I survived. Highs, Lows and Lessons From Rape 1-Year On. A Clinical Psychology Podcast Episode.
- Connor Whiteley
- 5 days ago
- 21 min read
Rape and other forms of sexual violence is beyond awful. It is one of the worse, most traumatic and devastating things that can happen to a person. During sexual violence, someone takes everything away from you, your control, your consent, your ability to do anything at all. You just go into survival mode and the consequences of sexual violence are immense. There isn’t a single area of your life that sexual violence isn’t impacted by. Therefore, in this clinical psychology podcast episode, to mark the one-year anniversary of my rape, I want to explain the highs, lows and lessons from the past year as I survived my rape and everything I had to deal with afterwards. There were a lot of awful, horrific things that I had to deal with as a rape survivor in the past year, but there have been some highs too. By the end of this clinical psychology podcast episode, you’ll know some of the negative mental health consequences of sexual violence, how sexual violence can destroy lives and how people can deal with sexual trauma. This is a great, deeply personal episode that you’re going to learn a lot from.
Today’s psychology podcast episode has been sponsored by Applied Psychology: Applying Social Psychology, Cognitive Psychology and More To The Real World. Available from all major eBook retailers and you can order the paperback and hardback copies from Amazon, your local bookstore and local library, if you request it. Also available as an AI-narrated audiobook from selected audiobook platforms and library systems. For example, Kobo, Spotify, Barnes and Noble, Google Play, Overdrive, Baker and Taylor and Bibliotheca.
Note: whilst this psychology podcast episode will talk about rape and other forms of sexual violence, I will not include any graphic details about what happened to me during my attack.
One-Year Anniversary Of My Rape
On the 13th April 2024, I was raped and as much as I know some people will call me a liar because of the societal myth that people Assigned Male at Birth never get raped and they are always the rapists. That is a lie and I have done a lot of research over the past year about the truth behind sexual violence, and how and why men and women can be both the sexual predator and the survivor. Hence, I am just going to be honest and tell you about my experience and if people call me a liar or a fake just seeking attention then so be it. I’ve been called it all over the past year so it won’t be anything new to me.
Therefore, on the 13th April 2024, I was raped in a hookup that went very wrong. After a lifetime of being abused, hated and never being accepted for being gay, and with my friends all in happy relationships where they could do whatever they wanted without the fear of death and being beaten. I just wanted a single night of being gay, a single night where I could experience something that was perfectly natural and normal for other people, and a single night where I could be free.
It really didn’t work out like that at all so I was raped. Contrast to all the myths and lies about sexual violence, I didn’t scream, fight back or try to stop him. I simply went into survival mode and I fawned because I didn’t want to make him angry, I didn’t want him to hurt me anymore than he was already and I wanted to escape as soon as possible.
I survived.
I was in denial for two days about what had happened to me because I thought that was simply how sex worked. Then as more and more trauma responses manifested themselves, I realised I was raped and then everything happened. I developed Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder along with intense social anxiety so I couldn’t really go out by myself because I was so anxious and terrified of being raped again.
And I have discussed a lot of what happened to me over the next seven-months in different episodes of The Psychology World Podcast.
Now I want to focus on the lows and the lessons learnt before wrapping up with the highs of the past year along with a few final lessons.
The Lows of The Past Year After Being Raped
The Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
There have been a lot of different factors and mental health consequences that have not been fun in the past year. I think the worse because it encompasses so many different facets of my mental health was the Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. That was seriously horrible to experience because the majority of people think it is just soldiers who can experience PTSD. Yet I did because whenever a rape memory was triggered or I was reminded of my rape whether this was through something I saw, something I hear or an intrusive thought or flashback. I had severe trauma reactions.
I would literally run away at times. I would get so fearful and scared that I was going to die, be raped or get beaten. Or I would go into survival mode and once I was safe, I would have a full-on breakdown because it was simply too much for me.
One of my triggers was seeing fat men, and I don’t say that to be fatphobic but because my rapist was a fat man. I couldn’t actually stand to be in the same room as a fat man because it would cause me to have a breakdown and enter fight-or-flight mode. The same went for hearing or thinking about the name of my rapist or experiencing any sort of sexual or romantic attraction.
Which was really tragic because when I thought a guy was cute or attractive after my rape, I would have an extreme trauma reaction. That was really horrible, because I was raped in April and then it was summer, and I won’t deny that I like summer because men can look very hot in shorts and t-shirts.
Sleep was another major issue because of rape dreams. There wasn’t a single night for the first six months or more when I didn’t have a rape-related dream. It wasn’t even related to what actually happened, it was just how my mind twisted everything. I had dreams about my rapist killing me, my friends raping me, people I had only seen briefly at social events raping and beating and killing me.
