In this episode, I discuss how we can support ourselves after sexual assault, rape, and sexual trauma. I share advice on how survivors can begin to feel safe in their bodies again, take their power back, and navigate the journey towards a new normal. Drawing from my own personal experiences and a listener question, I provide heartfelt guidance aimed at helping survivors feel less alone and more empowered on their healing journey. 

Timestamps

• Introduction: 0:15
• Poem: 2:00
• Listener Question: 3:27
• Outro: 26:30

For episode show notes, please visit: https://www.newviewadvice.com/108

For more free resources and to learn more about New View Advice, visit: https://www.newviewadvice.com/

Want to have a question answered? You can submit your question here: https://www.newviewadvice.com/ask-a-question

Thanks so much for listening! Sending you so much love!

Welcome to New View Advice. I'm your host, Amanda Durocher, and I invite you to

join me here each week as I offer advice on how to move through whatever

problem or trauma is holding you back from living life to the fullest. Let's get

started. Hey,

beautiful soul. My name is Amanda Durocher, and this is new view advice. If you're

new here, this is a healing centered advice podcast where I offer guidance for the

healing journey. It's not my intention to give you all the answers. I believe you

have all the answers you seek. You just may need a new view and a

little help along the way. Thank you so much for joining me for today's episode.

Today, I'm answering a listener question about how we can support ourselves after we

experience sexual assault. We will discuss how we can begin to feel safe in

our bodies, how to take our power back, and why we may not ever return

to normal, but that's okay. My intention for this episode is to help you

to feel less alone. Sexual trauma can often feel really isolating,

but I want you to know that you are not alone and healing is possible

and that it really does get better. I promise. So I am

deeply familiar with this trauma as a survivor of sexual trauma myself.

And today, I wanna offer you a new view and a safe space to come

as you are. Please be kind and gentle with yourself as you listen to this

episode. If you don't like it, please just shut it off. There is no pressure.

This is just a place for survivors by a survivor. So

I honor wherever you are at on your journey. If you haven't checked out my

website, I invite you to check it out after this episode for more free

resources. I have a healing from sexual trauma hub on my website where you

can find a bunch of different resources. I also have journal prompts meditations and

more. So So to check that out, you can go to newviewadvice.com. And

part of today's episode is about taking our power back. So I wanted to share

a poem I wrote with you. I wrote this recently, and it's a little spicy.

It's a little hot, but this is a way that I take my power back

by telling my story by using my voice. For me a lot of times it's

through writing. I feel powerful and I feel empowered on my journey.

So I wanna share this poem with you. If you wanna skip it, check the

time stamps and you can jump right to the question. Alright. Let's jump on in.

I call this poem, you raped a witch. Sorry I missed your wedding. Someone

must have forgot my invite. You looked like a handsome groom and your bride looked

lovely and white. I'm not sure you heard, but as you bought a house,

worked the corporate ladder, and married a beautiful spouse, I was putting myself back

together, piece by piece, inch by inch, because I'm not sure you knew, but you

raped a witch. And when we come back, we come back with a vengeance. You

stole what wasn't yours and made me fear my independence. I locked myself in a

cage. I did magic spells and drank potions. I cursed your name under the moon

and felt all my emotions. I spoke to the divine mother and prayed for your

head. I wanted you to suffer too. I honestly wanted you dead. But the

dreams where I killed you and your little friends too always left me unfulfilled, and

I still felt sad and blue. So I began to connect back to me and

let go of you and your horrors. I learned to love myself and enjoy life

in her waters. I would have stayed in hiding because I built a life of

beauty, but I just couldn't shake the feeling that I had a mighty duty to

come back from the dead and let you know that I know what you did

that night in the woods before I could fully let you go. For you see

the others you raped, they come to me at night and they whisper that I'm

not alone, and together we can unite and rewrite a future history where we don't

live in fear every time our daughters leave the house that someone like you will

appear. So you thought we were playing checkers and that I'd always live in fear

and hate, but the whole time I was playing chess and I just moved my

queen to checkmate. Thanks for letting me share that. Came

in hot. Hope you enjoyed. Let's jump on into the question.

