08: Healing from Rape & Sexual Assault: Learning to Love Ourselves Again After Sexual Violence
Sexual assault and rape is all too common, and leaves survivors feeling lost and confused. In this episode, Amanda discusses why it was not your fault, how to move past self-blame, how to forgive yourself, and the importance of healing this immense trauma.
This post contains affiliate links to some of my favorite tools and resources. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases. Full terms & conditions here.
In this episode, you will learn about:
Why it’s not your fault
How to start moving past self-blame
Why forgiveness is so important
Why healing from rape and can feel so hard and how to start healing
The importance of healing this immense trauma
How to start noticing your coping strategies
Why therapy is important when healing
Episode References:
Know My Name: A Memoir by Chanel Miller
The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk M.D.
ANGER – Healthy ways to process (this is just a starting point, find what works best for you!)
Throwing rocks in the ocean
Buy cheap plates at a store like Walmart, Dollar Store, or Amazon and smash in a trash can in your driveway (don’t forget protective eyewear!)
Create an Angry Music playlist and dance / move your body
Scream in your car while in traffic or go park somewhere and scream in your car (don’t try this while actually driving)
Use Mother Earth – hit the earth, throw rocks, stomp your feet
Write a list of everything that makes you angry. Don’t filter it. Then hand this over to the elements. Either light it on fire, bury it in the Earth, or you could throw it in a body of water (lake or ocean). Keep the intention that you are handing over this anger to this element for support.
FORGIVENESS
If you haven’t already, I recommend you list to Episode 5: Back to Basics: Self-Love, Inner Child, & Forgiveness to learn more about forgiveness techniques
More About HO’OPONOPONO
You Are Love (Ho’oponopono) by Lotus Sky – My Favorite Version of this Prayer put into Song. I usually play this and sit in meditation and work on self-forgiveness or forgiving someone else. I play the song on repeat for as long as I need.
THERAPY RESOURCES
Therapy Aid (low cost therapy for essential workers, and a few other qualifying groups)
Check out my Instagram Post for Questions When Interviewing a Therapist
Interested in learning more about EMDR? Learn more about EMDR here.
Free Resource Corner
Meditation is important when healing because it gives us an opportunity to connect back to self.
Meditation: Healing from Sexual Assault & Rape
Here is a meditation I created for healing from sexual assault and rape.
Download the full list of FREE journal prompts!
Timestamps:
0:00 Intro
3:25 Teaching
13:39 Listener Question 1
36:52 Listener Question 2
59:29 Outro
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NOTE: This podcast was transcribed by an AI tool called Otter. Please forgive any typos or errors.
Amanda Durocher (Intro) 0:00
Before we get started, I just wanted to give you a heads up that this episode is about sexual assault and rape. If you or someone you know has been affected by sexual violence, it is not your fault and you are not alone. Help is available to you 24/7 through the National Sexual Assault hotline, one 800 656 hope or 4673 and also online@rainn.org and rainy spells R A I N N. Also, this episode contains explicit language. Welcome to New View Advice, a safe place for you to ask your most vulnerable questions about life, relationships, healing, and so much more. I'm your host, Amanda Durocher. And I believe our fears and traumas are often what holds us back from living life to the fullest. Join me here each week as I offer advice on how to move through whatever is holding you back from being your best self. Let's get started. Hey there beautiful soul. This is Amanda and this is another episode of New View Advice. If you're new here, this is a podcast where I answer listener questions about life relationships, healing, and so much more. Thank you for joining me for today. As I'm sure you've gathered from the episode title, today's topic is sexual assault and rape. So before I dive in, I want to give a disclaimer where I just want to say that if this topic is too hard for you to listen to, or if this topic triggers you too much, or if you're just not ready for this episode, you don't have to listen. And if at any moment, this becomes too hard of a conversation for you to have shut it off, and go take care of yourself and go do some self care and go take a bath or go take a walk. Sexual assault and rape is a hard conversation to have, especially as survivors. And when you're in the thick of healing. It's hard to take in a ton of information at once, and it can be really triggering. So I just want you to know that this episode will always be here for you. It'll always be here when you're ready. So I just wanted to start with that disclaimer. And I think everyone who's here and listening and wants to have these tough conversations, because today we are talking about rape. And specifically today we are talking about the aftermath. And we're going to talk about how important it is to heal from rape. Because what we don't talk about enough is how rape yes is one event that happened. But basically, when you're raped, you are shattered into a million pieces. And you are left to pick up the pieces. And picking up the pieces can be a very lonely process, especially in a society that still victim blames still shames victims, that still hides away from the topic of sexual assault and rape. So you're broken into a million pieces, you're trying to put the pieces back together. And then you're also have somebody come in sometimes, and they'll just hit all the pieces out of your hand. So then you feel like you're starting over again. And it can feel like too much to do. Because we don't have enough guidance. And we don't have enough people talking about what it takes to heal from sexual assault and right. So I am here to tell you about my process healing. And I'm still on the journey. And I've been on this journey for years. I don't know how to have this conversation without getting pretty personal. So I'm going to be using personal anecdotes throughout this episode be talking about what I did, because I'm not sure how to heal from this in any other way.
