Behind Closed Doors: Living in an Abusive Relationship

Behind closed doors, there’s an epidemic. 1 in 4 women will be affected by it. UK police receive one call about it every minute, an estimated 1,300 calls a day or over 570,000 a year, though less than 40% of cases are reported. No other crime has a rate of repeat victimisation so high(1). I am talking, of course, of domestic violence.

Domestic violence can happen to anyone.

Imagine for one moment that it’s you that it’s happening to. You dealing with the carnage.

Until you look back, you don’t even identify it as domestic violence: that’s something that happens to other people, right? You don’t use words like ‘abuser’ or ‘beaten’ or ‘raped’. That sounds so serious! You use minimizing language, always. And you’re so confused: tired and scared and confused. Hell, the confusion! He’s so attentive to start with, so thoughtful to start with, you don’t even notice things, or at least nothing to put a finger on until it’s got Bad, by which time it’s too late. Then it gets Worse, and the language ends: you have no point of reference; you stop speaking.

It begins with the odd comment about what you’re wearing. A few snidey remarks about your friends. Then: jealousy. Full on. He says you’re flirting with other men and though God knows that’s the last thing on your mind, you feel confused. You don’t meet your friends to save the arguments so there’s no one about to question his behavior, to get an opinion from, to back you up. You think - maybe I am flirty though I don’t mean to be.

I’ll try harder.

There’s been a gradual chip, chip, chipping at your self esteem. You were always a little unsure of yourself and now that’s become a yawning chasm of lost-ness. He tells you he loves you but he criticizes you, he gets angry, he gets so angry these days but he says it’s your fault and maybe it is. The things he seemed to like about you to start with, your rebelliousness, your intelligence, now seem to annoy him. You drink more to help with the feelings. Sometimes when he’s shouting it doesn’t feel like you’re really there at all.

Then it gets physical.

This is when people will tell you you should have left. People are full of helpful advice like that after the fact. I’m sorry, did I say advice? I meant judgment. He tells you it’s your fault and these people, the people you used to think would help you, hospital staff, they say the same thing. Look at her going back to him! He told you people couldn’t be trusted and you know what, he’s right. At your lowest point people have exempted him and blamed you.

You feel like scum.

You feel like you’re going crazy, and you know the drink’s a problem, the drugs are a problem. Together with the self harm they were things that helped you to feel in control even if only a little, to make it a little less painful, the self inflicted damage a means to ease the suffering in your head. He tells you you’re fucking lucky to have him, and you believe him. You look crazy but he doesn’t, you sport the bruises from the last beating and end up hiding at home, ashamed to be seen, afraid to be judged. He goes where he likes when he likes, he sees other women, and he’ll tell you all about that and how much better they are than you when he gets home.

You’re afraid you’ll be sectioned.

He used to be so sorry and upset when he hit you, but it wears off. His anger fades quicker than the bruises but can be triggered in an instant. You feel yourself splitting, mind and body separating out during the beatings, during the violence.

You are so, so lonely. And scared. Everything that’s close to you is broken and destroyed, and at some point you realize you’ve lost even yourself.  You see it in the eyes, in your eyes: an emptiness that speaks of exhaustion and pain and fear and hurt almost above and beyond human endurance. You’re here in body but it’s less clear how present you really are in any meaningful sense.

Things are happening that you didn’t know went on. Sex-wise he’s opened your eyes to a whole load of stuff. Did I say it gets confusing? It gets a little confused. He’ll be nice then he’ll be nasty, taunting you for being frigid, for not doing what ‘real women’ do. He shows you magazines and dvds to teach you how it’s done, and you’re scared to say no. You used to say no, but the rows and the violence mean you don’t say too much these days, and it doesn’t stop him anyway. Anything you say can tick him off and make his fist itch. 

It’s painful and degrading but it'll get worse.

He breaks your boundaries one by one. He wants anal sex. He wants to use toys. He wants to take pictures. There are certain points where lines are crossed and power shifts to him. You both know it though it’s unspoken. After the pictures he has it in his power to humiliate you publicly.

Now he brings in other people.

