Relationships February 13, 2017
Thanks to rising attention in the media – ranging from outrage over Brock Turner’s short jail time to a TED Talk featuring a rape survivor and her rapist – you may think you know everything you need to about sexual assault. But if spirituality isn’t on your list of healing tactics, you still have some work to do.
The truth is, an American is raped every 98 seconds, and healing from sexual assault can take anywhere from months to years, according to RAINN (the Rape, Abuse, Incest National Network). Healing the wounds of unwanted sexual activity can rightfully sound like a long, hard road—but everyone deserves the chance to recover and be happy. That’s why ENTITY recently chatted with Dr. Mic Hunter, clinical psychologist and author of books like “Adult Survivors of Sexual Abuse: Treatment Innovations,” and Dr. Gregory Knapik, assistant professor of nursing at Notre Dame College who has published research on spiritual healing.
Are you – or a loved one – ready to move past guilt or depression and use your spirituality to heal? Here are five expert-backed ways spirituality can help survivors move forward from sexual assault.
Being exposed to sexual trauma can a wide variety of emotional, physical and psychological effects. In fact, reactions can range from emotional feelings of embarrassment, isolation, confusion and denial to psychological issues like PTSD, substance abuse, phobias and low self esteem, according to the National Sexual Violence Resource Center. You may want to try to forget or ignore the pain you’ve experienced, but, as Dr. Hunter explains, “You can’t ever go back. You can’t ever be a person who wasn’t sexually assaulted.” Pretending that your wounds don’t exist is only an added injustice to yourself.
READ MORE: Stanford University’s Latest Move is a Big Step Backward for Sexual Assault Survivors
After all, as Dr. Knapik says, “A person’s sexuality is a deeply intimate aspect of themselves.” This deep aspect of your sexuality is one reason why spirituality may be a strong balm since “a person’s spirituality is another deeply intimate aspect of themselves as a human being.”
This is not to say that spirituality is an instant panacea. In fact, as you face your sexual assault, you might also have to face new religious doubts. “If you believe that saying the right prayers or going to services X number of times a week makes you a good person, and that God rewards good people, getting raped may make you question that belief,” says Dr. Hunter. “You may ask: ‘Maybe there isn’t a God? Maybe God is punishing me? Maybe God doesn’t care?’ Trauma can disrupt the relationship [between believer and belief].”
We can’t deny that facing your experience may be painful at first. However, recognizing these wounds is the first step to restoration – and the first step to healing through spirituality.
So what happens if you’re trying to use your spiritual beliefs to heal, but your experience puts those beliefs into question? The best course of action may be to turn to your faith community for advice and support. In fact, both Dr. Knapik and Dr. Hunter believe that asking open-ended questions about a sexual abuse survivor’s spirituality “is fundamental for assessing and helping a patient/client” in Dr. Knapik’s words.
As Dr. Hunter explains, “I’m not telling them [patients for sexual assault] that they have to have a spiritual resource. I’m just inquiring about what resources they have besides me. It’s better that you have a lot of people. Even if they don’t attend church but believe in a higher power, it seems to me like that’s a great resource.”
READ MORE: Meditation and Yoga: Getting in Touch With Your Spirituality
One 2015 study from Baylor University discovered that religious participation could help survivors experience as much of a “normal life” as possible after sexual assault. How? They found that the more people connect their identity to a spiritual community, the more they trust others (and regain the trust typically lost after being assaulted). Another study even reports that religious coping – which includes relying on religious support as well as one’s own spirituality – is positively correlated with post-traumatic growth.
You may not have been close to your spiritual community before the assault, but research seems to suggest that the more support (religious or otherwise) you have access to, the better.
Perhaps the most controversial aspect of healing from sexual abuse is the idea of forgiveness. Some, like Mental Health Counselor Anastasia Pollock, believe that forgiveness only helps the person being forgiven. For Dr. Hunter, however, “Forgiveness doesn’t mean that what happened is OK. If it was, you wouldn’t need to forgive. But, people can forgive – their attacker or themselves – for their own benefit, and spirituality and religion can give methods or encouragement for forgiveness.”
READ MORE: Can Using Social Media Make You a Rapist? This Judge Thinks So
Several studies do show that forgiveness comes with plenty of health benefits. For instance, forgiveness has been found to lower people’s cortisol levels (AKA, the hormone that makes you feel uber stressed), boost their immune system, ease chronic pain, and lower their cholesterol and blood pressure.
Perhaps the biggest benefit, however, is how forgiveness can help your mind heal. You have every right to feel angry, depressed or sad after an assault, but you can either allow those negative emotions to control you or you can choose to use those feelings as motivation to move forward. As one rape survivor from South Africa said in a 2015 study, “Hating the person who raped me was going to retard my progress and pull me away from God, so I decided to forgive.”
Now, God may not play a huge role in your own decision to forgive (or your decision not to) – but you can still decide to not let others’ harmful actions define you and to turn to your spirituality for strength.
One could argue that our entire life is about finding meaning. After all, everyone knows the ending to our story: death. However, we still strive to do our best and find happiness in life because we believe that our life matters, regardless of the outcome.
READ MORE: Jessica Ladd on Saying ‘Yes’ to a New Sexual Assault Reporting System
Although sexual assault is obviously unacceptable and not “the best thing that could happen to people,” Dr. Hunter points out that spirituality can help sexual assault survivors “make sense” out of their experience. For instance, “they could decide that relationships matter to them more than status. A survivor could realize: ‘My life was organized about getting the corner office, and then I got raped and I decided that those things weren’t so important to me. What’s important to me is my family and friends – that’s what matters.'”
Studies have found that sexual violence can cause survivors to lose their sense of the meaning in life. As another South African sexual assault survivor explained, “The emotional pain of rape trauma was so overwhelming that I think I became dissociated from the environment around me. I needed to find something else which combined the incidents to make sense in some way.”
Spirituality has historically been been used to cope with war, birth and death, according to Dr. Hunter. So why should it not be just as beneficial when applied to sexual trauma?
Maybe you’re reading this article and nodding your head. Or, maybe you’re reading this and wishing these tips could apply to you – but you don’t have the “right” kind of spirituality to help. The truth is, the spirituality you use doesn’t matter. In fact, Dr. Knapik’s research found that, although most of the survivors incorporated spirituality into their healing process, they each had a “personalized and unique” routine. “For some, a personal relationship with God / Jesus Christ was central. For others, it was more of a ‘Higher Power’ conceptualization,” says Dr. Knapik. “For many, the social aspect of the spiritual practices were key, but prayer in some form was also very important.”
Although the number of Americans who identify as religious has dropped from 92 in 2007 to 89 percent as of 2014, Americans’ spirituality is on the rise. In fact, nearly 60 percent of surveyed Americans report feeling “spiritual peace and well-being” and 46 percent “wonder about the universe.” All of these fancy stats really just go to say that you don’t have to be religious to reap the benefits of spirituality.
READ MORE: Why Millennials Aren’t Claiming a Religion
When Dr. Hunter works with patients who have experience sexual assault, he always asks, “Tell about about the God of your understanding.” Your God is probably different from my God and maybe even your pastor’s God – if you have one at all. But, all that matters is that “your spirituality is working for you,” according to Dr. Hunter. Because, if your spirituality is working for you, you can “use your spiritual beliefs and community to get stronger so that you have a scar instead of an open wound.”
Understandably, overcoming sexual assault is a long, difficult process that requires a lot of commitment and time; however, once you turn your negative feelings into something positive, you’ll be stronger than before.
