What does a sexual assault survivor look like to you?

“I am a survivor of child sexual abuse,” I say. Then, to ease the discomfort of sharing something so intimate, I quickly follow up with, “I’m healing from it: I am going to therapy, and I’ve done a lot of work on my own.”

To this, I’ve received variations of: “I’m so sorry”; “Thank you for telling me”; “I’m proud of you for engaging in the healing process, for being proactive”; “You are so strong.” Then, eventually, “I just never would have suspected you were a survivor.”

Repeatedly hearing that I don’t fit into what others imagine survivors to be, I realized that we all have a survivor in mind. This survivor is visibly traumatized; has low self-esteem; doesn’t recognize, differentiate, or express their feelings; experiences depression and anxiety; demonstrates their trauma through their body (eating disorders, illnesses, disconnection); has a lower capacity for intimacy; is hypersexual or not sexual at all. We think this survivor to be all survivors because this imagining has been popularized, mythologized, so that we start to believe that sexual trauma is uncommon, only happening in certain places with certain people.

The reality is entirely different.

The truth of the matter is that when “one out of three (or four) girls and one out of six boys are sexually abused by the time they reach the age of eighteen[1],” it is impossible and dangerous to generalize about what a survivor looks like[2]. As a survivor, you can experience any of the above effects of abuse, or you can experience none of them. You can cope in many different ways, too. You might present a façade to the world, use humor or wit as a defense, dissociate, space out, avoid people or constantly surround yourself with people, create chaos or maintain control at any cost, underachieve or overachieve. You may exhibit self-destructive behavior or you may be the most reliable person you know. 

There is no mold; there is no formula. You can never know; you can never assume.

For a long time, I held strongly to the belief that I did not need to engage in healing of any sort because I was not the survivor I had in mind. The first time I shared with someone details of the trauma from my childhood, I followed it up with, “But none of that really affects me. It happened, it’s over, and I’m good.” It took nearly a decade after that initial admission to say, “No, I think it does affect me. Just not in the ways I thought it would.”

In addition to blinding survivors to the deeply embedded effects of abuse, this mythic imagining of the survivor creates self-doubt. I found myself wondering: Was it really that serious? Did it really happen? Do I really need to put this much energy into healing? The secrecy and shame around abuse is enough to create these doubts; it’s even more dangerous to reinforce it with assumptions about what surviving should look like. 

What I’ve learned through my healing work is this: There is a diversity of experiences when it comes to abuse and trauma, and they all count. Abuse, in any form for any period of time, is serious. It really did happen, even those things that we only have inklings about because we have forgotten or blocked out the details. Most importantly, healing is worth it. Every ounce of energy we can put into it is worth it because the rewards are tenfold. And I, we, deserve to heal. 

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Description of the effects of child sexual abuse and ways to cope came from The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse by Ellen Bass and Laura Davis. 

[1] The Courage to Heal 4th edition, 2008, p. xxiii

[2] CSA is generally under-reported, so these statistics vary widely depending on the study. For more recent statistics from several different studies, you can visit the National Center for Victims of Crime.

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A version of this piece was first published in Vagina, Winter 2016, Issue #17.