on. To feed their drug addiction of fuel needed to exist.l Most of these men or women have other addictions to add to lying, deception, and romance scamming us. This is the bad part of this whole nightmare. If we figure out what is happening and what they are. We expose them or just leave them. They do not go away. They pop up, trying to hurt us. Getting back at us. Making us look like we are victimizing them. At times their are law suit. God help the married people and mothers and fathers of sociopaths psychopathy narcissist. J. Short was a wife and a mother going through this. Thank you for all you are doing 🙂
People who are capable of love, caring and trust have a high level of oxytocin or vasopressin. That’s what actually makes us believers. Our brain is genetically wired to compel our mind to accept and attach.
Romantic love is a form of physical addiction but instead of being addicted to drugs or alcohol, we’re addicted to the person who stimulates our level of romantic attachment.
The person experiencing the attachment has a sense of longing, forgiveness and acceptance. That’s fundamentally why even brutalized romantic partners keep returning to their abusive mates.
If people could understand how addictive the brain chemistry of love actually is, they could be more pro-active about setting themselves free!
Hi Joyce,
I wanted to comment to the story about “Laurie”. It brought tears to my eyes, as the exact same thing happened to me. She is not alone! Men from the BDSM community are luring Vanilla women in to care about them, and when they have secured their affection the true intentions of the predator comes out. When I wrote you my story I described our so called romantic evening as turning into “fright night” and they have no right to pull this on anybody without consent. If you think about the psychology – you are laying there scared for your life. Is that not the same as a rape victim feels? I have suffered for years and developed chronic PTSD. Something really needs to stop this! I also read on Donna Anderson’s web site about another victim that suffered at the hands of a sadist. I wish the proper authorities would set something in place to protect people from being victimized this way! My heart goes out to “Laurie”.
You’re so right Nina!
The way to stop it, or at least prosecute it, which will have the net effect of putting the brakes on it, is to specifically state that consent is “Freely Given, Knowledgeable and Informed Agreement” in the penal code of every state. And to articulate that sex without consent is rape, sexual assault, sexual misconduct, sexual battery…… whatever the state wants to call it.
I’ve made this point in “Combating Romance Scams.” The more the book gets into the hands of legislators so they can grasp the problem, and the more their constituents jump up and down to insure they do something about it, the more states will put an end to this madness!