In some circles, there is an idea that if you are sexually victimized, then you must suffer for the rest of your life. This is not true. You will suffer only as long as habituated, self-injuring thoughts remain free to do their mischief. When you decide to no longer just sit there and take it, then you will have begun to heal.
Can you recall a time that you were physically injured - say a scraped knee while biking as a child? Okay. Can you recall the excruciating pain of that moment? Is it difficult for you to hold those memories in your mind? Probably not. You can recall the incident and even the terrible physical pain of the moment, but you are not re-traumatized by the memory.
Let's pretend that your community severely disapproves of scraped knees, that it is considered to be an extremely shameful thing -indicating that the injured person is some kind of lowlife. You would have hidden your injury, avoided medical care and kept the knowledge of the injury a secret for years. You would have covered your injury when going out into the community and you would have experienced shame. In short, there would be traumatic thinking associated with the memory of the injury. This traumatic thinking would be activated just by the memory of the injury.
Many young children are traumatized by injuries as slight as a scraped knee. Their childlike thinking tells them that something horrible has happened. Their emotional energies then take on this shape - fear and panic. Since scraped knees are not shameful in our world, your thinking about this kind of injury has grown up with you. It has not been suppressed under a blanket of shame, fear and secrecy. If you scraped your knee today, it would hurt physically as usual, but your grown-up thinking would process the event in an age appropriate manner. You would not be panicked.
Because you've had the opportunity to allow your thinking to grow up, the fear and panic thinking has not become habituated, as far as knee scraping goes at least. Scraped knees are a temporarily painful nuisance, not a tragedy.
are not traumatic to recall. I kid you not. This is possible.
Faulty beliefs and thinking errors remain effective, doing their damage, up until the exact moment that you truly see right through them, and with your own grown-up intelligence understand how untrue and illogical they really are. Habituated patterns may continue to recur again and again, but once you have achieved a breakthrough, you can do it again and again, with conviction, so that seeing the truth becomes the dominant habit.
Example: Some people experience pleasure or cooperate with their sexual victimization. Based upon these experiences, they falsely conclude that they are to blame and that they are some kind of sick, whacked-out, scum-of-the-earth, unlovable type of person. When they have come to a truer, more realistic, well informed understanding of sexual victimization they are naturally much less troubled emotionally. In the wonderful aha!!-moment during which they see through their own self-blaming and self-shaming, they become free of these insidious notions, at least until the next time that the old thinking reappears. However, the pathway to deliverance has been walked once, and it can be walked again and again, as the erroneous thinking gradually becomes defeated. That is the gig. The truth shall set you free.
The methods of doing this are straightforward, but require practice. I am sure that you understand this. You did not ride a bicycle perfectly the first time that you tried it, did you? Naturally, it took several tries and a lot of practice to get past the shaky, uneven stage. You practised even more before you were able to safely navigate in traffic. Ditto for the following method. Practice doesn't make perfect, but it does make accomplishments happen.
Remember the golden rule of truth-seeking: Don't assume what it looks like before you find it. Be open to discovering something new. You are able to make up your own mind anyway, that is something that cannot be taken away from you.