5. It's Not Your Fault

Aug 14, 2019

5 min read

Updated: May 4, 2024

The sun lights up the sky and has the ability to thaw what was frozen.

Dear Survivors, It's not your fault.

If you have suffered sexual trauma, I’m writing to you. I wish that had never happened to you. I wish you tremendous healing. I hope that you believe yourself worthy of healing. You absolutely deserve to heal. And most importantly, it's not your fault.

The sexual trauma may have already disrupted your safety, trust, boundaries, autonomy, voice, expression, health, and many more aspects of your personal wellbeing. It can be challenging enough to recuperate from those violations. It's already a huge journey to heal after sexual trauma, but it can become even more of a challenge if you are also dealing with internalized false messages about yourself on the topic of blame. For those of you uncertain about whether or not you are responsible for the sexual traumas you endured, I'm here to tell you that it wasn't your fault. If you are blaming yourself for what happened, I encourage you to stop blaming yourself.

What happened to you is not your fault. I cannot emphasize this enough. It's so vital for you to know and believe that it's not your fault. This is crucial for your healing and also crucial for accuracy. I will try my best to rule out any, "but's" you may have in response to reading my message.

No matter what.

**Trigger warning: In this section and the next section, I mention contexts of sexual trauma. I do not write any explicit details.**

Regardless of the context, what you were wearing, what you ingested, where you were, who you were with, what your relationship with that person or people was or is, what time it was, or any other circumstantial piece of information that could be included in the context of your story. Circumstances are not causes. Circumstances are the backdrop of the story. They describe the environment, but they do not in any way predict the actions of people within those environments. The circumstances of your story describe the external information, but they do not describe the internal motivations of the abuser.

Even if...

Even if you didn’t know what was happening at the time was wrong, even if you wish you had been on the lookout, even if you let your guard down, even if you had heard you should protect yourself against someone or some situation, even if you agreed to go along with something because you were afraid, even if you never told anyone about it, even if it has been years since it happened, it's not your fault. Even if anyone has attempted to make you think you did something wrong or said that you caused that to happen or told you that it was your fault, IT'S NOT YOUR FAULT.

The blame game is a strategic tactic used to disempower survivors.

Many perpetrators tell those they injure that what is happening is not abuse or that those they injure have done something to warrant abuse, but every word of it is untrue. All attempts to discredit and blame victims are attempts to silence survivors. Perpetrators attempt to control those they prey upon by scaring them into silence through insisting that their behavior is normal or appropriate. Even more disturbing, if a survivor believes they haven't been abused or that they actually caused the trauma, they are less likely to speak up about it, which only benefits perpetrators and further serves to disempower survivors.

For every story silenced, there is a person suffering. This is why it is imperative that I tell you in as many ways as I am able that it's not your fault. I need you to believe that you are not at fault for someone else's horrible treatment of you. I desperately want you to be free from any such misconception because I deeply believe that you deserve to heal from all of the pain inflicted upon you. If you have the inaccurate burden of believing yourself responsible for your trauma, you could continue to carry it with you and feel not only responsibility for it, but also ownership of it. From the moment they took place, the sexual traumas were and will always be the responsibilities of and belonging solely to the perpetrators of sexual traumas. Though you may have suffered greatly because of them, those crimes were never yours.

Blame has historically and chronically been placed on survivors, rather than assigned its correct source. The only people to blame for sexual crimes are the people who enact them upon others. Literally nothing could ever cause an abuser to abuse, other than that abuser's choice to perpetrate sexual injury. Any attempt to have you believe otherwise is called victim blaming, and it is a tactic used by both perpetrators and others to convince survivors of inaccurate responsibility for their traumas. This tactic is so powerful that it can cause deep shame to survivors. Such shame not only stands in the way of healing, but is fully unwarranted.

Inaccurate blame can debilitate survivors.

Any time spent blaming yourself is taking away from your healing. Blaming yourself for the trauma that affected your life can reinforce the wrong messages from the trauma itself, which can make it even more difficult to heal. Self-blame can result in not trusting yourself, hating yourself, or even punishing yourself, none of which is good for you, helps you, or fosters healing.

Every single version of blame only adds more pain to the hurt you have already sustained from sexual trauma. When we listen to and believe the myths about ourselves being responsible for the atrocities done to us, we may view ourselves as the problem. If we see ourselves, our bodies, our clothing, our expression, or even our existence as the problem which caused sexual traumas to happen, we have very little hope of climbing out of the depths of despair and hopelessness that can result from those mindsets. We can't imagine healing because we can't imagine that we deserve to heal.

Not only does self-blame stand in the way of healing, it is also and especially not accurate to blame yourself for something you are not responsible for-other people's actions.

There is no way under any condition that someone else’s actions could possibly be your fault.

You cannot be at fault for someone else's bad, malicious, selfish, or abusive choices. You are not able to control other peoples’ brains or actions. You have no power over other people’s decisions. And you certainly do not control other peoples’ choices to do harm to you. If we had the power to control others minds, why would we use that power to torture ourselves? If we were literally able to control other people's decisions, wouldn't we decide to have them help us instead of causing us pain? The truth is, we don't have that type of power over others decisions or actions, and it's pretty clear that we don't, based on the types of negative outcomes we sustain from others that we never would have chosen for ourselves.

It is the fault of the person or people that harmed you.

A survivor of sexual abuse or assault is never at fault. By definition, victims are people who did not decide for something bad to happen, but who did undergo something bad happening to them. If you are a survivor of sexual trauma, abuse, or assault, it’s not your fault.

The abuse that another person caused you could never be your fault because it has always been the fault of the abuser. You did not cause the abuser to abuse. The abuser chose to abuse. That person or people made the wrong decision and actions and all blame for what happened falls only upon them.

#MeToo

#ItsNotYourFault