The Importance of GrievingWhat does it mean to begin to cry/grieve more as you begin to experience memories of your rape during therapy?By crying for your trauma, you are beginning to accept it as a real loss, and not merely some disgusting thing done to little-old disgusting you. Grieving, as opposed to merely being moody and weepy, is a sign of change for you because it means you are starting to see yourself as a worthy person who was wronged. You are seeing that you are a hurt person, not a bad person, and that you were hurt by someone who never saw your worth. You will also grieve the lost time when you failed to see your own worth, and buried it in whatever life came after your rape.By grieving, you are changing your attitude toward rape itself--not as something horrible done to a girl who was somehow damaged, unlovable, and awful, but as a form of THEFT, of soul-murder, from which you are not only recovering but resurrecting. Try this for homework and bring it to your therapist (s/he will be amazed with you!). Write journals about these two questions:1) If rape is a form of theft, what did it steal? (hint: begin a new tradition of avoiding cataclysmic phrases like "all of me/my soul/my worth as a person. Rape took NONE of those things from you; you still have them. Try to write toward a new way of seeing: "It stole my nighttimes. It stole the dreams I used to look forward to at night. It stole the safety I once felt of hearing footsteps. It stole the excitement and pleasure I felt in the touch of another person. It stole countless hundreds of hugs I would have given my family if I had not loathed my own body instead.")2) If rape steals something from you, what parts of you are NOT gone? Which parts of you do you REFUSE to give away, no matter what? What do you hold for yourself as a treasure within?Notice how the point of these journal ideas is to begin to change the language we use when we talk about our rapes. We need to see it as a form of hurt done to us, not a permanent source of filth and badness ABOUT us.Good luck! Gakina Awiiya - We are All Related