Hi, Amanda. You dropped an episode about how to support a loved one that's a

sexual assault survivor. Thanks. I would love an episode about how to support

yourself after sexual assault and what to do after, like how to take your power

back, feel safe in your body again, and maybe about what are some things to

help getting back to feeling normal again and like yourself instead of a

victim. I am personally struggling with this right now and thank you from the bottom

of my heart for speaking so openly about your life and struggles. It makes

me and so many others feel less alone. Thank you. Thank you so much

for this question. First, I wanna thank you for seeing me. I almost cried reading

your question. I'm gonna be honest. I share my struggles because I wish I had

heard more survivors share theirs on my darkest days. So it is extremely

healing for me to be witnessed and seen by you in your heart. And I

also just wanna say that I am so sorry that you experienced sexual

assault. I am so sorry. This is a part of your healing journey. I know

all too well what you are going through, and I am just so

sorry. If nobody's told you recently that they're sorry for what happened

to you, I just wanna be the person today to honor you and to say

I'm sorry. I look back on my own journey, and I wish more

people had just said, I'm so sorry that happened to you. I've been

thinking about that a lot recently. I have kept some people in my

life who probably aren't the best for me because they provided some version

of safety for me, but I'm seeing now that they don't see me.

They don't see what I've been through. They don't honor this journey,

and it's kind of a necessity for me at this point because it's

so hard. And it's so healing

too. I mean, I always like to mention here that healing from sexual assault

has been the most transformative thing of my life, and it's been an honor to

witness myself and to get to know myself so intimately

through such a horrific experience. My

darkest pain led to my greatest light, and that's something

I'm grateful for. But with that said, it doesn't make it any easier. I mean,

this is a really hard journey, and we live in a world with people who

don't get it. They don't get it. And, honestly, I don't

know if they have to get it, but I get it. And I just want

you to know that I'm so sorry. And I felt so alone throughout so much

of my healing journey, so I know how isolating it can be to heal from

this trauma as well as other traumas. But I think there's a lot of shame

around sexual trauma. At least I felt that way in my life. And

when I would talk about it with other people, I could feel them shame me

right back or be really, really uncomfortable by the idea of it. And I hope

that's not too much of a rant, but I've just been reflecting a lot on

this journey healing from sexual trauma. And I just see a

need for survivors to have more safe spaces, to have

more resources. And one of the things that drives me crazy, which

is why I've leaned into really offering everything I do for free, is

that how expensive it is to heal from sexual trauma, and that should

not be the case. So wherever you are at, I honor you. I see

you. I have been there. I've been in the ups and the downs of healing

from this trauma. So thank you so much for this question. I think it's a

great question. I've broken your question into 3 sections. I'm

gonna talk about safety in our bodies, how to take our power back,

and how to feel like ourselves again. So let's start with talking

about how do we feel safe in our body again. So I think the foundation

for healing sexual trauma is creating safety for yourself

because when we experience sexual violence, our entire safety is taken

in that moment, and because of that, it's very difficult to feel

safe afterwards. So it's so important to build that inner

safety while also cultivating a safe home, safe places to process your

feelings, triggers, memories, and safe workspaces, safe relationships,

really honoring yourself and your body throughout this process. I

think to feel safe in your body, you have to start listening to your

body. And what I mean by that is that

your body will communicate to you what it needs. And so if you go

in a room and you don't feel safe, part of creating safety in the body

is leaving that room. It's allowing yourself to do things that may

seem illogical. That's what I think of when I think about healing from sexual

trauma is that I had to honor where I was at. So for example,

in my life, I, to this day, like to sit

in the aisle of auditoriums, airplanes. If I was on a

bus, I'd wanna be on the aisle. I need to be able to get out.

I need to be able to move. I need to be able to exit. And

this can seem illogical. How does this relate to sexual trauma?

It's because I was trapped when I was sexually assaulted. Right? I was

pinned down, held. But because of this, I like to be in the aisle. And

some people would think that's me being difficult, refusing to sit like in a

window seat or refusing to sit in the middle. I hate it. I hate it.

