The article on sexual abuse in the previous issue of Magnet referred to the high prevalence rates of abuse in India and described some of its negative consequences. The article concluded with the poignant question Anita, a survivor of incest, asked after describing her pain and anguish: “I am carrying a lot of painful experiences and I want to be a completely changed person. Is it possible for me? The answer given to this question was an emphatic “Yes!”
Sexual abuse can damage not only the body but also crush the spirit. But healing and recovery is possible! Life can be good again!
The following excerpt from the letter that Anita wrote to her therapist after the conclusion of her therapy confirms this:
… I believe through you Jesus has healed me of all the pain, sadness and suffering that I was carrying for years in my life. I can feel my body is pure and chaste. I like it so much now. I feel all the dirt has gone away though there are areas still to be healed–very clearly I can see it… Now I can shed tears of joy, not of sadness, and I really did…. I will try to live a new life covered with peace and joy….
Anita was able to experience healing. She was able to experience herself as good again, and she was able to look to the future with hope and optimism.
Anita’s healing process was facilitated through therapy and the letters her therapist wrote to her. Not every survivor of sexual abuse is fortunate enough like Anita to get the help of a therapist or to have someone to accompany him or her in the recovery process. In situations where recourse to a therapist is not possible, there are a number of self-healing techniques that survivors of sexual abuse can use to heal themselves.
This article describes some of these pathways to healing. It is addressed primarily to survivors of abuse. However, others too can benefit from it. Some of the techniques and approaches described here are useful for healing from any kind of trauma.
PATHWAYS TO HEALING
The ultimate goal of healing is to free yourself from the negative consequences of the abuse; to accept the abuse as part of your personal history and transform your self-loathing into compassion for yourself; to develop a more positive sense of yourself, enabling you to look to the future with hope and live your life in more serene and satisfying ways. This requires recalling and emotionally re-experiencing the traumatic aspects of the abuse.
This process has to unfold slowly, safely and in an emotionally manageable way; it cannot be rushed. In this process, the issues that will come up and require working through include: your distorted self-concept and thought processes, painful emotions, such as uncontrolled anger, shame, anxiety and guilt, as well as the dysfunctional behaviours that flow from them; negative attitudes toward body and sexuality; impaired relationships; and difficulties around trust and intimacy. A number of steps you can take to heal yourself are described below.
- Break the Silence and Secrecy
Survivors of sexual abuse are usually reluctant to disclose the abuse to anyone, fearing that it could be hurtful to self or to others to talk about their traumatic experience. This may be true of you too. You might have kept your abuse experience secret, unwilling to disclose it to anyone for a variety of reasons.
You might be fearful as to what might happen if others come to know your abuse experience. You might fear that others may not believe your story and instead might blame you. You might also have been threatened by your abuser with dire consequences in case you disclose the abuse.
The shame you associate with the abuse can also prevent you from disclosure. Even though the abuse was something that was forced upon you, still you might feel guilty, falsely believing you were somehow responsible for what happened.
Moreover, your abuse experience is something that you might have tried hard to forget or even denied, and retelling it can be very painful.
If you are reluctant to disclose your abuse experience, you are not alone. One large study of women sexual abuse survivors showed that 23.6 percent of them had never discussed the abuse with another person. These women had kept their experience of sexual abuse secret for an average of 54.3 years! For those who had discussed the abuse, an average of 24.7 years had elapsed between the onset of the abuse and their first disclosure.
Disclosure of abuse is especially difficult for men survivors. Raphael’s case is a good example. Raphael was fifteen years old when he was sexually abused by a man. Raphael felt so ashamed of the incident that he kept it as a dark secret until he was fifty-two, never ever speaking about it to anyone. It was in group therapy that he gained the courage to unburden himself. Disclosures of sexual abuse by a couple of other participants and the response of the therapist and of the rest of the group to those disclosures gave Raphael courage to open up. It took him thirty-seven years to disclose the incident. That disclosure brought him so much relief and comfort: “A huge load has been lifted from me today. Just sharing my secret has brought me the healing I needed. I can now leave behind the shame and the burden I carried for so many years, and move on.”
