In this podcast we discuss how you make sense of something you may still be confused about, what you do with the anger, the shame or maybe even the absence of either, how you ask for help and how you begin to feel safe in your own body again? Breaking the silence around SA is more than just telling women to “speak up”, it’s about giving them the language and information to understand what happens after that. For instance how we actually react after SA versus how we are told we “should” react. We’ve painted this picture of a survivor - you must know immediately that what happened was wrong, you fight back, you must leave, you must tell someone, you must be angry, devastated, traumatised in ways that fits in what people can “recognise”. But if they freeze, stay quiet, go back to the abuser, laugh about it or minimise it, or take years to even find the language to talk about it, somehow it makes them “less believable”. There is NO RIGHT OR WRONG way to “react” or “look like afterwards”. Nothing makes your experience less real or less violating. That a just been society’s way of protecting the abusers. Dr. Anvita Madan-Bahel www.cultureandtherapy.co.uk