Amanda Durocher (Teaching) 3:25
So some of the things I talk about might not resonate for you, they might not work for you. But I'm just offering guidance and a new view on this topic that I don't hear enough conversations about from an empowering point of view. So in this episode, I'm not here to pity you. I am so sorry for what happened to you and I wish it hadn't. And it makes me angry that rape still happens that there's not enough conversations about it that we don't educate about it makes me really freakin angry. But I'm going to come at this episode from an empowering point of view. Because the truth is, nobody tells you a few things about getting raped. One of the things is that even though this terrible thing happened to you, even though in that moment you were a victim, because I just want to quickly say I don't have a problem with the word victim, Chanel, Miller puts it beautifully in her book, no my name where she says, I don't have a problem with the word victim. It's just not all that I am. And that's how I feel I was a victim. In that moment. I was a victim, but I don't identify as a victim. So I only say that because this episode is going to be empowering you to take control of your life back. Because what happened to you? And what happened to me would happen some millions of people was out of our control. And what nobody tells us about rape is that one it is your responsibility to pick up the pieces. So that example I gave up the broken shattered plate. That is what your body feels like, unfortunately, and fortunately really, it is your responsibility to pick up the pieces of your life. And I will tell you that it can feel like an overwhelming job. And it can feel like an unfair job. But I promise you that if you look at everything, not only will your life transform, but I promise you that not only will you take all those pieces back, you will gain so much more wisdom, you will have more of an open heart, you will be a more compassionate being you will be a stronger being than before what happened to you. Because healing for rape requires you to literally break down every wall you have built around yourself before and after the rape, you have to look at every lie you tell yourself, it requires all of you. But I can tell you that at the other end of it, you are a stronger person, you are more in love with yourself. At the end of it, you realize nobody can ever take anything from you. And that is a gift. And I want to help you pick up the pieces because unfortunately, I can't do the work for you. And that's another lie about rape is that we'll just get over it. One of the questions mentions that you don't just get over it, you have to pick up the pieces, the more you think you just got over it means the more you are shutting yourself off from life, it means the more you are building up walls not to be affected by what happened to you. But the truth is you were affected. The truth is it did shatter you. The truth is there are a million pieces to pick up the truth that you tell yourself a lot of lies now that aren't true. The truth is you need to get in tune with your body because it will still communicate with you even when you try to shut down the thoughts and the feelings connected to right. So that leads me into how I want to talk about how I believe that rape infects us. So I want you to picture your body for those who have been raped. And I want you to see yourself as a light being. So imagine yourself as as being of light. And you're outlined in stars, and you are just pure light and love. And you can imagine this light any color you want. So it could be a bright white light, a bright gold light or bright pink light mines usually pink when I envision it. And So picture this light outline of yourself and overlay it over your body so you can see your body but you have this light body around you. And when you're raped, see, wherever you were raped, this dark energy goes in, and it starts to infect that area. So for me, it would be my route. But then the veins of this, it's an infection, it's like a virus, and it goes all the way all throughout your entire body and this light you had so this pink light for me is all of a sudden covered in a black. And the more I avoid what happened to me, the darker this black gets, and it becomes black until you cannot see the light of my being the light of who I truly am. And this happens, because rape is so traumatizing to the human awareness, your brain and your body, when that happened could not comprehend what was happening. It could not comprehend that such a horror could happen. And on top of it, that you could live after it. Afterwards, you're left with an experience that leaves you feeling dead inside because it disconnected you. So this dark that infects you, it infects your entire body. Because your body holds the trauma, but it also infects so you can see this darkness encircling your body but then also see it goes straight up into your heart and infects your heart and almost in circles it in a dark crust because your heart becomes hardened. Because all of a sudden, after this event, it does not feel safe to be a loving being. It does not feel safe to love others. For many of us loving others is what got us into this situation. trusting others got us into this situation. I sure know that's how I felt. I blamed myself for a very long time for what happened to me. How could I be so stupid? How could I trust these people? How could I like these people? One of the people who raised me in my teens, I had a crush on him. So that really fucked with my head. Okay. And I mentioned that because I think that that's true for a lot of people, especially when you're raped as a young person, or raped by an adult you trust. So back to my visual of the light body so it hardens your heart, it infects your body. And then from the heart it also goes up to your mind and it implants itself in your mind. just view it and planting a seed in the middle of your brain. The seed starts to grow. But instead of a beautiful seed see it almost decaying your brain and this is how it infects your mind with the thoughts of unworthiness, the thoughts of feeling like your trash, feeling like you're garbage. That's something I really felt the thoughts that it's not safe to be beautiful. It's not safe to be seen. It's not safe to be in Your body as rape victims, so many of us punish our bodies for what happened to us. So for me, I picked up booze, I punished myself over and over again, I picked up booze and food, I did not feel like it was safe to be beautiful. But being beautiful is my God given right? It is my God given right to love this body, but nobody was going to love it for me. So the other thing that happens is after a rape, so were our whole bodies infected. And it's almost like you're running around saying, like, who can help with this? Hello, is there a doctor, I'm infected. But instead of there being a doctor with a cure, society looks at you like you're fucking nuts. So then you're left with this pain and trauma, this infection that nobody can see. And you can't even really see it. But you feel it and you know, it's there. So you have two options. You either live with that. And then you start to cope with that. So you learn to survive, because the human body, the human brain, is wired for survival. So you learn how to survive with these thoughts. And that's what I mean when I picked up alcohol, and I picked up food, because those were my ways of trying to survive, to cope to numb this pain, that was very real in my body. So that's one way you could go. And that's the way a lot of people go because a lot of people don't know, there's another option. And the other option is to go in, to go inwards, and to pick up all those million pieces. And to love yourself more at the end of this than you even knew was possible. Because the truth is, as I mentioned, in many episodes, life isn't fair. And being raped is not fair, is not justifiable. And again, I wish I could eradicate break from the world. And, but I can't, but what I can do is I can help guide you back to yourself. Because what happened is you feel very disconnected from yourself, as I mentioned with that infection. And again, as I've mentioned, in previous episodes, we're not taught how to go inwards, and how to sit with ourselves and how to heal internally, mentally heal our body, hearts and minds. So that's the conversation we're gonna have today. And I'm gonna go into it with these questions. I'm going to just start to touch the topic of healing from rape. But this is a resource for you. And if you have more questions, please let me know I'm very passionate about this. And before I dive in, I want you to know that if you're a survivor, that I love you, and that I see you. And I see how hard this was. See how hard this is? Have you spent nights on the floor crying? And blaming yourself for what happened? I sure know I have. Do you look at yourself in the mirror and hate what you see? I sure know I have? Do you continually punish your body for what someone else did? Or you disconnected from sex? Because too hard to go there. I should know I've been there. Do you feel unworthy not good enough. And you're too afraid that if you go there, you'll never recover? I've been there. And I'm here to tell you that when you start to put those pieces back together, you will not only heal from this, you will hear from all the lies society has told you about yourself. Because healing from trauma is the ultimate testament of how strong you are. And rape. Sexual assault is a trauma. In many of you, many of us are running around PTSD, and nobody's helping us. So I'm here and have this conversation. And I'm here to cheer you on. As you remember who you are. And at the end of this you will be so connected with yourself. But it starts with the work. So let's jump on in.
