SEXUALLY ASSAULTED… Wait—Me?
That single word stopped my entire world.
I remember sitting in my psychiatrist’s office in 2019, forty years old, exhausted mentally, physically, and emotionally. I had just started my path toward sobriety and was desperately trying to piece myself together. I told him what had brought me there—what had happened that night—hoping someone could finally help me make sense of it.
He listened carefully, then looked me directly in the eyes and said, “Jacinda, you know what happened to you, right?”
I stared back, confused.
He continued, gently but firmly: “You were sexually assaulted. This was not your fault.”
His words hit me harder than anything I had prepared myself for. I felt shock, disbelief, and a wave of emotions. I had convinced myself it was my fault—I had been drinking, using substances, and around people I thought I could trust. I told myself I had somehow “asked for it.” The classic cycle of self-blame that so many survivors fall into.
Deep down, I knew what happened was degrading, terrifying, and life-altering—enough to push me into sobriety. But I had never allowed myself to name it for what it truly was until that moment.
Why do so many women blame themselves?
Why do we automatically absorb responsibility for someone else’s choices?
Why do we believe we somehow deserved behaviour that violated our boundaries and shattered our sense of safety?
This was the beginning of my hardest truths—and the moment I began reclaiming them.
In the days and weeks after that appointment, I kept replaying his words in my mind.
“This was not your fault.”
It sounded simple, yet it went against every belief I had built to survive. Because if it wasn’t my fault, then I had to face the truth: someone else had chosen to harm me. And acknowledging that meant allowing myself to feel the grief, anger, confusion, and betrayal I had buried so deeply.
Sobriety didn’t magically make this easier.
In fact, it made everything clearer—painfully clearer. Without numbing, I was forced to sit with the reality of what had been done to me. I started recognizing patterns: how I distrusted my own instincts, how I tolerated behaviour that crossed my boundaries, and how I minimized my own suffering. But naming what happened to me allowed something else to surface, too: compassion.
Real, gentle compassion for the woman I was then—the one who didn’t yet have the tools, who didn’t yet have the voice, who was just trying to make it through the night.
As women, we are conditioned from such a young age to take responsibility for others’ actions. We analyze our clothing, our choices, our drinks, our trust, our movements—anything except the actions of the person who hurt us. But healing begins when the blame shifts back to where it belongs. When we stop rewriting the story to protect the wrong people. When we allow ourselves to say the words out loud—sometimes for the very first time. This moment in 2019 was the point where everything in my life split into “before” and “after.”
It didn’t fix me.
It didn’t erase the trauma.
But it gave me permission to finally start telling the truth—to myself, and now, to you.