These ‘friends’ of his, his dealer plus entourage, he wants you to ‘look after’ them, and you’ve learned what that means. Outsiders will say if it was that bad you would have left, but it’s not that simple. Just because you’re still here doesn’t mean you want to be. If you could walk away, you would, but the last time you tried that, you got caught and by the time he’d finished with you, you weren’t walking anywhere anytime soon. He tells you he’ll finish the job off if it ever happens again. He doesn’t let you leave the house. He has the money and the car keys. You have a serious addiction and you’re in trauma. You have PTSD and it makes you easy to manipulate. Sometimes you can’t move, sometimes you can’t speak, sometimes it’s like he’s shouting at you but there’s actually no one there.

Choices? Clear thinking? I might have said it before but it gets confused.

Memories are fractured and best forgotten. You can’t take tomorrow for granted. The mind is resilient, the body resilient, until it isn’t. Fainting. Chest pains, wrist pains, leg pains, abdo pains, heavy bleeding, sickness, gashes, bruises, eyes so swollen you can’t see for a while, will never see as well out of after. The vision returns, but it’s not the same. Head injuries. The drugs and drink help the forgetting, the head injuries help the forgetting. You don’t half bleed a lot from your head. You take care of the body as best you can, you lie awake some nights scared to sleep in case you don’t wake up, looking at the belt draped on the end of the bed, a dark reminder.

If he lets you eat, you eat. If you keep these men happy, maybe he won’t hit you. Maybe not tonight anyway. You hurt all the time, from the beatings, from the fucking. Words like ‘pimping’ won’t come into your vocabulary until much later, and even then they’re hard to say – too real, too painful. Instead you think in colours and numbers, in rhymes and letters. Anything not to let the reality in. You need safety, everybody needs safety, but no place is safe. You tell yourself: I’m not really here, it’s not really me, it’s just a body but I’m not that, I’m someplace else.

You develop different headspaces.

Time passes and then, miracle of miracles, you manage to escape.

A happy ending? Not quite, not yet. If you were looking for a movie ending, riding off into the sunset, you'd be disappointed.

This is just the beginning. You try to fit in, to act ‘normal’ but you don’t know how. Your recent experiences have geared you to survival rather than living, have left you with massive trauma that confuses everything, the past seems more real than the present at times with the PTSD, stuff triggers it all the time and you feel disorientated and lost. The loneliness continues, even in company. You begin piecing stuff together, trying to figure: what the fuck happened here? You’re scared to talk about it, afraid of more judgment, knowing from past experience that people will take it more as a reflection of you and your character than a reflection of him.

The pain and the realization of what went before, what you couldn’t let yourself know, it catches you up. Denial kept you alive and it’s fucking hard to give it up, especially now you’re off the drink and drugs. You get nightmares and flashbacks, wake up soaked in sweat, you throw up, you cry sometimes but more often you don’t. You have scars, you don’t trust, your body upsets you, constant reminder that it is of where you've been, of what they did. You start to see how it could have been, how it should have been, and the stark, painful contrast of how it actually was.

Feelings and images burned into your body and mind, replaying.

You’ve seen stuff you didn’t want to see, that no one should ever have to see, experienced stuff that makes vocabulary seem redundant, and you realize that scary as it is to talk about it, you’re gonna have to find someone, try and do it somehow, because it’s too much on your own. You can’t do it on your own anymore. Images you’ve tried to bury and forget forcing their way out. They make you sick, the words make you sick and the prospect of trusting someone with stuff so close to you that sometimes it feels as if it is you makes you sick. But what are the options?

That was me. That was how it was, how it is, for me. It was me but it could have been you. It’s an epidemic. 1 in 4 women will be affected by domestic violence. The stories vary but the themes are the same. Being raped, being pimped, pornography can happen to anyone. Don’t see this issue as something that doesn’t concern you because it does. My ignorance was bliss until suddenly it wasn’t. We’re all in this together. The abuser needs to be made visible. Blame shouldn’t fall on an already traumatised victim. Women shouldn’t be living in fear of being abused, whether that be inside or outside the home. Every time we blame a victim of domestic violence, we exonerate her abuser. Every time we shine the light of judgment on her, we let him continue to live in the shadows.