Amanda Durocher (Listener Question) 13:39
Dear New View Advice. When I was in my teens, I was raped by a boyfriend. I found many people didn't believe me when I tried to talk about what happened to me. And because of this, I stopped talking about it at all. Eventually, I stopped thinking about it every day and started to move on. I used to think that I got over it and it didn't bother me anymore. But recently he popped up on my Facebook in the people you may know section and I caved I went down the rabbit hole of his life. This man I haven't talked to in 10 years seems so happy. To put it bluntly, it triggered me really, really triggered me. He has a wife and kids and I'm realizing I still don't even like a man to touch me. He seems so happy and something inside me cracked open because I realized I'm not. I've tried dating, but I haven't in a while. I now see it was always when things have physical. I found something wrong with the men I was seeing. I'm starting to see the ways I'm still affected. I find myself thinking about it all the time again, I worked so hard to not let this bother me anymore. And now I feel like I'm back at square one. What should I do? Thank you for this question. This is so relatable, so vulnerable. And I thank you for your courage to write in. I just want to start this question with I'm so sorry this happened to you. And I'm so sorry that people didn't believe you. I believe you. I know this really happened. You can't be affected 10 years later by some thing that didn't really happen. I'm really, really sorry. I know what it's like to not be believed. I'll share a little story just to emphasize this fact for anyone else out there who hasn't been believed not to make it about myself. But to kind of get the conversation started with what not being believed led me to. So as I've mentioned, I disassociated so for me, I was raped as a child by a friend's father. And I disassociated the experience. I now see that I disassociated because I think so many people do this. And we don't really talks about disassociation, but signs of disassociation or not remembering things. So I don't remember my childhood at all. And I don't remember most of my teens, people will talk about like stories and things we did, and I have no memory. And people are always like, Oh, you live in the clouds. It's like, actually, I'm just checked out. So this is a response, or a body response, a survival response. So I disassociated because it was too traumatic. And then when my memories came back, they came back slowly, because my body was testing me. Because if it gave me everything that happened to me at once, I probably would have killed myself. And I don't say that lightly. I say that with 100% truthfulness in my voice, I would have killed myself if everything came back at once. But what our bodies do is they are the gatekeepers to our trauma. And they give us things when we are ready. So I first just got the experience. And then I got more memories of the details. And then that eventually led me to also remembering that I was raped in my teenage years. But because of my process, because it was not in the moment I remembered, and because my memories came back slowly. And because I didn't remember all my trauma at one time, I had people not believe me, including a therapist I tried to see for help. It's absolutely heartbreaking to not be believed. So I'm really sorry that people invalidated your experience because he was your boyfriend, I can tell you that I was in group therapy for a while and there was another girl who, who had a similar experience. And I have so much empathy for having to go through that because people really don't believe it. And what we talked about in group therapy is that our society from the way it's pictured and movies, and I don't know, the way we've convinced ourselves rape looks like is people have an idea of rape. And I feel like they think it's you in an alley with a stranger with a knife to your neck. And the truth is rape looks really different for a lot of different people. And it's still always right. And it's like people don't believe you if it doesn't fit their definition of rape, or their definition of what you should look like afterwards. So I had a lot of people not believe me, and question me about my memories coming back. And this was really hard for me because it was really hard because it's hard enough, right? I mean, I felt crazy enough, not knowing this thing had happened to me for over 10 years, and then getting the memories back. I mean, that was really hard for me. But what I see now is that before I got the memories back, I dove into the grief that I've talked about in previous episodes. So I started to love myself and I started to heal the grief of my friend dying. And through that process, you'll notice when you're on the healing journey, that through the process of healing one thing other beliefs come up that you heal, that you've had around other things, so like family beliefs, cultural beliefs, societal beliefs, gender beliefs, you'll heal those along the way too. So I had healed enough through healing my grief, that my body trusted me to give me this information. So I mentioned this because I think what happened to you is that it seems like you have awareness around what's going on with you, as in you see, you're triggered. And you see, you see the way that the rape still affects you with other men in your life. And I think that your body, your body was really triggered and you feel like you were cracked open because your body's actually trusting you to do something with this cracked openness. So your body has been holding the trauma of what you experienced. And by your definition of quote unquote getting over it, it was more you hardening yourself to the world. So I think you just continued to shield up, shield up, shield up, layer up, layer up, and now you are cracked open. And in that first visual, I mentioned that light is peeking through. But these hardened dark places do not like to see the light. Because when we feel unworthy, when we start to think I deserve more, I am worthy. There are parts of us that freak the fuck out for lack of a better phrase. They freak out because there's parts of us that still feel so unworthy and when we start to let the love in, we start to let the light in. It's like the duality within us starts to battle. So with your question, I I mentioned my story because I think you're going through something similar. You have been cracked open as I was, when my memories came back, I was cracked open, and you can't go back to the way you were, I'm sure you're trying the same coping strategies you were using, you're trying to put those shields up. But you can't, because you have enough awareness now that you're seeing that it affects the way you relate to men, you're seeing you're unhappy. So you can't put up these shields that you had where you pretended everything was okay. So once we realize our coping strategies don't work. We have one other choice, as I mentioned earlier, that one choice is to go within. So I want to give you a little guidance on how I think you can handle this and how it's okay, where you're at. I think you're where you're at, for survival. You know, I mean, I think rape victims are especially hard on themselves, I think there's so much self hatred and self blame, and just all of it and it's an experience that leaves you feeling unworthy of love, I want to talk to you about it, and I want to offer you a few things maybe you can start doing to start going within. So I know how overwhelming it can feel. As I mentioned, it's like being shattered into a million pieces, and you might not know where to start. So as I mentioned, in a lot of episodes, I think you should find a therapist. And I'm gonna have a little talk about therapy today, because I mentioned a lot of episodes, and I know there's a lot of people out there who feel like therapy is not an option for them. And I'm just gonna get my two cents on that. So for therapy, I know therapy is expensive. And a lie, people don't tell you