My whole body tenses and I think about it the whole time that I'm not

sitting in the aisle. And I could either fight my body or I could listen

to my body and I could sit in the aisle. And I could ask somebody

to move so I could sit in the aisle. And sometimes it's not possible and

I have to talk myself through sitting in a different chair. It's life.

But I mentioned that example because I think that's an example of listening to my

body. That to the outside world that may seem illogical or I've had people be

like oh you should work on that trigger. You should work on that.

No. Just no. I don't want to. I don't have to. You

survived what I survived. You wouldn't wanna feel trapped again either.

So that's the other thing. What listening to your body is it's gonna

be your journey with your body. I know somebody else who

experienced rape and they like to sit in the back of the room. They never

sit in the front. They like to be by the exit in the back of

the room. That's just what they like, and they give themselves that.

They didn't realize that was why they did it for a really long time, but

when they did, they just honored themselves. And then they realized they could sit in

the front of the room if they wanted, but they still choose to sit in

the back. It's just like me with the aisle. I could sit anywhere, But I

still like to sit in the aisle, and I don't have to make myself feel

bad for it. That's another thing with healing your relationship with your body is don't

make yourself feel bad for the things that you need. Healing from

sexual trauma requires us to stop people

pleasing and to own what we need. Because we have a

lot of needs after experiencing this trauma. That's what I found in my life. And

I spent about a decade ignoring all those needs, repressing my trauma. And when

it came back up because I suffered from repressed memories, but I had to begin

to learn how to take care of myself. Because as I said, a lot of

your needs right now are gonna feel illogical. Maybe you need to

leave a dinner, like, 20 minutes in. I've done that. Maybe you

need to cry at a dinner table. Maybe you need to go be in

nature rather than at a desk at work. Maybe you need to leave that 9

to 5 job and get a job with more flexibility. Maybe you need to work

from home. I don't know what you need but I know that your body will

communicate to you what you need and it's not always comfortable.

So when we experience sexual trauma, I really feel like a lot of times we

leave the body because it's such a traumatic experience. So that's an

experience where, like, part of you leaves the body. And so what I found when

healing sexual trauma is it's like a journey back into the body. It's like

one step at a time. And a lot of

times to get back in your body, it's gonna require you to feel a lot

of feelings. And so those things I mentioned upfront with, like, the boundaries

and knowing what you need and listening to your body into different rooms,

That's often one of the first practices because once you start doing that then you're

gonna notice the feelings that arise. So if you feel disconnected from the feelings a

lot of times it's because you have to create that safety. So once I started

listening to my body and for me my body communicated it didn't want to leave

the house for like years. And I would leave the house. You know, everybody has

to leave the house. You have to go to the grocery store. But, truly, my

body was constantly telling me it just wanted to be at home. And so when

I would go home and when I kinda isolated myself for a few years,

which I'm seeing now and I've mentioned it on the podcast, but I'm really seeing

how isolated I've been. I felt a lot of feelings.

And the more I felt the feelings, the more I came back into my body.

Because when we're healing sexual trauma, it's unavoidable, the difficult feelings you're

gonna feel. I hope that doesn't scare you away. Because honestly feeling those

feelings is part of honoring yourself, witnessing yourself, and being

compassionate to yourself. Sexual violence is violence. It is

violent. And violence against you or against

humans does something to a person. It really does. I've worked with

enough people who have experienced sexual trauma, domestic abuse, other forms of

violence to see that violence does something to a person.

And it is a process to come back into your body and to create that

safety. It is possible. And I think you'll feel even safer in your

body than you did before. You'll trust yourself more than you did before. You'll be

more compassionate than you were before. You'll be more self loving. That's what the healing

journey does is we get more of us. And that is

the gift of healing. You know, I have a friend who I

speak to a lot about sexual trauma. We've both experienced it. And we

talk about how it's one of those traumas that forces

you to look at the dark in the world, and through that there

are many gifts. It's a hard journey. I'm not

gonna bullshit you and say it's like roses. You know it's

not. You know it's not. You know what you live with. And I believe

people who survive sexual trauma live with demons at night. Took me a long

time to shake the demons I lived with. They came to me in my nightmares,

my meditations, my low moments, my high moments.

