Whew, just realised that my WordPress connection to my Facebook account was posting this site through my Facebook page.  Not what I wanted at all. I have even set up this page with a different e-mail account, so I am not sure why that happened.  The only way around it was to disable the application that linked my blogs to Facebook.

It’s not that I want to be anonymous or secretive.  When you are writing about your personal experience of rr-ptsd and rape, you HAVE to be secretive.

I was reading about RR-PTSD on a website last night and it described other people’s reaction to disclosures of rape as being ‘secondary trauma’, negative reactions make RR_PTSD survivors retraumatised and lead to further isolation as the damage and hurt of people’s comments lead the survivor not trusting other people or anyone.

Most recently a very close and supportive friend blurted out, ‘they weren’t going to kill you’.  As far as I knew at the time they were going to kill me, and I congratulate myself for getting out of the situation alive.  I did what I had to do to survive.  If they weren’t going to kill me, did i do those things because I wanted to??

Another recent comment from another very close friend was, ‘I wouldn’t travel alone’, after over 22 years she had always assumed that I had been travelling alone, and somehow (even if I was) that made me responsible for being raped.  I was with a travelling companion all the way, from London, plus we had joined a scuba expedition to be in a group and increase our safety.

These kinds of comments just go on and on.  Hence the secrecy. They are damaging.

My mother, quite soon after I had been raped, lost her cool one day and said, ‘you have always been moaning about something, now you have something to moan about’.  Those words are scorched onto my psyche,  I love her and I have supported her throughout her illness and her bereavement, but it is impossible to blot out those kinds of remarks.

Only a year or two ago my father made a comment about the fact that I had been in relationships before I was raped, ‘I suppose they were rapes too’.  completely negating the trauma of being raped at gunpoint. I know that  people who love you will strike out on occasions, but wow does it hurt.

My brother said, ‘why did you go there, to one of the most dangerous places on earth?’  again it was my fault for going to that place.  The place we were in was on a well established tourist trial.,,……so it goes.

Not long after it happened a friend in a bar one night, braver with a couple of drinks, asked me ‘what it was like, because for him it was next to murder.  I just shrugged and said, ‘I am still alive aren’t I’.  How do you answer that.  Rape is next to murder.  Rape is a kind of murder, .a murder of the spirit.