In his book The Body Keeps the Score (2014), world famous trauma specialist Bessel van der Kolk observes: “Finding words where words were absent before and, as a result, being able to share your deepest pain and deepest feelings with another human being—this is one of the most profound experiences we can have, and such resonance, in which hitherto unspoken words can be discovered, uttered, and received, is fundamental to healing the isolation of trauma—especially if other people in our lives have ignored or silenced us. Communicating fully is the opposite of being traumatized.”
If you have been abused and have kept your abuse a dark secret and are burdened by it, you may want to leave the burden behind by disclosing the abuse to someone you trust. Ideal would be for you to work with a counsellor or spiritual director. You need to share only what you feel comfortable sharing and only to the extent you find comfortable sharing. If a counsellor or spiritual director is not available, you may confide in a trustworthy friend or elder.
A caution is due here. Disclosures of abuse do not always lead to happy consequences. You need to find someone who will respond empathically; otherwise you may be re-traumatised. This is especially true when disclosure leads to court cases. While some survivors find healing in the arrest and sentencing of the perpetrator, in many cases the legal procedure in itself can be more traumatising than the original abuse.
- Stop Blaming Yourself
Guilt is a common experience following abuse. Even though you were helpless before the abuser—after all, you were a child then—and the abuse was something inflicted on you against your will, still you might blame yourself for what happened and feel guilty. This happens especially because you might have experienced some pleasure and then concluded you might have wanted it. You need to know that the pleasure was involuntary. It was a natural consequence of your very sensitive sexual organs and sexual areas being stimulated. You were not responsible for it. You may have to say to yourself again and again that you were not responsible for the abuse and place the blame squarely where it belongs, on the abuser. It is the adult who is guilty, not the child. Someone on whom you were dependent or whose domination you were too weak to resist took advantage of your dependency and vulnerability. You need to hold him or her responsible and stop blaming yourself.
- Know You Are Not Alone
Often a sexual abuse survivor thinks that she or he is the only one who has had such an unfortunate experience. If you think this way, you can feel very isolated. The reality is that you are not alone. Research and clinical experience show that sexual abuse is the experience of many children, as well as quite a few women, as the article in the previous issue showed.
However, while abuse is the experience of many, your experience is unique to you. No one else would have had exactly the same experience. Everyone’s experience is different. However, you are not alone; many have had similar experience like you.
- Believe Healing is Possible
All the negativity that follows your victimisation might make you believe that your life now is useless, that you are condemned to remain a victim and suffer shame and distress all through life, that life will never be normal for you, that healing of your pain and distress is not possible. You may believe that, as one survivor described it, “It’s only going to be downhill.” Such negative and defeatist thinking is part of the cognitive distortions that follow victimisation.
Yet, healing is possible; life can be good again. But you have to work at it; working at it requires effort.
Many survivors have been able to work through the effects of their trauma and are able to lead normal and productive lives. You too can. You need to believe it first and then do your part in order to experience the healing.
- Don’t Quit!
Healing from the effects of abuse takes time and involves pain. Sharing your story, breaking the silence and the secrecy, in itself can bring about some healing, but deeper healing involves effort, time and also pain. This is especially true in the early stages of your recovery. Normally the symptoms get worse, that is, you will experience them more acutely, in the early stages of the healing work before getting better.
This can lead to discouragement. That is what happened to Daisy, who was in therapy to deal with her sexual abuse experience. She found the working through too painful and decided to quit. It was only the patient encouragement and reassurance by her therapist that brought her back. Ultimately she was glad she decided to stay with the recovery process. It did heal her.
You too may begin to feel, after you have begun working at your recovery that it is not worth going through the pain involved and may want to stop. This would be a mistake. It is important not to quit the healing work because of the initial distress you might experience.
- Educate Yourself on the Nature of Abuse and its Effects
It is helpful for you to be informed about sexual abuse and its effects. You can read about the nature of abuse, its consequences, particularly the traumatic symptoms, such as flashbacks, nightmares, dissociation, numbing, intense emotional reactions and hyper-vigilance. There are also books written by abuse survivors sharing both their victimisation and their healing experiences. These can provide you with useful insights and means for healing yourself. Today much useful information is available in books and on the Internet.
It is also useful for you to attend seminars and workshops on sexual abuse and healing.
- Express Your Feelings
Sexual victimisation evokes a number of painful emotions, especially anger, grief, fear, guilt and shame. Because these are painful and difficult to live with, you might expend lots of energy in trying to suppress them. However, your healing process is facilitated when you allow yourself to acknowledge these feelings, allow yourself to experience them and express them in helpful ways. This way you reduce their toxic impact.
