Trauma responses to sexual assault: What to know

Healing after a sexual assault takes time.

Those who’ve experienced sexual assault often describe the experience as shocking, scary, dehumanizing and destabilizing. Many experience profound grief afterward as they grapple to come to terms with what happened.

It’s very common to experience denial and self-blame, anger or rage (directed inwardly and/or toward others), deep sadness, anxiety and/or fear, and depression.

Some will have intrusive memories or flashbacks that make it difficult to function the way they used to before the assault.

Many survivors of sexual assault struggle with identifying themselves as survivors and may find it hard to recognize typical reactions to the trauma they experienced.

Knowing when to reach out for support beyond family and friends isn’t always obvious. But it’s possible to heal from what you’ve experienced, and it doesn’t have to be the defining feature of your life moving forward. If you’re experiencing any of the following symptoms, professional support may help with your healing.

Emotional responses

Everyday frustrations can get amplified in the aftermath of trauma. You may play the “blame game” or get caught up in the “shoulds” or the “if onlys.”

You may also feel:

• Anxious
• Guilty
• Ashamed
• Sad
• Numb
• Angry
• Easily overwhelmed
• Hyper-aware of your surroundings, like you’re waiting for the next bad thing to happen

Behavior

Trauma can often lead to certain behaviors.

Avoidance: This is one of the classic signs of trauma. You may have the impulse to avoid anything − people, places, things − that might remind you of what happened in some way. While it’s understandable that you would want to evade painful memories and feelings, avoidance puts constraints on your choices for how to move through the world. It actually prolongs suffering.

Isolation: You may struggle with the notion that to be strong you have to do it by yourself, and that’s actually what delays healing. It’s natural to have a hard time with trust when someone has robbed you of your ability to choose what’s next. But isolation reinforces feelings of shame and keeps a lot of people stuck in and overwhelmed by their pain.

Self-medicating: You may drink more often or use other substances to try to reach that numb place where you don’t have to feel or think about what happened.

Lashing out: You may become irritable or angry and lash out in ways that have nothing to do with what happened to you.

Taking risks: You might start impulsively engaging in behaviors that are out of character for you and are potentially harmful.

Thought patterns

You could experience changes in how you see yourself and how you see the world around you.

You might:

• Believe you’re damaged or broken
• View others as dangerous or untrustworthy
• Conclude that the world is an unsafe and terrifying place
• Have difficulty making decisions
• Have trouble concentrating as thoughts race through your mind

Physical symptoms

Sometimes it’s not obvious, but these symptoms can be a result of trauma:

• Loss of appetite
• Difficulty sleeping
• Headaches
• Rapid heartbeat
• Nausea
• Muscle tension
• Vivid dreams
• Changes in your libido

Seeking professional support for sexual trauma

No two survivors are exactly alike in terms of how they process the trauma of a sexual assault.

A trauma recovery professional can help you understand your symptoms, develop coping strategies and use evidence-based approaches such as cognitive processing therapy, prolonged exposure or eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) to place you on a path to healing.