It's interesting how a lot of people seem to wind up reconnecting with the abuse later in life while mixing drugs/sex. When confronted with a situation that could either trigger or help them through it, many seem to have come out the other side with a better mindset. I'd say it's got therapeutic potential if not for the risks surrounding meth.
I’m not saying I have all the answers but I feel I know part of us intuitively or through having had the necessary experience.
Being raped is undoubtably a sexual experience. There is the physical response, often this is one of paind and discomfort, and the physical system may still be stimulated into physical arousal. Men can get hard, women can get wet, it is a physiology that can not be dismissed, and often fucks with the survivors head.
The psychosexual experience is much different in a rape. For myself, in hindsight, the absences are most shocking. There is no love, no fun, no excitement, no anticipation, no ritual, no validation, no mind expansion, and no spiritual connection. It lacks even the valuable side of selfish pleasure seeking, as the neurotransmitter are dysfunctional and not mapping to behaviors in a psychologically helpful way.
That sexual experience became a violation or abomination. In some victims, all sexual experiences might be corrupted by this belief. I don’t want to speak for anyone else, and I will say there are a lot of different outcomes that are possible.
For me, I found a lot of this would become protective or at least not permanently damaging. While I would go through childhood and early adolescence fearful of “grownups” and mistrusting even my parents, I had a healthy, viable internal sex life. This was a place where I was safe because it was just me, and the pleasure seeking behaviors were triggering the correct neurological responses and spamming my brain with reinforcing feedback.
As I matured and my sex life became sophisticated the benefits increased drastically. I could feel the joys of sex as keenly as anyone does, but perhaps valued them more because I knew about sex that was absent of these. Imagine experiencing love for the first time, not through a parent-child relationship, but as an adult through the mechanism of sex? Consider excitement at that level, felt for the first time through sex, and not through the Christmas ritual or birthday party ritual or a family vacation, but from losing your virginity with a high school crush or through masturbation enhanced by pornography.
To your point, it is quite possible to come out of the experience setup undamaged, or with an even better sexual mindset. I think I did. Let’s acknowledge what I think what is probably most common outcome for child sexual abuse survivors. Compared to someone without rape on their sexual resume, through becoming more sexually actively, an irregular, and not necessarily better or worse, sexual mindset develops. This is often hypersexuality, but has other forms. In my case a sexually precocious child, grew into a precocious masturbator and pleasure seeker, but by the time I had found polydrug use and a sex life with as many partners as possible to be most enjoyable, and thus a satisfactory lifestyle, I was the same age as my peers who were ready to stop partying and settle down with a partner.