The First Lessons: Rape Has No End of Impacts, Need for Processing Trauma and Self-Compassion
On the whole, there were other aspects of the PTSD that I flat out hated, like the intense social anxiety and the depression that I’ve spoken about before on the podcast. Yet the stark impact that sexual violence has on a person was unreal and I couldn’t believe how many different ways it impacts you. From my work to my friendships to my ability to go outside and everything else, my rape and my mental health impacted so much of it.
As a result, this massive negative aspect of 2024 where the entire year was basically taken up me healing from my rape and recovering from sexual trauma. This aspect taught me the importance of having good friends and a good social support network, as well as never underestimating the power of trauma. In one of my books coming out in the next few years, I include the line “if you don’t deal with your trauma, your trauma will deal with you,” and that is so true.
You need to keep healing and processing what happened to you otherwise your trauma will make you process what happened to you in the worse ways possible. As well as this low taught me the important of self-compassion too, which has become an important part of my life now. I used to beat myself up so often for my mental health, for feeling so depressed and anxious and having such severe trauma responses that I couldn’t do anything for days or months at a time. I essentially didn’t have a life in 2024.
And that made me feel even worse about myself, my life and my mental health. Thankfully learning self-compassion helped me deal with those negative self-critical thoughts.
I still use all of these important lessons in my life nowadays to help my mental health whenever it dips.
Self- Blame and People Who Know Less Judging Me
A second major low of the past year was that at first I didn’t blame myself for my rape because it wasn’t my fault. Rape and other forms of sexual violence is never the survivor’s fault because there was nothing they could have done to prevent it. That is the simple truth of it.
However, when I started reading things online, seeing how certain people who were very dear to me started blaming me, judging me and making me feel awful for what some rapist had done to me. That only made my mental health worse. For example, two people very close to me who were meant to love me no matter what couldn’t handle the fact that I was raped. So they blamed me, they wouldn’t allow me to call it rape, they wouldn’t allow me to talk about it and they were very firm that it was my fault. I shouldn’t have done it and I shouldn’t have been gay.
And as whilst researching rape and sexual trauma more and more was very healing for me because it allowed me to see everything I was going through was normal. It reminded me of the world I actually lived in and how society saw people like me. It reminded me that sexual violence is extremely common, society always blames the survivor and the world is always against the survivor because of lies, myths and misconceptions. And the extreme rare cases of false allegations of rape don’t help matters.
Therefore, as I was exposed to those societal judgements and certain people in my life judging me and blaming me for being raped, my mental health only declined. And what really annoyed me about these people was that I am unfortunately an expert by experience when it comes to rape. I was raped. These people were not, and yet because of their egos, and what they’ve seen on the news. They believe it is their God-given right to tell me, the rape survivor, how I am meant to be feeling, how I am meant to be behaving and how I am not meant to be getting raped.
It is outrageous and disgusting that people think they know better than rape survivors.
Second Lesson: You Learn Who Your Friends Are After Rape
The second major lesson I’ve learnt in the past year is that after being raped, you really learn who your friends are. You learn who you can rely on, who you can’t and how people can deal with certain news. My best friend could certainly handle the news about my rape and they were great to me for the longest of times and I will always be extremely grateful for everything they did for me. Yet honestly, because of my disorganised attachment and their avoidant attachment styles and other traits about my best friend, we both turned the friendship very toxic and our friendship has never really recovered from my rape trauma and everything we accidentally did to each other during that time.
There have been friends who I’ve told and they act like it never happened and they let me talk about it whereas others let me talk about it but they don’t know what to say at all.
I don’t blame them at all because rape is awful and it is hard to know what to say.
As a result, in the past year, I really have learnt the different levels of friendship that you can have with people, what you can and what you cannot say to others and I have just learnt a lot about attachment and friendships in the last year.
At the time of writing actually, I’m doing a lot of work on my own disorganised attachment style because even though I am making great progress, I want to deal with it as much as I can so it doesn’t harm any more of my friendships and relationships.
Self-Harm and Suicidality
This is probably the lowest part of the past 365 days because I self-harmed a lot in the past year. I haven’t self-harmed since the 30th December because I can deal with a lot more things than I could previously and I really have worked hard to deal with whatever happens. Including learning that certain people who I’m close to where having sex. Again, even thinking or learning about sex was a major trigger for me up until recently.
Even though a year later, sexual contact is still to much of a trigger at the moment for me.
