149. She felt like a victim but was she?

There’s a funny thing about reality, or you might call it truth. When you don’t live in reality it always hurts. Reality means just what is, as it is. And what is doesn’t set well with a lot of us a lot of the time. We think we know how it should be, and it sure as heck shouldn’t be the way it is. With that thought we suffer.

I was thinking recently about a conversation I once had with a woman in her early 50s. She was talking about a man she was just getting to know. Unplanned circumstances occurred that found her sharing a room, but not a bed, with this new acquaintenace during a short trip here in the Northwest. They had planned to be home that night but there were delays and they were forced to get a room. For financial reasons it made sense to share a room.

In summary, they went to bed in their separate beds and she said he was very respectful. Later, though, he suggested he join her in bed so they could talk more easily, and the result was that they eventually had sex. The problem for her was that she said she felt, “like I had been raped.” This was a woman who had been on a spiritual quest for years and seemed to be pretty emotionally mature so I was surprised.

I asked, “Did he threaten you?” “No.” “Did he force you?” “Well no, not really.” “Then how is it that you felt raped?” I asked. She said, “Well, I kept saying ‘I think this is too early,’ and ‘I don’t think we should be doing this right yet,’ and things like that. But he just kept on, yet he was never really forceful.”

So what’s the reality here? Was he to blame? Not in my book. Yet she was trying to make him responsible for the sex they shared that evening that she said she didn’t really want. There are two things going on here as far as I can see. One is that whenever we do something we say we don’t want to do, that’s not true. We do it because we want something. She’s not a little wallflower woman and she certainly knew how to say no. So reality is that she wanted something. Maybe something as subtle and simple as not wanting to be seen as a prude, who knows? But she wanted something.

The second thing I see here is that she wanted to make him responsible so she wouldn’t have to face her own participation. At first it often feels good to try to make someone else responsible for our feelings. But there’s a huge down side to that. The down side is that in doing that she automatically feels like a victim. And what does it feel like to be a victim? It feels terrible because we feel totally vulnerable, unprotected and unsafe. We feel that we’re being taken advantage of and there’s nothing we can do about it.

But where is victimhood when you take responsible for yourself? There is none. Reality is that unless someone chains you or locks you up you’re probably not really a victim of anyone very often if ever. As soon as you make someone else responsible for how you feel, though, bam! In that instant you’re an automatic victim in your mind: “They made me feel (whatever it is you feel).”

That applies equally well to when someone makes a sharp or negative comment about you as it does to this situation about sex. So unless you want to feel the suffering of being a victim you might want to question whether you really want to blame someone else for how you feel. You might just be dealing in fantasies rather than reality.

Copyright © 2006 Chuck Custer