On average, two women a week are killed by a violent partner or ex-partner (2). People are dying and it needs to stop. And people are surviving and dealing with judgment and willful misunderstanding on a daily basis. That needs to change too.

It was me but it could have been you.

---

(1) See www.womensaid.org.uk for statistics

(2)  (Povey, (ed.), 2005; Home Office, 1999; Department of Health, 2005.)
Also thanks to Rebecca Mott for ending my writing block!

Lighting A Candle: The Battle for Words

To write, you must have energy above and beyond that necessary just to get through the day. I haven’t written for a while quite simply because I have lacked the energy. All the energy I possess has been channeled into surviving. Things are shifting and it’s painful, even if it’s good. Sometimes the pain is absolutely overwhelming – physical, mental, spiritual. I keep my head down and weather the storm. There are no quick fixes in recovery and boy, do I hate that! I do all the right things, but that doesn’t always mean I feel better – at least, not immediately. Opening up about my past seems to mean feeling worse in the short term.

When things have been really black I think, I can’t do this anymore. Too much, it’s too much. I feel raw and broken and scared and hurt and damaged, damaged beyond repair. And I’m exhausted from not sleeping, and my body hurts with PTSD and my mind’s full of technicolour images of the abuse, the scents, the sounds, the feelings. Enveloped with pain, frozen and mute with trauma, it chases through my mind: I simply can’t do this anymore.

But you know, what are the options? I contemplate suicide but I don’t want to die, I just don’t want to feel like this, to hurt like this. The survival instinct which brought me through the abuse and into recovery burns deep at the core of my being. So I put one foot in front of the other and do what I can to look after myself, to take care of myself, to pull through this, now as then.

Facing my past without drink and drugs to take the edge off, seeing my absolute powerlessness, experiencing fully the horror and pain and degradation that was my life is absolutely terrifying. I struggle to talk about what’s in my head: the realization of the brutality and humiliation to which I was subjected make the words stick in my mouth, make my lips seal together, form a dry sob in my throat. I’ve never felt more alone. But I do have help these days in the form of my therapist and my sponsor. I am doing the right things, trying to talk, trying to trust, trying to heal.

An old Chinese proverb says ‘it is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness’. In taking care of myself as best I know, in keeping going, in riding it out, in being proactive in challenging the lies of the sex industry by telling my story, whether people choose to listen or not, that’s what I’m doing. I’m taking action, even if that action is painful and scary and feels woefully inadequate at times. Keep putting in the right actions, and no matter how slowly, things begin to change for the better. There's a long way to go, both in my personal recovery and in the larger scheme of things. But I'm in it for the long haul. It's the only way to be.

Emotionally Challenged?

I find I have become an expert at hiding emotion. It’s the only thing I can hold onto, that I don’t give them the satisfaction of laughing at my tears, or cumming to them. Blank is good. Neutral is good. He finds fault and when any expression can lead to a beating, it’s better to have none. Although sometimes he’ll beat me for that anyway. What’s the fuck’s wrong with you you stupid fucking bitch? Not got anything to say for yourself?

I have nothing to say for myself. My lips remain sealed, there are no words - if there were to be any they would be the wrong ones and lead to more trouble. Talk is, largely, futile. There are words in my head, sometimes, but I stop saying them and sometimes they don’t connect with what’s happening anyway.

What’s inside and what’s outside cease to match up.

I can do blank and I can do detached. But sometimes it’s more than that, sometimes I manage neither but something wildly inappropriate, bearing no relation to what’s happening or how I’m feeling, will out. It’s like all of the expressions of emotion have jumbled into one big mess, firing off at random. So sometimes in the direst circumstances, about to be beaten and raped I’ll laugh, a kind of whatcha gonna do? Which infuriates him or makes him tell me I’m mental. I talk to myself aloud sometimes, apparently, I’m not aware of it until I’m told to shut the fuck up, poems and odd words, comfort words. Rare indeed are the times I’ll cry. I throw up a lot, pass out a lot, play distraction games: reciting mantras, spelling out every third letter of each word, or every word coming at me or spoken over me, thinking in colours or numbers or rhyme.