They always liked to peek their head in. And I mention

this because most people don't live with demons or not the kind of demons

you and I live with. Because what I've come to understand, and I think

I might have mentioned this recently on an episode, but I believe

everybody's been through something. So I believe we should be kind to one another. You

never know what somebody's been through. But, also, some of us have

just been through shit. You know? Like, the demons I

live with, other people don't live with. And that's probably true

for you too. You know, some of the demons I live with is that I

was raped as a child, then I was gang raped as a teen by

people I went to school with, and then there were people who watched it

happen and did nothing and said nothing. And then

I know of other people who experienced the same thing I did, and some of

them are no longer with us. That kind of experience changes a

person. That's what I've found. And the more I heal, the more angry I become

that I'm not alone. For so long I felt alone, like nobody

understood, and a lot of the world doesn't understand. And before

I wrap up this part of the question, I want to mention again that a

lot of people aren't going to understand. So when you're finding safety in your body,

you want to listen to you, not to other people. Do not take advice

from people who do not understand what you're going through. I have made that mistake

enough. I took advice from people who don't get it. And

that caused more harm than good. So really take advice from people who

understand. I hope there's more resources. I'm going to continue

putting out more resources. But, you know, other survivors really understand

the experience and are great resources. And if you can find a therapist who's

also a survivor, that's amazing. Because I think that when it comes to this trauma

and getting back in your body and feeling safe in your body, it's going to

be listening to your body. Another thing I just wanna mention is that

when you are healing from this trauma, all of us are gonna have different

triggers. So, like, for me, my experience happened in the woods in my teens. So

for a long time, I would have this fear come over me when I stepped

into the woods. And it wasn't until last year that I was like, alright, Amanda.

You need to deal with this. You love nature. You love being in the woods.

You don't want this to be something that keeps you from nature.

But for a long time it did, and I was okay with that until I

was ready to make peace with the woods. That process could not be

rushed. So you coming home to your body is a process that

cannot be rushed because you deserve to feel this whole experience. You deserve to

honor yourself. And I'm so sorry we live in a world that still struggles to

honor what you've been through because I know you've been to hell and you are

making your way back up to your own heaven. And I respect that and I

love that for you, but I know it's hard. So that's like a

big sum up of how I feel about safety and your

body. But a few practices you can try are meditation, really

sitting with your body, getting familiar with your body. I found

meditation to be a great way to get to know my body again, feeling where

the feelings were within my body that needed to be processed.

Meditation really helped me to slow down and be with my body. A lot of

people practice breath work, yoga. Yoga will help you

to be in your body, and I find easy yoga when you're healing.

Right? Yoga Nidra, sound baths, but allowing yourself

to do slow easy yoga, trauma focused

yoga will help you because a lot of these emotions get stuck in the body,

which is why we avoid our body, which is why our body doesn't feel safe

because all these stuck fear, emotions, and terror are

in the body. I've talked with people, and I have an episode where I talk

about EMDR. I find EMDR to be a helpful tool along

the journey of healing from sexual trauma. For me, it didn't heal everything,

but it helped me move, like, the terror, the panic, like, some of those

really hard feelings that are gonna be very difficult for you to just sit with.

I found EMDR to be a really helpful tool for that. But finding what

works for you, also, I invite you to explore your diet.

For me, I ignored my diet for a really, really long

time. And recently, I've used food as a way to nourish my body,

respect my body, and come back home to my body. And it's been really

healing for me to honor my body through what I put in it. But

again, for a long time, I drank to numb the really hard

feelings. And then I ate sugar for about 3 years. I baked a lot,

and all I did was eat sugar cookies and ice cream. And

now I still eat sugar, by the way, but I just am

much more conscious of how foods feel in my body, and I

understand when I'm picking them up as a coping strategy. But none of that

happened overnight. So, again, you connecting back to your body is going to be

step by step. It's gonna be a personal process. And the first step is to

listen. Just begin listening to it. It is communicating with

you and it takes courage to begin to

listen, but it's also a journey home to yourself. The second

question I wanna talk about is how do we take our power back? It's really

one step at a time, and I promise that the more you heal, the more

powerful you will become. But it's a journey, not a sprint. Be kind

to yourself. I read a poem at the beginning of this episode. That's one way

I practice taking my power back. But the journey to taking your

power back is the journey of being with this trauma and your own pain.