There are a number of techniques that are useful not only for facilitating the expression of feelings but also for bringing about healing in other ways as well. Among these techniques, two that you can do on your own are Expressive Writing and Expressive Drawing.
Expressive writing is a very easy yet effective technique. It consists in focusing on your abuse experience for a while and then writing freely whatever comes to mind (Pennebaker, 1990). It is important not to censor any thought, feeling, memory or desire but give free expression in writing to anything you experience. Such writing heals by bringing about changes in the traumatic memory tracks in your brain.
You need to set aside about fifteen minutes daily for about two weeks for this exercise. Focus on the abuse experience for about 7-8 minutes and then, for another 7-8 minutes, write freely whatever comes to mind. You can throw away or burn what you have written. The healing is in the writing itself.
It is important to note here that, although such writing may look simple, yet it is not always very easy to do. Focusing on the abuse and writing about it can bring up some very powerful distressing emotions. However, if you are able to endure this distress and complete the process, it is most likely you will experience considerable healing.
Anthony, a 28-year old seminarian, was first abused when he was a four- or five-year-old by a cousin. The cousin passed Anthony on to a friend of his who also abused him, for about four years. And the abuse continued… by different people, even after he entered a seminary. All the abusers were men, some of whom persons he had gone to in desperation for spiritual or psychological help. The continued abuse distressed him so much that he even attempted suicide. Anthony described the effect on him of doing the Expressive Writing exercise suggested to him (see box).
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Expressive Drawing is another simple yet useful technique. As in the case of expressive writing, focus on your traumatic experience for a while and then use crayons to draw whatever you feel like. A five-step technique can then be used to process the drawing. These steps are: (1) See Clearly; (2) Free-Associate; (3) Feel the Emotional Impact; (4) Discern the Message/Invitation; and (5) Give a Caption.
After you have completed the drawing, you have to look carefully to see all that there is in your drawing. Many images in the drawing will come into focus only when you take time to contemplate the drawing. In the case of one survivor who did this exercise, what she at first thought was an airplane became a sexual organ when she took time to look at her drawing more carefully. And that image opened up a whole gamut of emotions in her.
In the free association stage, you allow the various images, shapes and colours in the drawing to trigger in you any associations in terms of memories, thoughts, feelings, longings, fantasies and so on.
In the emotional impact stage, you get in touch with the mood and feelings the drawing and the associations to it evoke in you. For example, the mood it creates in you could be one of sadness, anger, confusion, joy or excitement and so on.
In the discerning stage, you try to listen to and discover what the drawing is telling you.
Finally, you give the drawing a caption—a word or short phrase that captures what that drawing means to you or represents for you.
One woman who fought back to avoid being raped, at first could only stare at the crayons and the paper. She then grasped a bunch of red crayons and kept circling around forcefully digging into the paper. When she stopped, there was just a heavy blotch of red on the paper. When asked what she saw, she said: “blood on boil.” When asked what emotions were arising, she said: “Rage, rage, rage!”
Such expressive drawing and contemplation of it can help you tell your story in pictures when speaking or writing about it is difficult. More than this, drawing like this and processing it a number of times through the methodology described above will gradually loosen the grip of the trauma, reduce distress and bring about healing.
Free body movements, such as dancing freely to music after focusing on the abuse experience for a while, also help to loosen and free the somatic memories of the trauma embedded in the muscles and tissues of your body.
What is important in all these techniques is that you give yourself permission to feel what you need to feel and give expression to the feelings freely.
- Learn to Calm Yourself
As you begin to narrate the horrendous experiences, or start doing the exercises described above, you may have painful flashbacks and can re-experience the distress—nausea, fear, shame, etc.—that you had experienced during the victimization, and begin to be overwhelmed. If that happens, you can stop the exercises or narrative for a while, calm yourself down and do them again later when you feel some level of control.
There are a number of simple techniques you can use to calm down and stay present. Learning to breathe calmly and stay in relative physical relaxation helps. You can take a few slow, deep breaths, inhaling through the nose and exhaling very slowly (exhalation should be longer than inhalation) through the mouth. As you do so, focus on what is happening to the breath and in the body.
