Am I overreacting?

[Ava]

Thank you for any advice!

4 years ago when I was 16 my first kiss/relationship turned into a rape, and the second time I saw him it was sexual assault. I stayed with him only a month (yay!) but he was emotionally and sexually abusive through the relationship.

Right now, I have OCD, Depression, PTSD, and Anxiety. I have been with my current boyfriend (Aaron) for about 3 1/2 years and he has been incredibly patient and supportive as I recover.

But

A year into our relationship, he had sex with me when I was sleeping. I remember bits and pieces and him sitting on the edge of the bed crying telling me he was sorry. After that we almost broke up, but I chose to stay with him because he seemed sincerely sorry and willing to change. Since then he has been perfectly wonderful and has kept me grounded as I have slogged through all my depression, coming to my university when I had a panic attack twice.

Recently though, I've been thinking back to that day and I'm really upset out of no where. Whenever we talk about it he talks about how guilty he feels and I believe him. I just keep thinking back to my first relationship and my relationship with Aaron and how quickly I moved in my second relationship because I didn't think it mattered. I wish I had time to develop sexually at my own pace.

Now, I keep thinking back to that night two years ago with Aaron. And I love him so much and he loves me so much and I don't know if I have a reason to be upset about it now that everything seems clearer, but I am. I feel like I can't trust him and I don't like that feeling.

[Mo]

Hi there, Ava, and welcome to Scarleteen.

You aren't overreacting at all to be upset by this. If someone's asleep they aren't able to consent to sex; what he did was sexual assault. So I'm not surprised you don't feel like you can trust him, or that you're still upset when you think about this incident. That's totally understandable, especially with your history of sexual abuse.

What do you think would help you feel better or safer now? I do want to say that you're allowed to decide to take things at your own pace, even if that's different from what you've been doing up until now, at any time. If you want to just take a break from sex for now, that's ok.

[Ava]

Thank you for your help, Mo!

That's what I'm not sure about, I've asked him to talk about it with me tomorrow, which he's agreed to. Right now, we've been taking a break from sexual activities for about a year now, and I might keep that going. I think the problem is that I feel betrayed, but he's a different person now.

[Mo]

Even if he understands that what he did was wrong, and has changed since them, that doesn't mean you can't still feel betrayed or like you can't have a sexual relationship (or a relationship at all) with him. How he is now doesn't change or remove what he did to you. There's no one right way to handle a betrayal of trust like this. If you find that you just can't continue a relationship at all with him, no matter how much you might love each other, that's a valid way to respond. And if you think you might just need more time to trust him again, that's valid too.
I hope your conversation goes well, and if there's anything you want to discuss about it afterwards, we can certainly do that.

[Ava]

Thank you Mo!

As a update, yesterday we talked about it. He and I both feel incredibly guilty...we're taking a one month break to think about it. We've been dating for 4 years and I already feel awful about being separated, even if if potentially temporarily. Do people still in love with eac other normally break up up or separate?

[Heather]

How we feel about each other doesn't always dictate how we interact, or what we choose when it comes to our relationships.

For example, people in abusive relationships often strongly love someone abusing them, yet it's obviously not a sound choice for them to stay in abuse. When they can and do get out of and away from those relationships, it's rarely because their feelings about the person who has been abusing them has changed. Instead, it's about recognizing that however they feel about them, it's not safe or healthy for them to be in close proximity to that person, let alone deeply involved.

Too, sometimes in healthy relationships people who are in love with or love each other will separate: things like job or school opportunities far away, or people just growing apart because they're not the same people who want the same things as they were when they first got together? Both are common situations for splits or long separations. Too, know that even for married people, legal separation is most often exactly about people who love each other taking time apart to figure out what they want and what's really right for them by getting some space apart to do that.

Being with someone who has assaulted you is a) potentially very unsafe, and b) really, really tricky, especially if that person has not gotten any professional help/counseling to address their behaviour. That's what we know is usually the only way people actually change so that they learn NOT to be abusive in any way. And even then, that often doesn't work (mostly because people don't really do the work being asked of them, and also because once a relationship has had abuse in it, staying in it makes it hard to change patterns, on both sides). If he hasn't done any kind of work or gotten any kind of help with this, the truth is he probably is NOT a different person than he was. (Really, we're never some totally different person than we were even decades ago, let alone a few years. But what CAN change is our behaviour, but only if we do the work to learn how to change our own patterns and frameworks, and that's not something that does itself or gets done by just feeling bad about something.)

Too, if you never had any kind of professional help to heal from that assault, that's also an issue, and that's also going to make it hard for you to even know what it is to feel safe and be with someone who is safe for you. Are you getting help with the OCD and PTSD? If so, have you talked with your therapist(s) about your relationship? If not, are you open to? If you are not getting any help with the OCD, PTSD, or both, are you open to it? If so, would you like help finding that kind of help?

I think you're making a very smart choice here that's very much in the interest of your own self-care. It also sounds to me like you perhaps finally trusting your own feelings: it may be that for a while, you were pushing away how unsafe you have felt -- which is certainly valid, since this person assaulted you -- and now you are starting to instead pay attention to those feelings and are letting them guide you more. And that is ALWAYS a good thing: the best thing, really. Our gut feelings about our safety are incredibly valuable and one of the biggest players in keeping us safe.

[Heather]

Aslo, if you know that you need some real time -- including if that means being outside ANY sexual relationship, or relationship with the potential to be sexual -- so that you can, for perhaps the first time, figure out what your own sexual pace is, and ONLY be sexual with someone when it is at what feels like your own pace, AND when you have no history with someone of them being abuisve or otherwise unsafe? That's very, very valid.

In fact, I'd say if you feel like you're in something now where not only has the person you're with assaulted you in the past, but where you feel like you got into something sexual and are in something sexual where you were never able to a) figure out what your own pace even is or what you really want, for yourself, and b) is at that own pace and is in line with your own needs, then I'd say that's a pretty big problem, and not likely to be something very good for you.

So, getting away from that? However much that might hurt in some ways, and be a heartbreak in some ways, it's probably less hurty and heartbreaky in the long-term to get away from that -- or to make a big change with that, like maybe shifting to a platonic friendship, rather than a sexual relationship -- than to stay in it.