Grooming

This is a letter written to a young woman who has suffered from mental health issues, and, as a result, has been a victim of multiple sexual predators. She has been hospitalized multiple times, attempted suicide, and expresses a very low self-worth. I met her four years ago and became a senior mentor to her, but the depth of her involvement in self-destructive activities only became apparent recently when she spiraled and intensified her activities after the death of a loved one.

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Dear __________,

This is as blunt and direct as the email that was sent that gave a glimpse of the problems you were having to your family. You need to read it in a safe place and with plenty of tissues. You also need to remember that this is written to be honest and help you, not to hurt you, although you may find some of what is said hurtful to read.

I am concerned about the acts that you have suggested in our conversations that you are good at. The combination of your descriptions and the injuries you were suffering that night when we had to come and get you have given me a pretty good guess about one of the things that you do.

I am going to make a conjecture as a story, and you can tell me later whether I have gotten close.

Someone does not get good at what you have described without abuse. Those are not things that a whole person chooses for pleasure. These are things that are both extreme and abusive on any scale of activities.

Someone(s) intentionally brought you to this point in your life. First, you were groomed to make you emotionally dependent on your abuser, then to believe that you were physically dependent on the feelings that the abuser provided you. You were made to believe things about yourself that were not true. You were gaslighted. You were groomed. This was intentional by your abuser.

Then, you were made to believe that you owed your abuser something "special" in return for his attention.

Your abuser convinced you that he wanted something "special" from you in return for all that he provided you. In your groomed state, you could be convinced of something that you would not have done had you not been groomed into compliance. Your abuser had a previous someone that could provide him with this "special" experience, and you would be seen as "good" in his eyes if you could provide it, too. "Groomed you" wanted to please him, so you said that you would try.

So, he taught you to take him deeply. No one learns that without being abused. We have reflexes to protect us. This includes the gag reflex. After grooming you to make you compliant to his wishes, he had to condition you to accept what your body knew should be rejected. When he started to force himself into you, your body rebelled. You gagged. You choked. You cried. You might have thrown up. All of these were indications that your body knew something was wrong. But, your brain had been groomed to believe that you owed him something more, and that if you accomplished it, you would be special to him, and so, to please him, you worked to suppress your natural, protective reflexes.

Eventually, any nerve response can be suppressed, and as you were able to take him longer, and eventually deeper without gagging, he praised you, and that praise made you feel special. In your altered, groomed state, you took pride in being able to please him. You had a special status in his life - you were the one who could do that for him.

You did not enjoy it at first. You did not enjoy it for a while. But, much of arousal is mental and emotional, and meeting his expectations made you feel special, and it did begin to excite you to step out of your comfort zone to please him.This became something you could offer to set you apart from others. Being special added to your arousal.

I don't know if it was him or someone else, but eventually someone moved you beyond the act of taking someone deeply to being taken forcibly.That took another round of conditioning as your body tried to reject the new, more forceful, and repeated invasive stimuli. But, being "good" for him meant trying, so you suppressed your protective reflexes again and to another level. Being able to take that abuse is rare, so, to your abuser you were more special, and being more special to that person also became arousing.

But, in your latest abuse, the abuser did not find that enough and continued to get rougher and rougher to satisfy his masculine insecurity (no real, secure man does that to his body) through the need to dominate someone weaker (again, something a real man doesn't do). So, he kept escalating the abuse, going harder, deeper, longer, rougher. As you tried to react to protect yourself, he held your wrists so hard that he bruised them so that you could feel the pain days later. We talked about the arc of the abuse. At first, he seemed to offer strength and a little danger. Then, he violated boundaries, although just a little, and that seemed to make it more exciting. But, as things progressed, and especially as you returned from home in your emotional state and out of control yourself, his abuse escalated until you found yourself injured, drunk, and emotionally broken on my couch.

Yet, your grooming and conditioning was so complete that a part of you still craves what you perceive made you special. This is part of the rewiring of your responses that we talked about. Your brain has been conditioned to expect and, for now, think it needs that kind of abuse to return the physical response that you crave. That is a function of the intentional grooming and conditioning directed at you. It is not because that is who you are or because you are a bad person. The person or persons that did this to you are the bad people. You were a vulnerable, frightened, lonely young woman that sought comfort, but instead received manipulation and abuse.

Part of my reason for telling you this is such stark language is that I am concerned about the perpetuation of the abuse. Someone has to break the cycle. Your abuser or abusers were most likely abused themselves, or they were conditioned by someone, like you, that was abused by someone else into believing that this kind of activity was what they needed to be satisfied. So, someone who had previously been abused had your eventual abusers treat them in an abusive manner. That triggered in your abusers a need to dominate and abuse others themselves, justifying to themselves that this is something that women want because that is what someone that was abused herself wanted. So, they went out looking for someone else to dominate and abuse. They justify their future abuse using the apparently voluntary participation of someone who was themself reenacting their own abuse. And the cycle of abuse continues.

On that Friday when your recent abuser traumatized you, you later saw someone who wasn't an abuser, but who really cares about you. Apparently, you had been telling him of the things that your abusers convinced you that you needed to feel special. You told me with some satisfaction that he tried, although somewhat tentatively and reluctantly, to break out of his normal gentle behavior to give you what you told him you needed. My question since then has been, are you pulling him into the cycle of abuse? Are you setting him up to make you recreate your abuse each time you see him? Are you creating in him an expectation that this abusive behavior is widely accepted (you are a large part of his lifetime experience). If you and he don't work out in the long run, have you created in his not very experienced mind an unrealistic expectation that this is what someone has to do to satisfy a woman? Will he expect the next girl to participate in that? Will he offend her and ruin a relationship if he tries what he did with you? Will she submit because she likes him and doesn't know better? Did it trigger something in him, like it did your abusers, to seek out or even groom someone else for him to do that to? That is how the perpetuation of abuse spreads.

The same applies to your latest crush. If you did get him in private, would you expect and even direct him to act out your abuse to satisfy your craving? Would that cause in him an expectation that future women would expect that treatment, or would it trigger his own cycle of domination and abuse.

Have you thought that your actions might cause another young woman to go through the cycle of grooming, conditioning, and abuse that you have been subjected to? I know that you don't want that to happen. That is really the greatest danger to others of where you find yourself.

My father-in-law was an electrician, and in most electrical devices, there are safety tabs that have to be broken off in order to intentionally move to the next, more dangerous stage of the work.

Your abusers have removed many of your protective tabs that keep you from getting your wires crossed. During the grooming they removed the tabs that make you suspicious of those who might take advantage of you and that allow you to make independent decisions in your own interest. In conditioning, they broke off the tabs that allow you to respond to dangerous physical stimuli, and in the continued abuse they broke off the tabs that separate appropriate responses from the stimuli associated with the abuse.

If you have been groomed, conditioned, and abused in this way, if you look back at other activities, in what other ways have you gone through similar cycles? The grooming and conditioning erode your sense of self and self-worth. You talk about how little you respect yourself and how little you value your body and dignity. Those are things that those that groomed, conditioned, and then abused you took from you. You deserve to get those things back. No one should use you. You deserve to be treated better.

I believe that when your moods are stabilized and that you clearly see the cycle of manipulation and abuse to which you have been subjected, you will regain control of your life. You will untangle the inappropriate connections that your abusers have created. You will live a long, happy life, and I will get that email from you 20 years from now telling me about the amazing things you have done.

With Love,

Your Friend