I became “friends” with a co-worker when I was 16, he was 22 At 17 I went through a couple of really traumatic events, and he acted as a main source of support for me. A week after my eighteenth birthday he came to visit me at college. He supplied me with a duffel bag of alcohol with the promise of “I’ll take care of you, it’s your birthday, you deserve this.” He got me home, and convinced me I was too drunk to change my clothes by myself, and I wouldn’t let me sleep in the clothes I had on. He continued to to cross more and more boundaries and ignored me attempts to stop him. I turned to reasoning with him, but our “friendship” meant nothing to him. I shut down as things progressed further and woke up the next morning to him trying to apologize. I kicked him out, blocked him, and the mass amount of fake numbers as well. I reported the incident to campus police a couple of months later, and he was banned from campus. It took me months to realize I was groomed, and he was not the friend I thought he was.
I felt dirty. I showered multiple times a day for months. I felt as though my body wasn’t mine. Like I was a separate being from the physical form of me. Sometimes I still feel like that. I don’t think it’s something that we will ever truly get over, but therapy- especially EMDR- helped me tremendously. Nothing you did could have changed what happened to you. You did everything you knew how in order to protect yourself in that moment. Everything you felt and continue to feel is valid, and no one can control how that, but they can control how they react. Your energy is more important to you than anything else in the world. Nurture it.
