I thought I was too ugly to be sexually abused by my therapist

Shame told me I wasn't worth violating. He used that to his advantage

Therapist abuse will make you betray yourself in hideous ways.

Remember when Donald Trump’s defense lawyer said that his victim E. Jean Carroll was “too ugly to rape”? I do. I remember gagging in disgust that someone could ever be repulsive enough to say something so grotesque.

Sexual assault and abuse isn’t about how attractive the victim is. It’s about power. It’s about having the power to dominate and control someone else. I have known this in my brain for decades. I’ve been a feminist since before I knew what one was. And when I heard the “too ugly to rape” justification I knew it was not just disgusting, but totally incorrect.

And yet still, when it came to my own case, I completely bought into the idea that I wasn’t pretty enough to be sexually abused. I was so low that I took the Creep Psychotherapist’s abuse as a compliment. I even wrote it down.

When a group of anonymous strangers on a message board told me I was being sexually abused by my psychotherapist, I told them that they were wrong. Someone asked me why I didn’t feel completely creeped out that he was expressing sexual feelings towards me, and here is the response I wrote:

“I'm not creeped out at all. I feel absolutely desperate to be close to this man. I've never had sexual feelings this intense for anyone in my entire life. It is wild.

Even the idea that I'm being taken advantage of in this way feels appealing to me, because (I know this sounds awful) I've never even considered myself attractive enough to be taken advantage of sexually. I actually welcome the idea of being used in this way--that anyone would even find me attractive enough to get off on.”

This is what I looked like at the time I wrote that message:

No, it doesn’t matter how I looked. I know it doesn’t.

It does, however, show how distorted my self image was at the time, and how vulnerable I was to being used and manipulated by a man throwing attention my way.

When I think about the time I spent with the Creep Psychotherapist, I see now that I was trapped in this state of early adolescence with him. I acted very much like a child and revered him like a high school teacher I had a crush on. It’s a very common thing to happen in therapy. It’s called “transference.” It’s like when you project feelings from a relationship from your past onto a relationship in your present.

Transference can be very useful in therapy. Like if you had an awful unloving father, and suddenly you have this older man, your therapist, in your life providing you care and kindness, sometimes it can act as a corrective experience and heal some of the pain you had about your dad.

And yes a lot of the time it manifests as the patient feeling a sexual attraction towards the therapist. It doesn’t mean you were sexually attracted to your dad. It’s more like the love you wanted from your dad didn’t happen, and now you’re an adult and that love is coming up inside a grown woman and now it feels like sexual attraction.

I had a really scary dad. He was a special forces Army Colonel with severe combat PTSD and a traumatic brain injury from the Vietnam War. He often exploded in rages with no warning. He was cold. He never hit us but he threatened too. The threat was enough. I remember him walking around the living room when I was about six years old, holding a nightstick–like a police officer would use.

“Be good,” he said to me, tapping the nightstick into his hand repeatedly. “Or I’ll break your legs.”

Then he laughed. And I did too. But on the inside I was shitting bricks.

When I turned 12 years old, my family moved to a new state. I entered junior high school carrying a few shreds of confidence with me because I had been the smartest person in my class at the previous school. Not only was I way behind the kids in my new school academically, I was the new girl with a profound physical flaw–a very lazy eye

.As my attraction to boys started to fully blossom, I was just met with rejection. I was met with disgust. I was ridiculed every morning by the four boys assigned to sit around me in my homeroom class. The one who sat directly in front of me, a kid named David, would deliver humiliating insults to me in a lighthearted tone.

“Has anyone ever told you how motherfucking butt dog ugly you are?” he’d say, in the same tone of voice you’d ask “Do you have a pencil I can borrow?”

This happened every day of 7th grade and then 8th grade and 9th grade in various versions by various boys and a few girls too, but mostly the boys.

They drilled it into my head: I was unlovable, unkissable, un dance with-able–a circus freak. Some of my classmates even assumed I was intellectually disabled because of my lazy eye and spoke to me slowly in a voice you’d use with a child who was, well, intellectually disabled.

I learned my lesson well. I was hideous.

