Sex is great. Orgasms are amazing. Especially when you experience it for the first time. With someone you trust. But then something shifts in him. It’s the shift from the Conscious to the Shadow. She is a different person now. You are a bit scared. He is trembling a bit. No longer the stable, secure caretaker you’ve known her to be. He does things to you which don’t feel that great. She does things to you that don’t feel great. You are surprised. You don’t know any better. You don’t even know the word “sex”. Is this how it’s supposed to be? I guess this is how it’s supposed to be.

This is normal.

This is normal.

This is normal.

The part of you that finds it odd gets drowned in the chants of “This is normal”. The experience is full of emotions. Excitement. Disgust. Shame. You kinda look forward to it. Regular life seems dull in comparison. You feel bored when you are not being abused. But then he comes again. In your mouth. In your anus. It feels shocking. Exhilarating. Like a rollercoaster of emotions. You hate it. You like it. Do you like it? He never asks you that. Do you though? Do you like it? Is there a part of me that liked the abuse? Till Apr 2022, I would have said “Fuck no! Do you think any child likes being raped? No one does! Are you fucking kidding me?”

February 2022

I matched with Lisa on Feeld, when I was visiting my brother homie Ryan in Austin, TX for his birthday. Lisa lived in Austin with her partner. Lisa is poly. Poly is short for polyamory. It’s a way of being where one explores romantically beyond just a single partner. With transparency. Think of it as an avenue for the “cheating” instincts to be explored, accepted and processed. If you are used to typical normative dating in the West, polyamory will fuck with everything you are conditioned to do. In normie dating, you meet a few people for a few dates in parallel and then decide to commit to one person for a relationship where you are exclusively exploring romance only with each other. Polyamory introduces anarchy into these conditioned dating sequences. I won’t say it’s perfect. It can encourage the relationally avoidants to never commit. There’s a beauty in deep commitment to a single individual. With every new layer of exploration with them, emerges a new one. But my own awareness of this beauty emerged only after I allowed myself to yearn for polyamory for a few years. In a sense, I’m still polyamorous because polyamory is dynamic. Polyamory allows for monogamy.

Lisa has a beautiful face and a shaved head. I have historically gone weak in the knees for pretty women with shaved heads. She led with a message that made an indirect reference to how handsome I was. I liked reading that. I followed suit.

We had an easygoing conversational chemistry. Which soon shifted to sending each other video messages while I was recharging myself in Thailand. Facebook awards you with a month long vacation called “recharge” after you finish 5 years of work there. If you are European, you are probably laughing at that notion. I really enjoyed sharing with Lisa, hearing her reflections and getting to know what was going on in her life. I was quite taken by her energy. When we walked into a restaurant in downtown Austin a month later, another woman I matched with on Bumble was also there with a date. That woman would later tell me how both she and her date were just completely taken by Lisa’s presence the moment we walked in. She had a beautiful, nourishing femininity that combined easefully with a strong masculine spine. I can sense the presence of a strong spine in women. It’s an indication to me of strong boundaries. It’s not strength in the traditional muscular sense. It’s energetic strength. Lisa identified as queer. Many queer women I’ve come across have repressed their femininity to get to a place of equal masculine and feminine. For good reason. Trauma, especially sexual, closes up the receptive feminine. I did not have that sense about Lisa. She used to repress her feminine too, then she changed course. She told me that on a walk we would take later in a beautiful park in Austin.

I explored queerness in the wake of recovering my repressed memories of childhood sexual abuse. It is so difficult to talk about this subject in words. Not just emotionally but also literally difficult to express what goes on in the repression of child sex abuse in human consciousness. My chants of “This is normal” worked so well that these memories had gotten tucked away with a bunch of other “normal” childhood memories like say sucking on a pepsicola – a cola-flavored frozen popsicle that you could buy for Rs. 2 right outside Indian Education Society’s VN Sule Guruji English Medium Secondary School in Dadar. Formerly known as King George School. Used to be such a simple “cool” colonial name, now quite a mouthful. I don’t know you who is reading this so I am gonna resist making a dark joke in reference to my childhood sexual trauma to spare you the trigger but just know that there’s a hilarious joke in my head which is bringing me a lot of amusement in this moment.

