It’s okay to be a victim
Tags: Trauma, Self Improvement, Sexual Assault, Self-awareness, Psychology

Being a survivor of sexual assault is not the only way.

I get it, to have your fundamental boundary violated by someone who did what they pleased without your consent is one of the most terrifying, disempowering, and ultimately confusing things to happen to a person.

It creates anger, disbelief — many different mostly uncomfortable feelings and you want it to stop. To take yourself out of the role of victim and to take back some of your power and say that you survived this attack is a way of taking back a part of you that you did not give. This is the way most supportive staff will talk about people who have experienced sexual assault. This is the word a lot of writing about people who suffer the effects of a disrupted life as a result of sexual assault will use. And I really understand why. And I don’t think it’s a wholly bad thing.

But I want to make the case for being a victim and allowing yourself to feel hard-done-by, picked on, exploited, disempowered, scared and sad. And whatever else comes up as a result.

Shame

Sometimes I feel like refusing to call people who have experienced sexual assault a victim shames the part of them that feels that way.

The part of a person who has been attacked, had their choice removed and been betrayed by another human is allowed to feel sorry for themselves. They are allowed to feel the injustice and get angry about it.

When we go straight to calling them a survivor, we are again taking their choice away in how they see themselves, of how they feel themselves, if they even can feel themselves. It’s an implicit message that if you see yourself as a victim you are wrong to feel this way.

Missing the point

Positive psychology and spiritual bypassing are phrases I see more of each day. To instantly go to looking on the bright side of things, of finding the silver lining and striving for growth, misses the biggest point: we have ALL the feelings because they ALL need to be felt. They are all a part of the human experience, the beauty of the richness of life really. It feels almost trite writing that out, but I do wholeheartedly believe that no part of our daily experience should ever be negated. Any feeling we have is a message from our body about what we need. And to jump straight to moving forward, to leaping off our trauma into greatness and strength creates potential problems for the future and ignores the most vulnerable parts of ourselves. Not just ignores, outright suppresses them, banishing them to a place far away to make them more acceptable.

If you feel like you have been a victim of a violation, you probably feel like you need comforting, like it would be great to allow someone to look after you, even if you’re not able to let someone do that, it would be useful to acknowledge that and maybe even try to give yourself the thing you would like another person to. If you are instantly called a survivor, do you feel like you can feel sad? Would a survivor feel powerless and lost? No, they would get on and live their life and show their abuser they weren’t conquered by them. Again, not a bad thing, but I think this is a matter of timing. And this timeframe is not linear.

Experience it all

Allowing yourself, or allowing people in your life that have experienced sexual assault to describe themselves as a victim and experience all the unpleasantness that goes with that and be uncomfortable about it is a part of the process of moving through the trauma. It isn’t a permanent state, but I do think it’s a necessary one.

A time will come when strength and movement forward and ‘I’ll show them’ feels absolutely correct and will help you heal/push through/grow/move on/(insert appropriate next step).

But again, these states will not stick, they will change, adapting to the new you will take effort and energy, and you might just get sick of pushing, get caught up in the injustice of it, and feel like this thing that was done to you is too much to bear and you feel like a victim again.

A big ask

All of this is easier said than done. Especially for the everyday people in your life. And asking a professional who is supporting you through the after effects of an assault to allow you to be a victim is probably a risk too far. I think my aim for this is to raise awareness to the fact that an alternative is possible.

I also want to make it clear that if the professional that is supporting you is a psychotherapist or a counsellor and they don’t allow you to use the word victim to describe yourself that that is their discomfort. If a therapist ever tries to change the words you are using, unless this is in an exploratory way, you are quite within your right to refuse and to challenge them. Being able to challenge your therapist is a big deal and probably needs an article in itself.

You are the only you you have

Describe yourself however you feel is right. Be whoever you are however uncomfortable it makes other people. As long as you aren’t hurting others, your experience is valid and deserves to be communicated the way that feels correct for you.

And if it does feel too much to challenge all those external people, silently allowing yourself to describe you as you feel and offer compassion to those hurt parts, then you’re repairing a bit of what was injured.