I think I self-harmed because I wanted to punish myself for being raped. A lot of important people in my life were telling me that it was my fault, that I should have done things differently and I interpreted certain things that being my fault. For example, I remember last June I was driving to the university in the evening for a social event and I parked my car, it was a beautiful evening and I was listening to the radio. And I listened to a news report about a cop congratulating a rape survivor for coming forward because they were able to arrest the rapist because of it.
I cried so hard, and self-harmed in the end of it.
For me, because other people had already told me that I was a failure for not reporting it, for not going to the police and a whole bunch of other factors. I felt that I needed to be punished and control was another factor too. I self-harmed because I wanted to be in control and feel something instead of depression, anxiety and other trauma responses.
And as my mental health continued to decline, I went to kill myself three times. I won’t explain how but I tried to kill myself three times and this was how I learnt how strained my relationship with my best friend became. They were so badly hurt, in so much pain and I later learnt that this is the point where they started having panic attacks over me because they really didn’t want me to die.
I really did destroy our friendship with these suicidal attempts.
However, contrast to popular myths and lies, I didn’t want to do suicide because I wanted to. I tried to kill myself because I didn’t think there was another way out. My quality of life was so low and I couldn’t go outside, I couldn’t do anything with my life and my mental health was so bad that I couldn’t do anything I enjoyed. I doubted I could ever form a good relationship, I doubted I could ever have sex and so many other factors.
I just couldn’t see another way out and I suppose I knew that it would hurt my friends and my housemates. Yet I just didn’t want to be in pain anymore.
I wanted it all to end.
Third Lesson: Life Actually Does Get Better
There have been other lows in the past year, like my anorexia, but I’ll talk about them in one of the books that are coming out in the next few years. As a result, in the past year, I have learnt that life really does get better in the end. It will take a while, believe me, it seriously will take so much longer than you want.
Nonetheless, your life will get better overtime. It will be small changes at first and you will be able to do more and more over time, and it will never seem enough. You will be angry, upset and depressed that you cannot just magically bounce back from your sexual trauma, but you will get there.
If you keep putting in the therapy work, if you keep healing and if you intend to survive this, then you will in the end.
And now as I transition onto the highs, I am really looking forward to sharing with you the positives of the past year since I was raped.
The Highs Of One-Year On From Being Raped
Becoming An Expert By Experience
I fully understand that this is a very, very weird benefit of the past year but as an aspiring clinical psychologist, honestly I am glad to have the mental health and counselling experiences that I have. Now I understand what it’s like to have PTSD, to have intense social anxiety and to have major depression. Of course, everyone’s experience is slightly different but I can now understand and empathise with future clients because I vaguely know what hell they are going through because I have lived through it too.
I am grateful to know how to survive these awful mental health experiences and I am really happy that I went through specialist rape counselling, and my anorexia counselling. I have learnt so much about myself, self-soothing and trauma recovery because of my two excellent counsellors. I have had such lovely and powerful conversations with both of them and I have learnt tips and tricks and techniques that I can now use with future clients once I’m qualified.
Without my rape, I never would have learnt those things.
Of course, I am not saying I am grateful to be raped. I will never be grateful to having gone through that but I could look back on the past 365 days with hatred, bitterness and I could not focus on any positives. Yet that isn’t actually healthy. Still, grieve for everything that you have lost, been through and allow yourself to feel all the painful emotions that you’re experiencing. Yet as part of positive psychology and compassion for ourselves and others, we should try to focus on the positives.
It is actually a great way in my personal experiences to push away suicidal thoughts. Even on the really, really bad days if you can name three or five positive things that happened then you really do start to feel better.
It’s a simple but very powerful technique.
So the past year has taught me a lot of valuable techniques, life experiences and mental health experiences that will serve me in the future. It means I can relate to clients more, come to clinical work with a unique insight and it gives me more experiences to draw on when I’m writing these podcast episodes.
I am a survivor, not a victim.
Healing, Healing and More Healing
The penultimate high is a great benefit of the past year because I am finally healed from all sorts of different traumas that have happened to me in my life. I explain more about this in my upcoming book Healing As A Survivor but the vast majority of my rape trauma responses were actually just heightened trauma responses that I got from my childhood because of my child abuse. I was able to deal with all of that and I was able to learn from healthy boundaries and how to be empowered for the first person in my life.
I flat out loved resetting my boundaries and resetting my relationships so many people, because I am not perfect at it. Yet I want to stop the harmful, toxic relationships that have ruled my life for so many years and I am already reaping the benefits.
Furthermore, I’m healing in terms of my anorexia too. My rape really did refuel my anorexia to new levels and I was losing a kilogram a week for months, I was making myself really ill and fatigued all the time. My health wasn’t the best because of the condition, but in the past year, I’ve healed more because I’ve targeted my anorexia. Sure I still have anorexia because you can’t eliminated mental health conditions, but I know how to cope with my sense of control, strong emotions and my anorexic thoughts.
