[Warning: Potentially Triggering Content]
We are in such constant awe of AnnaLynne McCord‘s bravery.
The 90210 alum revealed back in a harrowing 2014 essay in Cosmo, well before the #MeToo movement picked up steam, that she had been raped by a friend in Los Angeles when she was 19 years old.
In 2018 as she was being treated for that trauma, she recalled that she had blocked out having been sexually abused when she was a child, just 11 years old, giving her PTSD for years that she didn’t even know the cause of. That PTSD nearly caused her to commit suicide. And once again she shared this with the world in a bombshell 2019 interview. Why? To help others who were going through something similar. Sadly there are far too many sexual abuse survivors who are.
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Just this year, she revealed her diagnosis of dissociative identity disorder stemming from her trauma. She said in an interview at the time:
“I am absolutely uninterested in shame. There is nothing about my journey that I invite shame into anymore. And that’s how we get to the point where we can articulate the nature of these pervasive traumas and stuff, as horrible as they are.”
Now she’s speaking out again, this time sharing more about how her childhood abuse transformed her.
Sitting down with Alex Cooper on the Call Her Daddy podcast, she explained how she left home when she was just 15 years old to start modeling. By that time she had already cut off her emotions as a subconscious way to protect herself:
“I did not have time for feelings. Those were things that we did not do… I did not believe in relationships. You make your mark on the world, that’s what you’re here for. If you like a dude, cool, but make that a super low-key thing.”
It wasn’t long living like that, struggling through depression and anxiety, when she started cutting herself. She now realizes that self harm was directly due to the lack of emotional outlet, telling Alex:
“The self harming started just because I couldn’t feel anything.”
But that wasn’t the only way she found to feel. She also brought pain into the bedroom.
The Excision star opened up about a “very sexual” relationship she got into when she was younger in which she experimented with BDSM:
“I was opening up Pandora’s box sexually without consciously knowing why I might like these things, why they might turn me on the way they did.”
Her coping mechanism ultimately only caused her to seek the kind of abuse she was dealing with:
“Because our beautiful brains that put pain and pleasure together to try to help us, ended up keeping me in a body that would go on to abuse herself for a very long time.”
Obviously this is not intended to kink shame anyone. People get into bondage and S and M for lots of reasons, not necessarily working out abuse histories. And experimenting isn’t necessarily unhealthy for everyone. This is just AnnaLynne’s experience.
And for her, having cut off experiencing pain in a healthy way left her seeking it in an unhealthy way:
“A big part of BDSM for me was just trying to feel anything in my body at all.”
She couldn’t feel good things either? Sadly no…
“The level of torture that I went through as a child that I now remember was so horrific that my brain said no, she can’t feel, so we’re gonna shut off feeling. I just stopped feeling pain.”
AnnaLynne warns people who may be experiencing the same lack of pain that they should be careful:
“People laugh and say, ‘Oh, I have a high tolerance for pain.’ You should ask yourself why. Because that’s not a good thing. You should ask yourself why. We have pain for a reason, it’s to let us know something’s wrong. And you don’t win awards for having a high tolerance for pain. That’s unkind to your body.”
She went on to give more details about her DID, one of the most misunderstood psychological disorders, explaining it’s not the “multiple personality disorder” you see in movies:
“You are not multiple personalities when you experience DID. You are fragmented versions of yourself. The reason that the brain splits in this regard, it’s always a protective mechanism.”
The 34-year-old gave examples of what she meant, saying when she’s been on red carpets sometimes her “nervous system was so overwhelmed” that she would go on a sort of autopilot and only fully wake up hours later when she was feeling safe back at home.
On how she would experience that autopilot later, she made clear:
“I wouldn’t fully black out. I could remember things, but my life in a lot of ways was a blur.”
She talked about one of these versions of herself, one she calls “Little Anna” that used baby talk when dealing with men:
“I had this mechanism with men where I thought I had to be really small. And it wasn’t a conscious thought. Bad things happened if I wasn’t a good little girl, who was the special girl, who did the things that she was supposed to do.”
That included being sexually active even when it wasn’t necessarily what she wanted. She continued:
“I didn’t know why I had to just give my body to people and I didn’t realize that I was doing it because I was hoping that I’d get some love back. And I was so desperate to be loved because I was so alone and had been so alone for so long.”
But there was another alter, she revealed, that represented a 13-year-old rebel version of herself, a “balls to the wall, middle fingers to the sky, anarchist from hell” who “could be a real c**t”:
“I became a bully, I could be very emotionally, psychologically abusive… I would go into an alter that was just ice cold and impossible to get through to.”
However, even while she was terrified of that alter, she credits that tough exterior with helping her to survive so much trauma for so long. She told Alex:
“And I thank her now, I have so much gratitude to her.”
What a mature, nuanced revelation. No wonder she tries not to hold other people’s bad actions against them. Just last month while speaking to House Of Influence, she said of her abuser:
“The truth is, we’re not good and we’re not bad. Even the person who sexually abused me as a child, and the person who sexually assaulted me when I was 19, they’re not bad people. They make bad decisions from bad places that they were in at the time. From my point of view, [they] deserve an opportunity for redemption.”
Wow.
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In the podcast she explained how her anti-human trafficking activism led to her personal revelations.
While visiting Cambodia on a volunteer trip something clicked:
“I realized from former slaves how enslaved I was. I was a total prisoner to my mind. I was so rigid, I had all these standards of perfection, I was so abusive to myself.”
She finally acknowledged that she was having “blackout panic attacks where I was losing time.” And she also realized it probably was a scary sign that her legs went completely numb automatically whenever she had sex with a man.
That’s when she started seeing a doctor who explored her repressed memories. In August of 2018 she first recalled her childhood sexual abuse:
“The memories of a trauma survivor are fragmented. They come in pieces, they come in waves, they come in impressions, they come in sounds, they come in smells, they come in all of this different imagery, whatever. There are no two experiences alike.”
As part of her DID, she still has big gaps in her memory — including, she says, everything before she was five years old. She barely remembers anything after that from her childhood — just flashes of abuse. She explained earlier this year while speaking out about her diagnosis:
“I don’t have anything until around five, and then from five to 11. I recount incidents throughout… And then when I was 13, I have a singled-out memory that was just one thing, that I don’t have a sense of anything else at that time.”
While she still has not gone into much detail about the sexual abuse she suffered, she did mention for the first time on the podcast remembering being choked with a rope.
Just unimaginable someone would do such a thing to a child.
After the podcast aired, AnnaLynne took to her Instagram in a tear-filled video in which she couldn’t stop crying as she explained that ever since the episode had gone up, she’d been flooded with messages from other survivors of abuse.
She said while fighting back tears:
“I’m sorry I’m crying, but I’m receiving so many messages from so many people who have been through so much sexual abuse and rape and pain and suffering. And they’re saying that my episode meant something to them, and I’m just so grateful for this opportunity. Alex, thank you for using your massive platform to talk about these issues with me and to give a place for other survivors…”
See her grateful, emotional video (below):
You can find the full episode of Call Her Daddy on Spotify HERE.
[Image via AnnaLynne McCord/Instagram.]
The post <i>90210</i> Star AnnaLynne McCord Reveals She Got Into BDSM Just 'To Feel Anything' After Childhood Abuse appeared first on Perez Hilton.