Rape recovery is not a direction you need to go in. It's a country you need to explore blindfolded, guided by the voice of someone who knows the land.

Back when I was young and struggling with rape-related PTSD, people used to throw $1 advice at me all day and once more for dessert: “Stop thinking about your rape. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. Trauma begets trauma. PTSD is a sign that you're obsessing about this assault. Try dance classes. Try homeopathy. Try hypnosis. Here. Have a hug, and while I'm rescuing you, tell me about that night in minute detail. It'll cure you. I read about it on WebMD”

A lot of that advice sounded wise, so I twisted myself into a hundred different shapes trying to apply it. When none of it worked, I saw myself as a failure and PTSD as incurable. Every trite suggestion corroded my hope a little more. I felt ashamed and weak.

I spent years talking myself into a festering puddle of trauma because a boyfriend with half a psychology degree said exposure therapy was the most effective cure. It didn’t work quite the way he thought it would. Its only effect was to freeze me in my trauma five years longer than I had to. Letting your romantic partner practice this one trick he learned at 20 will leave you in a mess of flashbacks and horror.

After we broke up, a trauma specialist dug me out of the mud in under a year because exposure therapy makes PTSD worse, not better. I had to let go of all the other cheap advice I’d heard over the years. Some of it blamed me subtly. Some of it minimised my trauma, positing rape as something you can recover from with five easy self-help tricks.

If rape was that easy to deal with, we'd all recover.

And we don't because rape touches something primal inside you that's nearly impossible to extricate. It penetrates you sexually, spiritually, and morally. The experience is like being shredded into pieces, dipped in honey, and left on top of a termite mound. Canned advice claims you can fix that mess by thinking more positively. If that were true, all rapists would recover within a week.

Telling a survivor to get where she’s going with a few basic tricks is like pointing left to explain how she can get from Kazakhstan to London. There are many paths to where we're going, and they all require more than just a short walk. Rape recovery is not a direction you need to go in. It's a country you need to explore blindfolded, guided by the voice of someone who knows the land. Recovery is a process, not a problem to be solved.

An internet stranger with five mind-blowing tricks for rape recovery can give you temporary comfort at best and corroded self-esteem at worst. A qualified guide will do a far better job of exploring your shame. Around 67% of PTSD patients recover, and so can you—with the *right* therapy. Your boyfriend with the three-year psych degree might be able to offer emotional support, but he is not the right choice for a therapist.