I’ll continue to have flare-ups in the future, but I seriously doubt my anorexia will ever get bad again. I know how to manage it and because I know who I am, what my values are and everything that anorexia threatens. I really don’t want my anorexia to return.
At the end of this psychology podcast episode, I’ll share one of my favourite quotes of all time with you because it hits this topic right on the head.
New Friendships and I Had A Partner
In the past year, some of the highs have definitely included the new friendships I’ve made along the way. A good few of them haven’t lasted because of my mental health, my disorganised attachment and a few factors related to the people themselves. Yet I’ve still really enjoyed making those friendships because they were all great people and I honestly wish them all the best with the future.
Equally, now I have my friends who I spent almost every Saturday with playing board games and/ or Dungeons and Dragons or another RPG system with. It was only yesterday I met up with three of them and we played board games outside in the sun for a few hours before moving inside to play for another four-ish hours before we went to dinner at Wetherspoons in Canterbury.
I really enjoy hanging out with my friends on Saturdays because I never would have met or become friends with them otherwise. I have a lot of fun with them, we always have great conversations and it’s how I met my partner.
Which is certainly something I never expected.
After I was raped, given all my mental health struggles, how bad I was at social relationships and my low self-esteem, I never expected to have a relationship for 6-weeks. 6-weeks full of laughter, fun and just enjoying being someone’s partner. I had my first kisses, I held someone’s hand in public for the first time and I was just able to do things that I had never done before, and things that I never would have dreamed of a few years ago because I would have been too terrified because of trauma.
We even both stayed up until 4:15 in the morning one day just talking and hanging out and cuddling.
I really enjoyed that relationship more than I wanted to admit, even though it was casual and I was able to do casual.
We didn’t even break-up after 6-weeks because we weren’t into each other. We broke up because making out with my partner brought up a lot of trauma for me, and my partner had been repeatedly assaulted in their last relationship so they were struggling too at times and they weren’t in a good place themselves.
My partner agreed if they were in a better place they would want something deeper, committed and longer-term with me. And ever since we got together, they kept saying how they didn’t want to hurt me.
It was sweet.
There’s a lot more to it than that but considering this a public podcast that is all I’m going to say.
However, I still really enjoyed it and after I was raped, I never ever imagined forming new friendships, certainly not playing dungeons and dragons for hours upon hours with them, and I truly never imagined someone as beautiful as my partner would say yes to me.
There really is always hope.
It doesn’t matter if you were raped, it doesn’t matter how much trauma you’ve been through, it doesn’t matter how dark you think the world is. There is hope that great, wonderful things can happen to you in the end.
It may take far longer than you imagine, or it might take no time at all, but it can happen in the end.
Brief Guide To Actions We Can Take To End Sexual Violence
In the future, I have another episode on the actions we can take to end sexual violence once and for all because it is possible. Yet I want to briefly mention three things we can do at the end of this podcast episode to work towards ending sexual violence.
You Need To Learn About Sexual Violence And Share It With Others
I know I’m preaching to the converted here but if we’re going to end sexual violence then you need to learn about it, what it is and the truth behind sexual violence. In other words, you need to overcome all the myths and misconceptions that we’ve created for ourselves in society, because these myths are harmful and extremely common. Therefore, it’s good to know that online resources, like this podcast, have made it easier than ever before to get accurate information about sexual violence as well as how common it is within our communities and how it devastates lives.
Knowledge is power against sexual violence, so please, make sure you read about it and learn about sexual violence.
The next step is sharing what you’ve learnt with other people.
You Can Advocate For Youth Prevention Programs
As I’ve spoken about before on the podcast, the majority of perpetrators of sexual violence are teenagers and young adults. Therefore, if we’re going to stop sexual violence then we need to give young people the knowledge and tools for healthy relationships. This includes tools to help them understand consent and to help them have a healthy sexuality.
Thankfully, over the years, there has been a lot of work done on the development of youth prevention programs to help give young people the tools to have healthy relationships without them believing they have to commit sexual violence.
You Can Identify Organisations And People Working With Sexual Assault Survivors In Your Community And Connect With Them
To help take action against sexual violence within your community, you can see who’s doing prevention and response work in the local area. For example, this can include a family justice centre, a rape crisis centre and local political groups in charge of legislating against sexual violence. This can be a powerful way to take action to end sexual assault because by reaching out to these organisations and people you can get involved in their networks and be an active member of them so you can use your interests, skills and abilities to support them. For instance, if you identify a gap in their resources, like there being no way for people to donate to the local cause, then you could help them fill that gap in the community’s network.