about being raped. And Chanel, Miller mentioned this in her book, if you want to read a book, Chanel, Miller mentioned this in her book, No, my name is nobody tells you how expensive it is to be raped. It's a truth. It's a fact. And you need a therapist, if you're still working through this, one of my long term goals is to create affordable therapy for everyone to create a database of affordable good therapists for people. And I'm going to look into cheaper options to hopefully put a resource on my website. But for now, my thought on it is that when it comes to money, money is another topic we can talk about. But for me, I struggled with my spending habits a little bit in my 20s, I spent more than I had. This was also a coping strategy, this was using money to make me feel better. So what my partner and I talked about is that the more money you make, the more once you can have. So basically, when you have money you have wants and needs, and you have needs you need to pay for with that money. And a lot of people think the needs are just food and housing. But to me, your healing is a need. So you need to invest in it, you need to spend money on it. So I can have this podcast and I can offer you a ton of free resources. And it's a goal for me to make healing a lot more affordable. But the truth is, you're probably gonna have to spend some money on your healing, but it's an investment in yourself. And I truly believe that when we invest in ourselves, the money comes back to us 10 times 100 times fold, because you took the time to invest in yourself, and you will be rewarded for that. But it is a need for you to invest in yourself. And it is a need for you to invest in your healing. So I think you should find somebody to talk to you. And I also want to mention about therapy that you should find somebody who's worked with sexual assault victims and rape victims. And this should be 100% question you ask them when you're interviewing them, because as I mentioned, I had a therapist who honestly re traumatized me about my whole experience who didn't believe in repressed memories, and basically asked me why I wasn't over it yet. And then also asked me to play out rape fantasies. I digress. But that was horrible advice. And that was a red flag. There were many red flags. But the truth is, she didn't believe me. And you can't start to heal with someone if they don't believe you. So I want you to find somebody does. And I want you to talk about how you weren't believed and gauge how they feel about that. But I think if you find somebody who has expertise in sexual assault, that'll really help. So that's the first thing I think you need to do. So the second thing is that you have disconnected from yourself. So you need to find a way to connect back to yourself. So this can be through movement. This can be through meditation, but you need to slow down and connect back to your body. Because how you're feeling right now you're very triggered has been sitting in your body. So it's not like something happened to you. What happened is the emotion that you were burying. So I mentioned this in my first episode, but imagine, imagine you have a rug and your emotions are cookies, you're shoving the cookies under the rug. And at some point you have this pile and that pile is gonna fall over. And this event triggered you and you tried to put another cookie under the rug, but the cookies fell, the tower cookies fell you couldn't stop any more cookies under your rug. Your body said enough. An F we got to look at this. We can not do it anymore. So you have been given the opportunity to heal this, and I want to tell you that it is 100% possible heal this, you will heal this, you will be stronger at the end of this, and I love you, I literally love you, you might be thinking, Do you don't know me? No, I do, I love you, I send you so much love, because I know that you're gonna get through this. And I know that you will be stronger, better, more resilient, more loving, more compassionate. When you look at this, again, it's a lot of hard feelings to look at. But what we don't realize is, if we don't look at it, they're still there. So you can either look at them and move through it, or they just sit in your body. And what we write victims have to realize is that we don't deserve to sit with all this pain, we deserve to become light again, we deserve to become that light silhouette, we deserve to heal and to no longer be infected by this darkness. And no, it's not fair that you have to do all this work. And that is something you will have to reconcile with along your journey. So some things you can do is I want you to start becoming aware of your coping strategies. So what do you do to make yourself feel better when you're upset? So a place you can start is what did you go to first after you saw this Facebook post, which quick sidenote, I totally relate to what happened to you. Social media is a blessing and a curse. And I had a similar experience happened where I saw one of my even though I blocked every single rapist I've had on all social media, a girl I know from high school, it was hanging out this guy who just got engaged who raped me and I saw it and it led to a lot of triggers. So I feel you and it sucks. But in those moments, we can either cope and put on more layers, or we can allow ourselves to move through something that's been sitting there. So I want you to ask yourself, What did you do first? So did you go to a self care practice? And did you journal about it? Did you let out some anger in a healthy way? Did you take a bath? Or to do allow yourself to cry? Or did you try to escape it? Did you try to numb it? Did you pick up booze? Did you smoke a joint? Did you make yourself cookies? Did you stuff your face with food? Did you not allow yourself to eat? Did you go have sex with somebody? Did you binge a TV show? What did you use as your coping strategy. So I don't want you to judge whatever you did, I just want you to start becoming aware of what you use to cope with these feelings. Because that's what happens we have all this trauma in our bodies that we have to find ways to deal with it. If we don't face the feelings, and it sounds like you've been shielded up for so long, that you haven't felt all the feelings, you might have felt some at the time, but you definitely still have feelings in there. So I just want you to start becoming aware of your coping strategies. So when you're triggered, what do you do? Like how do you numb? How do you escape? And just start writing those down? And becoming curious about them? When did that start? Why do you pick that is that a lot of us who pick food and alcohol and drugs are punishing our bodies are punishing our bodies for what happened to us because we had something happened to our physical form. So we're punishing it for causing us so much pain, because a lot of us blame ourselves. I've never met a rape victim who did not blame themselves at some point. So we blame ourselves. So just become curious about these coping strategies. And then the next time it comes up, become curious about it as you're doing it. So like, Oh, I'm drinking a glass of wine now. Hmm. Why don't you start becoming aware of what you're using to cope, and then trying to find a new way to cope. But if in that moment, you can't find another one. Don't judge yourself. Don't, don't inflict more pain upon yourself. Just become curious, the more curious you become, the more awareness you bring to these coping strategies, the more you'll be able to shift to a new one, which leads me to the next thing I want you to do is you need to start sitting with your inner child sitting with your inner teenager, you need to start sitting with her because what happened is when you were raped that version of yourself that that teenager got stuck. So that stuck, there's a lot of stuck energy there, because you haven't healed it. So there's a lot of stuck feelings and trauma from that experience. And I think from after so I think there's even more trauma around not being believed. Because it sounds like you started