The more you sit with your heart, the more you will see yourself in a

new way and you will see your strength. Anyone listening to this episode, I see

your strength. I know you've been to hell. That's how I view it. I can't

describe sexual trauma as any other way than going to hell. You go to

hell and you have to climb your way back up. And I honor that in

you. You are a courageous warrior

and I believe trauma survivors are warriors of love. And

every time you choose your heart and you choose to listen to your

inner guidance in your inner world, you are choosing a loving act and

that's brave and I honor you and you are taking your power back every

day. I think that sexual trauma really teaches us that we are

extremely powerful. You know, I really believe you are already powerful.

You're just remembering that through this healing journey. You're courageous, like I

mentioned. You're brave, and wanting to heal, wanting to move past this is an act

of power and self love. You know what you desire at the end of

this, and you deserve to be free of this, and you will get there. And

you are getting there. And I wanna say I'm so proud of you because I

know what it takes, and it's humbling and

also really liberating. So I just wanna honor you. And, for me, my

power has come as I honestly peeled back the lies I told myself. So the

lies that I'm a coward or the lies that I'm unworthy, the lies that this

happened to me because I was ugly, that I was to blame. The more I

cried, yelled, screamed, and sobbed and allowed myself to go into the darkest places within

me, the more powerful I became. For me, For me personally, what held me prisoner

were those lies I mentioned around the experience, the stories I told myself. All the

shame and the self blame kept me a prisoner inside my own body.

But, through witnessing my pain and burning away those lies and

no longer running from the truth, which was that this was not my fault

and it was not your fault, I have found my power.

And that's how you'll find your power too. And I truly believe

power lies within self compassion because so often we

beat ourselves up as survivors, but your true power will come through being

radically loving and kind to yourself and cutting out all the things that do

not serve you and being unapologetic about it. And

that's not easy. I'm still apologizing for the boundaries I need to set.

But what I have decided is that in order for me to continue to

take my power back, I have to be the change I wanna see in the

world. And I mention that because for you, you know, follow

what you're passionate about. For me, when I first started this podcast, it helped me

to gain my power back by talking about these things and people

witnessing me and seeing me. Nobody in my life was able to

at the time. I didn't know how much I needed to be seen.

And I kept finding therapists who made me question myself

and made me feel insane again, because I felt insane

healing from this trauma. So many of us don't remember every detail of it or

every minute of it. And that's the body's way of protecting us, but it also

makes us feel insane. Like, wait, did that happen? Is that real? What is

that? And again, it's getting into your body. Feeling safe in your

body. And then step by step, that power is going to come as you

listen to your heart and what you need through healing. I

feel like it's an abstract answer. But the more you listen to your heart,

the more you will be guided back to safety and

back to your power. So I also wanted to address

your question of how do we feel like ourselves again. So I

understand the question, but I also wanna say that this is a hard one for

me to answer because the truth is, in some ways, I'm not sure we ever

feel like ourselves again. And I'm not sure we ever are the same person

again. And I don't say that because I don't think you'll always be a victim.

You are not a victim. You are a strong person. You are a strong

warrior in my opinion. You are a child of love

always. You're a child of God. You are so much more than

this experience, but it doesn't mean it's not difficult, and it doesn't mean we don't

feel like a victim. Because in that moment, we were victims. Right? And what I

found throughout my own healing journey was that I had to allow myself to feel

all of that victimhood in in order to no longer feel like a victim because

I had to process the full experience of being a victim. I was a

victim. I was pinned down and brutally raped and attacked by

people I knew. I was a victim. I had to allow myself to feel that

whole experience. It was very excruciating. But I

mention that here because you will return to normal,

in a way. You'll return to your great qualities. They will come

back. It will come back better than before because you'll have this

new perspective about yourself, and you'll see your strength and your resilience.

