Reply to Lack of trust after sexual assault

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]OP, I'm so sorry you were attacked. Your husband's reaction makes things worse for you. Your post focuses on his feelings and trying to understand and respond to them. Not to disregard his feelings, but the victim of an assault should be focusing on recovering from her trauma. Primarily, at any rate. The way you describe your post-rape dynamic, it almost seems that he's the recovering victim, rather than you.

If you'd made a driving error - say, you'd driven through a stop sign - and that was a factor contributing to your being in the path of a speeding drunk driver who then hit and injured you, would you think it's reasonable for your DH to say he has trust issues with you in the aftermath of that accident? People do stupid things, and you admit you did stupid things the night you were attacked. That doesn't make you complicit in the crime that was committed against you. His report of "trust issues" in your marriage following a rape is troubling. His insistence on your going through with the horrible post-rape legal process when you didn't want to is also troubling.

I feel for you. You seem to be in a difficult place. Intensive therapy will hopefully help you gain some perspective, and perhaps some answers, with regard to your marriage.[/quote]

Op here.  Thank you. It is easier for me to focus on my DH than myself, I suppose.  Because the truth is i do blame myself and I do feel like I should have known better given what happened to me before.  There is a lot of "evidence" in the way society views this issue to support this negative view of myself.  My husband does love and support me in many ways - and in this one aspect of our history together I do feel like he was focused on himself and how the event impacted him in all this - hence the trust issues type comments.  Therapy will help.[/quote]

PP here: you're not to blame. Assault affects victims in ways that sometimes lead them to make poor choices making them vulnerable to additional assaults. That's a well-documented tendency. It doesn't mean you aren't trustworthy.

What does it mean? It means you're traumatized by the original assault. That trauma has not been resolved. This unhealed injury rendered you vulnerable to additional assault, which then, very sadly, occurred.

Society inappropriately and cruelly blames victims of sexual assault. You're internalizing those messages.[/quote]

Op here - thank you for this. Also the part about recurring tendencies - I didn't know that. I guess anither fact my husband doesn't know about is that as I child I was molested by my babysitters high school aged son on one occasion.  So that probably features into all of this as well.[/quote]

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