to harden yourself to the world after just trying to talk about it. And I think that's very common as a coping strategy. I mean, it's our bodies being smart. It was not safe for you to feel this at that time. So I just don't want you to judge yourself for not quote unquote, being over it yet. Because the truth is, you weren't ready you didn't have the tools or the capacity to heal this at the time. And now you do, you might feel like you don't, but I'm going to be here with you, I'm going to help guide you, and I'm gonna help guide you to yourself. And with a therapist, and just with sitting with your feelings, you will get through this. And like I said, you're triggered to that extent, because your body does feel ready to heal this, it does feel like it's the time. So I just want you to know that don't judge yourself for it being 10 years later, don't judge yourself for thinking you were over it. If you're not over it, you're not over it. And we just got to learn to that's okay. Healing is a journey. And for me, I've healed a lot of layers of being raped, but layers still arise. For example, I'm still super hyper vigilant. So a lot of us become hyper vigilant because we don't want to be, quote, unquote, attacked again. Because as humans, we are animals. So I'm very aware of my surroundings. But if I feel safe, I become not hyper vigilant. I notice I'm still hyper vigilant, when I'm at home, and I feel safe, my partner will show up, and I didn't expect him. And I'll scream because it's like that hyper vigilance was down. And then it creates this reaction. So that still happens to me, but I'm working on it, I'm healing and I'm patient with myself, and I love myself through it. And I'm the happiest I've ever been, I'm happier than before I was raped, and I'm more connected with myself, and I'm more connected with spirit. And I trust that that will happen for you, too. So I want you to connect with your inner teenager. And how you're going to do this is you're going to start writing to this teenager, you're gonna start writing to them. And they might not talk a lot to you at first, because they don't trust you be patient. Wait Is every day for 10 days, I want to say 30 days, I don't know if you'll do it. So I'm going to give you 10 days, I want you to do it every day for 10 days, 10 to 30 days, I want you to write to your inner teenager. So how you're going to do this is you're going to write from your current point of view, whatever you want to say to this teenager, like dear Amanda, I hear you, I see that we're still triggered by this. I'm sorry, I haven't looked at this, what do you want me to know. And then I want you to write Dear adult, your name. But for me, dear adult, Amanda, and I want you to word vomit on the page. And at first there might not be a lot and you might be like, I can't think of anything. Do this every day. Because your inner teenager who's literally inside you, this is a part of you that stuck and isn't healed, wants to talk to you wants you to parent her. But she does not trust you yet. So do this for 10 days, and you're going to see more and more come up. And she's going to be really angry, really scared, and really sad. Because the other thing that happens when we bury these things for so long is that she's really scared that you're not going to believe her, or that you're not going to listen because she already went through that. So what you need to do is you need to validate her, because what happened to you is you had people invalidate your experience, you had people not believe you so then you cut off a part of yourself instead of validating yourself. So this is what a lot of rape victims do. So where are broken pieces, we're walking around as a shattered piece of glass, and we're looking for people to tell us it's gonna be okay, we're looking for people to put us back together. But they don't. So we have to do it ourselves. But if we turn against ourselves and we disconnect from life, then we are invalidating our own experience. And by doing that, we learn not to trust ourselves. So you have to start learning to trust yourself. So this is a practice, communicating with your inner teenager is a practice. And I want you to start practicing it daily. Because she deserves for you to take the time to heal this. But when I say her, what I'm saying is you, you deserve to heal this. You deserve not to be stuck in the past. You deserve to be able to embrace the present moment. You deserve to be able to let life flow through you. You deserve to live life to the fullest. And we cannot do that when we're holding so much trauma in our bodies. We are living in too much overwhelm and stress all the time that we can't actually connect to life. And you deserve everything you've ever wanted. And you deserve joy and happiness and love. And you deserve to be touched and deserve to have a beautiful thriving sex life. And you deserve to have a man in your life who loves you, but I know it feels unsafe right now. So you have to start validating your own experience, and you need to start listening to her. And I find this inner child practice really helps because sometimes it helps to view the experience a little bit outside of ourselves. So if you can view her as your inner teenager that might be easier for you to start. I know that was for me to view all these pieces of me a little bit outside of myself before I was able to be like that happened to me. It was like this happened to this little child. Oh my god. I love her so much. And then it's like that happened to me. I'm validating that. I love myself. Oh I see I am keeping me safe and I hear yourself, Oh, that was really hard. I'm so sorry that happened. And you will get to a point where you don't need anybody else to validate you, because you know what you've been through. Because the truth is, nobody's ever gonna know what we've been through, we only know, because everybody's rape is different, everybody's trauma is different. So you really have to validate the feelings you feel and the experience you have. And I just want to say that, I honor you, I honor wherever you're at. And wherever you're at today, wherever you're at tomorrow, this is really hard. And I am so proud of you for taking that step towards healing. I am so proud of you for choosing yourself, because that's what happens when we choose to heal, or choosing ourselves. And everyone deserves to choose themselves, and everyone deserves to love themselves. So I'm going to leave it there for now. So my recommendations for your therapy, starting to look at your coping strategies, and starting this inner child practice. And I hope that helps. And I love you. And this is hard. And I also want to address that you are not at square one, you're not at square one, you feel triggered to this extent, because you have the pieces, and you have the awareness, and that can't be taken from you. And each layer we heal on each layer we take off cannot be put back on. And that's the other great thing about the healing journey, that each thing we heal, we are new person, we are reborn and new. And we were reborn as more whole versions of ourselves. And those layers of healing are putting the pieces back together. So those million shattered pieces are slowly going to come back together. And it's going to become an indestructible piece of glass and indestructible you an indestructible plate, and it cannot break again. Every piece you heal cannot break again. And so I know that this journey is worth it. I know this journey is really hard. But those are the ways I want you to start healing this. I love you
Amanda Durocher (Listener Question) 36:52
