Chapter 2: Blink twice if I should See Something
One of the first things I had to do was actually notice I was being abused. I was in the habit of leaving myself notes and videos, and I began to include Sean in them more after his blackmailing and threats escalated. I really believed he was going to try to imprison me and I’d have to prove I was being abused. So I don’t have much from the beginning phase, when he was grooming me, but after about a year I started keeping records of him, too.
Because of Sean’s extensive use of what he called “cognitive and physical resets,” it took me a full year to become aware of what was happening. Before that, I’d just notice I was hitting breaking points over and over again, and eventually identified a common denominator: his presence, and the influence of his fourth ex-wife (his second baby mama, his kindergarten son’s mother, Ghislane).
When I tried to set boundaries to protect my mental health, he responded with blackmail.
What really broke through the fog was a video he showed me, footage of an event I had almost no memory of:
You hear him counting to me like I am a child? That was a part of the cognitive and physical resets, too. After he did them, he would act like a dad to me and tell me I was misbehaving. He projected loving and caring energy..In my disorientation, I would become subservient.
He also showed me videos of him having sex with me while I was clearly in a medical crisis, unable to move or speak properly. In one, I had fresh self-harm cuts visible on my body. And he was masturbating to that.
I remember thinking, actually thinking the moment I saw myself cut, and struggling in those videos: “How is he turned on by this?”
It started breaking the identity manipulation he’d implanted after the cognitive and physical resets.
Interestingly, later on, I used a TENS unit on my back during sex, and I was able to start speaking much, much faster. The aphasia was different, too. When I tried to speak, I blurted out a bunch of rapid-fire gibberish before my language snapped back on. Before that, it had always been slow, delayed speech.
His sexual deviance is disturbing. He was extremely aggressive and demanding whenever he interacted with Ghislane. The sex would be— so rough. I would grimace so much that my face hurt. My muscles were sore. He told me my face looked ugly, and that he couldn’t come while looking at it. Dissociated, I started training myself to relax during sex with him. That’s how deep his programming went.
The picture above, on the left, was taken right after one of those violently aggressive sex encounters that I thought were consensual, but clearly, they were coercive. Frequently, I’d become unable to move or speak, and he said my eyes looked “like people right before they die.” Somehow this degenerate was able to orgasm with me reminding him of how people look before they die… God ew. Like, why? The image on the right is from a video of him having sex with me after I began training myself to look less like I was being raped while he raped me.
Though I was still heavily dissociating I did draw the line somewhere. I was having breakdowns where I’d destroy my things, cut myself, throw out furniture, and fall into deep emotional chaos. This was by design, not by accident. This had been his goal, and I would later have flashbacks to him saying creep-tastic things like “you’re going to have so many grey hairs,” the first weeks after we met.
I didn’t know yet that he was resetting me or putting me in trance states to control me. The cutting began to focus on certain areas, my breasts, butt, thighs, and briefly, my neck. Almost immediately after it then shifted into dangerous intrusive thoughts of harming his son, and that’s when I drew the line. I told him clearly: you cannot bring your son here. I actually, literally said “i am not mentally stable.” This escalated even more when I’d refuse to be around his son, and he’d take me by the hand, force me to watch him, and then leave. The escalation continued still on account of Ghislane’s involvement, and eventually I was completely convinced they were both conspiring to make me kill their son. I forced Sean to move out.
I felt like Sean groomed me to say a lot of volatile things. He would often be specific in accusations: “are you poisoning my son? Did you put poison in his drinks?” and it was just a really weird thing to hear him consistently detailing out ways he was accusing me of harming his son, rather than removing his son if he thought I was a danger…while also telling me he was going to kill my children. (Meth. Don’t do meth.) It was like if I accused you of breaking into my home by saying “did you break into my home and steal my stash of money behind the fridge, that’s still there? Did you take the key out of the dark grey rock under the third bush by the door? It felt like that. It weirded me out- beyond the weirdness of being asked if I was poisoning a child whom I had already demanded be protected from abuse.
It was those kinds of things that set off red flags big enough for me to create distance, I felt like he was trying to create neurological pathways to implant ideas in my head. I felt like he was trying to turn me into a criminal.
All these things seem obvious, but at the time they were not. I really would like to emphasize that the “daddy’s baby girl” state-of-mind (detailed below) he implanted was not just sexual, it was all-trusting, and monumentally difficult to break. I was constantly seeking his approval.
Later, I felt prompted to search neurobiology and dissociation in Google Scholar and found out about the dissociative defense cascade, and it all made sense. My body was entering faint mode. It was so afraid I was going to die, so convinced there was no escape, that it started playing dead—not just to him, but to my own brain and will. It was shutting down in hopes the predator would go away.
It wasn’t until I saw those videos that my adult, prefrontal brain could re-enter and take over. And I think that disconnection, me being so unable to intervene in real time, was largely due to trance states. So after I saw the videos, and after some particularly violent SA’s that I perceived as consensual due to the coercion, I began making boundaries. I was basically ALWAYS in a child-like state of mind when he would have sex with me. He referred to himself as my “daddy” told me I was a little girl, and I needed to make him happy. It’s quite cringe to be this far on the other side. After I got the order of protection, he would make status updates on whatsapp trying to pull the subservient child programming up. What a creep.
Once, while we were on the couch, I kept nodding off, couldn’t open my eyes, couldn’t lift my head. I asked him why. He said, “You’re in trance.” I don’t remember what else was said, but I remember the knowing. I knew he was trying to get me to have sex with him, but I had no access to language or contextual memory, just that internal alert, disconnected from words.
I don’t think those were the only times he put me in trance states, just the ones I’ve been able to remember. Oh, actually, at the very beginning of our relationship, he used suggestion during and after sex that felt like trance states—because of all the chemistry. That intensity made me more open, more susceptible. He’d have me repeat things like, “I am Ari [Sean’s last name.] I am your wife. I only have sex with you. I only come on your [penis].” Over and over. Especially right after sex, when people are naturally more suggestible.
Whenever I tried to leave him, he’d message me calling me baby girl or his wife, trying to trigger the programmed, subservient patterns he had coerced into me, just to get me to behave the way he wanted.
He later admitted that he knew that. He knew exactly what he was doing.
It’s still surreal. Criminals like to claim their work. I only knew he did cognitive and physical resets because he bragged about it once. And I only knew he was doing trance because he answered my question. I only realized how grave my situation was after I saw the videos of him having sex with my cut-covered body, or saw myself unable to move, and stuttering to speak. Also, seriously lucky for me, I had been a part of a hypnosis group a decade earlier in which the leader called people her puppets (because I find all the psychopaths, apparently.) I meditated intently that I would always retain a part of me that could observe what is going on in my mind, and I think that saved me with Sean.