Sadly, sexual assaults involving unwanted sexual contact or behaviour such as rape, groping or molestation are way to common.
Experiencing a sexual assault can have a big impact on your life and your functioning. You may notice the following difficulties.
Flashbacks
- You might experience flashbacks to the incidents, this is where in your minds eye you are reexperiencing the sexual assault.
- You might have nightmares about it and wake up in an intensly emotional state during the night.
- Thoughts of it will pop into your mind when you don’t want to think about it. You might either be triggered by a sound, smell, TV show etc and this might make you think about the sexual assault when actually you would rather not have to think about it.
Overwhelming emotions
The trauma of the experience initially can leave you feeling overwhelmed.
You might feel vulnerable, scared, angry, sad or even guilty. It is as if the dial on your emotional thermometer gets turned up really high and everything becomes intense.
You might find these emotions overwhelming and they can easily lead to a change in your normal behaviour. You might just feel like you are not the same person you were before.
Withdrawal
You might find yourself withdrawing from the world, from your friends, from your family.
You don’t want to be around any reminder of what happened.
Sometimes just being with people who haven’t experienced the same things that you have can feel too much. Sometimes it can all just feel like too much.