I’ll smile at times, because I’m told to for the camera or to please the punters, the threat of violence always in the air. It’s a killer, smiling for your abusers, it’s been so long since I’ve really smiled and the pain is at times so great that I don’t know if I’m smiling or grimacing. Showing your teeth, something apes do when they’re scared. Sounds about right, although I kind of get beyond scared – out the other side, a light headed dizzying detachment. You can’t survive if you acknowledge the true danger – can’t live knowing you could die at any time.

I wear a mask at any rate beyond the pulling of the facial muscles – my makeup, heavy makeup for the most part. It’s covering dark circles beneath my eyes and bruises, making the mouth they’ll be fucking more prominent, easy to find, eyelashes thickened and lengthened. Got to please the punters! They don’t want to see past damage or dirt, just the damage and dirt they’ve caused, a part of their conquest, though they’ll ignore bruising between the legs as long as it’s squeaky clean. Of course, often your pain is their pleasure – when they don’t want you to smile but want you to cry. Wiping up the tears and the cum those times they get what they want, having done what it took, feeling the sickness of selling yourself out.

I am in body, out of body, detached, terrified, numb, in pain, sick, drunk, drugged, concussed, injured, sleep deprived, starving… it’s no surprise I guess in retrospect that the emotions should get out of kilter and, further, the facial expressions should become detached from the emotions. This isn’t a tv drama or a film, where the female lead weeps unsnotty silent tears and utters powerful and articulate monologues to a sympathetic audience at the appropriate moment, unveiling herself. This is daily, monotonous torture pure and simple and the consequent breaking down of patterns of emotions. Splitting, PTSD, get in the way of straightforward cause and effect feelings and expressions of emotions. Something triggers the head and it’ll be freeze, laugh cry or vomit as head and body re-live, irrespective of what’s actually happening in realtime. Confusing and nonsensical to an outside perspective.

It is true to say I am hard. Sometimes. But I am also soft, vulnerable. Most people have emotions but emotions have me: different head, different emotion. I am not Angel sad, Angel angry, I am Sad, I am Angry, the main continuity as Angel being that these heads inhabit the same body. To some people, I seem hard and cold, able to speak seemingly without emotion about horror and loss. In fact the very opposite is true: I split, I hardened, I detached, laughed hysterically and inappropriately because I am human, because I am vulnerable. Surviving in traumatic conditions, body and mind do what they have to do to get through, to protect themselves. My unusual reactions are not proof that I am heartless or cold. They are proof that I am human and have remained human. I built a shell around myself, the hard protecting the soft. Remaining vulnerable and open and dying, or closing off and surviving. I made my choice. Tell me you’d have done it differently.

PTSD and The Prostitution Trap

There have been times when I have thought about going back to prostitution. It felt to me, at times, inevitable that I would end up back there, as messed up by it as I have been and remain, with PTSD that makes everyday life almost impossible, with insomnia, when the splitting is frequent and time loses its meaning, when even being in a room with someone is too scary, too much. When things have been at their worst, I have felt any possibility of attempting ‘normal’ life to be laughable, and I have known the one place where I could go where I would be absolutely normal, where my fucked-upness would be not merely permissible but actually required. Prostitution. As a little girl I didn’t dream of one day growing up and having men fuck me for money. I don’t believe many little girls do. But we acquire damage on the way and end up there, getting more damaged day by day, desperate to get out, sometimes too damaged to get out, or out and sometimes too damaged to stay out.

I have had PTSD for more than a decade. It began with the violence of my ex, and continued throughout being pimped and then prostituting myself. Incapacitated by it, I struggled to speak or even move at times: I simply froze up. As the abuse continued and worsened, over time, the trauma continued to leave its record on my mind and body, layer on layer. My reactions to situations, from an outside perspective, might have seemed, probably still seem, at times, a little strange or unhinged. Sometimes in the face of extreme violence, I’d laugh: out on the other side of terror, a kind of hysterical ‘bring it on’. My different ‘heads’ – I remain fragmented – manifest quite differently. Or so I am told – I don’t always know. Difficulties with memory combined with splitting mean that I can lack continuity in relationships. I might react to the same situation very differently at different times, according which head I have on.

