Reclaiming All That Was Taken From Me

According to the Dept of Justice 2016 statistics, every 98 seconds an American is sexually assaulted. This translates to 1 out of every 6 women and 1 out of every 33 men experiencing an attempted or completed rape in their lifetime.  For both college students and non-students, in about 80% of sexual assaults, the victim knew their offender.

  I am one of these statistics.

My rapist wasn’t a stranger who attacked in the dark, he was someone I knew for nearly four years, a classmate, someone I trusted and considered a friend.  Today, I will speak about how my recovery changed my life.

 Before the assault, I was a naïve and highly driven 20yr old. Twice I had made the college dean’s list, was in the honors program and was on course to successfully transfer to UCLA as a psychobiology major with a 3. 8 GPA.   After the rape, my GPA fell as low as a 0.333.  I no longer knew who I was or who I wanted to be. It took all of my energy just to make it through each day.  But I couldn’t. Someone had taken everything I knew and believed in and left nothing for me to hold on to.  A rape leaves every aspect of your identity subject to destruction and you must rebuild it if you are to survive.  There is no universal passage through the trauma, suffering or healing.  The path to recovery is a personal journey that looks different for each survivor. I can only speak to my own recovery. Recovering from rape changed my life by learning how to manage my PTSD, rebuild my sense of self and to become resilient.  First I will talk about how I learned how to cope with my PTSD, second I will cover how I rebuilt my sense of self, and lastly, how I became resilient.

During my recovery, I continually faced obstacles with my PTSD and had to learn to manage the emotional and physical symptoms.  PTSD can be emotionally crippling because the flashbacks and nightmares keep you trapped in the trauma.  Flashbacks are unwanted, recurrent memories of the trauma that can lead to negative intrusive thoughts. Through years of therapy, I learned to use stress inoculation therapies such as exercising and surrounding myself with positive and comforting people in order to reduce stress reactions. I also learned to use a cognitive behavioral therapy technique called reframing to counteract the negative thinking and ruminating thoughts.

Next, the nightmares are frightening because they involve both emotional and physiological reactions. I learned to use image rehearsal therapy in order to change the ending of the dream to a more positive outcome. I also learned to use orientation techniques to ground myself back to reality after the nightmares through journaling. Moving on to the physical effects of PTSD, you can have a profound impact on your health and how you interact with the world. I experience increased resting heart rate that went from 85 to 110 bpm. The trauma had reset my nervous system.  I tried mediation and yoga to slow down my heart rate. It did not return to its previous rate but o/time I learned to adjust to it.  I also experienced shortness of breath due to the heightened sense of arousal.  I tied a red string on my right index finger to remind me to breathe more often.  Eventually, I bought this silver ring with the engraving “Nothing is Impossible” as a constant reminder to breathe and always be a present in the moment as a survivor.

Unlike the training and therapy techniques I learned to cope with the symptoms of PTSD, there was not a clear path to rebuild my sense of self.  Next, I will tell you about this part of my journey. When I began to rebuild my sense of self was when my life completely turned around.   I had to reclaim myself through forgiveness which for me lead to some internal understanding of the event.  It felt like my worth was determined by my rapist, that my body was not my own and my choices were meaningless. Forgiving my rapist and myself allowed me to regain some control over my life.   In letting go, I gained so much more insight into who I was, what I wanted and what was most important to me.  Learning about myself and my strengths through this experience allowed me to apply that knowledge to my everyday life.  I finally felt like I had nothing to hide and he couldn’t take anything else away from me.  Making sense of the event and reframing the negative allowed my goals to come in to focus again.  I realistically redefined my goals and they were no longer blocked by feeling ashamed or by my PTSD symptoms. I was no longer a victim but a survivor and I could take back my life. I could now see that my degree from UCLA would mean so much more than graduation, it would mean that I had not only survived but thrived.

So far I have told you about how I managed the PTSD symptoms, and how I rebuilt my sense of self. For my final point, I will focus on how I became resilient. Realizing that I am a survivor allowed me to believe in my ability to deal with whatever came my way. When you bear the unbearable, there isn’t anything you can’t overcome.  After becoming subject to academic dismissal at UCLA, my resiliency kept me driven. With the help of my doctors and professors, I successfully appealed my dismissal and went from a 0.333 to a 3.2 GPA with a year.  In 2008, I walked across the stage and received my bachelor’s degree.  I have made great strides and growth not just as a person but also as a more adaptive student.  Most recently, even after 11 denials, I did not give up on gaining admission into a graduate nursing program.

In spite of all the challenges, by reconstructing the negative narrative of my rape I gained control over my PTSD symptoms, rebuilt a stronger sense of self and became resilient. To conclude, after 14 yrs., finally publicly speaking about my recovery allows me to use my experience as a positive platform to reverse the stigma of rape and hopefully give a voice to other survivors. Just because injustice, harm or evil is done to you, doesn’t mean you also have to become these things.  You have a choice and only you are in control of the person you choose to become.  I wouldn’t change what happened to me because through this journey I found a gift; I found what I was truly capable of.