Chapter 8: Soft Launch of Evil

After Sean moved out, I finally had intermittent pockets of space, his absence every other weekend, courtesy of Ghislane’s insistence that he now maintain regular access to their child (such suspicious timing.) Those few days each month, from September through November, catalyzed a cognitive recalibration. What followed was a slow, disorienting unraveling: memory, behavior, and trauma-conditioned perception began to dissolve.

This post captures the period where I began to have physical separation from him, when the psychological infrastructure he’d embedded through coercion, dissociation, and double-binding began to loosen. Only then did the shape of what I’d been living inside come in to view, albeit, unconsciously.

It’s extremely difficult to reconstruct, because the memories weren’t encoded linearly. They split along functional lines: one part of me managed proximity to Sean’s child— that’s one timeline. Another held the somatic burden of Sean’s violent sex, that’s a separate channel altogether, even when the events were happening in parallel. I look at the videos of me with his child, and it’s hard to reconcile that I was also being raped senseless- literally. Literally every, single. time, i saw that child Sean would have sex with me until I couldn’t move or speak, disorienting me for hours.

Then, anything to do with Ghislane had it’s own perceptual space and associations. Everything was dissociated. Compartmentalized. And few of those parts were talking to each other or aware of each other. Which is probably why it took me over a year to assemble what actually happened.

I’ve tried to lay this sequence out chronologically, but my system stores memories by realization order, not event order. So this is me trying again. Ugh. Anyway…

Sean had likely entered a phase of narcissistic injury during our trip to San Francisco in July 2023 with his daughters. He couldn’t bring meth, and I had an emotionally raw conversation with my father (read: trauma dumping), that Sean overheard. When we returned, he spiraled.

I wouldn’t find out until four months later, but he had immediately begun messaging every woman he could find on every dating app in existence. What I did notice at the time was the shift, he became vindictive, unpredictable, and subtly cruel.

Months later, as dissociated memories began to return, I recalled one of the last instances I was forced to be with his son and I was heavily dissociated. His son was bent over, body angled in a way that when I did that, Sean told me I should expect to give him sex. All in the span of a second, I wondered if Sean was going to have sex with his son, and immediately became afraid his son was going to rape me.

That moment was a rupture point. It forced an immediate full confrontation with how scrambled my internal compass had become. The perception that someone so small could be a threat revealed the degree to which my baseline for danger, power, and sexuality had been corrupted. I had been conditioned to associate vulnerability itself with danger, and to treat proximity and posture as cues for threat, regardless of context.

What terrified me most wasn’t his son. It was that my brain, still running on survival, had defaulted to preparing for harm from every direction. I, at 36, thought a six-year-old was going to rape me. I was unaware of how old I was (this was baby-girl mode), and literally could look at his son, and think I was in danger.

The role I’d been forced into, infantilized, compliant, constantly adaptive to male power, had become a filter that warped my ability to interpret reality. The “baby-girl” state, trained into me through a mix of domination, perceived reward, and psychological collapse, wasn’t just a role I played. It had become a mode of perception that endangered how I related to others. This realization activated a deep desire to locate and dissolve anything that made that distortion possible.

As fractured as I was, I WAS trying. It was incredibly difficult to switch myself out of baby-girl mode once he triggered it. It could take me 15 to 20 minutes of uninterrupted focus to navigate my way to a different consciousness and only if I could physically get away from Sean. On top of that, I had to notice how I was even thinking first. His presence alone reinforced the baby-girl state. If he stayed near me, I defaulted automatically into submission. This is why he would show up in the middle of the night when we’d break up.

I began refusing all baby-girl/daddy talk, and would not let him use any names with me that triggered age-regressed personalities.

There was a night during this time I noticed I couldn’t walk well, see clearly, or keep my eyes open. He carried me upstairs. I’ve had flashbacks to a conversation I had with police a few days after this, mentioning that he had “put me to bed” multiple times that week, and that we had fought so badly I had diarrhea in our bed at night. I told the police his response was to scream, “That’s because you get fucked in the ass so much!” Which made no sense to me, as that’s not something I’ve ever done.

That was August of 2023, and in April of 2024 I realized he had probably drugged me and assaulted me, resulting in the diarrhea he later mocked and refused to help me clean up.

At that point in time, I was also waking in rage at in the middle of the night, likely a few hours after he had drugged me, as whatever was in my system began to wear off. I would just be in absolute rage. I had somatic visions of being unable to move, and of being touched without consent, which I interpreted then as my body processing early childhood sexual trauma, because I couldn’t fathom that he would be drugging and raping me. I literally thought he was my all-loving father.

I told him I didn’t want to be touched and didn’t want to have sex anymore.

He told me the best thing to do was to have more sex. I ignored him and stated clearly that I wouldn’t be doing that anymore because I was “processing childhood trauma.”

Now I can see that my body was trying to tell my conscious mind what was actually happening, that he was assaulting me during those periods of unconsciousness. He would later reference these “random times I went crazy” in emails, completely erasing the context.

During this time, (when he moved out, September to December,) Sean began frequently breaking up with me during arguments, literally saying, “We are broken up!” before leaving. He would then not contact me for two days, only to show up unannounced, often in the middle of the night and declare that we were back together and “working on things.” Below you can see him showing up in the middle of the night before he knew I had gotten cameras. He left to park, returned and unplugged them.

Still caught in the infantilized compliance pattern (baby-girl mode), I was devastated each time. I would end up shaking, sobbing, unable to function under the perceived loss of someone I had idolized— someone I believed was both worthy of adoration and the only person who could protect me.

Below is one of the times I entered that state, maybe one of the last. I don’t remember it clearly, but he took a video, and when he showed it to me later, it ended up catalyzing something in me. I could see my protectiveness starting to come back online toward the end of the clip, as I tried to respond to his questions.

At that point, I had been working hard over several months to regain control when this happened. In the beginning, I would go to him for comfort, and you can hear him trying to prompt that in the video. You can hear him trying to push me into an age-regressed state.

That state often preceded rage, self-harm, or breaking things, responses documented in trauma literature as part of the defense cascade. It’s not just psychological. It’s neurological, and Sean deliberately triggered it many times.

It escalated to the point where I was so emotionally dysregulated by 8 a.m. that I’d cry just from having to take my kids to school. But gradually, with more distance, like when he stayed away for five days instead of two, I noticed I could function until 11 or even noon before I was overwhelmed. The cracks in the programming had begun to form.

I switched my kids’ schedule so I had them every other week and told him he couldn’t be there when they were with me. That made a huge difference. Then, during the off weeks, he’d return—back in my space for 24 hours straight, day after day, while my kids were gone.