I never have gone back to prostitution. Even when it has felt inevitable, all I’m good at, when I’ve felt I’d never get any better and that I might as well get it over and done with rather than having it hang over my head – even then, I haven’t gone back. The reason? I couldn’t do it sober. The memory of the horror of what it would mean stops me. I have enough clear thinking even in those bleak times to realize that while things might not get any better, they could get a lot worse by going back. Hell, they would get a lot worse if I went back. Similarly, I have contemplated suicide when things have felt really black in recovery. In truth, I didn’t want to die, I just didn’t know how to live. I don’t want to go back but I haven’t known how to go on.

The help available out there to women who have exited prostitution is woefully inadequate. I have found it to be practically non-existent. The first hope I got was stumbling across the Object website (www.object.org), a UK movement against the objectification of women. I wrote to them, telling them my story and they wrote back. I couldn’t believe they took the time to write back! My attempts at accessing help elsewhere, at finding people who understood, who gave a shit, even within the mental health profession, had hitherto been unsuccessful. From my dialogue with Object, I gained a little confidence and started the blog, a big part of my recovery. I knew I wasn’t totally on my own, and had begun to be able to articulate some of what had happened to me, in print at least – it remained largely unspeakable. But I still lacked any face to face help. I needed someone who knew me, to whom I wasn’t anonymous, to see at first hand the different heads, the frozenness, to spend time with me and get to know me so that they could understand me and what it’s like to be me, and help me to move forward.

The last 6 months have seen that change. I am now seeing a therapist who listens rather than telling me how it is, who checks out if he’s getting things right and who I find myself able to trust. And I have a sponsor who I also trust enough to talk to about this stuff, which is immense – the power of a twelve step programme is that help isn’t confined to office hours and care isn’t on the meter. I have people I can sit down with and try and talk to about my past and work it through.

Now I have help, now I can talk to someone, I feel for the first time that I won’t have to go back. Prostitution is a trap, and simply having exited is not enough to stay safe. The mental trauma it causes serves to make women who have survived it incredibly vulnerable to going back - not because we want to (you can hear the johns rubbing their hands, gleefully saying see! They love it really!) but because in a society which has swallowed the lies and language of the sex industry, there’s quite simply no place else to go.

Things are hard right now. The PTSD’s bad: at night I keep the light on, bedroom door locked and wedged, and I sleep very little. I’m processing and re-living, body and mind. When I was pimped, it wasn’t safe to relax: I was always alert, always watching for the next danger, trying to stay a step ahead. Or I’d be dissociated, or numbed from the drugs and booze. The abnormal relationship between body mind and me is taking time to unknot. But I am so grateful to have help. I’ve done a lot of things alone of necessity, but carrying this stuff alone was impossible and made me incredibly vulnerable to going back. Things are moving, and that’s good, even if it’s painful. It’s not possible to change the future without disturbing the present, and I want a future that’s as far from my past as the east is from the west. I used to be a prisoner, locked up, beaten up, and told to shut the fuck up. Now I am free. Like a battery hen released for the first time from the confines of her cage, the mental cage can still confine me. It’s going to take a little sorting, a lot of patience and a whole bucket load of love for my head to catch up. Then I shall fly!

From Active Addiction to Active Recovery

It’s my birthday soon. 5 years clean and serene. Or at least, 5 years clean and sober. I could never have imagined that when I couldn’t go even 5 minutes without drinking towards the end. Good beyond words to be off the treadmill of addiction, the constant obsession, your mental and physical energy directed purely into securing the next drink or the next drug. The gradual isolation as people drift away, seeing your problem.