Clinical Psychology Conclusion
In all honesty, I probably haven’t scratched the surface of all the highs and lows from the past 365 days. For instance, I haven’t mentioned all the good things about university, my transgender mental health studies, my Outreach work, my family, my new Irish citizenship and more. Yet that’s a good thing. The past year has been hellish. I don’t wish my past year on anyone because of everything in my life that has fallen apart, been smashed and annihilated and everything I have had to go through and do just to survive. No one should ever have to go through it. No one should ever have to go through the Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, the rough and eye-opening experience of learning who your friends actually are in your darkest moments, and the self-harm and suicide.
No one should have to go through that.
However, me and so many other amazing, bright people survived our trauma. There were great benefits of the past year too and 2024 will be extremely transformative for me in some bad ways but a lot of good ways too. The past 365 days have allowed me to reset my relationships and actually learn who I am through doing a lot of healing, it has given me some great real world experience about mental health difficulties and how to cope with their maladaptive effects, and I’ve forged some great friendships.
I had a beautiful partner for 6-weeks, and we might not be together anymore. Yet my partner’s still happy to kiss, hold hands and hang out, so I’m happy. I can still experience stuff for the first time in my life.
Ultimately, I want to end this podcast episode by saying, if you’re an aspiring or qualified psychologist or a psychology student. There will be times when you meet a client who has experienced a type of trauma, be it sexual trauma or not. The past year has also taught me how outrageously high the number of sexual trauma incidents are, and when this happens in your clinical work. It is important that you remember it is possible to survive and you believe it yourself.
My anorexia counsellor and my old private counsellor who I forgot to mention earlier, they have no training and no real awareness about sexual violence. Yet there were still great things they did to help me and just help me through my time. The best result is always to refer rape survivors to rape crisis centres because East Kent Rape Crisis Centre is flat out amazing and they helped me to save myself.
However, aspiring and qualified psychologists should get some awareness in psychological trauma and stabilisation. You will come across a client with trauma one day and trauma is specialist work but you can help the client more than you possibly know.
And finally, if you’re a survivor, then please keep going, keep fighting, keep working towards healing. It will be painful, it will be slow and there will be days when you want to die because it seems so much easier.
Please don’t though.
If I had managed to kill myself any one of those three times, I wouldn’t be here right now talking to you wonderful people. I wouldn’t be able to share my experience, I wouldn’t be able to learn all the great things that I flat out love, and I wouldn’t be able to write, read fiction and do all the other thousands of things that make me happy.
And I wouldn’t have been able to meet my partner, have my first kiss and just be with someone. We’re still friends now and I’ve cried a lot over that relationship because I hate that someone raped and assaulted my partner who is such a lovely and caring person.
Sexual violence has to end and it will one day.
“As long as I have my unshakable self, I can dig in with both feet with all my might. As long as I know who I am, all my doubts, hesitations and frustrations will disappear. And no demon on earth can escape my descending blade,"
-Tokito, Demon Slayer anime Season 4
If you think about that quote from a mental health perspective then you’ll realise why that is my favourite quote of all time.
Just keep going yourself and remember it gets better in the end.
I really hope you enjoyed today’s clinical psychology podcast episode.
If you want to learn more, please check out:
Applied Psychology: Applying Social Psychology, Cognitive Psychology and More To The Real World. Available from all major eBook retailers and you can order the paperback and hardback copies from Amazon, your local bookstore and local library, if you request it. Also available as an AI-narrated audiobook from selected audiobook platforms and library systems. For example, Kobo, Spotify, Barnes and Noble, Google Play, Overdrive, Baker and Taylor and Bibliotheca.
Have a great day.
Forensic Psychology References and Further Reading
Armatta, J. (2018). Ending sexual violence through transformative justice. Interdisciplinary Journal of Partnership Studies, 5(1), 4-4.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/awareness-action/202203/3-ways-take-action-end-sexual-assault
Kirby, P. (2015). Ending sexual violence in conflict: the Preventing Sexual Violence Initiative and its critics. International Affairs, 91(3), 457-472.
Tutchell, E., & Edmonds, J. (2020). Unsafe spaces: Ending sexual abuse in universities. Emerald Publishing Limited.
Wessells, M. G., & Kostelny, K. (2021). Understanding and ending violence against children: A holistic approach. Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology, 27(1), 3.
Wright, H. (2015). Ending Sexual Violence and the War System–Or Militarizing Feminism?. International Feminist Journal of Politics, 17(3), 503-507.
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