For many years I had a belief that I could never say no to sex, and I didn’t even realize I believed it. All the sex from that time now feels like horrible memories I want to avoid. Were they all assaults? Eventually I did start saying no clearly, and sometimes sex continued anyway without my consent. Other times I don’t remember whether I said no clearly. I never initiated, and sometimes alcohol was involved for both of us. How do I make sense of this? It feels really horrible. Thank you for reading

Thank you for trusting us with something this tender and this complicated. Realizing that years of your life felt very different from how they looked from the outside is disorienting, and the horror you are feeling makes sense.

Researchers have a term for part of what you describe: sexual compliance, which means going along with sex you do not want, often because refusing does not feel possible. Many people live inside a belief like yours for years without seeing it, because beliefs like these tend to form gradually until they stop feeling like beliefs and start feeling like facts. Consent depends on being genuinely free to refuse, and that means more than being able to say the word. It also means feeling, inside, that both answers are actually available to you. When some part of you believed refusal was off the table, whatever you said or didn’t say was not coming from a free place. Carrying that belief was not your fault.

It can help to separate two questions that tend to get tangled together. One is whether those years were harmful to you. The other is what word fits each specific memory. The second may take time, and for some encounters it may stay complicated. “Assault” usually describes what another person did, and some partners may have had no way of knowing what was happening inside you. Some people describe experiences like these as unwanted sex, or as harm that came from the belief itself as much as from any one person. The first question you can answer for yourself now, and the way these memories feel to you is part of that answer.

The times you said no clearly and sex continued are different. Most legal and clinical frameworks define sex that continues after a clear no as sexual assault. You get to decide what you call it, and you also deserve to know that your no counted, especially given how hard it probably was to find.

Where you cannot remember whether you said no, try to go gently with yourself. Memory for stressful experiences is often fragmented, and alcohol interferes with how memories get stored in the first place, so gaps are expected. Heavy intoxication can also affect a person’s capacity to consent, meaning their ability to make a clear, free decision. You also hold information beyond the missing moments. You never initiated, and these memories feel horrible rather than neutral. You do not need a perfect memory of saying no for those details to count.

Wanting to avoid these memories is a very common response. Your mind may have learned to move past them quickly as a way of getting through experiences it had to survive without full safety or freedom.

Making sense of something this big tends to happen in layers rather than in one moment of clarity. A gentle place to begin is to write a few lines to the version of you who believed they could never say no. Tell them what you understand now about that belief and what it cost you.

You don’t have to figure all of this out at once, and you don’t have to do it alone. Thank you for trusting us with this.