Waking up at 4am like clockwork every morning (if you're lucky enough to sleep at all after coming round from blacking out), shaking and sweating, heart beat erratic, liver pains, stomach pains, kidney pains, knowing you’re killing yourself and making promises – if I make it through the night, I won’t drink or use tomorrow, I’ll stop tomorrow. The grey arrival of dawn and the inevitable scramble to find a bit of booze, a hidden bottle. The self-loathing and fear as you pour the first drink: the mixture of relief and brief respite followed by despair and hopelessness as the alcohol takes its effect. Sometimes in a moment of strength the night before pouring the drink away, or flushing the drugs down the toilet and thinking: thank God, a fresh start tomorrow. The cursing and disbelief the morning after: the why? What was I thinking?

The passing out, the throwing up, the dizziness, the blackouts where people tell you you didn’t seem drunk at all, seemed absolutely fine. The blackouts when they don’t and you struggle to put together some picture of what actually happened, your only guide the disgust and judgment in the faces of others as they turn away. Prescription drugs are no harder to let go of, the drinks vary and the drugs vary but the results in the end are the same: pain and chaos. That feeling of betrayal, the ultimate betrayal when the thing that helped you to start with, the thing that seemed to be your friend, the only thing you could trust, turns against you, becomes the problem rather than the solution.

I didn’t drink the way I drank, or use the way I used, because I was happy. Neither was I under the illusion that to do so would be without problem. But it helped, to start with. I couldn't foresee quite how problematic it was to become. It pulled me through when life was unbearable, when what was going on around me, what was happening to me, was too much. I always felt pain acutely, and finding something that helped take the edge off that was a real eureka moment. When I lost a parent, it helped. When the violence meted out by my partner and friends overwhelmed me, it helped. Numbed out through the alcohol, with drugs, it became easier to say it doesn’t matter, what they do to me doesn’t matter. I didn’t want to be present for it, didn’t want to remember it. And sometimes I was lucky and I didn’t.

But the solution becomes the problem. The inevitable overdoses, the constant illness, mental and physical. The hallucinations, the paranoia, the black tide of depression. The horrifying realisation that came for me quite close to the end that I actually couldn’t stop. Until then I’d told myself that I just chose not to. Knowing I couldn’t was a different proposition entirely, the stuff of nightmares.

I am incredibly, incredibly fortunate to be in recovery. The obsession to drink and use left me fairly early on, once I’d come off it. I have a programme of recovery which I work and good people around me, because recovery is not something I can do on my own. All the energy I put into my addiction I now put into my recovery, a necessity to stay clean and sober. The ability to talk, to articulate my feelings and emotions, even to identify them, has taken time. To put a narrative to my past. Fucking tough, feeling, re-living, seeing it unclouded by chemicals, processing. But now I have my words back, and I have the right people to help me build a life, rather than just scraping through, surviving. I have a chance. For that and each day sober, I am so grateful. I never want to go back to the hell of active addiction, and I don't have to.

Being Pimped? Bloody Hell

Hell can become mundane. The daily battle for survival. Small victories taken here and there. Perspective becomes warped. The unacceptable is happening all the time - get over it. It'll be bad, but the question is, how bad? Fear is a constant. You know at any time you might die here, be killed here, but there's no escape. The mind adapts. The body adapts. Both work to distance you as far as possible. There's the booze too, and the drugs, when you can get them.

You're grateful when they don't hurt you too badly. Thank God! Pathetic gratitude for them not being more sadistic than they are. Goodness and kindness and compassion are so entirely lacking that being abused, but less severely, feels like a gift. You loathe yourself in your powerlessness.

Normality? Tuned to survival, you forget. You live like an animal, just to get by. Scavenging food. Crawling when you can't walk, on your knees when they make you. You're caught, caged, trapped. You stop speaking. Can't trust these people! Will his hand stroke you or hit you? Will his words soothe you or cut you? If he offers something nice, you're waiting for the catch. He'll take it back, laughing maybe, taunt you for showing your desperation, or maybe let you have it. And then get angry later. Or maybe not.

Nothing can be held onto as solid, nothing can be trusted except for the certainty that today you will be hurt. You are only alive because your body is useful to them. It has value, not because it's good or intrinsically of worth. It has value financially, and that value lies in its use as a fuck toy.

