Moving on After Sexual Assault

Making Sense of a New Picture

Making Sense of a New Picture

Having been sexually assaulted, you have now worked through some of the challenges in your path. Now it is time to make sense of life, once again, and allow yourself to start being happy. 

Rachel worked hard to get over a traumatic sexual assault by her ex-boyfriend. She attended counselling sessions for two months and felt, after a while, that she had gained a handle on the situation and was “over it.” One day, seemingly out of the blue, someone walked past her in the street and she suddenly caught a whiff of the cologne her ex-boyfriend used to use. Instantly, she was reminded of the event in almost painful detail. She went home, cried for an hour, and proceeded to have an awful week. What happened to all her progress? Rachel realized that completely scrubbing away the memory of the entire event was an unrealistic expectation, and that the assault was not something to imagine never happened, but a part of who she was.

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Personal Progress

Depending on your own own unique situation, you may feel ready to move on after a traumatic event relatively quickly. Or you might feel better in waves, having good days and bad ones, moving on at your own pace. You may feel that you make progress and then the following week feel back to where you started. It’s all normal.

Your Techniques

A good idea, as you move forward, is to build up a toolkit of useful techniques and exercises that can help you through these rough spots. Try to keep in mind that, like Rachel, you can never go back into the past and erase what happened. But you can accept it and find healthy ways to move forward.

 

Full reference: 

(Jan 14, 2016). Moving on After Sexual Assault. Retrieved Jun 28, 2025 from Explorable.com: https://explorable.com/e/moving-on-after-sexual-assault

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