Eventually I convinced my parents to get me another eye surgery that still left my eye lazy, but not quite as glaringly lazy. I remember the biology teacher seeing me after my three week recovery, the white part of my right eyeball still red from the surgery and he said “Finally!”

Finally–finally someone had done something about this freakish little girl to make her look a little less freakish.

About 9 months later, my father had an affair with his secretary and dumped both me and my mother. She and I moved to Vermont and shared a studio apartment over a garage for a year. He would call her regularly and ask her for advice on the best ways to woo the girlfriend he’d dumped her for. She would mostly listen passively and sometimes say “Yes, that sounds nice” in reference to a restaurant he was taking the girlfriend to or the gift he’d bought for her. Then, she would hang up the phone and sob.

In my senior year of high school, I had my first kiss and my first boyfriend. I was deeply shocked, at age 17, that any male would find me attractive. We dated until I went away for college, where I proceeded to have zero boyfriends for the three years I attended Boston College.

When I was home from college for the summer that I turned 20, I literally asked a male friend from high school to have sex with me so I wouldn’t be a virgin anymore. He obliged.

This is what I looked like when I had to beg a friend to take my virginity:

When news got around my peer group (theater kids) that I wasn’t a virgin anymore, there was one guy who was “willing” to have some one night stands with me after some of the big cast parties. I threw myself at several other young men who said they weren’t interested. I had a couple of one night stands with guys I met at bars.

I moved to Los Angeles at age 25, met a guy at a bar and kissed him on New Year’s Eve and he became my boyfriend and eventual husband. He told me how beautiful I was all the time. He still does. I still struggle to believe him.

The Creep Psychotherapist knew all of this. After he stroked my hand in a way that set off an extreme sexual reaction inside me, I was terrified he would find out about my attraction. If he knew, he would surely cast me out from therapy, disgusted that someone so hideous was fantasizing about him sexually.

So when he told me that I was beautiful, that he would absolutely have sex with me if he wasn’t my therapist, that he could feel his desire for me rushing through his body, that it was “fun” to talk about what it would be like if we had sex…

I thought I was lucky. I felt like the luckiest girl in the world.

Here’s what another person on the message boards said to me when I described the crazy abusive relationship I was having with my psychotherapist. She wrote:

“I know you most likely feel very special right now. I did too. But the harsh truth is you're not. This man knows all about your insecurities and vulnerability and he is exploiting you and taking advantage of you for his own desires. I also know that what I say won't make you reconsider this because I get it. I've been through it.”

I responded:

Thank you for responding. I have told him many times that I feel extremely undesirable and unattractive and that I have never thought of myself as desirable. I guess I thought that the therapeutic element of this was that he was giving me the corrective experience of feeling desirable by a man that I expressed desire for.

Here’s how the sexual abuse prevention nonprofit TDI describes the grooming process for sexual abuse:

“The offender makes their target feel special, they may give them gifts or rewards, they will spend time together, they will share, and later recall, details of their lives and may enjoy keeping secrets together, they will appear supportive, they may offer protection, they might ‘accidentally’ touch the victim sexually.”

Accidentally touch. 🙁 I discussed this in an earlier post: My five-day orgasm and why I wouldn’t recommend it

Here’s what a convicted sex offender said about how he grooms his victims

“You become the child’s confidante,” he said. “You become the one they look to as the one that is going to provide their answers and give them their guidance. You supersede the really necessary and powerful other relationships in their lives. In fact, you discount them. You find ways in the things that you say and do to discount those relationships.”

Another offender:

“You allow sexual subject matter to be talked about,” the former teacher told News 8. “Perhaps you’re open to sexual questions … And of course then you start to push the boundary a little farther. ‘Is that something you’re interested in? What do you like in those situations,’ – inappropriate subject matter,” he said.

I didn’t have sex with the Creep Psychotherapist. I got away. Every friend and counselor and stranger I’ve talked to about the situation says that if I had stayed with him, the sex would have happened.

I’m really lucky that I got away.

Have you ever mistaken exploitation for love or affirmation?

I’ll post a new chapter of “My Psychotherapist Was a Creep” every week.