Assault Survivors, Are You Ready to Awaken Your Inner Warrior Who Saves Your Own Fractured World?
by Jenifer DeBellis
The newest statistics out by RAINN state that someone in the U.S. is sexually assaulted every sixty-eight seconds. In case you missed the simple math here, that’s a violation every minute (that we know about). A whopping 54% of assault victims are between eighteen to thirty-four years old, with 15% being twelve to seventeen. Additionally, one in six women will experience sexual violence in their lifetime (RAINN). That means there’s a survivor in every room with a handful of women in it. When such acts of violence happen every minute of every day to young, vulnerable individuals, it’s a crisis that should get everyone’s attention. Perhaps you’re the one in six who has recently experienced an assault and feel like you’ve been displaced in a foreign body and landscape. Perhaps you’ve been carrying the weight of assault trauma for years and don’t know how to cut yourself free from it. Wherever you are on your healing journey, you should know you’re not alone, as these statistics show. You should also know there’s a whole sisterhood of survivors here for you. I’m not only a fellow survivor in this sisterhood, I’m a trauma coach and author whose mission is to help survivors awaken their inner warrior and become the hero in their own story who saves their fractured world. Through my outreach, aRIFT+ Warrior Project, and self-help book, Warrior Sister, Cut Yourself Free from Your Assault (Library Tales Publishing, 2021), I help survivors rebuild their self-worth and total health so they can live their best lives.
I should probably fill in some context for my own journey, which began with chronic patterns of violence. You see, I’m a survivor who belonged to the assault frequent flyer club as a teen. I was stuck in a vicious cycle of physical and sexual violence for a few years, my trauma and grief compounding with each assault. While I navigated life in a fog, I wondered if I would ever feel safe or worthy of being whole. I also wondered if I would ever be treated with the types of dignity and respect other girls experienced. Yet, with each violation, I grew less confident in myself and wondered if I had some internal broken magnet that attracted trouble. In truth, I later learned I was onto something with that inner broken magnet that attracted trouble. Only it had more to do with predators seeking out easy targets with low self-confidence and worth and sharing their conquests with other predators. But that’s a whole other discussion. This discussion is about the survivor’s healing journey.
While I was a teenager stuck in that chronic cycle of recurrent traumatic experiences, I didn’t know about things like grief and healing from trauma. I was more focused on burying these bad experiences and surviving another day in a hopelessly endless season. It was a sad, lonely existence. My friends thought I was exaggerating or lying since I always told stories. Adults, even counselors, dismissed or downplayed things I did have the courage to share. My own trauma healing journey as a teen and young woman was ill-guided and filled with clunky navigation tools and lacking support. My first breakthrough came in college, when I was offered opportunities to write about certain traumatic life events and found research that spoke right to me as if it was written just for me. I couldn’t read and learn enough about what I assumed was a hopeless cause: how to rise above what felt like a perpetually pathetic life after assault. So, I read countless books over the years, many of these written for professionals serving survivors and all offering different insights and tools for understanding and navigating assault trauma. It was a tedious process, but I discovered ways to work through my trauma as I rebuilt my broken world. And, like God often has us do with our experiences, I began to work with other survivors, helping them overcome their trauma as I overcame my own.
Over the years, though, I’ve been disappointed with the lack of accessible resources for survivors. By accessible, I mean a single place survivors can go to gain easy to understand guidance, knowledge, and support they need. I follow several trauma speakers and outreaches and am always baffled that they suggest a handful or more books for survivors to consult as they deal with their trauma. While I am that exception to the norm who will read all these books to get my answers, I don’t know too many others who have this same interest, time, and energy for such scholarship. In fact, this is what ultimately led me to write the self-help book, Warrior Sister, Cut Yourself Free from Your Assault, that aims to simplify the complexities of traumatic experience and self-directed healing. I wrote the book I wish I had to help me through my trauma and hope this book and outreach, aRIFT+ Warrior Project, offer fellow survivors beacons of light along their healing journeys. I’m blessed to be an author writing about the survivor’s journey and topics centered on women’s experiences with violence, abuse, oppression, and abandonment. I don’t mean to say I’m excited to write about such negative topics. Rather, that I can give voice to important topics and bring a sense of hope beyond circumstances to the conversation. My vision is to bring survivors the resources and support they need during their trauma recovery journey because I cannot think of many other things as fulfilling than empowering young women (and beyond) to reclaim their emotional, physical, and spiritual well-being. Thanks, ReadersMagnet and Authors’ Lounge, for this platform to speak about this stigmatized and often dismissed issue. Find my book on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and beyond and visit JeniferDeBellis.com for additional details about my publications and outreach news.
