7 Strategies for Healing After Rape and/or Sexual Abuse

It hurts. Rape and sexual abuse are a scalding kind of pain. Still, it is possible to heal. Even from this pain.

1.Celebrate your survival. You’re here and you’re alive. You made it. You may be a bit frayed around the edges, but who wouldn’t be? In spite of all that you’ve been through, you showed up another day to fight again. That’s a champion. That’s a Survivor.

2.Be patient. I remember after my early counseling sessions. At the end of many I would ask, “How long does this take?” It seemed to me that healing was molasses slow. The good counselors would always say, “It takes as long as it takes.”

But they were right. Abuse scars you in the deepest crevices of your being. It scars you in places that you didn’t know pain had access to. It can take your entire lifetime to heal. Impatience will only make you more frustrated with a process that you can’t change anyway.

3.Catch a little joy every day. Be sure to remind yourself that life isn’t all about terrible happenings. Life isn’t filled with people who hurt others.

Life is really filled with laughter, art, enjoyable activities, peace, happiness, wonderful people, acts of kindness and goodness.

Make sure that you take part in it. Sometimes when you have experienced rape or sexual abuse, you have to almost do this intentionally. Do it. You deserve this gift. Make finding joy a habit.

4.Allow yourself to feel. As a person who experienced rape or sexual abuse, it may not have been safe to allow yourself to express or even feel pain. It was wrong for anyone to stifle your emotions.

Find a way to appropriately express your full range emotions. That is the only way that you will be able to feel healthy and whole.

5.Treat yourself. You owe it to yourself to find out what it is you really enjoy.

When I was a kid, I could roller skate for hours. But, somehow I convinced myself that once I became an adult I couldn’t do any of the things that I loved as a kid.

But one of my counselors challenged me on this. Why not? She pointed out that I had chosen to avoid anything fun activities I did as a child in order to avoid some painful childhood memories.

That was only making me bored and boring. Well, I bought myself a pair of skates and went skating on my back patio that evening. I had the best time ever!

6. Decorate your life with people you like and love. As a person who experienced abuse you might be reluctant to cut off difficult relationships. You might feel compelled to resolve the issues at all costs. You might also have a hard time identifying dysfunctional relationships.

Make an intentional choice to surround yourself with people that like and love you. At the same time surround yourself with only those people who you like and love.

7.Let someone help you grow. I wasn’t always so open to counselors. And the people around me, well, a lot of my folks still think counselors are for “crazyRise_and_Shine_rd 7 Strategies for Healing After Rape and/or Sexual Abuse” people. On top of that, as a person of faith, I’ve been told more times than many to “pray about it”.

I do pray about it. And sometimes that leads me to seek experts who have the heart and knowledge to aid me in healing and growth. Amen.

When people are injured in a car accident, they head to the er. Injured on the job, they seek medical attention. Most people don’t attempt to treat their own life threatening illnesses.

When people hurt, they seek relief from a professional. That is the healthy thing to do. Why should abuse Survivors suffer without the assistance of a professional?

Healing from abuse requires patience, effort, and work. It is all worth it. In the process, there is so much light to be discovered. In fact, there is so much you’ll have more than enough to share.