The Trauma in the Middle

This is the part I did not want to write first, even though it is probably the part that my mind keeps orbiting whenever this subject comes up, because if I begin the story here, then the whole paper becomes organized around the injury before the reader understands the framework of autonomy, consent, anti-group pressure, asexuality, controlled exposure, and the strange healing work that happened around the topic I still cannot comfortably touch. But if I never write this part at all, then the paper becomes too abstract, as if my reaction to sexually charged group dynamics is just a floating psychological quirk with no history, no context, no body-memory, no reason it feels like my nervous system grabs me by the shoulders and says, no, absolutely not, leave the room, leave the thought, leave the implication before it finishes forming.

So this section belongs in the middle. Not as the opening wound, and not as the hidden footnote.

I have mentioned earlier that I do not fully know where the original reaction came from, and I need that uncertainty to remain intact even here, because the events I am about to describe did not create every part of the fear from nothing. Some part of me was already afraid before the specific rupture happened. I already had this awful bodily reaction to the idea of being drawn into an intimate configuration with more than two people, especially if I felt like I was not just observing it from a distance but somehow being invited into it.

The specific situation involved people I cared about deeply, which is part of why it hit so hard and why it is still so difficult to narrate without either flattening them into villains or flattening myself into someone who “overreacted.” I do not want to do either. I am writing from my experience, and that means I am writing with bias, partial knowledge, memory, interpretation, and the emotional truth of what happened to me internally.

There were two people who, in different ways, mattered to me intensely: one was a long-time childhood crush, and the other was someone I cared about in a more aro-ace, squish-like way, which is to say not romantic in the standard sense but still meaningful. Around them, I started feeling like there was an invitation forming, or maybe not an explicit invitation, but an emotional gravity that seemed to be pulling me toward the premise of a relationship I knew my mind wouldn’t react kindly to.

At the time, I tried to protect myself in the clumsy way I knew how. I made a house rule that they were not allowed to kiss in my home. Looking back now, I can see the ethical complication there more clearly than I could then, because rules over what other people do with each other are not the same thing as boundaries over what I will participate in. A cleaner boundary would have sounded more like, “If this happens around me or in my space, I will leave or ask you to leave because I cannot be around it safely.” But I did not yet know how to communicate it that way. What I knew was that my home felt like one of the few spaces where I should be able to control whether I was surprised by certain intimacy, and that if I could not control the outside world, maybe I could at least say: not here. Not in my safe place. Not while I am physically and emotionally vulnerable.

And then they broke that rule.

The context is what made it hurt so much. It was not just that two people kissed when I had asked them not to. It was that we were all three platonically cuddling, the kind of closeness that I already do not give easily because my boundaries around bodies and intimacy are complicated even on a good day. That moment should have been one of safety, or at least that is what I thought I had built around it. Instead, the kiss happened inside that space, while I was part of the physical arrangement, close enough that the boundary violation did not feel like something I witnessed from across the room but something that erupted right beside me.

I blew up. I kicked them out. I reacted with the force of someone whose only rule had been broken, yes, but also with the force of someone whose nervous system had just been told that even the safe zone was not safe. And I know that from the outside, maybe that sounds disproportionate. Maybe someone else would say it was just a kiss, that people kiss, that I was being controlling or prudish or overly fragile or whatever words people reach for when someone’s boundary does not make intuitive sense to them. But the rule was never about prudishness. It was never “kissing is bad” or “you are bad for wanting each other.” It was, however imperfectly expressed, an attempt to protect the part of me that already knew this configuration was not emotionally survivable for me in that context. When they crossed that line, it did not just hurt my feelings. It shattered my trust in the space.

That rupture had a long afterlife. I have not really been able to do platonic cuddling in the same way since then, and that is one of those details that sounds small until you understand what it means to lose a form of closeness that used to feel safe. It has been years, five or six years, and I still have claustrophobia around people in certain bodily arrangements. Even later, with a recent (asexual) partner, I discovered that my limits were much stricter than I wanted them to be, because I had not healed in the way I hoped I had healed. Or maybe I had healed some, but not there. Not enough to stop the old panic from interpreting closeness as potential entrapment.

Then came the disclosure that broke something even deeper in me. One of the friends involved, someone I still talk to and do still trust in the sense that I believe in his honesty and his capacity to be good, later admitted something that I understood as my fear having come true in the worst possible way. He told me that he and that childhood crush of mine had taken advantage of the ace/aro friend (whom I had a squish on), the one I had specifically worried about, under the influence of alcohol, in a sexual group situation. I am phrasing this carefully because I was not there, and because the people involved may have understood the situation differently, and because consent is a serious thing to talk about with precision. But from where I stood, with what I knew about that person’s fawning response, their ace and aro identity, the presence of alcohol, the group dynamics, and the people involved, it landed in me as admittance to sexual assault, or at minimum as sexual harm in a situation where consent could not be taken for granted. It confirmed my fears. I was often worried about this person as they were very close to me, so I knew their history. The writing was on the wall, and my heart was already troubled by the experiences they chose to discuss with me prior to that event.

