It Took Me 17 Years to Realise I Was Raped
Let’s do away with the controversy over repressed memories, this is the lived reality.
[TW: Description of sexual violence, mention of childhood sexual abuse]
If you’d asked me two years ago if I had experienced sexual violence, I would have emphatically said no.
Having grown up in a loving middle class family, I couldn’t point to a single trauma in my past. I branded myself as sex positive, a happily promiscuous single woman living life in London. I wasn’t afraid to ask for what I wanted and (with some notable exceptions) found it easy to separate casual sex from romance. I often credited this confidence to the fact my ‘first time’ was within a loving and stable teenage relationship. In the summer of 2021, that illusion came crashing down on my head. I didn’t see it coming, but the truth had been tugging at me for a while.
Many people don’t believe a survivor of abuse could take years to remember what happened to them. ‘The False Memory Syndrome Foundation’ were successful in shifting media discourse around abuse allegations. In doing so they undermined the testimony of countless survivors.
I can understand why some people struggle to believe survivors. We’ve all had that conversation about where we first heard the news of 9/11. Our cultural understanding is that upsetting events stick in our minds. What’s not widely known is that forgetting is one of our brain’s defence mechanisms. This kicks in to protect us when we’re emotionally overwhelmed by the situation we face. Sometimes those memories never reappear but sometimes they creep back up on you.
In hindsight, I see my trauma memories had been vying for attention for years but time and again they were met with confusion, indifference and denial. Here’s how I came to acknowledge and accept my experience for the first time:
Summer 2020: Generalised anxiety
Like many people, I found myself suffering with anxiety during the COVID-19 pandemic. I was living in a warehouse with 10 flatmates, all with very different attitudes to lockdown. A permanent feeling of dread crept up on me and panic attacks became commonplace. Small things, like a vegetable going bad in the fridge, could tip me into a paralysing shame spiral for days. I kept finding myself re-arranging things in my bedroom, trying to find where that plant pot or picture frame felt right. More often than not things ended up back where they started, feeling no more right, but at least no more wrong. I did a course of NHS Cognitive Behavioural Therapy hoping it would fix me but it did little more than take the edge off.
Over time my anxiety began to seep into my dreams. I’d wake up every morning exhausted from stressful scenarios featuring people I’d known at school, old friends I’d cut ties with many years before. I remember telling my flatmate that this felt significant but I couldn’t put my finger on why. The person who showed up most was that first boyfriend. The one I’d lost my virginity to. The one I’d loved so much. But why was I scared of him in every single nightmare? I kept brushing that question aside.
Early 2021: Familiar feelings
With lockdown restrictions easing, dating was on the cards again. I met a guy from an app and after our second date, I ended up back at his. Sex that night was fine, but when we picked up where we left off the next morning, he avoided every attempt at a kiss. I stopped him, told him sex without kissing made me feel more like a body than a person. We resumed on the assumption kissing was back in the mix.
But next time I went in for one, he roughly pushed my face away, pinning me cheek to pillow as he continued on top of me. I froze and panicked. I wanted to say STOP, but what if he didn’t? Was I about to be raped? My stomach dropped. The thought process felt horribly familiar. Eventually I got the word out of my mouth. And he did stop. But there was no apology or contrition when I explained how I felt. Instead he proceeded to tell me he had a call with his parents in 15 minutes so I should leave. He avoided my eyes as I gathered my things. I cycled home feeling like a worthless piece of shit.
A few days later I met with some friends, and shared what had happened that morning. This opened a conversation on the grey areas between bad sex and sexual assault. We all had experiences that teetered on the knife edge but no one seemed inclined to use the word ‘assault’ for what happened to me. It felt like assault but it wasn’t assault, I told myself in my head. That dichotomy had a sinking familiarity to it too.
Summer 2021: The painful truth
Struggling with chronic back pain, I downloaded . The app promised to help you understand and ease your pain through a series of meditations, written exercises and brain training. I followed the instructions obediently.
1. Write a list of any and all events in my life that I wouldn’t wish on another person
2. Review the list and star the incidents that elicit the strongest reaction in my body
3. Pick one of the starred incidents and write about it
To my surprise, I found myself focusing on the time I was ‘raped but not raped’ as a teenager. I wrote an account of what had happened, unemotional and matter-of-fact.
Two days later, I’m at home about to prepare dinner when I’m struck by a pang of deep loneliness, this time devastatingly familiar. Next thing I know I’m on the kitchen floor, crying like I’ve never cried before. In that moment, something clicked in my mind. That thing that felt like rape when I was 15, it WAS rape. I was raped. FUCK.
Suddenly other memories begin to surface in my mind. My teenage self harm and suicidal ideation. The fact I threw out all my old diaries before I left for university. My severing of all friendships from my hometown… Next to no one* believed me when I used the word rape aged 15 so I convinced myself nothing had happened FOR 17 YEARS.
Sobbing on my kitchen floor that day, the truth (and the many consequences of it) were suddenly vividly clear to me. Since then, various other validating details have come back. I found some old letters from my ex, painting the love story that remained my narrative of our relationship for so long. The term ‘love bombing’ wasn’t coined at the time, but the letters I have could be a case study in it.
In sticking to that narrative, I’d erased the tantrums and the toxic jealousy and the wall punching and the fear. I’d told myself it wasn’t rape so many times I truly believed it.
It can’t have been rape because he was my boyfriend and he loved me.
It can’t have been rape because I instigated the sex.
It can’t have been rape because I eventually went back to him.
Except…it was rape because I asked him to stop and he didn’t until he’d finished.
It was rape because I only instigated sex to calm his anger. I’d actually been trying to break things off with him that day.
It was rape because it felt like rape and it traumatised me.
17 years later, it feels like it only just happened. My body racked by the truth of it. My brain connecting many painful dots.
This is the reality of how repressed memories resurface.
If you’ve experienced this yourself, please know you are not alone. Despite the naysayers, there are many people out there who will believe you. I do. And a trauma therapist will too. Please reach out to someone if you need support.
To anyone else who’s read this far, thank you. Please be a voice of reason when people question abuse allegations due to them coming out many years later. A long delay is not evidence that someone is lying. It’s likely evidence their coping capacities were overwhelmed at the time. It’s likely evidence that the first person they told didn’t believe them. It’s likely evidence that they’ve done a lot of work on themselves to feel strong enough to finally speak out. They deserve to be believed. WE deserve to be believed. Don’t let anyone tell you repressed memories don’t exist.
- Save two close friends I’m aware of, but they were as young and ill-equipped to deal with it as me
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