How to Heal Emotionally From Rape.

Recovery from rape is both a physical challenge and an emotional challenge. Your physical recovery will in most cases but much faster than your emotional recovery. This is especially true if you are the survivor of a date/acquaintance rape. In most date rapes, the level of physical abuse is not as obvious as a stranger-on-stranger rape.

Difficulty: Challenging

Instructions

1. If your wounds are not visible, your friends and family may not be as supportive of your trauma and may become impatient with your recovery time. However you must remember that emotional trauma will take a very long time to heal. There is no “normal” healing time for rape. It may take many months or many years.

2. Your individual response to the assault can cover a wide range of physical and emotional symptoms, even some that may not seem to result directly from the attack. When you learn to recognize these symptoms, it will help you to gain control of them. Not every victim experiences all of these responses, and the following list only suggests several possibilities. You may experience these symptoms immediately, or after months—maybe even years later—or you may never experience any of them. It all depends on each individual and the support you get from the people around you.

3. Here are some common emotional reactions to sexual assault: emotional shock: feeling numb, can’t cry; disbelief: questioning the event—why me?; embarrassment: what will people think?; shame: feeling dirty; guilt: it is my fault. if only I had...; depression: feeling tired and hopeless; powerlessness: feeling out of control; disorientation: feeling overwhelmed; can’t sit still; retriggering: having flashbacks of the assault; denial: minimizing the impact of the experience; fear: having nightmares; fearing pregnancy, AIDS, sexually transmitted diseases, intimacy; fearing that you are going crazy; anxiety: having trouble breathing; experiencing muscle tension; having difficulty sleeping; experiencing loss of appetite, nausea, stomach problems, nightmares, or bedwetting; anger: wanting to get even, wanting to kill the attacker.

4. Rape survivors react in different ways after they have been raped, depending on many factors. There is no normal or abnormal, good or bad, right or wrong response to being sexually assaulted. A woman’s reactions may depend upon her sense of self-worth before the assault, the extent of her relationship with the attacker, and the resources available to her after the attack. Her family dynamics (whether she will be blamed or shunned for being raped) and the amount of sincere support and caring her friends show after the rape also will affect the healing process greatly.

Resources

• Rape Abuse Incest National Network
• National Suicide Prevention site