Rape

When I told my ex- psychotherapist three years ago that the second time I was raped, I was on a date with a guy and was drunk, she said: "What did you expect?"
SHE, a female psychotherapist who is not meant to judge, SHE said: "What did you expect?"
"Not that," I replied, stunned, and we sat in silence for the rest of the session.

I did not want to return the following week but I did so as I wanted to confront her over what she had said.

Do you know what she said? She said "I never said that."
"Very good," I spat sarcastically. "You're the shrink, I'm the mental health patient, if I complain about you who are they going to believe? He was a boy, I am a girl, if I'd reported it and you were in the jury, you'd have acquitted him. How dare you say you didn't say that."

"You pushed me into a corner. You made me say it."

I never went back. I complained to her superiors with full knowledge that it was my words against hers. She was the 'professional', I was the 'mad' person.

Two years later I was offered cognitive behavioural therapy. Housing dominated the sessions, I didn't venture towards sex. I came to trust this psychotherapist but the nature of CBT meant the sessions had to end. Still, she knew I had been raped and referred me to a sexual therapist.

This is the hardest thing I have ever done.
"Why won't you look at me?" said the doctor as she did a requisite internal examination on me.
"Because I can't look at myself," I cried burrowing my fists into my eyeballs.

She was horrified at how disconnected I was from myself. After the internal examination, when she said I was 'normal' we began to make progress. I began to make progress. I could even touch myself and not be revolted by filthy images of myself.

Then the council turned up before Christmas saying it was hostels for us if I didn't agree to their alternatives and I started turning up at the sessions unable to connect with her, with me, with anything at all. I also told her I've been drinking alot. Volumes every other weekend.

"You are too overwhelmed with the issues surrounding yourself at the moment," she told me today. "They are barriers to you connecting with yourself and your sexuality and barriers to us achieving anything here. Go to your doctor. Make that a priority, sort out these issues and come back in a few months."

She's booked me an appointment in June.

In yesterday's Observer Barbara Ellen wrote that the term 'date rape' "only serves to muddy what are already dark and complex waters."

I was not "too rat-arsed" to say no, repeatedly. But even if I was, inebriation is not a green light.

She argued that if our phones are stolen whilst out on a date, that is not called 'date theft', it is called theft. If we are murdered following a date, that is not called 'date murder', it is called murder. Theft is theft, murder is murder, rape is rape.

Yes it is.

Too many in society believe we ask for it. According to Grace Lally in the Socialist Worker "a third of people believe that a woman is partially or totally responsible for an attack if she was drunk." Indeed, my ex shrink.

She says "at least 47,000 adult women are raped every year in Britain, the majority in their own home by a man they know." (28th March)

We are not commodities, there for the taking. Taking without consent is wrong.

Rape is unwanted sex
Rape is the theft of a woman's sexuality
Rape is the attempted murder of a woman's sexuality.

I owe myself my life back. I owe myself all of me. I will rise from the ashes.