Reply To: When it was 100% true in the past…
Paul McCabeHi Mac,
Thank you for sharing your story.
I appreciate how traumatic the sexual abuse you experienced will have been and that your dating experiences have definitely been traumatic for you. You are safe here and I am confident your posts here will help others.
I think there is an important distinction to make: not wanting to attract men is an understandable desire coming from your experiences. However, attractiveness is not what caused anything to happen to you. You may, however, have a belief like “it's dangerous to be attractive.”
This is quite a common pattern, where victims of physical or sexual abise blame themselves. It is not helped by certain views espoused in the media and the fact, as we have seen recently, certain “powerful people” abuse those “powers” to take advantage of others. Sadly, the victims of these abuses can often feel guilty, ashamed or responsible for what happened to them. Indeed, many people suffer in silence and with tremendous amounts of shame.
So, I would recommend utilising the Click Tracks to work through the traumas and the shame. It will be incredibly liberating for you.
“I didn't want to be sexually desired by men” is more of a consequence of what happened. It was an accurate description of how you felt and perhaps even how you feel.
To give an example of this: if someone is attacked in the street, they may suffer PTSD and then not want to leave the house (through fear of the same thing happening). Perhaps they stay indoors for a whole month. Well, “I don't want to leave the house” is a fair description of how they feel. It is the consequence of their fear and beliefs that have formed from the attack.
In this example, blasting “I didn't want to leave the house” may not do a great deal to the person's experience.
To resolve this, they would be best finding the beliefs that are “keeping” them in the house. These may be centred more around danger, trust and negative expectations.
So, I suspect that you would benefit more from discovering the beliefs that helped provide that “fear of being attractive” conclusion. Beliefs like “It was dangerous to go on a date”, “I was to blame for what happened”, “Men couldn't be trusted” and others are more likely to be feeding the pattern.
I would also recommend coming up with some alternative interpretations for those beliefs. For instance, “those men couldn't be trusted, but it doesn't mean all men couldn't be trusted.”, “the abusers were to blame for what happened and it could have happened to anyone” etc. You could add lots of these.
In actual fact, those situations were nothing to do with how attractive you were. It had everything to do with people taking advantage of situations.
Personal responsibility is important, of course, but when it comes to abuse…you were absolutely not at fault and I know that PSTEC can help you resolve those issues (and many more).
Please let us know how you get on and feel free to contact me personally, as I am always happy to help.
Paul
Paul McCabe – PSTEC Master Practitioner
http://www.lifestyleforchange.com
Please contact me anytime if you want any assistance in utilising PSTEC to help you live a life of tremendous freedom & possibility.
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