If you have Experienced Sexual Violence in the Past

It is important to realise that the trauma of an attack will have both short-term and long-term effects on your life. Expert support in examining and dealing with these effects is your right.

Contact with others who acknowledge and understand your experience and how it has affected you will break the isolation you may feel.

Counselling gives you time and space to explore your feelings. The aim in counselling is to help you to reach your full potential, so that your experience of sexual violence no longer controls or overwhelms your life, behaviour and choices.

The counsellor is a professional, so you do not need to protect her or him from the intensity of your feelings or the details of your trauma, as you might feel you need to do with family members or friends you confide in.

You can see a counsellor in a Rape Crisis Centre even if you do not report to the police or go for a medical examination. It does not matter how long ago the assault happened.

The pace of healing is different for each individual. It is affected by such things as the duration and intensity of the sexual violence, your relationship to the person who assaulted you, previous traumatic experiences and the degree of support you have outside of the counselling setting.

You may be with a Rape Crisis Centre for 6 sessions or 60. People often begin with weekly sessions and then spread out the time between sessions as they become better able to manage on their own.

Yes. The first time you go to a Rape Crisis Centre, a counsellor will explain how they work. After that introductory session, the counsellor assigned to you will contact you and normally work with you for as long as you need.

What counselling hopes to achieve is that the event becomes something which no longer takes over or controls your day-to-day life. Forgetting sexual violence is not a realistic or even desirable goal of counselling.

You may find that, in the course of counselling, you begin to develop positive aspects of yourself that have lain hidden or under-developed. Counselling will help you to understand that what you are experiencing is a normal reaction to an abnormal event. This does not in any way minimise the range and intensity of your feelings but reaffirms your normality in the context of what has happened to you.

The information in this section has been adapted, with thanks, from material by Rape Crisis Ireland.