Dear New View Advice. One night when I was in college, I went to a party with some friends. The last thing I remember is having a shot with someone I don't recognize. The next morning I woke up in my bed with my pants off. I was alone, but I know something happened. I went to Student Health Services to get a rape kit and they denied me. I couldn't handle any more rejection. So I went home and showered. I tried to put the night together. But no one remembers me leaving with anyone. To this day. I don't know if something was put in my drink. Or if I drank too much. This happened over a year ago. But I still play the events of this night in my head on a daily basis. I can't move on. I wish I knew what happened to me. I think that would help me move on. I'm mad at myself for not getting another rape kit. I'll never know who did this to me. And that makes me so angry. Any advice on how to move past the incessant thoughts? Thank you for this question. This is a very vulnerable question. This is a very relatable question. And I just want to say I'm so sorry, this happened to you. I'm so sorry that you went through this. And I'm so sorry that you're still going through this healing from rape takes time. It's not easy to fix. And I'm so sorry. I'm also sorry, you're stuck in the cycle of what I have also experienced of not remembering what happened and obsessing over what happened. Because you know what happened because you know it in your body. But that's really hard when you don't remember it. And if you haven't read it already, I recommend the book know my name by Chanel Miller, who is the woman who was sexually assaulted on the Stanford campus a few years ago, and she wrote a book called No My name after the court case, that was very publicized. And she describes the experience of being a survivor, the aftermath of rape in such a beautiful way, and so relatable. And I recommend this book for you. Because I also when I was in my teens, there was alcohol involved. And as people who are sexually assaulted when alcohol is involved, it adds another layer of self blame. And it also adds another layer of shame. And it's also something that people in our society people we may come across feel like it's okay to tell us it was our fault or to shame us for drinking too much. When What about the men who drink too much, and rape women are never held to the same scrutiny. So Chanel, Miller really helped me on my healing journey by reading her story, because I definitely blamed myself for what happened to me because there was alcohol involved. There was marijuana involved. There were substances involved. And I blamed myself for a really long time that if I didn't drink, this wouldn't have happened. If I didn't hang out those people that night. If I didn't sleep over at my friend's house, I blamed myself for a really long time. And the truth is that you drinking is not the problem. And I just want to dress this as part of the question because I know it's not quite in your question, but I think this comes up for a lot of people who have alcohol involved in their sexual assault, and it was not your fault. You're allowed to drink You're allowed to get drunk, you're even allowed to get blacked out. None of that justifies someone raping you, none of that makes what happened to you, okay? And none of that makes it your fault. You are not responsible for the actions of others, it is the person who raped you is responsible for raping you, it was not your fault. And with that said, one in three, I Googled this before this episode, one in three sexual assaults do involve alcohol. So as a society, it is our responsibility to look at that. So for you, you're kind of in the thick of the emotion still. So you haven't, from what it sounds like completely hardened yourself to the experience, you're still reliving it. So you have PTSD. So You're reliving the experience over and over again, that is post traumatic stress disorder, you are living in fight or flight mode, and you are constantly stressed in your body is constantly in overwhelm, because you're reliving this trauma over and over again and trying to put the pieces back together mentally, but what you have to do is you have to drop into your heart, and you have to get out of your head and into your heart and start the healing layer. So for me, I struggled with the reliving the event over and over again to when my memories came up. So one thing that really helped me with my PTSD is EMDR. So EMDR is a therapy technique that you can do in therapy with a professional. And I did this in therapy. And I also did this in group therapy. And it's somebody's with you, and they walk you through memories of the experience, and you hold these bizarre things, or you can tap your shoulders or there's different ways to do it. But somebody's there for you as support and walks you through these memories. You keep replaying so these images you keep replaying because I would even say you were traumatized when your Student Health Clinic denied you, like how I discussed in the previous question how it can be really traumatizing not to be believed. And that's what you experienced by being denied your rape kit. And I also just want to take a second to say that's unacceptable. I am so sorry that happened to you, that happens all too often where women are denied rape kits. And that makes me really angry. And I'm so sorry, you had to go through that because it is traumatizing enough to be raped once and to be denied that is trauma all over again. So I want you to take that blame off yourself, you can't go back in time, you can't get a second rape kit, you don't have to blame yourself for it. That's not what you're looking for. So I know that you think that if you had gotten that rape kit, you'd feel better. If you knew who did it, you'd feel better if all these things outside of you had happened, you'd feel better. And the truth is, it wouldn't fix how you feel it wouldn't fix the million broken pieces. So unfortunately, you may never know who raped you. And I'm really sorry. And that is part of this healing journey for you. I totally understand how hard that is. And the truth is, you can still heal from this and not know who raped you. And you can still put all the pieces together without that information. And I don't know if that information would make you feel better is the truth. Because what you're looking for is you're looking outside of yourself to put these pieces back together. But as this broken glass analogy I've been using, the only thing that can put the pieces back together is you and doing the internal work. So you can only put this magical plate back together inside yourself. You can't do it outside yourself. Only you can do it. Nobody can do it for you. Of course I wish we lived in a world where you were given that so many victims of rape, never see their attackers and abusers and rapists, any consequences for them happen because we live in a world that doesn't make it easy that victim blames that makes it really hard for people who go forward. And I'm really sorry about that. And I hope that changes in the future. But today I'm going to talk about things you can do for you. So one way you can go in is as I mentioned the EMDR. So this really helps you to reprocess the memories, and I'm not even entirely sure how it works. I read the book, The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk. And He even talks about how they don't really know how it works. But it does work. And he's used it with a lot of people who have experienced trauma. And this really was first used with people who were in the war. So veterans and who experienced PTSD while serving and it worked for them. And now it's used universally for all types of trauma. And what it does is by reprocessing these memories by revisiting them with a professional in this manner, it helps to make the memories that are stuck, or that are really hard for us to look at. It helps secrete a neutral energy. So when it's stuck, you can feel that shame Like you can't even look there, like you want to shut the window to that memory, or can make us angry or start crying at the thought of it. And with EMDR, it helps to make that memory neutral, which really is it helps to move that stuck energy, those stuck emotions by processing them that way. So that is one thing that could really help you because your question reminds me of myself at the beginning of my healing journey and how much PTSD I had. So if you do decide to look for a therapist, I recommend