You are owned. This body's not yours anymore: you have no say over what happens. You want to detach yourself fully, you get to hate this body for what they do to it, covered in their fluids, their scents, weak and hurting, frozen and incapable, but you can't, because to let go wholly would be to die, and you don't want that either. Well, sometimes perhaps but you're scared because you know you're bad, they tell you you're bad, and you're scared of the devil.

Scared of everything: being alone with your head; being with people, because of what they do to you. Scared of dying here like this; scared of going on like this. Scared of the dark and what hides there, but scared of the light, of seeing what you've become.

Lonely lonely lonely. With no place to run.

Here in recovery, that past hell hasn't simply lifted. You can be out of the hell that was then but still in hell, mentally. The experience of being tortured, physically and mentally, isn't something you can shake off or snap out of. I was young when it started, so I don't have any other frame of reference. I struggle with PTSD, nightmares, dissociating, splitting... a mountain to climb. Slow, slow progress, integrating, processing, feeling, accepting, coming to terms with. So frustrating!

I learned to survive, but now I'm trying to learn to live. And that's a different thing entirely.

Waving Not Drowning

Where the anger ends there is a whole ocean of sadness. In truth, I have put a good deal of effort into avoiding this sadness: I don't watch sad films or read sad books, if I sense an ending I'll flip the channel, I don't listen to classical music. I don't even like last seasons of programmes: it'll be over soon! The rawness of the sadness, my sadness, the depth and the width is immense.

I'm scared I'll drown out there.

It feels uncontainable, unmanageable, and that terrifies me. Much better, much safer, to be angry instead. Of course the problem is that in order to stay clean and sober, and to try to move on, this sadness is going to need to be looked at, experienced and talked and cried out. How to release it slowly, rather than sinking in a deluge, is a tricky one.

Everything interlinks. One thing triggers another: the death of my parents; the horror of addiction and active alcoholism; the insidious slide into domestic violence; being pimped; the violence of being pimped; the trauma and escape and fall into prostituting myself and the violence I met there.

In order to survive, just to get through, I told myself I don't matter, what's happening here doesn't matter, nothing touches me, these people and this situation doesn't matter and neither do I. Now here in recovery I have to resist that thinking. In truth, when I got sober, it was because there was a part of me, a tiny fire which was strong enough to say at my lowest point - enough! I am worth saving. I have to stop or die here, alone and terrified, just another addict prostitute gone, just another statistic.

But following this magical new outlook on me through to its logical conclusion continues to be painful. If I matter, then what was done to me matters, I can no longer snarl and say these fuckers can't get to me, they'll never hurt me. The fact of the matter is they did get to me. And they have hurt me, immeasurably. I survived through stuff as best I could by denying my feelings but those feelings are lining up to be heard, to be felt and acknowledged and accepted.

I guess that when you've pushed so much under the rug that it's become a mountain with a rug perched on top it's time to lift it up and clear some stuff out!

Scary but necessary. Anger, channelled positively, is a great driver in my life, and I'm not about to ditch that. But I'm at that jumping off point with the sadness, with being honest enough I guess to admit that I hurt, and to let some of it out. To be vulnerable. No human being can walk through all that shit and be unscathed. I'm just human. It fucking hurts. But I don't want to drink or use again, and I want to find some peace. Whatever it takes, I'm moving forward because going backwards just isn't an option.

The Fantasy of Fantasy

I find it truly bizarre when the women who are used in pornography are called 'actresses'. It strikes me as something of a misnomer. While it is true that they are often given lines to repeat to camera ('fuck me harder', 'it feels so good' being staples), and are told to smile as if they were enjoying it, there the acting ends. What is done is really done to the woman. It's not like any other show where you tune in and watch as actresses and actors pretend to be hurt. Take Casualty for example, or Midsomer Murders. It is stating the obvious to say that when the written role involves violence against the character or harm done to them, whether it be a car accident in Casualty or a murder victim in Midsomer Murders, this violence or harm is not actually done, is not actually perpetrated against the actor or actress. When, however, in pornography you see a woman being fucked, she might be speaking lines but the experience is real, it is something that is happening to her, that is done to her. It is real. The penetration, the 'money' shots, the aggresiveness, are her experience. The obviously painful tricks and the less obviously, they happen, they hurt her. No fake blood or fake bruises here, no painstakingly crafted fake body parts to take the impact of the actions. Whatever is done is done to her, done to her to make him money, done for your consumption, for your pleasure. Her expression of pain is for real.

