Loy Young

One of the most common stage-settings for future victims are alcoholic parents. A couple from Darwin, Australia, came to me for sexual intimacy counseling. Peter could only get aroused in a drunken stupor. Then he literally wanted to be brutally beaten. Carol, his wife, could only comply whenever she in turn was completely intoxicated. If the partners tried to make love in a sober state, she couldn’t bring herself to hurt him and Peter was impotent without the beatings.
Peter had been regularly beaten badly as a child when his father got drunk and took out his anger and frustration on the boy. The mother, instead of protecting her son, abused him verbally and emotionally. Occasionally, she also indulged in too much alcohol and hit Peter as well.

Otherwise the parents left Peter entirely to his own devices. The only connection he knew was through physical and emotional pain. That was intimacy to him, and that was what he continued to seek out as an adult.

I worked closely with a massage therapist who helped Peter to get rid of the pain that was deeply lodged in his body, while we cleared the emotional hurt. Within a few weeks, Peter’s body became sensitive to a lighter touch. I also asked his wife to take a feather and just stroke his body until he could begin to feel the sensuality of a very delicate touch. She remarked later that their lovemaking had become the best she had ever known. Tenderness and intimacy replaced abusive sex, but only after releasing the emotional hurts out of his body.

Write down the way your parents connected with you when you were a child, to discover your own "love" strategy. Any bad experience you had will keep your emotional nature calling similar situations and people to you. You often keep playing the same act again and again with new co-actors if your childhood co-actors are no longer in your life. When one loses their emotional zest to play with you, there is always another actor or actress waiting in the wings to take their place. Remember that your feelings keep you unconsciously playing the same old roles again and again like a broken record. In fact, the more familiar it is the more it appeals to the emotions.

You won’t feel so confused if you know at least what’s going on, and before long you can learn how to deal with those feelings! There’s no need to bemoan how awful it was, you just want to become conscious of your own victim scenarios that you might still be acting out today. Then you can learn to triumph over each and every one of these scenarios.