asking if they specialize in EMDR. And trying to find somebody who does, because also somebody who specializes in EMDR is familiar with trauma, so they're more likely to be able to help you along the way. So a step you could take towards healing. Is that your question? exudes blaming yourself, to me, you blame yourself for what happened? You blame yourself for not getting the right can you blame yourself for not figuring out who did this to you? You blame yourself for not remembering you blame yourself for drinking? There's a lot of self blame in this question. And so what you are looking to do is to connect with your inner inner child might not be the right word, but inner traumatized adult, you know, young adult, this was a year ago. So imagine yourself a year ago, and you need to forgive yourself, you need to forgive yourself for what happened. And it was not your fault. This was a really horrible thing that happened to you. It was not your fault, though. It is not your fault for going to that party. It's not your fault for drinking, it was not your fault. And how you're going to start believing this is sitting with yourself and forgiving yourself. And telling yourself that, and this could involve you're doing it in a meditation, so visualizing yourself a year ago, and telling her and telling that person that this was not your fault. But you need to forgive yourself and it is safe to forgive yourself, you need to let yourself off the hook. Because what self blame does is it creates shame. And what shame does is it keeps us stuck in the past, we are on able to move on or to move forward when we feel shame. And shame is very synonymous with rape experience with rape consciousness, and you need to forgive yourself and to stop shaming yourself for what happened. You need to stop blaming yourself and to stop hating yourself. Because that's what happens when we blame and we shame ourselves for things that were not our fault is we start to hate ourselves. And we start to resent ourselves. So I want you to heal. And I want you to sit with yourself and I want you to forgive yourself. So like I said, you can visualize yourself, you can journal to yourself and practice forgiveness. As I've mentioned in a lot of episodes, Hapa Pomona is an amazing forgiveness practice. So tell yourself, you forgive yourself that you're so sorry. Thank you. Thank you for showing me this. Thank you for still being here. Thank you for being patient with me. Thank you for loving me. And I love you. I'll link more about that I've talked about in the past. And if you go to my previous episode, I think it's episode five, I talked about forgiveness, In My Back to Basics episode, I go into more on that. But you need to forgive yourself. For you, you're at the beginning of your healing journey. And one thing that I found on my healing journey was at the beginning I needed to pick, it's almost like an anchor. So you need to find a phrase that resonates for you about why you think it's so important to heal. And for me, mine was there has to be a reason for this. And I will help others who have gone through this I held on to that whole time. So for years, I was like I will help others. This has to have happened for a reason. And that anchor is what I held on to throughout my healing process. So on those days, that it felt like too hard, and that I didn't want to look at it. I held on to that anchor, there has to be a reason I have to move through this, I will get to the other side. That was my anchor. But some other anchors could be I will be stronger at the end of this. I know I will be stronger at the end of this. I know it or I know it's possible to heal, I will heal this I will prove to myself that I am worthy of healing this, I know it, I will do it even if it takes everything I have, or I am worthy of happiness. And I know happiness is on the other side of this. But you have to find an anchor for yourself to hold on to as you move through the healing process. And with this question, I can tell you want to heal you want to move forward. And how do you stop the incessant thoughts? You pull an anchor out in those moments where the thoughts are antecessor that you pulled onto that anchor. And the third thing I'm going to say to you, which I'm not sure in 2021 what people's connection with a higher power is but people's connection with God is when people's connection with sources. I don't know what word you use, I don't know if you have a connection. But I found that I couldn't heal from this by myself. And what I mean by that is I had to believe in something greater than myself. And by my anchor Bing, there has to be a reason for this. I had to learn to believe in something that was always helping me move through this. So when I first my memories came back, I believed in the universe, I believe there was a greater thing out there. But I didn't really have a connection to it. But when I hit my lowest of lows, I basically looked up at the ceiling and said, All right, all right. Well, what is it what's out there? Help. I got on my knees as someone who didn't pray, and I prayed for help. And if you start to connect with God, and what is God, we are so programmed that God is like a white man that sits in the sky, that is not what God is. So some people don't like the word God. So you could use the word source, Sophia universe. But you have to connect with that all loving presence, because that's all got it. So it's all sources is all loving presence of life. And you have to start just asking yourself what you believe in. And by believing in something greater than myself, it really helped me heal, like, Please, God, help me through this. Show me the way. Show me the way God, an all I can say is if you start praying, that source will appear in different ways. And that could be through people who help you. It could be through friends, it could be through books, but things will start to fall into your life. But healing from something this massive requires you to lean on a greater, greater source, learning to have your own connection. And a great way to intro that is just to sit in nature sit like right nature, the woods are bigger than us. And that all loving life and that nurturing energy of Mother Nature is part of God is part of this endless source energy. And just being in the presence, like sitting at the beach is being in the presence of something bigger than you. So that's a way I recommend for just starting to connect back to something bigger than you. Because connecting back to that will start to ground you. So you also mentioned that you're really angry. And Anger is an emotion, every single rape victim will experience and will have to move through. And there's going to be a lot of anger. And we are programmed not to feel our anger. But there is going to be an immense amount of anger within your body. Because what happened to you was so horrific. Of course you're angry about it. So I love to connect with anger. I think it's so important because I think that to heal from rape, you have to feel all that anger. And so many of us are scared of our anger because we're scared, it will never end. And we're also really scared we're going to hurt someone. So I'm really passionate about finding safe ways to feel your anger. So I've talked about this in the past, but I'm going to talk about it again. So some safe ways I recommend for connecting with your anger are I love to throw things so you can throw glasses, you can throw rocks, you can throw sticks, you can throw eggs, but find a place where it's safe to throw things. So I love to throw rocks in the ocean, or I love to smash glasses into a trash bed. I recommend wearing protective eyewear when you smash glasses don't have anyone else around, be careful. But you need to find ways to let this anger out. I've also mentioned in the past that I love to scream in my car, I love to scream at the top of my lungs and get that anger out because it's in there. It's sitting there and it needs to move. And I find a lot of times when I'm angry, once I let it out, tears will pour