That said, let me explain that after a traumatic experience that is life-threatening or has caused serious injury, it is normal to develop symptoms related to the trauma. We call the group of symptoms as well as your response during the rape Post Traumatic Stress. You may have responded with intense fear, helplessness or horror during the rape. Afterward, you will feel any combination of the following: 1) recurring and intrusive memories, images, thoughts or perceptions of the assault, 2) nightmares, 3) acting or feeling as if the rape were happening again, 4) intense emotional distress when something reminds you of the rape, 5) physical responses that are intense in nature, like being extra jumpy or having trouble sleeping, difficulty concentrating, being irritable or being overly vigilant. All of these are normal responses to rape and signals to you that you need to pay attention and engage in a healing process. In my opinion, Post Traumatic Stress symptoms happen because the trauma becomes stored in your body until you find a way to get the physical energy connected with your emotional responses to the rape out of your body. One of the best ways to do that is to understand how to take very good care of yourself, to learn how to listen to your feelings so you can take good care of yourself and learn how you might prevent a similar trauma from happening in the future.
I also want to tell you that often after a woman has been raped, she feels responsible for what happened. Even though she was overpowered and may have said "no" there is something so vulnerable and humiliating about having been victimized and feeling powerless during the experience. As you look back on the rape, it is normal to try to think of ways that you could have fought the attacker off or persuaded him to stop. The reality is that you did what you needed to do to survive. You could not have stopped the rape from occurring. Your guilt comes from believing that you could have or should have done something to prevent the rape from happening or to stop it once it began. The truth is that you did everything that you could have done with the tools and awareness you had at the time the rape occurred. Even if you were raped by a man whom you invited into your home, the invitation into your home was not an invitation for sex. Feeling guilty because someone else had the intention to hurt you and you were unaware of that intention is unreasonable because you do not have a crystal ball. You could not have known that you were about to be raped, or you would have done things differently. Blaming yourself for something you could not foresee keeps the trauma alive. You must recognize that even though you can look at the events leading up to the attack in retrospect and see things that you think should have alerted you to danger, retrospective awareness is only useful to you for the future. What happened is not your fault. Please do not carry the blame for what happened, but do use the information you gain from your awareness
when you look back on what happened to protect yourself in the future.
With that said, I would like to share my perception from the work I've done with women who have been raped that many times, leading up to the rape, a woman is not "tuned in" to her awareness of danger. Most of the time, it is because she has had a practice of closing herself off to her feelings. A consequence of avoiding your feelings is that you do not have access to intuition; and, it is intuition that signals us to danger. So the healing process that will help you along the path of protecting yourself in the future begins with learning how to pay attention to and deal constructively with your feelings. This is also an important part of healing from the actual emotional trauma connected to the sexual assault. You can learn about that process of getting into contact with and dealing with your feelings by listening to broadcasts I did on The Purpose of Feelings on November 14, 2007 and Coping With Crisis on November 28, 2007. So in order to avoid being victimized again, it is a good idea to learn how to recognize and respond to your feelings that tell you something is "not right." Some women also find it helpful to overcome feelings of fear and vulnerability after they have been raped by taking a self-defense class.
So in order to heal, I think you need two things. You need to improve your ability to keep yourself safe in your physical environment and you need to learn how to soothe yourself that you are, in fact, not in danger when the symptoms of trauma arise. A caring, sensitive therapist can help you figure out what you, personally, need to do to keep yourself safe. Then, after you have done what you need to do to keep yourself safe, calming your emotions requires learning self-soothing and relaxation strategies for those times when symptoms arise. With Post Trauma the sensations, feelings, thoughts and surroundings that you were aware of during the attack will come back into your awareness whenever a similar sensation, feeling, thought or
environmental surrounding is similar enough to those that occurred while you were being hurt. So for example if you see someone wearing a shirt of the same color as the attacker, that visual stimulus can be enough to cause you to experience the same intense fear that you experienced while you were being raped. We call the shirt a "trigger" and there can be many triggers connected with the rape. Your job, once you have taken every step necessary to
improve your physical safety, is to begin to neutralize the triggers within your emotional and physical systems. You do this by combining relaxation techniques with self talk that goes something like: "It's okay. I'm safe now. I am remembering something that happened, but that is in the past. I am safe."
One of the most effective relaxation techniques than can be used fairly easily is breathing with your diaphragm. Imagining you have a balloon in your belly and allowing it to fill up as you inhale and deflate with each exhale. Again, these techniques and strategies for healing can be most effectively learned with the support of a therapist who understands the healing process after sexual assault.
One of the ways to feel like you are not alone with this experience is by reading. I recommend Nancy Venable Raine's book; After Silence: Rape and My Journey Back. Nancy does an excellent job of describing her own rape and Post Tramatic response as well as her journey through the grief and loss associated with the healing process.
You won't be able to forget the rape. That you are trying hard to forget it but experiencing intrusive memories of it is a signal to you that you need to participate in a healing process specifically focused on overcoming your rape experience. In time, you will be able to separate it from all of the intense emotions it now carries. It will become a part of your history, but will not feel like as much of a burden as it currently is.
Please, seek support and know that in time, you can heal from rape. Remember that what happened was not your fault. Trust yourself to be able to heal. You have my support and warmest hopes for a complete recovery. I hope I answered your question and that you find the courage to move forward toward a brighter future. If you are having difficulty finding someone who can assist you in your healing process, please call the Sexual Assault Hotline or send me an e-mail to let me know how I can help.
I'm Tamara Johnson, host of The Get Out of the Mud Show, sending you my love. Thank you for being here.