If you are--right now--having a difficult time coping, here is a quick list of ideas to help you make it through:

• Breathe
• Write in a journal
• Call a friend
• Watch a good movie
• Read a favorite book
• Listen to music that inspires you
• Take a soothing bath or shower
• Hug a stuffed animal
• Draw a picture or color in a coloring book
• Surf the Internet
• Take a walk
• Clean out a closet
• Exercise

Emotional recovery after rape can be an incredibly daunting challenge. In this section, we will share coping strategies we have found to be helpful in our own healing, as well as suggestions we’ve picked up over the years from other survivors. You’ll find suggestions for dealing with the day-to-day challenges faced in the aftermath of sexual assault as well as strategies for coping with special circumstances like anniversaries and triggers. Friends and family will also find suggestions for how they can help their loved one.

Our first thought on coping is one we learned early in our own healing—that you only need to make it through one day at a time. This thought isn’t a new concept, but it’s an important one because your mind’s tendency may be to scramble to “put all the pieces back together again”…RIGHT NOW. That’s natural, and unrealistic. It’s a sad fact that a rape that took only moments or hours to survive may take many months or even years from which to heal. You may have to remind yourself of this many times (maybe even many times in a day) that you only have to make it through the moment you are in right now. Today is the day over which you have control at this moment, so fight the urge to try to figure out when everything “will be all better again”. When you are dealing with a lack of sleep due to nightmares, flashbacks and fear, and you have a reduced ability to focus and function, coping through each and every day is its own huge accomplishment.

Another thing to keep in mind is that you can’t take care of everyone else. Yes, you may have a family to take care of. If this is the case, you might want to consider getting some help for a while to handle the daily tasks that need to be done. When family members and friends say “If there’s anything you need, please let me know.”—DO THAT! Tell them the things that would be helpful to you: if they would take your children for an afternoon so that you can have time to yourself after a counseling appointment, pick up a gallon of milk for you when they go to the grocery store, mow your lawn, walk your pets, help you pick up your house, stay the night with you when you are frightened, run a week’s worth of carpool for you or bring over a casserole for dinner next Tuesday evening. Whatever it takes to help you fulfill your responsibility to your family’s well being as well as your own.

If you especially trust someone, you might even ask them to talk with your spouse/partner or children, to support them through what is an emotional time for them as well. The people around you will be suffering because they love you and don’t want to see you in pain, but their emotions are not your responsibility. Knowing that they have someone to talk to when they need to will help you to focus your energy on your own healing.

This particular suggestion speaks to another important point we would like to make: you cannot take care of everyone else emotionally, either. Particularly in the hours/days/weeks following an assault--this is not the time for you to be “the strong one.” You need to focus on healing yourself. We know what it’s like to be wary of how a family member or friend will react upon hearing of our assaults and we can’t even count how many times we avoided bringing up the topic for fear of upsetting another person. We suffered in silence until we realized that we weren’t able to control how these other people handled the news of our rapes, but that we could control how we dealt with their response. If they responded negatively, we learned that we could cut them out of our circle of support (not necessarily our lives, just the list of people we called when we needed to talk). If they responded positively and empathetically, these were the people we counted on to help us through the rough spots.

With these main coping concepts in mind, click on the links to the left to read more specific suggestions regarding coping after sexual assault.