For rape survivors, a common outcome of this neurobiological storm is self-blame — a tendency to hold themselves responsible for the events that led to the trauma. Generally, people believe they live in a world that feels safe and predictable, and they tend to adhere to the just world hypothesis, which posits that good things happen to good people. To preserve the illusion of control, safety and predictability, survivors blame themselves in an effort to to restore order to a world that has been incredibly shaken by trauma.
Rape survivors often experience hindsight bias — the belief that they should have been able to predict or prevent an assault. This belief, which further reinforces self-blame, is fortified by a culture in which rape prevention programs tend to focus on women as opposed to men, leading women to believe they alone are responsible for and can prevent rape.
Then there’s denial, a defense mechanism that can take the form of avoidance of or dissociation from the trauma. Because the reality of what has happened is overwhelming to the brain and psyche, denying or ignoring it provides a defense from the flood of emotion that follows trauma and helps reestablish a sense of stability.
Common rape stereotypes — for example, that rape is mainly committed by strangers in a novel situation, not by acquaintances during everyday experiences — reinforce these feelings. In fact, statistics indicate that 80% to 90% of women are raped by someone they know.
Judging a changing story
A person assessing the reactions of a rape and trauma survivor generally does so in a calm and collected frame of mind. Yet the actions they are judging were made under extreme duress — under mental and physical hurricane conditions, you could say.
For a survivor of rape, an inability to clearly name the assault for what it was is a common outcome of the biological and psychological factors at play during acute stress. This denial functions to preserve their identity and sanity during acute stress, restore order to their world and help them make rational sense of what has happened to them.
Breaking through these self-preservation mechanisms often takes time — time that observers too often misinterpret as a false accounting of what actually happened.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Michele Patterson Ford is a practicing licensed psychologist and lecturer at Dickinson College with more than 20 years of experience working in academic and clinical settings addressing and treating mental health and mental illness. Through its opinion section, Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.