afterwards. So there's something oftentimes under the anger or sometimes I feel 10 times better. But the anger needs to move in order for other emotions to arise. And I also want to say that, of course you're angry because your boundaries were crossed in the most literal sense. And anger is often showing us when a boundary is crossed. And when you're raped. It feels like every boundary you ever had was crossed. And again it shatters you so you're angry about it, and you deserve to be angry but you also deserve to move through it but you also have to do it in a safe way. Because one of my favorite mentors always says hard feelings are not an excuse for bad behavior. So as you go on your healing journey, you learn that, even though you've been through immense trauma and immense suffering, it is not an excuse to take it out on others. So it is not an excuse to yell at your partner because you're raped, it is not your partner's fault. You need to take responsibility from your emotions, and you need to find safe outlets, because you need to not punish others for what you went through. It's not an excuse for bad behavior, the more we start to grow up emotionally, the more we realize that we are responsible for our own feelings, and we need to find safe ways to express them. So like I said, one of these is to find a safe way to express your anger. And I think for you connecting with that anger, and allowing it to move, and not blaming yourself, because I think you're pointing that anger inward. So you're saying, like, I can't believe I didn't do this, I should have done this, I should have done it. No, you need to just let it out. And if it's just sometimes I just end up screaming, and then maybe something will arise, but it's just there. And I'm just screaming and screaming, and throwing stuff, and it moves. And I just want to tell everyone out there that it is safe to feel your anger. Like I said, in a safe environment. I just think we're also programmed that anger is scary. Because especially as people have been abused, a lot of times this anger was taken out on us, somebody took their anger. So when we were raped or hit, or even yelled that someone took their anger and threw it at us. So we're so afraid of our anger, because we're afraid that we're going to do that to someone else. And we don't want to so we suppress it. But the truth is, there are safe ways to express it, and you need to let it out. So it's safe to. And you will also find that if you do suppress it, it'll come out at other people or it'll come out at yourself anyways. So it's important to let this anger move. And as I've mentioned in the past, another way is using Mother Nature, just go in nature, go to the woods, find a secluded area, and just be angry, throw shit break stuff, Mother Nature's here for you. And she wants you to use her as a playground for your feelings. And if all this is too scary, I also think that you could write yourself in a letter. So you could write a letter about all the things you're angry about. And if you don't physically want to express the anger, I would write down everything that makes you angry. And I would write a list of everything that makes you angry, and then I would bury that list, or I would burn that list and just see that element. So either the earth or you could throw it in the water rip burn it, but see that element taking that anger from you. So put it all out on the page, and then let it go. That might be easier for some people who aren't comfortable quite yet, physically expressing their anger. And I just want to end this with rape is really hard to heal from. It is a really long journey and is really hard. And I want you to be patient with yourself. When you start doing these practices, more feelings will arise. It's a long process. And I'm just here to guide you along the way. So this is what's coming up right now. And I really think if you start sitting in meditation, you start connecting with yourself, what you need will arise for you. And the key is that what arises is not to ignore it. So if there's a shameful memory, it's to sit with it and to cry. Or if it's the anger, it's to let it flow. Or if it's sadness that this happened is to give yourself a day to just cry and take a bath. And just allow yourself to feel the feelings. I spent a lot of days crying on the floor, I'll be honest. And on those days, I would pray to something greater than myself for help. And I would eventually pick myself back up and sit with what was up and forgive myself. Because the journey of rape is really a forgiving journey. So it's about forgiving yourself and forgiving others. But the most important thing when you start is to forgive yourself, because forgiving the person who did this to you might seem impossible right now. But what you're really looking to do is to forgive yourself, I love you, you will get through this, you are stronger than you know. And you will get there. But how you're going to get there is to feel all these feelings first. And to really forgive yourself. And I promise on the under the end of this, you will look back with such compassion for where you're at now. I love you.
Amanda Durocher (Outro) 59:29
Thank you for joining me for this episode of New View Advice. I am really passionate about this topic. So I'm so grateful for everybody who stuck around and listened to all these questions because I think this is a really important thing to talk about. Because I think the more we talk about rape and the more we talk about sexual assault, the more we will heal up the shame around it and the more we help the shame, the easier it will be to heal and the list really heavy energetics we have to work through. So I'm really passionate about this topic. So for this week's free resource corner I've just I'd like to record my own meditation because I couldn't really find one that resonated for me. So I am recording my own meditation for you connecting with you about this trauma. And basically this meditation, it's not very long, and I just want to help you connect with yourself. So you might listen to this episode and be like, Man, I still don't really get it. Listen to this meditation, I'm going to help you connect with your inner child, I'm going to help you connect to your inner world. And I think that you'll see more of what I talk about in action through this meditation. So that's why I've decided to record my own. So you can see my own process. Basically, this meditation is my internal process. And I'd love to hear what you think of it. And please let me know what you think of this episode. I'm so grateful to everyone who listened. And again, like I said, this is an episode about me helping you start to heal from this, I do not have the answers, I cannot do the work for you. This is a process and I just want to start helping you to look at this trauma in a different light to give you that new view that this is healable that you will be empowered at the end of this that you can heal from this that you are strong, and you are worthy of healing and love and you don't have to be stuck in that trauma anymore. Thank you so much for listening to another episode of New View Advice. I really love connecting with all of you each week and I love answering listener questions and discussing the healing process. If you found this episode helpful or you enjoy listening to this podcast, I'd love to ask you to rate and review this podcast. How you do that is on your app, you scroll to the bottom of wherever you find this and you press the five stars, you can leave a review as well. All the reviews and all the ratings really helped bring more people to this podcast, and it helps people to feel safe to journey through their healing process. And that's my goal just to help you connect with yourself. Thank you again for joining me, Amanda Durocher, for another episode of New View Advice. As always, I'm so grateful to be here with you and to offer you a new view on whatever you may be going through. sending you all my love. See you next time.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