Another simple exercise is grounding. If you are sitting, place both your feet flat firmly on the ground and feel the ground beneath your feet. Feeling your feet touching the floor and focusing on that for a while can make you feel more grounded and in the present.
You can do the same exercise standing. You can give further depth to the grounding by imagining yourself to be a tree standing firm on the earth. Feel its roots doing down from your feet.
- Pay Attention to Your Body Sensations
You can also focus on the body sensations you are experiencing, such as pressure, heat, cold, muscular tension, tingling, feeling hollow and so on. With focused attention to body sensations, you can recognise the ebb and flow of your emotions, and with that gain increased control over them (van der Kolk, 2014).
Focusing on body sensations is something that you can do even when you are not overwhelmed and can in itself be a healing exercise. Once you become aware of your body sensations, the next step is to label them. E.g. “When I feel anxious, I feel a crushing sensation in my chest. Or I feel a chocking sensation in my throat.” Focus on that sensation for a while and notice how it changes into something else when you do that.
Focusing on the body can be done with the mind, but also by touch—placing the palm at the location, or tapping the area with the fingers or palm. As you focus on a particular sensation, it might change into some other sensation, or may move to a new location in the body. Focus on the new sensation wherever it is felt and continue to focus on various sensations for a while until you experience some pleasant sensations, such as warmth, tinkling, flow of energy and so on, and a sense of calmness/wellbeing emerges.
- Take Care of Yourself
Sexual victimisation can affect your body, mind and spirit. You may develop a very negative attitude especially toward your body. You may feel your body is dirty and no good. You may even believe that you were targeted by the abuser because you had an attractive body. Consequently, you may try to make yourself as unattractive as possible to ward off any future attack. You might neglect grooming, hygiene and exercise. You might dress carelessly. You might over-eat or under-eat to make yourself look fat or thin, and that way less attractive to others.
In this context, it is very important that you not only try to get rid of your distorted thinking about your body but also engage in self-nurturing and self-caring activities. You have to learn again to take care of your appearance, hygiene and health and to participate in social and recreational activities. Give yourself permission to have fun and enjoy life.
You need to develop some compassion for your body that has suffered so much. You need to pamper your body a little to make it feel good. Eat healthy and nourishing food. Wear comfortable clothes, especially inner wear. This is one way of soothing areas of the body that might have been violated or hurt.
- Confront Your Abuser
It is sometimes helpful to confront your abuser. Tell him or her whatever you feel like telling them, such as how you feel about what happened, how it has impacted you, how you now feel toward them and so on.
You can do this directly in person. If you plan to confront in person, it is good to have with you someone you trust and with whom you have shared your story to provide you support. You can also do this through a letter or a phone call.
You should do this confrontation only after you have done some working through of your trauma and feel less overwhelmed by it. Otherwise the confrontation itself might turn out to be very distressing for you. You also need to consider how safe it is for you to confront your abuser. It is important that you do not expose yourself to further victimisation and trauma.
When done effectively and safely, such confrontation helps you not only to vent your feelings but also helps you regain the control that the abuse had taken away from you.
- Spiritual Approaches
It is also important to note here that this article has only described psychological pathways of healing. However, psychological work is only one aspect of healing the whole person. There are other pathways to healing, especially spiritual approaches, such as prayer, retreats and the sacraments. It is very helpful for you to make use of these to facilitate and enhance your healing from the effects of sexual abuse. Spiritual practices can be deep and powerful. They need to be rightly understood and practiced. When genuine, whole-hearted and exercised in healthy ways, they can be the most healing experience of all.
Useful books
Bass, E., & Davis. L. (1994). The courage to heal: A guide for women survivors of child sexual abuse. New York: Harper Perennial.
Gil, E. (1988). Outgrowing the pain: A book for and about adults abused as children. New York: Dell Publishing.
Halprin, D. (2003). The expressive body in life, art and therapy: working with movement, metaphor and meaning. London & Philadelphia: Jessica Kingsley Publishers.
Pennebaker, J. W. (1990). Opening up: The healing power of expressing emotions. New York: Guilford.
van der Kolk, B. (2014). The body keeps the score: Mind, brain and body in the transformation of trauma. London: Penguin.
For reflection
- What are the significant learnings or insights you have gained from this article?
- If you are a survivor of abuse, which of the approaches suggested here have you tried? What was the result?
- Which of the other approaches described here do you think might be good for you to try?
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