Processing Sexual Trauma and Grieving My Abuser

Let’s get the trigger warnings out of the way. I’m going to be discussing sexual assault, death, grief, anxiety, and how they’ve affected me. No explicit details shared, but please only read at your own discretion.

I’ve wanted, and indeed tried, to talk about this for a while. Even as I lay in bed with my laptop as I begin this piece, I’m so tired. Therapy was quite tough today - I cried a lot. It wasn’t over anything I want to cover here, but this feels like the most important thing for me to talk about.

There’s no proper way for me to tread lightly on this.

In December 2018, a close friend sexually assaulted me. As I am sure the title and my TWs suggest, this person is no longer alive. There are people who know her name; I don’t wish to add to that list.

It's been over four months since I first started, from that particular tired session of therapy. There’s been more since. My mind, my mentality surrounding both myself and how to navigate writing this piece has changed a fair bit.

For a while, I didn't realise what had happened to me. In fact, my abuser profusely apologised to me at one point and I shut her down, telling her she didn’t have to apologise for anything. I didn’t know… I didn’t know. She couldn’t bring herself to correct me on that.

A couple of years later, I began making jokes about it while I was drunk. No one knew what to say. What can you say to that?

I am not sure what made the penny finally drop for me. Perhaps all that isolation and forced introspection from Covid had something to do with it. One day it just… became apparent to me; it was sexual assault. Not only that, but that same person had attempted it a second time, and I managed to not let it happen again.

My sense of self shattered. I felt violated, humiliated, emasculated. Within a fortnight, my mental health tanked. I couldn’t go outside without a meltdown. Three times I broke down on my 25th birthday (I was having a bit of an existential crisis but that’s a story for another time, maybe). I was afraid, I think, of being seen. Truly seen. By people. Because then those people who looked for too long would see that I’m damaged goods. Then they’d go.

(This is not how I feel now. I’ve had to do a lot of work on that.)

I’ve written about my mental health issues at length in the past. It wasn’t something I was unfamiliar with… but that was different. I didn’t sustain any physical scarring or bruises, but I could still feel it all over me. Like a stain that won’t rub out, no matter how much soap, shampoo, conditioner, disinfectant you want to use.

And it just… lingered.

And lingered.

Writing Nosedive was one thing that helped me process it all, and having it nominated for Vocal’s Fiction Award was so important. It was as close to saying what had happened to me without explicitly saying it. Having my art recognised, especially something so vulnerable and personal, felt validating. But it wasn’t enough to stave off the trauma. It didn't make the pain go away.

For a long time, I have struggled to be physically and emotionally intimate with anybody. I struggled prior to the assault. I have a... storied history of mental health issues; but the assault amplified it to the max.

In any intimate scenario, even as simple as a kiss, I could “disappear” from what should be a pleasant moment, to find myself back in the dark, back in that room. It’s… a horrible sensation. It didn’t matter who I was with. Even if I knew who they were and trusted them intimately, I’d still have moments.

I went through a myriad of feelings over the years; anger, despair, frustration, but I never brought them up to her. It was hard to predict how she would react, or how I would react. I wrote out the messages several times, but I always deleted them. After a fair bit of inner turmoil, I tried to carry on with my life. She was doing better herself. Decided that “one day” we’d probably have to sit and talk about it.

And then she died.

People in my life have died before, but nobody close to me as she was. The pain was crushing. I experienced grief twofold - the pain of losing a friend, and the pain of the closure I felt I could no longer get.

With hindsight, I feel like I tried to force myself into forgiveness. It was overwhelming‌; I had to forgive her. It was important that I forgave her so I could move on because I could not tell her it in person. For my sake, I had to. And to no one’s surprise… I am not ready to forgive her.

Grief started smearing the bad from view; made me forget she tried to do it to me a second time. No amount of apologies can make up for that.

I’ve been in therapy since July 2024. Though I’ve not spoken purely about the assault, it has informed me how my mentality and how it shifted reflects on a lot of other issues I have had growing up. Troubles with people pleasing, abandonment, to name a couple of things. I’ve had a lifelong habit of being too forgiving, for fear of upsetting the people that hurt me.

It meant I’d been holding onto a lot of pain, and a lot of anger, for people and situations long, long past. When I claimed to be “over” it all, I could never quite hide the venom and frustration in recounting things.

One thing that has helped, besides therapy, was writing a letter to my abuser. No one besides my therapist has read it, but it helped me get all of those tricky feelings out. I’m not writing this to tell people this is the number one trick to help heal such deep wounds. I am not a professional. This is just something that has helped me.

I’m not the person to ask whether my abuser was actually a good person, not anymore. Now, I understand I don’t owe her forgiveness. There’s no desire for her to be rotting in hell or any shit like that. It would be nice simply to be intimate with people I care about and not have any flashbacks, no matter how brief.

And I guess that’s sort of brought us to now, as I try to close this out. Still feel rather weird about writing this. I know I am not alone in my experiences, and anyone who has suffered either my abuser or any in their lifetime, my heart goes out to you. Hope you can find your peace, no matter what that looks like to you.

There’s this understanding I have that posting this will encourage people to reach out to me. I don’t know how this will go down, but I may not respond super fast. Please be patient with me.

One step at a time, and all that.