But I wanna also say that I'm not sure we ever go back to quote

unquote normal because you experience something abnormal. Most people don't

have to sit with the demons that you'll have to sit with, and I'm so

sorry for that. And most people in this world, what I find is they

look away from the dark, the uncomfortable, and the scary.

They don't want to see it, and many of us were like that before

we experienced sexual trauma. And that's why

it can be hard to return to normal because our world is flipped

upside down. Your world is different. And, I just

found through my experience that it was about embracing the

change, and that life was different, and every time I wanted to return

to something past, I was unable to, is what I'm trying to say,

because it no longer existed. But the truth is that that's

life. Right? We're always changing, we're always growing, we're

always learning. And there's always a new normal. And I've also embraced through

this that I'm not normal. Maybe you're not either. I think every human

isn't really normal. I don't really love the word normal because I think what we've

created as normal in society is conformity.

And we're each an individual spark of light. We're each a diamond

in the sky, as Rihanna says. And that's not normal.

That's unique and brilliant and awesome. And I found through healing from

sexual trauma, I remembered all those qualities about myself. And

what a gift. Was it hard to find them? You betcha, but I found

my creative self, I found my funny self, I found my authentic

self, through allowing myself this experience and by being kind to

myself. Because that kindness is so important because when you're kind to yourself,

you're also kind to others, and life becomes lighter, and you no longer

blame yourself for what wasn't your fault, and for the cruel things people maybe

said to you afterwards. I spoke to somebody just yesterday who was telling me about

the way their mother responded when they were raped and how they've been

living with those words of, well, you shouldn't have done that in their

head for, like, a decade. Oh, breaks my heart. So I don't know

if this is the answer you necessarily wanted from this question, but I

really wanted to offer this new perspective that maybe life won't be

normal again, but that's okay. And that life can be

new. I really found that this experience of healing from sexual trauma

broke my heart a 1000000 times, but it broke it open every

single time. And when our heart breaks, we can either choose for it to break

open and break wider and bigger, or we end up putting defenses up

and closing off to the world. But if you allow yourself to be rewritten

by this experience, by the heartbreak, by the grief, by

the difficult experiences, your new normal will be

beautiful. You'll see life with fresh eyes. And again, it

doesn't mean there won't be things that trigger you. I currently am dealing with

some anger, and it's motivating me to create more. But

I also see the beauty of life, and I feel fiercely protective

of life because I see how beautiful it is. And for a

long time I didn't. And when I look out in the world that's not a

normal perspective I now have, because I experience something, again,

abnormal. This is not normal. There are more survivors than I'd

like there to be of sexual trauma, but it's still not a

normal experience. So when trying to quote unquote go back to normal, I

invite you to reframe it. Maybe there's a specific thing you want to go back

to, like how can I get back to my creative self? Or how can I

get back to my happy self? I think that is a clearer

intention for yourself than getting back to normal because your life will be

different. It reminds me of kind of going through a death. Right? When somebody in

our life dies, life is never exactly the same again. We've lost that

physical presence. Doesn't mean their soul isn't still with us, but we've

lost that person so life isn't normal. It's a

new normal. And so that was the perspective I wanted to offer

there. But I hope something in this answer was helpful. This is always a

difficult topic for me to discuss. I'm gonna be honest with you. I never know

if I hit the mark on it. So if nothing in this episode

resonated for you, know that this is your journey and that I'm just

offering you my point of view and what I've learned. But what I've found through

sexual trauma is that it is an individual journey back home to self.

And the more you follow your heart, the more you will be guided

home to yourself and the love that you truly are. Thank you so much for

this question.

Thank you so much for joining me for another episode of New View Advice. As

always, I am so grateful that we are able to come here together and have

these conversations. I am honoring you and your

journey today and sending you so much love. If you haven't already, I

invite you to visit my website, newviewadvice.com, where I have more free resources

for healing from sexual trauma. Thanks again for joining me for another episode of New

View Advice. As always, I hope I was able to offer you a new view

on whatever you may be going through. Sending you all my love. See you next

time.