All of it was just “normal”. The sucking of pepsicola, the sucking of penises, the eating of donuts, the eating of dicks, the eating of chutney sandwiches, the regular pooping, the irregular sodomy, the playing of cricket, the fondling of my penis. Everything stored together as a “normal” childhood.

Nothing to see here. Move along.

Just like the Policemen say when you are gaping at a road wreck. Nothing to see here, carry on. Just like the Policemen said, when one of their brethren was idly resting his knee on the throat of a black man who deserved it because he might have stolen $20. This is all just “normal”. Nothing to see here, carry on. The Protector parts are like Policemen, maintaining law and order within your chaotic subconscious.

What are Protector parts? Read this–

And then I grew up. Moved to the US. Gradually, I learnt about sexual boundaries. What healthy sex looks like. Absorbed the “No”s from powerful women I was romantically involved with. Women who had done their own work to overcome the abuse they experienced not just in childhood but beyond. And then one day my body had learnt enough about what was actually normal touch in sexual contexts. Not just my mind, mind you. But my body had learnt it. I had learnt it somatically. And it created this huge disconnect between the child parts of me that chanted “This is normal” and my adult self which now knew what normal was. The tension got strong till a few doses of entheogens opened up the flood gates. Holy fuck. None of that was normal. Holy fuck. Eating chutney sandwiches, sucking a pepsicola, playing cricket, regular pooping was normal. Sucking of penises, choking on dicks, sodomy, fondling of my penis was not normal. So obvious, in hindsight.

(It just occurred to me that “pepsicola” might have emerged from a garbled desi attempt at saying “popsicle”.)

When I recovered the first set of memories, the perpetrator was my maternal grandfather.

The next day, I had this urge to jump out of my own body and rip my own face of.

I look like him. When I look in the mirror, I’m reminded of him. That’s the core challenge of “moving on” from incestual childhood sexual abuse. Your own fucking face and ways of being reminds you of the person. I associate my steady, calm demeanor in tense situations with him. I associate my love for history and astrology with him.

I’ll note here that this isn’t as triggering for me, anymore, as my words might indicate. I have been able to process enough of the trauma associated with him that I can temporally allow the emotional energy to flow out into my writing and yet be quite stable in my body. It’s like I have conscious control over when to channel this specific trauma into art without it damaging my body. Aspecting at ISTA played a huge role in getting here.

I wondered if the humans, that are driven to modify their bodies significantly, through piercings, operations and the likes, have repressed incestual sexual trauma. I pierced my left eyebrow to signify the pain and feel distinct from him.

Next time you speak with an adult survivor and you have the impulse to say “just move on now”, pause for a second and reconsider.

Along with that urge to jump out of my own body, for the first time in my life, I felt a resonance with the radical feminist slogan “Kill All Men”. That resonance remains one of the oddest things I’ve experienced in life. Cue another childhood sexual trauma joke.

#KillAllMen emerged soon after #MeToo swept the Internet. Back in 2018, when I came across the hashtag, I felt uncomfortable. I did not want to be killed. I felt singled out somehow when I read the tweets with that hashtag. I get it now. I got it in that moment, the day after the Ayahuasca. Language is so insufficient to express emotions and the magnitude of rage against patriarchal abuse is so high that sometimes you feel like you want to just “Kill All Men”. Including myself. Not really, but in the emotional sense.

Back to Lisa and our long distance digital cavorting. The memories of exchanging video messages still brings me great delight and comfort. I had come to Thailand to dive into Muay Thai, in preparation for my first ISTA in Austin in May. My plan was to spend a month cultivating martial energy before diving into sexual healing work at ISTA. I arrived in Austin a couple of weeks earlier. I was excited to meet Lisa.

