YOU ARE NOT ALONE - A companion online community discussion board for The Mental Illness Happy Hour podcast with Paul Gilmartin

Oh for god's sake. IF I HEAR FROM ONE MORE PERSON WHO THINKS THEY WERE SEXUALLY EXPLOITED WHEN NOBODY LAID A HAND ON THEM I'M GOING TO RUN AMUCK AND START KILLING PEOPLE.

Well said.

Well, I'm not gonna tell you anything else I'm sure you already know...if you don't feel like you can talk about it with her I'm glad you brought it up here, but I hope you'll be able to do so with someone educated in psychotherapy sometime. I'm jumping to all kinds of hypotheses.

Are you in any kind of therapy?

ghughes1980 is absolutely right. I'm in my 40s, started taking meds in my 30s and I still have to adjust the dosage (in consultation with my doctor) now and then, and they can have a particularly powerful effect on teens.

I hear you. Deflection is a heck of a game, isn't it? How much of this is your therapist aware of--that your sexuality feels disconnected from your emotions;that you were raped? It's kind of a "You have to tell the Dr. where it hurts" thing.

I know it's hard...believe me, I know, I know, I KNOW it's hard. I'm not going to offer any peppy little bromides that would probably bounce off you as they would me.

Do you live near any sliding-scale clinics with pharmacies? That's how I get my meds and I don't have any money either.

To answer: yes and I don't remember. Maybe? I was assaulted at age fourteen, and any sexual experiences prior were relatively tame (I had not had sex and would not until I was eighteen). Any emotional connections I may have felt I would probably discount as me being a confused teenager. Boy...do yo...

Stereotypically men are supposed to be "better" at not linking the two than women. I'm sure it has occurred to you that this disconnection is an after-affect of your rape. I don't wish to ask you to relive it or to trigger anything, but did you have any sexual experiences prior to it, and ...

One of my pet theories is that we never grow up into the world that we think we're going to. When you're a kid, you look at the "adult world," but when you get there they've changed it. Not sure if that explains why nostalgia can hurt, except maybe in reverse.