How To Reclaim Your Life After Sex Assault
- Brainz Magazine
- Mar 13, 2023
- 4 min read
Written by: Oksana Saprykina, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
Are you a victim of sexual assault? Do you have after-effects from your assault? Find it difficult to trust others? Afraid it can happen again? Are you constantly on alert? Feeling anxious? Nervous? These are all common occurrences after a sexual assault.
The Emotional After-effects
Difficulty trusting new partners
Panic attacks
Generalised anxiety
Compulsions such as cleaning, having to keep things in order, hoarding, etc.
Sexual problems like vaginismus, inability to orgasm, loss of interest in sex, etc.
Feeling guilty that you didn’t do more to stop your attacker
Feeling dirty or unclean
Not being able to remember certain parts of your life
Sexual assault is an assault of a sexual nature, or a sexual act committed without your consent.
If you have been sexually assaulted, either recently or sometime in your past, it is important to resolve those hurtful, upsetting and maybe frightening emotions that surround the incident. By acknowledging them and resolving them with the gentle help of a trained hypnotherapist, it is possible to heal the hurt so that you can have the happiness you deserve again.
Survivors of sexual-abuse will commonly describe how they found ways of separating themselves from their bodies as unpleasant things happened to them. These experiences of dissociating the mind from the body is a form of dissociation and help people to protect themselves from trauma. These are often described as being akin to out of body experiences and are a form of hypnosis.
Dissociation was probably your defence mechanism when it was all happening. It’s a form of self-hypnosis.
Abusers are so manipulative that the victim is often left with the belief that they were somehow to blame. Perhaps they should have fought back. Perhaps they should have told. The fact that they did what they thought best at the time is forgotten and that little child I judged as if they should have acted with all the power and agency of an adult. The self-judgement can be remorseless and unending.
Effective Recovery With Rapid Transformational Therapy
You can recover fully from the after-effects of sexual assault and lead a perfectly happy life again. As a trained RTT therapist, I regularly see clients who have experienced an assault of this nature at some stage of their lives. It gives me great satisfaction to see a client, after a few sessions of RTT hypnotherapy, able to speak openly about their traumatic experience without those old negative emotions. This is the point at which you make room for positive, happy emotions in your life again.
Hypnosis is a state of mind which we all attain on a regular basis. The deeper states are similar to those times when we know we’re falling asleep but haven’t quite crossed that line. Lighter states are found in daydreaming.
The relevance of hypnosis to the treatment of sexual assault derives from two sources: the fact that hypnotic phenomena are mobilized spontaneously as defences during assault, becoming part of the syndrome of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and the usefulness of formal hypnosis in treating PTSD. The role of dissociative defences during and after traumatic experiences is reviewed; an analogy between the major elements of formally induced hypnosis ‒ absorption, dissociation, and suggestibility, and the major elements of PTSD ‒ is drawn. Special problems relevant to sexual assault in childhood are discussed, including extreme self-blame and a profound sense of personality fragmentation. Uses of hypnosis in the treatment of sexual assault victims are reviewed, with an emphasis on helping such patients restructure their memories of the experience, both by reviewing them with greater control over their physical sense of comfort and safety and by balancing painful memories with recognition of their efforts to protect themselves or someone else who was endangered. The use of a split-screen technique in hypnosis is described with a clinical example. Special considerations in such treatment, including the traumatic transference and forensic complications of such psychotherapeutic work, are enumerated.
When you have learned to forgive that younger self for the things he or she suffered then the rest of your emotions will begin to fall into line.
You can learn new ways of dealing with emotions on a ‘here and now’ basis so that you’ll no longer need to repress them and suffer the consequences of their exploding into rages, tears or anxiety/panic attacks.
Hypnotherapy could help people to leave anger, anxiety, depression or that strict sense of ‘I must always be in control’ behind them – once and for all.
Without going into a detailed all that’s necessary to know is that I suit the therapy to your needs. You’ll find rapid changes occurring as each week goes by, and those changes will quite likely continue beyond the end of the therapy, so that you can finally get back to enjoying life again and realising that you are safe today.
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Oksana Saprykina, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Oksana Saprykina is an established Certified Hypnotherapist practicing an award-winning method ‒ Rapid Transformational Therapy (RTT) taught by Marisa Peer. Oksana lived and worked in four countries on different continents. She speaks three languages fluently and works with clients around the world. Oksana is an expert at identifying her client's talents and passions and converting them into the career of their dreams. She has the skill and ability to make a difference in someone's life in an extremely rapid straightforward way. She helps clients unblock and release old behaviors or beliefs and allow that person to take back the life they dreamed of but never believed that was available to them.