The money she receives, what if any she gets of it after her pimp or 'agent' has his cut, simply expresses the fact that women have to be paid to take this crap. Or the men who control us have to be paid for our use. We don't do it cos we love it, as the pimps and pornographers would have you believe, we do it because we need the money, be it for drugs or food, and we see no choices, or because they want the money, our pimps want the money and there'll be Trouble if we dissent. The women used in porn don't generally come from the happiest backgrounds. We're damaged, and in porn we get more damaged.

The risks and the harms done are grave. Unprotected sex with numerous parties having unprotected sex with numerous other parties is hazardous, with or without screening. HIV and Hepatitis B are a couple of a whole host of other blood and fluid borne diseases. Prolonged rough sex, be it vaginal or anal, or the insertion of objects can lead to internal damage and bleeding, to urine infections, prolapses, fissures and other long term problems. Many of the more 'hardcore' acts are undisguised expressions of aggression.

Put yourself in her shoes for moment if you will. She is hurt, she is humiliated, by one man or several, while somebody films this happening. While she is physically in pain, she is called names like whore, cunt, slut, bitch, and told that she likes it. She is told to say she likes it -'fuck me harder' 'fuck my arse'. She is made to say she enjoys being abused. They laugh at her, about the damage done to her body - 'she just might be wearing diapers soon!". Imagine being her, opened up for the camera, nowhere to hide, for the pleasure of a bunch of men she never even met, who pay the men who do this to her to do it, who will also sit and laugh at the damage and sit and orgasm to her pain.

Not good for the old headspace, is it? Or for the body. The physical experience of pain of being used in pornography is matched only by the mental pain. The rates for PTSD, drug and alcohol abuse and suicide in prostitution and porn speaks for itself. Trust issues, body issues, dissociation, self harm, substance abuse issues... and on, the glamour of 'acting' in porn goes on, it doesn't just end with a quick scrub off in the shower. The nightmares begin, the triggers begin.

Powerless to remove yourself from that situation, you do the only thing you can do to cope, just to survive, to get through. When the pain is unbearable, the fear is unbearable, the degradation is unbearable, you split off. Your body feels like it's no longer your own, you're not even safe in that, and their words are in your head, they're in your head. No place is safe and so you go to no place, a kind of disconnected numbness that pulls you through at times. When I can't get there by willing it, I cut or I drink or I use. I try to forget, try to maintain some shred of this self, such as it was, against all the odds.

In recovery, I often find myself disconnected, sometimes pleasantly so but mostly it scares me, I feel stuck outside my body and there's no getting back. Every movement this body makes feels like an immense effort, a conscious pulling of strings. I feel fake because I don't know who I am, who Angel is, which of the shards and the fragments and the competing but opposing voices are me. The despair or the hope, the optimist and the pessimist, the hard and the soft, the cold and the warm. What you get when you encounter me depends largely on whichever part of me is dominant at that time. Trying to integrate myself is slow progress and right now I feel as if I've gone backwards. Trust them - don't trust them! Be honest - show nothing! I matter - I don't matter! I live in a warzone and it's exhausting and scary. I don't know who I am, and that makes me sad and lost.

My experience of being used in pornography has been one of extreme and enduring trauma.

Now I'm no mental health professional, but I'll wager that the actress who was in a car crash in Casualty went home with a paycheck, nothing more. The 'extras' a porn 'actress' leaves with - physical and mental trauma - mark her as separate. Porn is not fantasy, it is not acting - it happens to and hurts real women. Instead we should see it for what it is - lies and abuse. The women in porn are the rubbish dump for our perverse imaginations, used and discarded for our pleasure, at the bottom of the pile in a series of unequal power relations.

Actresses? My arse.