How To Cope With Anxiety And Triggers After Sexual Assault – Real Tips For Survivors
- Oct 30, 2024
- 6 min read
Updated: Jan 20, 2025
Brianna Anderson is a well-known and highly skilled trauma resolution practitioner, energy healer, and educator. She is the CEO of Healing with Bri and is the founder of Ascend, an online healing program designed to help people resolve body trauma.
Surviving sexual trauma can leave deep emotional scars, impacting daily life and overall well-being. While healing is a personal journey that takes time, effective coping strategies can assist survivors in becoming more regulated and lessen the response to triggers. This will enable you to more quickly come out of trauma responses and cultivate resilience. This guide outlines practical approaches and ways to cope with sexual trauma.
To understand foundational steps to healing sexual trauma read more here.
Understanding triggers
Triggers are external stimuli or specific conditions that evoke strong emotional responses and activate the fight, flight and freeze states in the nervous system. They also can bring memories of trauma to the forefront.
Common triggers for survivors may include certain smells, places, times of day or night, people who look like the perpetrator or even specific interactions with others. Recognizing your triggers is the first step in learning how to deal with sexual trauma symptoms. Once you can clearly identify the triggers you can then begin to develop coping strategies to manage their effects.
Practical coping strategies for sexual assault trauma
1. Grounding techniques
Grounding techniques can help bring you back to the present moment when feelings of anxiety arise. They are important because they slow and settle the nervous system which helps the activated parts of the brain and body to recognize that the traumatic event isn’t occurring and that it is in the past.
When you get triggered and become consumed within a trauma response – what is happening is part of the brain and body think the trauma is happening in that current moment. So these grounding and settling exercises are extremely important.
Below is a list of some simple methods to try:
Deep breathing: Inhale deeply through your nose, hold for a moment, and exhale slowly through your mouth.
5-4-3-2-1 exercise: Identify 5 things you can see, 4 things you can touch, 3 things you can hear, 2 things you can smell, and 1 thing you can taste. I highly recommend you talk out loud while you do this exercise. The added benefit to speaking and hearing yourself speak is very effective at bringing you into the present time.
2. Journaling
Writing about your thoughts and feelings can be a powerful tool for processing trauma. Journaling allows you to express emotions, identify patterns or triggers, and track your healing journey over time. Consider writing prompts that encourage reflection on your experiences, feelings, and hopes.
Here are 3 journal prompts that can be used regularly:
How are you feeling today? List 3 emotions you are feeling right now. One way to begin to connect with yourself is to begin identifying how you feel throughout the day. Many people are disconnected from themselves and are not actually aware of all the feelings they have throughout the day.
How does it feel in your body to think about your sexual trauma? Does it feel heavy? Tight? Anxiety inducing? Do you feel a sensation in a specific spot in your body? Stomach? Back? Heart? Allow yourself to journal about the feelings and sensations that arise in your body when you think about this experience.
How do you feel about the person who sexually assaulted you? The answer to this question can differ by day. Are you angry? Heartbroken? Hurt? Scared? Allow yourself to write about how you feel about this person. Do not censor yourself and let the process be messy and unorganized. You likely have a lot of feelings, so allow yourself to release these feelings. Imagine that the energy is draining out of you onto the paper. You are not a bad person if you have really horrible things to say about this person, so write whatever you feel.
3. Physical activity
Engaging in physical activity can be a significant mood booster and stress reliever. Whether it’s walking, dancing, or practicing yoga, movement helps release pent-up energy and promotes the release of endorphins, improving your overall mental health.
Depression is one of the common trauma symptoms and in this state people can lack motivation and tend to become more stagnant in their bodies, making healing and recovery more challenging. One thing to try is to walk for 10 minutes a day outside, working up to 15 minutes and then trying this twice a day. Moving helps to shift your mind and energetic state.
4. Creative expression
Art, music, or dance can serve as therapeutic outlets for processing emotions that may be difficult to articulate. Creative expression allows for a unique form of communication and can be incredibly healing.
Anything that we do with our hands that requires attention to detail requires the mind to focus and move into a meditative brain frequency state, so creative expression using the hands is very soothing for anxiety or sympathetic activated states.
Here are 2 creative art prompts:
Paint, scribble, or draw your emotional state: Choose colors (markers, colored pencils, oil pastels, soft pastels, charcoal or a combination of these) that represent your current state, stressors or emotions. Allow yourself to scribble this out onto the paper. This directive is not about the final result and more about allowing you to process what is happening internally, placing it out on the paper.
The goal of this exercise is to help relieve stress while allowing you to explore your creativity.
My body map: Draw or print an outline of a human body. Choose colors that represent specific emotions or sensations that you feel in your body. Some examples of this could be: sadness, anger, disgust, fear, happiness, contempt, pain, etc. Color in the human outline where you feel each of these emotions/sensations. Make a key that labels what each color is. The purpose of this exercise is to visually express how you feel in your body. It can be helpful to see how much of each color you use. This is a great documentation exercise to do weekly or monthly to see if you are making progress in feeling better or if no change is happening.
5. Mindfulness and meditation
Mindfulness practices can help calm the mind and body. Techniques such as meditation, guided imagery, or focused breathing exercises can enhance your ability to stay present and reduce anxiety. Start with just a few minutes each day and gradually increase the duration as you become more comfortable.
6. Seeking support
Connecting with supportive friends, family, or support groups can make a significant difference in your healing journey. Sharing your experiences with others who understand can foster a sense of community and reduce feelings of isolation. Whether you choose to share your experience or not, connecting with safe and stable people can create a sense of co-regulation which is super important in feeling more regulated and emotionally balanced.
7. Self-care practices
Prioritizing self-care is essential for healing. This may include activities like taking a warm bath, spending time in nature, reading, or enjoying a favorite hobby. Spending time doing things that are soothing and nurturing helps to create balance in life.
Part of the issue with trauma is that the nervous system gets stuck in activated states and has a hard time flowing between the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system. Finding what rejuvenates you and making time for those activities regularly will help the nervous system to heal and become more fluid over time.
Building resilience
Each of the things listed above, when practiced regularly, can help survivors to become more resilient. Practice patience with yourself, and remember that healing is a journey, not a destination. Over time, these coping strategies can help you develop greater resilience and emotional strength.
Conclusion
Healing sexual trauma is a journey, but with the right coping strategies survivors can learn to become more regulated, especially when they are in a trauma response. Healing takes time so it is important to be gentle with yourself and remember that it’s okay to seek help along the way. Know that you are not alone, and healing is always possible.
The way to fully resolve the effects of sexual trauma is through a mind-body approach, and Somatic Experiencing is one of the most effective methods to do this. To learn more about releasing sexual trauma out of the body check out this podcast in which we spend more time diving into the topic.
To learn more about healing and resolving trauma from the body visit the Healing with Bri website.
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Brianna Anderson, Somatic Experiencing Practitioner
Brianna Anderson is a forerunner in Mind, Body & Spirit healing. She endured 10 major reconstructive hip surgeries in childhood that severely altered every aspect of self. This led her down a path of studying multiple forms of bodywork, spiritual and energetic healing, psychology, art therapy, breathwork and multiple forms of trauma resolution. She has since devoted herself to helping others heal and transform pain and trauma. Brianna is the CEO of Healing with Bri and the founder of Ascend, an online program designed to help people resolve body trauma.
