As many people know, April is sexual assault awareness month. Raising awareness seems good, but for many people the increased awareness means increased anxiety with no increase in power to do anything about the problem. In my own case, the opposite was true.

Eventually.

As one of many rape victims who locked the trauma away for decades, I thought putting the past behind me and refusing to think about it made me strong. Instead I was living with a festering wound that made me vulnerable to further exploitation. It also meant that the people around me could never really know me since the first defining moment of my life was a secret. My secret caused my beliefs and reactions to seem like they came out of the blue. At the core, I was alone even when it didn’t look that way from the outside.

For me the first step toward true happiness involved stepping back in time from a place of safety into a place I was terrified to go. As I let the memory of that long-ago trauma return (in small doses) I realized that while I took actions that were to my rapist’s advantage, I wasn’t the one responsible. I also realized how many times my rapist did or said something with the intention of shifting the responsibility from him to me. It was no accident that I blamed myself for too long.

But that was just the first step to happiness. The second and final step was ending the secrecy of my rape. However, this step was more of a stumble since I came out as a date rape victim through this headline in my local paper: New author writes about date rape form experience.

Instead of being run out of town as I feared, women I knew and total strangers told me that they too had been rape victims. For many of them, I was the first person they’d told. Eventually I encountered people who had nothing but hostility for me and what I had gone through, but to my surprise they no longer had the power to make me think less of myself.

Once I realized that I could accept the label of rape victim and be at peace with it, real happiness became a possibility for the first time since my first rape. It also gave me the ability to reach out to others impacted by rape in a genuine way. Every day of my life I am aware of sexual assault, but that makes the good in my life all the sweeter. Won’t you come join me and gain a healthy awareness of sexual assault?

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Post by Marcella Chester
Marcella would like to pimp http://www.abyss2hope.com

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