I was nineteen when I started dating one person,
little did I know that grooming was in play and they
had put a ‘curse on’
me.
I unknowingly fell into the perp’s trap and
endured two years of their manipulative, controlling,
and abusive crap.
Twenty years later, I was in trauma support training;
it was here I unpacked — my ego spraining, heart draining;
coming to terms with the sexual abuse and violence — my
face and soul raining.
One thing I learned is behaviors of abuse are there from the start.
Coercion and manipulation help the perp play their dominant part.
They slide in with charm and niceness when they see you slipping
to ensnare and entrap their victim, boozing the (in)toxic(ating)
cocktail of fake personality they have their victim sipping.
But charm and niceness are learned skills and
when targets realize this they can avoid the ills of
becoming a part of the Sexual Assault Sequence
as well as the harms, abuse, trauma, and consequence of
playing into a groomer’s long game of abuse and
exiting further encounters while snuffing the fuse.
We need to talk more about looking out for and knowing the signs
of grooming, abuse, and isolation — the perp and predator’s designs.
While I have not been with a predator since, I have been in
relationships with a “prince” or two who
felt that they were en route to be king and letting me
know when things were not to their liking.
You see I had come so far away from that
first piece of shit but failed to do the
work of further being hit with
different forms of abuse that were
not physical or sexual taking me years to refuse the
economic, mental, and emotional infusions of
negative control and my own disillusions. Because of
that training I fully came to know the game I had
been playing and I was done splaying — no
more settling for relationships not serving me;
no more meddling and unwanted attentions from those
swerving me
from my dreams, goals, and expectations with
less time for me to be sitting on lamentations.
Visual representation of story on @tolbert_on_medium Instagram
