You arrive into each moment of your life with the complete collection of all of your beliefs about yourself, other people and life in general. You also arrive into every moment with your habituated ways of thinking about what is happening. This collection of beliefs and thinking habits is called your "mental set". You can't leave home without it.
Therefore, you do not experience life in an unbiased manner, but on the basis of how your mental set is constructed. Mental set growth is what we are interested in most of all. Let's consider how beliefs work.
A belief is something that you just take for granted, usually without even thinking about it. Take your belief in gravity for example. You take gravity for granted without thinking twice about it. When you got up this morning, did you question your belief in gravity and wonder if it would hold true for the whole day? When we believe something, we tend to not think critically about it. We usually do the opposite. We tend to automatically defend our beliefs when they are challenged.
Sexual victimization can leave you with a complex collection of beliefs, which are just taken for granted, unchallenged and possibly even unrecognized. A common one goes something like this: "I'm really a worthless piece of garbage." Suppose that you are convinced that this is true. What kind of shape will this thought create for your emotional energies? You guessed it - depression or shame. The effect of belief is increased when it is repeated, over and over again, in your mind, self-propagandizing yourself into an emotional hell.
I know a young person who had the following belief: "I'm an asshole." He would say this to himself almost every time he didn't do something perfectly. Together, we estimated how often in a day that he repeated that belief to himself - around 30 times a day. That's over 10,000 times a year! No wonder he didn't feel very good about himself much of the time. Your mental set is the sum of all of the habituated, entrenched beliefs and thought patterns that you use. It also acts as a kind of sieve or filter. Messages from other people that are consistent with it will be easily accepted. Messages that are not consistent with it are apt to be rejected or not taken seriously.
If you think highly of yourself, you are less likely to take an insult to heart. However, if you think poorly of yourself, you will not only take a put down to heart, but support it by muttering to yourself: "Yeah, I knew it all along, no one likes me. I'm such a loser." Bingo! Your emotional energies take on the shape of those thoughts - instant downer.
Are you getting the idea that your mental set is where the action really is? Good. You are on the right track.