The People Drug

Sexual abuse is when sex addicts use people as the substance to feed their addiction. To objectify another person requires self-objectification. Anyone who is fully in touch with their own humanity sees it reflected in all. Anyone who carries the burden of self-objectification sees others as tools to take on some of that burden. The exploitative mindset that is suffocating the world, and the lies that have long comforted the middle class in reaching for a purely materialistic heaven, are coming to an end as we wake up to our humanity and feel the pain of the earth and all suffering beings as our own. To return to the places where I was trafficked is a great way to check on my personal progress.

The place I visited recently used to be my heaven on earth. It is not only exquisitely beautiful, but it was where I had felt most loved. That aura of perfection still permeates the places where I was brought by that particular perpetrator, I would feel it each time I came near. Only, I don't experience myself as the perfect object anymore - belonging with him and in those perfect surroundings. He has left his mark on every little detail of the places he owned, as he left his mark on me, whom he owned for a while. But this time around, walking through the area where he took me as a child, I was acutely aware of the severe split in this man. He invested in his image as good, benign, and generous, and in "the family" as a sacred institution.

There are little signs left around in the area reminding me of that essential hypocrisy "The owner and his family ask that you please...." He liked to keep things in the family, objectify the children, use them to feed his sex addiction, and, because he liked me, he felt that I belonged in his family as well. As a slave.

Love requires courage, and this man had none. The greatest authority figure he was, but inside, a scared, abused little boy who perpetuated that abuse onto the entire planet, while savoring the materialistic heaven for himself, and his family, or trading pieces of it in exchange for the public's respect and admiration.