healing

Sara continues: …At first I was reading all sorts of tantra books and preparing myself for wonderful sexual experiences, but then the guys around me started taking advantage of my blossoming sexuality, and my first mostly committed relationship was to a guy who told me years later that he had been…

What is self harm? How does it – and can it – fit into a loving relationship? Will I ever be comfortable with my scars? One self-injurer speaks her pain and her peace.

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…