April 2022

Lisa and I had discussed D/s before. Since the emergence of my childhood trauma, the D/s dynamic was emerging quite organically in my romantic situationships. While I was in upstate NY, I had also found myself friends with a few who worked professionally as Doms and Dominas. Sexual trauma transfers when the pain of one’s own trauma gets fused with the anger that one feels about the trauma to take rein of the adult self and leads the adult to act in abusive ways. Being able to see one’s own pain makes you not want to follow through on the horrible vengeful acts that the anger associated with the pain wants to inflict on other humans. You see how that’d continue the cycle and not really bring you relief from your own pain. You learn that when these angry, vengeful thoughts come up, you have to look inside and just hold the little child who is spitting them out and just tell him that you love him and just listen to him and hold him lovingly through it all.

Or.

Or you could express these “horrible” things that the inner child whispers to you in a consensual D/s container with a Sub who can feel your loving presence as you express these. A Sub whose nervous system typically associates such utterances only with the energies of hatred and anger. Not with love. The Sub’s nervous system gradually learns to unwire the associations of the words with trauma triggers.

Or you could do that. It’s tricker though, mind you. In my admittedly limited perspective, it’s a very thin line between healing D/s and trauma-perpetuating D/s. Still an open exploration for me.

Lisa and I explored D/s. I remember an evening when we went on a date in Austin at this vegan food bowl spot where we dropped into the consciousness space of D/s. Me taking on the Dominant consciousness. Her slipping into the Submissive consciousness. As we polarized our consciousnesses, a vortex opened up between us where all of my worries and anxieties melted into the present moment. We hardly did anything with it. It’s the purest form of consciousness D/s play that I’ve engaged in. That’s been my guiding principle ever since. Do less. Even less than less. It’s not about all the tools and toys, as fun as they can be. There’s so much more to just being in the primordial polarized consciousness split of the Dominant and Submissive.

Before everything, there was One. Then the One split into the Two so that the Two could create Play.

The Universe is a Divine Play.

लीला.

D/s is Divine Play.

Lisa and I decided to explore deeper intimacy. We got together one evening and dropped into sensual connection. At one point in our lovemaking, I felt more connected to her masculine and lost contact with her feminine. I had a moment of panic and I effectively disassociated. Thankfully, I was able to blurt out “hey, I’m feeling disassociated”. We paused and I felt numb. Something had shut down inside me. Lisa held me. I dropped into sleep. I had dreams. I was a child. I dreamt about how attractive a male friend from school looked. I dreamt about how attracted I felt to a male relative of mine who, with his sense of humor, had really taken the stage in a social setting. The attraction I felt was sexual. And there was no discomfort in feeling it. No rejection of it. In my dream space, I was purely experiencing life from the perspective of my sweet 8 year old, inner gay child. He had sexual crushes on many men in my life. I saw it clearly now. I woke up in the morning and wept. Lisa held space. I wept and wept and wept. Even harder than recovering the memories of childhood sexual abuse, was the thought that I liked it. Not just the thought, but clear somatic and transconscious evidence. I just coined this term “transconscious” to refer to phenomenon that are not just conscious or subconscious but transmit from the subconscious to the conscious in a manner that you see them clearly in the subconscious, liminal, shamanic, astral space and also simultaneously process them in expressible words in your conscious mind – the link being very clear to you. I can still feel my lower lip quivering when I feel into that moment. It was so painful to admit that parts of me liked it. I believe the pain of admitting it is linked with all of the fear that adult survivors have of being responsible for the abuse.

You are not responsible for the abuse even though parts of you might have liked the physicality of it. It’s normal (not “normal” but actual normal) to like the sensations of childhood sexual abuse and that doesn’t make you responsible for the horrible things done to you.

I could see another timeline of my life where this inner gay child had gotten fused with my self and I lived a life as a gay man. I did not live that life. I still hear the whispers of who the inner gay child finds attractive. I listen to them, I hold him and am always available for him. In the past, I’d feel jealous of such men or have other challenging interactions with them. Now I don’t feel that discomfort any more. I breathe out as I write this.

It’s nice to live a life that has fewer sources of discomfort.