That was the biggest panic attack I can remember from this cluster of experiences. It did not happen immediately in front of everyone, because my brain processes emotions in a neurodivergent way, but when I got home it hit me with full force. I had to go sit outside in the backyard to get my breath back. My heart was racing, my body was in alarm, and I think I called the one who admitted the event afterward, once I could exist as a person again, and told him that I had just had a panic attack. That detail is important because it shows one of the recurring patterns in my life: in the moment, I freeze or go quiet or get through the situation somehow, and then afterward, when my nervous system finally has enough privacy to collapse, the reaction arrives with all the force it had been storing. This is part of why “just tell me in the moment” has never been a simple request for me. Sometimes there is no speaking in the moment. Sometimes the words only return after the fact.

What made the disclosure so devastating was not only the possibility of harm to someone I cared about, though that alone would have been enough, but the way it connected backward to my own earlier fear. I had felt like I was being invited into a dynamic I did not want, I had tried to set a rule to keep my safe space safe, that rule had been broken, and then later I learned that the same cluster of people and dynamics had apparently led to something involving alcohol and a vulnerable friend that I interpreted as deeply wrong. It was like my mind stitched those events into one terrifying sentence: you were right to be afraid. Whether that sentence was perfectly fair in every detail is a different question, and one I can only approach with care. But emotionally, that was the sentence. That was the impact.

And there’s this thing about it being someone close to you. That wound can reopen at any time when you’re around them. The event could be alluded to afterward in group settings, never to me directly, of course. Sometimes the friend would mention that “experience” in the same sexualized, bragging speech patterns he already used, especially when influenced by a group atmosphere that encouraged masculine conquest language or the kind of joking that treats sexual history as a trophy case. I want to be fair here too: I do not think he was trying to hurt me in those moments, and I know enough about him to recognize when he is being pulled into a performance style rather than carefully choosing sentences during deep discussion. But impact does not take intent into consideration. Hearing even an allusion to it could send me right back into the same internal spiral, because to me it was not a funny story, not some wild youthful anecdote that was poured out during (toxic) masculine social bonding. It was the thing that had shattered me. It was the thing that made my fear feel confirmed. It was the thing that had someone vulnerable at its center, and I could not bear hearing it treated like conquest.

This is where I have had to learn the painful difference between what I can ask of others and what I have to manage in myself. I can tell someone, after the fact, that certain jokes or allusions hurt me. I can ask for care around those topics. I can explain that my freeze response means I may not be able to say anything immediately, even if I am internally falling apart. But I cannot make the whole world stop containing references to things that resemble the trigger. I cannot make my friend’s entire personality reorganize itself around my panic, even when I wish certain parts of his speech would just, please, never come near me again. And I cannot pretend that because I still trust him in some ways, the harm of those reminders disappears. Trust is not a single object. It is layered, partial, sometimes contradictory. I can trust someone’s honesty and still be hurt by their carelessness. I can believe someone is good and still believe they participated in something harmful. I can love a friend and still need boundaries around the stories they tell, the jokes they make, and the ways they discuss sexuality in proximity to me.

Writing that is difficult because my mind wants clean categories. Safe person or unsafe person. Betrayal or misunderstanding. Assault or ambiguity. Healed or broken. But real life keeps refusing to organize itself into the categories that would make my nervous system feel like it has a grasp on things. The people who hurt us are not always monsters. The people we love can become part of our trauma without becoming reducible to it. The situations that wound us can contain both ethical complexity and emotional clarity. I can say, carefully, that I do not know every fact, every intention, or every subjective experience involved, and I can also say, firmly, that the way it landed in me was devastating.

This is also why the healing matters so much, because if this were only a story of “I dislike threesomes” or “polyamory makes me uncomfortable,” then the later work with TiTS and relationship anarchy would seem almost comically overwrought, as if I wrote whole papers because I encountered a preference and decided to build a cathedral around it. But that is not what happened. What happened is that a set of concepts became wired to panic, betrayal, vulnerability, and a sense of being swallowed by other people’s intimacy, and then years later I found a fictional, controlled, autonomy-preserving environment where I could approach neighboring concepts without being trapped. That did not erase the trauma. But it gave me something other than the alarm to listen to.

And I need to say, because otherwise this section risks becoming only darkness, that I am not writing this to punish anyone or to make my past the final definition of who these people are. I am writing it because my reaction has a history, and because pretending otherwise would make the healing story dishonest. I am writing it because there is a version of me that still feels ridiculous for reacting so strongly, and that version of me needs to see the sequence laid out plainly enough to understand that the response did not come from nowhere. I am writing it because the body remembers betrayal even when the mind wants nuance, and because nuance should not require me to abandon my own pain.