Don't give in to that urge to take on the responsibility for the rape. People who say that rape victim deserved to be raped are the same people who cannot accept the reality of life that bad things can and do happen to good people who do not deserve it.

I too struggled with it for a long time. My mom in a fit of rage yelled "fuck me once you fault, fuck me twice I deserved it." I was raped twice by the same man so what does that tell me??

Bottom line.. WE DID NOT DESERVE IT!!!!!!!!

Precious your Mum was way out of line...what a load of crap!!! I read your other posts about your rapes and I cried for you. No one deserves rape!! NO ONE!! All the best Manda x

It was not your fault. Rapists want to take away our power and our sparkle. We can't let them. You cannot hate yourself. It will stop you from moving forwards with your life. People like to blame survivors of rape because it makes it easier for them to make sense of it. It also makes it easier for them to think that it wont happen to them.

It wasn't your fault. You have to fight those thoughts because they are not true.

I feel the same way! If I hadn't of let him over, if I hadn't of slept with him two weeks before. If I hadn't of met strangers off dating sites. I was asking for it. I gave up and let him finish. I know it was rape, part of it, but I feel like at some point I gave up and consented just so he'd hurry and leave, does it errase the rape? No, but I feel so stupid for letting him finish. After I was raped, within the same hour, I just let him climb back on top of me and finish. I even said he could. Its all jumbled up in my head. I pushed, and told him to stop,no! But just gave up so easily, I even remember laying there not able to feel my body anymore. I even tried to feel something but I couldn't. I let him, and I feel so ashamed.

I have these thoughts all the time! Along with the same thoughts of Chandelier. Since I went on the dating site, and talked to him, then agreed to meet him, I caused it...it was my fault! I know deep down this isn't true, because the truth is NO ONE deserves this constant HELL we now live!!

This is one of the hardest parts of recovery from rape, incest, child abuse and most of PTSD. Whatever happened to us, we lost our sense of control over our own lives, our own bodies. We lost it, and we want to get control BACK.

The easiest and worst way to get control back is to blame ourselves. We find a way to make it OUR fault, so even if we hated what happened, somehow it was still under our control.

Imagine a car accident. you're sitting at a stop light, just like t\you're supposed to be, and someone runs the red light and crashes into you. Would you tell yourself "well if i'd only run that red light, it wouldn't have happened?"

Would you say "I should have been driving on the sidewalk, then that car wouldn't have hit me?"

For a long time I blamed myself for what happened. I seriously was telling myself that as a 5 year old, I seduced an adult for a year or so. THAT'S NUTS. I know that now. But for a long time I needed to feel I had control.

Life is unfair. Life is out of our control much of the time. We can't control anything but how we CHOOSE TO REACT to the chaos.

Accept that, accept that life isn't always under control, and recovery starts to happen. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

Well said Richard, we choose how we react, we choose how we think. The external world will never be under our control. Horrible things happen to people. We have to accept that. We have the choice as to the impact they have on us and if we let it takes us down.

Recovery is hard. Really hard but it comes from within and it will not start from a basis of self hatred.

You haven't done anything wrong and until you believe that you will not be able to move on.

it is not your fault nothing like this is your fault i believed that too for along time when someone does that to you it is them not you. no one deserves this

It is not your fault dear... ((hugs))

I think the sheer volume of responses should be plenty to convince your. Just in case your not sure though ill add my 2 cent as well. :)

I have had people try to fill my head with this before. For a while like you I allowed myself to believe that it was my own stupidity. I even sat down once and really thought to myself how stupid my actions had been. Then it sunk in. I wasn't the only one. Others had been attacked as well. Is it all our faults? If you give into that sort of narrow minded attack on your condemning others to the same conclusion. Your saying so it was my fault then it was hers as well to every girl out there who has been attacked. Its a system. People say these things to cover up what is really going wrong. Blaming the victim is a means of lessening the crime. Making it seem like less of a problem than it really is. If we can blame the person that was harmed then in essence it should never have happened. Meaning no crime? Its bull shit. Don't by in to the narrow minded bullshit others spill out on a whim. It took me a while to come to these. Don't make yourself and others suffer that. IT WAS NOT YOUR FAULT! Just like it wasn't my fault either. You have to believe that.