Rape Within A Relationship
I had sex with him so many times, consensually, sometimes out of feeling I should and a few times where I did not want to. I was in a relationship and the times I did not want to were mixed in with times of consent alongside an extremely high level of abuse which I am unpacking piece by piece. It has taken me over a year to be able to see and call those times I didn’t want to as rape. Being in a relationship made me feel I couldn’t call it that, the abuse and gaslighting I was being subjected to were tearing me to pieces. I was living a life where I was hyper vigilant, experiencing insomnia, shaming and blaming myself, feeling numb, feeling angry, feeling sad, confused, incredibly anxious, hardly able to function or think clearly, pretending I was okay to other people, having circling thoughts and flashbacks and trying to minimise what was happening to me because I wanted to believe he would go back to treating me nicely again, like he did in the beginning.
I have blanks in my memory from that time because the abuse was putting me into a constant fight or flight mode, but there are some things that I remember so clearly that if I focus on them for too long my body reacts as though they just happened. One of those memories is the last time he raped me. It had happened a few times before as I lay motionless, crying while he used my body. Feeling numb and disgusting. I told him afterwards that I…
