healing

Abba: this isn’t an odd question at all, and we do counsel users with rape and sexual abuse quite often. I’m also a survivor of rape and sexual abuse myself. Rape is a violent crime, and it is normal for any of us to experience trauma from a violent crime being committed to, on or inside of us. It’s…

It’s common for teens to have a mentality of “that won’t happen to me”. Well, what if it does? How does one cope when their trust and belief system is shattered by sexual assault?

Your friend was likely referencing a longitudinal study of 3,000 women done in 1999 (Acierno, Resnick, Kilpatrick, Saunders and Best, Journal of Anxiety Disorders) which found that women who had been raped before were seven times more likely to be raped again. As well, many studies have shown that…

You just take whatever time you need, at whatever pace you need, to build trust with a new partner or potential partner. Being assaulted of course impacts how we trust people and makes it more difficult to trust, especially when you were assaulted by people who you trusted, who those around you…

(Amsinha’s question continued) Whenever I’m alone my mind drifts to the fact that I was already 18 and that he didn’t exactly rape me and also that I wasn’t careful enough or alert enough. I feel as if I should have known that when he complimented my hair that there was something inappropriate. Most…

Clarisse: the very first thing I want to say, and want you to try hard to hear, is that you are not abnormal, nor are you some kind of basket case. You’re simply someone healing from a serious injury. With at least one out of every four women being raped or sexually abused at some point in your…

I don’t know of anyone who would think that they needed to guard their drink from someone they thought of as a best friend. I sure wouldn’t. There’s just no sound reason, at all, for you to think that for some reason, you should have thought to do something that pretty much no one on earth would…

Really, the why here isn’t that important. What’s important is the “is.” In other words, you’re doing things you’re saying you really don’t want to do. WHY you’re doing them, or what might have caused you to have a hard time with making the choices you want to isn’t as important as the fact THAT…

Sometimes we have no idea how things will affect us, no idea about the million ways in which one event can influence our lives. When I ran out of the driveway that day, across the street and to our house, I had no idea that the hard part was still to come. One volunteer’s story of her history with sexual abuse, and her journey to healing.

If you have NOT gladly and freely consented to and participated in sexual activity – if you have not in some way said a big yes and wanted to keep saying a big yes – and someone else had sex with you anyway, that is rape. No matter what ANYONE tells you, it is not your fault. There certainly is fault, but it lies with the rapist, not the victim.